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.
There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:3, Insightful)
GNOME 3 is basically a dead project at this point. No serious developers use it these days, and when that happens to an open source project, it dies.
It was taken over by failed web designers. They screwed up the user interface and the user experience in a way that nobody can use it for real, productive work, and thus no serious users actually use it.
GNOME users have moved on. There are a small group that stick with GNOME 2. The rest now use KDE, XFCE, or a variety of apps under some standalone window manager. The only GNOME 3 users are those who try it out before moving on to a better desktop environment.
The same thing is happening with Firefox, too. The productive users are fleeing it because the failed web designers have moved on to fucking up its UI, too.
It's sad to see these once-great projects fall away like this, solely because failed web designers started trying to apply their failed web design techniques to desktop applications. I suppose that it's a self-correcting problem, however. Software projects like GNOME 3 and Firefox 4+ just don't end up surviving because they lost the users who formerly made them great.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:4, Insightful)
Unity (Score:2)
Unity - At least it's not GNOME shell.
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Unity is sort of like if Goatse man had a baby with tub girl, nothing but an elaborate effort to troll teh internetz.
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Why is the parent modded "Troll"?
There are almost 50 comments in this thread, and I count 3 that aren't saying something negative about GNOME 3. The general consensus is that GNOME 3 is no good. That's exactly why we see major Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint rejecting it, and putting considerable effort into projects like Unity and MATÉ.
The parent is exactly right to question how GNOME 3 could be picked as "Product of the Year" when it's universally despised.
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Ah, yes, the valuable consensus of Slashdot. The same community that decided both the original iPod and the iPod mini would flop.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Insightful)
in this particular case yes the slashdot opinion is important. because it is us not the general public that use desktop linux bsd or other non-fruity unix. the problem is gnome thinks by making a more "intuitive" tablet / web bastardization that the masses will flock away from there proprietary shackles of mac and windows and fly to their gnuniverse. but lets be honest the average person just wants to be able to stick a cd in the drive or click the .exe and have their program run, most people are afraid of even installing the os, it is only people like us who install *nix and thus only us who use this product they are making, but gnome has shown that they want to chase people who hate and fear the idea of them instead of listening to their user base and making a functional desktop . desktops are not tablet they are not smart phones. the idea that people will want one gui to rule them all is flawed it was tried b4 by pushing the desktop onto the mobile devices that failed apple saw it first and they built new products with a new interface that would not work on a desktop. now everyone thinks that because it works on mobile it will work on the desktop and it will fail to. when it comes to different devices the need different interface because they do a different job
servers work best with a cli
desktops work with toolbars icons or the traditional desktop,
tv's tablets and phones work best with widgets and thumbnails
Touch friendly (Score:2)
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Have you actually used it on a touchscreen? Of course not. It looks like a touch UI, but it does not at all work like one. For instance, you get to the menu not by pushing an icon or through a gesture, but by sliding the pointer up into the top left corner, as if you were using Exposé with a mouse. Yeah, I thought it was a touch UI at first myself, but it's just a strange hybrid.
I still don't get the reason for the hate, though, except that whiners whine more loudly. It's not a bad UI at all, and with
This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh that's right, there's somebody like you calling deathwatch on every new thing ever released. You talk about people moving to KDE - a few years ago when KDE 4 was released, you, or one of your many clones was saying exactly the same thing about KDE.
Gnome Shell will prevail. It might not look like it does in a few years but it's flexible enough and most importantly, hackable in a simple language that doesn't need compiling. Power users will latch onto that and we'll start seeing some really awesome things and then Gnome becomes desirable. And that's already starting to happen.
Anyway, thank you for yet another very incorrect prediction. You're bound to get it right one day.
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:This sounds familiar... (Score:4, Funny)
Don't taunt him. According to his login, he's a member of Anonymous!
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Oh that's right, there's somebody like you calling deathwatch on every new thing ever released. You talk about people moving to KDE - a few years ago when KDE 4 was released, you, or one of your many clones was saying exactly the same thing about KDE.
To be fair, there are so few linux users in the world that both KDE and GNOME can both be failures without contradiction.
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And to this day, I don't know anybody who has done a large scale deployment of KDE4. Where I work to this day we have something like 1000 users on KDE 3.x, and the rest on Windows 7 and OSX 10.6. Part of that is simply down to the fact that I work for a relat
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Re:This sounds familiar... (Score:4)
I've seen this before - a system so fucked up its users need to go on line, on "communities", on "forums" to switch on or off some badly designed asinine shitty smelling wart they call feature. That was Windows. Congrats, Gnomers, way to go!
