<story><title>Gnome: Staring into the abyss</title><url>http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kijin</author><text>1. As the author says toward the end of the article, I think the biggest problem with Gnome nowadays is that only a small number of people actually use it on a day-to-day basis. Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. No matter what merits Gnome 3 might have, it was such a flop in its first few releases that it has the Windows Vista stigma attached to it. Of course, there&apos;s GTK and several Gnome apps that people do use on a daily basis. But for many people, Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they don&apos;t want to contribute to it.&lt;p&gt;2. If Gnome really wants to win back the hearts of potential contributors (i.e. power users), they&apos;d better make programs that appeal to that demographic. People who have the skill and motivation to make significant contributions to a free software project often want a lot of room for configuration, including the option to use the desktop in a traditional manner. Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but none of them will ever submit a single patch.&lt;p&gt;3. Gnome is too big for its own good. Why does a desktop environment project need to maintain a complete stack of apps and libraries, from GTK to Gnome Shell to a text editor to a bundle of games to a web browser to an email client to a media player to a full-blown spreadsheet app? Why can&apos;t they just tell people to get a third-party browser? They should spin off the rest and focus on GTK, the Shell, and a small number of essential utilities. If Epiphany or Gnumeric died a slow and lonely death, how many people would really care? Heck, if you don&apos;t have the manpower to maintain anything else, just give me GTK so I can install xfce or lxde on top of it. It&apos;s really just Firefox and LibreOffice and VLC that I want, and I don&apos;t need Gnome to run them.&lt;p&gt;Edit: some rephrasing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JoshTriplett</author><text>I find it wryly amusing to see the entire GNOME 1 -&amp;#62; GNOME 2 debacle repeated so accurately.  GNOME 2 eliminated a huge pile of configuration and tweakability that had accreted over the years, and produced an environment designed for user-friendliness even at the expense of some power-user configurations.  It took a few releases to sort out (2.0 proved quite painful), but by GNOME 2.4 or so the environment had become far more pleasant than GNOME 1.&lt;p&gt;If the GNOME 2 -&amp;#62; GNOME 3 debate has produced more vitriol by volume, I&apos;d say that just reflects GNOME 2 having a much larger user community than GNOME 1 ever did.</text></comment>
<story><title>Gnome: Staring into the abyss</title><url>http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kijin</author><text>1. As the author says toward the end of the article, I think the biggest problem with Gnome nowadays is that only a small number of people actually use it on a day-to-day basis. Popular distros like Ubuntu and Mint have shifted away from it. No matter what merits Gnome 3 might have, it was such a flop in its first few releases that it has the Windows Vista stigma attached to it. Of course, there&apos;s GTK and several Gnome apps that people do use on a daily basis. But for many people, Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they don&apos;t want to contribute to it.&lt;p&gt;2. If Gnome really wants to win back the hearts of potential contributors (i.e. power users), they&apos;d better make programs that appeal to that demographic. People who have the skill and motivation to make significant contributions to a free software project often want a lot of room for configuration, including the option to use the desktop in a traditional manner. Taking away those little checkboxes and toolbar buttons is like slamming the door on power users. You might win a billion non-technical users, but none of them will ever submit a single patch.&lt;p&gt;3. Gnome is too big for its own good. Why does a desktop environment project need to maintain a complete stack of apps and libraries, from GTK to Gnome Shell to a text editor to a bundle of games to a web browser to an email client to a media player to a full-blown spreadsheet app? Why can&apos;t they just tell people to get a third-party browser? They should spin off the rest and focus on GTK, the Shell, and a small number of essential utilities. If Epiphany or Gnumeric died a slow and lonely death, how many people would really care? Heck, if you don&apos;t have the manpower to maintain anything else, just give me GTK so I can install xfce or lxde on top of it. It&apos;s really just Firefox and LibreOffice and VLC that I want, and I don&apos;t need Gnome to run them.&lt;p&gt;Edit: some rephrasing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>&quot;Gnome itself is decidedly uncool. No wonder they don&apos;t want to contribute to it.&quot;&lt;p&gt;This is the biggest weakness of FOSS in general. It is true that some people work on the stuff that has to get done or isn&apos;t &quot;cool&quot; but contrasted to &quot;cool&quot; parts where folks are available in abundance and it means people burn out and there is no one there so replace them. If there isn&apos;t someone out there paying someone else to be in that uncool part of the code, chances are bit rot sets in.</text></comment>