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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience
There are advantages and disadvantages to running a development
distribution like Rawhide. One of those is that users often get to
experience new software well ahead of all but the most dedicated developers
and testers. Whether this feature qualifies as an
"advantage" or not will be left for the reader to determine. While
(sometimes unwelcome) bits of GNOME 3 have been slipping onto your
editor's desktop for a while, he has, thus far, avoided engaging with the
full GNOME 3 experience. Nothing
lasts forever, though, especially when it comes to development
distributions. As the features slowly drained out of the GNOME "fallback"
environment, it seemed to be the right time to jump in with both feet.
What follows are some impressions of where GNOME is going.
The early days of GNOME 2 were characterized by a relentless campaign to hunt down and eliminate any configuration options that seemed unnecessary, for a large and inclusive value of "unnecessary." Strangely enough, this move proved to be unpopular with users, with the result that, over time, many of those options were added back. GNOME 3 shows signs of wanting to repeat this history; the end result may well be about the same.
Configuration optionsThis all came forcibly to your editor's attention when the font used for various desktop elements (application menu and tool bars, for example) suddenly changed and became larger. That created havoc on a carefully laid-out desktop, creating scrollbars and "more bookmarks" menus where none had existed previously. Anybody who follows GNOME releases knows that there are few things this project likes better than forgetting its users' configuration selections; it was logical to assume that this had happened again, sigh heavily, and go off to fix things up. The assumption seemed valid - blinking cursors in text areas made an unwelcome reappearance at about the same time - but things turned out to be different this time.
One of the more visible changes in GNOME 3 is the new "system settings"
window. This window now lacks any sort of font selection utility.
There's two really specific cases where having
yet-another-control-panel-applet is not good: discovery of the
settings that users *should* want to change and, in the support
side of things, users who change the font, don't know what they've
done, and then have to call to $linux_savvy_family_member or
$corporate_IT_help_desk. We added the a11y mechanism to handle
vision-related needs specific to fonts in a way that was
simultaneously safe without requiring an entire applet.
Having wandered out of the area of "settings that users *should* want to change," your editor is out of luck. His complaints have led to a suggestion that a "smaller" option might be added, but it has not yet made an appearance as of this writing. This sort of thinking appears throughout GNOME 3. It will no longer be possible to configure what happens when a laptop's lid is closed. The nice dialog which made it possible to restore the control key to its $DEITY-intended position is long gone; it's a good thing that xmodmap still works. Screen saver configuration seems to have gone entirely by the wayside; it's fade-to-black for everybody now. User-supplied background wallpaper can only come from the "pictures folder," the location of which evidently cannot be queried or changed; in this case it turned out to be the home directory. Evidently nobody wants to enable mouse clicking with touchpad taps anymore. And so on. That is the world GNOME is (once again) aiming for. It is, evidently, seen as an increase in usability that will bring large numbers of new users to the platform. (Update: it turns out that some of these options still exist; see the comments for their new locations.)
gnome-shellIt is in this context that your editor, with some trepidation, enabled gnome-shell on his desktop. Given the changes in the platform, the complaints about gnome-shell seen elsewhere, and some early experiences, he thoroughly expected to hate the whole thing. After two weeks of usage in the doing of real work, things have not turned out quite that way; gnome-shell is not that bad, and there are even some things to like about it. That said, there are a lot of things that could be better, and a return to the "fallback" environment is likely, at least for a while. The initial gnome-shell experience was harsh indeed; it ran so slowly that the desktop was essentially frozen. Your editor is a fast typist, but, unreasonable person that he is, he still believes that a terminal emulator should be able to keep up with him; that was not the case when running gnome-shell. The problem, as it turns out, is the result of limitations in some Intel graphics chipsets which cannot do 3D rendering if the display width or height exceeds 2048 pixels. The system in question, running with two monitors, had such a display. Disabling the second monitor makes things work, but with an obvious cost; one might describe it as a new form of the classic time/space tradeoff. One can argue that this particular failure is not gnome-shell's fault, but it is a consequence of the decision to require working 3D support to run gnome-shell at all. It seems likely that, as more users try GNOME 3, the number of people encountering this kind of problem will grow. Systems which work perfectly under GNOME 2 can collapse under GNOME 3. One can only hope that the detection of such systems improves in the near future; gnome-shell should simply refuse to run in such situations. The alternative - a nearly-frozen desktop - is just not the sort of Amazingly Improved Usability experience that users might have been hoping for. Beyond that, the desktop is not quite as responsive as it was under GNOME 2; there is a perceptible delay when scrolling within windows, for example. Emacs windows get corrupted when compositing is in use; this bug has been reported for a while, but no solutions are in sight. That said, gnome-shell does offer a desktop which is visually pleasing, with nice drop shadows, zooming effects, and such. One can argue about whether it's all worth the cost, but 3D rendering is something that should work well on most Linux systems at this point. The decision to make use of hardware-accelerated 3D rendering in gnome-shell is defensible - as long as the alternatives work properly. The GNOME 2 panels, which could be configured to appear almost anywhere on the display (your editor's laptop has a single panel running vertically on the left edge) has been replaced by a mostly featureless black bar wired to the top of the screen. Launchers as such are a thing of the past. Instead, one clicks on the "Activities" button (or simply slams the pointer into the upper left corner of the screen); in response, the desktop will zoom back yielding a display of application windows (no longer overlapping), a "dash" on the left side of the display, and a strip representing workspaces down the right side. The "dash" looks like an application launcher panel, but it is a bit different. Its contents are the union of the applications which are currently running and the user's "favorites." Clicking on an icon will either (1) launch the application if an instance is not already running, or (2) take the user to a running instance if it exists. Getting a second browser window (say) requires right-clicking on the icon and selecting "new window." So, an operation which was previously accomplished with a single click on a panel icon now requires (1) moving to the upper right corner of the display, (2) right-clicking on an icon, and (3) selecting a menu entry - a rather longer and slower sequence of events. It is not immediately clear this behavior is an increase in usability. The reasoning behind this change is described this way:
For many applications, such as XChat IRC, Telepathy, Evolution,
Calculator, or Chess, it makes most sense to only run one instance
of the application, so switching to the existing window of the
application is what the user wants if the application is already
running. However, in GNOME 2, the user had to know whether such
application is already running before making a decision to click on
a launcher to open a new window of the application. Accidentally
opening a duplicate window could mean having an unnecessary extra
Calculator window cluttering the desktop or signing in into IRC
under a second nick. By combining the application launcher and the
application switcher and making switching to the already running
copy of the application the default behavior, we give the user
confidence that if they just go ahead and click on the application
icon, the right thing will happen.
Your editor, having been blissfully unaware of the scourge of unnecessary calculators just waiting for their opportunity to overwhelm his desktop, has not yet come to love the new way of doing things. Happily, gnome-shell has not done away with the concept of workspaces, despite some claims that workspaces confuse inexpert users more than almost any other feature. They have become more dynamic, though, and do not really exist until windows are dragged into them. Anybody who uses workspaces heavily may come to miss the old scheme where workspaces were fixed. In your editor's world, workspace 2 is where LWN writing gets done, workspace 3 is for programming, and email is hidden in workspace 1 where it can be ignored for extended periods. Photo editing tends to happen in workspace 4, and so on. Gnome-shell makes it harder to know where everything is without having to go looking for it; one learns to be careful in the initial population of the workspaces. Switching between workspaces involves moving the pointer to the upper left corner to zoom back, then going all the way to the right side of the display to select the workspace of interest, then clicking on a window (or hitting escape) to zoom back in - a lengthy ritual. The good news is that it is still possible to designate keystrokes for moving quickly between workspaces, so it's not necessary to do the zoom-back-and-click dance every time. As has been discussed elsewhere, gnome-shell has done away with the "minimize" and "maximize" buttons on window titlebars. Your editor never found any use for either and, thus, does not miss them at all. On the other hand, the maximization of windows by dragging them to the top of the screen is unintuitive, surprising, and unwelcome. It's easily undone, but it's annoying.
In summaryThere are a number of other weirdnesses perpetrated in the name of usability. For example, there's no "power the system off" option in sight. To turn off the system, the user must click on one's own name at the upper right and hold down the "Alt" key while the menu is visible. Clicking on one's name may be more intuitive than stopping the system with the "Start" button, but it seems a little strange and possibly narcissistic as well. Hiding a useful menu item (we all turn off our systems sometimes) behind the "Alt" key, instead, seems intended to confuse. All of these complaints notwithstanding, it must be said that gnome-shell is not an unpleasant environment to work in most of the time. It looks nice, and most of the needed functionality is not that far away. It is also said to be designed for easy enhancement via extensions written in JavaScript; very few of these extensions exist now, but one can imagine that developers will use this capability to improve the gnome-shell experience considerably in the future. For now, your editor will be switching back to the fallback environment so he can have his second monitor and Emacs back. But, if a properly functioning gnome-shell were the only alternative available, it would not be that bad a fate. Around GNOME 3.4 or so, when the important configuration options come back, GNOME 3 has a good chance of being a pleasant, flexible, and powerful desktop. But the road between here and there may be a little rough in spots. (Finally, your editor would like to thank the numerous GNOME developers who have responded to his questions. We did not always agree with each other, but they were always more than willing to answer questions and to help get things working.) (Log in to post comments)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:06 UTC (Tue) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link] The nice dialog which made it possible to restore the control key to its $DEITY-intended position is long gone; Did you mean the dialog which has moved to: Region and Language > Layouts > Options ? User-supplied background wallpaper can only come from the "pictures folder," the location of which evidently cannot be queried or changed; in this case it turned out to be the home directory. This is odd, it should be ~/Pictures that's what the default setting is. Unless that directory has been deleted, in which case it gets set to ~. Evidently nobody wants to enable mouse clicking with touchpad taps anymore. Huh? Mouse and Touchpad > Touchpad > Enable mouse clicks with touchpad And so on. Indeed, I wonder what other discoverability problems were faced while doing the testing. Am I missing something drastic or was all this overlooked?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:12 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Interesting. I asked the GNOME people about moving the control key, and they didn't know. I'm sorry I missed it, but you probably don't have to be as dense as me to not go three clicks into "regions and language" to look for keyboard fixups. Why on earth isn't it under "keyboard"? Oh, yes, that's where the "blinking cursor" option is...:)On the touchpad thing, I don't have a "touchpad" option at all. Probably because the system in question lacks something which GNOME recognizes as touchpad hardware (there is one present). My error.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:19 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
The touchpad UI will only be visible if X is reporting that there's a touchpad present - otherwise there's no way to turn tap to click on and off anyway.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:58 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]
It is true that, if "Pictures folder" is chosen, the images there are pre-populated from XDG_PICTURES_DIR (see ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs) -- and there's no way, it seems, to change this.
However, there is a '+' button that lets you pick your own image from a different folder to add to the list. ISTR it only starts appearing in the 2.9x.* betas, because I do remember having this problem the first time I switched to Rawhide, a month or so ago.
Pictures Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:05 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I'm running control-center-2.91.6; no "+" button in site here. Does it show up in a later version than that?
Pictures Posted Mar 16, 2011 6:28 UTC (Wed) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link]
2.91.6 is a very old beta, tons of new features and bugfixes have landed since then. I strongly believe that 2.91.92 (to be released on Monday) or at the very least 2.91.91 (released March 9th) should've been reviewed.
Most of the reviews I've seen have reviewed the older betas, and often criticized GNOME 3 for bugs, glitches, and missing features that are already fixed. I had hoped LWN's coverage would be more up-to-date, especially since 2.91.6 was released 1.5 months ago.
Pictures Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:11 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] I'm running what rawhide packages - as noted in the article. Gnome-shell is at 2.91.91, for what it's worth.According to the GNOME git repository, control-center 2.91.6 was tagged on February 2. The next release was 2.6.90, three weeks ago; I'm not sure why rawhide hasn't pulled it in yet.
Pictures Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:18 UTC (Wed) by yaneti (subscriber, #641) [Link] Often in this stage of development the prerelease branch has newer stuff than rawhide. You could try# yum update --releasever=15 --enablerepo updates-testing --skip-broken
Pictures Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:20 UTC (Wed) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link]
Ah, well, I suppose we should blame the rawhide folks for not updating it :)
However, the fcrozat has been releasing weekly livecd images[1] with GNOME 3[2] on them, although I haven't given them a spin myself.
1. http://blog.crozat.net/2011/03/gnome-3-live-image-010-rel...
Pictures Posted Mar 16, 2011 6:32 UTC (Wed) by nirbheek (subscriber, #54111) [Link]
To answer your question about the add button in the gnome-control-center backgrounds panel, it was added a week after 2.91.6 was released:
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-control-center/commit/?...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:11 UTC (Tue) by psankar (subscriber, #68004) [Link]
My main problems are:
- Top panel doesn't hide at all and not movable to left/right
I will have to live with the gnome 2.x until these are fixed.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:31 UTC (Wed) by RainCT (subscriber, #57473) [Link]
I remember a patch for panel auto-hide got merged quite some time ago. Unless it was removed, the option should be available in gconf/dconf.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:39 UTC (Wed) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]
have you tried Guake (or YaKuake). they are terminals that are hiden, and then drop down from the top of the screen when you press a hotkey (apparently like the terminal in the game quake). sounds like this would fit your terminal usage. i don't know if it works with gnome3, but it can be quite handy traditional desktops.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:00 UTC (Wed) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
I second the Yakuake suggestion (or Guake, which I didn't know). Terribly useful, specially when running multiple workspaces (with loads of shell tabs).
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:57 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
It is not the intention that the top panel will ever be movable, officially, though it is conceivable that a third-party JS extension could change it. The top panel is intended as a safe harbor: it's always there looking exactly like its supposed to look and nothing can install applets in to it that do god-knows-what (that's what the message tray is for). The white-list of top panel functions is: overview access, application-level functions like ("Quit" or "Open a File"), the clock, and *hardware* applets (a11y, sound, network, bluetooth, power, always in that order) and the user menu for setting IM status and session-specific tasks (logout, settings).
