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GNOME Open Source Operating Systems Software Ubuntu Linux

GNOME 3.26 Released (betanews.com) 176

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Today, GNOME 3.26 codenamed "Manchester" sees release. It is chock full of improvements, such as a much-needed refreshed settings menu, enhanced search, and color emoji! Yes, Linux users like using the silly symbols too! "System search has been improved for GNOME 3.26. Results have an updated layout which makes them easier to read and shows more items at once. Additionally, it's now possible to search for system actions, including power off, suspend, lock screen, log out, switch user and orientation lock. (Log out and switch user only appear if there's more than one user. Orientation lock is only available if the device supports automatic screen rotation.) These search features can be accessed in the usual way: click Activities and type into the search box, or simply press 'super' and start typing," says the GNOME Project. The full release notes are available here.
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GNOME 3.26 Released

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  • by The123king ( 2395060 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:02AM (#55193875)
    Does it have a rain screensaver? After all, it always rains in Manchester
    • It's named after the football/soccer team.

      They're alike in that the further you are from them the more likely you are to be a fan.

  • by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:16AM (#55193887)
    Is the default theme dull and grey?
  • Performance (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sirber ( 891722 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:19AM (#55193905)
    No word on performance? Gnome 3.24 is so slow on my i5 with HD 4000 on wayland and xfree.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:22AM (#55193913)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Oh wow, that's SUCH important improvement that I can hardly contain my excitement! It's okay that the rest of the desktop-environment sucks ass as long as I get my emojis!

      I know man. I just U+1F4A9'd myself in excitement.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      I am waiting for animojis. :P

  • Makes me want to vomit. It is simply a mobile phone desktop.

    People would not use that in a work environment even I would prefer to use Windows 7 then to use that mobile phone desktop.
    Am I getting old? or are these people just fuck up.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Bring back the old gnome where everything was sensible and didn't try to re-invent itself *against* tried and tested UI layouts.

    All 3 did was take a massive shit on the UI and it's been shit ever since.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I actually like Gnome3, it's fairly minimalist, and make the focus you're running programs instead of the UI itself. What I'm trying to say is, to me, Gnome3 make a good effort of getting out of your way and making your work/(workflow) the most important thing.

      I only cared about animated spinney 3D cubes to switch desktops or for screensavers, when I was young, more evangelistic and felt like I had something to prove vs the windows crowd. IE from roughly 97 to 2010. Now that linux is eating windows fo

    • I have tried Gnome 3 several times, just too hard to use, the pager is broken (up/down only), no maximise button, hard to open a *new* terminal in a *new* window, ... I now run Mate [wikipedia.org], I find it intuitive and it works as I want.

    • by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:13AM (#55194483)

      I run Mate [mate-desktop.org] which is a clone of the more sensible GNOME 2. Mate is based on the GTK+ user interface toolkit.

      Unfortunately, development of the GTK+ toolkit was also taken over by the same idiots that "develop" GNOME 3.
      They have done things such as breaking the API on minor version number revisions, and added requirements to those of GNOME 3.
      They changed the tried and true behaviour of scrollbars and sliders to not paging when you click in the trough and which stops if you move the knob too slowly.
      They removed the way that submenus stay open longer if you move the mouse pointer towards it.
      Text has smooth - but delayed - scrolling that can't be sped up to instantaneous.
      I thought about writing a theme engine that patched the behaviour (which I did in the GTK+ 1.2 days) but they "deprecated" theme engines, so now I would have to fork the entire toolkit if I want to fix it.

      • by caseih ( 160668 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @10:39AM (#55195011)

        Mate is now pretty much been ported to GTK+ 3, and they've managed to keep much of the look and feel that it had with GTK+ 2. So apparently most of what you dislike about Gnome 3's behavior must be tweakable in GTK+ already.

        GTK+ 3 themes can now be made much simpler than the old engine days. You can now do it with CSS to good effect. And there are GTK+ 3 versions of older themes like Clearlooks that look pretty good.

        • by Misagon ( 1135 )

          The only thing that is tweakable is left-click for paging in scrollbars.
          The other things are not.

      • That lack of submenus staying open was the the thing that got me off of Mate. I tried to like it, but I haven't been able to break the muscle memory of moving diagonally to a submenu and expecting it to stay open. XFCE under Xubuntu is working quite well for me right now.

      • Also, at this point, Xfce can do pretty much everything that Gnome 2 could - while still being more lightweight (dunno how it compares to MATE, but since that's a fork, presumably about the same).

  • Can't Log Out? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pikoro ( 844299 ) <init&init,sh> on Thursday September 14, 2017 @06:46AM (#55193973) Homepage Journal

    "Log out and switch user only appear if there's more than one user."

