After nearly 25 years of life with Unices, almost 20 years with Linux, nowadays I'm pretty confused about future of Linux. Allow me to elaborate a bit. I'm convinced that the Kernel will survive and be better in the long term future. RedHat and IBM as biggest contributors within it and Linus as maintainer (leader, mogul ... ) give me faith in the future of Linux. GNU fits well on the top of kernel. That is a rock solid base for every Linux distribution. Last 7 years all of my desktops, laptops, servers are locked down on RHEL and derivatives and Fedora. I saw many changes, bad and good ones. But last one, with fairly unfinished, not even close to, so called Beta release, Gnome 3 DE is the worst what is happened. On the other hand, I like the new look, many promising features, ...etc. So, what is bad? The bad thing is attitude of Gnome (developers, promoters, project leaders) toward end users. They decide to abandon Gnome 2 and put distribution maintainers in awkward position. Maintainers must use (buggy, unfinished, untested) Gnome 3 if they want to use Gnome DE in their distribution. Breaking compatibility at API level with previous version put application developers in unenviable position. This is almost unacceptable! ( because of that I understand Ubuntu leaders ) >From that point of view I wonder on whose payroll are these gentlemen? This is not good way to promote OpenSource way of life, I'm presume. I will agree with opinions that DE need some changes, fresh ideas. Frankly, I don't see anything new that does not exists in other OS/DE combination. It is good to have DE for mobile devices, tablets .... etc. But that could be a related project with main Gnome, isn't it? I use laptop only when I'm out of office. Desktop with 2 monitors is my main workplace. ( someone would say "he is old-fashioned guy" ). No one can convince me that all Gnome developers use only laptops. I would like to see their workplaces. I was shocked when I read the response of one of the Gnome developers in a discussion about maximise/minimise buttons. I paraphrase the answer: "we where not able to model use cases for them, because each user uses them in different ways" ????? (I'd rather not comment this) At the end, using of Free Software is liberty/freedom of choice. There are many opportunities: KDE, XFCE, LXDE .... They have been created as response from people who thought differently. This is a waste of energy, time, resources, even money. As an old elephant, I could recall the story about end of XFree86 project. This is not the way how we can attract more young people who will use/make/change OpenSource software. Regardless of all these current events about Gnome, I will continue to teach my students about importance of OpenSource, FSF, and freedom of choice. P.S. I like to excuse myself about my English in front of linguistic purists :) -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
