Right away to the point, three(3) enormous changes are happening or going to happen in just 2 years.
The birth of Gnome3
Love it or hate it, you can’t say anything but admit that Gnome3’s interface is the biggest attempt to change the Desktop semantic since Windows 3.1. Bigger than Windows 8, bigger than Apple Lion, bigger than Android and I can only compare it with the first iPhone revolution. And if it isn’t polished/ready yet, so what?
Gnome in Wayland
X Server, the center of the Universe for more than 20 years for Unix/Linux, the one and only project that was the life giver and cancer at the same time for Linux, is gone. Not yet but in the first semester of 2013 will be dropped from every Linux Distribution. Wayland, the next generation X server and display manager promises to make Linux desktop the absolute astonishing graphics-friendly environment.
Although graphic cards manufacturers and openGL Foundation will play a key role to succeed that.
Gnome Online
In every Gnome release we see more and more new Cloud Features. GOA, Documents, Videos, Contacts etc, there is no reason to go further because you all know about these and I guess you realize how important factors are for a complete operating system.
By the way I could named Gnome3 and Windows8 as next generation OS because they brake many stereotypes of the old fashion like menus, local data installations, they introduce multi-device Desktop Enviroments and others.
Time to come back to the original title of this post. When I wrote about the 10 goals of Gnome for 2013/14 I referred somewhere the need for Gnome to acquire a cloud synchronization of GSettings, extensions settings etc, similar as Chrome and Firefox already do.
The benefits by doing this are obvious, fresh installations will be customized by default in our personal preferences, all our Gnome devices (laptops/desktops/tablets/TVs ..yes yes I am a dreamer) will be set up the same way and corporation environments will be able to easily supply custom workstations boxes to their employees according to the company needs.
Yesterday I uploaded here the latest tentative art of Initial Setup.
It seems there is an option to sign in with a Gmail or an Enterprise Account. While Initial Setup will come in Gnome 360, this feature I really doubt it will be there. It could be a quick sync with GOA but it seems that is more than this.
After all we are talking about creating a new user in a Linux box.My Gmail is alexis.diavatis and I really don’t want to see a user name like that in Gnome-Terminal.
Today in Gnome Live I discovered something more impressive.
This is a tentative design by Alex Filgueira and of course is not going to come in 360. Alex proposes the stuffs that should included to a synchronization mechanism:
- Online Accounts
- Wallpaper
- Extensions (maybe using extensions.gnome.org?)
- List of favourite APPS in the dock
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- Nautilus and Epiphany’s Bookmarks ??
- Some other config…
And all these are just a playground, and mockups and won’t happen any time soon. But the big picture remains, Gnome goes Online and it goes in crazy pace!
When these features will land in our boxes? Even Gnome developers don’t know, but one thing I know is that Gnome gains support by companies day by day, while other Open Source community Desktops seem to lose ground.
Developing in Gnome is amazing fast and except companies, Gnome apparently has the fanatical support of many users that contribute with coding or by filling bugs.
Have nothing else to say than wish Gnome a happy cloud life :)
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