Workspaces are *only* vertical. There is no horizontal movement and though there are some extensions in the works that do modify this it, it is not the intention that there will ever be permanent workspaces. We do realize that this is a workflow change for some people, such as yourself, but this does a couple of things: it makes the mental model of a workspace discoverable via the animation associated with the act of creation and it emphasizes task-oriented work.
For example, last week I had a number of conflicting tasks on-going and a lot of things distracting me with this GNOME 3 launch coming up. To complete a paper I was working on, I moved all the related PDF's, websites and LibreOffice windows to a new workspace and Shell kept things from distracting me while I was completing the task. By setting my status to "Away" in the user menu, this told Shell to suppress all IM, IRC, Updates and jhbuild notifications and allowed me to focus on my work. When I took a break, I flipped back to my main workspace and all the pending "jclinton: ping" notifications were waiting for me in the Shell Message Tray.
When I go back to Fallback Mode now, I feel like I've lost something.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:11 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] it is not the intention that there will ever be permanent workspacesFWIW, a number of older window managers (including the venerable fvwm2) have much the same underlying implementation. I have never seen a single user of these window managers (who use workspaces at all) who does not immediately congeal into a standard layout of workspaces and move from it only when forced: and I've seen a lot of users of fvwm. I've been using the same workspace layout for more than eight years now, and its change from the layout I started with seventeen years ago is not great. There are 'spare' workspaces on it, but a core set of applications remain on the same workspaces forever. This is wired into my fingers and wired into my wm hotkeys: I can get to any of them, and navigate between them, in very nearly no time at all, without conscious thought. It seems to me that you're destroying this working pattern. This if nothing else would render GNOME 3 forever unusable for me, no matter what other nifty features it gained. From experience, I can relearn *typing* more easily than I can relearn this.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:19 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
As a happy fvwm2 user, I submit that there will *never* be anything that makes you happy except it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Oh no, fvwm2 has big problems. I use it mostly out of inertia. (The biggest of its problems are an absence of proper programmability and a deep-seated architectural inability to handle double-buffering, which rules out compositing forever. Compositing bling may be pointless but a little subtle bling -- not giant desktop cubes, just things like subtle glows around active window edges and the like -- *does* make the desktop look prettier and slightly easier to use.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:49 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
btw, I note that you totally ignored the actual point I was making, which was not 'I am a total stick-in-the-mud' but rather 'constant workspaces wire themselves into your fingers and mind, promote the formation of unconscious habits, and thus improve working speed'.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:10 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] I note that you totally ignored the actual point I was makingWelcome to the wonderful world of GNOME. One of the reasons I still use fvwm, despite its faults, is that GNOME and other similar desktop projects have no desire to cater to my needs, and whenever I've asked how to do something I've been told that I'm wrong to want it. By all means provide defaults that you think will work for the majority of users. But it's my computer, and I want it to work the way I want it to work, not the way some desktop developer thinks I should want it to work. Fvwm lets me do that. People are not the same, no matter how much some might wish it so. The GNOME project in particular is unwilling to acknowledge that point. They're wrong. But they've made it clear they have no intention of changing their viewpoint.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 15:59 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
You are wrong to demand *your* needs from others. The 'developer' tries to cater to as many as possible, i doubt fvwm does that. Remember, you are not more important than anyone else, and free software is not about solving *your* needs.
But you are free to *create on your own* whatever extension you need.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 7:55 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
> You are wrong to demand *your* needs from others. The 'developer' tries to cater to as many as possible, i doubt fvwm does that. Remember, you are not more important than anyone else, and free software is not about solving *your* needs.
You're wrong about GNOME developers: they are not trying to cater to as many as possible--this whole article is about that very point.
You're ignoring the fact that GNOME devs (and "designers") are claiming to be making software for other people to use--people besides said devs and "designers." They *want marketshare*, yet they stubbornly refuse to cater to the voiced needs of the market.
They aren't catering to as many as possible--they are catering to an imagined user, one who's nearly computer-illiterate, and is unable to learn or adapt, too. Self-proclaimed "designers" are "designing" based on "research" and ignoring in-their-face, real-world, practical problems brought to their attention by their *actual* audience.
They are being hypocrites: they claim to be making software for others, yet they're actually just pleasing themselves.
And that's fine: we're not paying them--they should scratch their own itches if that's what they want to do.
The problem is that they are either dishonest or delusional. They should just admit that they are going to do what *they* want to do, so that other people can stop wasting their time trying to convince them that GNOME 3 isn't what anyone besides GNOME devs and "designers" want.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:56 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
So, have you anything else to say about his *actual* complaint and insight? Which is not fvwm-related whatsoever.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:13 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
You assume it will never happen, assmuning we are talking about fixed workspace for app X. There is a real usability case for keeping the same workspaces open across sessions.
Also, i'm sure a simple extension/plugin can be made to force certain apps opening on certain workspaces. Just because it won't be enabled or distributed by default, doesn't mean it's not appreciated.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
Sorry, but I don't get the gist of your message. Might be because I'm not a native English speaker.
Do you agree with nix that the ability to have fixed static workspace arrangements is important, or do you disagree?
Or do you agree with the GNOME3 developers that workspaces should be dynamic all the time, only created as needed? (At least that seems to be their assumption that's reported here. That's why I asked Jason if he could please stop with his cheap fvwm shots, actually react to nix's argument, and confirm or deny that this reported viewpoint is true or not.)
Actually, I don't use GNOME. But I try to keep educated in the design decisions of the various Linux desktop environments. And this is an important design decision, IMHO.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 0:54 UTC (Fri) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
I'm no native English speaker either :).
I think i missed what you meant with fixed workspaces. If it's app X in workspace Y at all times, i'm sure an extension is doable.
I was agreeing that the workspace layout should be remembered across sessions (login/logout, boot etc.). That's fixed enough for me..
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 4:49 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]
I have a 4x2 workspace layout, and I usually fly from one workspace to another by zipping my mouse to the edge, wait a half second and then pop to the next workspace. This has long been deprecated by the gnome folks, which I've been using sawfish to take over. Lately, since sawfish is now pretty much unmaintained, I've been using xfwm4.
Gnome3 scares the crap out of me. My box doesn't support 3D (I build my boxes, and always buy the cheapest video card I can find). It sounds like I can't even use most of the new features that come with it.
I'll have to remember to press "HOLD" in aptitude on gnome (like I did for grub) and stick it out for as long as possible. By the time I'm forced to go to gnome3, I think I may be switching to KDE.
As I believe Linus once said: You make a desktop environment made for idiots, only idiots will use it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:07 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
> Lately, since sawfish is now pretty much unmaintained, I've been using xfwm4.
There's a new release, 1.8.0, but I haven't tried it yet. Recent versions in the Unbuntu repository have been broken, so I've been using something quite old. There's something about writing themes in lisp that I can't seem to give up. :)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 19, 2011 8:22 UTC (Sat) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
I stuck with sawfish for years but ended up switching to openbox (after briefly trying metacity) for the same reason. i'm pretty happy with it. can't say i really miss anything from sawfish. OB gives me a no-fuss WM without forcing animation and other annoying & distracting bling on me. i'm going to have to look for a decent replacement for gnome-panel sometime soon. i expect it will be "deprecated" to force people into gnome's Glorious Vision whether they like it or not. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found one that is an adequate replacement.
even the cheapest video cards available these days can do 3d acceleration. and that's been true for years (but until fairly recently only if you're willing to install proprietary drivers for them) not that that is an excuse to force 3d crap in your WM on you if you don't want it. and that, i believe, is the reason why Gnome's changes generate so much hostility - they come up with what is, to them, an amazing idea and expend all of their development effort on it. but instead of making it available as an option to allow people to try it and gradually get used to it (or decide "it's not for me, i'll stick with what i like") they force it on everyone...and not even as the default option, but as the ONLY option personally, i'd rather they concentrated on fixing existing bugs than go chasing shiny new things all the time, but volunteers have the right to work on what they want to.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:50 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (subscriber, #56959) [Link]
> It is not the intention that the top panel will ever be movable, officially, though it is conceivable that a third-party JS extension could change it. The top panel is intended as a safe harbor: it's always there looking exactly like its supposed to look and nothing can install applets in to it that do god-knows-what (that's what the message tray is for).
I run GNOME 2.x on a netbook, and when I moved the top panel to the left edge of the screen, the vertical space for each web page increased by at least 10 percent. Since vertical space is at a greater premium than horizontal space, shouldn't any safe harbor be on the left or right sides of the screen?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:55 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Three points:
1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:17 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.
Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
> Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.
Useful content: yes; large content: no.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 18:57 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (subscriber, #56959) [Link]
> > Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.
> Useful content: yes; large content: no.
Another completely ridiculous statement.
foom didn't say anything about large content. Their comment was that users with a small screen may "want to use the whole thing."
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 18:54 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (subscriber, #56959) [Link]
> Three points:
> 1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.
I don't have a bottom panel. As I explained in my earlier comment, I only have a panel on the left side of the screen. I don't have a panel on the top or the bottom. Adding an unmovable top panel removes vertical space--a huge amount of space on a netbook screen.
> 2. 90 deg. rotated text is not legible so it's likely never going to be an out-of-the box option though you may be able to use an extension to get some of what you want.
The main menu pops out to the right, so there is almost no rotated text. But my main problem is the removal of useful out-of-the-box options for purely dogmatic reasons.
> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.
In GNOME 2.x, I was able to easily configure the panel on the left, and I have made no complaints about the screen real-estate of the device. GNOME 2.x is perfectly usable (with customization) on a netbook. Why take a step backwards in GNOME 3.x? And please don't tell me I have to buy new hardware when I upgrade.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 19, 2011 13:12 UTC (Sat) by gjmarter (subscriber, #5777) [Link]
>> Three points:
>> 1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.
> I don't have a bottom panel. As I explained in my earlier comment, I only
Seconded, since the decline of full-height monitors I can't understand why we keep forcing the dead screen space to be along the top (or bottom). Most users have more width than height.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 21, 2011 12:03 UTC (Mon) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link] > 90 deg. rotated text is not legible 没
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:03 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 24, 2011 20:59 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]
Whoosh!
pjm's comment went completely over your head. Your statements are true, but they are completely irrelevant to both pjm's point and the point to which he was responding.
The original comment from me@jasonclinton.com was "90 deg. rotated text is not legible." This statement is false to the point of absurdity, unless you have some hopelessly myopic and restrictive definition of text along the lines of "text = latin text". pjm was pointing out the obvious falsehood: East Asian languages use vertical text by default, and under no reasonable interpretation is such text "not legible".
It is true that Han characters don't rotate, but how is this at all relevant to the legibility of vertically oriented text? It isn't.
Similarly, the latin alphabet is not well designed for vertical text, but this is not relevant to any point that was being made in pjm's comment.
Vertical text Posted Mar 24, 2011 21:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Actually, vertical Latin text works just fine for the GNOME 2 panel. I can read it without twisting my neck too badly (and without lifting the laptop from the table). But even that matters little: what's there to read on the panel? The Applications/Places/System pulldowns are pretty clear no matter what their orientation is, I really don't have to sound them out every time.
Vertical text Posted Mar 25, 2011 15:05 UTC (Fri) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] For the GNOME 2 panel (haven't yet cut myself on the GNOME 3 bleeding edge), the date and time display becomes rotated and unreadable on vertical panels (and, sadly, even in Chinese, GNOME rotates the characters, which is not the right behavior). Conversely, the window titles in the task list are not rotated and thus are never capable of being displayed on a vertical panel unless you configure your panel to be inordinately wide. These are the main items of text that I would like to be able to read on vertical panels.
giving more vertical space in an interface Posted Mar 25, 2011 4:56 UTC (Fri) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]
I'm sorry if my comment was interpreted as saying look how wrong you are; that wasn't my intent.
I'm excited that there are common languages that are legible in only a small amount of horizontal space, because it does allow putting some interface elements at the side of the screen or of a window when native English-speaking interface designers wouldn't usually think of that option. Icons are one tool that can help in allowing what might be a horizontal interface element (titles of windows/tabs/..., buttons, menus) to fit in a vertical space; using vertical text is another, and it's important to remember that vertically-oriented text (whether with glyph rotation or not) can work well in some languages better than in english. I thought a "one-line" response would make an impression that might inspire interface designers reading the thread, and might serve to remind them of this possibility for their creations.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:01 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.
Yet another example of GNOME's "You're wrong for wanting that" attitude towards its actual userbase. Said userbase will, of course, soon shrink rapidly due to the aforementioned attitude.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:22 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
So... the users are wrong. The computers are wrong. What else will you declare unacceptable?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 25, 2011 14:00 UTC (Fri) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]
1) Good. More free space as a default and fewer panels is better.
2) Who's requesting 90-degree rotated text? I'm hearing requests to make the top-panel moveable to the left or right side of the screen.
3) This is a straw-man argument. Plenty of netbooks are available w/ a 1366x768 resolution or at least 1024x600 resolution. The former is equal to most of those 'equal cost laptops' you mention.
This mindset is also ignoring a basic physical fact:
LCD screens are becoming wider and shorter, to the point even $3k+ laptops aren't physically available except with 16:9 or in increasingly rare cases 16:10 screens.
I'd rather work in an 800x600 box than a 1024x560 box. Maximizing the smallest available dimension seems a more sane idea to me, even if it costs more overall pixel count.
The fate of non-desktop-environment applications Posted Mar 20, 2011 23:25 UTC (Sun) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link]
> By setting my status to "Away" in the user menu, this told Shell to suppress all IM, IRC, Updates and jhbuild notifications and allowed me to focus on my work.
I've seen claims in the same ballpark made before, and they always make me confused. Do people actually restrict their applications to whatever is in their current desktop environment? Otherwise, I don't understand how this could possibly work, and without working perfectly, I believe such a feature would only create confusion and irritation ("Why am I still getting messages in this one application when I told the system I didn't want to be disturbed?").
