Wed 11 Apr 2007
As a co-maintainer of D-Bus I often say, and I believe Havoc would agree, D-Bus is only interesting when it becomes uninteresting. That is when it is a part of a programmers every day life where one does not notice changes and just accepts it as part of creating applications. To a degree I think this is true of other project such as GNOME. One need excitement to motivate developers and entice new users but I believe an application is not successful until it is another boring part of a persons daily routine.
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April 11th, 2007 at 11:17 pm
In other words, you’re saying software isn’t useful until it’s a commodity?
April 12th, 2007 at 12:32 am
useful? A piece of software can be useful to anyone at anytime. I’m saying in most cases the pinnacle of success is not fad but sustained usage without an emotional attachment. Yes, a piece of software which becomes a commodity I believe is inherently successful. Isn’t that what we are trying to do? Commoditize OS’s?
April 12th, 2007 at 8:24 am
You were at Kathy Sierra’s talk at GUADEC last year, right? Creating Passionate Users, rememeber?
Think of the community of Apple users. Disspassionately purchasing run-of-the-mill equipment so they can execute their humdrum lives?
Absolutely, plumbing like dbus should not be at the top of our list of exciting, new features, but Jesus, to say that excitement is just a lure for new users and developers and that the measure of success for Gnome should be how quickly we can suck that excitement out of them is deeply frightening, coming from a leader of the community such as yourself.
Gnome: We Aim for Boring!
April 12th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
You know….you almost make me want to stop using GNOME. Here’s why…
As a user the thing that gets me with each new release, is that I still don’t understand what GNOME is:
1) There is a very distinct look and feel with Windows, Mac OS, and even KDE. But with GNOME is more or less at the mercy of the WM and GTK themes.
2) When I used to use Windows every release crashed less, so I could play games longer
With GNOME….its not much different than 1.4 (uses more memory). What can I do with 2.18 that I couldn’t do with 1.4. And before you dismiss this as an inflammatory statement, think about it from a users perspective…why should they use GNOME? What is the value-add?
3) The good thing about recent releases are things like Tomboy, it is like smart notes or intelligent paper and it actually makes my life easier. There’s also nautilus which is pretty neat.
4)I tried a test: I fired up Enlightenment DR17 which presents you with a very minimalist “shell”. I needed a file manager, so i fired up nautilus. I needed my smart notes, so I got a system tray (Trayer) and fired up Tomboy. I like music, so i fired up Rhythmbox. I also like movies, so I fired up Totem, even though MPlayer works just as well if not better for certain things (DVDs?). Each one of those apps has a different look and feel. Maybe it is geared to the apps function, but shouldn’t be consistent…or maybe those are not GNOME….
I might be way off, but maybe I am not, what do you think? What is GNOME? What should it be? Some say it should be an underlying framework for embedded computers such as OLPC or OpenMoko. Is GNOME still suited for desktop tasks?
April 12th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Hm, are we really trying to commoditize OS’s? No reason for anyone to choose Linux then …