When you design your interface in such an annoying manner that it creates emotional pain, it becomes ingrained in the victims memory and the experience never goes away - and then you win! You win, Gnome! Win!
Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-moXUALZtw [youtube.com]
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:4, Insightful)
And they didn't publish the vote tallies, which means that "voter turn-out" was embarrassingly low. Same as their readership numbers, I guess.
Don't compare firefox with gnome (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox is still the developers browser.
Chrome lacks the range of developer extensions, and while Opera is very standards compliant, it's actually full of nasty bugs that only developers would encounter.
Firefox doesn't come close to the arrogance of GNOME, since all the funky mods can be switched off.
After my knee jerk reaction against browser.urlbar.trimURLs, I actually switched this one back on.
Posted anon since I'm not pulling the /. party-line of hating on FF and evangelizing chrome.
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.
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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.
You must have a very small monitor and a very fast mouse. Or suffer from an eye disease.
The corner of the screen is a very easy target to hit.
What do you mean, "the" screen? Try using multiple monitors (or a virtual machine in a window, if gnome shell had even worked with that) and you'll find it's not all that easy.
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.
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Wakey wakey! ;)
You can right-click the titlebar and then click Minimize, which can also be done with Alt-F9.
Or, you can use the gconf-editor to add the minimize button back to the windows. The lack of minimize/maximize buttons is just the default, you can change it.
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On my laptop, my Mandriva ("mandreeva") runs Nepomuk semantic ontology-based file archiving and search on KDE.
This is real innovation.
Definitely not impressed with Gnome 3. From what I saw, there wasn't anything much there except nice cosmetics, which your post confirms. Besides, I still think Gnome eats too much visual space.
Nah. Sticking to my KDE.
Semantic sense for the desktop: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21840/?a=f [technologyreview.com]
Goals and objectives of the Nepomuk project: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop. [semanticdesktop.org]
Switch to LXDE and get back to work (Score:3)
The rest now use KDE, XFCE, or a variety of apps under some standalone window manager.
My interest in Gnome was killed by the uselessness of Compiz, long before Gnome 3 was a sprite in the eye of any delusional developer.
I switched from Gnome 2 to LXDE (Fedora, Lubuntu). LXDE is simple, easy to tweak, and does what it is supposed to do. I don't even care what happens with Gnome. First they chased all the users with four video cards and four LCDs, then they chased all the users with tablets.
I have never, not even for five minutes, liked KDE. Some kManner of kRevulsion.
Maybe Gnome 3, KDE, and U
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Insightful)
GNOME was nothing but NIH combined with FSF fud over Trolltech's licensing of Qt. It would be nice if we could retroactively abort it.
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It wasn't FSF FUD: Qt really had serious licensing problems. Those have been resolved. But Qt is still a C++ toolkit, with the usual bloat and design compromises that that implies. And it isn't even standard C++, they had to invent their own build system and non-standard language extensions.
I don't like either Gnome 3 or Unity. So, I gave KDE a serious try again and absolutely hated it: it is full of NIH apps, not-quite-right-graphics, and unnecessary complexity and gimmicks.
I ended up using XFCE4. It'
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seriously, you do not want to use a programming language without object orientation for GUI programming.
GNOME does use OOP.
If you don't like the syntax of GObject (understandable), just use Vala [gnome.org]. It compiles to C (no performance loss).
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Insightful)
I never understood why someone would use Gnome over KDE anyway. Gnome always felt kind of a toy or candy interface.
That's odd, because that's how I've always felt about KDE. I try to use it every now and again but rapidly go back to Gnome 2, which generally stays out of the way and doesn't waste my time with stupid animations.
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Gnome 2? Feh. Real Gnome admirers are nostalgic for Gnome 1.
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I try to use it every now and again but rapidly go back to Gnome 2, which generally stays out of the way and doesn't waste my time with stupid animations.
Funny you should mention stupid animations. For a long time, I was looking for a way to turn off that unspeakably ugly "wireframe" minimize animation for windows in Gnome2. I mean, it looked like something from early 90s, and took long enough that it was seriously distracting. Turned out that there was a very non-obvious [blogspot.com] way to do so, but once you do that, your windows will show up in wireframe mode when you drag them around, rather than showing window content. One way or another, Gnome2 would make you feel
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Funny)
Pass the crack pipe bro.
Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers (Score:5, Funny)
This is exactly why Apple went bankrupt back in 2007: "designers" fucking everything up. And thank God for that, because otherwise we'd have lost the smooth functionality and labor-saving keystroke memorization that Lotus 123 and WordPerfect have blessed us with... not to mention the almighty command-line, which in the general opinion of all good men far surpasses any "designer's" laborious move-hands-from-keyboard-to-mouse-and-move-mouse-and-click slavery. Free market forces and common sense have converged to refute the heresies of the designers and their shiny UI's and gradients and drop shadows, and our world is a better and more moral place because of it.
There are only two kinds of programs in the world: eye candy without functionality, and the raw power of DB-engineer-designed matrices of text input boxen! For those who don't understand, let me elucidate by analogy: there are only two kinds of women in the world: the pretty, vacuous ones, and the ugly lesbian geniuses. The world is a binary place, full of ones and zeroes, and there's no room for compromise: the shiny is always useless. Suck lied to us.
Let us all take a lesson from Firefox, which lost its entire userbase to Chrome not because of lingering perceptions of memory bloat that a better marketing team could have dispelled; nor because Google had so much name brand recognition, practically being synonymous with the internet in the minds of many thanks to the ubiquity of its search and mail, that everyone accepted its new browser as Really Hot Stuff From a Quality Company—no, Firefox lost its entire userbase to Chrome and was abandoned as a software project because a "designer" moved the tabs and consolidated the search and address bars.
I'm glad that I'm not alone in daring to hope that the GNOME team takes a good, hard look at its socialist ways and decides to return to just plain, American xterm windows with a Motif-like window manager. It's time we programmers took back our computers from the commie "designers" who want to push useless eye candy on us.
Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with Gnome is that it was predicated on the human interface guidelines copied from Mac OS 8.
The updates they've done, IIRC, are not substantial, and very ad hoc. Nothing in Gnome seems to indicate they're knowledgeable in the area of human-computer interfaces. Meanwhile, KDE embraces a state of the art artificial intelligence project in usability (the KDE implementation of NEPOMUK - Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)...
KDE has cooler graphics too...I (and a lot of people) would argue.
Furthermore, Gnome hasn't conducted any serious usability studies (only ones with sample sizes so small they don't count). For a company that had a millionaire astronaut supporting it (indirectly through Ubuntu) and used to have Red Hat's support, it's too little, too late.
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He,he. What I find funny about the venom from some people is that Gnome 3 without a touch screen _forces_ me to use 2 or 3 times more hot key combinations and quick loads than I'm used to. Stuff people have been _telling_ us would be great for ages if we would just _use_ it. And they were right. Sometimes, it is almost like the speed and freedom of being back at a terminal.
I suspect part of the venom is that it's a bit like making a commitment to the Dvorak keyboard and if you work in an environment tha
Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers (Score:4, Insightful)
Or proof that /. moderation is a slow process and you commented way too early.
It's modded "+4 Funny" right now.
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Though still, nobody can find that they're looking for...
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:5, Insightful)
... or try using Gnome 3 with multiple large monitors. You quickly get tired of moving the mouse the extra kilometers every day.
Or use remote X11 or VMs, and you can't even get gnome shell, so users have to deal with two different UIs. That's so clever!
Gnome 3 was made for single-taskers by single-taskers.
It was apparently designed by people too young to even know about standard x mouse functionality and the power of having focus separate from z order, nor aware that X is a TCP/IP protocol, nor a myriad of other things completely lost on the cell phone generation.
Yes, get off my lawn, kids. You haven't earned the right to camp here yet, cause you're BLOODY IGNORANT.
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I hated gnome shell until this site came online. Distros will fix the gnome usability issues as usual - give it some time.
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:5, Informative)
You're typing up a document and want to reference other things in a different window.
You're writing code and want to keep it's documentation/requirements. your code, and your language's/libraries' API all viewable by a glance. It would be too mentally jarring to have the screen switch to a task switcher then having to think for a moment which item you want to view than simply glancing at a different part of the screen to get the info you want.
I don't understand how other people can't understand this.
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You can't see the content of other windows in the task bar, if the window was visible without switching that what the hell does Gnome Shell vs a taskbar to do with it, if you need to quickly switch applications while typing... alt-tab was the best way to do it before, and continues to be it
Re:There will be no GNOME 4. (Score:4, Insightful)
1. what about the conventions that've been around forever for minimize/maximize? they have staying power for a reason. they're simple enough to be intuitive. even if this can be turned back on, it's something that should be there by default. ..or using someone else's? ..missing the point entirely.
