The Future of Gnome
A lot of smart, dedicated hackers contribute to the Gnome platform. So why do longstanding bugs like the ones I'm whining about persist?
One explanation is that improving Nautilus's list view or its file-replacement dialog box is simply not sexy work. Given a choice, hackers will nearly always elect to design and build out cool new features rather than perfect existing ones.
And indeed, there's a lot of discussion and coding going on relating to Gnome's future. A core group of developers believes strongly that making Gnome the perfect environment for the Web-based apps of the future is an extremely important task. As a result, Gnome's Online Desktop project is garnering a lot of discussion and development these days. (Wanna try the nascent Online Desktop yourself? The easiest way is to install Fedora 8 and follow these instructions.)
Similarly, other folks recognize that more and more, our technological future is in our pocket and on the move. So Gnome's Mobile project seeks to ensure that a version of the platform is all ready to go on mobile devices. (Certain Gnome Mobile technologies already power Nokia's Internet tablets. The overall efficacy of the project is certainly in question--but read Planet Gnome for a few weeks, and you'll see postings from developers hard at work building Gnome apps for mobile devices.)
For these and other reasons, it's easy to feel good about Gnome's future. But what about the nagging problems in the platform as it exists today?
As I said, hackers gravitate toward sexier stuff. And companies that devote full-time coders to the project also tend to dictate that those coders work on sexier stuff. Nokia, for example, has no incentive to hire developers to make Gnome's file-replacement dialog box more helpful; it has only an incentive to hire coders to make Gnome run well on its tablets and cell phones. So sometimes the fixes and improvements we'd like to see in basic features are far from coming. But truth be told, this hardly makes Gnome any different from its commercial cousins.
Matthew Newton is PC World's QA engineer and unofficial Linux guru.
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