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GNOME

GNOME 3.12 Released 134

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the dude-you-got-a-smelly-foot dept.
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.
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GNOME 3.12 Released More

GNOME 3.12 Released

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  • ... related to gnome already sounds negative

  • Unity-ish UI (Score:5, Insightful)

    by trainman ( 6872 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @05:37PM (#46588501) Homepage

    And I see they're still jumping on this Unity-ish sidebar UI bandwagon... ugh, I guess I'll be using xfce for a while longer so I can actually have a normal top and bottom panels. Running apps and workspace picker along the bottom, Application (etc) menus along the top with various system controls... its worked well for over a decade, yes some people might like the newer Vista/OSXy way to set things up, and fine that can be the (annoying) default, but at least give us the *option* to set up our workspace as we like. Saying "we don't support user customization anymore" is simply arrogant and not an option for open source software which was supposed to be all about the user having control.

    It looks nice, and I commend them for all the hard work, I'm sure a lot of hours went in to it, but I won't be in any rush to upgrade if I still can't even do something simple like move my panels around.

    • Why not use http://extensions.gnome.org/ [gnome.org] and then you can probably add the stuff you need to make it more what you are used to. There is also a classic mode which tries to mimic GNOME 2. Of course, there is always Mate. :)

      • Why not extensions (Score:5, Insightful)

        by efitton ( 144228 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @06:15PM (#46588757)
        Because:
        • -They are Beta software
        • -They are not typically upgraded when Gnome upgrades, if at all
        • -They are an attack vector
        • -They can and do conflict causing stability and speed problems
        • -Only can be installed when online

        But mostly because just about every extension is really something that should be a preference and is every way inferior to a checkbox.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by efitton ( 144228 )
          Also forgot the "wack-a-mole" effect. 46 pages of extensions, many that do the same thing. Have fun finding and picking the right extension. Again, clearly inferior to system settings and checkboxes.

        • Re:Why not extensions (Score:5, Informative)

          by Sri Ramkrishna ( 1856 ) <sriram...ramkrishna@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @08:37PM (#46589523)
          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: (Score:2)

            by efitton ( 144228 )
            http://www.ioccc.org/ [ioccc.org]

            But yes, the attack vector is the least of my worries. You write: "Putting in prefs and checkboxes also increases code complexity." True, having the extension increases the code complexity by at least the same amount. But no testing, no planning, no updates, no review. Just an unorganized mess of hundreds upon hundreds of extensions that conflict.

            Gnome has the reputation, and for very good reason, of not acknowledging when users need a choice of behavior. Look at your own plus.goo

          • You say , "... the behaviour should be correct the first time..." and this is wrong. The behaviour should be *selectable* by the user. That's why folks are asking for checkboxes and configuration dialogs. The behaviour cannot possibly be "correct" because it is a preference and what I prefer may not be what you prefer.

            I realize that the Gnome folks really believe there is only one correct way for the desktop to look and behave, but they are wrong.

            • I don't think we're saying there is always only one way. But in a lot of cases, you generally want the correct thing. For instance, when you plug in your monitor in your laptop, you generally expect the correct behavior right? Having options that control at 5pm, you want your desktop extended instead of a dual session screen is kind of silly. But there are a lot of people who revel in these kind of things because there is some kind of technical elitism involved in being able to do that because the other

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by efitton ( 144228 )
            I've been thinking more about this and have to say, one of your weaker arguments. Your argument seems to be that extensions suck, but might suck less in the future. It sounds like you agree that extensions are inferior to checkboxes for the user when handling preferences but that the trade off for developer ease is worth it. The issue being code complexity and testing. But you then write about how short the extensions are and that they are code reviewed. So there is a trivial amount of complexity, honestly

            • I've been thinking more about this and have to say, one of your weaker arguments. Your argument seems to be that extensions suck, but might suck less in the future. It sounds like you agree that extensions are inferior to checkboxes for the user when handling preferences but that the trade off for developer ease is worth it. The issue being code complexity and testing. But you then write about how short the extensions are and that they are code reviewed. So there is a trivial amount of complexity, honestly most of the code is already there it is just difficult to set the preference. And your users want the testing. Extensions suck because they aren't tested, they interfere with each other, they break; but then you say we should try them if we don't like stock. So as I'm still having my coffee this is less lucid then I would like; but which is it? Is this a tiny bit of code that Gnome developers just can't bother adding or is it truly complex, in which case we can expect extensions to be a mess and make the entire system a tottering mess? Please tell me that your last line about users abandoning Gnome if you add preferences was a joke or a throw away line. Specious argument, and while easy to deflate I'd rather not take the time. If you have your "perfect defaults" no one would even have to see that you had preferences anyway. And actually maybe not specious, I don't think it is even remotely plausible, everyone has been screaming for preferences.

