For those who do not want to read much: Just read this comment from Clem lefebvre from almost a year ago on why there were only 2 official tracks in version 13, compared to 9 in version 9.
I will apologize in advance for the sarcasm .. I have to give another low blow to the Gnome developers. GTK3 is not a reliable API. Maybe it should be called libgnome. GTK3.4 came with Gnome3.4, and it was not compatible with previous GTK3 themes. This means that all the GTK3 applications looked very ugly, not only with all the GTK2 themes that do not support GTK3 (almost all), but also the few that do. With this in mind we had three options:
1) Offer a desktop with little integration and applications that look different, based on the API they use (which is totally unacceptable)
2) Get rid of all GTK3 applications from Mint and replace them with older versions in GTK2 or GTK2 or QT applications (this includes Gnome applications, but also Gdebi, Streaming and some others)
3) Fuck like crazy, remove all themes, and waste countless hours giving Mint-X and Mint-Z the correct support in GTK "3.4", although it will probably break again in 3,6 ...We went for option 3 "this time." Hope this little example is enough to convince third party developers not to use GTK3. No release notes or documentation that explains the regression or how to solve the problem has been found. Actually I have the feeling that GTK 3.4 was developed for Gnome 3.4, that it doesn't really matter if it breaks things and that we should not use it outside of Gnome.
Now for those who want to read a lot:
A few days ago, IgnorantGuru (SpaceFM developer, PCManFM on steroids) sent out a super two-part article on several projects that are on the wrong track, several of which Red Hat is behind. In the first part talks about GTK issues. According to him, both the intrinsic problems with the development of GTK and the forced conformism of the developers represent a challenge for those who create stable software outside of GNOME. In addition to what Clem mentioned, Glade version 3.8 was the last to support GTK2, and that on Debian they don't even bother to make a legacy version (the one that will come out for Wheezy is version 3.12)
IgnorantGuru faced these problems in the GNOME bugzilla and Benjamin Otte (the only full-time GTK developer) with quality replies that GTK does not swim within extra developers, happy to spend their time ensuring compatibility with rarely used themes, and that theme authors involved in the development GTK's agree that it is better to update themes than to maintain the status quo, and that after those decisions there is no time for compatibility for themes. Emmanuele Bassi complements that Adwaita (the official GNOME theme) changes for every change in GTK, and that GTK changes when the authors of themes for GNOME and also for Windows and MacOS ask for a new requirement.
But this thought comes from long before, when they still thought about what GNOME 3 would be like. The idea was born of returning to GNOME a brand, with a user experience different from that of Windows (the menu bar below) and Apple (the menu bar above), and ideas for applets and extensions they threatened that idea. If it can't be fixed, it won't be fixed. When the bugs arrive asking to return such a thing, they close them with the WONTFIX tag. This goes even further. 2 years ago William Jon McCann reported a bug in Transmission asking that they not use icons in the notification area for GNOME 3 as they were going to remove support. When the maintainer complained that this could harm XFCE users, McCann replied, “I think you're going to have to decide if it's a GNOME, Ubuntu, or XFCE app, and I have no idea what it is or does. XFCE, sorry. »
The second part The article talks about udisks, gvfs, udev and systemd. With the arrival of udisks2, the command line was changed, breaking compatibility with the software and scripts that depended on udisks. Its author David Zeuthen (Red Hat employee) added in documentation "This program is not intended to be used by scripts or other programs - options and commands may in incompatible ways in future even in maintenance releases." Hon Jen Yee, creator of PCManFM regrets the malfunction of udisks, polkit, consolekit, and how they are moving away from the KISS philosophy. Both PCManFM and Thunar rely on the gvfs API, which according to IgnorantGuru is poorly maintained and very unstable. Regarding udev, recently a few Gentoo developers they made a fork (eudev) because udev was more absorbed by systemd, breaking compatibility with previous systems. Linus has already been bugging the maintainers because they don't want to accept certain patches that were sent to fix some bugs.
And about systemd (which was proposed as a GNOME dependency), there is a better explanation in a post on aggressive evangelism that is being made of it, which is being endorsed by its creator, Lennard Poettering.
This post was going to be called "A Conspiracy Theory in Linux", as the original IgnorantGuru article was called. However, Perseus told me that this is not conspiracy but sabotage, plus the article is more Anti-Red Hat than what I am writing to you. The truth is to ask ourselves, how independent is a project like systemd? Not only do I mean independent of Red Hat, but of Lennart himself (it is already considered one against him being the creator)
The gigantic list of sources:
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2038
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/opinion/a-linux-conspiracy-theory
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/opinion/a-linux-conspiracy-theory/2
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=638478
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=687752
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-April/msg00314.html
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685
http://udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/1.91.0/udisksctl.1.html
http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/udisks2-another-loss-for-linux/
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1210.0/01131.html
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1210.0/01889.html
http://lwn.net/Articles/529314/
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/132gle/eli5_the_systemd_vs_initupstart_controversy/
http://sporkbox.us/blog/?r=page/108
23 comments, leave yours
Excellent post, in many blogs every canonical decision made with ubuntu is attacked and criminalized for free, without even smearing a little bit and entering to inquire looking for more information about why these decisions are made. When you as a serious company have to guarantee the quality of the product you develop, in no way can you depend on the whims of a developer who does not take into account your improvements or contributions to said package, the times and deadlines that you as a company have with your customers, or what is worse, depending on the decisions made by your competition (red hat). At the end of the day all the software that Canonical develops is licensed under free licenses, to and to each person whether they decide to use it or not.
