Re: Gnome objectives

[Andreas Wallberg <andreas wallberg gmail com>]

Hi again!

> I don't believe the above is true;  don't mistake a small very vocal
> group for a "major backlash".  Always remember that those with a
> negative opinion have more motivation to speak-up than those who agree
> or are happy with a project direction.  Measuring anything by forum /
> list "vibe" is a *totally* flawed approach to understanding overall
> sentiment.

Come one, the early iterations of KDE4 were horrible, whereas the last
iterations of KDE3.5 had been great. The expectations from the user
community were sky high. I almost never used Gnome back then because I
found KDE3.5 be the environment in which I was the most productive. I
also set up KDE on the workstations I prepared for others as an admin.
Since then, Gnome has improved a lot whereas the KDE4 effort proved to
be a much larger undertaking that anyone seemed to imagine. These
days, I would never put an inexperienced Linux user in front of a KDE
desktop and expect them to find their way around. With Gnome I most
certainly can and I also enjoy using it a lot.

In my mind, the biggest mistake the KDE guys did was to get a bit
obsessed with technology and frameworks, while forgetting about
stability, ease of use and consistency. Slightly silly remark perhaps,
but as an advocate of Linux on the desktop, it was highly frustrating
to see KDE go from "almost there" with 3.5 to "lets start over" with
4. At this point, Gnome is "almost there" (for me, at least), so I and
others are naturally a bit nervous about Gnome 3.

> As a user I feel that GNOME 3 has been well explained many, many,
> many... times.  Perhaps those who don't understand could spend a few
> seconds going out to find and *read* the explanation.  Or there are even
> audio / video talks from GUADEC about it; and at least one audio
> interview from GUADEC.  So you can *read*, *hear*, and *see* the
> explanations of GNOME 3.

Yeah, I think I need to digg around better for these resources. I'd
love to have a better idea about Gnome 3. Especially what we can
expect as users. New versions of libraries and frameworks are awesome,
but has a slightly bitter sweet taste to them after the KDE
experience...

/Andreas