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GNOME GUI Software Upgrades Linux

GNOME 3.6 To Include Major Revisions 327

supersloshy writes "The launch of the GNOME 3 desktop environment sparked heated debate and criticism. GNOME developers have been listening to the concerns of its users and it is rolling out several significant changes in GNOME 3.6. The message tray, often called hard to use, was made much more visible in addition to being harder to accidentally trigger. The "lock" screen can now optionally control your music player, the system volume, and display notifications so you don't have to type in a password. GNOME will also support different input sources directly instead of requiring an add-on program. Nautilus, the GNOME file browser, is also getting a major face lift with a new, more compact UI, properly working search features, a "move to" and "copy to" option as an alternative to dragging and dropping, and a new "recent files" section. These changes, among many others including improvements to system settings, will be present in GNOME 3.6 when it is released later this month. Any other additions or changes not currently implemented by the GNOME team can be easily applied with only one click at the GNOME Extensions website."
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GNOME 3.6 To Include Major Revisions

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  • All two (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:10PM (#41253593)

    GNOME 3 users are extremely excited!

    • Re:All two (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nerdfest ( 867930 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:37PM (#41253863)

      I've been using it for about the last year (occasionally switching to Xfce or Unity when I feel like it), and I'm okay with most of it, happy with a few bits, and fairly excited by the changes. My main complain was *always* the ridiculous notification system. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to hide notifications? When I gen an email while the screen is off, or I'm not looking at it, I want to frikkin' see it. That's the whole point of a notification system. Having to actually see if I have any notifications is only minimally better than having none at all.

      Anyway ... yeah, nice to hear. I'm pleased enough with the rest of it now than the extensions are available that it actually looks and works like I used to have Gnome 2 set up, other than the notifications mess.

      I tried Unity again this week on a new development machine. I tolerated it right up until I added the extra monitors. Global menu is a very silly idea.

  • Too late (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:13PM (#41253623)

    Over 6 releases to have them starting to listen to their user? I am out!

    • Re:Too late (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:20PM (#41253715)

      Over 6 releases to have them starting to listen to their user? I am out!

      By the 8th release they'll take out the options so why bother in the first place ?

    • Re:Too late (Score:4, Informative)

      by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @05:48PM (#41254491)

      Over 6 releases to have them starting to listen to their user? I am out!

      Ignoring the fact that Gnome Developers are Users too; There has only been 3 releases [Odd .1 are development releases]; You never had to run it with Mate; Unity; Cinnomom [my personal preference]. Where are you going to, Seriously put that install Ubuntu on that overpriced Apple now so you know what you are talking about :)

      • Sadly, Debian wheezy doesn't have Mate, nor even poor workarounds like Cinnamon. You'd have to go with XFCE which I find somewhat lacking, or one of fifty or so niche alternatives (I used to be a sworn WindowMaker user until ~10 years ago. It doesn't seem to have improved since then...).

  • Iterations (Score:5, Funny)

    by DeadDecoy ( 877617 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:14PM (#41253643)
    After a few more iterations, it'll look just like OS X.
    :P
  • My Ubuntu box with Gnome 3 is sadly neglected - after I spent days laboriously recreating my working environment on OSX.

    I use docky with Gnome 3. This makes them superficially similar. I re-built the key mappings that I live with.

    We'll wait cautiously and see.

  • (The "too little" part doesn't even matter anymore.)

  • Gnome 3.6 (Score:5, Funny)

    by NoNonAlphaCharsHere ( 2201864 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:19PM (#41253701)
    "Now with only ONE button".
  • Don't Care (Score:2, Interesting)

    by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 )
    Switching to Debian 6 XFCE.

    You had your chance, GNOME, and you wasted it.
    • Re:Don't Care (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fnj ( 64210 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @11:45PM (#41256863)

      Agreed, Xfce on anything is the one to beat now. It's time we all switched gears and started trying to list significant missing features and capabilities in Xfce so they can be added, rather than trying to fix brain dead DE abortions. I don't think there's very much missing from the latest version of Xfce (NOT the outdated version shipping with the spring release of Fedora and Ubuntu).

