I like the current Gnome desktop very much. And I'm sorry to see it go, which in the foreseeable future will happen anyway.
But I can't imagine switching to either Unity or KDE. I'll probably end up with Xfce or LXDE. :P
Linux is the supercomputer operating system of choice; thanks to Android, Linux is becoming the most popular smartphone operating system of them all;and Linux continues to make gains in the server market. But, when it comes to the desktop, no matter how you measure it, Linux has never how more than a tiny share of the desktop market. Why? Well, I can give you lots of reasons, but one that Mark Shuttleworth founder of Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, has pointed out that there’s a lot of disorganization and disorder in Linux desktop developer circles.
The specific problem that started the current discussions roiling the Linux desktop waters was explored by Dave Neary, a member and former director of the GNOME, in a commentary on how Canonical and Ubuntu people claimed that “We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn’t want it.”
The technical problem behind the dispute is that GNOME rejected the Ubuntu Ayatana system status indicators. These indicators, and their messaging application programming interfaces (APIs) would be used on the Linux desktop to convey such information as “Whether you are connected, what the time is, whether you are online, whether your battery will last long enough for you to finish your work, whether you have messages,” etc. etc.
I think we can all agree that this is useful information for desktop users. The devil, as usual, was in the hard work details of getting it to work. The GNOME release team rejected Ayatana because it wouldn’t integrate in the forthcoming GNOME 3.0 shell, GNOME didn’t need it in any case, and that the developers didn’t follow up on it. From how Neary tells the story, “the discussion petered out [and there was] no feedback .., from the GNOME Shell team.” This was “hardly ideal.”
Further work on the Ubuntu and GNOME technical dispute by Neary revealed, that Ayanta, under the name, StatusNotifier spec, had been worked on by KDE developers and that GNOME developers had reviewed the spec. Never-the-less, Neary states that “It is disingenuous to call StatusNotifier a cross-desktop standard. Hosting a document on the freedesktop.org wiki does not a cross-desktop standard make.”
He’s right as far that goes. FreeDesktop was meant to facilitate development work on low-level interoperability between Unix and Linux desktops. For the last few years though the FreeDestkop ‘organization’ has done little though to further its mission.
Neary went on to state that Mark [Shuttleworth] wants GNOME to have “strong, mature technical leadership.” Neary then stated that “My understanding of GNOME is this: GNOME does not have technical leadership - it hasn’t had clear technical leadership since, as I understand it, the creation of the GNOME Foundation (at which point, by design, the board was given a mandate to build and define GNOME, and then soon afterwards removed that mandate from itself). The foundation does not now dictate any vision or direction for GNOME.”
Neary continued, “It can be argued that this is something which should be changed. That change will be effected by people involved in the foundation and the project. It is not enough for Mark to tell the project that “you need leadership”, or Jono Bacon [the Ubuntu community leader] telling foundation members (as he told me in 2007) that they should step up to the plate.”
