quanticle · HackerTrans

il y a 3 ansdiscuss

    while Java originated the billion dollar mistake

By the "billion dollar mistake", are you referring to null references [1]? But null references were introduced in 1965 in Algol, by Tony Hoare. They long predate Java.

[1]: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Bill...

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Well, it's not as if the Gnome devs are listening to me as it is, so I don't really see the difference.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I don't know about bugs. I haven't really noticed very many bugs in KDE, XFCE or MATE. Those pieces of software seem to be no buggier than Gnome. And I'm not sure why "modern tech" or a rapid release schedule is a good thing in and of itself. Modern tech and rapid releases are good only when they result in good things. Otherwise they're just churn. Change for the sake of change.

Maybe if Gnome didn't have so much "modern tech", (like DBus, for example) the Gnome devs wouldn't be so overworked.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

And yet, KDE, XFCE, even Gnome forks like MATE and Cinnamon manage to handle having loads more customization options than Gnome, despite having equivalent or inferior time and financial resources.

I have very little patience for the, "It's open source and maintained by volunteers," argument when other projects which are equally open source and maintained by fewer volunteers somehow manage to deliver more functionality.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

By that logic, Windows is the best operating system. After all, there are millions of PCs out there running Windows, and the vast majority of those people don't switch.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

You genuinely don't see what Gnome has to offer power users because the Gnome developers removed all the configuration and customization options that would have been helpful for power users. Gnome 2 was just as customizable as KDE. Then with Gnome 3 they removed almost every option. Now, with a combination of Gnome 42, Gnome Tweak Tool and the aforementioned extensions, some (not all, some) of those customization options are back. Only, now, instead of having all customization options built-in and available from the beginning you have to understand that you have to install Gnome Tweak Tool in order to, for example, remap Caps Lock to Ctrl. That's something that MacOS offers out of the box. That's something that KDE offers out of the box. Gnome used to offer it out of the box too, but they deliberately removed the option.

Really, that's what gets me. It's not as if the world moved on and Gnome just didn't keep up. No. Gnome 2 was actually better than Gnome 3. The Gnome devs removed features for what, as far as I can tell, were purely aesthetic reasons.

Put another way, whenever we see Microsoft or Apple dumbing down their operating systems, do we not criticize them for unnecessarily making life more difficult for their users? Why should we give Gnome a free pass for doing exactly the same thing?

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Valve doesn't want the Linux desktop to become mainstream. They want a viable Linux gaming ecosystem. That's a different task than ensuring that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows for the millions of HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops that people buy each year. As for what's wrong with Gnome pursuing "the masses", I'd have far less animosity towards Gnome if they pursued the masses without actively spitting on their existing users. However, they seem incapable of doing that.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

The fundamental problem with Gnome is that it presumes that "the masses" (however defined) will use a GNU/Linux desktop. They will not. Insofar as the masses use Linux on the desktop it will be in the form of ChromeOS (or something like it). Instead of chasing Windows and MacOS's taillights, and infantilizing its desktop by continuing to remove features, Gnome should have continued with the Gnome 2 philosophy of focusing on power users, with an emphasis on stability and backwards compatibility. Instead, what we've ended up with is a Gnome desktop that has all of the customizability of MacOS, but with defaults that are nonsensical rather than (somewhat) thought out.

And yes, I'm aware that I can change a lot of Gnome with Gnome Tweak Tool and various extensions. But the fact that I have to install a third party tool, a browser extension, and then some extensions off a random website to get the same functionality that other desktop environments (such as KDE, MacOS and Windows) include by default is an absolute indictment of Gnome's design philosophy.

Instead of chasing after users who have never heard of Gnome, and barely know about Linux, Gnome should have focused on improving the experience existing users. They still can. A good start would be taking all the settings that Gnome Tweak Tool exposes and bringing them back into the main settings UI, so that I don't have swap between two settings applications, with no rhyme or reason dictating how settings are split between the two. Also, please give me the ability to hide the clock (like I can do in Windows 10) without having to install some random extension [1] to do so.

[1]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1110/hide-clock/

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Yeah, I agree that it's challenging to fill up a 3840x2160 or an ultrawide 3440x1440 monitor. But I see apps (Gmail being a prime example) that don't even fill up 1920x1080 window.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

That's exactly the problem! There's this idea that, if we automate the 80%, developers will do the last 20%, and we'll end up in a land of milk and honey, where mobile apps scale up their information density and rearrange their UIs to suit the high precision pointing devices and large screens that come with desktops and laptops.

