SVU's blog

Survey, shmurvey

Here you can see it again. People at Phoronix ranting against GNOME3. People on d-d-l staying kinda cool and professional – and critic-prone. The very same scenario you could see on Slashdot and linux.org.ru and other FOSS-related sites.

Even though GNOME 3 is already 3.2, these battles keep happening. Why? And we seen them back in the days of GNOME 1 –> GNOME 2 transition. Why?

Look at the lessons explained by Guy Kawasaki in his blog. In particular, lesson #2. “Customers cannot tell you what they need”. The same way late Jobs was “the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool” (c), Gawasaki’s lessons make active marketing look cool.  And yes, “active marketing” is a term with extremely negative ethical value (same as “jail”), as far as I am concerned. What is it about? Inventing new needs for the people. Telling people what they want instead of giving them what they think they want. The results are high profits. Kawasaki says this is the only way to innovate and be commercially successful at that. He is right, most probably. I consider it pushing the innovations down customers throats. That is the thing that made Apple great and rich. That is one of the things that made many people angry with Apple.

It is a common place to accuse GNOME  of following Apple, spiritually, technically, visually. There are funny and serious sides about that. But it seems that lesson #2 was taken seriously by GNOME, when GNOME 3 was conceived. And that is the most pronounced PR issue with GNOME 3 – the way it is perceived by many people.

How many? That is the question of the day. Noone can say. Really. The way the survey is performed by Phoronix is somewhat provocative and questionable – at least it is seriously challenged by the d-d-l folks on those grounds. With all that, the question still does exist. And that question is strategically important.

So, would GNOME Foundation consider performing “proper” survey of what people think about the way GNOME goes? The survey that would be accepted by GNOME developers as useful, reasonable, answering important questions. The survey that (potentially) could help reconsidering the values and goals. Or, alternatively, the survey that would silent (forever!) all people who just want “faster MS-DOS” – by displaying them the real demand in innovative interfaces. “Look guys, there are only 10 of your kind!”

I guess the question is important enough to consider it first priority for the GNOME future, immediate and long term. Would you be able to face the statistical truth?

Enough is enough

I waited several month for Ubuntu 11.04 to stabilize on my good old Power G5. No way in hell. Even X does not start properly. Had to spend several months in MacOS ( So… considering that I have no interest whatsoever in Unity and other heavily patched gnome components of Ubuntu …  It is Debian now, testing + gnome 3 from experimental. Well, gnome 3 starts in fallback mode only so far – but at least that’s better than absolutely non-working X.

On my laptop, virtualbox for some reason went to disagreement with Ubuntu (inside) as well, so now I have FC15 inside VB, with nearly vanilla gnome3 (working properly with gnome-shell!).

I was some kind of fan of Ubuntu. I am leaving that camp for now. Political reasons, personal reasons, technical reasons… Perhaps, for me 10.10 was the finest hour of Canonical. So long.

libxklavier: good bye, CVS

libxklavier was originally hosted in CVS on sourceforge.net. At some point, it was moved to CVS hosted on freedesktop.org.

CVS is out of fashion for quite a while – but I did not see any reason to switch to git (standard de-facto for freedesktop.org). Now, I made the move. Here it is: git+ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/libxklavier. All future changes are going to be made in git. I just made last commit to CVS. So long, old friend!

Where is GNOME2? GNOME2 is in EXDE!

I knew it was a matter of time till somebody would decide to continue development of GNOME2, “tried and true”. Here it is, EXDE. There was a number of GNOME forks before – none of them had anything close to some form of real life. I wish this project all the luck – just because too many people find GNOME3 … well … “too different to be acceptable” (putting it mildly).

And, above all, I hope that some good ideas from EXDE (if they are going to happen) could be fed upstream. That would be win-win scenario.

We’ll see…

xkeyboard-config: last developments

I was not blogging here for a while. But the project is still live.

The major event for all of us is going to be GNOME 3 release. There was a lot of changes in the keyboard configuration GUI (now it is search-based, wow!). There was a mockup of what the Regional/Language configuration could look like – and GNOME is very close to it. In order to facilitate that change, some fixes in xk-c would have to be done. Most important, the layout/variant descriptions have to be changed.