              Well extensions just give people the option to extend your desktop. What they write isn't necessary something that is going to be useful to everyone. The code can either be very complex or very simple, it just depends on what you are doing. For instance, you could write an extension that by pressing F3, will open up two nautilus windows side by side so that you can do file copying or something. That might not be very hard to do at all. There might be other things that might be more complex like wobbly w

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by efitton ( 144228 )
                "Intractable" is a word. Two or three successful forks (depending on how you count Unity) and the main employer of most GNOME developers ships their pay OS with classic mode enabled over shell. GNOME limits options (settings kill kittens) to make life easier. Except we have gone from two dominant desktops w/ Gnome 2 and KDE 3, to one dominant desktop with the move to KDE 4 ,to no dominant desktop with GNOME 3. Now to use Linux I have to consider: Unity, Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, LXDE and E. Two more if you are

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vux984 ( 928602 )

      its worked well for over a decade,

      Over a decade ago, I had a single 17" CRT and yes "it worked well". Today I have a pair of 24" wide screen monitors.

      It doesn't "work well" anymore.

      The left side panel works better especailly on modern wide screens, where the limitation is usually vertical, and for most applications you have extra horizontal space.

      But still flawed on large multimonitor desktops.

      Of course, I agree with you that providing the option to change it from the defaults is generally a good thing, e

      • A decade ago a lot of people had already had dual screens of unusual sizes for a decade.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          And even today "a lot of people use a single 4:3 screen"

          But the balance has certainly shifted wouldn't you agree?

          • The "balance" doesn't mean squat. When I came to slashdot over 15 years ago, it was normal for people to have multiple screens, of various sizes, and the open source technology already supported it. The main difference now is that we don't have to calculate (or look up) modelines and hand configure a bunch of crap. But the windowing systems already had good support for it, and the X Window System surely doesn't care how many screens you want to configure.

            The newer desktop paradigms seem to be driven by devi

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by vux984 ( 928602 )

              "Windowing systems already had good support for it [multiple screens of different sizes]"

              The windowing system physically supported it yes. But menu bar along the top, task bar along the bottom isn't a terribly good paradigm on widescreens or multiple widescreens.

              The newer desktop paradigms seem to be driven by devices with very small screens, so it seems that more traditional desktop environments might actually have better support than the newer ones.

              No. Devices with very small screens operated by touch wor

              • The newer desktop paradigms seem to be driven by devices with very small screens, so it seems that more traditional desktop environments might actually have better support than the newer ones.

                No. Devices with very small screens operated by touch work abysmally with 'traditional desktop environments'. That's why Windows CE phones never took off.

                You said "no" but then you went on to paint a picture that supports what I said.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by vux984 ( 928602 )

                  You said "no" but then you went on to paint a picture that supports what I said.

                  What?

                  You argue that more "traditional desktops environments might have better support than the new ones"

                  I said, new small screen devices are abysmal with "traditional desktop environments".

                  How does "abysmal" translate to "better"?

                  • By thinking about the context. ;)
                    The newer paradigms are designed for small devices because of the claimed problems with traditional paradigms on those devices.
                    You're claiming that the newer paradigms are better for large screens, but to support that you're actually agreeing that the new paradigms are designed to overcome problems on SMALL screens. So you're supporting my case, by attacking what I said in the wrong direction. ;)

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by vux984 ( 928602 )

                      You're claiming that the newer paradigms are better for large screens, but to support that you're actually agreeing that the new paradigms are designed to overcome problems on SMALL screens

                      The shift of the taskbar to the left is due to *wide* screens not *small* screens.

                    • The traditional unix desktop has a movable taskbar that is just an application. Moving it left or right can be done without forcing any "innovation" on people.

                      This is exactly the sort of idiocy that has caused a large percent (~60%) to abandon the 2 projects that used to combine for over 90% user share.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by vux984 ( 928602 )

                      The point is that I agree with moving it to the left by default.

                      However, I agree with you entirely that it should be as easy as it ever was to put it back at the bottom. I agree with you entirely that the changes FORCED by unity are terrible.

                      I am ONLY arguing changing them changing default layout is sensible. And that implementing touch friendly stuff is sensible.

                      But forcing it? 100% Idiotic.

              • Devices with very small screens operated by touch work abysmally with 'traditional desktop environments'.

