Competition or cooperation: Gnome-Shell and Unity

The new Gnome-Shell has started to land and to take its final development steps. This landing has also raised some intensive discussions around Gnome - what is Gnome, whom are the competitors and what should get into Gnome.

From the major distros the Fedora camp have indicated themselves to utilize Gnome-Shell/Gnome3 with their upcoming Fedora 15 release, where as the Canonical/Ubuntu guys will be using their own homemade Unity Dekstop and Gnome3 applications. This division was initially fired already at October 2010 @Ubuntu Developer summit where Canonical stated that all the future releases would be based on Unity.

Currently ongoing discussions have been especially intensive around libappindicator - as it has been taken as _the_ item to discuss in various of different blogs [1]. Shortly the history of indicators have evolved from KNotificationItem to Canonicals StatusNotifier proposal and now to the rejection of libappindicator as part of Gnome 3.0 module set - "there is nothing in GNOME needing it". For Canonical this statement is quite clearly saying that Unity is not part of Gnome. Naturally this has raised some discussions.


This definitely becomes interesting when we are discussing about the future of Gnome. What we have here is freedesktop.org project aiming for "interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops" and two most popular Linux distros differentiating themselves. What we are also discussing about is free software. Surely in both efforts it is just about that but Canonical copyright assignments contribution agreements are something that Gnome does not want to depend on (this in a scheme where libappindicator would be part of GTK+).

The two projects do have quite different directions, making them competing against each other rather than cooperating. I personally do agree with the statement that healthy competition is always welcomed. The danger is that too much competition can also ruin the possibilities to compete the outside world - competing with the closed source solutions whom are running fast. Getting some new innovation emerging from these Linux based desktops is something that we all would want to see. This would require some big time cooperation instead of competition.


[1]
* collaboration's demise
* Application Indicators: A Case of Canonical Upstream Involvement and its Problems
* Has GNOME rejected Canonical help?

New Gnome-Shell release ... reminds me of something

Gnome-Shell had an new release published at mid last month. The new release is now dependent from GTK3.0 and at least according to different sources should be more stable and performing - ready for a test drive.

So what is this Gnome-Shell.
Well Gnome-Shell is your integrated window manager, compositor, and application launcher. It uses Clutter canvas as an scene where your GtkWindows are reparented as actors. The main logic behind this is under Mutter, an fork from Metacity.

The architecture is done in such away that the window manager, compositor, and application launcher are tightly coupled together. With this approach there is no need to provide any additional abstraction layers to different WM/CMs or any scene/graph abstraction. Also with this the GNOME guys have the full control of the stack. Because of the architecture Gnome-Shell has been receiving quite a bit of comments especially from the Compiz people. This as the approach will make other WM/CMs live quite difficult.

With the architecture, it is actually funny how it reminds the Hildon 5 architecture - composition with clutter canvas as scene, Hildon desktop integrated appl launcher, desktop integrated Window Manager, etc. and everything nicely coupled together.


As from the user experience,
launching the latest and greatest Gnome-Shell with my Intel 855GM based based device was an extremely slow experience. Gnome-Shell was really unusable. Bit of an Googling revealed that syncing to VBlank might be the root cause for this problem as it is enabled by default. "export CLUTTER_VBLANK=none" seemed to be the cure for this problem. Wonder why this problem... (bit of a debugging might be in place). This trick makes it at least testable.
The main thing that I noted with the Gnome-Shell is that you really want to learn to use the basics - your ALT+F2 key combo. The new Application Area did not at least convince me. Maybe as the usage is going towards more basics it would be time to put the good old Awesome back in use - going really back to basics...