Dear reader the GNOME armageddon has started,
First of all I want to clarify that this text was meant to be a source of information otherwise i wouldn't have spent so much time into writing it.
Belive me it took me a couple of days writing this text in a foreign language.
Even if you don't care at all for GNOME, you may find some interesting information within this text that you like to read. please try to understand my points even if it's hard sometimes, otherwise you wake up one day and feel the need to switch to a different operating system.
On the following lines i'm trying to give you a little insight of the GNOME community. the things that are going on in the back, the information that could be worth talking and thinking about.
Many of us like the GNOME desktop and some of us were following it since the beginning. GNOME is a promising project because it's mostly written in C, easy to use, configurable and therefore fits perfectly into the philosophy of *NIX, only to name some of its advantages.
Unfortunately these advantages changed with the recently new released version of GNOME. The core development team somehow got the idea of targeting GNOME to a complete different direction of users, the so called corporate desktop user.
In other words they're targeting people that aren't familiar or experienced with desktop environments. usually business oriented people who are willing to pay money for getting GNOME on their computers.
Having this new target in mind, the core development team mostly under contract by companies like RedHat,Ximian and Sun decided to simplify the desktop as much as even possible by removing all its flexibility in favor of an easy clean simple interface to not confuse their new possible customers. So far the idea of a clean easy to use desktop is honourable.
Some of the new ideas, features and implementations such asgconf, an evil Windows Registry-like system, new ordering of buttons and dialogs, the removal of 90%-95% of all visible preferences from the control center and applications, the new direction that GNOME leads and the attitude of the core development team made a lot of users really unhappy. These are only a couple of examples and the list can easily be expanded but for now this is enough. Now let me try to get deeper into these aspects.
You may imagine that users got really frustrated because their beloved GNOME desktop matured into something they didn't want. During the time, the frustration of a not less amount of people increased. more, more and more emails arrived on the GNOME mailinglists where users tried to explain their concerns, frustrations and the leading target of GNOME.
But the core development team of GNOME don't give a damn about what their users are thinking or wanting and most of the time they come up with their standard purl. The reply they give is mostly the same -- users should either go and 'file a bug' at BugZilla or the user mails are being turned so far that at the end they sound like being trolls or the user feedback is simply not wanted. whatever happens the answers aren't really satisfying for the user. even constructive feedback isn't appreciated.
If you gonna think about this for a minute then things gonna harden that they are directing into the commercial area. The core development team actually don't care for the complaining home user -- it's more important for them to reach the customers with the cash. It seems that this has been told to them by the company leaders -- everything about GNOME has been decided already, a way back or direct communication isn't possible. Don't get trapped by sentences like 'we listen to our users'. They listen to you -- yes, to make funny silly jokes about you afterwards.
I thought that everything was build up on friendship, build on programming for fun, build on understanding each other. But the reality looks like it's all for the big money. The cash is what matters everything else is a lie and a dream. Time for people to wake up.
Not long ago they threw one of the most important long year core developer Martin Baulig out of team -- a guy who worked really hard on getting GNOME into the right direction, a nice friendly person who put all his time into GNOME.
But narrow minded GNOME elites such as Havoc Pennington were responsible that he left the GNOME project -- the trouble and the pressure that was put on him was to much.
With the new GNOME desktop a lot of user interface changes happened such as button reordering -- needless to say that this confuse people who are used to the 'right' button ordering for ages. Even our fellow Linux guru Alan
Cox wasn't thrilled about this idea, but the GNOME elites such as Havoc Pennington, Seth Nickell, Calum Benson and Dave Bordoley knew it better. Why following the road of any other desktop that exists ? Why not doing something that don't confuse their users and still stay usable ? Well it seems to be too easy. GNOME needs to be different than anything else so they changed the button order which was one of the reasons that users became unhappy. They said that there was a hard fight about this and the decision was made to change the buttons. But I belive they simply copied the behaviour of Mac OS because most of the GNOME developers use a McIntosh as either laptop or desktop. Sad that they forgot to keep in mind that users tend to mix applications and that this will lead into weird button searching and clicking.
