Time for patches
Not happy with GNOME Shell, not happy with Unity, not happy with alternatives. Seems it is time for starting the editor again and cooking patches. Merging the good ideas from GNOME Shell and Unity. Ripping out the crap. Well, making it possible to hide: Some people believe in it - fine.
Still wondering which of the two I'll work with.
Really sucks that people allowed this split to happen. Both teams have good ideas. Both teams have bad ideas. Both teams are motivated. Good leaders would not have permitted this split to happen.
Well, back to fetching source code, reading documentation, understanding what's going on.
Big fears wether I am able to get my code upstream. Both teams appear narrow-minded from outside. Guess I'll need a (good) plan.
Not ready to give up yet. Want a modern free desktop, which suites my needs. Not a corset.
Wondering where to steal the massive amount of time needed.
You seem to have an awfully high opinion of yourself... And YOU are calling _two_ developer teams narrow-minded? After this blog-entry I don't even want to KNOW what kind of code your big, fat ego thinks GNOME needs now. I have no connection whatsoever with GNOME development but I hope for all of us that your type of person stays out of the project because your kind cannot work with others.
@Marc, where do you think most of our motivation to work in F/OSS comes from?
Because someone thinks he can do it better.
What exactly are you afraid of that you felt the need to attack Mathias directly?
How about starting with gnome-shell, producing a theme that works the way you want to, and adding components as needed to support bits you can't get by changing the theme (such as configuration for bits you want configurable)?
Leaders, and I'm not saying good leaders because the few ones we do have aren't bad ones at all, is precisely what GNOME is missing. And this, I think, is why splits like this happen. Especially leaders that aren't biased towards A or B, if you know what I mean.
We also miss a process to become a (technical) leader. It's all too vague. And too many off-topic organizations are trying to influence GNOME. For example, as much as the actual developers agree or don't with the philosophies, doesn't GNOME have much to do with woman-rights/feminism, freedom ideologies, software patents, Mono, Novell vs. Ubuntu vs. RedHat or vs. $X-whatever debates (as if the actual developer cares that much), or ... (plugin in $X-subject here). Whether certain people like that or not. The problem with that is a constant loss of focus. That focus, in the end, ought to be the "actual" development of components that are usable for building a rich user interface environment (and not just a "desktop", as "desktop" should not be GNOME's only focus at all). NOT just the talking about aforementioned "actual" development. Fewer and fewer people do the actual development, more and more people do just talking. That saddens me. About ten years ago (or more) GNOME used to be a place to go if you wanted to meet awesomely good developers. Nowadays you go to GNOME if you want to meet talkers, idiotic philosophers and other nonsense. The crazy thing is that I know that the good developers are still there. They are just hiding from picking up leadership.
A good leader would herd these sheep to refocus each time said focus is lost. GNOME doesn't have any such individual at this moment. And has not had one since Miguel. Which is just sad.
This is all nonsense; Mr 'Canonical' Shuttleworth forced the split because he wanted complete control and the GNOME community didn't just hand it over to him.
And apart from that, we have just seen how good GNOME works as a team and as a process by the sheer spectacular success of pulling off this release.
We don't need 'strong' leaders like Mr. S.
This release of Gnome a success ? It's a Joke ?
Apologies for not mentioning Jeff as such a leader who came after Miguel. I think Jeff's efforts at being such a leader where good. I don't question his good intentions (whatever certain other people think: I often disagreed with those people and yet sometimes I didn't, even if when was Murray who I respect a lot. Surely sometimes, I was critical too. In the end, people aren't perfect but that says little about either their good or bad intentions). However, GNOME needs technical leadership. Not political leadership (which is what Jeff did more than the technical side). GNOME's foundation is founded and works now (quirky but .. well). Now phase two please. It's about time, yes. It's possibly too late, even.
@Marc: I don't think Mr 'Canonical' Shuttleworth's intentions were to "split GNOME". There's a.t.m. just no method to "sell" your "alternative ideas" to what we today call "GNOME". This is, I think, GNOME's current biggest strategic mistake (GNOMErs wont admit this, like they don't admit any of their mistakes, yet I can assure you and give you a few "I'm being blind for the problems"-blog items of a few weeks ago to prove this).
If GNOME would be a set of interopable components, like it aimed to be during Maemo-times (which is what I think GNOME should be, instead of a "desktop"), then a "different kind of desktop" wouldn't be incompatible with GNOME-3 .. at all. Whatever the dogma people tell you (there are plenty of them).
