Why Linux is boring
It seems, for whatever reason, that the Linux community has stopped evolving. We only seem to be heading towards one of two environments: GNOME or KDE. Now, of course, I'm not blind, this trend has been obvious for a very long time. It's amusing, however, that so many people buy into it. They don't see the potential for other possibilities, and they assume that anything which challenges the current two dominant players must be "nuts".
Is this the brave new world of open source? Will KDE and GNOME be all we have? I have looked at both and I am unimpressed with what they offer. Both are poorly designed, amateurish pieces of software. They both feel like they have "evolved" to this point and were never *designed* to be like this. In my next few articles, I'll examine them both further.
Is this the brave new world of open source? Will KDE and GNOME be all we have? I have looked at both and I am unimpressed with what they offer. Both are poorly designed, amateurish pieces of software. They both feel like they have "evolved" to this point and were never *designed* to be like this. In my next few articles, I'll examine them both further.
Comments
Those people launch GNUstep applications daily :)
If someone develops yet-another-type application , his friends say: "Wow, you can create yeat-another-type application yourself!". If someone develops an application with new idea or new concepts, his friends say: "That is weird, who wants that anyway?"
Why it is that way? Because most of the people think that way. Unfortunately.
And brave new world of opensource? It looks like it turned from "new world" to "free world - as in beer". From the beginning, people wanted to create something different, something new. And they wanted to share their ideas, but protect them as well. And now? They want what already exists for free. So they start copying. Mainly copying looks, ignoring original intentions, ignoring original feel, which they never experienced in most of the cases.
People do not want new ways of doing things, because they do not even can imagine them. They want same ways of doing things as they are used to, but for free (as in beer).
Why is it like that? I would like to know too...
Although GNOME is built on a shaky foundation, there's so much work going into it that it manages to be the most usable desktop by brute force. I would love to hack GNUstep, but I wouldn't love to *use* GNUstep. I also have little faith in the ability of the GNUstep hackers to move forward. Although I have seen some progress very recently, it seems from the outside like GNUstep has had the same small set of applications for years. While GNUstep people are still hacking on their foundation, GNOME people are forging ahead and writing applications that I would actually want to use, even though their technology is awful.
This is not meant to be a flame, it's just my view on why I'm using GNOME instead of GNUstep.
Hopefully with some of the new developments, notably Nib compatibility in gui and (soon) Nib compatibility in Gorm, build compatibility with OS X, it will become possible for application developers to port to GNUstep more easily and for new GNUstep developers to more easily share thier applications with OS X. Additionally, themeing is coming to GNUstep as part of it's core, so that it will be possible to make GNUstep take on any number of looks.
Additionally, the Etoile project has started to become more and more popular lately in GNUstep as it's applications are very well written.
Keep an eye on GNUstep in the next year. I think you'll like what you see. :)
GJC
I don know well GNUstep. My interest is test it and use in future, but now I get many little problems when I try to do anything.
Convince me (and others, please) of necesity of other projects like GNUstep, because until there are enough applications, pool of users will be very little.
Greets.
That's exactly what I intend to do.
GJC
I do disagree with pretty much all of your points however.
The Linux community is very much evolving. there is (in my opinion) more support for different types of hardware than ever, better stability, better security, and a better, more vibrant and strong community to name a few pieces of evidence of this evolution. Probably most important for this discussion, desktop environments are more advanced, powerful, and easy to use than they ever have been and show a lot of promise for the future.
As for the copying bit (from Stefan's comment), Microsoft seems to be doing most of the copying (see Aero, multiple desktops and others).
More things are the same than different in OS desktops for a few reasons. First, there are only so many ways to do certain things -- windows, mouse pointers, menus and so on are all basically the same. Second, computer users are accustomed to interacting with their computers a certain way. There needs to be fundamental similarities so switching between environments is somewhat smooth and pleasant. In my experience, end-users feel most comfortable with things they are familiar with. That's not to say we should stop progress but change should be an evolution not a leap in order to make that progress possible for the end-users without them killing sysadmins like me because they can't easily do something they used to be able to do.
I could not disagree more with the notion Gnome and KDE are poorly designed and amateurish. This sounds completely insane to me. I have found them to be very clean, responsive, robust and capable. I can do everything I could want to do on my computer using them and more, from simply running programs, to configuring the environment's look and behavior, to drag and drop encryption and managing files. They are a pleasure to look at and use, especially when I compare them with the Windows desktops I have to manage at work. Speaking of which, if I were to convert the desktops I manage to Linux (as I hope to do at some point), I would choose between KDE and Gnome for many of the reasons cited above. While I'm sure it is of outstanding quality (in the way it is put together) I wouldn't even consider GNUstep -- would you?
The fact that most GNOME users don't look beyond the GUI is interesting to me. While the GUI might be nice, the underlying technology in GNOME is a mess. Most users, in fact, don't care about how it's done, only that it works, as per your comment.
My comment in the blog was based on my experience with the GTK+ code and it's C w/ structures, non-object oriented architecture. The code, from looking at it, smacks of being hacked together. While GNOME may be solid from a usability point of view, it's quite a mess when it comes to the code.
GNUstep, on the other hand, has many concepts that are unheard of or are completely foreign to GNOME. One of the most notable of which is the concept of services.
Services allow an application to call on other applications or services without having them linked into the app. For instance, in a GNOME app you must link in a spelling library to allow your application to check it's spelling. Under GNUstep/OPENSTEP/Cocoa you get this for free just because you have a textfield. All the developer needs to do is add the menu. The application can then use any spelling service that is installed on the machine. This doesn't simply have to do with spelling, but all kinds of other services can be written.
Services are the GUI equivalent of the command line pipe, where the user can join the input/output of several small programs together. GNOME currently doesn't have anything like this.
All GNOME and KDE have really done, in my experience, is copy Windows. They haven't done anything new. While GNUstep is obviously a clone of the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP look and feel, part of the aim, if you read my later posts, is to make it something much much more.
Please wait and see....
GJC
Aaron
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