GNOME 3.34 Released

Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen has announced the release of GNOME 3.34, bringing many performance improvements and better Wayland support. Phoronix reports: Making GNOME 3.34 particularly exciting is the plethora of optimizations/fixes in tow with this six-month update. Equally exciting are a ton of improvements and additions around the Wayland support to ensure its performance and feature parity to X11. GNOME 3.34 also brings other improvements like sandboxed browsing with Epiphany, GNOME Music enhancements, GNOME Software improvements, and a ton of other refinements throughout GNOME Shell, Mutter, and the many GNOME applications. More details can be found via release announcement and release notes.

All That

[i58]

But still can't recognize my scanner... You may begin yelling at me now about how I'm an idiot because I would like it to just work and not have to use VueScan.

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

Did you look on the hardware compatibility list and choose a scanner that your operating system supports? If not, how did you expect a random piece of hardware to be supported?

Re:All That

[I am not a Bicycle]

What scanner are you using? Epson scanners are supported by proprietary software that you must download from a third party developer (affiliated however with Epson). Brother and HP also provide their own scanner software. Most cheap CIS scanners should probably work since they use practically the same horrible scanning engine.

If it's really not supported, I suspect it's because 2D scanning has become a niche activity in a world now ruled by selfies and cat videos. Blame the scanner makers for not developing a common interface where the scans can be accessed using common protocols such as HTTP, now possible in wifi-enabled digital cameras.

Re:

[sonamchauhan]

Woah, that's rough!

Got no advice except perhaps .. Gitlab. And Sourceforge does hosting. And: send a 'letter of demand' to PayPal . (Or sue them.).. to return your money.

Re:

[sonamchauhan]

And yes, stack exchange can be that way. Despite the sin-binning people still respond

GNOME 3 Has Killed Linux

[Ashthon]

GNOME 3 does more to stifle Linux adoption than anything else. People interested in Linux probably will probably try Ubuntu or Fedora, and the first thing they'll be confronted with is GNOME 3 and it's worthless file manager. After using it for a while they'll think, "Wow! This is utterly shit! I thought Windows 10 was bad but it's great compared to this garbage!" Then they proceed back to Windows to be raped on a daily basis by Satya Nadella.

After Windows 10 was released many people were enthusiastic to try Linux. This gave Linux a significant boost, and it reached a market share of 2.96% [netmarketshare.com] in August 2017, but has now dropped back to 1.72% and Microsoft have effectively won. Windows 10 was probably the best opportunity to increase Linux adoption, but the first thing most people will see when they try Linux is GNOME 3, and that effectively kills any hope of Linux taking off.

Great job GNOME team!

Nonsense

[ZombieCatInABox]

Do you really want to steer Windows users towards Linux ? Then steer them towards Linux Mint Cinnamon, or LMDE 3 Cinnamon, or any reasonably stable Linux distro like Debian or Arch, as long as it has a reasonably recent (>= 4.2) version of Cinnamon as its display manager. And unlike MATE, the Cinnamon people were wise enough and clairvoyant enough to build it on GNOME 3 instead of cligning on to GNOME 2.

Because of that, Cinnamon can continue to take advantage of a product in active developement. It's all of GNOME 3's advantages, without any of its inconvenients.

MATE and Cinnamon

[steveha]

unlike MATE, the Cinnamon people were wise enough and clairvoyant enough to build it on GNOME 3 instead of cligning on to GNOME 2.

The Cinnamon people are the MATE people. Both projects are part of the Linux Mint project.

When GNOME 3 happened, the Mint guys forked the GNOME 2 code base to create MATE. They shipped MATE while then working on Cinnamon. So far, they've maintained both.

I'm still using MATE, because I love the smooth polish that comes from man-decades of work (all the people who worked on GNOME 2.x and then the following years of work by the small MATE team). Back in the 90's, Sun Microsystems paid for actual usability studies, and the results of those studies were used to guide GNOME development. The result is, IMHO, the best desktop environment available; it steals the best ideas from Mac OS and the best ideas from Windows, and combines them into a seamless whole that gets out of my way and lets me focus on my work.

Every couple of years I try Cinnamon again, and so far I haven't felt the need to switch. If you like Cinnamon, that's great; keep using it.

But I guess I'm "clinging" to MATE so I'm grateful that some developers are keeping it going. (I'm guessing that a lot of people are downloading and using the MATE edition of Linux Mint, and I'm glad that the Linux Mint guys seem to care what their users want rather than telling the users what they should want.)

By the way, the latest versions of MATE are based on GTK 3, so I don't think we should really accuse the MATE developers of clinging to outdated technology for no reason.

Cinnamon can continue to take advantage of a product in active developement. It's all of GNOME 3's advantages, without any of its inconvenients.

I agree that for Cinnamon, building on top of GNOME 3 was the correct decision. And from comments I have seen on Slashdot over the years, the technical underpinnings of GNOME 3.x are actually pretty good; it's only the user interface that is unfortunate.

