Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

For a desktop that was supposed to become defunct two years ago, GNOME 2 remains surprisingly alive. Linux Mint offers a direct fork in Mate, and recreates GNOME 2 with a series of extensions in Cinnamon. A new distribution called SolusOS now offers Consort, a fork of GNOME fallback, which resembles GNOME 2. Meanwhile, the GNOME project prepares to support a set of core extensions to reproduce the GNOME 2 experience. Hardly a week goes by without some distribution announcing a release that includes some form of GNOME 2.

All this activity is understandable, and even admirable to a degree. It's testimony to users' anger over GNOME 3 and the ability of free software to empower users.

However, increasingly I worry about the effect that these efforts will have on the future of the desktop. In the stampede to return to the past, the ability to innovate frequently seems to be trampled without anyone caring.

The lost year

After all, while GNOME 2 is a perfectly adequate desktop, it is hardly unique. Users who were unsatisfied with GNOME 3 could have found a usable substitute in Xfce. Alternatively, they could have reproduced the desktop of their dreams with KDE. And, in fact, in the first six months after GNOME 3 was released, many did consider these alternatives, and were reasonably satisfied.

Yet these alternatives were somehow not good enough. Instead, much of the development on the free desktop was distracted for a year in re-creating a technology that began over a decade ago, and offered little that alternatives could not match. 

Admittedly, the free desktop is no longer playing catch-up with its proprietary rivals, and, thanks to Windows 8, is now substantially ahead. Still, that's a year of development we won't get back again. Instead of considering what might come next, the community threw that time away on unnecessary projects that duplicated each other closely -- and in the midst of celebrating that accomplishment, nobody seems to have noticed any shortcomings.

Reaction and nostalgia

This lost year is a concern by itself. However, what may be even more serious is the conviction that it was time well-spent.

In the Linux Advocate community on Google+, Aaron Seigo recently asked the users of GNOME 2-type interfaces how they saw the free desktop evolving in the next five years.

Ikey, the founder of SolusOS, talked in terms of his distribution becoming more community-managed, hinting that this change of direction would be in response to GNOME's perceived unresponsiveness.
However, other responses implied that there was not much need for change. For example, Alessandro Ebersol wrote, "Problem is, I've never seen another shape of wheel but rounded. trying to create square wheels, these are the results: [GNOME]3, Unity, Metro UI."

Similarly, Andrew Wyatt, the developer of Fuduntu, a popular GNOME 2-based distro, predicted that "We'll start to see a slow shift back to a classic desktop experience. This experience has matured for over thirty years [and] abandoning it was a huge mistake."
I don't think I am misreading these comments when I say that they suggest that GNOME 2 is the epitome of the desktop, and that any major departure from it is therefore misguided. The future, presumably, will be in minor changes, while the basic design of the desktop remains similar to what it was in 2002.

Judging from some of the online conversations I have been having in the last six months, such views are currently widespread. They suggest to me not just a nostalgia for a desktop that some users have logged into daily for years, but a reaction against the entire idea of innovation. A few users are more specific in their criticism of recent interfaces, blaming the triumph of usability theory over actual consultation with users, or how new ideas were introduced, but a disturbing number -- perhaps a majority -- seem to be rejecting even the possibility of change.

The outlook is not true, of course. KDE's ability to swap out icon sets and maintain separate desktops for different tasks are both innovations that are substantial improvements over GNOME 2. Similarly, GNOME's future plans call for increased security features, including easier disk encryption and anonymized web browsing. Both these sets of features are evidence of just how much remains to be added on the desktop. 

Unfortunately, like Americans discussing issues like health care and gun control while ignoring how other countries' approaches to these matters, GNOME users tend to ignore KDE in their debates. And, in much the same way, the GNOME project has too little credibility for many to have a strong interest in its plans. Instead, the idea that innovation is both unneeded and impossible continues to spread like a stain.

The trouble is, such ideas do not have to be true to be influential. If nothing else, if enough users believe such views, then for practical purposes they may as well be true. If enough people believe that only minor innovations are possible, then nobody is likely to attempt major ones. Projects will become cautious about experiments, their developers will become bored and leave, and major changes will become even less likely to get past the brainstorming stage.

I suspect that this is all too likely to be the atmosphere of the free desktop in the next few years. All too likely, we are entering a world where a rearrangement of items in a menu becomes a major release feature.

Experimentation within reason

I am not suggesting that free desktop developers experiment wildly. Still less am I condoning the way that different desktop environments have introduced change in the last few years. 

In particular, the way that users' perspectives have been overlooked seems irresponsible. The days in which the developers in each project did what they pleased, and any complaints by users was greeted by invitations to code it themselves are long gone. 

These days, developers need to monitor carefully whether users want change, and how much change users will accept at any one time. To do anything less amounts to letting down the thousands who depend on them.

As the free software community absorbs the lessons of the last few years, there is no need to lurch from one extreme to the other. Yes, major changes should not be added without workable fallback settings, but that is a long way from endorsing a complete rejection of change. But today that complete rejection seems a more probable alternative than any search for middle ground.

This atmosphere might change if a major innovation becomes wildly popular. But otherwise, instead of enjoying an era in which the free desktop proves its superiority, we had better prepare for several dismal years of development.

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