As reports emerge of developers
working on Gnome OS, Mark Oakley looks at what it means for mobile platforms
and the impact it could have on the Linux community
For the open-source movement, news of
Mozilla's Firefox OS has been met with equal measures of excitement and
skepticism. On the positive side, it's great to hear of a truly open-source
environment that can aim its gaze, in the long run, to rival big hitters
Android and iOS. On the negative, some would claim that it doesn't stand a
chance of success. The smartphone industry is one of the most competitive
around and despite the fact that Mozilla has hardware support on board in the
shape of ZTE and Alcatel, it looks to be a long and arduous path ahead for the
OS.
Mozilla
Firefox OS announced, coming by 2013
And yet this hasn't stopped another
open-source name making its own move in the mobile arena. Gnome is developing
its own OS.
Doing It for Developers
The idea of a Gnome OS has been around for
a few years, now, but renewed interest in the project has come about following
the Gnome Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC), in which Gnome
community members no doubt eagerly discussed where it goes from here.
Writing a blog post on the matter, titled
'As far I know', user experience designer Allan Day laid out details about what
the project is and clarified exactly what it isn't. For anyone who thinks Gnome
OS is going to compete directly with existing distributions, that's far from
the case.
"Some people seem to have assumed that
Gnome OS is an effort to replace distributions, so let me be clear: that is not
the case," wrote Day
So if that's what it isn't, what exactly is
Gnome OS aimed at? It's all about developers and the overall enhancement and
development of the Gnome Project, something which could do with a pick-me-up
given the fact that so many within the Linux community feel that Gnome has
somewhat lost its way. For a better insight on that, there's another blog post
you should know about, this time from a Gnome developer, who doesn't exactly
hold back.
In the post, titled 'Staring into the
abyss', the developer Benjamin Otte bemoans much, including the fact that the
entire project is understaffed, that it has no goals (referring to the
project's own 'nondescript' description of itself as "a community that
makes great software") and that the project's core developers are leaving
it for pastures new. It's a long, clearly thought-out post, which reflects much
of the mood surrounding Gnome.
It's not just Otte, either. At GUADEC, a
couple of developers, Xan López and Juan Jose Sanchez, mentioned some of the
key Gnome challenges in a presentation. They mentioned issues such as a
"lack of direction and vision," and the project's current "focus
on the traditional desktop."
Back to Otte, and one of the key issues he
also cites is that the project's target users are leaving the desktop
environment for more mobile platforms - something he notes Gnome does not work
on. That's got to change.
Mobile Platforms
The introduction of Gnome OS - which we'll
have to wait a while for, because it's due to land in March 2014 - will allow
application developers to work on Gnome's associated SDKs and APIs in order to
improve and enhance the user experience. With what Day calls a "new model
for accessing content", work through Gnome OS will ultimately help to make
Gnome the success everyone involved wants it to be. Theoretically, it should
address the very problems developer Otte raises himself.
Gnome
OS
The developer-focused Gnome OS will help in
the development of Gnome 3, including work on touch compatibility. This doesn't
mean that Gnome is forgetting about its desktop roots, which Day claims will
remain the core focus of the community's work. However, it does accept that mobile
hardware is unavoidable in the project's development.
Work has been done in this area already by
the Gnome community, with users being encouraged to visit the touchscreen wiki
page. With this renewed focus, however, Gnome's hardware future looks to be moving
towards the mobile arena with interest. The development of Gnome OS will only
help to facilitate this move, with a touch-compatible Gnome 3 planned for
release in a maximum of 18 months.
So a focus on new mobile hardware but a
desire to hold on to its core desktop audience. Gnome has a bit of work to do
but it is trying to manoeuvre itself on the up again, with the OS helping
developers to move the entire project forward. It's a much-needed boost for an
environment that hasn't been feeling the love from all in the Linux community.
Good Timing
There is a feeling among some Gnome users -
Linux Torvalds among them - that the project lost its way when it moved from
its 2 release to 3. Torvalds has been very open with his thoughts on Gnome 3,
commenting in a public Google+ discussion last year "Could you also fork
gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment? I want my sane interfaces back. I
have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3."
Torvalds went on to say "It's not that
I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it's that
the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is
unacceptable."
In exactly the same discussion, another
Linux expert, Intel's chief Linux man. Dirk Hohndel, couldn't be any clearer
"Gnome 3 is just completely unusable as far as I'm concerned."
With this level of disquiet from major
voices within the Linux community, it's little wonder that the announcement of
Gnome OS would have been met with skepticism from some quarters. For what it's
worth, I'm all for it. It's great timing for Gnome to ride on the back of the
announcement of Firefox OS in order to generate increased interest in
open-source alternatives within the mobile platform community.
Android and iOS are so dominant in the
tablet and smartphone arenas, any genuinely attractive open-source alternative
would be welcome and Gnome has a large and experienced community behind it. The
odds are stacked against it, of course. Much like Firefox OS, it's unlikely
that Gnome 3 will really find a wide audience and, as Day admitted, its focus
will remain on the desktop environment.
Gnome
3
But perhaps that's not the point. The
reason Gnome OS is great news and the reason I believe that it deserves to
succeed, is that users deserve Gnome 3 to succeed. Those in the community who
have grown disenchanted are almost entitled for it to work, and if Gnome OS
means that developers can put their heads together and turn the doubters round,
that can only be a good thing.
Gnome needs a new direction and that might
not mean a truly successful mobile distribution, but by giving developers a
chance to make a difference and by giving them renewed impetus, it's just
possible that desktop environment could receive a boost of its own. And by at
least acknowledging the mobile market. Gnome's community is proving itself
capable of adapting to the times. Many will hope it succeeds.