In GNOME2, the full variant description was composed of the layout description (usually country name) and the variant description itself. For example, “USA – International”. That schema does not allow creating variants like “Engish (US)”.

Now, the descriptions for variants are full and self-contained. That allows putting there any lines, for example “English (US)”. That is a better approach – but it requires someone to take the latest base.xml.in, walk through it and fix the descriptions. to make them user-friendly If this is done before GNOME3 release – I’ll try to make extra (out of schedule) release of xkeyboard-config. Volunteers, anyone?

PS Last couple of days I got another set of traditional enjoyment, related to Crimean Tartar variant. Here and here. The guy does not get something important…

Keyboard -> Region configuration, GNOME3 style

Bastien did a really great job adopting the kbd configuration panel for the GNOME3 g-c-c style. Thank you, hadess! Even though the decision to drop the model is still questionable for me (discussing in d-d-l), overall it looks more consistent with other g-c-c panels than 2 days ago. Also, a number of bugs related to the keyboard rendering are closed (again, my gratitude to Bastien for filing them).

The future challenge for me is to implement “search” for layouts…

On Ubuntu, Unity and GNOME 3

I think there are some lessons gnome should learn from the fact that Ubuntu effectively quits gnome 3 ride (and bids gnome-shell farewell). It is not only about Canonical. It is about GNOME as well. Sapienti sat.

xmodmap and gnome

GNOME (gnome-settings-daemon) was supporting custom xmodmap files for ages – as a convenient way to tweak the kbd config. I heard several times about people using that feature – even though it was never important, used by minority. Yesterday that feature has gone from g-s-d.

Since I feel that at least rudimentary xmodmap support is necessary, I made libgnomekbd load $HOME/.xmodmap if it exists. Hope it won’t be much trouble for people to change their configs.

Actually, I would be interested to hear here in comments about the ways people use xmodmap with gnome.

The discussion on IRC was quite hot. My apologies for some bad words, lads – I did not control myself well enough. Even though that does not eliminate my points about importance of xmodmap – and in general about our (GNOME) attitude to features used by minorities. Minorities matter. 99% = 99*1%

stracciatella

Do you speak Italian? I do not. Anyway, stracciatella is “vanilla-flavoured ice-cream with chocolate chips”. Ubuntu introduced that idea of nearly-vanilla GNOME quite a while ago (http://www.piware.de/2009/02/the-stracciatella-gnome-session/) but only today I tried a taste of it, with 10.10. Brrrr. Nonsense. Hardly usable (try to finish the session, for example:). A bit too much of “chocolate chips”. If you look at the Canonical discussions (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Jaunty/StracciatellaSession), there is one essential phrase: “This works on component granularity, not on the level of patches.” Very sensible remark, technically – and honest statement, too. But at the same time, it makes the whole idea more and more useless, as time goes by – because the size of patches applied to standard components grows with every release of Ubuntu. The result is something half-baked that I would not recommend to consume without 0.5 of vodka (I hope the original stracciatella is not that bad).

Whatever tensions are between Ubuntu and GNOME – I do not think it is fair from Canonical to make that kind of bad PR (feels more like FUD) by introducing “NEARLY vanilla” Gnome desktop.

PS I filed a bug in relation to g-s-d, closing it could add a bit more vanilla.

IDC (Russia) overestimated the TCO for FOSS, published incorrect report

IDC (well-known analytical company – or, to be exact, its Russian division) recently published the report analyzing the TCO for different approaches to IT infrastructures for schools. Namely, they look at proprietary solution vs FOSS-based solution. Unfortunately, that report turned to some kind of scandal – everyone, more or less familiar with the economics of  FOSS, raised brows quite high on some figures.

Today, the major Russian Linux vendor reacted: CEO of Alt Linux, Alexey Smirnov published the open letter explaining why the report was wrong – and why it should be withdrawn. I think this is a good practice, to publish more or less official statements when someone tells lies about FOSS. We are all quite vocal at Slashdot, Linux.org.ru etc – but sometimes someone should say something loud and strong. I hope IDC has decency … at least to react somehow – if not to admit, immediately, they did rather poor job.