GNOME Foundation: Evolving a strategy for 2022 and beyond | Hacker News Reader

GNOME Foundation: Evolving a strategy for 2022 and beyond

ramcq.net

3 pointspabs35 comments

Some things I'd like to see from the GNOME foundation, and as it happens they fit well with the initiatives:

1) Commit to long term API support. It makes no sense to want a diverse/sustained app ecosystem, then throw away existing apps because the API changed and nobody is there to fix it. I can run win95 apps. I can compile command line unix apps older than that. But gtk/gnome for more than a few years ago gets hard.

2) Decide on minimal supported target hardware. Gnome seems to put in a lot of polish for top end hardware. Meanwhile, the average piece of hardware is a cheap computer. If it runs Linux, it's possibly a hand me down. Gnome should run well on a 10 year old craptop with low-res screen.

3) Decide on a user model. Gnome seems focused on the average 90-year blind computer-illiterate Linux enthousiasts. I'd like to see them focus on 1 or more persona.

I don't think the GNOME Foundation involves themselves in the development of GNOME? They are more working on supporting and growing the developer and user community.

Then this effort is doomed from the start, and the strategy is in fact an empty shell.

The first red hat^W flag one gets from the foundation's site is total lack of governance information (as in: who's in charge) and financial data.

Maybe I'm reading their site upside down, but this doesn't bode well for the foundation.

A bit OT, but how many people use Gnome ? or KDE ? The only stat I see is that it's about 1.2% of Steam users which are about 120 millions. So we're talking about 1 million here and I guess many devs don't play games so that's more... I've checked the usual web page : steam, wikipedia, etc. Are there better sources ?

No, because GNOME and other open source projects generally don't do telemetry (or only do opt-in telemetry), so there is no way to know how many users there are.

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