As Linus was saying . . . .

Yes, I know LinuxCon is next, and that’s in mid-August, but I think they’ve got the publicity thing covered, especially with the 20-year thing and with Linus being there and all. But if you’re going to the next show, make it the Ohio LinuxFest in September. Bradley Kuhn and Cathy Malmrose are keynoting, so you’ll not want to miss that (especially Cathy — Go ZaReason!)

Until recently, I had several of my lab machines using GNOME — until my hardware and I were relegated to second-class status by being only able to use the GNOME 3 Fallback Mode while the rest of the world went on its merry way using GNOME 3. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s OK: Regular readers of this blog also know that in the recent past I have taken both GNOME 3 and Unity to task for bailing on already experienced users in an effort to dumb down the desktop for those who are new to Linux.

Of course, the woe I documented in past blogs about it is nothing compared to the choice words Linus Torvalds has for GNOME 3.

As widely reported by ZDNet and others, Linus had some — how can we put this tactfully? — issues with GNOME 3, which he outlined in a Google+ message.

Also, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols points out in the ZDNet article linked above, the request by Linus to fork GNOME 2.x “started in a public Google+ posting by Dave Jones, a Red Hat engineer and one of the maintainers of Fedora Linux, where Jones announced some minor Linux kernel news for a Fedora update. As the discussion continued, Torvalds joined in and remarked, ‘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.’ “

Well, now . . .

As just about everyone in FOSS knows, Linus is not one to mince words. Not only this, there’s a Wikiquote page that backs up this assertion.

But it’s not like Linus T. becomes Mr. T when in disagreement. Since he is particularly charming and well spoken in person, I would think those words coming from him verbally would not have the same edge as they do when you read them on the screen. Opinionated as he is, it doesn’t appear that Linus is a jerk about taking a stand on an issue, which cannot be said for everyone in the FOSS realm.

I like to think that the GNOME 3 situation is one that’s akin to what happened with KDE 4: The latter had a rough start before levelling out to a pretty decent KDE 4.7. For GNOME’s sake, I just hope this is a repeat of KDE’s experience. Though it appears that GNOME 3 has done something significantly radical in this new desktop, I think the curve for “correction” — for lack of a better term — could be more steep.

But as I’ve mentioned in past blogs, GNOME 3 — and to a great extent, Unity — and their attempts to dumb down the desktop were a mistake from the start. Whether that gets fixed or not remains to be seen.

Now to get those “Linus T. speaks for me!” T-shirts and buttons produced and out . . . .

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and has just started developing software in his new home office. Watch this space.)

Too nice outside to blog

Linux for the GNU South — it’s coming up so attend if you can.

Make no mistake: There’s a lot out there to write about, obviously — The OpenOffice.org handoff to Apache, the trials and tribulations of desktop environments and their continual dumbing-down for the dumbest of us, and other stuff. I’ll get to that later, as well as those in Santa Cruz getting a treat later this month with networking professor Rick Graziani from Cabrillo College taking time from the surf — the real surf, with a surfboard as opposed to a motherboard — to explain IPv6 to us.

I still have a few scripts and assorted code, with the Python book close at hand, which will someday be a Facebook app called “Lifeville” — it tells you that you’re spending too much time on the computer, gives you two minutes to save what you’re doing, signs you out of Facebook and then a minute later (just in case you forgot something) shuts down your computer — but not before giving you a message: “Do you use your powers for good or for awesome?” That last quote comes from Fedora Ambassador mentor and all-around good guy, the soon-to-be Rev. Scott Williams.

So despite the weather being quite screwy — even here, at least until today — if you look out your window and see it’s a nice day and the only thing you’re doing right now is reading this blog or being involved in some other frivilous digital endeavor (wait, let me rephrase that . . . .), shut down your computer and get outside.

I’ll make you a deal: If you are lucky enough to have a nice day and you have the time to go outside, I promise to blog later on regaring the items above. I’d do it now, but the day here is too nice.

(Larry Cafiero is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation. He is also one of the founders of the Lindependence Project.)