<story><title>The future of GNOME</title><url>http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2012/07/31/the-future-of-gnome/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>monkeyfacebag</author><text>&amp;#62; The desktop really doesn&apos;t need reinventing.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m surprised people think this. Do you think we&apos;re going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years?&lt;p&gt;Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of input become viable, but we&apos;re not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10 years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.</text></item><item><author>tomrod</author><text>If I could say anything to the Gnome3team:&lt;p&gt;&quot;I used gnome 3 shell for 6 months until I could no longer stand it. Please please, Gnome team, go back to Gnome2 or Mate. The desktop really doesn&apos;t need reinventing. You&apos;re solving fixed problems!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don&apos;t know how well the open source adopts the philosophical concept of sunk costs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>We&apos;re still fundamentally using the PARC Alto model.&lt;p&gt;We&apos;ve got windows.  We&apos;ve got keyboards.  We&apos;ve got mice.  In some cases we&apos;ve now got multi-touch keypads and touch-sensitive screens.  Some screens are very large.  Some are very small.  Some are in-between.&lt;p&gt;There have been some improvements:  processors are vastly faster, pixel densities are increasing, and rendering has improved.  We&apos;ve got some hacks for displaying fonts more clearly.  But those are pretty minor.  Compiz effects if you want to get flashy, but those are hardly necessary.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve seen master developers completely satisfied, and massively proficient, in hacked-up twm environments.&lt;p&gt;Really:  the desktop is a solved problem.  Move on.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve looked at many of the &quot;modern&quot; desktops.  And I&apos;m still using the same one I was using 15 years ago:  WindowMaker, based on NeXTstep.  It&apos;s simple, it&apos;s fast, it&apos;s light, it&apos;s stable. It&apos;s &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; visually distracting.  It gets out of the way.  It supports keyboard shortcuts and navigation.  It presents me with persistent pinnable window lists (something no other window manager / desktop environment provides me) and pinnable submenus.&lt;p&gt;What the desktop developers for GNOME, Unity, Microsoft, et al are forgetting is Anoine de Saint Exupery&apos;s dictum:  perfection comes not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away.  There&apos;s an implied &quot;and what is left is sufficient to the task at hand&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>The future of GNOME</title><url>http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2012/07/31/the-future-of-gnome/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>monkeyfacebag</author><text>&amp;#62; The desktop really doesn&apos;t need reinventing.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m surprised people think this. Do you think we&apos;re going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years?&lt;p&gt;Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of input become viable, but we&apos;re not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10 years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.</text></item><item><author>tomrod</author><text>If I could say anything to the Gnome3team:&lt;p&gt;&quot;I used gnome 3 shell for 6 months until I could no longer stand it. Please please, Gnome team, go back to Gnome2 or Mate. The desktop really doesn&apos;t need reinventing. You&apos;re solving fixed problems!&quot;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I don&apos;t know how well the open source adopts the philosophical concept of sunk costs.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhizome</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Do you think we&apos;re going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. We used the command-line model for 25+ years before that.</text></comment>