Comments on: Notes on the Future of GNOME: The Great Achievements

By: Lucas Rocha » Blog Archive » Notes on the Future of GNOME: Problems and Questions

Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:57:10 +0000

[...] Lucas Rocha The mustache, the beard and the smile: everything together. « Notes on the Future of GNOME: The Great Achievements [...]

By: James

James — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:32:56 +0000

The original aim of the Gnome project was not a desktop that just works. It was to create a network-aware component model that supported compound documents. Building the desktop was a side-track: it had to be done to have somewhere to edit the compound documents.

Somewhere along the way, the original goal was discarded and the temporary side-track became the new goal.

By: The way the GNOME desktop should go | Mirsal Ennaime

The way the GNOME desktop should go | Mirsal Ennaime — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:21:30 +0000

[...] effort to discuss the future of GNOME is really amazing. following Calum Benson Christian Schaller Lucas Rocha Jono Bacon Richard Huges and the other, I’ll post my little contribution to the [...]

By: Decadence of the Enterprise Desktop

Decadence of the Enterprise Desktop — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:20:40 +0000

[...] Lucas Rocha – Belives that we reached the original goal for Gnome – a desktop that just works. Acknowledges that Gnome has some problems. Writes up a list of all the things we have achieved in the Gnome community and project as a whole. [...]

By: Owen’s Photolog » Blog Archive » 3 for 3.0, and Project Sandbox

Owen’s Photolog » Blog Archive » 3 for 3.0, and Project Sandbox — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:12:55 +0000

[...] that the project seems to have reached1. I think that stasis is not a horrible place to be. As others have said, having a desktop that is stable, useful, and predictable is a good thing. Developers have worked [...]

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:44:30 +0000

Oh, I also forgot our other competition…
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/09/apple_previews_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_with_quicktime_x.html

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:39:33 +0000

Hi Lucas,

I agree with your opinions and others on the desktop. I don’t believe there’s a massive game changing change we can make to the desktop to improve it, at least not at the moment. I think evolution of the desktop is the way to go. The average user and especially corporations aren’t huge fans of massive changes as it costs them too much in productivity loss and re-education. One of the reasons I believe we’ll do very well over the next couple of years on the desktop is due to consistency. Just look at the corporate response to Vista, which while it looks a little different to XP, I don’t think its a massive change.

I think the areas that GNOME can make the revolution happen is on the new styles of devices that are coming out. Look at things like the openMoko phone, Nokia Internet Tablets, eeePC and the NetBooks, iPhone/iPod touch, Intel MID devices, OLPC, etc etc….

The issue that I see is that gnome seems to be quickly losing these devices… the gnome mobile effort seems to be moving slowly, the performance may as well be dead with no posts since Oct 2007. OpenMoko is moving from the gnome mobile stack to qtopia and efl, nokia is reviewing their use of gnome…

I think that we’re losing the areas we could be innovating most, the desktop is a done deal, there are gains to be made but the massive gains will be in the small innovative devices. Just look at the impact the eeePC has had on the consumer market running linux. A lot of consumers don’t care overly about the OS. This device proves it… but try and run evolution on it or any other device that uses 800×480…

I think also the cleanup and deprecation of ancient libraries will help the speed and mobile in a lot of deployment things…. things like libgnomeprintui and bonobo are still hanging around a couple of releases after there replacements… at this rate it will be 2010 and we’ll still be aiming for the big 10 and we’ll still depend on bonobo!

By: David Prieto

David Prieto — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:12:58 +0000

Lucas, you’re definitely one of my favourite persons. It’s a pleasure to read you.

By: Étienne Bersac

Étienne Bersac — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:42:12 +0000

Hi,

I fully agree with you, especially about the strength of GNOME (happy, open, usable, etc.). Maybe did you just forgot i18n ;) which can be included in usability. Same for a11y.

Decadence is by far too negative to explain the current situation. I agree that all that work on rewriting parts of GNOME could look like a loopback not very productive. But that’s actually wrong, and not all the work on GNOME. First, GIO, new gnome-session, epiphany-webkit, etc. allow us to fix limitation of 2.X. Second, GNOME also has great innovation : Empathy, GNOME Scan, vala, etc. are all just promising and very exciting projects.

However, GNOME do have some issue, and i’m pretty sure you will expose clearly most of them. I’m a bit afraid of the decision that will be taken. Will we break everything and restart from scratch ? I’m sure not. But how to solve issues without throwing the baby with the water ?

I guess that Gtk+ is, one more time, a good starting point. Gtk+ 3.0 hackfest exposes this amazing migration plan. May GNOME follow a similar way, ever evolving, taking the opportunity to drop jurassic code while keeping migration smooth.

For the best for developers and users, as usual ;)

Best regards,
Étienne.