If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain about where to steer.
Really? Not even in the case you think the captain failed to notice the iceberg, and a simple heads up would save not only yours but all the other passengers' lives?
Nothing ot do with Gnome, I suppose, but this was a really bad analogy.
I happen to disagree with the course, but it's their right as developers to choose a different direction. At some point as a user you have to come to grips with the fact that their vision and yours have diverged. There are undoubtedly many other users who prefer this different direction and they can't all be right.
Find the boat going the direction you want to go and climb aboard and help out.
I have to learn more about KDE -> Gnome, since I remember it was the other way around :)
hmmm
here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
There was more to the issue than BK simply deciding to drop the free version. The short story behind that one of the Samba authors helped force Free Software along in more ways than one!
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-well-written-accounts-of-...
He switched from KDE 3.5 to GNOME 2 series when we were dicking around with KDE 4.
Then GNOME started their own process of dicking around and Linus tried KDE 4 (including rotating all the Plasma widgets ;).
Not sure if he stuck there or ended up on XFCE though.
| The terminal is a power-user feature
Now, the best software projects on Linux, ones that had previously been creating software that power users liked, and which became important at all because of the power users that switched over to using it, have apparently decided that power users are a minority segment of the overall market and that they are no longer worth optimizing for.
To make this clear: imagine if Windows, which currently is marketing itself to the "average computer user segment", a user segment that by-and-large were humans with some large subset of eyes, hands, and ears, and decided that the real money in the future was going to be branching out to take over the "any organism of any form" market.
Of course, that market has no real use for a keyboard or a mouse, as the majority of organisms don't have fingers. They can't see the screen, and they probably can't even reason in symbols. So the entire user interface starts getting converted into some kind of EM sensitive yes/no detector that is mostly useful for doing simple arithmetic.
Would this be reasonable? Would the people who currently use Windows not find this ludicrous? This analogy is obviously downright insane, but frankly I think it covers the situation here really well: the people who care about Linux are power users, so by forsaking power users they are forsaking their entire existing market segment.
For a simpler analogy, that I think also nails the core of the problem here while seeming really awkward: imagine if ALL the worlds best manufacturers of semi-trucks decided that cars were more profitable, and so decided to start marketing their products to them, not just by adding amenities but by making them less useful as semi-trucks.
So, over time, new models stop taking diesel, they force a back seat into the front, they add an optional trunk, and one they they decide to just remove the option to hitch things to the back at all. Would this be sane? This may even make sense on some kind of long-term strategy to take over the car market, but their market doesn't want a car.
Here, then: yes, I would agree with "the terminal is a power-user feature", but it is missing the point entirely to then argue that "I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there" here: claiming something is a power-user feature in order to justify its removal is indicating "small market segment", but power users are the market segment.
They are the most absurdly productive and effective computer users I know and the most highly competent.
They can deal with thing abstractly and don't need to spatially visualize every type of manipulation on the screen.
The CLI allows you to create tiny on the fly programs, slicing and dicing small tools to do really useful things.
There is absolutely no way to do it quite as fast if you have to artistically draw the connections with a pointing device in a GUI.