GNOME begins to play catch up with KDE

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 07 April 2009 06:39

Opinion and Analysis

It now looks like GNOME wants to do something similar.

Sometime last year, a discussion began about whether GNOME had lost its way and was, to use bizspeak, "lacking a vision." Things needed to be "taken to another level" - whatever that means.

No matter what "vision" it adopts, GNOME will have to stick with the six-monthly release cycle. This has been touted as a virtue though often it amounts to the equivalent of a man running in the same spot to give the appearance that something is happening.

Ubuntu has tied its fortunes to GNOME and this is one more reason why the six-monthly cycle will have to continue.

Will GNOME move away from its policy of providing limited functionality in its applications?

The philosophy of providing the basics that work is good for beginners and in some situations. In most other situations, it proves a nuisance.

NetworkManager, the tool used to manage connectivity in GNOME, is one good example of this philosophy. If one has the most common setup and uses DHCP to connect to the outside world, all is well.

But anything different means that it is sheer torture to get a connection going. The only sensible solution is to remove the tool altogether.

The second area of speculation concerns Mono which is slowly creeping into the GNOME desktop. It hasn't made any big moves into Ubuntu yet but in some distributions like OpenSUSE it has become compulsory.

In OpenSUSE major applications like Evolution are now dependent on Mono. How long before this disease spreads?

Will the new roadmap involve more Mono or less? These are things that the GNOME project must address - and soon.