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Gnome 3
The Eternal War On Users
It is often said that gnome has lost its ways around the release of 3.0, but that is a misconception.
Everything started the moment Gnome 2 released, when Havoc Pennington started having funny ideas about tailoring the user interface for the sake of a mythical "average gnome computer user" that has never existed and will never exist. 23 years after the release of Gnome 2, not only is the linux desktop still the butt of a joke, but it has gotten far less usable in the hands of most because of the invisible UIs (not even a dock),
lack of desktop icons (which pretty much all people who don't understand computers use), proliferation of hamburger menus (the amount of time I've seen people incapable of doing something on their phone because it was inside a hamburger menu and people just don't notice nor understand them. It's no surprise Valve picked KDE for their steam deck desktop mode.
In short, our UI has sucked for the same reason version 1.0 of the Linux kernel sucked; it's not mature yet. Creating a good UI is a matter of assembling and effectively organizing a sufficiently large and coordinated group of contributors for a sufficiently long amount of time
Over perhaps the last year, especially the last 6 months, I've gotten the sense that we've turned the corner and finally could really tell you what's involved in creating a GUI competitive with OS X or Windows XP
The most-often-mentioned example of bad free software UI is "too many preferences." This is pretty much my pet peeve; I was inspired to write a whole window manager on the premise that current window managers suffer from preferences overload.
So, from his point of view, whatever shipped before Gnome 2 was garbage and finally they found a way to make something good in the form of Gnome 2. But, what was Gnome 2? The main problem that causes people to have hope in gnome is that they always forget that it used to be just as bad
and things happen in cycle, with Gnome developers backpedaling on the most hated misfeatures until they release yet another disruption again.
I will start with Gnome 2's biggest misfeature : the spatial nautilus. The idea behind this horrifying thing is that instead of having files well ordered and through deep folders hierarchies, people would interact with a few folders, that would always open in new windows, in the same place on the screen and with manual placement of every file.
One can only wonder what they thought when they made this.. for example, how much effort would be lost by people because this concept doesn't age through hardware evolution and would make you lose all the time spent doing manual placement on the screen.
If you buy a higher resolution monitor, what to do with the previous spatial nautilus? where is the "save" button that can preserve the state and allow you to import it elsewhere? does the feature really scale for people who manage thousands of files?
This nonsense went on from Nautilus 2.6 to 2.29.
Here's how it was received in 2004:
Why Users Blame Spatial Nautilus
Now the feature doesn't even exist anymore. It caused years of flamewars and this was all for nothing. Gnome devs probably never used this piece of shit it was just another hill for them to die on the mountaintop of arrogance.
Gnome Switches Nautilus Back To Browser Mode
Early Gnome 2, before all the backpedaling, was borderline unusable. It is no coincidence that there was a coterie industry around packaging modded versions of it and offering paid support, such as the Ximian Desktop.
When gnome 3 released, it didn't even show you a power off button
unless you knew about a specific keyboard shortcut beforehand.
Not even gnome's most ardent defenders can stomach this on the platform that has, even to this day, the most broken and dysfunctional support of ACPI and other power management tools. It is well known that linux always has worse battery life than Windows on the same hardware,
that it oftens crashes resuming from suspend and so on. Yet this is what these geniuses developers were thinking:
The developers argue that users should generally suspend their computers instead of shutting down. In order to encourage that pattern of behavior, they hid the shutdown and restart menu items. By default, shutdown will not be displayed and the restart option will only appear when you have system updates that need to be applied.
They know better. They always know better. Until they realize they don't and backpedal on their positions. Although it can take years before they do. Is it good engineering to force a feature that doesn't work well on a large amount of computers ?
On chasing users and developers away and the consequences
Staring into the Abyss
I won’t be attending GUADEC this year. I don’t feel like I would be productive in the current state of things. The only event I will be missing is the keynote of Jacob Appelbaum. That is all for now.
core developers are leaving GNOME development.
The most recent examples are Emmanuele and Vincent. Both cite the need to look for something different, there is no hard feelings.
GNOME is understaffed.
This is hard to explain in a short and concise way. For anecdotal numbers: GTK has 1 person working full-time on it (me). Glib doesn’t even have that. I think evolution is in a similar situation (a complete email client). We can also try Ohloh’s statistics for GNOME (they include 131 packages, including GStreamer and NetworkManager). You’ll see a sharp drop off of committers on the first page already which suggests around 20 full-time developers at most.
GNOME is a Red Hat project.
If you look at the Ohloh statistics again and ignore the 3 people working almost exclusively on GStreamer and the 2 working on translations, you get 10 Red Hat employees and 5 others. (The 2nd page looks like 6 Red Hat employees versus 8 others with 6 translators/documenters.) This gives the GNOME project essentially a bus factor of 1.
GNOME has no goals.
I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development.
The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.
My personal guess is that they have seen the incessant API breaks in the Gnome stack and have realized that making a Gnome application is task for Sisyphus.
taking features away (compact view removed from Nautilus)
Icaza, Mena, Pennington, Friedman, Hertzfeld, Mueth, Levien, Decrem..
Most of the founding members are gone.