    Um, so I can't log out unless someone else is already logged in? How does someone else get a login prompt then? Stop removing shit!

    • It probably means that there should be at least two linux users with uid >= 1000.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think it is meant to be read as the machine have more than one user account on the machine ;)

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I've been trying to figure out why all Linux desktops suck so much. I think it must be due to barriers to contributing.

      I looked at working on KDE, since it's the least bad one I found. They have a page [kde.org] that tells you to start by spending hours on IRC, hoping that helpful people are in your time-zone and suffering from the same level on insomnia as you are. The relevant section on their forum [kde.org] is dead, hardly anyone gets replies. They then start talking about how you should do all the boring, trivial bug fixi

      • I find MATE less bad than Gnome and KDE. Both used to suck less.

      • by juanfgs ( 922455 )

        , and they don't seem interested in fixing the horrible mess they have created. In fact their current goal seems to be to remove as many options and alternative settings as possible.

        Or perhaps they don't see it as an horrible mess and just disregard disrespectful people who come trying to impose their vision on them.

        Contributing is just that, just contributing, not pretending becoming the boss of a project at day one because you know better than everybody involved in it.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Are you seriously saying that everything post-Gnome 2 was an improvement? MATE seems to have the right idea.

        • >>Or perhaps they don't see it as an horrible mess and just disregard disrespectful people who come trying to impose their vision on them.

          You mean like the designer of SystemD?

      • by Saija ( 1114681 )

        Yeah! recently I'm interested on trying to help KDE, which btw is my preferred desktop environment on Linux, by the way of coding.
        When I found that pages that you share which talks about going to IRC I said: WTF?

        They should have some basic guidance page where they tell you what its needed to make code contributions to KDE:

        • The tools needed
        • the way to grab the source code
        • the patching

        all of this explained to the different distros on which KDE works
        but going to a fsckn IRC is not a valid nor useful resour

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          If it had that, plus maybe an overview of the architecture and how the source is organized, I'd probably contribute some code.

          • by Saija ( 1114681 )
            Amen bro!
            That would be an amazing boost to the devs out there desperately trying to improve and lower the bug count of KDE ;)
      • Try reading this page https://community.kde.org/Get_... [kde.org], it seems to describe more what you want to do, you can communicate with IRC or mailing lists
        they suggest a few ways to get started "A good place to start is with a small bug or feature in an existing piece of software that affects you personally ("scratch your own itch"). "
      • Well where would you like to go if you run into issues or problems with the newcomers guide to ask questions? Most people start off with the applications that we have.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:16AM (#55194039)

    Why can't all these UI idiots face facts. The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.

    All they've done since then is continually waste time reinventing the wheel. And each time it gets worse, less usable, and more of a complete PITA to get your actual work done.

    Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things. If there's a working file manager, a way to adjust settings, and a way to launch programs easily then your job is done ! Now go and do somethng USEFUL with your time. Wtite some decent APPLICATIONS.

    But no. These retarded clowns will spend the rest of eternity chaging pixel shading, dumbing things down and genrally pissing off what used to be their users. This week we've made the file manager circular with green icons... two months later..... now we've made the file manager triangular with all new pink icons.... two months later... now the file manager is oval with yellow icons... Rinse and repeat until the end of time.

    I hope GNOME dies in a fire.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 14, 2017 @07:36AM (#55194107)

      ...

      I hope GNOME dies in a fire.

      What did fire ever do to you?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      completely agree, Gnome devs are fucking retarding shitted clown cunts and totally fucked cunts.

      • Thanks for insulting all of us. You're welcome to use whatever you want, although I have no idea why they would accept you with such a caustic personality.
    • by rjforster ( 2130 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @08:13AM (#55194251) Journal

      You forgot to mention making the invisible border a little bit bigger. You know, the thing that breaks the fundamental point of mouse driven GUIs: if I can see it I can click it.
      Try getting two file manager windows and place them with a small but visible gap between them. Place another window, say a terminal in the middle and click both file managers to raise them over the top of the terminal. Now you can see the terminal in between the two file manager windows. But can you click on it, expecting it to raise to the top? No! Fricking invisible borders!
      (If you can click on the terminal, make the gap smaller and try again).

      • by Anonymous Coward

        This annoys the fuck out of me to no end. Know what else does? I use dark theme and white on black terminal. Since there is zero border if I have multiple terminal windows up sometimes my eyes cannot even tell where the individual panes are, it's just a mishmash of blended overlaying terminal windows. It almost hurts sometimes when my brain decides a window ends in one column, then I click to raise it and nothing happens...then I shift the window contents and my brain realigns the invisible border so now it

      • YES! What's with invisible borders? And those f$cking 1px borders in xfce while we're at it.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      .3 being the last version with a bunch of the configuration settings I use. Depending on your OGL libraries/running compositing it can be a leaky fucker though.