                Touchscreens work abysmally with any imaginable operating system, since they're the single-button Mac mouse all over again. Except this time the keyboard is an on-screen only version, too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        For many, it works well. For those who don't think so, let them configure a left side panel. Even make it a default that can easily be changed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hodet ( 620484 )

      This right here. I have settled on XFCE. Some people may find the UI dated but to me it just stays out of my way and just works. When I need to do something then it facilitates that with no hassles. Thank god for choice.

  • New submitter (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sri Ramkrishna ( 1856 ) <sriram...ramkrishna@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @05:41PM (#46588541)
    Jezus, I've been on this site since Malda was still using it as a tab on his website. It took them this long to actually accept a submission of mine.

    • Wow, that's patience... I've been reading since 1997, first submission in 1999 IIRC. Karma will be good to you I bet.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      http://slashdot.org/~Sri+Ramkrishna/submissions [slashdot.org]

      Submission Summary: 0 pending, 2 declined, 1 accepted (3 total, 33.33% accepted)

      Not sure what you're complaining about.
      You make it seem as if you've submitted dozens of stories during a period of many years.

      • You make it seem as if you've submitted dozens of stories during a period of many years.

        Most of my submissions aren't shown in the interface. It only shows submissions which occurred after some psuedoarbitrary date.

    • thank you and the horse you rode in on for the most useful news i've had here in a while.

      gnome is driving me nuttier than i thought i could get at the moment, but am sticking with it, is better than nothing.

      which about sums up the alternatives, when they're not trying to be everything.

      -- dear linus, who is git, and to what is he objecting? --

    • Jezus, I've been on this site since Malda was still using it as a tab on his website. It took them this long to actually accept a submission of mine.

      No kidding! They stole my UID merely to promote a Gnome 3 announcement!

  • Gnome = good (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    After a few missteps, Gnome is now a pleasure on the desktop. The window management is intuitive and functional - the first desktop since the late 1980s that isn't a morass of windows. The applications menu is well laid out instead of a wobbly tree of menus. Overall it's quick and stable.

    I do miss the dual pane in Nautilus, but I just installed the alternate file browser from the Mate/Cinnamon project. After all this is Linux, we have choice. Here's hoping that they put those features back, as they have don

    • Thanks!

    • They took out the the duel pain feature?!?!?! WTF.
      I keep hearing people say "oh its nice but,..." and they list a feature that the gnome team broke or just removed. Guess I will be sticking with mate for now.

    • I tried KDE for a few weeks, it claims to be ultimately configurable. But you can't even do simple stuff like assign the meta key as a shortcut, or have a menu to the left of screen that works well. KDE is too much like the familiar but difficult Windows desktop paradigm.

      Super/Meta is a modifier key. You wouldn't assign a shortcut directly to Ctrl or Alt, would you? If you truly want to use Super/Meta as a single-key shortcut, ksuperkey does what you want.

      I've been using my main panel on the left ever since I got my 2560x1440 monitor. I assume that's what you meant by "menu to the left of screen". It works perfectly fine, BTW. Just drag the panel there and resize it a bit.

  • File, Edit, View.... gone! (Score:5, Informative)

    by jabberw0k ( 62554 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @05:53PM (#46588597) Homepage Journal
    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!
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        [...] the "gear" menu can be opened with the keyboard by hitting Tab until the focus goes to the toolbar, then using the arrow-keys to move focus to the gear icon, then hitting Return.

        Let me guess: GNOME developers use Emacs?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        So you have to keep hitting Tab and watch carefully for a little bit of highlighting to determine what GUI widget is selected (which might not be in a logical order depending on how the GUI was built). How is that any better or faster or easier than hitting Alt (which would traditionally automatically highlight the menu) then pressing the arrow keys to select your menu option of choice?

        We're going backwards and people seem not to know any better.

      • Besides the fact that Print is accessible, like everywhere else, through Ctrl-P, the "gear" menu can be opened with the keyboard by hitting Tab until the focus goes to the toolbar, then using the arrow-keys to move focus to the gear icon, then hitting Return.

        Oh yes, tab arrow key return. How obvious. I mean, sure it's obvious to you and I, but even KDE has menus which are obvious to anyone who's used a computer before. I don't think most people who haven't will even know what a gear is, or why it would make sense for it to be used for settings. Woops, that's not even what they're using it for, is it? Fail, fail.

        GNOME should stop trying to invent the new thing in the mainline. They're not very good at it. That's okay, most people/projects aren't, but most people

    • I'm using XFCE and I can just type "evince" in xterm. I still use a lot of gtk and gnome-based apps, but they only way to escape innovation is to abandon projects that innovate.

