The post-Gnome fall out

Gnome is dying.  It might be brought back, we have yet to see.  But it is definitely a dying project.  It’s dying because somewhere, for some reason, someone turned it into an ideal instead of a project.  Ideals never really die, but they fade and are twisted and interpreted, whereas projects serve a purpose.

Now, we have a ridiculous picture: Gnome, Gnome-shell, The Gnome3 forks Cinnamon and Consortium, the Gnome2 fork Mate, and of course Unity.

All of those are originally derived from Gnome 2.  What the hell happened?  It doesn’t matter.  My advice to you is to get out of dodge.  The gnome project is destined to fractured hopeless wasteland, move on to other projects.  XFCE, LXDE, Enlightenment, KDE, Openbox, a Tiler, IceWM, JWM, hell, anything.  Do it.  The reason is, if you don’t the future of your desktop is in question.

Gnome got emotional.  People are outraged now by stupid things, go look at Ikey and Joss’s latest argument Ikey’s posted on Google+.  And its because Gnome is an ideal instead of a project.  I’m done.  Have been done. You should be too.

Why you should use KDE

Full disclosure:  I don’t use KDE on a daily basis.

So, if I don’t, why then am I recommending it to you?

Because I like it, it has a great number of great things going for it, and if you found this article, it probably means you’re interested.

Linux Desktops (2012 2nd Quarter Comparison)

Relatively little has changed in the Linux Desktop world since my last post in March.  As such this will be a relatively quick post.

I’d say the biggest news would be the targeting of Gnome 3 Fallback mode for primary use by a couple distributions.  Trisquel, one of the FSF’s approved distributions as well as Solus OS have decided to go this way, disregarding the Gnome team’s UI redesign, and instead opting to enable the “fallback mode” to be a more usable, less crippled environment.

Linux Desktops (2012 1st Quarter Comparison)

A lot has changed since my last post about Linux desktops only a few months ago.  Mostly in response to the big uproar in the community over Gnome3 and Unity.

LMDE Update frustration

I have now encountered my second problem incurred as a result of Gnome3‘s emergence in the wild.  The first was Gnome Shell, and it resulted in me moving away from gnome as a desktop environment in a gradual manner, so as to ease the process.  This time, long after not using gnome anymore, I was running updates with Linux Mint’s update manager when I noticed that it said Dropbox was going to be uninstalled.

Linux Desktops (2011 4th quarter Comparison)

(edit: also see my update for 2012 1st quarter)

In the wake of Gnome 3, Gnome-Shell, and Ubuntu’s Unity interface those of us who can’t do 3d acceleration are left with a decision of what to do about our Linux Desktop.