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?

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.

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…

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…

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

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%

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.

So, there are some important consequences:

• If you are end-user running ubuntu 10.10 and you have complains about gnome keyboard indicator, you’re not really welcome to bugzilla.gnome.org. First, you should file your problem at Launchpad. If the Ubuntu team finds the problem down the stack, they sure will escalate it.
• A lot of Ubuntu users (including myself) were happy to utilize non-documented but working support for flags in GNOME. In Ubuntu’s implementation that feature is not supported, AFAIK. You’re welcome to complain in Launchpad.
• Single-click layout switching does not work any more (I was told). You’re welcome to complain in Launchpad

As a GNOME developer, I am very concerned about the fact that Ubuntu is starting to create its own version of GNOME. All distrovendors have patches, but Canonical seems to be gone a bit too far, on my taste.

As an end-user, I am quite irritated. I am thinking about switching back to Debian or Fedora (considering the fact that Ubuntu’s support for PowerPC is not great anyway).

I would appreciate if someone provides explanation on how to get original gnome keyboard indicator in Ubuntu 10.10. I did not install that version yet – but people are asking.

Turned on/off using gconf entry. Open questions:

1. Should I request stock icons (instead of png files in g-s-d) – for themability?
2. Should the icon names be added to “well known icons list” in the notification area applet?
3. Should the gconf entry be made visible through the kbd capplet (checkbox)?
4. Most important: can anyone with designer skills better than mine create 6 icons that would look better than that?