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."
Don't Care (Score:2, Interesting)
You had your chance, GNOME, and you wasted it.
Re:All two (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Copy to.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is my problem with F/OSS in general... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the problem is people like these on /. who criticise everything.
That's stupid. You're stupid. Everything is stupid. Nyah :P
Compare this to games developers that give in to their fans and give them whatever they want, usually go bankrupt.
Like how Valve started circling the drain the moment TF2 went free to play?
Re:Iterations (Score:5, Interesting)
It also makes it almost useless to have apps on a second monitor. That "feature" was one of the reasons I moved away from OSX a couple of years ago.
Re:You know what's... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 experiment with it. But then it depends on what software and toolkits you bring to your desktop.
Personally I think Gnome 3 shell is pretty interesting but I've got a Razer mouse which multiclicks so it's not very usable atm. KDE4 seem so heavy on my machine and imho KDE applications look like a mess. I know about the QT XML projects and such which was for a very short while the future of Nokia and I just wish someone made better looking QT applications. I think having one tool kit and an integrated desktop would be pretty nice but I don't want to have to be tied down to poor applications. Guess that's one advantage of the Windows and OS X desktops.
And I've seen clips on YouTube where they boot a Macintosh Classic (?), fire up ClarisWorks, type something, save it, quit and power down and compare that to a (then) modern PC laptop and the PC was slower. I think it's pretty disturbing a machine with 1 GB of RAM runs slowly now and then I see screenshots of Directory Opus 4 running on the Amiga with 770kB of RAM available. Of 1 MB..
It's amazing how much crap you can throw into software without increasing usability.
Had some old simple-wm (don't know what one, there's plenty now anyway, scrotwm, i3, ratpoison, the likes) screenshot with a terminal, screen, mutt and some others (centericq and some command line MP3 playing "service" I think?) and mutt is always such a beauty. And it makes you long back =p, should design a standard reply template for HTML mails which put the reply in a 15x3 characters iframe or something such with a headline informing the reader that's about how readable their HTML mails is in a text based mail client. However today with advertisement it make sense and rather HTML than something application specific / new I suppose.
I currently have Bodhi Linux installed but I suppose a bigger distribution with Enlightenment would work as well / even better. But that Bodhi comes with some touches (like GTK theme) which make it look nicer together.
Kinda not that you expected back then / just after the year you mention? That Enlightenment would be one of the lighter window managers in the future..
Re:And the other side of the problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Support is not free. You want to keep your old ways, while I want to move on. If I am a commercial developer, I'd weigh the value of keeping you as a customer and offer you a support contract to compensate me for the work required to keep you comfortably in the past. If I am an open source developer, you are not likely to be interested in paying for my efforts, so what incentive have I to do things your way when I believe I can do things better my way? That's what forks are for. GNOME 2 has been forked and people like you who love the old interface can keep working on it. GNOME 3 in the meantime can continue trying new things that may bring about an easier and more comfortable future for users who are not already set in the ways of GNOME 2. If you want GNOME 3 developers to instead support your old ways, why not put your money where you complaints are? How much are you willing to pay for continuing GNOME2-style UI support? Nothing? Well, what did you expect for that? Slavery is not cool.
Re:Yawn... (Score:5, Interesting)
Screenshots are not encouraging...
I read through some of this and I am a user of Japanese language input. (Output too) In my recent experience with trying to get GiMP 2.8.x compiled and running on CentOS 6.x, I learned that when I was successful, I could only accomplish this feat by compiling many of GNOME's core libraries because the GIMP toolkit (you know, the GUI toolkit intended for use with GIMP) ended up as part of GNOME against the advice of the larger community. The result is that if I try to run a GTK based application in an environment which uses a different GTK, I lose theming... not the end of the world. But ALSO I loose access to my input method! Since I lose GNOME integration, input methods are also lost among other things.
This is GNOME's fault. They simply aren't mature in their development philosophies.
And what did I read in the article describing the new changes? "more tightly integrated IME!!" Uh... no. That's a bad idea. If there's one thing I learned from my experiences in breaking GNOME integration, it's that input is something of a low enough level that it should be handled by X, not by GNOME.
GNOME marches forward ruining things. If they want "a direction" they need to consider moving in a mature direction that unifies the desktop experience with X and with that other thing that is closer to the hardware... freeland or something like that?
And what was that "GNOME-OS" thing I heard about? Oh crap. Every app and environment thinks they should be an OS. Uh... no. Please no,
Re:I hear all these people switching to OSX. (Score:2, Interesting)
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 happy since. Cinnamon is the future, folks. And I really hope KDE can ditch some of that Nepomuk shit and turn down the dazzle for next release then we can have two alternatives to the batshit insanity plaguing Gnome these days.