Apple's poisonous touch silently kills the GNOMEs of the Linux forest | Hacker News Reader

Apple's poisonous touch silently kills the GNOMEs of the Linux forest

theregister.co.uk

32 pointswatchdogtimer25 comments

Flamebait article with a lot of factual errors:

Article confuses GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell (Linux Mint and Ubuntu both use GNOME 3 the framework). Both the UI and the framework went through a huge transition, both arguably hurt the developers and the users.

Nokia's abandonement of GNOME has nothing to do with GNOME 3. SUSE was a KDE distro from the very start, years ago. Ubuntu not shipping with GNOME 3 the UI by default is less to do with GNOME Shell and more to do with Ubuntu pushing their own thing (valid strategy, but not a response to GNOME 3 mess). The only major distro to react to GNOME 3 disruption is Linux Mint - which had to do so because both Unity and Shell weren't there yet.

Back to Apple envy and "poisonous touch" - whoever paid attention to what's going on with GNOME development knows there was (is?) much more Web "envy" (or rather panic: "it's going to render the desktop obsolete!"). In fact, I'd say Apple in this case served as an example of an ecosystem that successfully pushed against the web and obsolesence of desktop (or rather "native") apps.

It's not Apple's fault

It's the fault of 'the inmates running the asylum' thinking that visual gimmicks + removing functionality until the product is lobotomized == User Experience

And don't give me the BS that Gnome cares about UX, they don't.

How do you know you care about the user? They like you. Sometimes they even like you enough to give you money.

I'm wondering what people do exactly hate so much in Gnome? I'm working right now in Gnome 3.6. It's not perfect, but it suits me pretty well by being simple elegant and not in my face.

For the record, "works for me" is the least useful way of addressing someone's concerns. Way back when I worked in QA, I absolutely hated the WORKSFORME status in Bugzilla.

I recently tried GNOME 3.4 for about a month. I liked it right away: it's pretty and it's practical. I stopped using it because it slowed down my (old, granted) computer horribly after a few days (memory leak?). Restarting the computer made it feel faster again, but I like keeping the machine on all the time (I usually only restart when there's a kernel update in my distro). I went back to LXDE and my machine feels so much faster: even freshly started, before a few days of slowdown, GNOME 3.4 is slower than LXDE, and I use mostly the same programs on both: chromium, evince, gvim, empathy, totem, etc.

Seriously, in reality, gnome3 and gnome shell are pretty nice.

[and I have exactly the feeling you do: it gets out of my way except when I want to use it, and then it's easily available]

The gnome shell especially is also a welcome sign that there's some independent thinking about UIs going on, which is a welcome change from the painful old "let's be just like windows with a few tweaks!" schtick of times past.

Its worst sin is that it represents change, and, well, people hate change... :[

> And don't give me the BS that Gnome cares about UX, they don't.

I don't know why I'm bothering to respond to such a ridiculous and unsubstantiable claim, but there's actual evidence in the form of work product that GNOME cares about UX. It can be found here https://live.gnome.org/Design/Contribute

Yes, I was expecting this answer.

But this is not evidence they know what they're doing. Or the designers may know what has to be done, but the organization doesn't know where to go. Maybe it's committee driven design.

They may talk about it, but it's like a presidential campaign speech: "Yes, we care about education, about healthcare, etc" but it's not necessarily true.

Their designers are good, and some good things come across, but in the end it's like having a car with a powerful engine and a crappy suspension, and it's this that shows in Gnome, they don't know how to put together a nice car, it always ends up with a ridiculous aerodynamic, small tires, etc

The article seems to gather a number of unrelated assumptions and keeps repeating them until they must be true.

For instance, a statement like "...the radical rewrite that is the GNOME 3 desktop seems to have pleased almost no one." is backed up with no data at all. And that's exactly the problem. Without data, who is anyone to claim that GNOME is gaining or losing users? Or market share, for that matter. Personally I love GNOME 3, but what I personally think doesn't matter one bit.

And while I respect Linux (sic) Torvalds as much as anyone, the fact that he is a kernel hacker means he is as far away from GNOME's desired target audience as anyone could be. His dislike of GNOME 3 could almost be seen as a positive sign.

I think the articles touches on many interesting things, such as:

- How and why did a number of distributions decide to go their own way? How does GNOME plan to respond? Maybe being the default for a smaller number of distros means less restrictions and less need for compromise, who knows.

- GNOME seems to focus on being great on touch devices, but how will they end up on those devices if they don't sell hardware?

- How can GNOME measure its success to know they're heading the right way? How do they define "success"? If it's the number of users, how can it gather usage data?

Those are the things I'd like to know more about. Not empty claims of users leaving in droves, or the suggestion that the only way GNOME will survive would be to return to its old ways (because back in the day, GNOME 2 dwarfed Windows and OS X, right?).

(I've read it a number of times now, and I am still completely in the dark as to how Apple ties in to all this. Surely Apple must be important, since it's mentioned in the title.)

> - How can GNOME measure its success to know they're heading the right way?

For the "right way" they actually do user testing / design / trying to simplify specific workflows for an average person. You'll hear about it sometimes on the mailing lists, but if they publish anything it's usually only the result. While the lack of opennes there is annoying, at least they're doing something.

> If it's the number of users, how can it gather usage data?

I hope that the downloads per version and per distribution that uses gnome3 gives some data. (although it's dirty data, affected by many other effects)

> - GNOME seems to focus on being great on touch devices, but how will they end up on those devices if they don't sell hardware?

