Bling!

This was posted to another blog regarding the future of the Gnome desktop.

The “bling!” factor never impressed me much. Not too long ago, Gnome used Enlightenment as the default window manager. We moved to Sawfish/Sawmill and then to Metacity, paring down the window manager into something “serious” and simple.

I was never too impressed with Enlightenment. It’s fun, sure, lots of glowing and shiny buttons (esp. e17) but everything is just so *heavy* and *fuzzy*. I prefer simple and snappy. Lately, I’ve been very impressed by XFCE, it’s slowly growing more robust while remaining quick and straightforward.

For example, I have never understood why music players need to have an interface entirely unlike anything else on the system (eg. Winamp/xmms). At least now with the current generation ~ Muine, Rhythmbox, Banshee, etc. ~ things look normal and more *usable*.

I definitely agree that if we’re going to start incorporating Clutter, Lowfat, Compiz/Beryl, Pyro, etc. we are going to need a HIG which addresses these interfaces. They need to be standardized and accessible if they are going to be an official part of Gnome. Just doing things because Apple did them isn’t good enough, they need to have a purpose (demoware is not a good reason). Are ideas like iTunes’ coverflow useful? Personally, I prefer just scrolling through a list of albums (Muine) rather than through a 3D flipbook (iTunes), the pictures are good but is there any purpose to making it 3D?

Another concern is *reduced* functionality with increased “bling”. I put my desktops in a 3×3 square so that every desktop has 4 adjacent desktops. Every desktop is home to a separate application (terminal, GEdit/vim, Firefox, Nautilus, Muine, etc) so I can easily switch between them. With Compiz/Beryl, switching between desktops is not only slower but can only be done linearly (as far as I’m aware) so that every desktop only has 2 adjacent desktops. It looks cool but reduces my ability to actually work. 3D file managers (”It’s a Unix system, I know this!”) never caught on because file management (along with most other things) is a bear in 3D.

What is the purpose of these projects? We are putting them out there, saying that if the architecture exists, the projects will come. No offense to Rasterman et al. but there’s a reason Enlightenment isn’t taken seriously and why it’s not popular. Shiny effects aren’t what bring people to the desktop, Vista proved that. “The wow starts now!” wasn’t effective once people realized that things simply didn’t work and were awkward, ugly and confusing when they did.

Project Ridley (”libgnome must die!”) intrigues me more than the new “bling” libraries. I also see Mono as bringing a more pluggable, rapid development, integrated architecture to Gnome if done right (we have to watch the resource consumption and speed on this a *lot*, along with Python now that both are officially used by Gnome). I’m not saying that we need to be XFCE but, as the previous commenter said, “Let’s not lose our heads here.”