  • You know what's... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:24PM (#41253761)

    the window/desktop manager I'm still using?

    WindowMaker.

    As I have been since 1998 or so, whenever I originally started using X on linux. It was intended as a clone of the NeXT workspace, and was for a time the official windowmaker of GNUstep. And you know what? They haven't fucked with it beyond a few minor usability improvements in 10 years. Basically the only changes were adding truetype fonts (Which helped with a few font related issues on later X servers, but otherwise hasn't added much), 'live' editable menus (previously text files that required a restart to change the right-click/f12 menu layout), and some inter-desktop fixes that came out whenever the release popped up on slashdot earlier this year.

    It doesn't have a desktop shell, and finding updated wmapplets can be a hassle, but the former can be fixed by borrowing thunar from XFCE, the latter by fixing them yourself (or suc...er 'convincing' someone else to), but it'll run on any computer you have dating back to at least the pentium era (and would probably run on older if it wasn't for the 'mandatory' freetype support.)

    Point being: What has gnome offered in either the 2.x or 3.x releases that made it so much better than the original versions, and did any of those features make up for it's unusable bloat on legacy systems?

    I know nobody bothers to code for legacy systems anymore, unless they already were, but the point is program efficiency and usability is being reduced by wasting cycles on things that.... don't add to the apparent front-end usability! A problem that the GNOME project seems to be embracing from the wrong end wholeheartedly.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Yeah, WindowMaker has always been pretty nice and worked. Can't say I've used it "since" 1998 though. My experience with it may have been just before but I haven't been very loyal to anything.

      Haven't really been an active Linux/*BSD user for the last 5+ years either so until very recently my last real experience was KDE 3.5.

      Anyway. WindowMaker works.

      Personally I think Enlightenment17 is pretty interesting to. It's fast, configurable, most likely coded by someone who knows what he's doing rather than experim

  • by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:25PM (#41253773) Homepage

    Nautilus, the GNOME file browser, is also getting a major face lift with a new, more compact UI...

    Actually they removed compact view. [gnome.org] To say it's "more compact" is the opposite of what happened.

    • by A Friendly Troll ( 1017492 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:47PM (#41253929)

      Good lord... One of the developers says that horizontal scrolling is "horrible", and the other says the comments are unhelpful and tells people to go away.

      Is there even a point in using GNOME when shit like this happens and with people in charge being such enormous assholes?

      • Good lord... One of the developers says that horizontal scrolling is "horrible", and the other says the comments are unhelpful and tells people to go away.

        Is there even a point in using GNOME when shit like this happens and with people in charge being such enormous assholes?

        I have to say I agree that "Compact View" is a waste of time. I personally will not miss 2 panes, because I have always found that a bizarre concept in a Desktop environment.

        Now personally I object to them removing the up directory, because its something I use all day long.

        PS. I think its kind of ironic that you calling people "enormous assholes" for telling people to go away

        • I personally will not miss 2 panes, because I have always found that a bizarre concept in a Desktop environment.

          It's amusing you suggest that two panes is a bizarre concept, considering the whole of GNOME 3's shell is ultimately a bizarre concept anyway (compared to most other desktop environments), so it's not like keeping dual panes would be out of place in GNOME 3. :)

          I didn't use dual panes much, but occasionally they were useful. Just like the Windows "start" menu - occasionally useful, and it's annoyin

          • I personally will not miss 2 panes, because I have always found that a bizarre concept in a Desktop environment.

            It's amusing you suggest that two panes is a bizarre concept, considering the whole of GNOME 3's shell is ultimately a bizarre concept anyway (compared to most other desktop environments), so it's not like keeping dual panes would be out of place in GNOME 3. :)

            I didn't use dual panes much, but occasionally they were useful. Just like the Windows "start" menu - occasionally useful, and it's annoying to have it removed when it wasn't hurting anyone. It's reduction in functionality which made me look into using MATE (which lasted for a while, until I cracked and went back to Windows 7 for reasons of tension with the Linux ecosystem.)

