Why GNOME on Phones will fail ..if succeed!
https://medium.com/@alex285/why-gnome-on-phones-will-fail-if-succeed-94777faf2af8
Jul 10, 2018
hello! Before I’ll give you my perfectly historically established argument (half joke / half true!) why GNOME on Phones will fail, some background on the current work, just in case you’re unaware!
Purism is the company that works for bringing into life devices that run a typical Linux desktop, either with Plasma Mobile, or a GNOME/GTK based Shell, called Phosh, and that is what we are interested here
Phosh Shell with a far from ready keyboard :p
First of, this is currently a prototype, rather some alpha version, and the technical details in bullets are: Wayland (wlroots / rooston) compositor, Phosh Shell (GTK), Virtboard (virtual keyboard), oFono framework for calls, and GNOME apps. More details on their blog!
And a very in rush demo I uploaded :)
Followed by some fresh mockups from Tobias Bernard for Web and Calls apps
As you can see from the above designs, the goal here is to have “converged” apps that run both on desktop, and the phone. Another cool thing on this part is the work on GNOME Builder that can push our development Flatpaks directly on devices with Deviced
And yet another (older) demo that illustrates the “responsiveness” on Contacts app.
This is a patched GNOME Contacts with LibHandy, but the goal is all the “responsiveness” patches to get into GTK 4.0
Done with the material, but one last thing I want to highlight here is that GTK on devices is critical important for GNOME project to advance. Most development now is with Camera and GIS, and we can’t do that in desktop
Why GNOME on Phones Will Fail
There is the common scenario when a project has delays, and eventually loses interest, as it happened with Ubuntu Phone, that still continues by a small community, but ~nobody really cares anymore
Or a project can be delivered on time but not be technical good enough, so people wont buy it, as it happened with Mozilla Phone
But lets be positive and assume that Purism will deliver on time, both the phone and OS will be good, and people will be excited, and they will buy the devices, they will contribute code, and in general there will be an economy around, that will keep the project sustained and healthy!
And Then ..Linux Mint — THE PHONE!
Followed by 15 different OSes, with 27 different GTK Phone Shells, and this is how GNOME on Phones will fail with perfect precision! Exactly as it happened with Linux desktop
I’m not against diversion when that is done for a good reason, and brings good results and new things. But in the case of GNOME, we have 10+ GNOME based desktops, that not a single one offers something significant new (than menus re-position), and most importantly from almost all those GNOME based desktops, none is contributing upstream in GNOME ..like never ever!
What they brought instead? Fragmentation! Broken apps, broken visuals, hundreds of new bugs, reduced support, everything stayed low maintained, and eventually they formed an environment that nobody wants to invest, or at least it makes it hard to invest
I do understand that is difficult for people to collaborate for various reasons, and I’ll accept that GNOME is not a very “tolerant” organization to work with. Not because GNOME devs are the “bad guys”, but because GNOME has not strong management and leadership, so the communication is low
In any case, if GNOME on Phones becomes a thing, I hope and I wish people in GNOME community, to work together and support a single solution ..otherwise it is gonna be a sure failure!
and if it hits 100 million users, then sure! they can create one more Linux Phone Distro :)