      WindowMaker on the other hand is still basically the same as when I used it in 1997 on Slackware 3.0. The three big differences being the visible task switcher when alt-tabbing, the dynamic menu support (was still static back in those days), and the truetype font support (originally supported only bitmaped/type 1 fonts until freetype was safe/reliabl

    • Why can't all these UI idiots face facts. The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.

      With the current hardware, the desktop UI problem was solved over two decades ago. These clowns are just reinventing the wheel, and doing a very poor job of it.

    • by Tranzistors ( 1180307 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:50AM (#55194687)

      Did you attend the last GUADEC?

      The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.

      GNOME devs felt the same way, until the Sun Microsystems conducted the usability study of GNOME in 2000. It was not useable, it was a confusing mess. Who do you think the GNOME people are going to believe, some AC on slashdot or actual usability studies? If you in particular prefer different desktop environment, good for you, there are others out there.

      Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things.

      A rather informative presentation on this subject was given in GUADEC by Jakub Steiner [youtube.com], about how animations improve usability.

      As for the rest of your rant. I hope you find another desktop that fits your needs. Why you want other people to fail, if they don't serve you for free, is beyond me.

      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        I guess it all depends on your audience. To most slashdotters of my generation (I must be old), the desktop as it was in Gnome or Windows 20 years ago was indeed completely usable as it was what we were used to (they *learned* it, regardless of how unintuitive it was). Gnome devs seem to be chasing some mythical new user, but I'm not convinced this new user exists. So instead of catering to their actual base--you know the people who actually use Linux--they are alienating their base in a hopes of appeali

        • To most slashdotters of my generation (I must be old), the desktop as it was in Gnome or Windows 20 years ago was indeed completely usable

          Indeed. I was converted to Linux in 2007 and I felt it was great. The first doubt I had was when I installed it on computers of friends and saw them trying to use it. When I installed it in classroom setting at work, I saw it get broken on sooo many ways it hurt. The GNOME 3.0 was not ready, but it addressed every single problem I had with GNOME 2.x and this is why I loved it then and love it now. Sure, it may be dumbed down and missing that one cool feature, but if it means my friends and clients are not l

        • I'm probably as old as you. You'e used to a particular paradigm and see no point in the change. But younger generations are growing up on touch screens and cell phones. If we stayed with the old paradigm, the only users we have will be you. The mission is to spread free software, and that means moving with the times to attract the next generation of software consumers. Are you a cumudgeon about your cell phone or tablet? Kindle?

          No input devices are coming like touch screens that we do support, and sho

          • by efitton ( 144228 )

            Former students of mine put Linux back on my machines. None of them use Gnome. (I was specifically warned off of Gnome). Most use Cinnamon. Now they were all introduced to Linux from the same teacher so maybe that has something (everything) to do with it. But do you have ANY evidence that young people like the Gnome interface more than other interfaces? My anecdotal evidence is that they strongly dislike Gnome. But hey, lets change break everybody's workflows every release and then claim we are doing it to

            • I don't have evidence per se, but children who grew up never being exposed to the windows interface would readily pick up the GNOME interface given its design that is similar to webapps.
              • by efitton ( 144228 )

                Aren't you the one who always says that it isn't a tablet interface? Isn't that a direct contradiction to what you claim here?

                How many people do you think are going to pick up a GNOME desktop without having been exposed to a Windows interface first? Who is going to show them Gnome? The disaffected Linux user who is now on MATE?

                PS: My crappy anecdote trumps your unsubstantiated claim.

                • Please note that I referred to webapps not a tablet. And yes, I have said that GNOME is not a tablet and what I said does not contradict what I said. If you go to amazon's website, you can see the same visual elements like popovers being used. These days, webapps are popular making the OS immaterial. If you spend all your time in browsers then who cares what OS you use? In which case, you might as well use Linux and not have to pay the OS tax. There are companies like Dell, ZaReason and System76 that
                  • by efitton ( 144228 )

                    Probably true that webapps are beginning to dominate. Which might mean we've already lost. Google Docs isn't exactly free software.

                    And given how low the price is for the OS tax anymore, it has really gotten hard to recommend Linux give the state of the desktop.