            Please do not confuse the gnome shell experience with nautilus. I use Gnome 3 applications with cinnamon and it is excellent. As for my reasons against two panels and why I think its bizarre. I can open more than one instance of "Files". Two panels made sense in DOS. I got driven to Linux by Windows by the abuses by the company and the Spyware/DRM in their [not your] OS Windows 8 is not where I want to be :)

      • by kav2k ( 1545689 ) on Friday September 07, 2012 @03:10AM (#41257713)

        Oh god.. I read the bug comments too. The original poster refers to this gem, quote from developer:

        Please go to random forums on the internet instead - there you can add your unhelpful comments that might make developers not want to look at certain bug reports anymore.

        Well, that pretty much sums up Gnome development team's attitude.

    • Until now, I had be indifferent to the "radical" changes in gnome 3, thanks to gnome-tweak. Although, thanks to your link, MrEricSir, I now have a faint idea of why there's so much opposition to gnome 3. Left a comment there. Although, personally, I don't know where I'd move from gnome 3. I was never a fan of KDE, and I have tried xfce and lxde, but didn't like them much. Gnome 2 was perfect and if they continue in this direction, all my hopes towards keeping linux as my main desktop would die. After a lo
      • by caseih ( 160668 ) on Friday September 07, 2012 @12:01AM (#41256923)

        The Mate desktop runs great on Fedora 17 with a third-party repo, and will be in the 18 repos. You can still have Gnome 2.

      • by fnj ( 64210 )

        Did you bother trying the current latest version of Xfce? I did and I was amazed. Steady progress. I don't think it lacks anything of significance now. There are some applets that aren't quite as mature and well developed, and maybe one or two that are missing, but that's it.

        I was a GNOME 2 fan as well; still am as a matter of fact, but I would be happy with Xfce when GNOME 2 is no longer an option (and maybe before that given its steady and rapid and evolution in unerringly the right direction).

        Perhaps it

    • What's wrong with detailed list view? It doesn't take up much space, the file order is always on the same axis (up/down), and you can sort by whatever metadata you want?
  • by QilessQi ( 2044624 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:28PM (#41253793)

    ...can (3.0 + 0.6) be less than 2.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:36PM (#41253859)

    Hipsters and people that sway easily to trendiness, are why computers are starting to suck. Whoever let these monkeys program needs to be drawn and quartered. "Oooh, let's take the close button, and not actually close or exit the application, let's just make it disappear but still running in the background, because users don't know what they want to do anyway." (Banshee, Pidgin, just to name a few). Let's just throw away 40+ years of HCI and ergonomics because touch screens are the new rage.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The worst part is that the GNOME team never, ever learns from past mistakes. After all the negative criticism they've gotten since the launch of GNOME 3 they still pull shit like this [gnome.org]. Seriously, I don't even know where to begin with that one. Apparently they think it's too much work to navigate a filesystem so they removed the left directory navigation pane. WHY?!! If it's there - they'll make sure to break it (or remove it) just so they can show off some bizarre "idea" about how things should work in la-l

    • Agree 100%

      > Whoever let these monkeys program needs to be drawn and quartered.
      And flogged.

      I'm looking at you Skype ... and all the retarded UI designers ...

  • Copy to.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:40PM (#41253897)

    I'm glad to see GNOME finally adopt Copy To and Move To in their file manager. That was one feature which I loved in KDE and drew me away from GNOME, oh, about ten years ago. Odd it has taken them this long to include the feature, but I'm glad they finally did. The summary doesn't mention it, but have the developers finally enabled the shutdown button by default? The "press ALT to show" concept was really silly.

