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:Xfce (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm seriously considering switching from Gnome. ." in a remote session, and get the file manager for whichever directory you were in. Try that with cutter or nautilus.
The main reason is that I use remote logins and lots of VMware. Gnome shell won't even work unless you have hardware acceleration, so you can forget a consistent UI, and have to fall back to Gnome 2. So you now need both.
Never mind getting the file manager to work remotely. I still remember with fondness how easy it was in IRIX to just enter "fm
So, yes, I expect I will be migrating. But not to Gnome 3. I'll migrate to something functional, and Gnome ain't it.
Re:How To Tweak GNOME 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not what I see in your review. What I see is a new interface that's designed with the assumption that there's One True Way to configure a desktop and that there's no reason to let mere users decide for themselves how they want things to work. As an example, that "feature" of showing the desktop when you move the mouse to the top right corner of the desktop is the first thing I got rid of when I started using Compiz because I personally find it obnoxious and repellent. If this is how you want your desktop to look and work, enjoy the new Gnome. Personally, I'm in the process of abandoning Gnome altogether and moving both my laptop and desktop to XFCE.
That, I might add, is one of the reasons I use Linux, not Windows: when Microsoft comes out with a new "look and feel" for Windows, you have no choice but to learn how to use it; with Linux, if you don't like one DE, you're free to try a different one.
Re:What problem does Gnome 3 solve? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's a dreadful way of organising a desktop. The "start button" design buries applications deep in menus miles away from wherever your mouse is. The task bar view of running programs manages to display minimal information while also lacking any spatial element that might help you find the window you're looking for. The icons-on-desktop design puts all your files and shortcuts in the single least accessible place on your screen. Etc.
In all honesty, Windows 95's interface was terrible. It managed to be a step back from Windows 3 in many respects. It caught on because Windows 95 was so much better in every other way. It has stuck around because Windows acquired a monopoly and the entire business world would scream blue murder if Microsoft tried anything radical. And Linux distributions that copy it are only popular because it is familiar. People really do prefer the devil they know.
I'm not claiming GNOME 3 is the solution. I haven't tried it yet, and what I've read has not sounded very appealing. But I will give them credit for trying, just like I gave KDE credit for trying even though I'm not a great fan of their interface either.
Shakeups like this are essential. If you only ever go for incremental improvements, you will at best find a local maximum. Your chance of finding the best solution increases if you try radically new ideas. And putting them out as concepts that nobody every really uses won't get us anywhere either -- interfaces can only be evaluated properly if they are forced into mainstream distributions and real people actually make an effort to use them for real things. It has to be this way. This is a good thing. Honest.
Re:What problem does Gnome 3 solve? (Score:5, Interesting)
In all honesty, Windows 95's interface was terrible. It managed to be a step back from Windows 3 in many respects.
Interesting. I have a contrary opinion: to me, Windows 95 was the high-water mark of Microsoft's interface design and got some things right which everyone else - 2000s-era Microsoft included - have been strugging to even understand since.
Granted, the cascading Start Menu was horrible. But that can be fixed. The underlying "a shortcut on the menu is just a desktop shortcut inside a Menu folder" architecture was a stroke of utter genius, one GNOME completely failed to get. They had to create two incompatible kinds of launchers, and make it near-impossible to edit menus, or to drag one to the other. Why? The Win 95 way was so perfect.
The taskbar, too, is something that was brilliant compared to the Dock or anything else: an area that could show you at a glance where all your currently running stuff is. Yes, it's simplistic, and needs to be expanded - but the basic idea of dividing the screen into separate permanently-there areas, one which gives you an overview, one which gives you a closeup, was awesome. The big win of the Start Button is that (unless you really mess with things) it's always there in a known location. Same principle as Apple's menu (possibly they couldn't just do that because of look-and-feel patents? they were still a big deal in the mid-90s).
What I'd like is an interface which lets me extend this principle, to let me create user-defined fixed 'trays' in various parts of my desktop where I can guarantee that windows can't spill out of. For a while I thought Gnome's panels were going to be this, and I loved having one at the top and one at the bottom, one for menu and one for taskbar, but knowing that under the hood they were just identical instances of Panel.
I think the ultimate desktop still will be document-oriented - something like a Zoomable User Interface - rather than application-oriented, but we seem to have abandoned the quest for this and keep iterating on tiny visual variations of a half-finished underlying architecture, but now with the added pain that the user can't change the visual look and feel anymore. This seems like going in precisely the wrong direction. I'm at a loss to understand why this is. If we'd invested half the effort that's gone into force-feeding rigid visual look-and-feels onto an unwilling userbase, instead into creating an underlying architecture that seriously splits the look and feel from the underlying data and lets the userbase create and remix their own 'look' while the application developers can focus on the data processing - wouldn't we be a lot further ahead?
tldr: I don't want application designers telling me how to organise my desktop. I want them to give me the tools that let me organise my desktop however I want. But they're not. Why?