reflections on LJ's reader's choice awards

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

The awards listing is at:

  http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue91/5441.html

Here are some random thoughts I took away from reading this. Its not a
large sampling of people, and is of course biased because its a polling
of LJ readers rather than random linux users, etc etc. This is a
slightly markety sort of message, because what I'm talking about is
largely marketshare. 

Aside: This message untangles into a rant about getting GNOME2 out at
the end, humour my poor tired brain.

Desktops: lets face it, KDE kicked our asses here. 40% to 24.5% are not
good numbers. I have no idea what the ratios *really* are in the wild,
but I think this number means we have been slipping somewhat.

Distros: Red Hat dominant again. Significant to GNOME because RH is
*still* the only major Linux distribution that pushes GNOME. See that
Mandrake in #3? That's significant because Mandrake has been funelling
development effort into GNOME and started to give it billing in its
installation. Lets encourage this and try to help Mandrake GNOME
developers and work with Mandrake on making their GNOME face as kickass
as possible. Debian is #2 but I think it doesn't matter as much because,
for the most part, Debian users already know what they want.

We need to figure out why other distros are not using GNOME. Distros
probably have the most direct connection with users of any
"organization" within the Linux world and have the best idea what users
want. And they'd probably be happy to share that information with us
because *they* want to make Linux better. I'm hoping that distros are
corporatitized enough that they aren't just making decisions based on
religion, but have done some analysis of why they move with one
environment or another.

Apps: And here's where things become interesting for us.

See those high numbers for Star Office? That means *real honest to
goodness people* are using Linux. Those Star Office votes are probably
votes for getting work done (not to insult applications like AbiWord,
they work perfectly for me, but they probably aren't
bloatware-corporate-world-ready yet). We need to seriously evaluate the
technical feasibility of turning Star/Open Office into a GNOME
application, since I suspect the powers that be in OpenOffice (Sun:-)
probably would be happy to see Open Office turn into a GNOME
application, but don't have resources to throw at it right now. It might
be impossible, but I'd really like to see a technical analysis of what
would be involved before we make that call. Guess what platform most of
those StarOffice users are probably using? I'm betting KDE.

The next interesting point about applications is that GNOME applications
really kicked ass overall. AbiWord, GIMP, XMMS, Coffee (that runs on
GNOME, right?), Mozilla (ok, that's really iffy, but it does use GTK
;-), X-Chat, Jabber (I'm guessing this is mostly gabber), all rated
really highly. Overall, GNOME-ish applications favoured better than KDE.
The one notable exception was KMail, but a stable Evolution could do
wonders in that department.

Office Suites: "Again?" you ask. Why does he keep going on about this?
Well, we don't have an office suite at the moment. We wouldn't have had
anything to put in this category (at least not honestly), and its a
really really important category to "normal people". Its sort of funny,
because AbiWord did really well and I suspect Gnumeric would have beat
out KSpread (and probably lost to Star). We need to put it together.
Cohesion is where GNOME loses big browny points I think, both in the
Office section and in overall desktop marketshare. Another interesting
thought: I don't know if people have looked at Hancomm, but it looks
pretty impressive to me. We need a strong contender in the office
category. And I'm not saying that means our office people haven't been
doing a terrific job, they have, it means we as a desktop need to
prioritize it and encourage people to work on this sort of thing.

My suspicion is that the reason we have such low numbers in the desktop
arena in spite of doing very well in the applications arena
is....integration and user features. We've largely stagnated in terms of
improvements to the desktop that users see and feel are part of the
desktop. What was the last life changing applet you saw added? When was
the last major change to gnome-core made? To my knowledge the only major
addition to the user side of the GNOME core user environment in the past
year has been Nautilus. A new control center is in the works and kicking
ass already (amen!), so things seem to be picking up as Ximian starts
drilling down on "fixing GNOME".

We need to make sure that doesn't happen again. I mean, there's nothing
that could be done (or should be done, or would be desirable to be done)
to make people work on particular things. We can't allocate resources or
bullshit like that. What we need to do is collectively raise excitement
about work on improvements to the desktop itself that positively affect
users. I would mark the pinaccle of our fervor to do this as between 1.0
and GNOME 1.2. You'll see a lot of the changes that make the GNOME
desktop appear as it is today, such as the anti-aliased beautified
launchers, the foobar, etc made their appearance there and we started
getting excited about having an elegant beautiful end user platform.

I think the effort we have poured into the development platform for 2.0
(and 1.4, though  basically only Nautilus and Evo used it then) will pay
off. But its really important that that investment is ultimately toward
making it possible to write cool stuff that people will like using, and
will get a lot done with. Its also cool for some people to have the
development platform as their sole focus, specialization is great and
benefits everyone. But its critical that this not become the focus of
the community as a whole. When this happens, I think GNOME will have
died. A desktop environment must be ultimately founded on users... It
can survive without an amazing or even good development platform (I
think the Macintosh has been at many points in history a testament to
the fact that you can create an amazing environment with relatively
hackish and constraining APIs). But a desktop cannot survive without a
great user environment. Our users will simply dwindle away until its a
tiny incestuous fringe community.

So lets finish strong for 2.0, and get our kickass development platform
onto lots of user desktops. That means we have to get the basic parts of
the desktop and a reasonable number of applications ported. Now lets
take our tools and make some really awesome things we couldn't easily
make before. We need quick punchy releases where users (positively ;-)
notice the difference between each release.

-Seth