Just to provide a concrete example, I run a KDE4 desktop, with KMail (KDE) for e-mail, Psi (Qt, but not KDE) for IM, Opera (their own toolkit) as my browser and RSS reader, GnuCash (GTK+, not sure if it integrates with GNOME) for accounting, Weechat (ncurses in screen in a Konsole terminal) for IRC, Emacs with Gnus (GTK+ or terminal) for usenet news and, for what I believe is the largest part of my communications load, Emacs with LysKOM (again, GTK+ or terminal, and no, you're not expected to have heard of LysKOM). And suppressing incoming messages is just one tiny part of the problem: What's the point of adding Nepomuk metadata to my documents if Emacs in LaTeX mode can't use it? Why have Akonadi store some PIM data, when it can't see the equally important data in RSS or usenet feeds?
It's taken a number of years of testing lots of alternatives to come up with this mix of applications, and while I'm always looking for better options, this seems to be the current local optimum for me. But do "normal" people stick with whatever KDE or GNOME gives them? Do desktop environment developers therefore ignore people like me?
The fate of non-desktop-environment applications Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:04 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
> Do desktop environment developers therefore ignore people like me?
I think you know the answer to this question. :) But some DE's ignore you more than others...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:13 UTC (Tue) by shemminger (subscriber, #5739) [Link]
Thanks Jon, I am glad to see someone is willing to poke the sacred cows of GNOME experience. Looks like it is time to learn something else since GNOME seems to be headed out to pasture.
XFCE Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:50 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
Switch to XFCE. With an hour of effort I had it looking pretty much like GNOME with Metacity. Sure I miss the compiz glitz but in a couple of days have already forgotten about it and got on with using the applications again like they are supposed to work with the panel looking like it always looked and workspaces like they have been for working for years.
GNOME might be useful again in a few years but I seriously doubt it. Their whole focus seems to be hostility to existing users in a never ending dream of bringing about 'the year of the Linux desktop' wherein millions of newbies will suddenly flood in because they removed enough of UNIX philosophy that these newbs will feel at home. They have been proclaiming this gospel for almost a decade now, perhaps we should start to realize they actually mean it and aren't changing their minds.
XFCE Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:43 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
Shouldn't it be possible to replace xfwm4 with compiz? I was planning to move to xfce in a few months and I'd like to keep the few effects I'm using (real transparency, expo, wall, scale).
XFCE Posted Mar 17, 2011 14:44 UTC (Thu) by colo (subscriber, #45564) [Link]
I tried that with xfce 4.6, but its panel turned out to have serious rendering problem with compiz enabled. I switched to LXDE, an even lighter desktop environment, which did not share the problem with xfce, and have been a rather happy user ever since. Do note that the xfce panel was rewritten for 4.8, so the problem might have disappeared meanwhile. I do not intend to leave LXDE any time soon, though.
I use a compositing WM due to the flicker-free UI it can provide, mostly - it's not any kind of (borderline) useless bling I miss.
XFCE Posted Mar 18, 2011 5:15 UTC (Fri) by Tara_Li (subscriber, #26706) [Link]
A lot of people do seem to be mistaking Gnome the Desktop Environment and whatever Nautilus is called when it's handling the icons and stuff for the main window for the window manager (apparently defaulting to Metacity). Currently on Ubuntu 10.10, I have Nautilus doing the background and icons (I think), Enlightenment DR16 for window management (and what a wonderful thing *THAT* is!) and the Gnome Panels (one at top, one at bottom). People, this ain't Windows with One Layer To Rule Them All.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:49 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
These "time to learn something else" comments puzzle me.
GNOME 3 has a "fallback mode" that allows you to maintain essentially the same desktop you have now as a GNOME 2 user. They are explicitly allowing you to opt out of their great user experience experiment.
Also there are an increasing number of "in camp" alternatives. Unity is a different user experience but it is still going to be GNOME 3 really. All the libraries and all the applications will be the same. The Elementary folks are releasing their own desktop soon (this month?) as well. Their "panel and dock" metaphor may be less jarring than GNOME Shell for some. Again, they will really just be a GNOME 3 desktop though.
Even some of the "other" Desktop Environments are pretty GNOMEish. How different are XFCE or LXDE really? They can be easily configured so that you can hardly tell the difference and again they are using many of the same libraries and many of the same freedesktop.org standards. Certainly GTK+ unites them all.
It just seems an exaggeration to imply that users are being pushed off to Windows, Haiku, or even KDE. You can skip the GNOME Shell and still be using all the same libraries and running all the same apps. This is not at all like KDE4 was.
So, just keep using "fallback mode" if you like GNOME 2. Either GNOME Shell will improve to the point where "fallback mode" loses it's attraction or GNOME Shell will wither on the vine. Free Software tends to be a bit Darwinian.
If "fallback mode" is not enough, I do not see why you are not switching to something else already. I mean, you cannot like GNOME too much if "fallback" is so unattractive.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 4:57 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] They can be easily configured so that you can hardly tell the difference and again they are using many of the same libraries and many of the same freedesktop.org standards. Certainly GTK+ unites them all. That's the kicker: easily configured which seems to be the thing that gnome wants to avoid. It tries very hard to be no way in hell do I want users to do anything different than what I tell them to. I spent a full day trying to get rid of metacity and replace it with sawfish (later to switch it to xfwm4). I just didn't want to waste time learning xfce totally, so I kept gnome and used a different window manager. I don't know why gnome makes it so hard to change things. To me, it seems the gnome developers are lazy, and do not want to be bothered by supporting such options.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:19 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
I really should stop this. But be polite and nice to others.
PS: They are not lazy, they release a product every 6 month. Try contributing instead of calling out others as lazy.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]
Well, I didn't say they were lazy, but it just "seems" that they are. One could interpret that as being the same as just calling them lazy. But that may also not be too bad of a thing to say. As Larry Wall once said: "Lazy programmers are the best programmers". :)
I know when I support products, the more options it has, the more work it takes to support the product. IIRC, during the 1->2 switch, that was one of the reasons they took out some of the features. It was too much work to support them. I think the moving to another workspace by pushing the mouse to the side of the window was one of the things that was dropped for this reason.
That feature is a major part of my work flow and I took it personally. That's also the #1 reason when ever I install a new desktop, the first thing I do is to replace metacity. Which is also the most time consuming part of installing a new desktop, as gnome makes it very hard to replace it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 1:04 UTC (Fri) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
Did you ask if was possible as a separate party process/extension?
The workspace part seems simple, tracking the mouse pointer, not easy, but i'd guess it's doable.
http://library.gnome.org/devel/libwnck/stable/WnckWorkspa...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:14 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]
I daresay a lot of people will have a lot to complain about with GNOME 3.0. However, with a change this big, you're never really going to get it right first time, and you're going to make big mistakes.
I was one of those who had a lot of initial problems with GNOME 2.0. The 2.x series, though, has been magnificent. Yes, things like spatial mode didn't stick. But the dialog button re-ordering did, so did getting rid of Save buttons, and now it feels jarring using a system which doesn't have those.
I have high expectations of GNOME 3 going forward. It's going to be a pain initially - it's been particularly crashy on my nouveau setup :( - but 2.x repaid my time and effort many times over.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:36 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> However, with a change this big, you're never really going to
> get it right first time, and you're going to make big mistakes.
That wouldn't be a problem if the GNOMEs were announcing this as a design concept instead of something several major distributions are going to ship as the default over the next couple of months.
Look at how the auto industry does it. They produce 'concept cars' and send them around to the auto mags, car shows and such. Nobody expects them to ever make it to dealer showrooms but a lot of people will see them, discuss them and comment. The good ideas eventually show up in production models while the bad ones quietly disappear. Everyone can remember the one big exception to this rule, which is why the lesson hasn't needed repeating.
GNOME3 is heading towards an Edsel moment. Ford survived the Edsel and hopefully GNOME3 will only be a setback.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 21:17 UTC (Wed) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
It's been in various stages of that design since 2009. There have even been preview packages in F14 and I think even F13. Ample warning about what was on the horizon. There was a design concept at the 2010 GNOME Auto Show. And that concept has now moved into production.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:21 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
As per my earlier my comment, those packages have rarely been useable for long. I.e. when they've worked at all, they've had quite bad bugs (like the hot-corner locking up the shell), IME. It's been perhaps a year since I've been able to try a gnome-shell preview on Fedora for more than a minute.
I have to say, I'm intrigued by GNOME3 its shell. It sounds like could be really good. What I find annoying is the lack of overlap being offered to users / the discontinuity of experience. A release or two of having both old WM & panel being supported alongside the new shell would have allowed me some choice in when to switch. It would have allowed the shell developers more time to find, fix and polish those problems that are found only when testing with a wide user-base. It might allow the plugin API to be finalised.
To not do this kind of release-management, to give users no alternative but a .0 UI experience (which even if well-tested and stable, will be feature-immature, as shell developers in this thread seem to acknowledge) comes across as a bit of a "fuck you" to many existing users.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:54 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Metacity and GNOME Panel is offered as an alternative and is called fallback mode. It should serve the purpose or people can just choose not to upgrade for a while. Xfce can mimic GNOME 2.x really well as well.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:11 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
That'd be nice, but my understanding from GNOME bug reports is that gnome-panel in GNOME3 has been stripped down to provide close to the same UI as the top-panel in GNOME shell. Also, fallback doesn't reinstate nautilus' ability to draw icons on the desktop.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631553
It appears to be wrong and/or disingenuous to claim fallback mode offers anything like the existing GNOME 2.x desktop.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:44 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Notice, I never made that claim. So why bother implying that I did? That is really disingenuous and wrong. If fallback mode doesn't meet your requirements and If you must insist on the GNOME 2.x experience, stick to it or try Xfce as I explicitly suggested.
http://mso-chronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/make-xfce-rock...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:03 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Your comment was made in reply to one of mine, which was talking about overlap of old and new in UIs. I, not entirely unreasonably, interpreted your reply in its prior context.
E.g. I said users had no alternative other than a .0 UI (as you point out, there's obviously also the the null choice of not upgrading, but Linux desktop software is now so intertwined these days that that choice comes with many side-effects in having to forego feature and even bug fixes - and potentially lose all bug-fix updates within a year). In that context you replied that fallback mode was an alternative - but, as I pointed out in reply, it *also* is a .0 UI - and a deliberately emasculated one at that. So that's not an alternative beyond the condition I stated.
If you meant me to understand something else, you'll have to add more information so as sufficiently the change the context stack. And I apologise for misunderstanding you in that case.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:12 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
"but, as I pointed out in reply, it *also* is a .0 UI"
I can see why would you think that but have you actually used it? It is different from GNOME Shell UI in many many ways and although it has been changed to not be entirely different recently, the user experience cannot be called a .0 UI really. It is definitely a alternative among many that I have suggested earlier.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:18 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
If my Edsel had a switch that changed it back into a more modern version of the old care that I like, I think I would have liked the Edsel just fine.
I wonder if everyone who says "I will just have to keep using GNOME 2" know that GNOME 3 supports working with the same old GNOME panel that they know and love. It is like GNOME 3 has a "GNOME 2 with upgrades" mode.
Software desktops are a bit for flexible than cars.
PS.
I just realized that I am supposed to call it "fallback mode" and not "classic" as I have done elsewhere.
It has come-up here before:
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:20 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
Sorry, "old car" not "old care"
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:03 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
It also came up that the fallback mode is being rendered unusable.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:09 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] "Rendered unusable" is not an accurate way of putting it. There are some sad developments, like the loss of panel applets, but fallback mode as a whole works pretty well.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:16 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
It seems to me that "rendered unusable" is a perfect description. It's not only the applets, it's everything.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:21 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] OK, I can see that if you like Nautilus, you'd be unhappy. I have yet to find a use for that particular tool, so I kind of didn't even notice that particular change...
Fallback mode Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:44 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]
I don't particularly like Nautilus, I've got at most a couple of directories and a few symlinks on my ~/Desktop because I use it mostly as a transient area, so that alone wouldn't be a great deal.
The thing is that the "classic" or "fallback" mode has been advertised as a way to keep using a mostly traditional GNOME 2 desktop; see jmalcolm's comment I originally responded to.
Well, it's not that. Icons on desktop, themes, font selection, panel applets, the fallback mode lost all the things that were stripped from GNOME 3, and also a lot of things that were a big part of the GNOME 2.
I suppose that somebody realized that if the users could choose between a fully working GNOME 2 and the shell most of them would have preferred the former, so something had to be done...
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 3:29 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Nautilus is actually surprisingly useful for quick network mount stuff where you don't want to go to the hassle of setting up fuse, nfs, or whatever, or when finding music files, and so on. It actually is a very nice piece of software these days. It took about 10 years for me to actually use it, because I was always convinced that "real" computer users (i.e. old school UNIX) wouldn't be seen dead doing anything other than on a command line. Maybe, in ten more years, I'll come around to the idea of using 3D for anything other than academia, number crunching, or pretty games.
Of course, nautilus is gone too now. Which is so sad. After about ten years, after it reaches the point of being "just works" software for me...now it's back to 5 years ago with Thunar - a great project, but it'll need time to catch up. And, of course, we'll rinse and repeat this in a few more years.
Jon.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:22 UTC (Thu) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
Nautilus usable ? Even on SSD and all the previews disabled it still takes ages to list a large directory.
I'm fairly certain there is an architectual mistake in Nautilus which is never gonna get fixed so it will never be faster listing 'large' directories.
I just checked, it takes 7 seconds to open a directory with 318 items every time you go to that directory. There is no caching or anything like that ? Really 7 seconds ? That makes no sense to me.
Nautilus just makes me sad to think that it would be the best/most advanced.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 18, 2011 7:28 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> Nautilus usable ? Even on SSD and all the previews disabled it still takes
> ages to list a large directory.
Just use thunar. It lists directories with thousands of entries pretty quickly. It also caches previews of media files, etc.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 18, 2011 8:55 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
I know Thunar, I'm just surprised Nautilus is still being used in GNOME and default on so many Linux distributions.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:08 UTC (Thu) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
Nautilus is still present in both Gnome Shell and fallback mode. Just launch it. Do you mean that by default Nautilus does not handle the background?