As a software developer myself I assure you that you can design software in such a way that it will work just fine with any "different desktop"-idea (Shell, Unity, XFCE, whatever ... really). It even works fine, and has always worked fine, between mobile, embedded and Personal Computer desktops or laptops. There is no inherent incompatibility and if the GNOME-3 / GNOME-Shell people would (they aren't, as far as I know) try to make you believe that: they'd be lying.
Problem isn't (as far as I know) that the GNOME Shell folks are saying this. Problem appears to be that talkers and idiotic philosophers have concluded this themselves. And that is just ... silly and typical for people who know little about software development to think and say.
GNOME Shell and Unity aren't incompatible at all. However, there's a.t.m. too few common ground between those two: "that" is a mistake being made by the leaders (or the lack of) of both groups. And both groups should indeed feel ashamed for being too biased and should feel even more ashamed for not talking with each other enough.
The decision not to talk, or to talk with each other too little, is going to end up as a catastrophy in opensource UI-land. Just like GNOME vs. KDE has been a catastrophy in the nineties and 2000ths.
I just hope the leaders (who are apparently hiding behind a mediocracy) will make more intelligent decisions this decade. I fear they wont and will again end up blaming "the other guys" for several years; masking away their own incompetence.
I think you perhaps see the split in a glass-half-empty way. There is a very real possibility that a single project would have baked in only the bad ideas from both current efforts. With two parallel shells we get many more ideas out in the open and in practical use. It'd be hard to know which ideas are good and not without alternatives to try out.
@Philip: "About ten years ago (or more) GNOME used to be a place to go if you wanted to meet awesomely good developers. Nowadays you go to GNOME if you want to meet talkers, idiotic philosophers and other nonsense."
Please don't take this as an offence, but I find it a bit weird these words are coming from somebody who filled foundation-list with philosophical talks, rhetoric and flames for a long time.
I think the huge development effort our community put in GNOME 3.0 speaks for itself as a demonstration to what we can achieve, with very little political talking from all the people who stepped up and did the actual work.
And back on topic, Mathias, I'm not sure people just allowed this split to happen; somebody looked for it. Call me biased, but this is just obvious to me.
I'm glad you're choosing to take the hard way and start patching out what you don't like, and if that touches something I'm involved in, I'll be glad to see and discuss your patches; I'm confident many other developers in the GNOME community think the same.
Honestly, I don't see a good reason to use either as a base. We have gnome-panel and Metacity. I am to this day still confused as to why GNOME 3.0 is all based on OpenGL when there is not a single mandatory effect or feature in Mutter or gnome-shell that requires GL at all. Add a plugin system to Metacity to get the overview modes and you've basically got the good parts of GNOME 3.0 without all the other crap (like a useless panel, broken workspace management, or an inconsistent-with-everything-else toolkit). gnome-shell is just a big huge reimplementation of a ton of already working code just for the sake of having fun. Usual FOSS 80/20 nonsense (get the project 80% done, realize the remaining 20% is boring tweaks and bugfixes, so rewrite it all from scratch to have fun). Going forward, add an abstracted compositor system to Metacity, like KWin uses. Use OpenGL When it can be supported (and add extra effects in that case where it makes sense), and use render or software fallbacks elsewhere. Heck, use D3D on Windows as a dwm/explorer replacement, too.
Hello Mathias.
I will be trying too. I will most likely focus on GNOME Shell since I'm mostly a Fedora and GNOME user.
Good luck, and thanks for remaining constructive :D
Could not agree more with this post. I fled back to xfce. If something constructive comes out of this -- I want to help
@Cosimo Cecchi: The people on foundation-list all had to become member, and to become a member you need to have contributed. So those people are always people who don't just talk. I'm btw. not saying that GNOME 3.0 isn't an achievement without much political talk. I'm not satisfied with the level of collaboration with alternative desktops like Unity, though.
'ffin +1, Mathias!
It's not a great time to be a free desktop user.
Both the big distros have dropped the well worn UI for the experimental and less featureful.
One annoying thing to think about is the whole spatial philosophy that drove GNOME 2 being reversed. Spatial nautilus wan't a great idea but was pushed hard.
Spatial desktops is/was a good idea. Knowing my email is always on desktop one and being able to get to it with a single click is a productivity win.
Being able to launch a new gnome-terminal with a single click is a win.
Zoomy semi-transparent animated window overviews and desktop switching is not.
Mathias, I really hope you can help bring some sanity back.
One more project to follow. :-)
Thumbs up, Mathias!