But as if this wasn't enough the same people decided that the new GNOME Human Interface
Guides were the ultima non plus ultra in human interface guides. The announcement contained informations that the KDE usability people got initiated into it. Unfortunately the KDE people heard about it the first
time when Seth Nickell went to the KDE mailing list which happened after the announcement. You can imagine that they got highly pissed off about this attitude. You can read more on this link. To summarize it, the KDE people clarified that GNOME should care for their own business.
The problem that came with the new interface guides was, that every little GNOME hacker started to become an user interface expert over night. A lot of GNOME programs that we like to use matured into a disaster over night. Hackers that never programmed correctly for their life started to blindly follow the hype of simplification. For an example look what happened to Galeon's interface (pay attention for the last paragraph). Even Philip Langdale a long year galeon hacker got highly indignant by the target that GNOME leads and wrote this email to the Galeon mailinglist.
Here another reason why users became angry. The elite assumes, that the user knows nothing about their system. you find a couple of heavily insulting mails on their mailing lists containing sentences like the quoted ones.
"the user don't know what a window manager is",
"the user don't know what themes are",
"the user don't know what a homedir is",
"the user can't compile a kernel",
"the user don't want to customize their desktop",
"the user shouldn't see preferences which purpose they don't know"
You may imagine that a lot of people are being offended by such lines because it's exactly these GNOME users who are meant by these phrases. To read more such lines on the GNOME mailinglists, simply click on this link and grep in their archives. Be said that most of these sentences are coming from Havoc Pennington.
Such evil practices shouldn't be tolerated by the users and need to be fighted. *NIX users aren't stupid people. Who actually gave Havoc Pennington the rights to decide what the user wants and what not ? Various users told him that people who use a *NIX like system are well aware of their capabilities dealing with such a complex system. There's a reason why people are switching from alternative operating systems. They want to learn, they want to use the full power of the system, they want to change everything they like.
To top all this, look at the future plans of Nautilus. The current maintainers got the idea of changing the whole Nautilus concepts into an object oriented user interface design. You may be highly interested in reading the exact words of Alex Larsson's vision for Nautilus' future direction by clicking on this link.
To summarize it, it's assumed that the user don't need to deal with his homedir or his whole filesystem because it may confuse him or because he don't understand it. The new concepts of Nautilus should be that the user deal with symbols in the Nautilus view. E.G. you get a cdrom symbol and by clicking on it you see the directory of your cdrom, you get a photo symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your pr0n pictures, you get a music symbol and by clicking on it you get a list of all your mp3's. You don't know where all these files are located because you don't deal with the bottom layer of your homedir or filesystem anymore as mentioned earlier.
The question is why are people that know nothing about their users, that know nothing about correct user interface design destroying GNOME ? The users don't deserve all this specially those that backed GNOME for all the years. Even sun threw a bunch of so called user interface experts together and have them work on GNOME. don't forget that sun are the creators of the Common Desktop Environment. We don't need another CDE clone named GNOME. Even Havoc Pennington author of the good user interfaces text isn't able to get his own written software following his rules.
Not long ago there was an report about the 'two captains of Nautilus' where the reporter (Uraeus a GNOME contributor himself) reported Alexander Larsson and David camp. You may imagine that such a report can't be taken serious because it's done by their own people. We here have a saying that sounds like this 'one crow doesn't hack the eye of another crow out'. Now you can click on this
link and read more. It may be interesting to read the replies from various users all over the globe of what they think about GNOME and Nautilus in general (please pay attention to the listed ip's there). Another nice and informative reading can be found by clicking on this link.
