GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award 378
msevior writes "Although Linus Torvalds and some Slashdot commentators may disagree, GNOME 3 has many admirers. GNOME 3 was awarded the Linux Journal Readers' Choice award for 2011." Though I'm one of the complainers, I hope to be converted with the help of Gnome Shell extensions.
2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine... (Score:5, Interesting)
... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.
What about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Gnome 3 is people with large egos. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's simple, someone comes and determines that the way you have been doing things, that worked perfect for you and everyone you know up to this point is not optimal and must be done differently. Then, they throw away something that works for everyone and replace it by something that maybe works better for most, only for a few or for no one.
It's hit or miss, really, pulled by people with a gigantic ego. Gnome 3 doesn't have access to the large amount of user test groups that Apple, Google or Microsoft do, and even the later companies don't do changes as radical as in Gnome Shell.
So, yeah, Gnome 3 is just people with large egos forcing their unproven beliefs upon us, the community.
OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a C/Java developer who loves Gnome3. It's all javascript, so I've created buttons in the Window Manager interface to open searched files in different web services and text editors. Chat and Social Networking can be integrated directly into the notification pop up bar, so that's a plus. And it's simple. I don't need a lot of control, and what control I do need I can get from Extensions or messing with the js. The keyboard shortcuts are similar to Gnome 2 and are fairly intuitive to me.
Basically, I don't understand the vehement opposition here. It's like I'm looking at a forum with a bunch of 60+ Republicans in it. If you don't like it, don't use it. Just because you can't comprehend why another person would choose a different option from you on a poll, it doesn't mean the poll was rigged. Just because it's different and you can't get used to it doesn't mean that no one else can. Grow up.
Re:How to boil a frog (Score:4, Interesting)
XFCE was unimpressive, and I found it really didn't have much of a smaller footprint than gnome. What I really liked was LXDE, especially in the form of Lubuntu.
I like overlapping resizeable draggable windows that I switch between with alt-tab, and I really don't care how much they want to deprecate it, I simply won't tolerate a DE that takes this very basic workflow away from me.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:1, Interesting)
Man I don't know what you're talking about and I don't think you do either. While really UI choice is up to the individual's personal prejudices I can't see where you think that windows interfaces are quicker than KDE and Gnome. I've used KDE and Gnome in various distros as well as XFCE and Enlightenment. I've never found anything anywhere that lagged like window's UI......well maybe Mac OS 9. I personally loved Ubuntu 10.10 and loathed 11.04. I'm forcing myself now to use 11.10 as Unity is mostly stable now on my hardware but really it's ugly and hard to take but it's still better than windows. I use Win 7 at work and it's better than.....Vista. Lord if I had to use that shit at home I'd seriously think about digging my A3000 out of storage.
Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:5, Interesting)
No he's not. I remember how Gnome 2 was the end of Gnome way back. I have to admit that if you really love to fiddle with your Desktop it's hard to beat KDE.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Interesting)
What about workflow? How do I minimize a window? Can I run my cpu and weather applet on top bar? What about having more than one window open on the desktop? What if I want to see all that running while not leaving my libraoffice out of view or closed? Can I move my cursor over the icons and get a shrunken preview? Windows and gnome 2 had these abilities for years with the exception of the gpu accelerated preview. Windows NT 4 and win95 had these for over 15 years. Even Grandma would be frustrated by the limitations of gnome shell. It is not a resistant to change. It is the worst gui ever made. Even windows 1.0 made it easier to find things. It is so horrible and so unusable that I switched back to Windows and will leave Unix on a VM. If gnome 2 wont be updated it means it will eventually not compile. That makes us angry as we dont want linux to fade away but kde and gnome killed it on the desktop. Thats why there is so much hate
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly stops you from using GNOME Shell for "real, productive work"? I use it and I have no problems getting things done.
And exactly what "failed web design techniques" have been applied? Can you name one web interface, failed or otherwise, that looks and feels like GNOME Shell?
After using GNOME 3 for a couple of months, I'm finding that I struggle when I have to go back to a GNOME 2 machine and use it. My problem with GNOME 2, KDE and even Mint's new desktop environment, is that they all look and feel like Windows 95 clones. This is fine if you like Windows, but if you do then why not just use the real thing?
Something that a lot of people seem to complain about is switching tasks in GNOME 3. I'm pretty sure that these people are just complaining about change without trying it first to understand the reasons behind the change.
Let's compare switching tasks in GNOME 2 and 3. In GNOME 3 I can move my mouse over to the hot corner just as quickly, if not more quickly, than I can move my eyes there. The corner of the screen is a very easy target to hit. This brings up the overview where I get a thumbnail of every window on my virtual desktop. The animation is fast enough that I don't have to sit there waiting, and smooth enough so that I don't lose context of which windows are where. Each window is as big as it can be, while still fitting everything on the screen. Because of their size they're extremely easy targets to click.
So that's just one click on a very big target. Not really that hard.
In GNOME 2, I have to use a Windows-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen. When I've got enough windows open, each task becomes tiny! The only information I get is an application icon and a truncated window title, which is useless if window titles have common prefixes. This is harder and slower than GNOME 3.
After having used both methods for a while, I'd much rather use an Expose-like task switcher than a Windows-like taskbar.
As for Firefox, the the reason it's losing users because everyone is migrating to Chrome. And GNOME Shell is based on one of the same UI design principle as Chrome: "less chrome, more content". Chrome gets out of the way and gives maximum space to the website, and GNOME Shell gives maximum space to your apps.