What enraged me about GNOME 3.x is that a few people made really drastic, sweeping changes without formal usability testing and without a trial release and some (any) feedback. The result may not be horrible, but it's completely unlike any other desktop environment.

You can take a Windows or Mac user and sit them down with MATE or Cinnamon, and they can immediately start using the computer. With GNOME 3.x, you had better give them a tutorial [youtube.com].

Re:

[OneHundredAndTen]

Do you really want to steer Windows users towards Linux ?

No. As long as I have a desktop system under Linux that does what I want and need (which I already do) I'd prefer for Windows users to stay away. Because that way the bad guys will carry on focusing on Windows. Not only do I have a system that works for me but, in addition, it is more secure than Windows by design, and the bad guys will, by and large, ignore it, sensible choosing instead to pick up the low-hanging fruit of Windows.

Thanks so much, Gnome people, for your service to the Linx community.

Re:

[I am not a Bicycle]

Google has done more than Microsoft or Gnome to stifle the adoption of Linux, by introducing Android and then the Chromebook (did I get the order right?). The Chromebooks practically killed the market for low-cost GNU/Linux laptops, which is where Linux adoption is more likely to happen (witness Asus aborted EEEPC line). Android also killed the possible backdoor entry of GNU/Linux into the living room. Think of all those cheap Android pirate TV boxes. Their functions could have easily been mimicked by a kio

Re:

[brickhouse98]

Even for slashdot standards this is amazingly dumb.

Re:

[OneHundredAndTen]

You are so right. Gnome 3.* is the best guarantee that Linux will carry on spinning its wheels in the desktop. Gnome and, to a lesser extent, KDE.

Re:

[slack_justyb]

GNOME 3 and it's worthless file manager

Honest question, what's wrong with the file manager? I spend most of my time in terminal and as such, I don't often, if ever really, load up the file manager.

Re:GNOME 3 Has Killed Linux

[Seven Spirals]

100% truth man. Gnome3 is incredibly bad. It's so bad I think you'd attract more users with TWM or a Zenity shell interface. Gnome3 literally runs people off from Linux and puts a little league face on a big league operating system. What's even more incredible is that most Linux distros have made massive changes to accommodate or enable features in Gnome3 (Moar Systemd, Moar Pulseaudio shit, Moar DBUS garbage) which has made those distros suck even for non-Gnome3 users. In my opinion Gnome3 has been an unmitigated disaster for Linux. Thank $diety that few other *nixes are interested or when they do make it work, it's a half-hearted effort in Ports or whatever. Nobody gives a fuck about Gnome3 outside of the Fedora/Ubuntu bubble. Even really popular distros like Mint go out of their way to give you something else besides that horror. Gnome3 makes Unity look like an extremely high quality interface and Unity was horrible.

Why??

[dicobalt]

Why does the GNOME desktop have a Windows 8 style launcher? Do those icons honestly have to be so huge and uncategorized? I don't get the attraction.

Re:Why??

[Atomic Fro]

I don't get this either. The peeps that I work with that are young enough they cut their teeth on GNOME 3 use the launcher like the command line. They just type what program they want to run. They don't bother using any part of the UI at all. That's how they use Windows, too.

At which point do you even stop bothering with a desktop environment at all and just have your xsession start a terminal?

Good

[Kryptonut]

I actually don't mind using Gnome 3 these days, it's come a long way. Though as of late, I'm quite liking Budgie.

GNOME 3.34 videos

[steveha]

TL;DR If you already use GNOME 3.x, you will be happy with the small improvements of this release. If you don't already use it, nothing in this release is likely to win you over.

The first video is the best one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElfpeiDHbwE [youtube.com]

This seems to be the GNOME project's official video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAjPRr5SGoY [youtube.com]

The following videos really drill down into small details. I'm not sure who "baby WOGUE" is, but she talks about features making or not making the cut to be released as part of GNOME 3.34 so she seems to at least be watching the development work. She has lots of GNOME 3.34 videos; here are two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhASRTBY7CU [youtube.com]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s09BWXeXA9U [youtube.com]

It's about 'mobile'.

[ikhider]

I am not a fan of Gnome either but I understand why they do it that way, because of mobile. If you are using a mobile device with a touch screen, then Gnome makes absolute sense. Along the side you can click the menu options with your thumb or tap the other icons with a forefinger while you hold with one hand. As a phone or tablet experience, it is optimized. As a desktop experience, maybe not so much. It is a shame there are not many true Linux tablets and phones out there because Gnome would sort of be ideal. For desktop, I like KDE, DWM, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, Xmonad, maybe even Ratpoison...depending. They are all fun, but I think Gnome is about 'mobile'.

Re:

[OneHundredAndTen]

Because of mobile? And its presence in the mobile world is - what? 0.01%? Gnome is a failed project.

Re:

[WallyL]

I wish they would move their Gnome efforts into mobile and off the desktop. The usability of Gnome took a nosedive with Gnome 3. Gnome 2 was so much better. I confess I've never tried MATE, but I have had love affairs with Cinnamon and now Xfce. (Although nowadays I'm using just Fluxbox DE when theming isn't important.)