Project GoneME as community project has been ceased. I try to explain it with a quote from Jamie Zawinski which I found on his Web Page and adopted it to suit this situation.

You can divide our community into two kinds of people: those who want to go work on a project to make it successful, and those who want to go work on a successful project.

This is the only remaining Web page that I'd like to keep as memorial for historical reasons and as a resource of information for other people who do feel dissatisfied with GNOME as it is now.

Project GoneME is the first attempt to try moving the GNOME Desktop into a new direction. I got quite unhappy with the new direction that some core decision takers have chosen even if I do see that plenty of things that got changed in GNOME does indeed make sense, I on the otherhand think that some decisions have upset quite a lot of people including me and there was no possibility to bring these problems up on the GNOME Mailinglists or the IRC channel without getting yourself trapped into ugly discussions, slandering, defaming, mobbing or even stalking.

The people that I met and whom I was able to read and talk with, pointed out how much they dislike changes such as Buttonorder, GConf (often declared as Windows Registry), Spatial Nautilus, things like general inconsistencies, no real progress, speed issues, huge dependencies, instant apply without reverting to default, scrollkeeper and many more.

And here starts the Project GoneME. The intention is to create a community of people, who are willing and interested to help fixing these and other issues and make the vision of a usable Desktop in the means of good old Unix fashion become true. No fancy technology, no overwhelming bloat and no dumbifying of peoples talent and skills using a computer. The idea is to not directly fork GNOME but to use their CVS modules and write patches that covers these things for the better.

The patches shouldn't be sent to Bugzilla or their GNOME Mailinglists because they most likely won't take them anyways or have them rot forever in the darkest place they have. The patches should temporarely be stored on a place, where people can download and patch them against GNOME CVS. I do feel sorry for these necessarity but I do see interests conflicts between their designmodel and the opinion of some users and developers.

The recent past has proven and shown that attempts like forks are necessary to lead into a better direction. For example there was gcc then egcs as fork which then became main gcc again. Same happens with XFree86 and Kdrive or Xorg at the moment. This could also happen for GNOME and the Project GoneME but depends on the available resources and contributing souls.

I don't have in mind to make Project GoneME become some sort of MacOSX replacement and I am also not in competition with Microsoft or Apple. All I want is a nice good looking Desktop that sits ontop of my Linux box where I control everything, where I feel happy. I don't have the idea to bloat GNOME more than it actually is or pump unnecessary new technology inside it or have them implemented in a half fashion. I am still a follower of good old Unix fashion and I also believe that our audience is important too and not just the Joe average user audience.

As you can see I brought up some points here which of course are a matter of change and a matter of further conversation and thinking. This is surely not targeted for people who like GNOME as it is now. It's more targeted to the audience who feel lost with GNOME at the moment and who are unhappy about the situation as it is now and who feel lost because they are not able to bring these points up in either IRC or the Mailinglists for conversation because of ugly treatment. We need to get in here and start changing the things slowly to become normal again. Please also note that you shouldn't expect changes over night. This idea must first manifest and people need to be found to help doing the work.

Actually I do like GNOME because of the fact that it is written in C (and therefore fits in the UNIX world) and it seamless ways how it fits into the filesystem after installation. That's quite clean in my opinion.

A problem I see is that GNOME itself wants to adopt all types of technology which somehow scares me e.g. a lot of talks about Storage, a lot of talks about MONO and Python and so on. Having different bindings for different languages is indeed a nice thing and people should be allowed to code their applications in what language they like and what they think is their good right. But I am worried that a default GNOME installation could depend on these languages one day. E.g. that all these technologies get mixed up and that you need to install Python, MONO, Java and so on only to get GNOME as Desktop compiled. This is quite problematic as I see it. This also explains why I like to get rid of Python dependency (over 40mb) for just one 50kb libglade-convert Python file within GNOME.

