quanticle · HackerTrans

3 tahun yang laludiscuss

    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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

4 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

8 tahun yang laludiscuss

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

10 tahun yang laludiscuss

    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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