One Week With GNOME 3 Classic 169
An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Gallagher, Security Software Engineer at Red Hat, has completed his week-long experiment running GNOME 3 Classic. Stephen writes: 'While I was never as much in love with GNOME 2 as I was with KDE 3, I found it to be a good fit for my workflow. It was clean and largely uncluttered and generally got out of my way. Now that Fedora 19 is in beta and GNOME Classic mode is basically ready, I decided that it was my duty to the open-source community to explore this new variant, give it a complete investigation and document my experiences each day.' I'll leave Stephen's opinion on the new Classic Mode to the Slashdot reader to discover, but I will say that it does touch on the much debated GNOME Shell Activities Overview, and the gnome-2-like Classic mode's Windows List on the taskbar."
MATE or Cinnamon (Score:5, Insightful)
Both GNOME 3 and Unity simply aren't very useful for power users. Cinnamon and MATE are both useful substitutes until Gnome/Canonical start listening to their customer base again.
Re:MATE or Cinnamon (Score:2, Insightful)
...It's impressive how they were able to fuck up such a good application...
Are you a sadist? How can those two words in the same sentence? (emphasis mine...)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Problems with Open Source in general (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the problems with Open Source in general: the engineers are expert in coding, and believe that this is all one needs for a great product.
There are acknowledged experts [google.com] in usability and presentation (and documentation and testing and installation procedures and marketing) who have spent many years of study and have experience in these things. For some reason, few open source projects have subgroups of these types - the development is always code changes checked into a database.
A good example is the ribbon interface [lazytechguys.com] in XBMC. Some other computer product had a "ribbon" of program icons, so having one made from words was thought to be a good idea. Icons are mostly small and square, while words are generally wide, so the result is that only one or two selections are visible at one time. Compare with Tivo's vertical list [photobucket.com] and you'll see a marked difference - using XBMC is like reading a newspaper through a straw.
(Don't bother telling me how to skin XBMC or the obscure option in some hidden menu that makes the presentation sane. It would have been easier to just make a product that isn't frustrating or time-consuming to correct.)
There's an ocean of expertise in other areas that goes into making a good product. If any coders are bored and wanted to explore a new field of research, usability and presentation skills could be very useful.
((Apropos of nothing, there's room for innovation into different ways of presentation and control. I've seen a lot of good suggestions from fiction, such as the AirWolf cockpit altitude display, the gesture-based input from Earth: Final Conflict ship, the cell phones [wearethevo...urhead.com] from Earth: Final Conflict, or the medical display in Star Trek: Into Darkness (at the very beginning, the sick girl).))
Re:tl;dr (Score:4, Insightful)
tl;dr: With a few adjustments, he likes Gnome Classic.
Nope.
He started with KDE 3, didn't like KDE 4, switched to GNOME for a few years, and then he discovered how good KDE 4 had become. He switched back to KDE 4, and he how prefers it and recommends it.