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:28 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]
We no longer show screenshots over the background, no.
(I say this jokingly because gnome-screenshot is the only app I know of that explicitly saved things to ~/Desktop; since browsers moved downloads to ~/Downloads...)
You can access the "Computer" and Trash from the Files app.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 22, 2011 22:01 UTC (Tue) by engla (guest, #47454) [Link]
Ah but, you can configure applications to save documents there. Or as I do, put them there when asked for each download.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 4:41 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
Ok, I have to step back a bit.
If "fallback mode" is to be so different from GNOME 2 then it is not as simple as I have said it was. I was completely unaware of the plan to remove desktop icons from Nautilus.
There are of course other GTK+ apps that can serve as drop-in replacements. Still, the more you have to beg and borrow the less GNOME the desktop becomes. This is is not the crisis that some people declare it to be but it is more disruptive than I understood it to be.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 18, 2011 13:02 UTC (Fri) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
It is just disabled by default. You can enable icons on the desktop through gconf.
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:25 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
I'm sure you can enable it. You used to be able to disable it in gnome2. (gconf)
Fallback mode Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
There is a legitimate technical reason for applets not working straight away in gnome-panel.
Corba has finally been removed and applets used that and required linking to corba from gnome-panel. It should be entirely possible to run those applets out of process though, they used to in old old gnome 2.X's (still corba), but having seperate process a waste of memory.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 21, 2011 9:41 UTC (Mon) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]
> That wouldn't be a problem if the GNOMEs were announcing this as a design concept instead of something several major distributions are going to ship as the default over the next couple of months.
Well, those major distributions you refer to, happen to be 'bleeding-edge' distributions with a 6 month release cycle, which pretty much is intended to try out software and improve things like Gnome 3.
If you'd be using an Enterprise Linux distribution, Gnome 3 will not appear for at least 2 years and by then it will be more polished and supported by the vendors.
If you don't want to run software that is not at signed-off by a large support-organization, than don't run a bleeding-edge distribution.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:16 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
The "dash", with its mix of favorite launchers and running apps, sounds very much like the OS X Dock.
That "maximize a window moved to the top of the screen" is a scourge on humanity. I don't know where the idea came from (I assume Vista), but I hated it when it appeared in KDE, and I'm disappointed that GNOME is adopting it too.
In general, this description makes me extremely glad to have (mostly) stuck with KDE instead of jumping to GNOME.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:31 UTC (Tue) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
> In general, this description makes me extremely glad to have (mostly) stuck with KDE instead of jumping to GNOME.
I haven't used KDE on a regular basis for a very long time, but I didn't enjoy the transition from GNOME 1 to 2, so I think I may switch to KDE until things settle down. Our editor isn't the only one who tends towards grumpiness.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:40 UTC (Tue) by jiu (subscriber, #57673) [Link]
This seems like a very good choice indeed. I'll probably do that too, I've never really given KDE its chance, now is the time.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:58 UTC (Tue) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]
I agree, I don't know how many times I accidentally maximize a window on my machine at work, drives me nuts. Thankfully, the KDE devs included an easy to use and find configuration option that disables this behavior.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:50 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
I do hate the increase of number of actions for operations that I do ever few minutes. While it might not seem much, but the increase from one click on an always visible static icon to 2-3 click on an icon with a dynamic location that only shows up after the first click/action and its animation is complete, that is a HUGE increase in time and attention needed just to launch an application or switch to an application. It reduces productivity for the most common operation that people do with the system. And that is unacceptable. New versions must have a better workflow for common operations, not worse.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:42 UTC (Tue) by jiu (subscriber, #57673) [Link]
agree, and to me the best example of change requiring more user movements for the same effect is the MS ribbon introduced in office 2007. God do I hate that thing, 4 years after the fact!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:15 UTC (Wed) by ewen (subscriber, #4772) [Link]
You may want to consider setting up a keybinding (ctrl-alt-SOMETHING is what I normally use) that launches your common applications (ie, one binding per application). I've done this for years (probably 15+) over a bunch of different environments (OS/2, fvwm, Gnome, OS X, etc), and it's usually one of the first things I do when setting up a new desktop.
I only fight through the menus (or other launchers) for things I only need to run infrequently (either because I hardly ever use them, or because they stay always running started soon after first boot -- and then the system is suspended/resumed through until it needs a kernel update, usually many weeks if not months).
Ewen
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:26 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
A good point, but sometimes one actually likes to use icons. I tried using xmonad (which is what some others who have left GNOME have landed on) but that's a little too extreme. If I'm going to use a "graphical desktop", having and using icons in launchers is the order of the day.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:11 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
There's no need to do that. Just hit the Logo key, type the first few letters of an application name and press enter. I do this in about 800ms, frequently, for both Terminal and Calculator. If the app is already running, it's brought to the foreground; if it isn't, it's launched.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:42 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I tried GNOME Shell back in November (was a KDE user, have since migrated to using XMonad). Is there any way to unbind the Logo key so it can be used in global shortcuts without doing anything when a shortcut isn't completed?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:01 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
gconf-editor > apps > mutter > general > overlay_key
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 16:09 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] You may want to consider setting up a keybinding (ctrl-alt-SOMETHING is what I normally use) that launches your common applications (ie, one binding per application). I use the "Win" key for this, having once found the KDE 3.x configuration screen which lets you set this up. Why the "Win" key? Well, I have to use that key for something. And like you, I rarely need to go into the menus any more, although I also place my favourite applications in the icon/launcher bar just in case I'm using the mouse. It occurs to me that a "bookmarks" paradigm for applications would populate both methods upon indicating that an application is "bookmarked" or needs a shortcut, or whatever.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:08 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
I've found that there's been a net reduction in time to reach an application in Shell. For example, I frequently cannot remember if I already have a terminal window open among the 10 windows that I commonly have open. Instead of hunting for it in the taskbar (old way) or going to the overview and clicking on it (as you indicated), I hit the Logo key and type "term" and press enter. It takes me about 800ms to complete this action. If it's not already running, it's started. If it is already running, it is brought to the foreground and I can either use the existing or open a new tab (Ctrl-Shift-T.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:47 UTC (Wed) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
That does sound good, but: 1) I usually have 4-5 different terminals open and would like to switch to a particular one, they are often named by title so I can find it in a rather easy way, 2) for me personally typing is far more disruptive to my mind flow than clicking.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:51 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Then you may find that there is a penalty. In my case, I use a laptop with a nib in the center of the keyboard so combining keyboard and mouse operations is quick. I frequently, hit Logo, and nib over to the dash, for example. In the multiple window case, I right click and look at the list of window names in the popup menu and choose the one I want.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:18 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
While for me I generally have at least three different classes of terminals open at once (in separate tabbed terminal emulators). Each are in different places in the (2D) pager: it is at most two keystrokes to get to any of them, and on my keyboard at least all the keys to do this are under my fingers or thumbs anyway (though this is not true on normal QWERTY keyboards). Each workspace with a terminal emulator in it also has a chorded function key associated with it, which means they're all one chord away, and any arbitrary terminal in each of them is no more than two more chords away.
(My keyboard has a trackball in the centre, but, y'know what? doing large-scale movements with a trackball or a nib is *terribly* slow compared to hitting a couple of keys.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:23 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
If your trying really hard to hunt for an obscure reason that GNOME 3 isn't going to work for you without having even *tried* it, then I'm afraid there isn't anything that I could say that would change your mind.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:51 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
No, I'm not. I'm trying to point out valid existing working patterns that *do not fit* your ostensibly 'fit for everyone' working pattern. (I didn't try it because I have actual work to do and cannot spend every day or every weekend trying out the latest desktop of the week. The criticisms of people for not trying desktops with fixes committed only three weeks ago and not even in rawhide yet are hilarious from my perspective. Do you think these people have nothing else to do?)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:54 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
My point is that you have nothing to add to this conversation being that you are not informed.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 23:01 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]
Specifically it's not going to work for Nix for the same reason it doesn't work for me .. lack of focus-follows-mouse.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 10:45 UTC (Fri) by nyfle (guest, #72967) [Link]
For what it's probably not worth, unlike nix, I am a Gnome user with a workflow that is almost 1:1 with his, and I have tried doing day-to-day things with it for roughly half a day. And what can I say, it looks nice (shiny things are always a plus), but my productivity was severely reduced because of the necessary keyboard-mouse-keyboard dance. I'm sure non-power users will love it - but what about the rest of us?
I do wonder why opinions/insights from non-Gnome users are being, in my opinion, so arrogantly shot down. UIX feedback is always good, no? And this is a general observation by the way, not necessarily aimed at you personally. I've seen quite a bit of "Don't like it? Sod off, then." attitude over the past few weeks...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 24, 2011 13:37 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>My point is that you have nothing to add to this conversation being that you are not informed.
And you and I have nothing better to add than randomly trolling people, but that hasn't shut us up.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:03 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
You can already disable the drag-to-maximize and drag-to-side-snap feature. gconf-editor > desktop > gnome > shell > windows.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:22 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] «insert extremely snarky and unpleasant comment about Mr. Clinton, cigars, enlightenment and developers knowing better which font people want to use»
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:51 UTC (Tue) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
I'm part of a secret cabal of GNOME developers out to take away your, personal, favorite configuration options. We smoke cigars in Havana surrounded by servants thinking of ways to terrorize our user, you know, because won't anyone think of the *cigars*.
Oh wait, no, I remember now: I'm just the marketing volunteer/team member who made a special effort to reach out to a journalist and try to facilitate and explain the rationale behind a rearrangement of a font size option buried 4 levels down in GNOME 2.
I'm spending every waking, spare hour this week working on the GNOME 3 launch so keep your snark to yourself, please.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 19:10 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]
Oh well, I do hope that the choice to behave like a grandiose arrogant jerk and use a belittling and condescending manner of communication was yours.
If I'm mistaken and you've been forced to behave that way, please take my sincerest apologies.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 19:11 UTC (Tue) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Try reading the linked email before you comment again.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:24 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]
Unfortunately, I've read the whole e-mail thread. Also unfortunately, I do remember very well both the venerable GNOME 2.0 release (I had to switch to KDE at that point until GNOME started to be usable again) and the developers' attitude at that time.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 19:14 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] As I mentioned in the article, the GNOME folks were most helpful when I hit the lists with dumb questions. I still don't agree with all of the directions they are taking, but I do believe they are trying to make a better desktop in the best way they know. Please, let's not attack them personally, that doesn't help.In retrospect, I should probably have left that quote out of the article for the same reason.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:52 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
I think it's important that this point be made. I for one am very unhappy with the direction GNOME is taking, but I do believe they genuinely mean well, and I know many of the people are great human beings. Nonetheless, I totally disagree on their direction :)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 19:17 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
*plonk*
(filler text here)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:33 UTC (Tue) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
Why make a public announcement that you are going to block someone's posts?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 22:04 UTC (Fri) by eli (guest, #11265) [Link]
To provide feedback that such an action was taken, and provide a hint that a change in behaviour should perhaps be considered.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 19, 2011 19:46 UTC (Sat) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] a very public plonk usually involves a good deal of the «as a [human?] being living on high moral ground I really have to show off my moral superiority» attitude and it's not exactly the best tool for providing feedback it a) announces closing the communication channels completely and, obviously, b) it provides quite strong hint, that the the plonker doesn't care about further behaviour of plonkee
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 23, 2011 15:36 UTC (Wed) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
If this is marketing, gnome does not need detractors.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:32 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I also have a vertical panel. Given that monitors are (sadly) conforming more and more to wide-screen formats, I tend to have a surfeit of space at the sides of my monitor, and a lack of it top and bottom on my computers and laptop. Vertical panels are perfectly place to stick non-text icon bars. Sad to hear they're gone.
Really glad to hear the control-key-in-right-place option is still there (if buried)!
I'd like to try GNOME-shell, but it's been at least a year since any versions available as packages for released Fedora distros has actually worked on any of my systems!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:13 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Well, we liberated more vertical space by getting rid of the bottom panel and we moved that function in to the dash which is only shown on the left when in the overview.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:39 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
I never had 2 panels top and bottom. Only ever top OR bottom, and (with more recent, wider monitors) one at the side. The space at the sides of my desktops tends to be dead-space, unless I stick a panel there.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:51 UTC (Tue) by dvhart (guest, #19636) [Link]
I tried the fedora live GNOME 3 demo, so I didn't have the 2 week real-world experience you did. I liked it more than I expected to. The separation of desktop management with working context was very well done in my opinion. As I have started working on smaller laptops and netbooks, I appreciate efforts like GNOME 3 and MeeGo to look beyond the Desktop, Panel, Applications Menu concept. I imagine that it would work very well for a personal/social computing system, and perhaps still needs some work before it would be my choice for my work desktop.
The full screen application menu is awesome, but the categories should be on the left to avoid criss-crossing with the mouse. I can't stand those massive window decorations - I really don't understand it, so much effort has been put into an efficient use of space - particularly vertically lately - why should a half inch be used for the app title and a close button? (MeeGo suffers from this as well). What exactly is the point of the current application icon in the panel? Just another close button - the 1/2" of vertical real-estate wasn't enough? The lack of options like fonts is clearly something they just won't get away with. Some sanity checking (does the M glyph render in under 4 pixels, don't allow) should avoid many of the support issues referenced, and safe mode should handle the rest.
Griping aside, I thought it was an impressive demo and I could probably get used to it, and I needed another option for our netbook. Ubuntu destroyed their netbook UI with unity, KDE's netbook UI was basically non-functional in Kubuntu 10.10 for me, and while I quite like the MeeGo UI, until it supports multi-user, it's not even an option for us (There is a feature request for that at least https://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2682).
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:40 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
I agree with you on the netbook front, as I've said elsewhere. But, I'm using a dual large monitor setup on a desktop, and I have no interest in a Sugar-like pretty 3D experience. I'd just as soon unload all 3D support, compile software to force-remove it, and generally crawl back into my cave. I want a desktop that has panels, icons, shortcuts, buttons, etc. I don't want a netbook like experience on my *desktop* :)
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:05 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
We're landing dual monitor support at some point before feature freeze. Maybe you can try it again after that has landed?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:18 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Out of interest, why wasn't this a design goal from day one? It really feels like the design focused way too heavily on laptops, netbooks, etc. and not enough on existing desktop/server use cases. I might try it, sure, it's not a problem to login, etc.
