The Full Story Behind the Canonical vs. GNOME Drama

supersloshy writes this followup to our Thursday discussion of friction between Canonical and GNOME: "I've seen a lot of GNOME bashing for various reasons here on Slashdot as well as several other websites. The problem with all of this is that you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical. Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.' The points covered in the blog post include, among others, how Freedesktop.org is broken as a standards body, that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't understand how GNOME works, that GNOME is not easy to understand, and that open discussions from the very beginning are important for specification development and adoption. Another blog post by 'Sankar' also covers similar points while defending GNOME."

The problem is that both sides are wrong ...

[tomhudson]

GNOME has a long history of "NIH" (not invented here), and Canonical has developed a reputation for trying to boss developers around (like when they wanted all the major projects to sync their release schedule with Ubuntu).

In the end, they're both going to be irrelevant. GNOME shell is too late, and doing it their own way, going further away from what most people want in a desktop, and Unity is already outdated when you compare it to what's happening in the tablet world.

So a pox on both their houses. They sort of deserve each other.

How it works

[SuperKendall]

If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?

It doesn't. That's why people working remote often go visit the people they are working with, or at least they have one person who does if there are a group of them.

Telecommuting works because there is a buffer of understanding built up by in-person meetings and actions.

Fork it, minus all the whining

[ChunderDownunder]

Gnome weren't interested? If it matters to Canonical so much, why not just contribute the necessary support into the core libs? Refactor the gnome library so it supports both the gnome way of doing things and this new-fangled KDE/unity way and can be pluggable. Strict Gnome implementations can do it their way or link your lib.

If Ubuntu Gnome desktop (even running gnome-shell) is nicer that official Gnome, your fork will be adopted by other distros and thus 'win'.

Re:The problem is that both sides are wrong ...

[MrEricSir]

They're both going to be irrelevant?

Great, because the "screw you guys, I'm doing it my own way" mentality has worked SO well in the past for Linux on the desktop.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:For those without the patience...

[segedunum]

Which is kind of what you'd expect from Gnome - claim that Freedesktop doesn't work and that no ne understand how Gnome works, it's all just a big misunderstanding and everyone is equally to blame.

Bullshit.

Re:Gnome does it again.

[bcrowell]

However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new.

Yeah, it is annoying how they keep taking functionality out when there's no rational justification in terms of usability. My 11-year-old daughter was running Gnome on Ubuntu Lucid, and she had her login screen all customized so it looked cool according to her 11-year-old criteria. Then I upgraded her to Maverick, and her customization went away. I spent some time trying to help her get it working again, and basically learned that it's impossible (or would require more wizardry than I possess). Try explaining to an 11-year-old why an upgrade has removed a feature that she was using and wanted. Is there some usability improvement due to removing this capability for customization? Of course not.

But that's the beauty of open source. We have fluxbox, xfce, KDE, ...

Re:Aaron Seigo (from KDE)'s perspective

[segedunum]

Well, it is his business considering that he and lots of other people within KDE have contributed greatly to Freedesktop and it has meant that those of us trying to use desktops with applications with differing toolkits that can actually work reasonably together. For some Gnome people to then wander along and say 'Freedesktop is broken and doesn't work' is simply not helpful in the slightest, nor does it cover them in any glory.

Oh, and Aaron has consistently been critical of Canonical over a long period of time over a lot of what they've done. That hasn't changed, although they share a little common ground here.

Re:Gnome decides to remove minimize/maximize butto

[phantomfive]

OK, I thought that was bad, but they have a reason. They want people to use desktop pagers instead of maximize and minimize. After I read that, I tried it out to see what was so great, and indeed, having a separate pager for each project you're working on is amazing. So if it works like they expect, they will be pushing a lot of people to a better world (it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).

Overall I'd rather have those buttons included, but I rarely use them anyway.

Gnome and the gulag mentality

[Anne Honime]

The biggest trouble I have with gnome is the designers constant push to force me using my computer their way 'for my own good'. No, sorry, I won't, thank you very much. I've used almost every other GUI / desktop manager around, none has tried so constantly to take away my freedom to organize the way I want to work. To add insult to injury, Gnome color schemes and icon design always seem to lag 10 years behind current fashion. Gnome reminds me of my childhood in the cold war era. Although I was born in western europe, it feels like soviets are rolling their tank divisions through my computer. You wait months in a line waiting for next release, just to hear : 'there's no more resize button, get away, and if you're not happy, praise tell me, comrade, why would you need one ? Didn't you know resize buttons are antisocial ?'. And you end up living in a concrete shack, decorated by shades of gray, praising the vision of the komintern. Just say no.

Re:Gnome and the gulag mentality

[Anne Honime]

Case in point, why on earth then, did they dropped the minimize / maximize button ? Oh, yeah... sorry to speak about consistency, everybody should know by now that consistency isn't part of Gnome's roadmap. I'm not arguing that things should be kept around forever by default, neither do I think things must change for the sake of changing. What I want is the freedom to decide what I want to keep, and what i want to drop, and the way it's displayed. Easy enough. KDE, for all its shortcomings, does that very well. You have personalities, pagers, as much buttons as you like in title bars, wherever you like, arranged as you want them to be ordered, and you can suit your keyboard shortcuts to your needs. Stuff that, Gnome.