alex diavatis | August 8, 2012

Ubuntu may drop Nautilus 3.6 from Quantal!?

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

These are really interesting news that come directly from Ubuntu’s Sebastien Bacher in Launchpad Bug Tracker. Sebastian basically says that Ubuntu cannot follow Gnome upstream as Gnome lack to plan their work in advance or communicate enough with Ubuntu about their new features.

Sebastian also says that Ubuntu might use Nautilus 3.4 or Nemo or Marlin. Canonical puts the pressure in Gnome for sure!

There is another interesting discussion with Sebastien Bacher and Yorba’s founder Adam Dingle (which btw we’ll print a nice interview of him later today), this time in Gnome’s Nautilus Mailing Lists that Sebastien makes known that:

“ We (Ubuntu) might well start following GNOME with one cycle delay (i.e building our next version on the current stable rather than following the current unstable)”

I won’t comment or print the whole discussions here but just a small part of what Sebastian said:

“The lesson that we learned this cycle is that GNOME is not planning their work enough in advance or communicating enough for us to keep basing our distribution on the current unstable GNOME versions. If that situation doesn’t change we might well start following GNOME with one cycle delay (i.e building our next version on the current stable rather than following the current unstable), we can’t really build a solid product on shifting code where the direction is not communicated in advance.”

That is quite a surprise because Ubuntu 12.10 has already Nautilus 3.5. In the end of the day, it might nothing happens because there were such discussions also in the past.

You can follow and read more on Launchpad and Gnome Nautilus ML

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  • dingo

    Ubuntu is much worse. They do the ame thing AFTER gnome is getting release freeze. For the greater good of gnome just let Ubuntu trail by one release. It is their loss, not gnomes.

    • TrollBeast

      Actually, gnome loses. Most people don’t even install gnome shell or the updates PPA for gnome and Ubuntu is the most commonly used linux distro to date :L

  • http://www.facebook.com/mr.e.cameron Earl Cameron

    again gnome shows their incompetence! they don’t work with the community, this is the second major offense -i’ve heard of- coming from canonical about gnome -and we all know what happened last time, read unity.

    • dingo

      I think you are confusing incompetence with saying no to Ubuntus owner Canonical.Should gnome adhere to Canonicals own agenda? I think not. Gnome is so much more than a distribution.

    • Foobar

      Well, in fact Canonical is using *parts* of GNOME. They cluttered the user experience on their own. They are taking parts of our user experience and using them for their own good. That’s fine. However, why should any gnome developer care about their desktop when they try to create their own? They are trying to improve their own product. No developer is going to make it hard for them on purpose but they are not going to slow down their work or start to invest time for them.

      Following gnome with a delay of one version sounds quite reasonable. They triggered the issue and they are looking for a way to fix it for them self. I don’t see any problem here. Gnome offers several development versions and previews to help developers and packagers. Making it easy for distributions to pick up is an important goal and is working quite good for other distributions.

      (No offence to Canonical. I just don’t see how Gnomes development could be more open. GIT is open, Bugtracker is open, mockups for new user interfaces are open. It’s simply hard to sync both user experience in a short time. That’s all.)

      • dingo

        And off course Canonical could invest more in gnome thus getting more influence. That is off course not gonna happen to a large degree. Just like the kernel Ubuntu only invests minimum manpower outside Unity and other Canonical projects. Gnome is not here to serve Ubuntu just because Ubuntu thinks that is ow the world turns.

      • pt3

        Most of the users are from Ubuntu, so developers should care about it. That said it’s clear majority of Gnome developers don’t.

        • foobar

          Why should we? Ubuntu is /their/ job. They define heir user experience. Do you know how hard it is to follow a product you do not even use? Gathering information takes me at least one hour a day for Gnome. And I’m not even a core developer. My product is used by libunity and several gnome apps. I fix bugs and work on feature request filled/reported by Canonical developers and answer questions in case their are any. I spend days on features I was asked for but never planned to implement.

          I maintain my product in my free time because I believe in Gnome not in Ubuntu. I simply do not care about their user experience. It’s not the product I work on. Do I try to be a good citizen over there when they ask me for something? Sure. Do I plan to use their product just to find out what that means? No. Do I plan to read several Ubuntu developer blogs to find out how to integrate my software better into Ubuntu? No.

          You simply can’t ask upstream developers not paid by you to care more about your isolated product as it would be their own. (Note: Canonical is not doing it. Parts of their user base do.) We threat Ubuntu just like every other distro out there.

          Integrating your software into Ubuntu as well on your own is a lot of work. You have to integrate their libraries and you have to test your software twice. It’s not about beeing for them or beeing against them. It’s about testabillity. It’s about time. Its about following a project you do not even use. It’s about a visual gab between both products. It’s about different technology used by both products.

          You simply have no idea what’s going on. You take a look at the surface at one side of the coin and judge the great folks freely giving you their work.

