On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 19:04 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote: > On Mon, 2014-02-03 at 12:22 -0500, Alex GS wrote: > > Gnome Shell is a feature/product/package focused on mobile interaction > > for hybrids and touch enabled devices including tablets. > > GNOME (capitals please, same for MATE) is focused on desktop and laptop > computers, including laptops with touchscreens. GNOME has to support > touchscreens well because Windows has gone that route, and 90% of > laptops ship with Windows. > > Tablets are a secondary concern because very, very few people are > running GNOME on tablets. They're basically touchscreen laptops without > keyboards, though, so I don't think they're much of a stretch. > > Typically I associate the word mobile with phones, and nobody runs GNOME > on phones. A new startup, Endless Mobile, is trying to. I wish them > well, but I've yet to see reason to believe that will work well. (Which > is fine, since they're new.) > > Anyway, it sounds like you're spot-on part of the target audience for > GNOME Classic. I'm sure the developers would be interested in feedback > on why that environment doesn't currently meet your needs, and how it > might be improved to do so. If you look at MATE's road-map you'll quickly see most objections against it aren't valid. They're actively moving closer to core GNOME infrastructure such as GTK3, systemd and Wayland as well as defaulting to current GNOME packages in increasing numbers. Several GNOME packages from git.gnome.org have also been adopted by MATE's developers such as gnome-main-menu. If you look at www.ohloh.com below MATE is a "very active" project with over 2 million lines of code, 64 contributors and the last commit was made 4 days ago. GNOME 2 is alive and thriving and evolving with a large user-base among the top distributions Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu 14.04, OpenSUSE and many others including Fedora. Compare this to GNOME Shell which has only around 81K lines of code, twice as many contributors at 157 and the last commit was 2 days ago. http://www.ohloh.net/p?ref=homepage&q=mate+desktop http://www.ohloh.net/p?query=gnome+shell&sort=relevance This presents a very complex situation for GNOME. What does does GNOME do if they have two active thriving desktop products on the market coexisting in parallel? Clearly GNOME Classic hasn't addressed the traditional desktop use-case and isn't seen as a GNOME 2 replacement. GNOME 2 was released back in 2002 - 12 years ago GNOME 3 was released back in 2011 - 3 years ago http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/06/26/1813231/gnome-20-released https://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2011-April/msg00004.html Then look at Apple with Mac OS X: Mac OS X was released back in 2001 - 13 years ago http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_os_x Mac OS X is a contemporary of GNOME 2 and is still in active development and supported indefinitely by regularly released minor versions 10.xx as long as Apple is solvent as a company. If GNOME was like Apple they would have launched GNOME 3 along-side GNOME 2 and simply updated and supported GNOME 2 in minor versions. Today we would be on GNOME 2.9 or 2.10. The point is that when you have an installed user-base that's as large as GNOME 2 the default of most prominent commercial Linux distributions and even Unix platforms you don't just drop support and development like that. You have to keep that massive user-base happy while you continue to develop GNOME 3 and then eventually when it's ready you slowly transition your GNOME 2 users to it. When you abandon active and popular products like that you cause developers to fork your product and keep it in active development. Just like the MATE team is doing today. In reality MATE is providing the free support and development that GNOME should really be doing. That's why I propose the following: Proposal: GNOME Foundation adopts GNOME 2 (MATE) as an official GNOME desktop alongside GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell). "Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space" https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD You have to think of your brand GNOME as a collection of desktops in what is really a meta-desktop. Effectively GNOME 2 (MATE) is still an active GNOME product despite not being an official GNOME project it technically is one. The current thinking at GNOME is that GNOME Shell represents this flagship product and having alternative environments somehow represents failure of the GNOME project as a whole. This is far from the reality because success of one desktop environment GNOME 2 means success for GNOME 3 and GNOME as a whole, it means people still love your products and want to support you. GNOME 2 (workstation desktop) and GNOME 3 (mobile-desktop) should have a healthy symbiotic relationship. Take the recent strategic move of making CentOS an official part of the Red Hat family. The reaction in the Linux community was overwhelmingly positive. It was a sensible business move by Red Hat and will probably swing the Linux server market in their favor as a result. CentOS installations will become a powerful way to promote and expand the RHEL business and standardize the Linux server space. Well, I think Fedora Workstation is an opportunity to do the same thing for GNOME based Linux desktops. MATE much like CentOS represents a community fork that's become incredibly popular. Much like CentOS it also serves a very conservative end-user community. There would be an equally and overwhelmingly positive Linux community reaction if MATE was adopted by the GNOME Foundation and put on equal footing as GNOME 3 in terms of development and support. A fully modern and up-to-date GNOME 2 could be a powerful vehicle to promote GNOME 3 and Fedora Workstation. The user-base for what we know today as GNOME would be huge. There would be a large scale migration back to GNOME 2 by former users. GNOME would cease to be a single desktop product and become a meta-desktop. Competing against GNOME in this form would be extremely difficult. GNOME could address several different form-factors and user-experiences simultaneously. This can be achieved by having both GNOME 2 (MATE) and GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell) be parallel but related branches of the same GNOME desktop product. 1. Have the GNOME Foundation adopt MATE as a GNOME 2 re-development project. Provide development and support resources to accelerate MATE's efforts to transition to GTK3, systemd and Wayland. Make sure that both GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 are based on the same modern infrastructure. 2. Modify Mutter so that it can become the official compositor of MATE and replace the practice of bundling GNOME 2 with Compiz which is now a legacy Ubuntu product. This would ensure that GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 have similar bounce, behavior and feel. Another option is to use Compton but that could be seen as a short-term fix until Mutter was fully integrated into GNOME 2. 3. Keep GNOME 3 as is in the present. The GNOME 2 sub-project will not interfere with the GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell) project or dictate design to them. GNOME 3 will exist as a sort of "skunk-works" style advanced project focused on innovation, experimentation and creativity. Their focus would continue to be on pushing desktop boundaries and exploring alternative paradigms. If appropriate, innovations developed in the GNOME Shell would be occasionally fed back into GNOME 2. This will create a healthy GNOME innovation cycle. 4. Make GNOME 2 the default desktop for Fedora Workstation with Fedora branding and themes as well as the current GNOME default applications. Make sure GNOME default applications integrate seamlessly with GNOME 2. Also make GNOME 3 and KDE installation extras to be fair. 5. Promote GNOME 3 to GNOME 2 users directly. When the user runs GNOME 2 for the first time have a prompt that says "Would you like to see the future? Try out GNOME 3". And it would be installed side-by-side with GNOME 2 users could participate in GNOME 3 testing and surveys. I'm willing to bring this before the GNOME Foundation board or have someone more senior to myself advocate on my behalf and am committed to seeing it realized. I can also work as Marketing to engage developers in discussions and elicit interest. This is an opportunity that's too valuable for GNOME to let slip by. -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
