Re: Planning for GNOME 3.0

[Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu sugarlabs org>]

2009/4/6 Adam Schreiber <sadam clemson edu>:
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Ted Gould <ted gould cx> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2009-04-02 at 13:17 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
>>> There's one obvious question related to those potential changes: what
>>> will happen to the old way of doing things? For example, will we still
>>> make the GNOME Panel available if, for some reason, people are not
>>> immediately happy with GNOME Shell? There's no obvious answer to this,
>>> and this will have to be discussed. Some of us believe that it would be
>>> a good thing to keep providing the old elements for a limited time, to
>>> ease the migration. That being said, doing that would obviously take
>>> some development resources and slow down work on what should be the
>>> future. Not an easy choice, of course. However, it's worth noting that
>>> distributors and other community members using GNOME to build enterprise
>>> products will most certainly help maintain the GNOME 2.x shell for quite
>>> some time, and the project will support that to the greatest reasonable
>>> extent.
>>
>> I'm a little worried that this amounts to "forking" GNOME.  Yeah, they'd
>> all be in the same VCS, etc, etc, but at the end of the day there'd be
>> two different user experiences.  Currently, most distros that ship GNOME
>> have it customized in various ways, but you can still spot a GNOME
>> Desktop when you see one.  You know it's GNOME.
>>
>> I'm worried that in the GNOME 3.0 world, for various technical and
>> social reasons, that won't be the case.  I'm worried that amounts to
>> making GNOME a set of libraries and as recognizable on the "Desktop of
>> the Future"(tm) as it is in a Nokia Tablet or a Garmin GPS today.
>
> I think there's a point at which owners of vintage hardware understand
> they will not be targeted for new development any longer.  Granted
> there is hardware that doesn't have accelerated graphics support under
> GNU/Linux but let's encourage companies to add support by producing
> rocking software and encouraging users to buy hardware that has
> support already.  Our focus on multiple platforms, especially on
> mobile ones, will keep us lean and mean so that we aren't encouraging
> hardware requirement creep.

This sounds as a good idea to me as well, but I'm afraid reality won't
play as we expect.

There's going to be some penalty for focusing on a smaller segment of
the population and you may very well be underestimating the rate at
which that segment will grow.

Also, I believe there's much more growth potential in taking the lower
end of the market (including the emergent economies) from MS than in
competing with Apple for the higher end. Maybe this will change in 10
years, who knows.

That said, I truly believe that is strategically crucial for GNOME to
invest in alternatives to the traditional desktop, not only Sugar but
also stuff like GNOME Shell and Zeitgeist.

Regards,

Tomeu