Re: GNOME now

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hey Benjamin,

Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org> wrote:
> Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I think we are in same business as Apple - we are trying to offer
>> unified user experience. Difference between us and Apple though is that
>> (in my opinion) most of us strongly believe that openness/freedom and
>> consistent user experience (trough user interface and system design and
>> behavior) can be in same boat (versus "Walled garden" and "guided
>> experience"). I think we can all agree that's our vision.
>>
> First: Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 so you know what I'm
> going to reference.
>
> What you say is not a vision. That's a "what", not a "why". Also, are we in the
> same business as Apple? Apple is in the business of challenging the status quo
> and thinking differently. ($:04 in the video) Are we? WHY are we doing GNOME?

That why question is really important, and I agree that we need to do
some work to articulate it. My view is that the GNOME project has many
motives that go beyond the "what". The "why" is often present in what
the members of this community do and say. What we need to do is
articulate those "whys" clearly. It's not an impossible task, and it's
something I'm interested in working on.

> The second thing is one that has been nagging me since I've started working on
> GTK. I talked about in my talk at Berlin in 2011. And so far, nobody has
> provided a good answer for it: We are not answering some of the most basic
> questions you need to answer for any product about how we are doing it. Like
> these:
>
> Who are we doing it for?
>
> Well, we sometimes say it's for "everyone", but that's just not true. If it was
> for everyone, we wouldn't require OpenGL and spend our time on bringing GNOME 2
> to mobile phones instead of reinventing the one thing we were good at (the Linux
> desktop).

You have to pick your battles. Even if we say that our mission is to
bring Free Software to everyone, there are practical reasons why some
strategies will work better than others. That's the real world, and
it's nothing to be ashamed of or angst-ridden about.

Laptops and desktops are important to many people. Focusing on those
types of devices, where we have expertise and where traction is easier
for us, makes sense. It doesn't mean that we are betraying our goals
or our values.

> But even if we were for everyone, we have to have some people we like more than
> others. We already picked people that don't want to fiddle with their
> configuration over people that do want to fiddle with their configuration.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "fiddle with their
configuration", but I do disagree with the way you have phrased this.
It is not about "liking" some people and not liking others. If our
goal is to create a genuine alternative to proprietary software, it
has to be usable and attractive, and our software has to provide a
certain type of experience. That is the basis for our decisions.

> We've
> also been picking people that need simple consumer applications over content
> creators. Or we wouldn't have written contacts, clocks and a new shell, but
> would have worked on improving GIMP, Inkscape, Glade or Pitivi instead. And it
> looks like Wacom users with lots of VMs that require Kerberos logins are way

I disagree with you here, too. :) In my view, GNOME's job is to
provide a platform for Free Software applications. We provide the base
system, which includes utilities like contacts and clocks, and we
provide the application developer. That's a difficult task and it
keeps us fully occupied. But by fulfilling that role, we enable the
more complex applications to flourish.

I don't think it's fair to say that GNOME doesn't bring value to GIMP
or Inkscape or Pitivi.

We have nothing to be ashamed of for having things like Wacom or
Kerberos integration, either. Why shouldn't we provide a great
experience for corporate desktops or graphics tablet users? It's
entirely in keeping with our mission.

> Who are we selling it to?
>
> This question is not about the person who is going to use it in the end. It's
> about who is taking what we produce and doing stuff with those things we gave
> out. Apple for example doesn't just sell to users, it also sells to shops and to
> mobile network operators. And Android is sold to OEMs.
> So who are we trying to convince to use GNOME? Is it distros? Is it OEMs? Is it
> end users? All of them?

I don't see why we shouldn't target all of these potential users of
our software. They aren't mutually exclusive.

> Because if it's distros, we've lost a bunch with the GNOME 3 transition (Ubuntu,
> Meego/Tizen) and I don't see us trying to win them back. If it's OEMs, we
> haven't done much better. If it's end users, then why don't we have a product
> for them? The only product we have that targets end users directly is jhbuild...

It isn't fair to say that we're not doing anything. We're working hard
on GNOME 3, and it's getting better all the time. We're creating new
applications. We're working to make sure that we're compatible with
new types of devices. We're doing continuous integration and testing.
The reason for all of that is to make us attractive to users,
distributions and  OEMs.

> So HOW are we actually doing this?
>
> So that leaves the what question. It's a question most people aren't sure about
> either. Are we doing a desktop? A tablet interface? Maybe phones? Are we for
> kiosks? Do we ship a platform for others to build upon? All of it? We do have a
> bunch of guidelines (unified experience, HiG etc) that you outline, but from my
> POV we are clearly missing answers to a lot of these questions.

We produce a distinct user experience, including a consistent set of
core applications. We provide a platform with which 3rd parties can
create their own applications, primarily for deployment on GNOME. We
target laptops and desktops. We're working to make sure that we'll be
compatible with hybrid devices.

> And these questions are important for me as a GTK developer to answer. in the
> recent theming discussion - where theme developers complain that GTK breaks
> their themes every release - I need to know what to do about it and what to
> spend my time on. Do I make their lives easier? Or do I instead work on new
> features desired for GNOME 3.8? Do I look more or less at GTK portability to
> other platforms (like Windows, OSX, or even running on top of KDE or Unity)?
> Should I take time looking into porting Libreoffice to GTK? Should I improve
> devtools like Glade instead of GTK?
>
> I can roughly answer all of these questions myself. But I have no idea WHAT we
> as the GNOME community think is important.

It's not so hard to answer those questions, particularly if you look
at what we've been working towards in recent years. But if you do have
questions, you can always talk to our designers, other Gtk developers,
the release team and even the Board of Directors. We can sit down and
work out a definitive answer if you really want. It isn't an
insurmountable problem.

Allan