On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote:>> > Would the world really be a better place if CDE had never been replaced? Me, I?ll take GNOME 3 and all its warts over CDE any day of the week. CDE never would have *evolved* to be the equal of GNOME; it had to be destroyed to make room.But it doesn't matter how pretty Gnome3 is on some other box. I use remote connections through NX/freenx or x2go exclusively. Gnome3 won't work that way. And that's typical of the changes. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
On Thu, January 8, 2015 10:52 am, Les Mikesell wrote:> On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 10:35 AM, Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com> wrote: >>> >> Would the world really be a better place if CDE had never been replaced? >> Me, I???ll take GNOME 3 and all its warts over CDE any day of the week. >> CDE never would have *evolved* to be the equal of GNOME; it had to be >> destroyed to make room. > > But it doesn't matter how pretty Gnome3 is on some other box. I use > remote connections through NX/freenx or x2go exclusively. Gnome3 > won't work that way. And that's typical of the changes. >Let me second you. I for one have fled from Gnome (on my FreeBSD workstation, - once the upgrade made me switch from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3). I need the job done, and want my GUI User Interface be what was perfectly suitable for long time. I do not care of its looks or fanciness of "ultimately different" user experience. Therefore I fled from Gnome to mate. (The decision was made after 2 weeks of frustration of doing in Gnome 3 the work I usually was doing on my workstation) This is just my $0.02 (and note, this is from me, the one who is "not ready to join ipad generation"). Just on a side note: I question intelligence of an attitude that something (that works for some people) has to be destroyed to make room for something else one thinks to be more appropriate. Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On Thu, Jan 08, 2015 at 11:11:10AM -0600, Valeri Galtsev wrote:> Just on a side note: I question intelligence of an attitude that something > (that works for some people) has to be destroyed to make room for > something else one thinks to be more appropriate.Let me start by saying I'm also not a fan of Gnome3, and prefer MATE. However, I believe the new interface provided by Gnome3 is both well thought out and based on the results of research on Human-Computer interactions. Gnome has published their GNOME Human Interface Guidelines here: https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/3.2/ https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/ The idea is to have a uniform and consistent interface that is intuitive to all potential users. You'll probably agree with me that UNIX/Linux interfaces tend to be extremely inconsistent between programs, and even between elements of a display interface. Most of us who have been using UNIX for decades are familiar with many of the quirks and have long since adapted. I don't fault Gnome for trying to actually provide some guidelines for design. Apple has been praised for many years over its easy-to-use interface, largely because they have very strict control over their interfaces and a walled garden approach to apps. It would be very difficult to duplicate the ease of use from Apple while maintaining the free/open spirit in FOSS, so Gnome has a difficult path to tread. -- Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>
On Jan 8, 2015, at 10:11 AM, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:> I question intelligence of an attitude that something > (that works for some people) has to be destroyed to make room for > something else one thinks to be more appropriate.The amount of actively-maintained software has always matched the available brainpower given over to its maintenance. Therefore, if we are going to add more features, some old things have to be left to die. I do not mean ?destroyed? in the physical sense. CDE is still there, if you want it. There just hasn?t been any new development on it in many years now, because the people who were doing that have all moved on. If you want new features *and* everything old to continue to be maintained, you have a couple of options: 1. Grow the number of active programmers. Every open source project I monitor closely frequently sends out calls for patches and other contributions, which are usually answered with crickets. Shortly after the call goes out, the crickets are drowned out by people demanding more bug fixes, and more features, and behavior changes, and better docs, and? I don?t know *any* open source project that has more active developers than it knows what to do with. 2. Reduce the amount of effort it takes to maintain a given feature set. A lot of work has gone into that. It?s one reason software is moving to higher- and higher-level languages. Much of the Red Hat specific code in RHEL is written in Python, for example, not C, the traditional language of Linux. Then we get old farts complaining that the new software is less efficient, because it isn?t written in C. That?s the tradeoff: computer efficiency for programmer efficiency, because programmers are more expensive and harder to come by.