But that said, I'm not going to *use* gnome-shell while it forces me to use Windows 95 type "Start Button" logic to get anything done. I don't mean to be harsh, but that's how it feels. If this kind of logic is allowed to continue too far in modern day living, it won't be long before I'll have to click an "Activity" button to select between applying the gas pedal, turning up the radio, or adjusting the seat in my next car.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:03 UTC (Tue) by jjmarin (guest, #53201) [Link]
I think GNOME shell is far from the Windows 95 type "Start Button" logic you mention. I'm been using GNOME shell for a while and the "hot corner" is nothing to do with the "Start Button"
About the dual monitor user case, take into account that the design has evolved in the development process and this case is difficult to polish and put into practice until the design has been stabilized and marked as definitive. BTW, there is a lot of work done on this area (take a look in bugzilla.gnome.org) and I hope it will be released ASAP.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:40 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Nope. The hot corner is just 5x as annoying for anyone using a laptop with a wireless mouse where the mouse happens to get bumped around a lot. (Like, say, when it's on the armrest of your couch.) And when your trackpad is not ideal because it's located in the "your palm always hits it" space or you have an ASUS where the touchpad being enabled causes the keyboard to miss keystrokes, or you just happen to prefer a mouse over a trackpad.
Win7 has an option to show desktop on a hot spot in the bottom right, which is on by default. It's infuriatingly obnoxious on my laptop (I don't notice it at all on my desktop, of course) and I have disabled it. It's nice and logical where it's at, too: right-click on the show desktop button in the bottom right and unclick "peek at desktop." (The name of the option is horrible/confusing, but the location is the first place I thought to look.)
GNOME 3 on the other hand is just going to remain infuriatingly unusable for me on my laptop until that hotspot behavior gets turned into an option.
The corners work so well as a hotspot for desktop users specifically because it's so easy for a pointer to end up there. When your pointer is not always moving due to user desire, however, that pointer-gravity works against you rather than for you.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:46 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
How about putting it in a bugzilla for that? Put it in gnome-shell component. If you can't, I can do it for you, but at least this way you can track it.
I think that's a valid concern.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:40 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
I don't quite understand your "Start" button comment.. just about every Linux desktop has that exactly win95 setup. Panel, start button it's all there. Unless you're using windowmaker, fvwm2 or some other kind of thing; that's exactly the user interface you're getting on Linux desktops today.
At least credit us with the fact that we're trying something different in terms of the experience. We have an overview mode in which to separate launching tasks and the tasks itself. There is no menu. The overview is a bird eye view of your desk so to speak.
The design isn't new.. I have the same interface on my motorola atrix phone. I hit the expose button (home button twice) and I get a similar effect as gnome shell allowing me to see all my worokspaces and gadgets. I expect them to take that further.
As for the dual monitor item, we only limited man power.. we were able to do it because Alex Larsson took an interest in the problem and spent 2-3 weeks finishing up the design and implementing it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:15 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
The following is personal opinion. I disagree with the direction of GNOME, but it's not personally directed at you or others :)
The difference between what one has today, and the "start button" that is having to click "Activities" to do anything is that today, I have launchers all over my desktop, and all kinds of sources of information/interaction I don't have to seek out, and I can customize every aspect of what I do. If I want the weather, there it is (both in C and in F) in weather applets, if I want the time, there it is, where I choose it to be (and certainly not right in the middle of the screen). Today, I can even navigate to useful places simply through a menu at the top of the screen (albeit the default was changed a long time ago to spawn a new nautilus window for everything you can think of doing), of (shock!) right clicking on the desktop.
As to trying something different. This is both commendable to try new things sometimes, and also saddening in this case. What I want to see in the Linux space is standardization, commoditization, consistency, and a platform people can get behind. Not ripping out what finally works well just to replace it with something else that will take years to get roughly back where we started. I would much rather GNOME 2.x had incrementally changed over the next 5-10 years in ways that existing and new users would not find so radically different. Like it or not, there is a way that people interact with graphical interfaces, and there are certain expectations. You can take a person who has never used a computer and teach them almost anything, but the other tens of millions of us have certain expectations and don't enjoy having to completely change the way we interact. If I show some non-Linux friends of mine gnome-shell they're going to find it very pretty, but far less familiar than where they came from, and I don't think we command enough share of the landscape to be doing that. But I might be wrong, and so be it. It's not for me though.
As to the design. Yes, it's great on a *cell phone* or a *netbook*. But as with too many other things in the Linux landscape, it's targeting the wrong thing. With all due respect, we should not forget desktops, workstations, and servers. This is where we came from, and where we still are. Netbooks are shiny, wonderful, distractions, and they're well covered by many competing offerings that already have established bases.
Thanks,
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:43 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Sure Jon, I realize that this is not personal. I respect your opinion.
One nitpick, you don't have to click on Activities, it's more of a gesture to the top right corner. So you flick your mouse to the top right and you get the menu. Of course you can click if you want to, or your can use the windows key (or meta key).
Nobody is telling you to give up the launchers. There are plenty of software that does that already. For some reason, launchers are a popular piece of software to write. Nobody is *quite* happy with the default set of launchers and so they come up with their own panel and launcher etc. Sure, we took it away on the default install but you can use awn, docky or whatever and get the same effect. One great thing about GNOME 3 is that we didn't re-write everything.. you can still use the same software from GNOME 2 today. We've deprecated the API but you can still use them. So the wealth of software out there is not outdated.
Regarding standardization, commoditization and consistency. We want that as well. You'll find that as a platform GNOME has that. We are still source compatible with everything in GNOME 2. We took an incremental approach to the developer platform, but separated the user experience portion of it so that we can in fact make changes. There is also nothing stopping someone going out and re-implementing GNOME 2 on top of GNOME 3 libraries. Judging from the number of already existing re-implementations of the GNOME panel, I'd see it within months. So honestly, you're not losing anything.
You might be wrong, GNOME might be right.. how would we know if we don't shake things up? Note that we've been consistent for 14 years in terms of same interaction sans distracting options. XFCE, KDE, also have the same interface doing the exact same things, only the plumbing is different. We haven't changed that user interface since then neither have they. Don't think after 14 years it might be time to make changes? There is a balance between being static and evolving. The game board is the same, all we're doing is moving the pieces around. As a project who wants to push the limits you're giving us a bleak reality of doing nothing but moving game pieces.
Look, I come from a background similar to yours I suspect. I had defined launchers, gizmos all over my panel etc etc. I still cry that I don't have libgtop applet on my panel. But I found that when I gave them up, I realized I didn't really need them. The reason I wanted them was that system below me was unstable or didn't have the kind of defaults that I wanted. Even if I had whizzy stuff, I quickly got bored because they were gimmicks. It might also be a function of age. I'm less impressed with gizmos than when I was in my twenties. Now there are somethings I can't ignore and for that an option is or gconf setting is required. You're a power user, you're not scared to change those things I reckon.
We don't need a DE for a workstation or servers? All we have as a consumer desktop environment is netbooks, desktops, embedded devices, and cell phones and we want to be on all of them. We want to be able to come up with a user interface that works for all of them.
Thanks for an engaging discussion..
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:20 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Glad we're keeping it nice and civil :)
On the Activities, I understand gestures also work, and I'm sure they'll figure out some additions (plus there are other ways to script the UI, I know this, and I suppose I could hack up some things if I wanted, etc.), but today I have launchers on my top panel for e.g. firefox. Loading a new browser or browser window is easy, with only one click and less distance :)
The thing with a lack of launchers and the like is it's part of the overall trend to remove these features (and other configuration, and hide it behind what /appears/ to me to be very similar to a Microsoft-style registry - so now the options are still there but you have to fire up d/gconf editors to set them...and I can see "power" "Linux" users in a few years trading all kinds of obscure keys on forums). Many of us don't want these features removed. We want them to work out of the box, we want launchers. Frankly, I see very little wrong with the GNOME 2.x implementation for my uses. I could of course use the old 2.x bits but we both know that they're not going to be developed, so I am concerned about doing that while other things are moving (and possibly breaking stuff). That also only delays the inevitable. I become a "legacy" user who knows the end is neigh but is trying to drag it out...not a good situation.
I appreciate that the underlying bits of GNOME are good. I've been fond of many of the plumbing pieces over the past few years, the hotplug, power management, great integration, GNOME VFS, etc. That all works well. It's the coating on top that is unfortunate. If a group go and basically do a GNOME 2.x that can be supported, I'll probably switch over to it, since I would like to retain the ability to use my media keys, automount, etc.
I'm not sure shaking things up was entirely necessary in GNOME, but I understand your point. I'm not part of the GNOME project anyway, so it's not up to me. I'm just a user of it. But I do think there is a trend right now to be trendy and redesign things for the sake of it, or re-implement stuff for the sake of it. Not just the User Interface, but lots of other pieces that don't need to be redone. In my opinion, what this does for users is confuse them, and cause them to have to re-learn everything they are used to. I see this as being another reason users will look to other platforms. If I'm going to have to adapt my entire desktop, why not just install Chrome OS or something else? Why stick with GNOME at all? If there's going to be a complete change, it needs to re-convince existing users *and* be compelling for new users at the same time.
We perhaps do come from similar backgrounds. See, I used to enjoy compiling up early builds of enlightenment or whatever, and I've played with jhbuild/etc. on occasion too. My first Linux install took 3 weeks of carrying hundreds of floppy disks miles from the one place I had net access to home, rinsing and repeating when disks failed, etc. But these days, I just want a computer that works, with a UI that is consistent and I am familiar with. I want to take it for granted that this is a solved problem and move forward. When there's a cool new addition, like having the ability to list lots of times and timezones in the clock, I don't want that to disappear in the next version, and so forth.
The recent trend to re-implement everything in the Linux space has, sadly, seen me increasingly use a Mac on weekends for personal stuff. It's not that I want to do so, it's that it's a desktop environment that remains consistent. As I also leave my 20s, I also don't really care about rebuilding my desktop, tweaking configs, or joining some web forum and sharing all of the wonderful 3D hardware details, and many of the other things you allude to :) I'd rather spend my weekend learning about quantum mechanics (that was last weekend, trying to understand transistors, which interest me far more than spending my weekend re-installing Xfce when I've done similar for over 15 years). But at the same time, I still want my computer to display the weather on the panel. My GNOME 2.x desktop does this, my Mac does this, in gnome-shell I'm left thinking it's been deemed "too distracting" to know the weather outside so I should have no interest in having it displayed :)
On the power user front, I would hope I'm just a demanding user. I'm not someone who ever really cares about changing GTK themes, and about the most I usually do is set the wallpaper on a fresh install. I used to think of power users as those people who spent weeks needlessly configuring their systems and then creating long "signatures" on forums to share just how wonderful their 3D gaming performance was (I so don't care about gaming, or 3D beyond the academic interest of how it works). So, if I'm a power user, that doesn't bode well for the number of others who will need to learn to tweak random dconf settings over the coming months and years.
Not sure about your final comment - did you mean we don't need a workstation/server GUI or we do? I personally see a trend toward (and I don't mean this offensively) "dumbing down" the overall experience, which I don't think helps our core strength as a workstation/server platform.
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:26 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Of course! Being rude would accomplish nothing other than make things worse. Besides, as I said you guys are all being nice to me so I'm happy to discuss these things.
OK - so I think we're coming down to some of the core issues here. I'm pretty sure what you've written down is shared by a lot of people.
Regaridng GConf (or DConf) - that was given a bad rap and we didn't engage with anybody to fully explain that bit. Let's put it this way, if you wanted a persistent key value store that would allow apps to react when the values change, how would you do it? In this case, having a name space, and then a simple key/value with a set of types is really all GConf is and a server to maintain state. It's NOTHING like the windows registry. I think in DConf they've tightened things up a bit in terms of namespace. It is the name space portion that could be abused. GConf was damned by it's superficial likeness to the windows registry. You will note that nobody is talking about GConf in forums all that often. I think someone just writes some kind of gui tweak tool to do all that stuff. Looks at the gconf today with gconf-editor, can you claim it is a mess as the windows registry is? We've had it for ten years now.
For all the negatives that came out of the 1.x to 2.x migration it wasn't so bad.. and we were cutting options left, right and center in those days. Today, a lot of you appreciated.. some of you claimed it is perfect. :-)
You might also consider that our drive for "Just works" has improved the linux eco system tremendously with hal, udev, improved x drivers, wayland... there wouldn't be any drive for those projects without a project like ours demanding those features.
As for trendy, people are redesigning UI because there are new devices out there. Tablets, smart phones, medical devices, gps stuff.. everything is all getting connected to the Internet.. so projects like firefox, chrome are all out there trying to capture those markets. New types of embedded devices are coming out. We are winning there. Linux is _the_ embedded OS of choice. It is my blu-ray player, my television.. and it continues. It's trendy because there is a trend. :-) If we want free software to make inroads on these devices then we're going to need projects like GNOME, Meego, KDE to be able to adapt and be able to get into those areas. So we need to re-envision what the user interactions would be, and we need to push the rest of the Linux eco system to support it. Technology doesn't stay still it marches on, baby.
Users will be willing to lean a new interface if a user gets something out of it. GNOME 2 isn't going away immediately, there will be a transition state where users will be able to get their feet wet and their pace. In the mean time, users will go to KDE4, XFCE, FVWM2 and in that time GNOME will continue to enhance and polish itself. People by that time might come back see that GNOME has something to offer that would give them a reason to learn the new interface. It's on us to meet the challenge entrancing you back to our platform. If we fail.. well we failed, but it isn't for lack of trying. But I'll tell you this, I spent two weeks dogfooding GNOME 3 and I can't go back to GNOME 2. It surprised me because there was a lot of things I loved about GNOME 2, specifically my beloved gtop applet.
