* On 2017 19 Jun 23:05 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:

> Above, Didier expresses his personal opinion on the compellingness of
> Gnome. I agree 100% with his personal opinion.
>
> What really amazes me is that, in this world of multiple excellent
> GOSFUIs (http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/gosfui.htm), Gnome3 is
> considered such a must-have that people discuss moving huge numbers of
> programmer-hours from stuff an OS really needs to an ongoing undoing of
> the systemdizing of Gnome3.
>
> First, Gnome3 is bizarre in that it's one of those interfaces that
> joins Unity and Windows 8 thru 10 in guessing what the user wants, and
> if that first guess isn't productive, well, let the user look at
> everything. Not productive for those with varied computer activities.

I tried the Debian packaged GNOME occasionally over the years prior to
2011 or so and never found it compelling though I found plenty of useful
apps were written using GTK2, though not necessarily as GNOME apps. The
only version of GNOME that I thought was well done was that shipped with
Ubuntu 10.4. Then Unity was announced and the rest is history.

GNOME3 developers seem to have a philosophy unlike that of any other
group of developers in the Linux/FOSS ecosystem. The first clue I had
was watching Linux conference videos and some GNOME/Freedesktop.org/Red
Hat developer would open a Macbook and then proceed to start a VM to
show all the wonderful things they were making for "Linux". My
immediate question was, if it's so wonderful, why aren't you using it?

Then there is the abomination GTK3 has become. I guess this makes sense
in light that GNOME developers are maintaining it and seem to have
hinted that its use should be exclusively for GNOME. Fine.
Unfortunately, many projects that were based on GTK2 now face either
moving to GTK3 and its poor UI or moving to another toolkit or simply
ending development. The update of Firefox from 45 esr to 52 esr shows
just what a backwards leap GTK3 is. Suddenly dragging a small icon to
another tab results in the icon appearing about 10X normal size. This
is happening in Devuan and Salix so it's not a distribution or
installation specific issue.

A few years ago I took over maintenance of a handy application of
interest to radio amateurs. It had been dropped from Debian due to a
compile failure with a newer version of GTK2. The fix was fairly
trivial even for a GTK novice such as myself and the app is in Jessie.
For how long, I don't know as GTK2 will undoubtedly be deprecated in
some future release which leaves me wondering which way to go as I don't
think GTK3 is a worthwhile path to follow.

As I see it, GNOME/Freedesktop.org/Red Hat/etc. are moving toward an
Android model where everything else is all but officially excluded
except for apps written specifically for their environment. There is
nothing "universal" about their plans and for Debian to chase their
taillights means that Debian should drop "universal" from any
description of their distribution, IMHO. I think it would be wise for
Devuan not to expend any resources also chasing the GNOME, etc. cabal
and let them go their way. For those who want Devuan with GNOME, point
them to Debian and bid them a good day. Other distributions are doing
just fine without SD/GNOME. I think we can as well.

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

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