    • I'm glad to see GNOME finally adopt Copy To and Move To in their file manager. That was one feature which I loved in KDE and drew me away from GNOME, oh, about ten years ago.

      Even 10 years ago you could simply use another file manager (KDE's Konqueror or even something completely different).
      I never understood why people change their whole DE when they just like a single application better.

      Why not judge each component on its own merit? In my case most happens to be KDE-based but not everything. (eg. I use Firefox and GIMP)

  • Performance? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ohnocitizen ( 1951674 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:52PM (#41253981)
    Nowhere in the post does the word performance even come up. As computers become faster, there are those of us who want to use that increased speed and power for the applications we run (whether it is video processing, video games, or just a ton of youtube tabs open in our bulky web browser of choice). Don't get me wrong, we want a desktop environment that is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive to our workflow. I just don't see why we need to keep significantly bumping up the performance cost of the desktop to get there.
  • Windows 8 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Un pobre guey ( 593801 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @04:59PM (#41254021) Homepage
    Please enforce a 12 month moratorium on copying anything, absolutely anything, from Windows 8 that is not already in common usage. Do not under any circumstances tolerate or condone Windows 8 penis envy.
  • I've been running Vista on my computer at home for years. No GNOMEs yet, but plenty of gremlins.
  • I'd prefer it if it included major reversions... of all the bad ideas that have crept in over the last couple years.
  • by Zombie Ryushu ( 803103 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @05:18PM (#41254201)

    And I start to wonder if these are just Apple Trolls. Listen, It's easy enough to switch to KDE or XFCE. I run Mandriva 2011. I use KDE. I have my own custom KDE theme installed with rpm. It works fine. There is no reason to abandon Linux because Gnome sucks, just run whatever programs you please under XFCE or KDE if Gnome is so awful.

    You are an idiot if you switch to OSX or Windows over this.

    • Would you consider them to be idiots if they got pissed off and decided to switch to a distro that focused on another desktop environment? Run FreeBSD instead? How about Darwin? I did recently switch to KDE and after some initial pains I'm finding that I like it quite a bit. It will probably be my new DE for a while now. I'm looking at new laptops though and seriously considering a macbook. I don't think I could bring myself to run OSX on a desktop but my next laptop? Maybe. Note I have absolutely no
      • by ADRA ( 37398 )

        One Note: No right click!

        Well, you canif you buy a third party mouse, but all the mac lovers will ridicule you forever after.

    • Ubuntu and hence Gnome user since 8.04 here. Reason why I am moving soonish to OS X is that I am tired of each "upgrade" of Ubuntu (and Gnome) breaking things and changing things. Sure, I can switch to a different distro. Sure, I can switch to different desktop environments. But that's exactly what I am tired of. All the switching and fixing. I want to do my work, not having to Google for hacks, extensions, tweaks, etc. My work (freelance Perl programmer) already involves a lot of problem solving, don't nee
      • Ubuntu and hence Gnome user since 8.04 here. Reason why I am moving soonish to OS X is that I am tired of each "upgrade" of Ubuntu (and Gnome) breaking things and changing things. Sure, I can switch to a different distro. Sure, I can switch to different desktop environments. But that's exactly what I am tired of. All the switching and fixing. I want to do my work, not having to Google for hacks, extensions, tweaks, etc. My work (freelance Perl programmer) already involves a lot of problem solving, don't need additional problem solving to make the tools that I need actually work. It's like picking up an hammer and having to shape in into a screwdriver before you can use it. If that's what you like, good luck. But don't call us idiots because we have better things to do. Especially since as soon as I have figured out how to change that hammer into a screwdriver efficiently the hammer is replaced with a fiddle in the next upgrade of Ubuntu and/or Gnome.

        If you really use Ubuntu your not using Gnome 3 you are using Unity so not I suspect using extentions as you claim. Personally I would love a list of all the things you "fixed". Which I suspect is nothing. If stability really what you wanted you would have chosen the fantastic stable Debian or LTS Ubuntu both lack current edge features but, well not much fixing. I suspect your post is disingenuous which is a lot worse than being an idiot.