In practice that never happens. Developers make their mobile app, use the automated tool to make it into 80% of a desktop app, hit the publish button and proudly advertise, "Hey, look, we have a desktop app now!"

Maybe it's fine for Apple and Google to ruin their desktop UIs like that. Maybe they don't care, or, more likely, they think that catering to the vast majority of users who are on mobile is an acceptable tradeoff for alienating the few of us who still prefer desktops as their primary computing device.

But why does Linux have to tread that same path?

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

I disagree with the whole premise of having a single app for both desktop and mobile. Even if you give developers the tools to make a good app for desktop and mobile, they won't. They'll make the mobile app first, ensure that it runs on desktop, and then dust off their hands and call it a day. To quote the Purism blogpost cited elsewhere in this thread:

Web designers now have toolboxes to design web pages, which they adjust for mobile or desktop in order to get easier readability and use.

Except, web designers don't adjust web pages for mobile or web. They adjust pages for mobile, and then what you end up in a desktop web browser is acres of white space and buttons that are the size of your head.

The way I see it, this is Linux UI framework developers chasing Apple, Microsoft and Google's taillights yet again. Sure, Apple, Google and Microsoft don't care, but that's because they're trillion dollar companies and they have to go where the majority of the customers are. But why does Linux have to go there too? Why can't Linux UI framework developers focus on an under-appreciated niche (desktop "power" users) which are increasingly neglected by the megacorps?

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Apple conceded defeat and we have different interfaces on each device class.

Apple hasn't conceded defeat. Every release of MacOS becomes more and more like iOS. Apple keeps releasing tools, such as Catalyst, to make it easier for iOS developers to get their apps to run on MacOS. Apple is very much pursuing convergence between iOS and MacOS, to the latter's detriment.

quanticle

il y a 4 ansdiscuss

Furthermore, the variety of projects that are enabling convergence on their applications is growing at a fast rate, with KDE, GNOME, Nitrux, Elementary and Jingling among others shifting their interest on mobile-ready and touch-friendly applications for the future of Linux.

So, in other words, Linux desktop applications are going the same way as "desktop" applications on Windows and MacOS. I put "desktop" in sarcasm quotes, because so many of these apps are just upscaled mobile apps, which retain the giant buttons and low information density suitable for a 6" touchscreen even when they're scaled up to a 24" monitor.

If this is the future, I hate it.

quanticle

il y a 8 ansdiscuss

For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?

They've already started. Google Meet (their version of Hangouts for enterprise) didn't work on non-Chrome browsers for a very long time. If you tried to do a video call with a non-Chrome browser, you were told to install Chrome and load the page in Chrome. The only reason they were able to get away with this is because Chrome has the high market share that it does. If they'd done this when Chrome had 10% market-share, the response from users would have been to stop using Google Meet. However, because they did this when Chrome has 70% market share (and climbing) there was hardly any outcry; those who didn't already have Chrome installed gave a resigned sigh and installed Chrome in order to participate in their work meetings.

Currently, all of Google's services work on non-Chrome browsers. But will that always be the case? I can very well imagine a world where Google starts making its services Chrome-only, citing, for example, that only V8 has the necessary Javascript performance to run Google's increasingly bloated webapps with adequate performance.

Like you said, it'll start as a slow drip, with the least popular and most obscure applications (for example: Google Play Music) being moved over first. Then, as users fail to object, they'll move over larger and larger applications. Even if they never make the "big-two" of YouTube and Google Search Chrome-only, they'll still be exerting a fair amount of pressure for users to switch to Chrome.

quanticle

il y a 10 ansdiscuss

    but that's a false dichotomy

It's a false dichotomy for self-funded/bootstrapped businesses. But if you consider yourself a startup, you have to deliver growth. It's that pressure that leads to the 70+ hour weeks. It's entirely possible to own and run a business while still putting in reasonable hours. But it's unlikely that business is a startup, by Paul Graham's definition of the word.

For reference, Paul Graham defines a startup as:

    A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not 
    in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to 
    work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." 
    The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with 
    startups follows from growth.

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