In the past I have been complaining about GNOME's lack of innovation; and now I stumbled over a project called GNOME Shell...
So, this is the moment: this is when I have to revise my world view; when I have to apologize and praise the GNOME folks for their innovative ideas...
Nah, just kidding :-) But I have to admit that I was surprised -- and this is the incredible part -- in a positive way for a change.
Most of it is still rather vague (i.e. remarkably like my own ideas...); and the ideas presented there are not exactly revolutionary -- but one thing is clear: For the first(?) time GNOME folks indeed seem to be thinking outside the Windows (TM)... err... I mean outside the box ;-) ; for the first time they really try to come up with something new, rather than just doing cosmetics to well-known (stupid) approaches...
Do you hear this noise?... It's me applauding.
One thing that caught my attention in particular are some ideas regarding Activities: remarkably similar in some regards to my own ideas regarding session management...
This confirms an observation I'm recently making again and again: Slowly, very slowly, most things in the free software world tend to be moving in the right direction. Maybe in just another 20 years or so we will have a sane desktop environment! ;-)
3 comments:
hmm, why does that innovative gnome shell thing remind me so much of krunner and plasma? ;)
Well, when I first commented on Plasma, I did remark on the session management ideas explicitely. They were very vague back then however (even more vague than the GNOME Shell stuff is now IIRC) -- overall, Plasma looked more like a technical framework, with few actual use cases. The GNOME Shell stuff seems a bit more promising in this regard -- it seems to focus more on specific ideas regarding innovative user interaction approaches.
If indeed some actual nice features were born from the Plasma stuff in the mean time, all the better :-) I wonder, is there some page describing these in a concise yet expressive way?...
This wass great to read
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