2. can I do it without typing a buttload of javascript?
3. can you answer the question without being a pedantic asshole?
4. referencing a window while switching to another is a common scenario.
5-6. windows 95 (along with the others) for all its faults, got the core interface right. being able to see the output of more than one window at a time during a focus switch was considered a good thing. it still is. the single tasking tablet/phone trendhopping idiots behind gnome 3 don't get this I guess. there is such a thing as drawing too many borders around a picture.
7.
8. so your answers were apparently only a thinly veiled troll or astroturf. oh well.
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?
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GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt, and the end product is much more stable.
ROTFL.
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.
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... but if you run mixed repos (wheezy/sid) on squeeze, whenever you want to upgrade anything, it tries to pull in the entire Gnome 3 stack - even when you try to just install the 3.1 kernel build environment :(
But it seems this only hinges on two library packages, glib2 and gdk-pixbuf2 IIRC, and they often get pulled in via python7. No time to really look into it alas...
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A couple weeks ago, I did a clean install of stable Debian to replace my 2005's Debian installation with KDE v3.5.10 (awesome). I was upset with KDE v4.4.3 and I remember reading that it was supposed to be better than early v4 releases. Not for me!
I tried the default Gnome v2.3, and it was OK. I like it more than KDE v4.4.3. However, it is not good as KDE v3.5.10. I read about Trinity that is a fork of KDE v3.5.10. I would use it if it had a lot of support and users, and a good future.
Oh and I hated Unity i
What other window managers were tested? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, so they picked Gnome3, but what were the other window managers they looked at to make that decision? The Fine Article doesn't seem to say.
What about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What about... (Score:5, Informative)
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Do they use Gtk 2.x, or Gtk 3.x?
If it's Gtk2 (as I suspect it is), it causes a big problem: because the two are not fully compatible, programs have to choose one or the other, and you get more fragmentation (a Gtk3 app will of course run in a Gtk2 desktop, just as a Qt app will - but it won't look or feel quite as native).
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Do they use Gtk 2.x, or Gtk 3.x?
They are taking all the GTK 2.x libraries and renaming them. Their goal is to allow MATE to co-exist nicely with GNOME 3 on the same computer.
Once they have it working, they might look at adopting the GNOME 3 libraries. But what they are doing right now is the fastest route to a stable MATE desktop that co-exists with GNOME 3.
If you want something that looks more like GNOME 2 but runs on the GNOME 3 libraries, take a look at MGSE.
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851 [linuxmint.com]
steveha
Re:What about... (Score:5, Informative)
How to boil a frog (Score:5, Informative)
Like a lot of people, I hated GNOME 3 (and GNOME Shell) when 3.0 released. I skipped around a little, tried KDE4 (again), tried Unity, tried XFCE (again), but eventually came back around to GNOME 3 with the GNOME 3.2 release. The advent of extensions, as well as spending some time actually learning to use the new environment and making some small changes to the way I do things, has actually brought me to the point of liking GNOME 3 and the new Shell. I now enjoy using it, and I prefer it over the other available options.
Extensions are a big deal, and if they had been there Day One, I think a lot of the hate for GNOME 3 would not have arisen. I added lots of extensions to re-create the GNOME 2 type of environment. What I found is that in some cases the extensions duplicated functionality already in GNOME 3, but that functionality was achieved in a different way with the new environment. As I began learning the GNOME Shell and building new habits, I found myself disabling extensions one by one. At this point, I'm running with minimal extensions.
Desktop developers should take note of that. There is nothing wrong with innovative change, but you don't want to shock your users. If you are going to radically change paradigms, make it possible for your users to continue to use the old paradigms and adapt at their own pace by migrating from the old to the new. Don't try to force them down this new path. Extensions to GNOME 3 were the training wheels I needed for my brain to learn the new environment and adapt. Once I got my balance, the training wheels came off.
Re:How to boil a frog (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Don't like alt-esc? Make it alt-tab then (even though, I would bet in nearly every quantitative way, the alt-tab/alt-~ system makes workflows faster). But different strokes... System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts - change the binding to your hearts content. Not hard people. Bitching about non-problems is stupid!
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When the developers keep picking defaults you don't like for most things, you should realize the direction they are heading is not the direction you want to go, and stop wasting your time with their stuff (assuming there are better options
GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award (Score:2, Insightful)
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I have a mixed views of gnome, one criticism I have with it the old one of it has been simplified to the point of being un-intuitive. When people accused gnome of this in the past I dismissed it! Now I have noted that to minimize the open application I have to point to the upper left corner, no buttons for this. File, Edit etc are not part of Gnome apps they are in the bar at the very top of the screen. Much of this change is change for changes sake, its unfamiliar (no other desktop works this way). Its a shame because the general concept is good. One area (top left corner) gives you access to all applications and parts of the system.
