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Gnome On Its Last Leg?


V.T. Eric Layton

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V.T. Eric Layton

Caught THIS on /. today, which led me to THIS. Don't forget to read the comments. Interesting stuff. I would hate to see the sun set on the Gnome Project. It's times like this when I really wish I was a computer science whiz/coding god. I'd offer to help.

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I read that this morning (well more like noon when I hit the net) and had the impression that some blogger/tech journalist needed something to entertain the legions with on a Saturday.

 

Just because a project is kind of floundering doesn't mean they will disappear. Just might take a while to find their rudder and get on track again.

Fresh leadership and some really bad reviews and they'll get right to it.

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V.T. Eric Layton

That's not just any blogger. Did you see the amount of comments he gets on his articles. That is an uber-blogger. I wish I had traffic like that on my blogs! :)

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securitybreach

That's not just any blogger. Did you see the amount of comments he gets on his articles. That is an uber-blogger. I wish I had traffic like that on my blogs! :)

 

He is a GTK+ developer plus his blog is hosted on http://blogs.gnome.org/ so he may know what he is talking about:

"GTK+ Developer Benjamin Otte talks about the stagnation and decline of the Gnome Project. He describes how core developers are leaving GNOME development, how GNOME is understaffed, why GNOME is a Red Hat project and why GNOME is losing market and mind share. Is the Gnome project on its deathbed? Quoting: 'I first noticed this in 2005 when Jeff Waugh gave his 10×10 talk. Back then, the GNOME project had essentially achieved what it set out to do: a working Free desktop environment. Since then, nobody has managed to set new goals for the project. In fact, these days GNOME describes itself as a “community that makes great software”, which is as nondescript as you can get for software development. The biggest problem with having no goals is that you can’t measure yourself. Nobody can say if GNOME 3 is better or worse than GNOME 2. There is no recognized metric anywhere. This also leads to frustration in lots of places.'"

From the Slashdot article Eric linked to above.

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Is the Gnome project on its deathbed?

Melodrama, over-the-top.

If anything it sounds like an attempt to get the group motivated by making them think their project is near death.

GNOME is so big, and as he says is a Red Hat project, it will be like Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, etc. If it is dying, it's going to take a long time to get to being "mostly dead".

 

And, "mostly dead" is still a little bit alive.

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As long as the hordes of users will use it as their DE, it will survive. If we all flock other DE's it will simply die. Those are the elementary laws of nature

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securitybreach

As long as the hordes of users will use it as their DE, it will survive. If we all flock other DE's it will simply die. Those are the elementary laws of nature

 

Good point :thumbup:

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V.T. Eric Layton

That is very true, Alain. Unfortunately, running Gnome in Slackware is more trouble than it's worth. I do run it on my Debian Sid installation, though. :yes: Everything else is mostly Xfce for me. :)

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