> The only thing Gnome and Canonical have to show so far is a homescreen/launcher which is by far the least useful/interesting part of the tablet/mobile experience.
I wish the general public agreed, but the number of awful websites for new desktop wallpapers or icons or mouse pointers or other trivial customisations tells me that a lot of people think the 'home screen interface' is super important, and they don't care (or even know) about other more important things.
Canonical and Gnome have destroyed my previous arguments about the benefits of benign dictators or of directed committees. There's some gentle backlash against Ubuntu (a little bit is from people who know what they're talking about, a lot of it is from people who just don't like the popular Ubuntu) and there's similar backlash against some of the Gnome stuff.
I really wish that tablet / phone / touch interface things were spun off into separate projects, to allow people to continue polishing existing projects rather than focusing on monumental change. That'd allow people to continue using one interface on desktops and the other on tablets. Because they are different, and have different needs, and you can't really kludge one metaphor onto both devices.
That's what KDE has done: the big rewrite of KDE4 let them use the same libraries to power two different shells, for distinct purposes. That's a good way of doing it. Though it does not solve the problem for the rest of the applications.
Once users are happy with everything else, then they turn to customising home screens. If the entire system was only a home screen no one would touch it! (And arguably many are doing personalization rather than customization.)
I wish the general public agreed, but the number of awful websites for new desktop wallpapers or icons or mouse pointers or other trivial customisations tells me that a lot of people think the 'home screen interface' is super important, and they don't care (or even know) about other more important things.
Canonical and Gnome have destroyed my previous arguments about the benefits of benign dictators or of directed committees. There's some gentle backlash against Ubuntu (a little bit is from people who know what they're talking about, a lot of it is from people who just don't like the popular Ubuntu) and there's similar backlash against some of the Gnome stuff.
I really wish that tablet / phone / touch interface things were spun off into separate projects, to allow people to continue polishing existing projects rather than focusing on monumental change. That'd allow people to continue using one interface on desktops and the other on tablets. Because they are different, and have different needs, and you can't really kludge one metaphor onto both devices.