Gnome is a problem

Gnome has a big problem. They dont do marketing.

A recent post I saw highlighted the lack of product management in open source software. Thats fine but in Gnome's case their basic marketing is really bad. They also have a severe problem with reaching out to developers.

Its been almost 10 years for me of using Gnome and actually in that time I've bought a Mac and use Gnome less and less. I occasionally visit Gnomes home page in the vain hope that something has changed. That there will be a bright screen convincing me with cool screenshots and happy people. That the new features of Gnome will be simply highlighted, the features that are gnomes strong points and the features that it has that other OS's dont.

That day has never arrived.

Gnomes pages continue to drive users away to turn their backs at a jaw dropping public who cant believe the inescapable rudeness. Amazingly the actually OS is no so bad, its even a little more friend IMHO than KDE but to work this out without installing is impossible.

I dont think its good enough for Gnome to say go to the Distro, as actually this is Open source world and these things are modular. KDE is the competition and they do a darn site better job.

My impression is that the Gnome website is not even really for Applicaition Developers either, the documentation of the API is darned poor and has only improved in the last 2 years. Still nothing like Javadoc or google api etc.

So who is the website for. Its for the Gnome club members: the gnome developers themselves. They announce their cool get togethers, the whatever zeitgeist of the moment and we look on in awe from our plexiglass sideline view port.

And the amazing result is that in 10 years: GIMP is practically the only full application designed for Gnome. Sure there are OS apps like Rhythmbox but apart from this?

I'm done