Re: [tlug] Holy smokes, Unity and Gnome 3 suck worse than I ever could have imagined.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Martin G writes:

 > and Unity. I feel that Gnome 2 *evolved* over at least a decade or so.
 > Minor tweaks here and there, and more customizable as time went on. So
 > it was great design, and the "sense" came from collective
 > contribution.

Actually, I suspect that very little design went into GNOME 1 or 2.
What design there was, was in the desktop widgets and in the
underlying libraries.  Many of the grand designs fell flat ("good-bye
CORBA, hello dbus!")

GNOME and KDE are desktop environments built on the X11 model.  This
is very different from Windows or Mac, where the GUI is very much
integrated into the OS, and a GUI window may be treated as just
another OS service, managed by the OS.  Launchers, panels, etc are
also managed by the OS.

X11 is a much more cooperative model.  At a low level, windows (as
places to accept graphics), pixmaps, fonts etc are managed centrally
by the X server.  Since we don't really care here about the network
protocol for the client and server, just think of that as "part of the
OS" and you won't be far off the mark.  Other resources that are not
specific to the graphics console may work similarly (eg, the network
audio system NAS provides audio services the same way that X11
provides GUI services).

But everything else is managed by applications, using special
protocols.  Does the user want to treat windows as objects, moving,
resizing, hiding, iconifying?  Run an application ("window manager").
Does the user want the configuration of running applications and their
windows to be saved across sessions?  Run an application ("session
manager").  Does the user want to pile up iconified apps in a
particular place?  Run an application ("dock").  Does the user want
various meters and controls in one place?  Run an application
("dashboard").  I bet that including hidden services (the dbus daemon,
for example) typical GNOME or KDE configurations involve dozens of
such applications.

 > The point just being that designers *can* fail, and I think they
 > failed spectacularly with Unity/Gnome3.)

十年早いね。  It's really too early to say.  You may hate them now,
but incremental improvement can do wonders in 5 years!

 > The whole drop down menu thing fits [the mouse and keyboard] model,
 > and, for me, trying to squeeze some kind of "better" experience out
 > of it is like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic - pointless.

But as you point out, Unity et al aren't squeezing, they're slicing,
dicing, and nailing to the cutting board.  I think that it is probably
possible to gradually squeeze out quite a bit of improvement.  Trying
to do it all in one go is very risky though.

 > Now, if I have that straight, the new Gnome3-Code is a serious
 > improvement over the old Gnome2-Code.

That's not hard!  http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html is a rant "that,
unfortunately, is going to last a long, long time.  And when I say
'unfortunately', I mean that it's always going to be relevant to
something going on in this world around us." -- with apologies to
Stevie Wonder, who said that as a preface to performing Dylan's
"Blowin' in the Wind"

 > So my question is this: Would it not be possible to use the new
 > Gnome3-Code and make a new shell that is basically the same UI as the
 > Gnome2-Shell?

Yes, possible, but see above regarding "dozens" of apps that would
need to be ported.

 > But is there a place or a way I can plant the seed of suggesting
 > that someone fork a Gnome2-shell for Gnome3-code?

Not "one".  See above regarding "dozens" of apps that would need to be
ported. :^)