If you want a minimize button on windows, install GnomeTweakTool. It has an option that allows you to select the arrangement of buttons on a window's title bar.
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Except for the 100% of all desktop users that know and use that same concept on a day to day basis. I learned about minimized windows in Computer literacy in maybe grade 7/8 whenever they had Windows 3.0 released. Out with the old, in with the different.
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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.
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.
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Linux Journal Readers Choice?? that settles that (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, I don't understand the vehement opposition here.
Hint: most normal users want a UI that just works and stays out of their way _WITHOUT_ having to write a load of javascript to make it not be shit.
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I haven't had to write a load of javascript. I kept it at default for a while, then decided I wanted some extra functionality- stuff that wasn't even really present in Gnome 2 or KDE, like automatically opening various files in a specific text editor based on what search parameters I added to a search term.
Based on a number of people I've had this conversation with, I imagine very few people have honestly given Gnome 3 a try, as opposed to loading it up for an hour, deciding they hate it, then making angry
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Well, "normal users" just gave the Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award to GNOME3.
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I'm a $SELF_PROFESSED_GENERIC_COMPUTAR_HAXOR_KING who hates gnome 3. It's all javascript, which adds yet another layer of complexity on top of the already expanding linux desktop stack without any clear advantage to simple configuration files managed by a gui. if i need something scripted, I'll write a script in bash/perl/python/whatever. any of these are superior to javascript and have had bindings for all major widget and desktop environments since the late 90s. integration with the latest $MANAGED_RUN
"Reader's Choice" is not "Best Choice" (Score:5, Insightful)
I am disappointed in this year's "Reader's Choice." It mentions "Gmail" as the best Linux app for instant messaging, "Google Docs" as the best Linux(?) app for collaboration, and the "reader's choice" for Linux games have been the same for the past eight years, despite eight years of new developments (Battle for Wesnoth? From 2003? When there's Warzone 2100, OpenTTD, 0 A.D., Heroes of Newerth, Minecraft, Braid, Darwinia, DEFCON, MegaGlest, Amnesia Dark Descent, Aquaria, Tiny & Big, OpenClonk, SpaceChem ... jeez.
I think the "Reader's" part of the "Reader's Choice" may be out-of-touch.
Slashdot wrong again, version not specified (Score:3, Informative)
I know, I know, it's hardly news when slashdot gets something wrong. Nevertheless, it can be worth pointing out what they got wrong, and in this case, what they got wrong was the "3". Gnome won; the version wasn't specified. From TFA:
"Due to the timing of the GNOME 3 release, it's hard to tell if the victory is because of version 3 or in spite of it.
Personally, I'm waiting to judge Gnome3 till they release a working version. Same as I did with KDE4. :)
Correcting myself (Score:2)
Whoops, ignore the above. Gnome (no version specified) won Best Desktop Environment, but Gnome3 won Product of the Year.
Note that neither of these is, specifically, the "Readers Choice Award", though. Those are just two of the many Readers Choice Awards from LJ. So I was right about slashdot getting it wrong; I was just wrong about what they got wrong. *sigh*
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Not sure what link you clicked on but the one in the summary [linuxjournal.com] has the phrase "GNOME 3" 5 times.
I have been using it for a few weeks now and (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee for a DE that is suposta get out of your way and help you work more efficiently it sure does get in the fucking way a lot
(based on my default install)
why the hell does the top bar only show one thing at a time, its fucking annoying on my 86 mac and its still fucking annoying on my 2011 linux machine. how is me clicking on the taskbar to select a window in "old fashioned" windows style management LESS efficient than clicking on the magic corner and having to squint at reduced windows, and clicking again?
mounting filesystems, If I am in the file explorer and click on my windows partition a stupid ass popup comes up and asks me if I want to open it in the file explorer!?! and of course it does not go away unless I click in its general area.
virtual desktops? as far as I can tell by default they only appear if something is maximized, or you right click on a window and tell it to move, what if I just wanted to click on desktop 2 and open more shit up?
adding launchers to the desktop, why for the fucking love of god are modern DE designers opposed to me putting a shortcut to frequently used applications??? again how is it less efficient to double click on a icon vs clicking on the magic G spot bringing up a menu, THEN clicking on it from favorites if its even on your favorites list (which is tiny, and if its not on your favorites list add 2 more clicks and menus)? Hell before I sat down and read how to do this the only way I could get a fucking shortcut on the desktop was to log out of gnome 3 back into gnome 2, put my shit there, log back out then log back in again ... fucking fail.
