If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

Not sure which I find more irritating, Gnome 3 or Unity – either way, my Linux future is not clear for me any more.

up yours, Gnome

I preferred using Gnome to anything else I have used (stretching back to Windows 3.1, NT 3.5, the old UNIX X-interface and original Macs). It doesn’t get in my way. I don’t want an Android-like interface on my desktop/notebook, and nor do I want some cool fluffy post-Vista nonsense. I want a simple GUI that works much the same as GUI’s have for the past 20 years.

If I were to talk with people who developed this sort of crap, they would tell me I am wrong, that I don’t understand, that I need to adapt, etc. I have heard this time and time again from developers on various projects that soon went into terminal decline (Maemo, for example). It is arrogant to insist that people who use this stuff are wrong if they don’t like what developers have decided they should want, it is a bad model, and goes against everything I learned when I studied this stuff at Uni.

Open Source tries to work like business, with ‘open’ principles, but it does not follow any real business models; one thing I admire about MS is that as soon as they realised Vista was a turkey, they re-thought and bought out Windows 7 (As a GUI, W7 is great, as an OS it sucks – and failed me worse than anything since the days of the ‘blue-screen of death’). In practice, users are dictated to by developers, and rarely get consulted about what they might want.

Developers will tell me (despite my having an MSc in this shit) that I don’t really understand what I am talking about; hey, you know what, I want a GUI that lets me do what I want without having to think about it, it doesn’t need to look like some fluffy state-of-the-art video-wonderland, and I don’t want to have to start again and re-learn how to do what I do already already without thinking about it.

Developers will tell me that beauty of open source is that if I don’t like it, I can take the code and change it so it does what I want. Well, fuck you, no. What is ugly about open source is that some bunch of fucking wankers who control the source can take that source, fork it and call it a new version, cease work on the original and kill it off. And if people who use it don’t like it, well fuck them as far as you are concerned. Despite the hype, Open Source is essentially a very selfish enterprise, which panders to the egos of the people who develop it, and is not at all interested in anybody who might want to use it.

Hardly surprising few users actually put their hands in their pockets and support some of these projects – you can never be sure when some dick-brain who accounts to nobody is going to have a brainstorm and screw you and your investment.

Nice going boys, you took something great, and fucked it up completely.

So, I guess it’s LXDE for me in the future, which is a bit sad, because I really did like Gnome 2, but finding distro’s which:

1. actually work
2. give me what I want
3. make it easy for me to get what I want that isn’t there already
4. don’t force me to use one of KDE4, Gnome 3 or Unity
5. allow me to keep using Gnome 2

are getting fewer and fewer.

I guess it will help towards the cull of superflous Linux distros, something long overdue – let’s hope that at least one distro remains strong and persists with Gnome 2, and that somebody has the sense to ‘fork’ Gnome 2 (i.e., continue to maintain and enhance the original) and ensure that a perfectly good interface is still available into the future.

Links:

http://felipec.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/after-two-weeks-of-using-gnome-3-i-officially-hate-it/

http://www.lylebackenroth.com/blog/2011/11/08/ubuntu-has-jumped-the-shark/

http://ingeek.com/yes-gnome-3-sucks/

http://www.datamation.com/open-source/why-isnt-gnome-listening-1.html

 

Follow-up post:

The Leaving of Ubuntu

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