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Comment by maheart | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion the shift from desktop to mobile across the wider industry took the wind out of Gnome's sails (and desktops in general, no matter the platform). It feels like there's been very little (visible) progress made on any desktop in the last 10 years.

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The problem is Gnome seemed to look at mobile and "pre-sabotage" itself. Both Gnome 3 and Unbuntu Unity wound-up creating "tablet/mobile ready" shells when no one was going to be using them that way. Tablets only seemed to be the wave of the future because they were new and everyone was buying them. It only became evident later that laptops were going stick around for a while and be what most people still used if they were doing "real work".

But with the narrative being "this is the future", they were more or less pressured into it. The designers as well as programmers are volunteers and I would imagine designers want to work on the "cutting edge" even if that cutting edge is a complete disaster for users (just Microsoft's redesigned UI was).

Their target wasn't just tablets, but any device with a touchscreen and/or a small screen. As a Netbook user, I loved Unity and was excited about the Gnome 3 shell. It seemed like the logical progression of Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

What changed is that display and battery technology got better. I went from carrying around a tiny PC with an undersized keyboard (remember the Eee PC?) to one that weighs less, has a full size keyboard, and sports a display larger than the one the came with my first desktop computer. On this hardware, a traditional desktop environment feels cozy, while Gnome Shell feels foreign.

I owned one of the later models of the Asus EeePC and let me tell you, Gnome 3 ran like a old dog on it. Totally unusable. I don't know how you could use it. The processor was awful, the screen resolution tiny, while Gnome was a CPU hog and wasted screen space the eeepc simply didn't have with spacial bloat of interfaces evidently designed to be fat fingered on touch screens the eeepc didn't have.

That, plus the shift to SAAS apps so that everything runs in a web browser. Basically, the two things I have open most of the time are Firefox and a bunch of terminal windows.

I think the shift to web apps and repackaged web apps happened largely because of how insanely hard it is to roll a decent multiplatform app between mac, windows and the various linux platforms even before considering mobile. For example, the OGL backend for GTK3 has been broken on MacOS for years and while there's been a rewrite for GTK4, porting from 3 to 4 is non trivial and so is maintaining 3+4 so GG if you're a small project.

True enough, but Gnome has the advantage of being the basis of Phosh + being able to share applications with it, as per on Pinephone and Librem 5.

It works as a converged desktop too. Windows can't do that, OSX is only just getting there. It is impressive that an open source project is so ready for it, really.

Windows can surely do that, docking stations for Windows mobile were a thing, then there are tablets and 2-1 hybrid laptops.

The problem with GNOME as the basis of Phosh is that little work has been done to optimize GNOME for low-memory, low-CPU-power environments. The Pinephone has limited memory (especially the first board with only 2GB of RAM) and an ancient, low-end processor, and while it will run all this GNOME stuff, it does so only at a snail’s pace. On the Pinephone takes several seconds just to open the wi-fi settings to activate or deactivate wi-fi, for example, something that most mobile-phone users today expect to be a near-instant thing, because on Android it is just a quick swipe and tap.

Phosh is written from scratch and don’t have much to do with the actual gnome shell source-wise.

I’m not talking about the Phosh executable as much as all the other things that Phosh on Mobian is meant to provide an interface with: so much of those preinstalled applications and libs in Mobian are derived from the GNOME project, and they just haven’t been optimized enough to run well on the PinePhone’s hardware.

Oh I see, misunderstood you there. Yeah, many apps are basically just the desktop version with some pre-configured scaling to make them barely usable - but as far as I know it is only by necessity until the mobile friendlier alternative emerges. But while it is good to see the advances mobile linux GUIs make, they are still far from usable as a primary device :/

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