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GNOME GUI Graphics Open Source Upgrades Linux

GNOME 3.16 Released 196

Posted by timothy from the gnome-3:16-signs-for-every-sporting-event dept.
kthreadd writes Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released. Some major new features in this release include a overhauled notification system, an updated design of the calendar drop down and support for overlay scrollbars. Also, the grid view in Files has been improved with bigger thumbnail icons, making the appearance more attractive and the rows easier to read. A video is available which demonstrates the new version.
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GNOME 3.16 Released More

GNOME 3.16 Released

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  • Obligatory Discussions (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    blah, blah, Systemd, blah, blah, KDE, blah, blah...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by walterbyrd ( 182728 )

      To be fair, Gnome 3.x sucked before the systemd abomination.

      • Of course it did. It was built on Gnome 2. Garbage in, Garbage out!

        • Re:Obligatory Discussions (Score:5, Insightful)

          by RabidReindeer ( 2625839 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:20AM (#49344687)

          Yeah, but Gnome 2 was usable. Gnome 3 switched me to Cinnamon.

          • Sure... once you install an additional application to access what is basically a knockoff of the Windows registry (Why the F anybody would want to copy that shitty design...)

            Then you go in and change pretty much every default setting because the defaults all suck...

            You get something that meets a minimum definition of usable.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      FUD FUD FUD. Systemd is not a hard requirement of Gnome. Gnome developers have chosen to focus on using systemd-logind at this moment, but there's no reason why ConsoleKit couldn't be updated and maintained for use on other platforms. Gnome developers with their finite resources have chosen not to work on ConsoleKit, but you certainly could.

      From the Linux Voice interview:

      Some people donâ(TM)t realise that when Gnome started making use of Logind, I actually wrote the patch for that. I ported GDM onto

      • You spew nonsense, you claim it's not a requirement but then say work would have to be done to change things. That's fine though, plenty of us have left the GNOME rubbish and systemd-tards behind.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by skids ( 119237 )

        I actually found during a recent fresh Jessie install that, while there is still plenty of cruft pulled in, it has been easier to peel away some of the crud (byebye avahi, and pulseaudio, may we never meet again) from GNOME than in the past. FWIW. The biggest problem with it right now is that there are no knobs to tune a lot of really retarded crap to "off" or if their are knobs, you have to hunt for them in obscure tweak tools or buried in a theme or in some pathologically treeified config database or in

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hitmark ( 640295 )

          Bassi ripping someone a verbal new one in 3.. 2.. 1..

  • The 'primary' - define and discuss (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:50AM (#49344299)

    Dispite desparate attempts of the linux user base to move to alternatives and avoid wholesale changes to the linux userspace, distribution leadership and paid developers continue their push toward 'unification and control'.

    When gnomish developers develop on macs to produce a desktop centric operating system in the hope of capturing the windows/mac market, where mac users are happy with macs, windows users are happy using windows and all the linux users go anywhere else the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'

    • Mod the hell out of this. This person gets it!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'

      The paid developers (you mean Red Hat mainly) are funded by enterprise software sales and service. That's why their bosses want control of the stack. And without radical changes, those developers and designers don't have a way to become king of the mountain. So, change for change's sake, and enterprise users will have to choke all that bloated dick down, while the rest of us either put up with it or move away. Systemd's borg-like spreading is an attempt to make it difficult to get away from this corporat

    • In other words, stupidity like the Metro interface (aka "Change for the sake of change because CHANGE MUST BE BETTER") is not reserved to just Microsoft, but is a symptom of a much bigger problem that permeates many projects and companies across the technological landscape.

      Change is fine IF AND ONLY IF it can actually outperform the incumbent. Being different doesn't automatically make it better. Nobody complains that we should completely redesign current bicycles merely because they're old. They haven't

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hitmark ( 640295 )

        It comes down to people not wanting to do janitorial stuff, but want the glitz and fame of making something new.

        This is further compounded by the tech press fawning over changes and "new", resulting in the mentality that a project that is not introducing massive changes or new features constantly is a dead project.

