Last weeks GUADEC was less like a developers conference and more like a presidential campaign rally! The enthusiasm, positivity and general feedback that it has garnered is incredible but amongst the many interesting things propositioned at GUADEC came the idea of a GNOME as an OS.
“Linux as implementation detail..”
Using his Guadec speech, Red Hat’s Jon McCann put forward the notion of Gnome as an OS rather than, as it currently is, a collection of projects, tool sets and platform upon which other distributions and developers build upon. Various distributions customize the default Gnome desktop to differing degrees.
“What matters is what we expose to the user and the developer.” starts John McCann in a post on his blog today. “I propose that we take notes from Android, WebOS, Meego, and others and consider Linux an implementation detail and start to define the OS as we see fit.”
This certainly iterates Mark Shuttleworth’s recent thoughts on ‘tribalism’ between distributions and whilst working towards a common “monolithic” desktop in terms of UI, developer experience and application ecosystem would consolidate a lot of work that currently happens amongst distributions it should be noted that many recent technologies developed by Canonical/Ubuntu have been declined, passed over & rejected by Gnome with the latter preferring to create similar tools/features from scratch.
The success of a ‘Gnome OS’ would undoubtedly hinge, to some degree, on the level of cooperation between the two companies.
Super thanks to Brian Fleeger