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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective GNOME: 10 years old but did we need it?
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective GNOME: 10 years old but did we need it? | GNOME: 10 years old but did we need it? |
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| Written by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 31 August 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 It appears that even by 2001 a portion of the halo which had surrounded de Icaza when GNOME was set up had disappeared. GNOME was always viewed as an American initiative. There was more marketing, more buzz words (a trait that continues even today) and many structures of so-called leadership. Until at least release 2.0, GNOME was a clunky, heavy desktop, which was buggy in the extreme, Ximian was something of a nightmare; I personally had to reinstall Linux twice during the time when I was experimenting with it after Ximian installs went tits up. Three years back, the oldest Linux distribution, Slackware, decided to drop GNOME altogether as it had become a "maintenance nightmare." And no less a person than Linux Torvalds made his feelings about GNOME plain when he wrote in December 2005: "I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE. This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do. Please, just tell people to use KDE." But visibility counts for more in today's world than substance. GNOME has managed to remain in the limelight by tying itself to the Ubuntu project. Ubuntu is based on the unstable branch of Debian and one of its main selling points has been a timely release cycle; this ties in well with GNOME which is tied to a similar cycle. Never mind if the releases are buggy. Ten years since its inception, GNOME still has lots of rough edges. One only has to place a number of files on the GNOME desktop to see what a mess appears - the sizes of the icons are all over the place. KDE displays icons of the same size. GNOME's default layout for its panels wastes tons of space... but let me stop there. Hence, in the midst of the celebrations, it's good for the promoters of GNOME to stop and think what might have been if they had joined hands with KDE and moved forward in a cooperative manner. It is good to bear in mind that one of the men who started the project claiming that he wanted to provide "free software" is today tailgating APIs from Microsoft.
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