GNOME Ended 2013 With 46k Open Bug Reports

[Tgui]

Why would you use a gui on a server?

Some GUI tools make life easier compared to their command line counter parts. My ego doesn't get stroked by being able to state I'm masochistic enough to exist in a command line only world. The tool for the job as time is money.

[intellivision]

There is just one thing that the Gnome developers have to do.

Keep the API stable. It's not fun having to wait for your extensions to become compatible (if ever) after upgrading to a newer version of Gnome.

Furthermore, it's just as fun to try and figure out why no one can get extremely common non-Gnome applications such as Pidgin and Thunderbird working with the notification system, the online state system and getting calendar integration working.

I would use the Gnome equivalents, but Evolution doesn't have the expandability of Thunderbird and the same goes for Empathy and Pidgin.

[cbamber85]

Yes, this would be a very nice feature. Have you opened a bug report on that?.

This is probably going to start a heated debate, but here we go: I would never dream of filing a feature request on free software I have no intention of donating or contributing to, simply being a user does not give me the right to (attempt to) steer the direction of a project. Bug reporting or beta feedback is always good though.

That being said, I'm not perfect and I'll give my opinion on anything if people sit still for long enough...

[prodigy_]

And that is the point. Why should you have to adapt to the GUI? It is the GUI's job to adapt to your workflow.

+1

Sadly, very few developers still understand such things. Or maybe they just don't care - the end result is the same. In case of Gnome it's especially sad because a very popular and perfectly customizable UI was thrown out of the window... in order to create another UI which nobody asked for and which is simply inferior to its predecessor in every way. If this isn't deliberate destruction of value then I don't know what is.

[pandev92]

I hate gnome Shell and the slow performance that I have with my nvidia and a video playback with vlc o mplayer , movies runs like a charm for me on unity, very smooth, but on gnome Shell I can see low framerates every 6/7 seconds, I think that the problema is mutter and that this compositor doesn't have any gui for configurations.

For work I prefer:

1- Windows 8.1
2- osx
3- Unity
4- Kde
5- Xcfe

[Delgarde]

While Linus's Law says "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", the GNOME project ended out 2013 with more than 46,000 open bugs.

Well, that kind of proves the point, doesn't it? Linus's Law doesn't say that eyeballs get bugs fixed, but evidence says it certainly gets them found.

[Delgarde]

Hmm, I actually find Gnome 3 quite usable. It's my preferred DE over KDE, Xfce, Unity, LXDE and even MacOS X and I am quite productive in it. To each his own, I guess.

I do agree there are some bugs. None of them are showstoppers, though (IMO)

I don't see a lot of bugs, as such, stuff that's just blatantly defective. There are design decisions I have issues with - the default Alt-Tab behaviour (fixed by extension), and the new uber-menu thing that replaced the various top-right menus in 3.10 - but overall it's the desktop I have the least frustration with...

[Delgarde]

And GTK is awesome (how many remember that it's not a "Gnome" technology? :P).

For all practical purposes, Gtk *is* a Gnome technology. True, it didn't start life that way, but since the earliest days of Gnome, they've been by far the biggest contributors to Gtk development - and as a consequence, they've had near-total control over the technical direction taken by the toolkit for both the 2.x and 3.x series...

[Delgarde]

There is just one thing that the Gnome developers have to do.

Keep the API stable. It's not fun having to wait for your extensions to become compatible (if ever) after upgrading to a newer version of Gnome.

Eh, extensions will always have that problem... it's just not possible to reliably preserve API at that level, when you're changing the functionality. Some extensions keep working just fine (the one I used for sane Alt-Tab behaviour has never been a problem), but e.g the ones that patch the shell dropdown menus broke with 3.10 - unsurprising, given that the dropdown menus in question no longer exist in that form.

[Aleve Sicofante]

Gnome 3 is being designed ignoring the grand scheme of things, as if they were inside a bubble, away from the computing industry. They have diverged so much from de facto standards in window decorations, for instance, that it makes it impossible to have a consistent desktop unless you use Gnome-official-only apps. Nobody but Gnome Shell enthusiasts will go through the hassle of making an app specifically for that new design. Elementary has a similar problem, with their insistence on removing the app menu from every app. The fact that Gnome bureaucrats are living in such a bubble is a huge drawback for the usefulness of their development. (I remember having a personal quarrel with one of the "Gnome bosses" about the importance of resolution independence, only 18 months ago!!! They didn't see high dpi monitors coming. In June 2012!!! Go figure...)

