Even more funny is the fact is that since we can't educate our chidlren, we'll have to import our talent to run our war machines since we'll be nothing but a bunch of ignoramous who believe that dinosaurs and Jesus got along or something silly that or that the earth is only 5000 years old.

That's what I get for writing wtihout reading the link. I thought it was the same thing.. such as it is. :-)

I think it is successful. It's really popular at the farmer's markets here in Oregon. I am seeing more and more people. What people like about it is that they don't have to pay the credit card companies their 4% of the sales. Instead 4square is only about 2% so small business gets to keep more of their money. Plus all you need is an iphone or android phone to do the swiping. Pretty easy stuff. If you have a 4 square app, you can also pre-pay like juice or something before coming to the store. Use the app to find a vendor and do what you need to do. It's quite slick.

I agree that API and ABI stability is still a problem and that they really need to make sure they do that. The 1.4->2.0 migration was where we learned how badly we need do that especially as a young project. We took API/ABI stability a lot more seriously in this transition. Breakage isn't as bad this time. On the other hand, we have a lot less libraries to link to and most of the GNOME widgets are merging into GTK+.

But I think you have a valid criticism and it is critical that we have that stability in order to have a good application story.

Amazingly, confronting people constructively does help both the project and the people providing feedback. The exercise is to turn folks who complain into people who are invested in the project either by filing bugs, or contributing code, anything at all. The other thing is to make sure that contributions are looked seriously by others. The process is slow and the project is working towards being more community oriented. We've had some good success. I'm happy with the progress. I'm also impressed with my conversations here. Usually this place is a cesspool when it comes to gnome articles. Look how long it took for even acknowledging there was even a release! Sigh. Slashdot staff are not big fans of GNOME.

Yep, desktop is a tool, and that's how we look at it as well. The various desktop projects all have a role to play. We're all one big R&D project trying out different ways to serve people. Each is distinct and that's what makes it so interesting. XFCE is a very conservative project, KDE and GNOME each apply the desktop paradigm in different ways. What works and what doesn't ideally should be shared across the spectrum.

Regarding the animations. We try to make the animations as unobtrusive as possible, because the underlying philosophy is a "distraction free" desktop. So if you're distracted then we have failed in some way. But each animation has a particular purpose, they aren't there for grins. It's supposed to symbolize a transition of some sort. For instance, we've found that in GNOME 2, when you changed desktop a lot of neophytes thought that they lost all their windows because it just looked like they disappear so a transition animation showed that the desktop moved. Things like that. So we're doing the same thing.

That said, there are extensions available in extensions.gnome.org that will stop the animations. You can even not have the overview if you wanted. The extensions have unfettered access to all parts of the desktop (well note quite, but mostly it's all there) It's quite possible for instance to recreate Unity, Windows or something else if you had the time and patience.

I know, and I appreciate any time you work on GNOME and make it better. I work as a community manager of sorts for GNOME. Your particular problem seems more of a performance issue than a gui problem. It should be instantaneous. Certainly it feels like that to me. 3.8 has some speed ups in the animation so that might be of interest to you.

Applets are not coming back. Applets was broken by design, poorly documented, and generally not easy to program. That is why there was so few of them. Extensions is the new "applets" and you can do about the same kind of things and a lot more.

Devs didn't say 'fuck you'. You essentially had people asking the project to revert without giving the new stuff a chance. Then they grew angry because the project didn't listen to them. Throw away 2 years of labor? That's asking a lot. Also understand that a lot of these people are laboring for free and trying to be creative and take a different tack. There has been discussions on slashdot bemoaning the lack of innovation in the desktop in order to attract people to the platform. The interface is different and is not a rip off of some other desktop and internally there are more things that can be changed programmatically than before. Also custom things were replaced with standard web technology.

It would be nice have some appreciation for the risk taking and honest effort to differentiate from the usual Mac/Windows UI paradigm and create something unique.

Yes I do. Maintenance of ABI and APIis important to the project. Applications have to rely on it and not being able to do will not attract developers to the platform.

Yeah, I'm not sure how it would have worked out. I have my doubts. The question is pretty much academic now. :/

Why not just use cairo dock or avn or some these other dock software? Why depend on GNOME for it?

It was temporarily until they could fit GNOME onto a DVD. They were able to do that and they switched back. Debian supports GNOME. Look a the press release and you will see that one of the quotes is from Debian.

what advanced 'wm features' are you looking for?

At least we'd get some money.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9/systemmonitor/ There you go, and it's reasonably similar to the gnome 2 one.

And guess what? You can use that with GNOME 3 just fine.