Now I know every single bit of this can be customized, which brings me to my final point, why the fuck do I have to install a tweaker tool and mod endless text files to get simple functionality that used to be a GOD DAMED RIGHT CLICK OPTION!
While Gnome3 is not as stupid / broken as KDE4 (which I really hate) its still stupid and broken. A computer interface should be something you really dont have to think about while using it, and ever since installing gnome 3 I have spent more time getting rid of dumb shit poping up out of everywhere impeding what I was doing.
Shit I accidentally bumped that fucking magic spot on the task bar 2 damned times writing this post, shrinking everything down, making me stop everything and select what window I was using. Even the show desktop spot on the windows taskbar goes the fuck away once you move the mouse away.
Oh well guess I will just keep using XFCE
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.
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The nice thing about Linux is choice (Score:2)
I've tried Gnome 3 and I chose XFCE. It's not great, but it's a heap better than Gnome3.
I really hated that it got harder to switch between windows. Alt-Tab would switch between apps. Now all my terminal windows were on top. I eventually figured out how to select a specific terminal window, but then every time I switch, I have to think about what I want and how to get there.
Apparently it's good design for the masses, but it's really bad design for developers.
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Coming from a New User (Score:3)
I played with Red Hat back in the day and had Fedora 11 on my spare laptop, just cuz. But mostly I used Windows, occasionally a Mac. Everything I am about to say is filtered through that lens....
I was used to Gnome 2 on Fedora 11. It was similar enough to the windows and mac ui so that I could get around it very easily. When I installed Fedora 16 and used Gnome 3.x, I had to struggle to find things. Gnome Shell Extension [gnome.org] allowed me to put back the features I liked from Gnome 2, while keeping the clean look of 3. I just would like to see GSE as a standard install item, not an add-on
GNOME 3 (Score:2)
I haven't used GNOME 3, but from what I have seen in user feed back, it is not a positive release for GNOME.
I find the people that like it, are new users to LINUX and never used GNOME 2.
If you previously used GNOME 2, most people don't like GNOME 3.
But, everyone knows, there will be a GNOME 4 and like the KDE 4 release, which was a disaster I think, things will improve.
-Hack
Could someone tell me.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nobody can explain that coherently. It's a make-work project for frustrated "designers" who can never be happy without completely throwing away the tried and true in its entirety and "designing" their extreme idiosyncratic idea of a perfect world. There's really nothing wrong with this, but the new design should be seen for what it is - arbitrary change driven by ivory tower ego.
Nobody ever used Linux because they liked the GUI (Score:3)
Can someone please explain why we are "fixing" something that doesn't seem to be broken at all?
My theory about Linux desktops is that no capable Linux developer actually uses a GUI for their day-to-day work. The requirements for a desktop have long been:
1) Can launch bash and vim
2) Looks like the current coolest thing (used to be NeXTStep, then OS X, now iOS).
After all, bash (or your alternative CLI shell of choice) is the most powerful and flexible way of controlling a computer ever devised. Developers like vi because it is based on the paradigm of issuing logical commands that transform a set of
These are the same readers... (Score:2)
These are the same people who voted ...
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Some of those choices aren't too bad - Pidgin/Libpurple is a pretty awesome IM client (particularly for Jabber), GIMP could still well be classed as a design tool (and TBH Inkscape still isn't up there with most of the proprietary vector editors like AI and CorelDraw), VirtualBox is dead easy to use if you just want to fire up a VM to play around with, rsync is an awesome tool for quick backups, Libreoffice is really the only full-featured Linux office suite (KOffice and the GNOME Office collection are shap
Re:Flame wars (Score:5, Funny)
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To add to your point, he may not even need a keyboard mouse and screen plugged into his server to use X. X is designed to be run remotely too. That is what the DISPLAY environment variable is for.
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Let' s face it, you dont know what you are talking about.
X-Windows, and window managers for it, have been around a lot longer than you have been aware of them. The aping started in the opposite direction. The first WM I can think of that could be accused of aping one of those toy OSes would be FVWM95, and there were plenty of other options that predated it. Plus it worked a lot better than Windows in any event.
Gnome didnt really start on