I installed NetBSD on my Amiga.. (when I wasn't running AT&T SysV on my Amiga) I've been doing some kind of building and testing for the past 14 years. I would spend hours tweaking my .fvwmrc2 file juuuuust right. Then change it again next week.
What you want and what GNOME envisioned 10 years ago (before it was cool to think having a consistent user interface with minimal tweaking ) and here we are. Maybe you don't want to change, but in order to continue to be relevant we have to.
Skip the first release, come back for 3.2, by then we should have a couple of new extensions, fixed a lot of bugs, and changed UIs around to accommodate the feedback we had in the first iteration. I'm saying all this in order to leave the door open so that those of you disappointed in the changes might relent and come back after we've added some features, or put back features whatever you prefer.
I will note that we didn't re-implement anything but the user experience. But our development platform is exactly the same for the most part. In contrast, KDE4 completely re-did their internal plumbing and maybe it required it. But for those with large projects re-implementing their application was probably a pain they would like to fore go. It took the GNUCash guys 7-8 years to port to GTK2. Very painful. We have too many people depending on our codebase to be doing anything like that again.
Don't get too comfortable with that Mac, the next iteration will use IOS. :-) Which of course follows the same trend we are!
From all you've described, you seem the prime kind of person we want as a user for GNOME 3. If we offered you a stable UI and you got used to the interface and added your launchers, (and fonts for you Jonathan Corbet) I don't see why you couldn't stick with GNOME. :-)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:45 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
On the d/gconf front, I understand why it's not "just text files" (though these days we have all kinds of file monitoring and watching APIs that are getting a lot better for just using text files) but I am very uncomfortable with the idea of hiding the real guts such that one needs to edit these settings directly. If they really were just out of the way, and had a nice UI for changing them, ok. But it really does seem like things are heading into the Microsoft realm of "kinda sorta works" out of the box, with all kinds of obscure knobs you can only tweak if you look up the right schema.
I wasn't a huge fan of the 1.0->2.0 migration either, but it didn't churn my stomach as much as this transition has. I'll agree that having shiny things has advanced the Linux ecosystem (side note: I'm one of those "you can tear my real X server out of my cold dead hands" types when it comes to replacing it with something that is theoretically better but loses the UNIX networking heritage), and that some of these advances were necessary. But I think many of them would have happened anyway. Take automounting, hotplug, whatever, these are all things people like to have working and pretty much independently of the desktop environment they are using.
On the UI trendiness, you didn't really answer my point about retaining relevance to existing platforms :) I'm all for having a tablet or smartphone UI, but in my personal opinion it's simply inappropriate trying to run the same interface on both classes of device. Many others have learned that this is the case through bitter experience and failure in the marketplace, and I think GNOME 3 is going to try to offer what many other projects are already doing (tablet/embedded UIs) while not really catering to those of us who want a traditional desktop. As others said, 2.x is stable and mature. At that point, why not just sustain it, and have those interested in gnome-shell like UIs go and work on a dedicated tablet/embedded UI instead? That surely would have been better IMO.
Why does GNOME have to change to be "relevant"? Others have asked this elsewhere in these comments. This is a *fundamental* issue, and one where I think we very likely strongly disagree. I consider the current GNOME 2.x to be pretty "perfect" as a daily use system. It has some warts, there are things I would change, but I've been logged in for 100 days in this current session and aside from gvfsd doing its usual not understanding network routes changing and needing a kick, everything has been fine. It sounds to me like "relevance" is code for needing to have something for people to work on, or an answer for new kinds of devices. These are worthy goals, but they could (IMO) be better served as sub-projects, optional UIs, and the like, while retaining a great experience that works well. After 10 years, we can finally say Linux has a compelling and great UI, and now is not the time to be completely replacing it with something else :)
I *was* the prime kind of person for GNOME. But "new GNOME" is like "new Coke" to me. It looks great, passes all the tests, but the real proof will be when it's released next month and many times as many users start to have the same kind of reaction we're talking about here.
Thanks,
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 2:12 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Hi Jon,
The whole GNOME ui everywhere on all devices is my own perception and doesn't reflect what GNOME itself is trying to do. They might just simply focus on the desktop experience. I think big. It's a bad habit. :-)
The separation of the UI from the desktop API itself is a feature, that means we can come up with our own UI for any particular device. What's important is the underlying layers of GTK+/Cairo/Linux as the platform. Separating the UI and allowing us to use javascript to create and control the UI experience gives us the flexibilty of being able to create other UI for other devices.
As for your question why is change relevant. Change is always relevant. Why do you need so many different kinds of filesystems? Isn't ext4 good enough? If we just accept status quo how does anything get done? Why do we need a car? Isn't a horse and buggy good enough? Every time you move to the next level you move to a different set of realities that give you new avenues to pursue. It's in our nature to always pursue what somebody will always consider "flights of fancy". But it is the engine that moves us forward.
All people crave change, but not all crave change in the same area. Desktop people want to push the limits of user interaction. We have no other purpose. No desktop project is going to accept status quo for long. No kernel developer is going to accept using the same scheduler for long. There is always some new hardware that drives making a better scheduler to take advantage of it.
Maybe we've lost you for now.. but guaranteed, those other projects are doing the same thing we are. Maybe some want to give you even greater control of your desktop, give you lots of options, others might want to take away some, put others.. we fiddle with things, that what we do. You fiddle in the areas you're interested in.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 11:41 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] All people crave changeHere's where you should start rethinking. Most people crave stability and dislike change. They may not loathe it, but they don't like it. Change for the sake of change is a bad thing. (Look at the core Unix tools: fundamentally unchanged other than new features and the removal of restrictions since the 1970s, even though they are definitely not perfect. Why? Inertia. People dislike change.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:23 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
That's not the reason that GNOME 3 was launched. You can read what the reasons were here: https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory
* Finding windows was frustrating and difficult
In short, we saw real problems which needed real solutions.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:25 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It sounds like the amount of mouse movement involved now has made at least two and possibly three of these cases *worse* than they were. (I wouldn't know: I'm a KDE and fvwm2 man. I used to be a GNOMEr but the loss of funtionality in the early GNOME 2 days turned me off for good. Software that won't change to act as I want it, rather than vice versa, gets dumped at once.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:27 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
> I wouldn't know
Then stop commenting?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:44 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
My apologies for daring to point out how I as a human being use the machine, and why GNOME 3 would apparently not suffice. If ex-users are considered to be lost causes, so be it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 24, 2011 14:16 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Then stop commenting?
You have yet to make a single comment on this article that isn't outright trolling, but you seem to feel compelled to randomly pop up in every subthread to hurl some abuse.
Commenters like yourself are the reason that I consider LWN to be a largely hostile, poisonous community, and consequently make less of an attempt than I should to behave in a way that I might in a forum I respect.
The one potential positive outcome of your posting is that I resolve to try harder to act as if LWN is more like the place I want it to be, on the grounds that if everyone did that, perhaps it would be.
If only it were possible to killfile entire categories of articles as flamebait, the overall experience would probably be much improved.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:38 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Exactly!
We have (weirdly) in recent times gotten to a place where there is a big push (I don't mean to single out GNOME here, because it's general) to undermine our UNIX heritage, and throw it all away in the name of shininess. Now, that push may not be malicious, and I'm sure everyone is well intentioned, but the newer generation aren't necessarily respecting what came before, or the value of long-term, stable, backward compatibility.
Why do Microsoft have a strangle hold? Sure, lots of reasons that are not entirely kosher, but they also have win32 (and later stuff) that people have been able to target for about a billion years in writing to a standard platform. It is *high time* we re-embraced our POSIX, SUS, LSB, and other standard routes, had *one* well supported, ingrained and established GUI platform, and could be that shining Linux alternative. It might not be perfect, but by not re-inventing the wheel every 5 years we will finally give others a chance to really target our platform, then we can improve it slowly, evolving as dictated by real world use.
This is what I was alluding at in my other comment(s). I used to care about building up random platform bits for the sake of it, but after 15 years I'm growing tired of the same old stuff. I want a computer that just works and I can take for granted the platform bit. There's been enough time. Sure, I no longer have to run isapnpdump or APS Magicfilter, but in the last few years I've had to fiddle with (not mentioning names) let's just say "way too many" wheel re-inventions of core Linux technologies. All of these are interesting projects, but I would rather we had stuck with what we had before and new problems had been solved instead of doing the same old thing that was being done 10, 15, or 30 years ago.
In a few years, the current generation of folks trying to change everything will be 5 or 10 years older, get to the same realization, and the entire story will repeat itself. I suppose the important thing is not to get too worked up about it, which is why I also run a Mac now (not because I think it's any better, but because it's "good enough" for surfing the web and doing desktop non-server stuff at home). I might have just chuckled to myself and ignored this story, but it did work me up slightly because of the amount of time I've had to waste especially last weekend undoing all of these changes to get back to where I was.
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:43 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
I may also need to get a rocking chair, and a porch and start muttering, I'll accept that :)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:53 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] All people crave change Really? Could you back up that assertion with a little bit of evidence? My (admittedly anecdotal) experience is that most people hate change when it comes to major changes to the way their computer works. This is based on observations of my kids, parents, siblings and co-workers. My kids use KDE and found the KDE 4 transition extremely jarring; it took them a couple of weeks to get back to their normal level of productivity.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:34 UTC (Wed) by dmadsen (guest, #14859) [Link]
There's a difference between forcing change and enabling change. Using filesystems as an example as you did is very apropos -- if I want to use an old existing filesystem type, I can, and there are tools to help me migrate when/if I want to.
The changes happen *at my pace and my option*, not anyone else's.
I'm an old fossil. I don't want change. I want my hands/fingers to know what to do on my desktop so that I am free to think about the actual task I'm trying to accomplish. A changing desktop is a distraction, an annoyance, a hindrance to productivity.
And when I have a few minutes and want to try out a specific new feature, I should easily be able to. And if I like it, then I'll use it. Someday maybe I'll use the entire feature set. Whoo-hoo!
Someone may love desktops and it may be their whole life. But it's a tool for me. Don't ever confuse yourself with your user base. And God forbid, don't think that everyone likes Macs or weird cellphone menus or adding lots of mileage on their mouse.
So sure, add all the new stuff you want; rewrite anything you want; have a great time. But when you do it, *don't* mess with what I have!
---dcm
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:46 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
I doubt anyone but you can change what you have.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 21:39 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Indeed - but pinning your DE at the previous major version, which is what's necessary to keep it around when you find the new major version utterly unacceptable - tends to make your package manager very, very unhappy very, very quickly.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 2:20 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]
> On the d/gconf front, I understand why it's not "just text files" (though these days we have all kinds of file monitoring and watching APIs that are getting a lot better for just using text files)
Except that KDE's kconfig has done exactly that for something like 10 years now: configs stored as plain text ".ini" files, and an efficient binary cache that is regenerated if you change the config files. It seemed to work fine for them...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:14 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> Except that KDE's kconfig has done exactly that for something like 10 years now: configs stored as plain text ".ini" files, and an efficient binary cache that is regenerated if you change the config files. It seemed to work fine for them...
I seem to recall that one of the dconf selling points was that the storage backend was pluggable. Perhaps someone could write a backend that does the same thing as KDE, or even uses kconfig...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 24, 2011 14:04 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>In this case, having a name space, and then a simple key/value with a set of types is really all GConf is and a server to maintain state. It's NOTHING like the windows registry.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this? That seems like an accurate description of the Windows registry so I don't get why you believe it's nothing like it.
I think what people hate about the registry is the hiding of options behind an arcane interface, the proliferation of entries with no idea of what they do, the non-textual storage mechanism, and the fact that random applications add new entries and often don't bother to remove them. However almost anything conceivably changeable is documented by Microsoft, typically at least as well if not better than most GConf keys, and all of the other problems still seem to apply to GConf, except perhaps the last, so what makes GConf so different?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 8, 2011 7:40 UTC (Fri) by tjavailable (guest, #74182) [Link] Hi friends its happy for me to announce that Gnome 3 has been released. These are the steps to install Gnome 3: 1.Grab the ISO image based on Open SUSE or Fedora: 1.Pros: No need to replace your Gnome 2.x in Ubuntu 10.10 2.Cons: Need to install another distro that stays away from your Ubuntu 10.10 installation. 3.You can get the ISO image from here. Then place it on a CD or your USB stick and enjoy the Gnome flavour! 2.PPA for Ubuntu 11.04 1.Pros: Enables to try Gnome 3 from your own installed Ubuntu or in top of your Gnome 2.x 2. Cons: Your current Gnome 2.x might get bloated and you will feel why I'm using this as my default one since Ubuntu is shipping Unity from 11.04! For more check Here
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:41 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> We don't need a DE for a workstation or servers? All we have as a consumer
> desktop environment is netbooks, desktops, embedded devices, and cell > phones and we want to be on all of them. We want to be able to come up > with a user interface that works for all of them.
Cell phones and tablet computers need a fundamentally different interface than desktop PCs. You cannot create a single interface that works for all of them. Many have tried and failed, including Microsoft.
Embedded devices usually don't have an interface at all. If they do, it will depend heavily on what the embedded device is designed to do. Web interface are popular choices for consumer devices like Wifi routers; command-line interfaces are popular for business-oriented ones like Cisco routers. In any case, there is no room for Gnome here.
In my opinion, desktop environments should stick to what they do best: being boring, predictable and usable on desktop PCs. Being forced to learn new ways to do the same old things is bad. Change for the sake of change is bad.
I respect the GNOME devs for being willing to try out new things. However, maybe they need to explore more alternatives and get feedback from a statistically significant sample of users before really deciding what GNOME 3 will be.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 4:14 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
I'm not arguing for a "One Ring" solution here. I'm saying that we've setup our technology such that we can do that. You do want to show hardware manufacturer that linux + gnome is an all encompassing solution. You can have your embedded device and a great UI to go with it that you could change to your needs. It doesn't have to conform to the desktop style OS, it can be changed to suit your needs.