        This seems to be a offshot of the eternal growth mentality of Wall Street, where the moment a market segment (say Laptop computers) are not showing some quarterly growth it is all doom, gloom, and

  • As a Former Supporter of Gnome.... (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @08:54AM (#49344351) Homepage

    I am looking forward to this code to be ported into Cinnamon.

    Really, I wish Cinnamon, Gnome, and XFCE could all be merged, each giving meaningful input for Desktop, Tablet, and Lightweight.
    It's time to get it together!

  • Big far Meh.

    So GNOME, unlike even Motif and Athena lacks an arbitrary filter on file selection dialog boxes specified by the user. This makes finding spefic files in a large directory hard. If you have usability regressions compared to Athena and Motif, you have fucked up royally.

  • Primary desktop environment? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by andy16666 ( 1592393 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:02AM (#49344447)
    "the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems"

    Well, well, aren't we full of ourselves...

    • Well, it's only until they manage to ensure that it isn't plug-replaceable.

      Like the systemd logging system.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by opus981 ( 2663227 )
      Is this finally The Year of the Command Prompt?

    • Well, GNOME is the GNU project's primary desktop (Score:5, Informative)

      by ciaran2014 ( 3815793 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @11:46AM (#49346473) Homepage

      The GNU project has two desktop environments: GNUstep and GNOME. Of the two, GNOME is the primary one.

      For the history: in the late 90s, the KDE desktop was getting popular but it required people to install non-free Qt libraries. Two GNU projects were launched to counter this problem. One was Harmony, which aimed to be a Qt replacement, to allow KDE be run without installing non-free software. The other was GNOME.

      Years later, when GNOME was successful, the Qt libraries were released as free software.

      There was a third GNU project which aimed to make a graphical desktop, but they decided to first focus on a Scheme scripting engine. This effort produced GNU Guile, but no graphical desktop got made.

      I think there was even a fourth project, but I can't think of it right now.

    • Exactly. I was about to post the same thing. I am responsible for no less than 160 Linux desktops, laptops, and servers at work, home, family, etc.. Not a SINGLE one of them is using Gnome desktop. And based on a rough estimate at our Linux/Unix user's group, I would say perhaps less than 10% use Gnome on any of their machine.

      Now, if they said "popular" desktop or something, fine. But "primary"??? Give me a break.

  • Speak Marketing Much? What hubris! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:06AM (#49344485)

    Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released.

    The "primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux"? Really? Does the poster just speak Marketing as your primary tongue, or is this a simply characteristic of the arrogance of a project that has loudly shouted down every rational discussion about the merits of its interface design, the merits of requiring systemd to the exclusion of all else (not really true despite what the gnome developers say: Funtoo Linux, a Gentoo derivative manged by drobbins, has gnome3 ebuilds and straightforward patches that allow gnome3 to work flawlessly with openrc instead), and the merits of embedding splashscreen code into an init system?

    I suspect the latter, given the broader context, but really. Gnome isn't any more the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux than KDE is, or any number of other desktops. Just because Red Hat's marketing department says so doesn't make it so. In my work at numerous Linux shops (including large banks like Deutsche, and smaller Red Hat shops that will remain nameless to protect the innocent), nearly everywhere a Linux desktop is run the choice has defaulted to KDE, with a small minority of users choosing to run Gnome instead, or other less common desktops (Mate, etc.).

    The sheer hubris of a project claiming to be "the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems" in their press release, regurgitated mindlessly by slashdot, boggles the mind.

  • Gotten better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:09AM (#49344541)

    I used to hate GNOME 3!
    I tried out 3.14, and I have to say, it has gotten a lot better.