          • pt3

            This is why Linux will struggle with the desktop, many apps are created by non paid developers. They don’t care about their users. With paid developers your manager will kick your ass if you ignore the majority of users.

          • foobar

            pt3, your statement is unfair. There are some people out there who gave up their project. There are some people out there who are just releasing their source but developing the product to fill a gab for themself. They are obviously not going to hear at their users all the time.

            However, your fact is not valid for gnome/kde/xfce developers. Our goal is to provide a unified desktop. This includes an unified look and feel, unified interactions and unified solutions.

            Products in general are produced for a given task and for a given context. You are asking people to develop their applications for a context /you/ prefer instead of the context the developers prefer.

            This is not about caring about users. This is about wrong (and probably egoistic) expectation from outside.

            Take a look at the following example:

            I love Scribus. It is a great application written for a qt based environment. It does not fit into my desktop. They are not build after my desktops HIG. They create a different visual impression and are using different interactions. It does not feel right to use it in my environment.

            However, i’d never fill a bug about making the interface more gnome-like. The whole application is written for a different context and I am the one using it in a different one.

            Asking Gnome developers to prepare their apps for Unity is like asking KDE developers to follow Gnomes HIG. It does not make any sense. Not even the biggest noob is spoiled enough to fill such a bug.

            Our apps are used by a huge amount of users. However, somehow everyone things they are the only one with the right expectations. The fact that maintainers do not implement features /you/ or a couple of anonymous bloggers wish does not mean we are not listening.

            – Implementing new features is often much harder as you expect
            – Maintaining written source is often much harder as you expect
            – Maintaining/implementing is often much harder as you expect
            – Getting things right is often much harder as you expect
            – Getting things right is often not what you expect because you are used to something (See double click.)

            The only way to make progress is to test new things in real live. You have to get a product out there and get them used for a while to get usable feedback. Back in the days cars where new, everyone prefered horses. It was a known fact that cars smell, are loud and dirty.

            We all know how the story ends.

        • ScionicSpectre

          The question is who should be taking the initiative, GNOME or Ubuntu? We might as well be working more closely with the Linux Mint guys on Cinnamon in that case. It isn’t an upstream’s job to play favorites, just to make the best work they can. If Unity only runs on one distribution, no matter how popular, that doesn’t make it right to drop the focus on GNOME’s UX for their sake.

    • ScionicSpectre

      First of all, I think if you want to spread blame, it’s fairly well balanced on both sides. We did plan these changes far in advance and simply because Ubuntu developers don’t do the research doesn’t mean we’re being uncooperative. On the other hand, perhaps the Ubuntu users in the GNOME developer community haven’t built a very good bridge of communication so far.

      Second, GNOME doesn’t have any sort of obligation to do things the Ubuntu way- they’re an upstream for most distributions out there. There’s no reason GNOME should change itself for Ubuntu, any more than KDE or XFCE should change for Ubuntu. It’s not like Canonical shares their plans with GNOME in advance.

  • Гном Три

    >Nautilus 3.4 or Nemo or Marlin.
    Why not superior SpaceFM?

  • Žygintas Beručka

    If they are going to ditch 3.6 or even lag behind for one release cycle, I hope the Ubuntu community re-considers releasing a GNOME flavour of Ubuntu with plain vanilla upstream GNOME included. In general I like most of the things about Ubuntu (or at least haven’t found better solutions for little things here and there) and been using it since the very first release, but I don’t really see any benefits in making it harder for the average user to use the software one would like to just because, thanks to some not very neat design decisions made, this might break some things down.

    I’m afraid Ubuntu just doesn’t have the resources and manpower necessary to develop or maintain another piece of software on their own; Unity is fine, but that’s were it will end, I believe. My reason behind that is that Canonical is mostly inactive in all significant upstream projects, be it the kernel, X.org, LibreOffice, GNOME, or whatever else. Most of the time they are just waiting for others to do the things and that limits their pace in many cases. I’m not saying there are no exceptions. Quite the opposite, however, it would be great to see more of them.

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  • add comment

    That’s funny. Didn’t Mark Shuttleworth and his incompetent python freelancing employees know that the first thing a lot of people do is:
    sudo apt-get install -y gnome-shell ; sudo apt-get purge unity

    Someone go tell Linux Mint developers to make a gnome 3 derivative, I’m sure it will be a success.

    • TrollBeast

      “a lot of people” Overstatement to the EXTREME!

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  • Aaron Honeycutt

    what if we use the GNOME 3 team PPA? will we get the latest GNOME applications?

    • alex285

      I guess will be Ok, I am not sure yet because Ricotz (https://launchpad.net/~ricotz/+archive/testing) hasn’t ship yet Gnome Shell 3.5.5 and Gdm. And I failed to run upstream GS in Ubuntu 12.10. But 99% Gnome Modules will run in Quantal.

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  • gnomelover

    dedicated to all the gnomes
    http://gnomememes.tumblr.com/