      • You could type "atril" if you wish so, it's Mate's version and will spare you having to use some GTK3 gunk to read documents.

        • You seem pretty confused about how traditional *nix desktops work. Why would I get stuck using some gtk3 "gunk?" Oh, I wouldn't. Air ball!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Gedit is so slow that its startup time has been used as a strawman by Wayland folks to push their view that X is too slow to use. There are plenty of other editors better than that cobbled together MS Notepad lookalike.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The first bit of the video was a bit hard to follow because of the lightning speed of Gnome (I think Ms Sandler had had too much coffee) but when she breezily announced "an overhauled user interface" for gedit, all I thought was, oh no, where have you put the menu. Has it gone to the top of the screen? Why did you put the menus up there?

        I use Gnome on a desktop monitor and even when the design is OK it's often lacking basic features - I just had a look at the Updates available (this is what prompted me to

    • Why not use Okular?

  • Because it winds you up?

  • After watching the video.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by sc0ob5 ( 836562 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @06:30PM (#46588829)
    After watching the video I find I have been pronouncing Gnome incorrectly for all these years. Ga-nome, I've been saying Nome..

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It was called GNU+Noam, but Richard Stalinman had Chomsky's contributions to free software purged from history, so it was changed to Gah-nome.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )
      Yes I found that funny the first time I heard it too - just file it with SQL versus "sequel" and say whatever you like.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hodet ( 620484 )

      I thought it was common to interpret your own names for months and years before being corrected. Started for me with Linux being pronounced L"y"nex. I also called gnome noam for a while. There are many other packages that I did this with but none are coming to mind right now. I always thought it was funny how oss folks name their products, would make marketing people run for the hills.

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

      I think it's like GIF, piss on the 'official' pronunciation, do what makes sense. It's spelled 'nome', say 'nome'.

    • I work with a number of GNOME developers, and most of them pronounce it the normal way (the same way the English word "gnome" is pronounced), so I guess just choose whichever one you prefer.

    • The woman narrating the video isn't even consistent with her pronunciation. The last two times she says it, she first goes with the normal "nome" pronunciation, and then she seems to catch herself wanting to do it again, and gets out a half-G sound. I take this as a sign that "guh-nome" isn't the natural or comfortable choice for most native English speakers. (Given the negative response of so many people to the software, this seems somehow apt...)

  • Slightly more user friendly than Windows 8 (Score:5, Informative)

    by lophophore ( 4087 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @06:32PM (#46588841) Homepage

    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:Slightly more user friendly than Windows 8 (Score:4, Informative)

      by dbIII ( 701233 ) on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @08:45PM (#46589563)
      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.

  • Gnome 3 is sluggish and slow (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Sorry to say that but with every new version of Gnome 3 the Desktop is getting sluggisher and sluggisher.

    I compre here my experience of Fedora 18 vs Fedora 20.

    I know all these tasks in the background like tracker, pulseaudio, journald, packagekit make the system crawl but gnome-shell still feels slow.

    I also don't understand why the entire desktop gets grayed out and modal once I get a dialog where I only need to click cancel or ok. I't not possible to reach other features and other applications (time critic

  • Are We That Resistant to Change? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26, 2014 @09:41PM (#46589839)

    At first I had major issues with Gnome 3, but I kept an open mind. After a little while, I became more productive with it than with a traditional desktop UI. My favorite thing is that I don't have to point and click anywhere near as much as I did before. I can do almost anything with my keyboard.

    • Wow. I was scrolling down to find a positive comment for the new GNOME release. Well done and hats off to you sir.

      For me I'll be keep using GNOME 2 until something usable replaces it, checking GNOME release thread for signs that the devs might go back to producing a high quality and functional DE.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Roxoff ( 539071 )
      No. We aren't resistant to change. We're resistant to unusable desktop environments.
    • That is exactly what I think.

      Yes Gnome 3 is different from the good old Windows 95 paradigm. But like tablets and phone, it's just more intuitive. I installed Linux for my parents because they are real computer noobs that have big problems at understanding anything related to computer. And yes gnome changed it all, it's REALLY simpler to use.

      I use it too for myself, yes it's much more fun to use on a laptop because yes it's easier to use with a keyboard only that the old systems.

      I won't say it's
  • No? Didn't think so... Here's looking forward to Gnome 4. I'll give this one a miss.
  • It requires systemd, ergo I could care less.
  • I tried Cinnamon for a bit, and then finally settled on MATE. Gnome is irrelevant, and KDE I haven't used since 4.0

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