Mark Shuttleworth on “GNOME vs Canonical vs KDE”

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/661

by rbanffy • 15 years ago

53 30 15 years ago

hollerith• 15 years ago

OP (by Shuttleworth) is very hard for someone not intimately familiar with the history of who said what and who did what to follow.

abcd_f• 15 years ago

True, but the overall impression I got was that there is a design by a committee in the land of Gnome and MS is having hard time reconciling that with more structured development practices.

krakensden• 15 years ago

There are 2-3 designers working on Gnome Shell, but describing it as 'design by committee' is neither fair nor accurate.

It's also worth noting that Gnome and Canonical have completely different and separate collaboration systems, Gnome uses their mailing lists and git, Canonical uses Launchpad and bazaar.

Between the technical barriers, development priorities, and needless missteps (Canonical requires copyright assignment for /all projects under their umbrella/), the two communities are pretty well alienated.

bergie• 15 years ago

To try to steer the discussion to more constructive tracks, I wrote some guidelines on making cross-project collaboration work:

http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/on_cross-project_collaboration/

This is based on working several years on getting both GNOME and KDE to adopt some common ideas and libraries.

jdub7• 15 years ago

I'm writing a series of posts about the issue, largely as a result of extraordinary comments (attacking GNOME and individual participants) made by Mark over the last week. It is an attempt to correct the record and set a path forward.

http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-...

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Post it to HN and link the HN link here so we can find and upvote it.

jdub7• 15 years ago

Will probably do that when it's more complete. :-)

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

So is your argument that canonical developed their stuff in private and only wanted it approved once it was finished whereas the appropriate approach would have been to develop it in public (or within the Gnome process) so you could see what they were doing, comment and tweak it so it fit the gnome vision?

jdub7• 15 years ago

They did that, but they also didn't even try to upstream a whole bunch of stuff. Then in 2010, after not laying any groundwork, they were annoyed that the very first thing they proposed which was (even only partly) related to their UX work was rejected. Then Mark accuses GNOME or people within GNOME of playing politics.

lkozma• 15 years ago

Incidentally, I have recently (re)discovered fluxbox. It's a breath of fresh air compared to how bloated both Gnome and KDE have become.

ootachi• 15 years ago

Me too, but replace Fluxbox with XFCE. XFCE 4.8 is actually quite usable and pretty. I'm impressed by the developers' attention to details, like the fact that you can alter settings of a panel no matter whether you right-click on the panel itself or on a panel widget, or the fact that the taskbar correctly rotates 90 degrees when the panel is docked to the left or right side.

macco• 15 years ago

That is fine for you. But not for the average user out there.

bokchoi3• 15 years ago

The bickering in all of these blog posts makes me sad. I had hoped at least some of the project leaders could rise above the frivolous nit-picking. When will the conversation move on to constructive topics like "where to go from here"?

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

Projects inherently involve disagreements.

This post seems to be written in the most diplomatic language possible.

I've only looked at and used a few of the standards of Freedesktop.org but they certainly seemed problematic.

bokchoi3• 15 years ago

Disagreements are fine. What is not fine is the tit-for-tat he-said-she-said bickering. It is not professional and is counter productive.

jdub7• 15 years ago

This post seems to be written in the most diplomatic language possible.

You should see his previous post. :-)

jdub7• 15 years ago

Everyone wants to forgive and forget, but I don't think human beings in general are capable of forgiveness unless there is acceptance of what went wrong and some sense of resolution, so trust can be rebuilt.

The issue of "what went wrong" is under dispute. Dealing with that is the first step to "where to go from here".

bokchoi3• 15 years ago

From my outsider perspective "what went wrong" is clearly just a case of poor communication by everyone involved.

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

From what Shuttleworth is replying to: Mark argues that GNOME should be a place where we have internal competition. But his idea of internal competition seems to be competition between different end-user experiences.

So is the idea then that Gnome is oriented toward imposing a single user experience? Like Twitter and Apple and so-forth????

I deeply disagree with this. A good portion of open source user experiences indeed suck but competition seems like a far superior approach to creating a good user experience than accepting a single committee of expert.

xlpz2• 15 years ago

What does that even mean? How could GNOME do what Apple does if all the code is open source? Anyone can come, change whatever they want and ship it as their own. This is what Ubuntu and others have been doing for years. The kind of competition you consider "ideal" is already happening, and has happened for years. The only problem is that some people seem to expect that because you hack on free software you should not be allowed to have strong opinions about the UX of the code you are doing, and must submit to the will of all users and drive-by designers on blogs (which routinely ask for an innumerable set of mutually contradicting features, threatening to leave the project if they are not listened to).

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

What I consider ideal is a multi-layered structure where a "graphic shell" (Gnome-shell or Unity) sits on top of "agnostic" windows manager code.

The current version of Gnome actually seems "good enough" to do this. My main concern is that it stay that way. To consider an opposite pole, KDE is certainly open source too. But, for example, to use the KDE code to parse the gnome/kde panels start menu you need to import the entire KDE virtual file system. IE, KDE has a monolithic structure in that regard. Uh, it's open and you could rip out this piece of the code but it would be a mess. Gnome isn't that bad... yet.

devtesla• 15 years ago

With this and this [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319375] it seems like today is nerd thunderdome day.

cschwarm• 15 years ago

To be honest, it's a little bit embarassing to see such a... well, how would you call it? Flamewar, maybe.

I've been active in a irrelevant project of GNOME (ie. marketing), and my initial opininon still seems to hold: It's not about the desktop; it's about the apps. Neither GNOME's Shell nor Canonical's Unity solves any interesting problems for users.

And the lack of apps is basically just a matter of a missing business models for Open Source Desktop Applications.

To see them fighting over stuff that probably makes up -- at most -- 0.01 percent of the users' time, let's me wonder whether Open Source is ever going to be any major force on the desktop. I've once believed it would, but this belief dwindles.

jdub7• 15 years ago

Not sure it's a flamewar (the flames are basically going on one direction!), but let's go with it... I'm participating in that flamewar, but agree with you 100%. That's part of where the conclusion of my series goes. :-)

joe_the_user7• 15 years ago

Uh,

How is a debate a flame war in circumstances where name-call is not happening? What we have here is a heated debate. I might accept that Shuttleworth is totally wrong for the sake of argument. Even, I can't see ad hominem attacks, innuendo, comparisons to Hitler or any of what I'd see as the characteristics of the flame wars I know about.

The idea that the app Launcher doesn't matter seems implausible to me - first impressions are very important for example. But maybe you're right and it doesn't matter. We still have to argue what is or isn't important. I don't see anything embarrassing about that.

Mark Shuttleworth on “GNOME vs Canonical vs KDE”

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