OS and Software > All Things Unix > Is GNOME in Free Fall?

..."the GNOME developers walked away from their existing user base, ignored the protests with 'trust us, we know better than you what you really want,' and went ahead and designed something completely unsuitable for keyboard and mouse input, and now they wonder where their users went"...

GNOME is continuing to lose supporters as now part of the Linux Mint programming team start working on a fork of the GNOME file manger, Nautilus.

After creating its own GNOME Shell and Mutter forks, Nautilus is the third major component of the GNOME desktop stack that the Linux Mint team has decided to fork and maintain itself... the Elementary project also maintains its own derivative of Nautilus.

Bottom line? "I just don't get it," Mack concluded. "I realize touch screens are great for some things, but they are harder for things like programming or even writing moderately sized documents, yet the entire industry seems to want to abandon the mouse and keyboard despite what their own users are telling them.

I see nothing in GNOME 3 that would make it suitable for touchscreen use, just like Mac OS X is not suitable for touchscreen use. Does anyone have any examples? I think the people that make these comments don't own a iOS device or an Android device, or I am just missing something here.

I cannot speak for everyone, of course, but Gnome 3 with gnome-shell is my DE of choice.

Tim

Benjamin Otte, a leading GNOME developer thinks GNOME, once a popular Linux/Unix desktop but now more often used as a foundation for other desktop interfaces, is "staring into the abyss."

By July 2012, of all the major Linux distributors only Fedora remains a steadfast GNOME 3.x supporter. There's a reason for that: Otte states that GNOME is a Red Hat project.

"If you look at the Ohloh statistics again and ignore the 3 people working almost exclusively on Gstreamer [an open-source multimedia framework] and the 2 working on translations, you get 10 Red Hat employees and 5 others. (The 2nd page looks like 6 Red Hat employees versus 8 others with 6 translators/documenters.) This gives the GNOME project essentially a bus factor of 1.”

Bus factor? It's engineering/developer slang for how many people would need to be hit by a bus before a project would be dead. The lower the number, the more likely it is that the project is too fragile and could easily die. In other words, if Red Hat ever decided that GNOME wasn't worth investing in, the project would be dead in the water. You can see why Otte thinks this when he also observed that core developers are leaving and that GNOME is understaffed.

This is not a project that can be succesfully developed by a handful of developers - it needs more than that. And, Otte points out, the situation is only getting worse, since traditional GNOME/Gtk supporters, like SUSE and Nokia, are backing down.

I'm getting the feeling these concerns aren't exactly new, and that a solution isn't exactly right around the corner. GNOME took a gamble, and it isn't working out. I'm sure we'll see enough comments from people who like GNOME 3, but there's simply not enough of you. That doesn't mean GNOME 3 sucks - it simply means it isn't popular enough to sustain itself.

Add to all this the fact that GNOME has zero presence on the next wave of devices (tablets and smartphones) and the picture is complete - and dire. Sadly, I'm afraid heels will be dug into the sand regarding GNOME 3, and we'll see a doubling-down on an environment people simply don't want, instead of trying to find out what users do want.

iPod/iPhone users didn't know they needed (funny word, "need") those things until Steve built it for them.

Linux playing catch-up with Windows 8?

...GNOME 3 would not only lag behind KDE for code maturity and innovation, but fail catastrophically with users, resulting in alternative interfaces, ranging from Ubuntu's Unity to Linux Mint's re-creations of GNOME 2 in Cinnamon and Mate.

The collapse is so thorough that GNOME is reportedly now talking about obtaining a twenty percent share of the Linux desktop by 2020, where a few years ago its share was well over forty percent.

I know of no figures for traditional desktop usage in 2012, but LinuxQuestion's 2011 survey showed KDE in front, followed by Xfce. Cinnamon was too new to make the survey at all, and Mate registered only a few percent, but, like Unity, both are almost certain to do better this year.

Some, or even all three of these desktops are likely to do better than the 19% that GNOME 3 managed in 2011. GNOME 3 itself will probably show even further decline. As for actual numbers of users, all traditional desktops are likely to lose ground to mobile devices.

Today, the Cold War of the giants, of KDE vs. GNOME, is over. We are in a new era of diversity (or fragmentation, if you think having more choices is a bad thing). So which, if any desktops are likely to dominate in the next few years?

Which will be the source of major innovations? Which will fail to emerge from the pack? Which are likely to be in the running?

None of these questions are as easy to answer as they were three years ago.

Who's gonna dominate? Pretty obvious. Spacecoke Mark has his army of Kool Aid Kids, almost as bad as the fruit fanbois. He really worked on building a cult

Why is it necessary to be insulting every time you talk about Ubuntu? Is it out of the realm of possibility that Mark is doing something that others genuinely appreciate and perhaps that's a good thing?