Revolution: A Proposal

[darkmatter]

The following is simply a proposal, if there is enough interest, it is my intent to make it a reality.

Welcome to the the Revolution:

The Revolution Desktop Project intends to bring about the dawn of a community driven, best of breed GNOME desktop, to be a the shining star of what Free Software is capable of, and what a community can accomplish when they pull together.

The inspiration came, in part, from all the exceptional ideas/concepts put forth by very talented people that lack the experience or skills on their own to make those vision reality. There are so many fresh minds/ideas out there... and this community is no exception. We have programmers, artists, thinkers. Many of exceptional talent, and with such great potential.

In part the aim would to work closely with existing projects like tango and betterdesktop.org... adopting and learning from the various studies in usability and improving on them, making fd.o standards... well... standard. But above all else, it is about ideas, innovation, passion, and... synergy.

It will bring together art, code... etc. showing the best that the community has to offer.

Obviously, I could go into much greater detail, but the intent here is just to get an idea as to the level of interest. So please, Answer the above poll accordingly. Leave your thoughts.

So let us consider this thread an (initial) open forum for discussion, and as an outlet for ideas. A place for those who would be interested in getting involved (be it art, code, documentation, etc) to come and hang their hat's and let the creative juices flow

[Luggy]

It definately sounds interesting but do you think you could elaborate a little bit on what you would like to create?
Maybe we can talk about it on the chat one of these days.

[mostwanted]

I'm not sure I've understood what you want to do.

[Master Shake]

Yeah, you're being a little vauge there. Can you go into more detail?

[christhemonkey]

Yes i third the vagueness, though i think i sort of get it.

[Stormy Eyes]

Dammit, I thought you were going to talk about overthrowing the government.

[mike998]

I kinda think I sorta know what you are on about....
You really need to get into a bit more detail...
Till then my stance is a vauge possiblilty of a maybe voting.

But I'm not sure.

[PapaWiskas]

Dammit, I thought you were going to talk about overthrowing the government.

So this isn't about that? Well what the heck?!

[darkmatter]

Heh... sorry guy's... kinda posting when I'm not awake... I'll try to explain a little bit before I sleep...

The general Idea is for a third party desktop project dedicated to the evolution of the GNOME desktop (in terms of usability features aimed to make the desktop more intuitive... but NOT bloat) who's development revolves around the community (not just necessarily ubuntu, but possibly the gnome community in general)... hence the name 'Revolution'.

Now... regarding the idea of it revolving around the community... it's not 'brain drain'... although granted, in part it is about recruiting project members. The actually idea in this regard is to create a more personable developmental environment instead of strict adherence to mailing lists, though it may not be entirely open as such. (for things like polling users regarding opinions on feature implementation, etc). Basically, handling communication between those involved in the project and the user base the way projects suc as easy ubuntu, automatix, or ubuntu studio are handled.


As for the actual project as such... lets use, as an example... hmmm... SuSE's new menu applet/application browser.

We all have our own ideas on that, lets not discuss those here. But one of the things I would like to see implemented is a similar applet (perhaps even one based initially on the code once they release the sources), but implementing a more compact arrangement/ structure.. and I've been seriously looking into how to implement a more task oriented structure to such a menu under GNOME's current API.

Another example would a general idea for enhancing/extending nautilus in a more intuative and 'human' way of managing/cataloging and navigating the fs. But I think I'll have to save that one for when I'm awake enough to think

Not saying thats necessarily what would/will be done. Just an example.

Now.... part of the why:

Why start a project like this, or instead why not just join GNOME or whatever?

First off, this isn't an issue of forking GNOME or going against GNOME... but rather aimed at showing that there is still great room for improvement under the current 2.x series. An analogy was made once as to GNOME being petrified would. It's actually quite accurate, as though GNOME has become solid, it is also frozen in time.

Well... In part for the reason is that, although the GNOME HIG does a great deal in terms of making the desktop usable, it still... suffocates... innovation to an extent regarding the GNOME desktop. For example... disregarding the dispute over the closed door development of something intended to be open sourced anyway, take a look at the previously mentioned SuSE/Novell menu (and more... te general desktop layout)... There has been much heated debate regarding the break in the desktop layout/configuraton directed towards Novell for not doing things the "GNOME way". Now to me... this general attitude is somewhat troubling shows one good reason for enhancing (not forking) GNOME as a third party project, as, by the above example... because Novell broke the "GNOME way" of doing things (mostly due to the differing desktop layout and repackaging with there own default apps instead of the standard gnome defaults), it is no longer GNOME.

[Luggy]

Ok it is sort of what I was thinking. I like the idea, I'm all for it but there is some definate things to start thinking about before we go headfirst into this.

If the community has noticed innovative problems with Gnome then you can be sure that Gnome knows there are innovative problems with Gnome. You would have to be very very carefull not too step on the toes of what the Gnome devs are doing and by the end of the year have two differnt versions of the same app released.

I think the best way to go about doing this would be to find a Gnome app that could use some work, make sure no one else is working on a similar project and then start making our own.

I would also recommend that we start small. Do something easy like making the Gnome bit-torrent client cooler before we start fixing up Nautilus.

Yeah... I really have my doubts about touching Gnome's main projects...if we started doing that it would be causing a fork.