    Also you can install GNOME shell extensions, to get it more in line with the classic GNOME 2.
    Also you need get a new shell theme. But its possibly to get GNOME 3 pretty nice. :)

  • OSX (Score:3)

    by danomatika ( 1977210 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:10AM (#49344549)

    Again, new Gnome features match OS X stuff introduced years ago:

    3.16 introduces a new style of scrollbar for GNOME 3. Instead of being shown all the time, these new overlay scrollbars are only shown when needed

    • Re:OSX (Score:5, Interesting)

      by caseih ( 160668 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:17AM (#49344647)

      And it was a bad idea when OS X did it, and it's still a bad idea. I hope they can be disabled (this is actually a GTK thing, not a Gnome thing). I can see how this is useful on a very small screen with a finger as the pointer. But not a mouse on a desktop. We've really gone backwards in usability on computer desktops generally in the last 5 years. Perhaps this coincides with the rise of the "user experience" field of thought, rather than focusing on intuitive "user interfaces."

      • Re:OSX (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:45AM (#49344973) Homepage Journal
        The scrollbars on Gnome are so obnoxious now. You have to mouse over a tiny 2 pixel strip to get them to appear, then super precisely move your mouse to get to the part where you can interact with it, and one pixel off causes it to disappear and make you hunt for the invisible 2 pixel strip again. I'm sure they're great if you're on a tablet and just mashing your thumb in the general vicinity of the scrollbar, but for mouse users they're just outright terrible and enabled by default. If you have a distro like Ubuntu it's fairly hard to enable sane scrollbars again too, you have to know what esoteric package to install to fix the behavior, it's not installed by default.
        • I don't even remember when I directly interacted with a scrollbar last time. Only when interacting with crappy custom GUIs that don't support mouse scrollwheel maybe.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jandrese ( 485 )
            Or when you're on an older laptop where gesture navigation doesn't work, which is all the time for me.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sad_ ( 7868 )

            What about visual clues? The release notes say 'it unclutters your window and you can focus on the content", but i now no longer get a visual clue the window is actually scrollable.

            So the solution is to always use your mousewheel quickly once, just to find out if the window is scrollable or not.

            It escapes me on how this is a better solution and impoves my focus on the content.

            • I'm not yet familiar with gnome's implementation, but wouldn't you still see scrollbar along with progress indication if you mouse over scrollable area?

      • At least on OSX, you can turn scrollbar hiding off ...

      • Totally agree. At least Linux has no concept of "default UI" and is thus easy to choose the one that fits you best.
        Windows, OTOH, is designed with the notion that you will use the UI provided by Microsoft and is not as easy to change. Add that to the fact that I really don't like the direction Win10 is going and I honestly don't know what I'm going to use once Windows 7 is too old, i.e.: Doesn't play nice with new hardware
      • All current large GUI changes are not to make our lives easier, it's to bring in new people who can't be bothered to learn how to use a normal, productive GUI. It's about drawing in new customers, not pleasing their existing ones that are getting more and more aggravated.

        It's like when the Wii hit. Lot's of people like it, and hats off to you. But going from the NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube... and then being stuck with "casual" games on the Wii was like a slap to the face. It's like they said "There's no

    • Didn't Ubuntu introduce that crap years ago too? Ubuntu 11.04, which came with both Unity and Gnome 2 out of the box.

      Meanwhile, these days I'm having an always-visible scrollbar but without the up and down button. Which will only suck very slightly if some day I'm stuck without a scrollwheel.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        Yeah, they put that crap into Unity a few years ago. It's one of the reasons I gave up on Ubuntu.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Is this the same overlay scrollbar that maintains hard-coded list of incompatible applications [launchpad.net]?

  • Perfect (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    All you need to know about the mirage of "Linux on the Desktop" can be seen in recent GNOME releases. The developers spend far too much time either not adding things people desperately need and want (like a really first-rate file manager, instead of the toy versions various distros leave on users' doorsteps in a flaming paper bag), or screwing up things that do work at least reasonably well.

    "Linux on the Desktop" is almost entirely a "solution" that only works for hardcore hobbyists/ideologues and those wi

    • Linux on the desktop works just great for people who choose KDE instead of hitting their head on a wall and trying to make Gnome work just because they keep reading people mindlessly regurgitate the idea that Gnome is the primary Linux desktop environment.

      Gnome is really the worst thing that could have happened to the cause for Linux on the desktop. Somehow they got everyone to buy into this idea that Gnome is just the default and you shouldn't try anything else, they got distros to all adopt it as the sta

    • I wonder how hard it would be to fork a file manager to add the functionality you are looking for. Someone else mentioned various filtering options.

