What I love about Unity

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

Den 30. des. 2011 15:28, skrev Nenad:
>
> A story about indicators, etc. sounds as really good set of 
> architectural choices. Having said that, architectural cleanup should 
> not negatively affect existing user base by removing some workflows. 
> Backward compatibility might slow down overall progress but green 
> field development results in own set of problems. Ironically, 
> technical people who would otherwise support architectural changes 
> introduced with Unity are resistant to these changes because of some 
> user interface shortcomings.
>

I completely agree with that in some senses. Unity does not take 
anything away. Nothing is lost because of Unity. I often compare desktop 
shells to the web browsers. They can be considered "web shells". They're 
not technically comparable, but from a users point of view, they do the 
same thing. When Google entered the scene with Chromium and Chrome, they 
added to our choices. Some distros use it by default, and that's fine. I 
think it's a good browser. My preference is still Firefox and I would 
always install it as quickly as possible. Unity adds to the number of 
desktops you can choose from and does not remove any choices.

However, I disagree with the notion that Unity should depend on the 
workflow from Gnome Panel. I would much rather that Gnome Panel 
continues to be developed with respect to itself and that Unity is 
developed with completely different goals. The world has changed a lot 
since the mid nineties. I think Unity reflects that, Gnome Panel not so 
much. But that's fine. We don't all have to be modern and walk in lines. 
Nobody has the legal power to remove any free software. But if software 
should be kept, it must be maintained, or it must be deemed to be 
perfect. That's difficult. If you want it to evolve, then you also need 
someone to actively develop it. If you want that to happen, then you 
need to give it attention. You should not focus on why you think Unity 
or Gnome Shell is bad, but on why you think Gnome Panel is good. Because 
that's what counts.
> According to your description these specs are easy to implement for 
> remaining panels, then why support for look & feel of Gnome Panel was 
> marginalized remains unclear.
>>

It's not unclear to me. Someone is paying the bills. Those someone have 
a different view of what the future should look like. The only thing 
they agree upon, is that it should not look like the past. Nothing wrong 
with that. Gnome wants to focus on the future of Gnome Shell and 
Canonical wants to focus on its vision, which is Unity. We cannot expect 
any of them to focus much on Gnome Panel, because that is not their 
vision of the future. So, if we want to keep Gnome Panel around, then we 
need to find some developers who are willing to keep maintaining and 
developing it. Perhaps people like Vincent Untz can be persuaded. If 
not, then we either need to find new developers, or let the old software 
die in peace.

Just keep in mind that _anyone_ can start developing Gnome Panel. If all 
the anyones on the entire planet choose not to do so, then users should 
begin to wonder why.

> All of them contributed in serving some user groups, and none of them 
> fulfilled "One size fits all" promises. The same will happen to Unity 
> I guess.
>>

It's not comparable. You can use any programming language to interact 
with Unity and it's very high level. Literally. If you wanted to, you 
could write it by hand and not require a programming language at all. 
It's DBus. By the way, Gnome Panel switched to that from Bonobo a few 
versions back. I think maybe in 10.04 or something. It was a radical 
switch then, too. Most people didn't notice it, though. I didn't, even 
if I knew it was going to happen. That's how it should be. We should do 
these things from time to time, but we should do them because it needs 
to be done, not because of hype. Whenever something dramatic happens, we 
must always have a large number of users who can explain why it is so. 
Otherwise, we get massive amounts of speculation, conspiracy theories 
and general disarray. It's not a matter of who's right and who's wrong. 
We just have to learn from this and never repeat this mistake. Proper 
communication would have ensured that all the nonsense would've never 
happened.

Users should never be expected to understand the difference between 
Bonobo and DBus, GTK2 or GTK3, GConf and Dconf...As a consequence, they 
shouldn't care about Gnome 2 or Gnome 3. It's Gnome. It really isn't 
that much different.


And I think that concludes todays pontification. :)

Happy new year, everyone!

Jo-Erlend Schinstad