                    • The difference of course is that those other desktops probably wont respect your privacy as much as a Free desktop would. The inflection point comes when they realize that they can become part of a community instead of just a consumer. Granted our community could use some work, but diversity will be good for all of us. The other thing is that once you are in the Linux realm, as you become better acquainted, you can jump desktops and go somewhere else.
                    • by efitton ( 144228 )

                      Diversity in the community would be great. I like GNOME's Women Outreach program (too bad none of it becomes usable by those of us who won't use GNOME). But when three people seemingly dictate the entire direction of GNOME shell and happily break workflows whenever they think something "looks ugly" I'm less than thrilled and I am not actually seeing diversity. I remember reading the mailing list for input for different Asian languages and being appalled. Both because GNOME's guiding decision on input seemed

    • by Myrdos ( 5031049 )

      Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things.

      Oh, how I wish that were true. I mean, just look at the Game of Thrones intro and tell me you aren't impressed. If only we could keep our simple fascination from interfering with practical life. Alas! The fidget spinner is proof that we can't.

    • Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things.

      Well, I like them too. The problem is when they get in the way of actual functionality. "Form follows function," attractiveness is lesser than getting stuff done.

      Priorities are important.

    • The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.

      Facts? The desktop was a disaster for new users 2 decades ago requiring a lot of learning. The changes in the UI over the past 2 decades has been a big contributor to the general and widespread acceptance of computers.

      Your fact is backwards, the desktop of *now* is *not* usable for advanced powerusers.

  • by GeekWithAKnife ( 2717871 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @08:40AM (#55194345)

    I mean, for people that want to code, or browse or watch a film, maybe do some multitasking why choose GNOME over anything else?

    Is it easy to use and customise? Is it fast? Is it stable? Does it need a fuckton of dependencies and forces unnecessary shit on users?

    System search?! Emoji?? - what the fuck are these people doing?

    Once upon a time GNOME was clean, fast and simply didnt get in the way of doing shit. KDE was a slower but was very shiny. These days they both suck.

    If I wanted a horrifically bloated "flat" interface with seven layers of buried shit menus I'd just use Windows 10.
    • by juanfgs ( 922455 )

      I mean, for people that want to code, or browse or watch a film, maybe do some multitasking why choose GNOME over anything else?

      Because it's easier to set up, doesn't get in the way, can be used easily with a keyboard.

      Is it easy to use and customise? Is it fast? Is it stable? Does it need a fuckton of dependencies and forces unnecessary shit on users?

      - Yes is easy to use, my in-law uses it when she uses my brother's computer and finds it really intuitive.

      - If you have good hardware is fast, otherwise you have a plethora of other DEs to use, including the previous version of GNOME now known as Mate.

      - Pretty stable on both my desktop and laptop. In fact it has the best support for multiple monitors that I've seen on Linux so far.

      - Well define unnecessary, if it's nee


      • So far the excuses come from you. You seem annoyed that I don't like GNOME and KDE in their current forms.

        I think GNOME has to decide what its for. This unfocused messing with the UI shit is just that. Shit.

        When you have to market your greatest release with updated emoji you know you got nothing. You say it's popular and not everything has to be serious...look here, linux desktop market share has NOTHING to do with popular. So the popular bit, while harmless is not a selling point.

        I actually do use Ma
  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Thursday September 14, 2017 @09:06AM (#55194443)
    After all these years, the only thing that has ever made me question my decision to have a Linux desktop is Gnome 3. Had it been the case that Gnome 3 was the only desktop for Linux I would probably have stopped using Linux in the desktop altogether - even Windows seems to be an attractive option, in comparison (almost, not quite). Fortunately, we do not have to eat that dog food.
  • "GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience." The status icon tray was not in the way at all, it was hidden in the lower left corner of the screen. And since the applications that uses the tray will assume that the tray is still there, I'm guessing that they will continue to run in the background without the user knowing?
  • According to Gnome developers, removing of the system tray is so insignificant, that it is not even worth mentioning in the short list of changes. It is mentioned at the end of the long list, outside of the bullet points.

    GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience. The lack of status icons is not expected to cause serious issues for users. However, if you do find t

  • I only use GNOME because KDE uses the nonfree Qt widget set.

  • People still use Gnome.
  • Truly, it is a new era.

  • I used to use Gnome back when it was powerful, customization, intuitive and easy to use. In other words, back when it didn't suck and before it jumped the shark. When the Gnome devs lost their collective minds I switched to Xfce and have been on that ever since. However, I miss the days when Gnome was great and would love to see the project actually listen to its users and steer itself back onto the track of sanity.

    It makes me sad, reading the comments here, to realize we're still eons away from that ever h

  • I'll admit I wasn't a fan of gnome 3 from the beginning, and it took a few years before it started to work well.. but these days it's working really well.

    I actually enjoy using gnome... what is up with all this negative sentiment?
    Note: Don't get me wrong I still can't live without type-ahead in nautilus and will probably have to patch it when I upgrade again, but all in all gnome is nice...

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