Gnome as a project is a dead end. It loses contributors faster than it gains fresh blood. Yet they always think they have the luxury to reject those who would actually add much desired features to their desktop. Such as this patch to make it possible for apps to survive a compositor crash:
Draft: Add support for compositor handoffs
Or the whole history with Ubuntu:
Frustration, thy name is trying to work on two projects
For starters, some [2] people in the GNOME community moan about how Ubuntu doesn't pull its weight upstream. They then make it difficult for Ubuntu-y folks to contribute things upstream. People within the Ubuntu community, Canonical employees included, have tried to make significant contributions and have been knocked back on several occasions
They rejected every patch submission attempts at making the file chooser show image previews, a feature that every single operating system in existence has had since Windows 98.
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker (and my toilets are blocked)
The file picker is the pop-up box thingy that appears when you’re opening a file, usually when uploading something online. The GNOME desktop environment uses the file picker package GtkFileChooser. This file picker does not have a thumbnail view. It is broken software. Thumbnails are not a cute little extra, they are essential. This is as bad as a file picker that doesn’t list the name of the files, only their creation date, or inode serial number. It is broken software.
If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you, it’s because you’re used to mediocrity. If you think your experience all this time was "normal," you’re completely mistaken—and it’s not least because you’re using a specific desktop environment that’s available only on Free operating systems that account for only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer usage anyways.
This bug has received over one hundred comments over the course of nearly two decades. The total amount of time that generations of developers have collectively wasted writing out these comments have probably exceeded the amount of time it would’ve taken to fix the issue. The amount of written discussion on this issue is greater than 10,000 words, and now locked.
Gnome 3's solution to retaining users: the non-existent extension system
83 of GNOME Users installed Extensioms, survey shows
This is the bandaid that holds Gnome 3 together. The problem, though, is that unlike say, Vim's plugins, or Firefox WebExtensions, this isn't an actual, engineered extension mechanism.
It's just letting people use internal APIs that move and break every single release. And the developers always make it clear that when you're installing extensions, customizing your experience through the registry keys, err, I mean, dconf, or installing themes, you're doing something wrong and breaking gnome.
Extension developers are sick of having to do tedious work every 6 months to make sure their work doesn't break on a new release.
Arc Menu lead dev just quit
Andy writes, all sic: “Its been a pleasure contributing to the open source community on various projects private and public and also the GNOME project and can you all believe its been nearly 5 years since i founded ArcMenu “wow”, but its time for me to step down and stop developing ArcMenu further.”
Why ?
GNOME’s shifting sands. He explains that “…most extension developers have had to play cat and mouse to keep up with all the new changes [in GNOME]” The rate of progress and change in GNOME (and in Arc’s codebase too) made it ‘extremely hard’ to keep pace.
For Andy he simply feels he’s “…no longer enjoying what i was doing and it felt like work not a hobby”.
Even the few ardent Gnome fans remaining know the situation is problematic.
Please stop recommending shell extensions
Like I mentioned before, shell extensions aren't officially supported, are usually the cause for most of the "bugs" in GNOME, and get broken in between minor GNOME/GTK releases.
However, every time a new GNOME user needs or wants a common desktop feature, like having icons on the desktop or having the dock remain visible, instead of advising that user to switch to another desktop, someone in the community recommends a shell extension.
The user installs the shell extension, then almost immediately (or days or weeks later, if the user is lucky) starts having GNOME shell stability problems. When the user asks for help with the stability problems.
the user is told to REMOVE the shell extension that was just previously recommended. The stability problems go away, but now the user is left without the feature he/she/they wanted or needed in the first place.
Recommending a shell extension to a new user to cover for a missing feature, knowing that the extension will eventually cause stability problems or get broken with a new GNOME/GTK release, is a major waste of the user's time. At worst, it's a bait and switch
The community needs to be very honest with new users about missing features and the use of shell extensions.
Gnome tentacular's infestation of the ecosystem through Red Hat's money
Gnome, since version 3.0, has developed a particularly strong desire to take over the whole linux desktop ecosystem at the expense of others. It starts with minor issues like telling application developers they shouldn't use notification icons at all :
Don't use a notification area icon in GNOME 3
In the upcoming GNOME 3 we won't be supporting notification area icons (status icons). Instead we will support persistence of notification bubbles. So that if a bubble is missed or not acted upon an icon will be added to a queue and provide basic equivalence to what status icons are today.
Transmission has an option in the Desktop tab of the preferences to "Show Transmission icon in the notification area". This should probably be removed.
The option should be 'removed', nevermind that it works on other desktops.
Oh, wait..
I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.
Of course, while gnomers never accept outsiders patching real features into their software, they will be very happy to give patch to remove features from other people's software :
Thanks for the great app! Please let me know if you would like a patch for this
Or force dependencies on systemd, dbus, pulseaudio, wayland and other potteringware like filth that has ruined the quality of life on linux and the predictability of configuration and commands.
As a final note, a reminder about the topic that has been most debated to death
in the community:
https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/
https://without-systemd.org/wiki/index_php/Arguments_against_systemd/
One has to ask, after 23 years of waging war on the linux community was it worth it?
The worst thing in linux history's.. is Red Hat's success.
What world would we have if it had been Mandrake, Debian or SUSE winning the corporate hearts and minds?
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