GNOME 3 Released 353
Blacklaw writes "The GNOME Desktop team has sent its latest creation into the wild, officially launching GNOME 3.0 — the biggest redesign the project has enjoyed in around nine years. 'We've taken a pretty different approach in the GNOME 3 design that focuses on the desired experience and lets the interface design follow from that,' designer Jon McCann explained during the launch. 'With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.'"
Re:blah... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the UI is fairly unique. Well, sure, it still uses windows, and it's entirely true that the window decorations are awful with far too wide grey title bars, but I'm pretty sure the menu system is different from any other desktop and tablet.
"with any luck"-- No such luck. (Score:2, Insightful)
Respected? Right. "The reason we take away all the UI for configuring options is because we respect you. It certainly wouldn't be because we feel you're too dumb to decide how you want your own desktop configured or because we worry that users, if left to themselves, might configure their software to work the mundane way they want it rather than the superior way we UI elite have envisioned."
What problem does Gnome 3 solve? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am all for rethinking the desktop paradigm, but I'm not sure whether Gnome 3 is a complete rethink or a desperate attempt to break out of the Windows 95 mould (which I think most linux users, given the popularity of mint and pclinuxos, would grudgingly admit is a sensible way of organising a desktop).
When I moved from Win XP to Gnome 2, I appreciated the rapid access the upper and lower bars gave me to applications, places, open applications, control of access, desktop, shortcuts, other panels and a full calendar - something that greatly improved productivity. Gone were the days of clicking on the same spot in the lower left, and then trying to manoeuvre your mouse around the nested menu upon menu just to find the setting or application you were after, which often led to the mouse losing focus and frustration all round. I feel like Gnome 3 is a step back in this regard, channelling almost all operations through the same spot in the corner could create exactly the same sort of inefficiency and bottleneck.
When I can get Gnome 3 to work properly on my setup, and give it a go for a decent period of time, maybe I'll change my mind. But I think it's more likely I'll find the answer to my own question, and realise that the problem is Linux struggling to clearly define it's niche and uniqueness between Mac OS X and Windows 7.
Re:What problem does Gnome 3 solve? (Score:5, Insightful)
Complacency. Gnome users haven't had to re-learn their desktop in a while, and the devs are helpfully breaking those users out of their rut.
Re:lol wut (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually emailed the press team. Here's what I wrote:
"I think a thank you is in order from the XFCE team, as the release of GNOME3 has urged me (and many others) to switch to XFCE. With XFCE 4.8 released, the featuresessentiallymirror those found in GNOME2. With that being said, I think you can confidently send the XFCE team a "you're welcome" message for addingnumerousnumbers of people to their user base. Remind them that without the GNOME team ignoring the myriads of complaints about thedirectionof the GNOME project, none of this would of happened.
Thank you very much for reading"
Anyone here should feel more than welcome to use this message, no credit needed. Spread the word, the XFCE team NEEDS to thank the gnome team for all of their hard work removing everything we needed, and giving us everything we didn't.
Re:How To Tweak GNOME 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
To summarize my latter post, I love how GNOME 3 "puts me in the driver's seat".
My problem with GNOME 3 is that it does put you into the driver's seat alright - that of a train on a single track.
Re:Xfce (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't work as advertised. It's a horrible piece of shit, to bhe honest. Unless you have the exact same version of gnome on your local X server as the remote, and the remote also has a head, you get gdbus errors and lock-ups with gvfs, not to mention that the process never exits - you have to ctrl-c it or kill it from a shell.
Is a file manager that works over a straight X tunnel to any X server too much to ask?
Re:How To Tweak GNOME 3 (Score:5, Insightful)
I would much rather have a desktop that only allowed the most efficient ways to do things than one that gave me a bunch of configuration options and told me to "figure it out for myself", in a sense. *cough cough*.
"Most efficient" is highly dependent on the user. For example:
1) Do you have a strong spatial memory of where things are in menus, on the desktop or the taskbar? If so you'll hate all auto-intelligence that keeps adjusting your favorite functions. You'd rather have an ordered alt-tab list than an unordered expose function like OS X.
2) Are you a person who remembers a great number of shortcuts and prefer the interface doesn't use much screen real estate to show you the buttons and toolbars? Or do you prefer most functionality to be visible to you?
3) Do you prefer arranging windows or do you like maximized windows and easy switching? Is it important for you to group windows into virtual desktops?
4) Can you recognize software by its icon? If not you'll hate Windows 7.
The "One True Way" is an illusion which may be true for things like kernel benchmarks. But when it comes to what is best for the user that depends on his mental skills, familiarity with the interface and the software and sometimes simply preference. Sane defaults are important, but if you've built the "perfect desktop" the chances are very high you've built YOUR perfect desktop.
Re:How To Tweak GNOME 3 (Score:4, Insightful)
like kde 4, windows vista/7 and osx, it suffers from web 2.0 syndrome:
1. useless extra borders, huge icons with lots of space between them. computers are tools, not art museums. no, not a false dichotomy as it's possible to make an efficient space look decent. the problems come when the artists and marketers get free reign over interface design and coherence.
2. searching for everything? god I hate this garbage. It's a lot easier to just know where the icon is and click it. I don't want to search for every god damned thing on my computer when I want to use it. this 'feature' is just a crutch for a shitty launch interface. I always turn that indexing garbage off no matter what OS I use because it's always indexing when I'm trying to do something intensive that it's useless heuristics assume isn't 'that' intensive. please stop. just stop.. do things when I tell you to do them. if I want something automated, I'll automate it.. leave the feature in if you like just leave it off by default, thanks.
3. useless animations.. Instant response is important and should be expected from computers clocking at microwave frequencies. if your bloated OS/app/desktop environment lags on a modern desktop, you're doing it wrong.
4. the final thing. tons of extra clicks. why? every new desktop env seems to take longer to configure to a usable state, longer to get at the software and files I need, and more difficult to back up in such a way that I know I got my data and (here's the hard part) my custom configurations stored in a way so that when I have to format, I don't have to work that hard restoring everything. then there's the little bits of functionality spread all over the place syndrome. all modern interfaces suffer from this.. gnome 3 is no different.
Re:What problem does Gnome 3 solve? (Score:4, Insightful)
I see, so it's for the lords and masters of Gnome to decide the the peasants are "in a rut" and make them run about adapting to some new aritrary "order"?
Re:Xfce (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:lol wut (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't bother. They only read the email messages they've written themselves.