You're still thinking too technical here... wifi routers, cisco routers, etc. But in any case, we can in fact create a GTK+ interface using a web browser so absolutely you can create a GTK+ app using broadway technnology, See Alex Larsson's post: http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/15/gtk-html-backend-...
Alex Graveley did something similar a couple of years ago. So yes, there is room for GNOME there. How about medical devices? How about smart phones? How about a device that controls a multi media experience in your living room? How about a universal remote? How about a car stereo? How about the device that controls your house temperature? What about your TV? DVD player? You know your TV and DVD player all run Linux right? Imagine the devices that you interact with every day.
There might be some over-reach and that's fine. We pull back a bit, and then try to push some more. GNOME 3 is kinda boring right? It doesn't have a lot of visual options to change, the desktop is pretty blank except forthat top bar, it is a very unassuming desktop. But there is an extensions setup that you could do interesting things. It doesn't expose a lot of the API yet, but I can see them exposing more and more of the underpinnings.
We need to think big, dream big. If we didn't, it only leads to stagnation and for whatever parts of your life that interest you, you don't want that.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:16 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
This point should be repeated. The GNOME developers designed Gnome Shell so that it could be *easily extendable*, much like Firefox, through extensions written in javascript. (The developers are still finalizing the extension mechanism and the documentation about extensions. Most of that will probably land before Gnome 3.2. There are a few extensions already out in the wild, though.) So, the Gnome guys actually designed the shell to invite people to play with the desktop and change the way it behaves to suit the users' needs. They want Gnome Shell to be a power user's playground as well as a place suitable for newbies.
This may not be so apparent right now because the Gnome guys are trying to get the shell out the door in its default mode. After that's done, based on the feedback they receive, the developers will add options, change other options, alter some defaults, and create extensions. They will also invite the users to create lots of extensions. The developers have to get the shell out the door first, however. So, be patient. You may find that soon Gnome Shell will do anything you want it too.
Extensions and applications Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:02 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] The GNOME developers designed Gnome Shell so that it could be *easily extendable*, much like Firefox, through extensions written in javascript. (The developers are still finalizing the extension mechanism and the documentation about extensions. Most of that will probably land before Gnome 3.2. There are a few extensions already out in the wild, though.) So, the Gnome guys actually designed the shell to invite people to play with the desktop and change the way it behaves to suit the users' needs. They want Gnome Shell to be a power user's playground as well as a place suitable for newbies. This sounds a lot like what KDE 4 does with Plasma, although I may not be completely up-to-date with the terminology and whether it's specifically a particular flavour of Plasma or not which manages this. Generally, I find the "people who aren't real developers can tinker with JavaScript" attitude somewhat condescending, even if it is possible to make some serious extensions in these environments, but maybe the attitude towards languages other than C and C++ (and the about-face in adopting the awful JavaScript as a concession to "everyone else") is traditionally more of a problem within KDE than GNOME. I have to say that the applications are what make KDE 3 interesting for me, although the theming obviously plays a role in making everything look largely consistent, and the desktop furniture plays its part by doing what one asks of it in a non-annoying way. Some applications are based on KDE frameworks which would suggest that those frameworks help developers to build decent software, so maybe the real test of a desktop environment should be whether it manages to cultivate applications one would want to use, not whether the designers thought up some radical paradigm that gets in the way of getting to those applications.
Extensions and applications Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:37 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
> Generally, I find the "people who aren't real developers can tinker with
> JavaScript" attitude somewhat condescending, even if it is possible to > make some serious extensions in these environments, but maybe the attitude > towards languages other than C and C++ (and the about-face in adopting the > awful JavaScript as a concession to "everyone else") is traditionally more > of a problem within KDE than GNOME.
That's not correct. The motivation for choosing JS was three-fold: rapid prototyping, maturity/speed of the JS engines in Firefox/Webkit, and the massive pool of "web developers" out there who are already familiar with it. It has nothing to do with level of skill. If anything, JS can be harder to develop in because of some missing safety features.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:58 UTC (Wed) by rathann (subscriber, #50815) [Link]
> We are still source compatible with everything in GNOME 2.
Now that either means something else than I think or is a lie. There are many GNOME 2 applications that no longer compile because you renamed libraries (for example, gnome-media to libgnomemediawhateveristhenewname) and changed APIs and ABIs.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:21 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
Gnome 2 applications still compile against the GTK+ 2 et al. libraries, which aren't going anywhere. So, Gnome 2 applications will work just fine in Gnome 3.0/Gnome Shell.
GTK+ 3 breaks API and ABI, of course. The break isn't too dramatic, though, and there are porting guides at the Gnome sites. It should be much easier (and quicker) to port from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 than it was from GTK+ 1 to GTK+ 2.
I hope that answers your question.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 21:47 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
Thank you for the clarification.
I think his question was if Gnome 3 really was "source code compatible" with Gnome 2. It sounded a lot like you were saying it was. He was rightly pointing out that this is not correct.
I had the wrong impression until he called you out.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:01 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
The number of clicks (or other actions) is the difference. Currently to switch to my Firefox window, I need to click once on a region location of which that does not change during my session, is aways visible and is on edge, so has infinite height. Same for launching any of my favorite applications that I have put on launchers on the panel - one click, constant location, always visible, edge location.
In GNOME 3 both of these actions will require a swipe to Activities, then wait until the animation completes, then find where the Firefox has moved to now, then click on it, which is harder, because it my cursor is already in the corner, so the fact that the button is on one edge does not help. And then if I do want a new window it is an one more click.
So all benefits of launchers are gone and we are back to Win95 start menu (even without quick launch bar of Win98) and additionally that is also without task bar of Win95. So in fact Gnome 3 is *less* click-efficient than Win95.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:51 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
What's broken is the speed of the animation. Once you have the speed, then you'll be able to complete those actions. In the mean time, why not use one of the existing launchers that are out there until that occurs?
We haven't even hit feature freeze yet. You can't judge the product while we're still racing around trying et all the features needed and trying to get them into place. Speed will come. Remember all this stuff is new. Polish will come.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:29 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
The problem is that this new, unpolished stuff is being put out into stable releases as the only interface. The fall-back option has been emasculated. Users are going to have to put up with the lack of polish for a year, perhaps two, given distro release cycles.
This isn't user-centric release engineering.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:29 UTC (Wed) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
Even if the animation was instant, these actions would still take more time, because:
1) there are multiple separate actions instead of one action 2) the second action depends on the results that computer will show me only after the first action is done
Imagine typing on a keyboard where the layout of the keys might change after each keypress - you can't type blindly anymore or trust your fingers to press keys in rapid succession - you'll need to check each time if the key you were aiming for is still there
A lot of people seem to like side bars and application launchers. How about this compromise - create an optional bar on the left side of the screen that would contain application launchers and already started applications (just like the left side of the Activities menu, but: make it be just the with of an icon, make it an always visible panel, make favourite applications always stay on the top side of the bar in user-specified order, make clicking on this sidebar icons instantly execute launch/switch actions without starting the Activities overlay, make the sidebar discoverable by making it morph into the left side of Activities screen during Activities 'show' animation.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 15:44 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Multi-monitor workspace management landed this morning.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:51 UTC (Tue) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link] I can't stand those massive window decorations - I really don't understand it, so much effort has been put into an efficient use of space - particularly vertically lately - why should a half inch be used for the app title and a close button? (MeeGo suffers from this as wellI can't say I'm happy with the result either, but the problem is a tricky one:
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:27 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
You have an "icon" (more like a large button) at the top bar with the name of the current application (at least on this Fedora 15 Alpha I am using at the moment); why not put the X button there (like on Firefox's tabs)? Then you could shrink the title bar as much as you want, since it no longer needs to be a mouse target.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:20 UTC (Tue) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]
I was mostly explaining why MeeGo looks like it does (it really has a massive title bar). There is no panel-equivalent there so your suggestion wouldn't work.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:07 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
There's a right-click option on this area to quit application.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:42 UTC (Tue) by dvhart (guest, #19636) [Link]
Perhaps an option for "Giant-clunky titlebars you can click with your bloody stumps" and "Precision Title Bars" would be a start? ;-) Even just small,medium,large, and stumpy settings would be a big improvement. Also, when maximized, the titlebar is completely redundant and the panel offers an adequately sized means of closing the application. In this case, the titlebar should be eliminated as it adds no value and fights the notion of maximize by consuming a 1/2" of vertical space. The options I mentioned are still desirable for a Desktop environment with a large screen though as apps are rarely maximized (a 26" browser window is a little silly - and a console more so).
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:16 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
Why have a close button at all? Just make the close action only appear when you punch into Activities overlay - then each mini-window can have a large close button on it and during regular use you can reduce the window frame to just few pixels for the resize handles.
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:02 UTC (Tue) by brugolsky (subscriber, #28) [Link]
Figuring out the latest configuration-fu would be a lot more entertaining if the settings applet were a 3D quest-style adventure game, complete with crumbling floors, flying arrows, magical incantations, and powerful amulets. Then the GNOME UI designers could argue over how to organize the levels and where to place the hidden focus-follows-mouse portal with each new release.
Thanks Jon for lighting the way; sadly, your fate is likely to be the skeleton in the corner of the anteroom with the arrow through its head. ;-)
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:48 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]
"You are in a maze of twisty GNOME configuration settings, all different."
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:09 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
Having to click on your own name and hold down the alt key to get to "shutdown" does seem like something out of an adventure game.
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 16, 2011 11:23 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] At least you don't have to collect an empty can and six ingredients so you can brew "shutdown juice" first.
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:51 UTC (Wed) by meyert (subscriber, #32097) [Link]
Oh, yeah that's intuitive! risible.
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:53 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
We have great documentation which is being finished up this week by the GNOME Docs Team. All of this should be addressed there.
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 20, 2011 19:55 UTC (Sun) by jae (guest, #2369) [Link]
And people read documentation. Yeah, right.
Seriously: do you *honestly* think clicking you own name and pressing Alt (mouse and keyboard together) is *more* intuitive than the Start button?
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 21, 2011 2:30 UTC (Mon) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Is there a plan to document the other major parts of the GNOME desktop as far as programming applications for it go? Could we, perhaps get to a point in another ten years where people are able to write applications without using other applications as a reference?
Play "Quest for the Linux Desktop Configuration" Posted Mar 21, 2011 2:39 UTC (Mon) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Stop trolling, please. http://library.gnome.org/devel/
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:10 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (subscriber, #65743) [Link]
From the looks of it they took what seem to be usable and popular in other OS stuffed it together then reduced the functionality of it and label it Gnome without doing any kind of usability research before hand and then they seem to be going about adding things back that get complained most about or simply turn out to not work in $next_release and they call that improvements?
Does anyone know if they actually did perform any usability research to back up those changes as in stuffed x amount of completely novice end users in a room full of computers with "Gnome" installed on them, observed without any interaction and took notes on what they where struggling with and improved those areas in Gnome3 basically a research that shows that those changes are not something they think they might be improving?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:24 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
You can browse some of the thoughts behind the design here:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/
I realize that this is completely far afield from the usual desktop of a panels, applets, widgets and what not. But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go. We can just change the internals a little, make new themes, new widgets. There is only so many ways you're going to be able to cut this. if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.
Or we can try something new. Yeah, if you're used to the old interface and you've setup specific setup for your work flow, it is going to suck. I'll even agree that perhaps the font stuff might need a second look and time will tell if we have to go back and tweak that design based on the feedback we get on it. I had a similar experience regarding the fonts. I've gotten over it for the most part since it wasn't that big of change. I eventually forgot font set ups altogether. Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font. If you do, then something is wrong with the font and we need to fix the font.
As for launchers, most of the tools like docky are still going to be there and work as well as apps like gnome-do (which I still personally use). Eventually like 2.0, 3.0 is going to mature as well. I think the overview idea is a super idea.. it's like vi, baby. Command mode and work mode.
Someone mentioned the use of 3D.. let's consider this. We have graphic cards with all this power and we're not using it. When we don't use it there is nothing is driving us to make those 3D drivers better. When the drivers get better we have even new uses for them. Interactions too slow, we're going to start hitting X developers to make those drivers better.
I'll argue that when we pursue these things it creates new avenues to improve the rest of the Linux ecosystem. This isn't just good for GNOME, its users, but it's good for Linux.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:41 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] "we've taken this interface as far as it will go [...] if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years."I have difficulty grasping this point of view. At the point where you have developed a tool as far as it will go, it is not "dead", it is "perfected". Other words that come to mind are "mature" or "stable" or "reliable". If new tools are also needed, so be it. But you should not throw out the old reliable ones while you are still struggling with the design of the new ones.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:54 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
It's dead.. because nobody wants to work on a perfected tool. If it is in fact perfected, there is nothing else to do is there? Just sit around and move chess pieces around. We won't be keeping many volunteers around with that attitude.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:13 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (subscriber, #26706) [Link]
Do you *NEED* as many volunteers? If it's down to just minor bug and security fixes, is that so out of line? Just churning to keep people busy is make-work, not real innovation.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:37 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Your question doesn't make any sense. For some people, the desktop experience reached perfection when bash3 was released. Without the drive of "just works" you would not have had the kind of ease of use you get today.
I suspect distros would also be unhappy (you know all those companies that hire free software people?) if we just stopped doing things.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 11:26 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
The key difference is that when bash3 was released the bash team didn't decide that bash4 needed to have incompatible syntax and require 3D acceleration in order to remain relevant. Instead bash4 builds on bash3 in a backwards compatible way, adding and not subtracting.
> I suspect distros would also be unhappy ... if we just stopped doing things.
How about solving new problems and not re-hashing old problems? A lack of feature density is a sign of immaturity, not a sign of usability.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:50 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Without the drive of "just works" you would not have had the kind of ease of use you get today. Umm? I do not believe computers today are significantly easier to use than they were 10 or 15 years ago. In fact, I find some of the modern desktop trends in GNOME and KDE making computers harder to use.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:24 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Volunteers for what? Having people reinvent the wheel just to keep them busy is possibly the worst idea ever. Think about it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:35 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Volunteers to invent spokes, vulcanized rubber, and all sorts of other improvements. You're welcome to continue using your stone wheels as long as you'd like.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:56 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Great, now instead of inventing paper or penicillin, let's just reinvent our wheels every five years, just because. Next iteration we will do them squared, on the basis that:
* they are more compact and easy to store.
