undefined | Better HN

story

0 pointsmagduf7y ago0 comments

>Compare this to GNOME, on the other hand, which regularly removes popular features and ignores all user complaints.

The fact that GNOME is the dominant DE for Linux, despite this fact you cite, really is confounding considering that the whole point of FOSS is supposed to be that it empowers the users. It almost feels like the entire existence and adoption of GNOME by many prominent distros was a conspiracy to prevent FOSS desktops from succeeding.

0 comments

Crinus7y ago

My guess is that it wasn't really a conspiracy but that most distro developers do not give a rats ass about good desktop experience, thus they simply package whatever those who do work on desktop stuff and get done with it. "Those who work on desktop stuff" are basically Canonical and Red Hat and both of them decided, for various reasons to stick with GNOME, partly because GNOME at some point (2.x days) was a good enough desktop and partly because everyone had settled on Gtk+ as the defacto Linux toolkit (itself mainly thanks to it being usable from C, written in a way that allowed other languages to interface with it almost automatically and of course having a license usable by everyone from the beginning) and GNOME was the defacto desktop environment for Gtk.

Of course all that was on the Gtk2/Gnome2 days and Gtk3/Gnome3 broke a lot of bridges, still the complexity of the desktop and the fact that GNOME has actual paid people working on it ended up with the project having a lot of inertia and they are the projects that do most of the work no matter how misguided that work might be.

After all, those who do the work are those who decide how that work will look like. Anyone else, regardless of them being right, wrong, having better or worse opinion on that work, is irrelevant.

If you want to take control of the Linux desktop away from GNOME you need to replace the GNOME stack - not just the desktop, but also the toolkit, the inter-application communication, sound libraries, etc - with something that is objectively better (for a definition of better that a majority agrees with it) and convince other developers to use it.

magdufOP7y ago

>After all, those who do the work are those who decide how that work will look like. Anyone else, regardless of them being right, wrong, having better or worse opinion on that work, is irrelevant.

Yes, but it's not just GNOME who does such work. KDE has been around even longer than Gnome, and has a very different philosophy for their DE (one which, IMO, is much more aligned with the hacker philosophy of being able to customize things to your heart's content and having lots of features), yet most Linux distros stick with Gnome.

>If you want to take control of the Linux desktop away from GNOME you need to replace the GNOME stack - not just the desktop, but also the toolkit, the inter-application communication, sound libraries, etc - with something that is objectively better (for a definition of better that a majority agrees with it) and convince other developers to use it.

Yeah, we already have that; it's called KDE. We also have other DEs based on both Qt and Gtk: LxQt, Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce.

Basically, your post seems to imply that Gnome is the only full-featured DE available for Linux, and this simply isn't the case at all.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse