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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

I'm not very familiar with the Gnome team, but isn't this just a resource problem?

They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers.

At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features.

I also don't think language (api's) are not at all comparable to desktop environments. There's just so much going on in a desktop environment.

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>> They're trying to build a better product, and they're only a bunch of part-time volunteers.

I thought quite a few of them worked for Redhat?

>> At some point they had a bunch of features, but to keep up with the other desktops (Aero, Quartz) they had to focus on rearchitecting and, being a small team, there haven't enough manpower to keep all the features.

That seems a bit of a rosy view of what happened. A cynic might say that they decided to scrap everything and start again, users be damned, and went out of their way to make 3/Shell incompatible with 2 to force people away from it, announcing that it was now abandoned and of no further interest. Then, as now, they explained how everyone that didn't like that move was wrong and stupid, and they set about making the desktop experience that you will absolutely love because we say so and if you don't do it our way you're a curmudgeon and intellectually subnormal.

> A cynic might say that they decided to scrap everything and start again

and not only this cynic would be wrong, but he would also be full of crap, because it's such a trivial thing to check in the public repositories, public mailing list archives, and public bug tracking system.

but, obviously, crapping on a bunch of volunteers trying to work on the project they like is easier.

That's certainly how it has looked from the outside.

Are you saying they didn't force incompatibility with Gnome 2? Or that they didn't just decide to change everything to exactly how they wanted the desktop, regardless of users?

Maybe they didn't scrap some of the underlying libraries, but the whole look, layout, interaction pattern/user flow and pretty much everything else was a total change.

> I thought quite a few of them worked for Redhat?

Ironically, the Redhat-employed ones seem to be working on Classic mode (so they can release RHEL 7 someday), which minimizes the damage the non-Redhat-employed ones have done: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Red-Hat-Linux-7-Will-Have-a-T...

> I'm not very familiar with the Gnome team, but isn't this just a resource problem?

How much time that is spent on packaging, documenting existing features, building communication systems, and doing cool new features is indeed hard resource questions for a project manager. Then there is policy questions which effect resources.

Python demands PEPs to be written before changes is considered. That demand for PEPs is less a resource question, and more a policy question. It forces developer to write down in words what they try to accomplish with a change, and also write down what effect it has on users.

In my opinion, the community reaction to gnome3 is not very surprising. Its a result of "less restrictive" developer process and few efforts into mitigation of community outrage. I can only hope they will find some insight from other projects, and start to handle feature changes with more user awareness.

They weren't really competing with Aero/Quartz, the most direct competition would be Android/iOS and the abomination known as WinRT. I don't know what happened in 2010 or so, but it seems like all the GUI developers collectively decided to jump off the same cliff by gutting the desktop experience and trying to re-create it for tablets; never mind that there's still a whole bunch of people that would like to use a GUI on non-tablet devices.

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