      I'm very much a fan of "it's easier to make the tool you need than it is to convince someone to make it for you."--even if it would be easier for someone to modify their own project than you having to learn all specifics, they're normally so resistant to ideas that it's almost impossible to get a dev to care about a feature you do.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hitmark ( 640295 )

      In recent years the big backer of one particular variant of "Linux on the desktop" is the US military.

      They seem to finally figure out that using Windows for things like cruisers are a no-go, and has adopted Linux as the replacement as they can then still shop around for hardware.

      This is why we are getting all kinds of replacement for working subsystems, because they are not "secure" in the eyes of the military. Funny thing is that their enemy may well be their own troops more than anything else, as seen wit

  • Have they fixed the invisible file mgr borders? (Score:3)

    by rjforster ( 2130 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:30AM (#49344811) Journal

    I posted the text below almost as-is for the 3.14 release, only later finding out that no, this bug is still present. So here goes again....
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-
    It's mainly on the file manager (that I've found) but you can click OUTSIDE the window and still interact with the window. For example if you have two file-managers close to each other with another window below them both and visible in the gap then you can't click the lower window directly even though you can see it and put your mouse over the visible part of it. All you do is focus one or the other of the file manager windows.
    You can also hold down the windows key and click outside the file manager window and drag it around the screen just as if you had clicked inside the window (I can't remember if I changed the default key from alt to windows in my settings but the point applies).

    Generally I'm OK with Gnome3 (providing you get the right extensions) but these invisible borders are such a fundamental breakage of the basic concept of a graphical windowed user interface.

    • Slow your roll, cowboy. You expected Gnome3 to handle multiple windows at the same time? What do you think it is, so kind of manager of windows? Full-screen all the way!

  • Oh it now displays notification history in...the calendar?

    What.

    Who thought that was a good idea? what's next? Calendar inside WiFi settings?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by steveg ( 55825 )

      Does that mean you no longer get a pop-up?

      Because if that's the case, putting it in the calendar might be better. Not good, but better than a pop-up. What I'd really like to do is disable notifications entirely, or at least selectively be able to disable various functions' abilities to display notifications. Like printing.

      You run a script to print out a hundred or so separate files and the side of your desktop fills up with announcements of files that have been printed. Why?

      • Add a notification that you've received a notifitcation, and you might have a notification bomb.

      • Well, in KDE4 if you do that, you just get a single notification that scrolls messages gradually and doesn't get in the way. I think it's a good (not perfect) system.
        You are still notified about...well, notifications, and it doesn't take up much space. Filling the screen with notifications is overdoing it.

  • Terminal notifications looks nice (Score:3)

    by Rhys ( 96510 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @09:39AM (#49344909)

    Everyone is all down on it, but the terminal notifications thing looked sweet.

    ref: http://fedoramagazine.org/terminal-job-notifications-in-fedora-22-workstation/

  • Pronunciation (Score:3)

    by ichthus ( 72442 ) on Thursday March 26, 2015 @11:22AM (#49346139) Homepage
    Agh! It's even ambiguous in their video. Is it pronounced "Nome", or "G'nome"? The female narrator in the video says g'nome at the beginning, and then makes the 'g' silent toward the end.

    I can't take this anymore. And that, my friends, is why I use KDE.
    • You switched software because of how it's pronounced?? I guess I shouldn't tell you about my GIF collection stored in SQL on a SCSI drive.......
      • You mean your Jeef collection stored in Sequel on a Scuzzy drive?

    • Agh! It's even ambiguous in their video. Is it pronounced "Nome", or "G'nome"? The female narrator in the video says g'nome at the beginning, and then makes the 'g' silent toward the end.

      I can't take this anymore. And that, my friends, is why I use KDE.

      Errr...is the "K" silent?

  • Last I checked another Ubuntu based disto which has team that made two fine alternatives to GNOME was the dominant desktop. And others are using KDE. I'm in the Linux architecture/admin biz and don't know anyone who uses GNOME any more.

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