I'd encourage you to try GNOME Shell for a few weeks before deciding whether it's good or bad. I had to spend this time to unlearn some old habits, but once I did I found I was actually much more productive, not less.
Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and (Score:4, Interesting)
again how is it less efficient to move stuff around until I can see an icon on the desktop and then double click on a icon vs clicking on the magic G spot bringing up a menu
FTFY
So far I'm finding Gnome3 to be an interesting change. I even managed to tolerate having to left-click the terminal icon to get a new window. After I spend a few months to get used to it, I'll go back to a conventional desktop and see how much I hate that. Then decide.
Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually there has been some good work done in the area of usability. Tog (ask Tog) really did lay out some basic principles that make sense and work well when applied - and he is largely responsible for the fact that the old Mac interface was so easy to learn and, for some purposes, to use. (Of course for some purposes it was awful, but for the target audience it was a pretty good tradeoff - making things they were likely to do easy, and things they werent likely to even think about hard.)
But you are largely right. With OSX Apple seemed to largely forget his work, and the whole usability scene such as it is seems to be mostly off in lalaland and engaged in make-work for designers, constantly fixing things that arent broken, and often regressing in the name of progress. The Gnome project seems to have jumped on that bandwagon with both feet.
Change for the sake of change is fundamentally incompatible with any sane usability doctrine. Even experts and 'power users' get angry and frustrated when an 'upgrade' changes their workflow and/or forces them to learn new ways to do things they have been doing just fine for years. Programs that get a reputation for capricious, arbitrary breakage like that (and GNOME I am looking right at you) are only cutting their own throats.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Interesting)
GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt
Care to give some specifics?
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:2, Interesting)
You mean the stupid animations that allow you to switch desktops in a flash and make Windows 7's "rad" desktop look like a poor wannabe? Or do you mean the ontology-based (A.I.) desktop search? Or the full-blown office package, complete with a project management application that is completely lacking in OpenOffice.org? I really don't know what's so bad about KDE or what's so good about Gnome. I guess if you don't have complex searches for documents or all you write are text files, yeah, Gnome fits the bill.
If Windows 7 got rad software reviews because of its cool interface, I can't imagine what the "specialized press" people would write about KDE.
Now, if anyone is low on resources and wants a kewl, rad, slick desktop that is not a toy project, then please do checkout Enlightenment. If it was good enough for Yellow Dog Linux to choose it for their PS3 Linux distro (in the days before Sony betrayed us all - fuck you Sony, I will buy an XBox just out of spite), presenting cool graphics on those 8 parallel-processing chips, then it's good enough for the rest of us.
But, really, Gnome 3 looks like it's same-old, same-old. Polishing an old shoe does not make it turn into a new shoe.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO, look and feel is hardly the biggest failing of the GNOME system. There are more fundamental problems with their user philosophy. Years ago when a new set of workstations were deployed where I work everyone had the option of running either GNOME 2 or KDE 3. Officially the admins only wanted to support GNOME, but within a short time everyone in our location was on KDE 3.
Why? Well it turns out the admins never really did a thorough test of our tool flow on GNOME. We use a lot of expensive tools that come from legacy Unix backgrounds (they aren't recent GTK devel), so it turns out we had major problems with things like focus stealing. This would be where the app would pop up a messagebox and GNOME would happily yank you from whatever desktop you were working on to wherever the messagebox was. At the time there were no options in GNOME to handle this kind of thing, whereas KDE had a number of focus stealing controls.
Then there was the issue of resizing windows. At the time GNOME had one method of resizing windows, and that was to continually redraw the content in it - no wireframe or outline methods, only continuous redraw. That's great and all if your most complex app is a web browser, but when you got an app showing a couple gigs of visual data and every window resize event triggers a redraw, it quickly locks up the machine.
And then there was the question of the right-click menu. WTF was with this menu. It was loaded with a bunch of useless options for creating folders and crap. It was like someone who had never used a Unix machine before just decided to shoehorn in some crap there so the menu did something. KDE at least allowed the menu to be customized into something useful.
This is all regarding GNOME 2 at the time, but it gets to the core of what I perceive as GNOMEs problem - and as I understand it, this is both widely understood, and truly a development target of GNOME (and I fully expect GNOME 3 to be no different) - and that is that the GUI is not designed to be flexible or changeable, it is designed to be rigid and idiotproof. They are providing a fixed GUI interface for the lowest common denominator of user, and anyone who wants something different can STFU.
This is of course further compounded by their method of burying the GUI settings in a hundred different files across a dozen hidden directories, perhaps wrapping it in some obscure XML pseudo-code, so nobody can figure out WTF the options really are or what they do (perhaps it's some kind of subtle method of eliminating those annoying hacker types who might undo their GUI "vision"). KDE is no better in this regard. I remember when at least one GUI I used to use kept its menus in plain text format that was easily understood and modifiable, what the heck ever happened to that concept?
I'm sure if I were to relate to a GNOME dev the problems I had with focus stealing, he would turn around and tell me the problem was with my app, not the GUI. And if I were to relate how I like to launch programs from the right-click menu I would be told I'm doing it wrong and I should learn how to do it the "right" or "better" way. And thus I become yet another alienated user who has moved on to something else. Radically changing an interface and then pushing it as a rigid right-and-only way is going to piss off a lot of people. Lots of people left KDE when they did it, and the same will happen to GNOME.