I put my comment before reading yours. And although I'm not a fanboy of Canonical, I fully understand that the saying "the donkey was not rude, the sticks did it."
I would title it more or less:
Is Ubuntu closed? Find out what Gnome is like! »
Interesting article.
Ufff ... thank goodness I switched to KDE that uses QT, so I stay away from all the evils of Gnome / GTK haha
-The following is a personal opinion and I apologize in advance if anyone is offended-
The truth is that Gnome TO ME seems a shame for the Linux universe, imposing on the user who came from the great Gnome 2 a sudden change and a reeducation of the way in which it interacts with the desktop interface.
In addition to not being able to change the appearance because the Gnome gentlemen believe that their all flat theme with their super outdated icons that come from Gnome 2 make a perfect combination ...
Luckily there are alternatives in Linux, lucky that there are projects like KDE.
You also have an alternative to Unity.
Come now…
And Fluxbox, Openbox, LXDE, XFCE, Awesome, JMW, etc
Man, if you are using gnome shell, I do not think that a simple openbox, flubxbox etc, is an alternative for the user experience you are looking for, which I think is total. Also this weekend I was disappointed with the window managers, seeing that with my nvidia I was not able to completely make the stupid tearing of these drivers disappear.
And also Cinnamon, MATE, Razor QT and E17. We are lucky that there are so many environments to use !!
The truth is that at the beginning I had some problems with udisk2 (mainly with Thunar) but little by little it was fixed and with systemd at the moment I have not had any problems.
I have the latest version of GTK3, but at the moment I have no problems with the issues, mainly because the vast majority use GTK2 (such as Thunar, LXPanelX, Transmission, etc) and some with QT4 (and one with QT3 which is what It looks uglier, but I don't care)
No, if in the end we are going to have to agree with Icaza ...
I, as I have said for so many years, I stay with my Fluxbox and so calm.
I sincerely believe that if ubuntu in the near future, unity will pass to qt, gtk3 will have it very difficult, the most important applications have even been ported, gimp, libreoffice, chrome, firefox, blender….
I agree; I think why Shuttleworth always liked Qt more than GTK and why Ubuntu chose that path today is found in the same article. Then Canonical will make decisions that don't satisfy everyone; but the steering wheel has a clear foundation.
Well that's why it's always good to see the 2 sides of the coin ...
Time to time goes the saying. Canonical has seen this long before we have; but of course, since then it has been criminalized, including from Red Hat who has long believed that GNOME is theirs and does what they please, without any guidance.
If this continues, GNOME has an inevitable end; there will be forks, but not all to preserve the old GNOME 2, but to save GNOME from the follies of its developers.
MMM…. I already read this post on esdebian
The Lennard that advocates because systemd is the hairless wonder, and attacks anyone who criticizes it to death, I read a discussion on the debian mailing list a while ago and there were shots and stabs.
here you have it. Lennard does not participate but he does John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/11/threads.html#00328
Fuck, and wherever I get Matthias Klumpp .. the guy behind Tanglu 😛
Perhaps the developers are having a very bad time with Gnome, however, as a user I feel very satisfied with it (not only me, my father also uses it and finds it excellent), so I can only congratulate all the people who goes to great lengths to create and maintain this magnificent desktop environment.
Thanks for the news, hopefully things will be fixed and 2013 is an excellent year for Linux in general.
Good article, something complicated for those of us who are not so deep in the knowledge of linux development and its personalities. So I had to read the article and the first comment twice to understand where the topic was going.
My experience with Linux is very different from many people. I use it to work editing videos, images, web development and the normal use of all the others check facebook, twitter etc. My computer is a 7-year-old laptop with modest performance, when I started using ubuntu the computer worked very well until they imposed Unity. So Ubuntu lacked two features that I need, a light environment so that all the resources are for my work and not have to be formatting every 6 months or every year because the system does not work as well as it is supposed to. work after update. My change to ArchLinux was the natural option but when testing gnome3 and its shell I can also say that although it has a degree of customization more than unity it is not better achieved and consumes a lot of system resources. My conclusions.
1.- Linux users are also to blame for demanding and pretending that PEDORROS computers "turion, AMD Sempron, ATOM" work as well as a MAC or Windows 8 with intel i7. the fault is poorly programmed compiz and the interface, not our integrated video card.
2.- Do not spend money to support projects and distros, it is true that many have not paid for the windows they use and the programs they use in windows, but what we must understand is that the people or institutions that support those projects will be the only voices that will be heard. It's funny how a company says it will launch a project based on linux and automatically the drives that support the hardware come out.
3.- Companies like Red Hat and Canonical are at odds because both want to attract customers because their market is so small that the benefit of one is detrimental to the other. "The real market is SERVER", so its laboratories are the desktop where according to this article RedHat and Ubuntu are confronted by gnome-gtk but openSuse is not very innocent in its handling of KDE and the indiscriminate use of Mono.
4.- The important thing is the files «photos, music, documents, videos». Let's stop worrying about desktops and their integration with libraries, the important thing is what you can do with them.
I would feel somewhat frustrated if I lost my OpenBox desktop that has cost me so much to customize but I also admit I am not good at customizing because an installation of manjaro openbox on my niece's laptop left me very pleasantly satisfied despite archbang's criticism of the manjaro menu openbox.
Greetings and sorry for the comment.
red hat, red hat ...