      • by ADRA ( 37398 )

        Last I heard, major revisions of Windows / Mac tend to fck things up also, maybe to a slightly lesser degree. Anyways, there are plenty of Linux distros that don't hump the bleeding edge, and plenty of spins of popular distros which have DE's that don't decide to change their paradigms on a dime. But of course, this does take more than a few minutes of research to investigate, so...

    • I use Mac OSX at work, but it is inferor to xfce4 or cinnamon. more buttons to click and hold to do simple tasks.

    • You are an idiot if you switch to OSX or Windows over this.

      Guess I'm an idiot. I've run out of patience in all this infighting and tension in the Linux community. I just want some stability in desktop environments. I know everyone hates Windows 8 but Windows 7 is going to be around for quite a while still, so I'm sticking with it.

      • You are an idiot if you switch to OSX or Windows over this.

        Guess I'm an idiot. I've run out of patience in all this infighting and tension in the Linux community. I just want some stability in desktop environments. I know everyone hates Windows 8 but Windows 7 is going to be around for quite a while still, so I'm sticking with it.

        "infighting and tension" I don't drink Milk anymore because of All the "infighting and tension" that happens between cows. I'm going back to drinking mud.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Speaking as a former Ubuntu advocate (since Dapper, woot) it's not just GNOME that's driving ppl to OSX or Windows. It's Unity too. There's a race to become shittier by adopting all of OSX's worst features (global menu DAMN YOU) and leaving out the good stuff (Nautilus' second pane was pretty sweet). KDE is still too slow compared to Gnome, on my octocore gigantic RAID10 SSD behemoth, to tolerate on a daily basis.

      After I got a Mac and found out how awful OSX can be I went to Mint and have been happ

  • by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Thursday September 06, 2012 @06:21PM (#41254841)

    Ignoring the usability issues. Love the renaming of Nautilus to files. They need to continue on that trend

  • these superficial changes don't fix the GNOME3 philosophy of dictating user's workflow, and needing a fucking developer to make changes that are configurable by user in sane desktops. forget the fork, get a fire extinguisher for GNOME3, it's burnt beyond salvaging in the GNOME3 dev's oven; the smoke is stinking up the desktop Linux house. Listening to the remaniing few users fixes nothing.

  • Its better every release. At least if you dont have a touch screen device KDE 4.9 is the my new old way of getting work done.

    Unlike gnome which seems to regress every release. I am waiting for them to release their own version of X and Linux.
    A system with integration of all components into one monolithic thing.
    Like Kernel/X/DE/... in just on bin.
    Also might want to start calling bins excecutable files and shotren their extensions to .exe and .so files could be called dll i guess...

  • by assertation ( 1255714 ) on Friday September 07, 2012 @12:53AM (#41257173)

    GNOME developers have been listening to the concerns of its users

    That is news. Wow. No disrespect, please keep doing that.

  • by MrLizardo ( 264289 ) on Friday September 07, 2012 @02:33PM (#41265271) Journal

    I'm actually looking forward to some of the GNOME 3.6 changes. Once I went out and grabbed some extensions ( http://extensions.gnome.org/ [gnome.org] ) to tweak things more to my liking I really started to enjoy GNOME Shell. I was kinda hoping to wander into the comments here and talk to other Shell users about what they like and don't like and what extensions they use, but instead there's just this incredible hate-fest. Other GNOME 3.x users, what extensions are you using? There's like a million and I'm totally curious if I've missed some.

    My top 5:
    - Calculator (lets you type equations into the search bar)
    - Weather (It's just a classy weather applet)
    - Window Options (puts close/min/max options in the app dropdown menu on the top panel)
    - Maximus (Removes the title bar of windows when maximized. Combines well with the 'Window Options' extension)
    - Blank Screen (Adds a menu option to blank the screen without locking it. Puts the monitor in power saving mode)

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