Yeah... that's the question I'd really like to find the answer to. Maybe the idea is that normal desktops will just become touch devices in some time (HP Touchsmart / MS Surface style). But that's a gamble and I haven't seen that claim made officially yet.

Without data, who is anyone to claim that GNOME is gaining or losing users? -> How and why did a number of distributions decide to go their own way?

I worked on the GNOME project this past summer and went to GUADEC. Attendance at GUADEC has been steadily declining drastically over the past few years. The auditorium had ~100 attendees during the keynote speech. Many of the side talks had < 10 listeners.

## Distributions

- RedHat: Primary GNOME contributor in money and developers. Most attendees at GUADEC were Fedora users. There were a handful of Ubuntu / SUSE devs.

- Ubuntu: Unity shell on top of GNOME framework.

- Linux Mint: Cinnamon was originally a small project, but is currently gaining momentum.

## Simplicity

There is a goal by the designers to push simplicity. They're not making these changes based on empirical evidence AFAIK, but rather gut decision.

1. For example, McCann axed a lot of features from Nautilus:

  http://blogs.gnome.org/mccann/2012/08/01/cross-cut/

Removed features:

  - compact view
  - typeahead find
  - split pane view
  - bookmark folders
  - backspace key to go up a directory
  - "tree" view
  - "new file" template

2. Closing laptop lid now unconditionally suspends, settings to change behavior have been removed:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687277

3. From GNOME desktop development mailing list, fallback mode will be phased out now that there is a roughly working software renderer for GNOME shell. The ones making this decision criticized users for not having a <5 year computer, completely ignoring the fact that a lot of 3rd world country users are running on older hardware.

I primarily use fallback mode (with xmonad). In GNOME 3.6, a lot of stuff is just broken tagged WONTFIX.

## Touch Devices

There was a heavily attended talk about touch UI support in GNOME on tablet and phone devices.

I brought up this issue with the primary speaker but wasn't satisfied: How are you going to get hardware manufacturers to adopt GNOME over Android?

Hardware manufacturers make money by selling devices. They will use whichever software ecosystem that positively impacts their bottom line. There are no users out there clamoring for GNOME on their tablets. By designing GNOME for touch, they are instead alienating their existing user base.

## Direction

Quite simply, there is no leadership at GNOME. Yes it's a FOSS project, but maybe there needs to be a benevolent dictator driving the bus.

Instead there are the designers who are trying to simplify GNOME shell. Others are moving functionality into web apps. An extremely large group wants to create a GNOME distro.

One of the biggest questions proposed at GUADEC was where does GNOME go now? No one seems to know, so instead we have a few key people deciding on their own in a non-coherent fashion and the project meanders along on cruise control.

Buried in a very misleading article is a good point:

> (Apple) did not rewrite the OS X desktop that runs on Macs, nor did it try to re-imagine the desktop computing paradigm. Apple created something entirely new that was always designed with touch screens in mind.

I have never understood why traditional desktops must adopt to touch screen based GUIs. Why can't both be independently developed? Why is Microsoft and Canonical trying to unify seemingly unrelated user input paradigms?

Because they both have an existing desktop product, both of which are dominant in their own sphere (Microsoft: desktop computers, Canonical: Linux desktop computers), and they'd really like to leverage that advantage to get into the touch-based market, which is predicted to grow massively while desktop is stagnating.

I guess there are also a few products where both input paradigms make sense, ie. the tablet/notebook hybrids, you wouldn't want to entirely different user experiences on a single device depending on the currently chosen input, so you make a hybrid user experience fitting the hybrid device. The other choice would be simply not supporting hybrid devices, but clearly that is not what Microsoft has chosen to do.

I'm using OSX as things just work on it and the last thing I need is friction working with my OS - but every day I'm finding it harder to justify my relationship with Apple.

It's hard to believe with so many big players around that the choice is so limited right now.

Can please explain the relation between the title and the article? How did Apple kill Gnome, again?

Not "Apple" but "Apple's poisonous touch". It refers to the touch interface (made popular by Apple), not Apple as a company.

The title matches the article very well, burying whatever substance there might be in innuendo.

There is none — the title is misleading linkbait. The article only mentions Apple twice, and even then it doesn't explain what "Apple's poisonous touch" has to do with GNOME 3 being almost universally disliked — or as the title puts it, "killed" (which is also completely untrue).

Not true: "What happened that made GNOME developers seemingly abandon all sense of sanity and design a desktop interface that almost no one wants? ... The more likely candidates for inspiring GNOME's 3.0 stumble is Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS."

Maybe the title is linkbait, but the thesis isn't absurd.

The way this article is written is highly misleading.

> iOS for mobile devices Apple, well, created iOS for mobile devices. It did not rewrite the OS X desktop that runs on Macs. Apple created something entirely new that was always designed with touch screens in mind.

Except that is untrue. Or to quote Apple during the iPhone's initial release:

> iPhone uses OS X, the world’s most advanced operating system.

What later became known as "iOS" is based on OS X which is its self based on Darwin. You could fairly argue that OS X for the i-devices was a fork but to say Apple made something "entirely new" is just false.

Not to mention calling OS X "the world's most advanced operating system" is entirely subjective, and highly debatable.

I use gnome because my computer can't run unity. :)

I didn't wanted to change to other desktop because as it always happens to me, something goes wrong and i can't use my system for half a day. (Today i'm upgrading to 11.10, the support term is over for .04, I hope it goes well...)

Pssssst xubuntu

Or anything running XCFE or LXDE.

    > Linux Torvalds himself called GNOME 3 "an unholy
    > mess", going on to add that he's never met anyone
    > who likes it.

Stay classy, El Reg.

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