[zxzax]

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to each other. They're not really even close to being that, they're open source projects that collaborate on a sizable amount of things. If you believe there is a better way to do something then just contribute to another desktop. The existence of GNOME doesn't prevent you from doing that and isn't detrimental to it, especially when you consider that the cost of switching to another open source desktop is a big fat $0. Please don't unnecessarily politicize things, one of the benefits here is that you explicitly don't have to do that.

To put it another way: maybe some specific mode of "Linux gaining ground on desktops" with "configurability and techniness" is your goal, but people working on any given desktop (including GNOME) may not share that goal in the same way you do, and it doesn't make any sense to expect them to.

[jrm4]

Obviously, I can't expect them to. I'm not paying them. But I can absolutely encourage and discourage different ways of thinking and doing, and I'm absolutely free to express that. And yes, I would like to discourage "the GNOME way."

To elaborate a bit about why I'm saying this; For quite some time, onboarding people to Linux was pretty easy. "Just use Ubuntu" was a really good answer. And then Unity came along, with a) bloat and b) this new paradigm that was ostensibly as simple as a Mac, but different enough that people wouldn't recognize it. And this was a terrible direction for Ubuntu to go, especially since XP was on its way out.

And now, when people ask me, hey, how do I get started with Linux, and they've heard of Ubuntu, I can't just say "Yeah, go for it." I have to launch into a thing and name 2 or 3 different distros, primarily due to the weirdness of GNOME. I appreciate freedom and choice, but I'm also quite free to say, I believe the following: I really wish the GNOME people would more-or-less give up, because they have mindshare not off of the quality of their current interface, but because of the momentum of their old one plus Ubuntu. I believe that (much like Windows, frankly) if they actually had to compete in this space on the merits, they'd lose out.

KDE (and LXDE and others) are doing a better job of making a predictable useful interface.

[zxzax]

I don't understand what you're trying to discourage, what you're saying doesn't follow. That has nothing to do with "the GNOME way" and is mostly related to the decisions made by Canonical, who decided to make their own desktop, and then dropped it in favor of GNOME. Asking the GNOME people to give up isn't going to make it viable for Ubuntu to develop their own desktop again that is more to your liking. Your issue is with them, not with GNOME. And according to them, you seem to have it exactly backwards: it was Unity that was not able to compete on merits, so it was dropped in favor of GNOME.

But anyway it sounds like you just fixed that by using a different distro, you can even just suggest the KDE or LXDE spins of Ubuntu. Those still exist, and it's not hard to use them. If you're already using them then it's very hard for me to see what your actual complaint is or what you're trying to discourage. It's true you're free to express what you want, but please consider that what you're expressing may not be something that was done with having the full information. I've noticed there is a lot of confusion about what GNOME is and a lot of people seem to mix it up and equate it with Ubuntu or Red Hat or something, which is understandable, but it's not true. I'm only here to explain why.

And just to make it painfully clear: it is already hard enough to maintain open source and fix all the issues and improve the quality of the current interfaces, without people constantly demanding that open source maintainers give up and stop fixing bugs. If you want to get things fixed, you really don't need to do this.

[pjmlp]

> I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to each other.

They surely where born that way, GNOME only exists due to the original Qt license.

Then Gtk+ was always the go to framework for C devs, while KDE was embraced by C++ community on GNU/Linux.

Murray did a very good job for the C++ refugees on GNOME/Gtk, but that has always been a minority versus being on KDE land.

[zxzax]

I honestly haven't seen any real license drama about that for like 10 years now. Qt and GTK are (mostly) the same license.

Also I really wouldn't say that C and C++ are equivalent to political parties, that's like saying the same thing about coke and pepsi.