I think the current best DE is Unity, by far.

First of all, it's not designed by committee, but by a design team, which makes it invulnerable to the Homer Car Syndrome, which is KDE's signature (KDE is the poster child of anti-design, IMO).

Second of all, it adapts to the current standards so developers don't need to do anything special to have their apps "fit in". Even LibreOffice, Firefox or Thunderbird have been taken care of regarding the Global Menu issues. There's barely any difference from Qt and GTK+ apps when it comes to look and feel under a standard Ubuntu install.

Third of all, it's so far ahead from other attempts when it comes to device convergence (including Microsoft's) it's not even funny. Unity 8 will be the culmination of the best idea in that area. Of course many people think convergent OSs/DEs are "stupid" but that's to be expected in a conservative environment like Linuxland. I bet the market will speak otherwise and that's the reason why MS, Google and Apple are pursuing it one way or another.

Fourth of all: it's minimalistic and keyboard-centric. That helps productivity. A single launcher on the left side, a single search-everything one keypress/mouse-clic away and a single row of indicators. That's it. Everything can be accomplished with the keyboard (including the access to menu items, thanks to the HUD), which is great for developers. Anything can be guessed at first sight, which is great for newbies.

And finally, regarding the near future, Ubuntu is slowly but steadily moving to Qt, which is IMO the best crossplatform UI kit out there, used by many high profile applications and backed by a solid company (being backed by a company is another advantage of Ubuntu, at least "for the rest of us", non-developers, non-geeks). Also Unity 8 will become probably the first true resolution independent desktop in history (with a much better technical approach than Apple or MS). Gnome, as stated above, hasn't shown signs of even thinking about it.

Of course, Unity also has design mistakes. The vanishing global menu is simply inexplicable, but if you're not fond of the global menu itself, you can simply remove it and use Unity with the ordinary per-window menu. A long standing bug asking for the menu to be permanently visible seems to be on the verge of being addressed (fingers crossed).

They also had a great feature (the "dodge") and removed it based on rogue conclusions from a usability test. That was probably Shuttleworth's fault, but since Shuttleworth is becoming less and less influent in design (he's busy with PR, mobile carriers, etc. which is where he should stay), Unity can only become better... ;-)

The spyware inside the Dash (yes, I consider it spyware) is not nice and also a very stupid idea. They won't make any significant money out of it (the money is on the server and mobile markets, they should know by now) but have annoyed the heck of a lot of people by planting it there as opt-out instead of opt-in. At least it's easily removed. It's even an official option of the DE itself.

Nautilus is on a road to nowhere, but you can now install Nemo without Cinnamon dependencies (http://www.webupd8.org/2013/10/insta...tches-and.html), which works fine enough. Many people, including myself, expect Canonical to develop their own file browser for Unity 8 at some point, but until then, Nemo will do. (Marlin is very fast and would be great too if they had more resources, I guess.)

Customization is nigh on non-existent in Unity. This is both good and bad. SOME customization is desirable, but too much (like in KDE) is just another word for "let's leave design to the user" (you'll be hard pressed to find a single KDE fan that doesn't say, sooner than later, "five minutes of tweaking will do this and that". Of course in KDE geek speech, "five minutes" means "five-days-unless-you've-been-a-KDE-expert-for-years"). I believe Unity should be more customizable, but the current codebase is probably not the best place to do it, especially when a whole new one (Unity 8) is around the corner. What's not acceptable is a customization that breaks with every new release, like the once promising Gnome Shell extensions idea. It's definitely better no customization at all than some that will break your system every few months.

Finally, the one big Unity issue, non-portability, is a bit of a myth. It looks to me like more an anti-Canonical stance than anything else. Pretty immature but so common in Linuxland... Unity is available in Arch, so if you can't have it anywhere else it's just because of the "let's bash Ubuntu" trend that every geek must follow lately, or so it seems.