• Reverting the Buttonorder is one of the things that I would like to see done and the first approaches into that direction has been started. When the specific MacOSX way of Buttonorder was introduced it so what caused troubles for me and other participants of GNOME that people filled pages with complaints and rants because it irritates them when they use GNOME applications together with KDE, MOTIF, GNOME 1 etc. applications. They are not consistent anymore and that's an argument for me to revert back. All these nice usability studies - good or bad - but changing something a user got used too for many years is not the best decision and then trying to enforce the same on KDE isn't good either. Some of these people are even going that far that they tell everyone that everything else as order is wrong and must be reported as bug. It's totally regardless for them what the opinion of users are, what only matters is that they must be right because they say so.
• Spatial Nautilus needs to be reverted to Navigational Nautilus again, this is also one of the many complaints people rised in the public because they dislike it. Again something has been decided in a meritocracy manner without proper tests and feedback. The Amiga had a nice Spatial concept with Icons in Windows and it was quite nice but it doesn't feel right under GNOME.
• Discussion whether it might make sense to remove Nautilus Views is also necessary. It never really worked and whenever I was using it stuff crashed when switching between different Views.
• Removing the dependency for libglade-convert as single module that requires Python, removing Esound (do we really need it ?) and removing other not necessary things are worth to talk about.
• Control Center is a pain to use. Clicking on all the little tiny capplets is not the way to go and accessing the shell through Nautilus is by far no option. MacOSX has a nice way accessing the Control Center elements and GNOME supports something similar which is disabled by default I like to enable the shell and have the other stuff removed from the Menu.
• GConf as it is now reminds me to much about Windows Registry and you hear people complaining about this on all sorts of places. Sure GConf has quite some advantages that I not like to ignore but I don't like the approach of having a dozen directories in ~/.gconf with silly XML names like %gconf.xml. There is no need to change everything but a better approach is required. I have something less intrusive in mind such as ~/.gconf/evolution.xml or ~/.gconf/galeon.xml or ~/.gconf/nautilus.xml. So when you open the directory with your filemanager then you get a nice list of program configuration you have on your system without hundrets of directories. Of course it's open for conversation whether you should want to add subdirs for 'apps', 'system' in ~/.gconf and I think this makes indeed sense to have.
• GNOME should also have the essential stuff only. Only the things that are really required no other application. Only the framework per se at the beginning. There is a lot of work required to get this task done. Instead of adding more and more stuff and continue development into all different directions, GNOME should reconsider for a moment and start fixing the stuff correctly. Should we use GTK+ for doing Window, should we use BonoboUI, should we use GnomeUI ? At the moment these questions can only be answered by those who lead GNOME in a meritocracy way. It would be necessary on concentrating and proposing one way of doing Windowing and GUI related stuff in GNOME. GTK+ sounds correct here (yes even I trapped in mistakes by having use BonoboUI over GTK+). Although I still prefer GTK+ and BonoboUI over GnomeUI but I think it's important to go GTK+ only and have the other stuff disappear (of course I don't see all the consequences of having these stuff disappear so this aspect needs to be discussed too) but I don't see the point of still keeping that stuff and have people use technology that leads into three different graphical user interfaces. If someone play with the GNOME Control Center applet for Menus and Toolbar they know what I mean three different GUIs behave differently.
• Something I really dislike is dumbifying people down to a low level grade and kicking their skills with disrespect. One example is names that appear in menus for applications. 'Web browser'. Now what Web browser is meant here ? Firefox, Galeon, Epiphany, Atlantis. I want to know this because I want to know what software I start. Same with 'Music Player'. Music player what ? Which one ? XMMS ? Noatun ? Rhythmbox ? Whoever had this idea to have this changed like this and assume that people shouldn't know about these things should shame.
• I saw ideas appearing on GNOME Mailinglists where people started to propose that /etc /dev /root /lib and so on should be hidden from Nautilus. Also the user shouldn't be allowed to dig deeper than three directories with the filemanager. My question here is why do we need Nautilus then ? I want to dig deeper in my system, I want to see all these dirs above. I don't need to see them every day but in case I want to I should have the right to do so on my very own Computer.
• Removing Scrollkeeper and Docbook support is something to think about. Wouldn't it be better to generate documentations out of LaTeX (only an example) and have them be some sort of well formated PDF documentations nicely stored somewhere ? Easier to print, easier to deal with and easier (add your own easy thing here).
