It's Been Three Years Since "GNOME 4.0" Was Proposed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: It's Been Three Years Since "GNOME 4.0" Was Proposed

Three years ago this week was GUADEC 2012 where GNOME 4.0 was proposed along with GNOME OS. While GNOME 4.0 was supposed to materialize in 2014, that obviously didn't happen, but at least GNOME 3.x has matured a lot and garnered much better support than it had years ago...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-4.0-Three-Years

[Michael_S]

My sense is that GNOME 3 had a terrible launch for the GNOME community and alienated a lot of people. But they've been both listening to user feedback (and watching the amazing success and popularity of the Cinnamon and MATE forks) and also doing an incredible job improving the product. I think they've won back most of the fans they lost.

I don't know much about GTK+ and the GNOME technological innards. My guess as an outsider is that the best possible path forward is not GNOME 4, just keep making GNOME 3.x better:
- More high resolution support in applications.
- Make the Wayland support as solid as the X11 support (for all I know it already is, I have not checked)
- Work on the GNOME IDE Builder for other applications.
- Work on the application sandboxing for enhanced security.

I think the obstacles to 20% market share have nothing to do with GNOME and everything to do with PC OEMs, existing applications users prefer in Windows and OS X, and Windows and OS X -only games. To get a bigger share of the existing Linux desktop market, GNOME developers need to keep doing what they're doing. To get a bigger share of the world desktop market, GNOME developers need to branch out into selling PCs and contributing to the Wine project, Radeon and Nouveau display rivers, Mesa OpenGL, and especially getting more "killer apps" into HTML5. That's the path to world desktop domination.

[AndyChow]

Gnome 4 should simply be to bring back gnome 2. The only thing good about gnome 3, is when you hit meta and can launch and can find something quickly. But we already had that with gnomeDo, which was/is superior.

I still haven't found a window manager that had the workflow that gnome 2 had. Unity takes too much real estate. And it's default behavior to have the open software icon be the same as the icon to launch it, means half the time I have to do one more click to open a second instance of the software.

The Gnome 3 team are a bunch of idiots that have no clue what they are doing.

[johnny]

Gnome 4 should simply be to bring back gnome 2. The only thing good about gnome 3, is when you hit meta and can launch and can find something quickly. But we already had that with gnomeDo, which was/is superior.

I still haven't found a window manager that had the workflow that gnome 2 had. Unity takes too much real estate. And it's default behavior to have the open software icon be the same as the icon to launch it, means half the time I have to do one more click to open a second instance of the software.

The Gnome 3 team are a bunch of idiots that have no clue what they are doing.

I've used GNOME since 1.x.. and GNOME 3 is my favorite GNOME. You don't speak for all of us.

[DebianLinuxero]

I think the main problem of Gnome 3 at its beginning wasn't the tablet paradigma's change :

The mistake was to release the pre-3.10 branches as oficial, they were allmost at beta state, and forcing the users to quit using a fully functional desktop (Gnome 2) for an incomplete desktop.

Incomplete in the way it didn't cover all the functionality Gnome 2 has.

Things could been better if they had continue supporting Gnome 2 (and GTK 2) while developing Gnome 3 on background until it'll be really ready.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Gnome 4 should simply be to bring back gnome 2. The only thing good about gnome 3, is when you hit meta and can launch and can find something quickly. But we already had that with gnomeDo, which was/is superior.

I still haven't found a window manager that had the workflow that gnome 2 had. Unity takes too much real estate. And it's default behavior to have the open software icon be the same as the icon to launch it, means half the time I have to do one more click to open a second instance of the software.

The Gnome 3 team are a bunch of idiots that have no clue what they are doing.

Sorry, but GNOME 2 blew. It was a hobbled clash of MacOS and Windows.

[Danny3]

No wonder linux market share is still at 1%
All this effort is for nothing

I believe windows desktop is 90% what a user want
Microsoft got this from the first try

Linux desktop environment developers should just create an interface exactly like Windows and continue to improve from there

Not only that they create new and different interfaces than windows, but they also try to force an interface made for tablets, touchscreens on desktop users
EPIC FAIL

Only distribution that seems to understand this is Linux Mint (MATE/Cinammon)

[MichaelSerious]

No wonder linux market share is still at 1%
Linux desktop environment developers should just create an interface exactly like Windows and continue to improve from there

You're so right. The only way to take market share away from Windows is to create the same exact interface minus the games and applications that run on Windows.

Brilliant strategy.

[Delgarde]

I've used GNOME since 1.x.. and GNOME 3 is my favorite GNOME. You don't speak for all of us.

Agreed... even from the beginning, 3 was a significant improvement over what went before it. It might have taken some people a while to get used to it - and some people clearly never have - but I've been using it with no regrets ever since it appeared in Fedora 15.

Sorry, but GNOME 2 blew. It was a hobbled clash of MacOS and Windows.

I wouldn't go that far - Gnome 2 worked fine, and even the antiquated version I'm currently using (a CentOS 5 VM installation) is more usable to me than the Windows 7 host it runs inside of. But I'd definitely be happier with G3...

[justmy2cents]

Gnome 4 should simply be to bring back gnome 2. The only thing good about gnome 3, is when you hit meta and can launch and can find something quickly. But we already had that with gnomeDo, which was/is superior.

I still haven't found a window manager that had the workflow that gnome 2 had. Unity takes too much real estate. And it's default behavior to have the open software icon be the same as the icon to launch it, means half the time I have to do one more click to open a second instance of the software.

The Gnome 3 team are a bunch of idiots that have no clue what they are doing.

hmmm... NO?

and ffs, if you want Gnome 2, use MATE whose sole mission is preserving and evolving Gnome 2.

I think the main problem of Gnome 3 at its beginning wasn't the tablet paradigma's change :

The mistake was to release the pre-3.10 branches as oficial, they were allmost at beta state, and forcing the users to quit using a fully functional desktop (Gnome 2) for an incomplete desktop.

Incomplete in the way it didn't cover all the functionality Gnome 2 has.

Things could been better if they had continue supporting Gnome 2 (and GTK 2) while developing Gnome 3 on background until it'll be really ready.

mistake or not is a good question. they got a lot of useful feedback which wouldn't be in effect if they developed without testing.

as far as continuing 2 while developing 3. problem are finite resources, this is why MATE was much better decision for that. people focused on Gnome 2 work one magic while Gnome 3 can evolve without disturbance.

i personally loved 3.0-3.6, hated 3.8 and 3.10 (at this one i was on verge of last straw with Gnome). at 3.12 i was like "oohh, well... at least there's this", 3.14 was awesome and 3.16 is better i could ever imagine desktop could be. while changes in 3.18 make me drool