The fileselector problem was a long discussed issue in the GNOME community. Finally they came to an solution for this and have decided to go for this ugly fileselector instead going for this one which was developed by a free volunteer for a long time and in general looks and behaves better.
most users have no problems with the idea of keeping things simple and clean. Removing some not needed preferences was indeed a good idea but it doesn't stop. People started to remove everything from their apps. You're forced to use dubious programs like GConf-editor which basically works like the Windows Registry editor, to tweak uncommented preferences. I don't think that this is an advantage. Even the possibility to tweak preferences with an editor was taken away with that ugly implementation of GConf. All your preferences are stored in a directory tree with an unknown amount of *.xml files. Even if you delete programs their keys are still remaining orphaned in these trees and finding them is like playing trivia. At the end it's worth a discussion if a system driven by a single home user needs such a registry like system. We didn't need such a system for over 30 years but the GNOME development team got the idea copying one of the most retarded systems from Windows to *NIX. Not to mention that the copy is more retarded than the original.
It's a shame to see how such a nice desktop got thrown into the trash by such people. But there is a lot more behind the scenes that i don't know about. Everything around GNOME is a big marketing strategy. Poor people are working the hell out of GNOME for nothing and companies such as those mentioned above are getting the big cash. for sure you could say - go and fork GNOME - but seriously how can you go and fork GNOME ? such a big project which needs a bunch of people to keep the code alive and compatible. Well you know it's all about open source the code is signed under the GNU/GPL or GNU/LGPL, you can't own it. Even the companies are aware of this. But if you can't own the code - go and hire their developers. You can direct them like puppets in any direction that you - as company - like. Exactly this is happening with GNOME.
well you could easily come up and tell me to simply not use GNOME and let them do whatever they like. Well, you are right with that but things are more complicated nowadays. GNOME is influencing a lot of third party projects such as XFree86 which recently added a lot of GNOME components into their CVS repository. Please know that with the next coming XFree86 version you get a lot of GNOME components without even knowing it. code like, GNOME-XML, pkgconfig, fontconfig, xcursor and xft2 were mainly written by people who're heavily involved into GNOME development. Also the GIMP is maturing more and more into getting the look and feel of a native GNOME application. The CVS version of the GIMP has a lot of GNOME pixmaps inside and they are heavily working on integrate the GIMP into GNOME. If not today but the direction is sure and i fear the day this gonna happen.
It's ok that these things exist and it's ok to see XFree86 and the GIMP are beeing hacked on. But please think about the people that don't like or use GNOME. What about them ? Why force them to have GNOME components installed on their systems ? Why can't GNOME go the same way that KDE went e.g. doing their own stuff without infecting other projects like AIDS. Seeing more and more libraries and applications that were in no way related to GNOME jumping on the pkgconfig boat which's really not needed. Look what will happen to Solaris, the world famous operating system on *NIX used by big companies and long years
experts. They really plan to replace cde with GNOME. I know that cde wasn't the best invention of desktops but it rarely crashed and it fits far better into the philosophy of XFree86 with their configuration system than GNOME. You know the good old way having your settings defined with .xdefaults and all nice default configurations are going into /etc/x11/app-defaults/ and so on. Understandable that the good old way may be blocking the future of applications for multiusersystems - but why must it have to be a Windows Registry like system that replaces future configuration ?
Well to come to an end I personally don't like many of this stuff. I can't stand the button reordering, I don't like the GConf system and even more I don't like the commercial outsourcing of GNOME and the bad influence that GNOME has on other applications. The bad attitude of some GNOME developers is another story since we are all different reacting humans. Luckily there are people sharing some of my thoughts otherwise I wouldn't be able to proof my text with so many links. Even amongst the GNOME developers there are silent voices of people that hate many of these decisions and silently use something else.
Right now if you checkout the GNOME CVS repository every day you find out that the whole GNOME development seemed to came to an halt. The contributions to their CVS are poor. While projects such as KDE are reaching easily 10-20K commits per month - GNOME is getting around 1-2K per month on it's best times.
It really looks like the situation of GNOME is unclear so it would be better to have it not influence so much other programs or at the end we deal with an disaster.
Now I hope this text was informative for you. I hope that you start to think about the situation and the global direction. The situation of GNOME is unclear, their target is groggy too since I can't belive that the users that they are targeting ever heard of *NIX or Linux. They plan to get out of the 0.05% desktop niche but this will for sure not happen if they continue their current direction and their bad ugly attitude.