• Aesthetics is one of the biggest criteria I do have. A lot of people compare GNOME with the clean interface of MacOSX. Well I had the chance to play with MacOSX for a couple of days and must admit that MacOSX is indeed aesthetic - unfortunately GNOME is not. Apple certainly took a shitload of care into GUI and everything is so true polished. Every Button sits where it has to be, correct padding, correct look and feel. Sure GNOME wants to do it right too and I do understand it and I also do understand that they want to achieve this with rules such as the HIG but well written paper and well writen ideas is all there remains. I think that if a developer takes ten mins more care in his GUI design then the entire user experience will be ten times more fun. It's not easy to achieve all this if you have different ways of doing GUIs (as mentioned above with the three windowtypes). Another problem is having multiple so called HIG fixing people working on dialogs, the one fixes it half HIG conform, the other more HIG conform and the other does it differently once again. Or once you have fixed something, someone else comes and changes everything again. I saw a lot of *.glade files for example where entities and properties still have different values inside - this all is unexact.
• Something I dislike is that GNOME 'must' touch everything. No matter if it fit's into GNOME or not it has to be touched and messed. I brought up a bunch of points here where in my opinion GNOME needs more work but their developers waste time into adopting technology which is not adoptable such as Open Office or Mozilla and the rest of the Linux world or even trying hard to convince other projects such as KDE, XFCE or even total different systems from adopting their freedesktop.org specifications (yeah whoever specified them). It would be nice if they could do their own little thing in their own world without convincing everyone else that they must change their stuff the way they like because they said so. KDE is a good example of a neutral institution because the people concentrate on KDE and just KDE and leave the bottom framework (the Linux plattform to name one) as is. They don't need to convince everyone to adopt their stuff. There are other Operating Systems such as QNX, BeOS or MacOSX who also benefit from the GNU toolchains (such as GCC, Binutils, Tar and so on) and if people really disagree with GNOME or KDE then we should leave them space to breathe and leave them room to switch over to another Operating System be it QNX, BeOS, MacOSX, Windows, MorphOS or whatever without that these Systems indirectly adopt stuff that might have been altered for GNOME support only. Today everything is still controllable because you can easily remove some stuff but in the future (say ten years), how does things look then ? Say if GNOME fails or KDE fails what remains then ? Cleaning all the mess that has been left will be an even more complicated task.
• I do believe that KHTML is a nice thing to have for GNOME. I don't see the point messing around in Mozilla, which is an own architecture and framework. I for my own do not want Mozilla to mature towards a GNOME toy. It has an own framework and this framework (regardless how much there will be worked on) still has some stuff which strictly violates against the GNOME HIG. A good thing here is XUL used as Toolkit. Dunno if it might become applicable one day and I am not interested either. KHTML is nice and adoption to many architectures have been proven to be a good thing but people should still be free to use Mozilla, Firefox or whatever they like to use. But instead having the GNOME people concentrate on fixing Mozilla to become merged to GNOME they should first concentrate on fixing GNOME and prove that it even stands the demands of experts.

Other people for sure have other points as well and they should bring them up for further conversation. How all this should be organized I don't know because my intention initially was to simply revert Buttonorder to look normally again. This was my initial plan but I never thought that so many people joined the IRC channel and shown interest. This is a clear sign that people do welcome a change. How this change has to be done and accomplished can only time tell. Will it be successful ? Will it fail before it even starts ? etc. dunno. We must organize here and find a way to give tasks to people who are interested no need to be a perfect coder or something but helping in general is welcome because this task as good it sounds, as nice the ideas are can not be done by one single person. GNOME is by far to big to deal with and we need plenty of help here. A Mailinglist, A projects Webpage, A CVS Server, A Bugzilla reporting place and then start working on this. Yes all things that GNOME already has to offer. But sadly their ideas are far too different of the ideas that I and others share.

Please understand that these are just my very own personal opinions. Even if I am not the master haxor of GNOME and never contributed much enough to be of value but I do assume that my ideas are valid and good and I don't see any differences here to what ideas other people have or what they review even on news related sites.