GNOME 3.12 Released

New submitter Sri Ramkrishna writes: "Like clockwork, the next version of GNOME has been released with updated applications, bugfixes, and so forth. People can look forward to faster loading times and a little better performance than before. A video has been created to highlight the release! Check it out!" The release features "... app folders, enhanced system status and high-resolution display support. This release also includes new and redesigned applications for video, software, editing, sound recording and internet relay chat. Under the hood, support for using Wayland instead of X has progressed significantly." There are a bunch of new features for programmers too.

Re:Meet the new boss:

[erice]

Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.

You mean: "Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss". Gnome keeps removing features. Session saving for gnome-terminal was removed several versions ago supposedly because they have a new way of doing this. Only they didn't actually implement the new way. They just took out the old and left it.

Re:Meet the new boss:

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Session saving is a hard problem and it requires apps to participate. Since it was never working correctly, it was removed so a better way could be done. But sometimes those things take awhile.

File, Edit, View.... gone!

[jabberw0k]

Wonderful, the unusable interface of 'evince' (Print is hidden under a sun icon or a gear, or something -- with no known way to open the menu from the keyboard) now comes to gedit. Now editing a file becomes impossible too! Please, folks, follow CUA , the Common User Access [wikipedia.org] protocols, with named menus we can access with Alt+keystroke or F10. Arrrrrgh! Stupid! Make it stop! Give us back our File, Edit, View menus and all the rest!

Re:Good riddance Gnome (and KDE)

[enter to exit]

You're right about GNOME. Those guys won't be happy until they've reduced the Desktop to a single close button and a window.

I think you're being too harsh on KDE though. The usual KDE criticism is that they have too many advanced options. On my machine, KDE (and all it's related processes) are consuming about 90MB of RAM (even with some bling turned on), to compare Chromium is consuming about 400MB.

KDE4 has a unfair reputation for being wasteful. I think the stigma is mainly caused by Anakondi's initial one-time file indexing processes being heavy. People tend to switch to something else before it finishes and leave with bad impressions.

After watching the video..

[sc0ob5]

After watching the video I find I have been pronouncing Gnome incorrectly for all these years. Ga-nome, I've been saying Nome..

Slightly more user friendly than Windows 8

[lophophore]

Gnome 3.12: **slighltly** more user friendly than Windows 8, which is like saying it is slightly more user friendly than a rabid zombie wolverine in a kindergarten playground.

I watched the video. Gnome 3.12 still sucks. It is an embarrassment to Linux; it is one of the reasons why after 10 years we still don't have "the year of the Linux Desktop". This is a continuing example of the developers deciding how the users should work, not thinning about how the users are used to doing things. Yecch.

Thank goodness for XFCE. XFCE's developers seem to actually have the user experience in mind.

Re:Why not extensions

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Anything added to the web site is code reviewed for attack vectors. Most of the extensions are fairly simple and easy to write. The extension I wrote to put a lockscreen on the topbar was all of 20 lines. Yes, only online because of attack vectors as you said earlier. We should see some improvements, some of the breakages come from the fact that gnome-shell is in active development and so some times extemsopms break because the code is getting refactored. In the past, we were not able to put out an image for extension writers to test. Now we have both a continuous integration build that extension writers can literally test everyday for breakage and also a QA team is spinning up so that we can at least check the popular extensions and bug extension writers to port. Once gnome-shell becomes more stable extension breakage will happen less.

Putting in prefs and checkboxes also increase code complexity as that is just more than you have to test and secondly the behaviour should be correct the first time without having to modify the behaviour. Basically it should do the right thing 99% of the time. If there are cases that it doesn't work that way then agree a preference should be put or if there something that a user does need a choice due to hardware or some behaviour.

The irony is that if created a bunch of preferences, a number of you will abandon the platform because it is bloated and move to i3 or awesome or something perceivably "light" like XFCE.

Re:Slightly more user friendly than Windows 8

[dbIII]

Some people like it (there's one in my worplace - others look at his screens in horror), but the thing I hate the most is you can't use the old gnome and the new gimp at the same time unless you run one or the other remotely from another machine. Some utter bastards in the gnome team deliberately created name conflicts to prevent old gnome applications working at the same time as new ones. That's something like bringing DLL hell to *nix for the first time, but with required background applications instead of libraries.