Don't mention that old roads will not adapt very well to those new wheels, but hey, it's all in the name of progress.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:12 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
How lame. I'm sorry I paid any attention to you.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 1:17 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
No, lame is using the interests of volunteers to excuse a bad technical decision, that is, throwing out the window all experience gained with a currently working environment, all in the pursuit of some questionable usability nirvana.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for improvement, but I seriously object to two things:
But I guess they will make the same mistake again, who is going to test it if it's not mandatory, anyway? Excuse my lameness, but I have been through all this before, and it was not pretty.
All this would be moot, though, if Gnome tried to finish something. But can Gnome 2 be considered "done"? Nope, it was never written with that in mind. There are piles of bugs that will *never* get a fix, because in the minds of those developers Gnome 2 is not mature, but deprecated.
Of course, I may equally well be wrong. It happens to me all the time.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 3:23 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
As usual, Jamie Zawinski had something to say about this years ago...
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
His choice of language and attack vector aside, many people have written about this kind of problem, for a long time now. And I don't mean GNOME, I mean the general problem of never really getting to a finish state.
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:43 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
The point is not to work on the shell indefinitely. The shell itself it utterly uninteresting by itself.
The point is to have more apps that perform useful tasks for users.
That won't happen if the platform is changed upside down every five years. That's why people are still writing TCL/TK and motif apps, and no sane isv wants to touch GTK stuff if it can avoid it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:11 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Exactly right.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:34 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]
We obviously don't have a lot of ISVs (in the sense you mean) - but what applications are you talking about?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 19:02 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> That's why people are still writing TCL/TK
That is one reason I still use it. That and documentation.
Challenge: Point me to a source for hardcopy documentation to develop a GNOME application. Can't, can you. Now in a scripting language.
Closest I came was an online GTK+ 2.x in Python document that looked pretty good but GTK isn't GNOME. All those wonderful GNOME technologies that churn almost annually and the only way one can learn how to use them correctly is to look at the source of an existing app and HOPE it is using it correctly since odds are that author learned the same way.
So last time I needed to knock out a graphical app for Linux I grabbed my worn copy of Practical Programming in TCL and Tk and got r done.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 20:36 UTC (Thu) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] It came out in 2004. The latest review on Amazon is from 2007. Whether what is in that book is of any use with current GNOME is anybody's guess.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 19, 2011 22:44 UTC (Sat) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
Nope. As someone else has already noted it is old. It is also out of print. Even the web docs on www.gnome.org are bad. Describing a libraries under a banner noting it's deprecation. And look at the language bindings.
C? Duh.
C++ also looks well maintained.
Java? Tutorials "Coming Soon" for about five years now. "has been used to develop non-trivial applications" and "coverage level is reaching maturity" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence to jump in and find out what works and what doesn't while developing code intended for production.
Perl? "Our documentation isn't what we'd like it to be..." is truthful. A look around leads me to think most of the GNOME APIs are supported at some level.
Python? A lot of GNOME apps are written in Python so one would think there would be documentation out there.... one would be mistaken. All pointers in the FAQ are to information dated between 2001 and 2003 so considering how many APIs have been deprecated since then...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 19, 2011 23:47 UTC (Sat) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link]
Sorry, but that's not a fair assessment. TCL/TK, like GTK+, is a _toolkit_ not a desktop environment. I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.
Tcl/Tk Posted Mar 21, 2011 15:36 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today. I don't know of any desktop environments based on Tk, period. However, I love Tcl/Tk and I think the GNOME developers could learn a lot by studying it. Here's why:
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:43 UTC (Wed) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]
> I have difficulty grasping this point of view. At the point where you have developed a tool as far as it will go, it is not "dead", it is "perfected". Other words that come to mind are "mature" or "stable" or "reliable". If new tools are also needed, so be it. But you should not throw out the old reliable ones while you are still struggling with the design of the new ones.
Just a thought - I share many of the thoughts and worries of people commenting on this article. But I also wonder - are the GNOME people actively preventing anyone from maintaining GNOME 2, or are they just not doing it as much themselves? If the second is true then perhaps something is broken outside of GNOME, if so many people (or is it just that those people are more vocal?) badly want just an ever more polished GNOME 2 and no one is doing it? And if a high percentage of their users would appreciate it why do distributions not step in to do something?
Is it that a lot of people really do want the new GNOME? Or not enough people care? Or do we need a way to pay people to work on that sort of boring thing? Or some other way to make people want to? Or am I completely off?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:02 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
GNOME Fallback Mode is very much in need of developer attention and we would *love* someone or someones to step up to improve its status.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
I actually disagree with Sri on this. The motivation for GNOME 3 was that GNOME 2 had serious problems. See here: https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:50 UTC (Tue) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132) [Link]
> Someone mentioned the use of 3D.. let's consider this. We have graphic
> cards with all this power and we're not using it. When we don't use it > there is nothing is driving us to make those 3D drivers better. When the > drivers get better we have even new uses for them.
This is the comment that really made me shiver. I bought a Dell Studio laptop early in June 2010 with a Radeon 5000 GPU. I've used Gnome 2 on it perfectly happily, but 10 months later I'm still waiting for full 3D support to appear in the xorg driver (it's present in preliminary but buggy form in xorg 1.10; most 3D applications still freeze the X server). There is no reason to think that conditions are going to change such that the pace of development in this difficult area is going to be any faster in the future than it is at present. In this context, it's lunacy to make something as basic as the desktop environment depend on 3D support.
The actual consequence of this decision will surely be to pressure people in my current situation to use ATI/AMD's proprietary drivers and thereby to decrease the user base for the open-source drivers. This is not going to make the open source 3D drivers better. Rather the opposite.
Very sad.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:08 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Well it seems kind of broken that we can't have a consistent 3D experience across the board. Every other OS does? Don't think that's a gap that we need to bridge?
Now, I'll grant you, depending on 3D when we aren't quite there is going to painful. We have our own internal arguments regarding relying on 3D features. But the flip argument is that we don't rely on it we have no way to push for a consistent 3D experience in the first place on par with what you get with another OS. You paid a price for your laptop, and you should be able to get your moneys worth out of the hardware you have.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:20 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (subscriber, #26706) [Link]
Why do we *NEED* so desperately this 3D experience? Look at what 3D has done to the gaming industry. It's turned it into a wasteland of Yet Another First Person Shooters, and other similar wastes. All the 3D I really need is generally provided by making the top outline of the box being drawn lighter, and the bottom outline darker.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 8:55 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] Just about everything that is wrong with the mass-market video game industry can be blamed on it being largely run by a handful of large publicly listed companies or their subsidiaries, turning it into a case of "we need you to write a game we know how to sell", with only a few "rockstar" designers like Peter Molyneux or Will Wright really getting free rein to do whatever the hell they like because the companies can sell the damn thing by slapping the rockstar's name on the front cover. 3D is a red herring in that argument.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:38 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
I don't want a 3D desktop, period. I have a 3D capable graphics card so that I can run glxgears occasionally. Once upon a time, I used to play Quake 3, but that's about it. I'm not a gamer and I don't care (at all) about 3D desktop effects, or any of these things. The only reason I can think of for using 3D effects on my desktop is to be distracting, or to look cool in reviews/demos, etc. It's ok that these features exist, but many of us are not asking for them :)
It's a similar story with things like smooth-transition from bootloader to X with KMS. Sure, it's a nice pretty thing, but I don't care at all (the first thing I do is turn off this and go back to a real bootloader setup). One thing I would have liked to see is a Mac-style graphical panic screen. That would actually be useful, but the rest is just pretty dressing to me :)
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 8:29 UTC (Wed) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]
I think using "3D" to describe this is a bit ingenious, as it doesn't at all describe what e.g. gnome-shell does. Its nothing like Quake 3.
However, what gnome-shell does is use the graphics card hardware in the way that modern graphics accelerators really work, not like the previous generation of graphics hardware worked.
Current graphics cards have none of the traditional bitblit or drawing primitives in hardware, and the "native" way to program them is with an API like OpenGL or Direct3D. That doesn't mean you can only program a 3D game using them, it just means that is how you program them.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 19:59 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
so you claim you use Mac OSX on weekends because it does things the Linux desktop isn't sufficient for your needs and yet when anyone tries to improve the Linux desktop, you moan like a kid. Go use Mac OSX full time if you like it so much.
You are using a 3D desktop on Mac OSX every time you sit at it. You are seeing a smooth boot when Mac OSX boots. Why be a whiner when Linux tries to be better?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 21:14 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] we might need some working 3d-enabled graphics/video drivers first ;-)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 4:40 UTC (Wed) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132) [Link]
> You paid a price for your laptop, and you should be able to get your
> moneys worth out of the hardware you have.
I did get my money's worth. I don't want the `3D experience'. I'm completely happy with my 2D laptop.
But that's neither here nor there (just my preference). More important is that linux has always been about giving users *a choice* about such things and control over their working environment. And it's disappointment about that fundamental point that runs all through this thread. I don't want to stop using GNOME, but if you push this through, then my choice will be between (i) giving up on GNOME (ii) turning to the proprietary drivers. Me, I'll give up on GNOME first, but I'm sure I'm in a minority.
> But the flip argument is that we don't rely on it we have no way to push > for a consistent 3D experience in the first place on par with what you
The Xorg developers are already working flat out on the 3D drivers for these cards and they've made amazing progress recently. But the open source drivers for ATI and NVIDIA cards are probably always going to lag behind the proprietary drivers by about a year. This decision on your part is not going to make AMD/ATI any more cooperative than they are at present, nor is it going to suddenly produce a flood of money to hire new xorg developers. What it will do is push yet more users to the proprietary drivers (and thereby give AMD/ATI an incentive to be even less forthcoming than they are at present).
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:41 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
btw, I think it's *not* "neither here nor there" when it comes to the 3D stuff. It's a key point actually. Many of us could care less about 3D effects, smooth transitions, and all of these bells and whistles we are being given in return for losing even basic functionality that was there before. It's like we're getting all these great prizes, but I for one never entered the prize draw. I just wanted my desktop to keep going as before.
I make no pretence that I don't look at these things mostly from the point of view of a corporate/enterprise user. Users like myself care more about having a consistent experience that is well understood and easily adjusted than they do about having any of these bells and whistles.
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:20 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] The problem with this is that current graphics cards generally no longer accelerate 2D graphics in hardware. All modern OSes (except Linux) use 3D primitives even for their desktop drawing (as opposed to »real« 3D stuff such as games) already, anyway, so there is no point for graphics card manufactures to actually go to the trouble of including accelerated 2D graphics, and a reasonable incentive to leave out stuff that will just clutter up the chip while it isn't even being used. So, from the point of view of a Linux desktop environment developer, it's either stay with 2D drawing even if it is unaccelerated and you need to jump through hoops to do it at all, or else move over to 3D primitives for desktop drawing, which will be accelerated even though the desktop doesn't actually »look« 3D. Since using the accelerated 3D primitives enables all sorts of other cool and indispensable things that 2D drawing doesn't give one (like a bunch of virtual desktops on the faces of a cube with video playback windows hanging across the edges), this decision is mostly a no-brainer. As for the lost basic functionality, that's a different kettle of fish altogether which is nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D. If the GNOME developers, in the process of upgrading their software offerings, want to provide us with a radically changed (I'm deliberately not saying improved or worsened – as a KDE user I wouldn't know) user experience then that is their privilege. Users can always vote with their feet.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:35 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
2D still tends to use less power than 3D desktop though. Which means it's certainly still being implemented efficiently in hardware.
But hey, who wants longer battery hardware? Look at the shiny...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:46 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
That's not true. When Clutter is rendering animations, it actively throttles itself to avoid drawing faster than the VSync rate of the monitor to save power and avoid visual tearing. When Clutter is idle, the graphics hardware is completely idle. So since we're avoiding CPU-intensive expose events with a compositor, you actually likely have a net power savings, at least with Intel graphics. AMD and NVidia haven't yet managed to idle low enough and so they are frequently tied to an Intel graphics implementation. On proprietary OS's, if a game is not running, the Intel graphics are used. (We cannot do this in Linux, yet. Though it is on the horizon.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Compiz with GNOME2 certainly used more power than normal metacity on my intel graphics laptop. I'm glad to hear that clutter tries to make efficient use of the hardware.
For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.
Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:59 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
> For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.
Yes, that is what you should find. It's likely to be very close but a good test is a bunch of open windows and then dragging one window around the desktop rapidly.
> Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?
Mm... I thought I was up to date on this but perhaps you know more than I do. My understanding until now has been that dynamic graphics switching requires the same Gallium state tracker in both drivers since the entire hardware state has to be moved from one graphics card to the other. Perhaps this is the milestone that has been reached to which you are referring?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:03 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]
I've only got login/out switch working,
dynamic switching where it powers up/down the second GPU for running games is something I'm playing with now.
Complete switch at runtime for all X apps is also on the list but harder.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:31 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
Linux is not about choice. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-Ja...
Before you comment on the AMD/ATI situation you should probably be aware of the company stance on the issue: http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/
And actually, the proprietary drivers have turned out to be quite buggy.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:41 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] Linux is not about choice...in the opinion of ajaxxx. Now maybe you happen to agree with him. But that doesn't necessarily make it right. Sure, he makes some valid points. But he also overlooks the fact that for some of us, it is (at least partially) about choice. By removing that choice, you're pissing off a non-trivial subset of your current users. Maybe you'll gain more in the process. If so, you might deem that to be a worthwhile exchange. But that doesn't make it any less painful for those of us that you're pushing away.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 8:55 UTC (Thu) by gleb (subscriber, #55308) [Link]
By requiring 3D you basically prevent GNOME3 to be usable inside hypervisor.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:11 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
This is not right due to two different reasons. GNOME 3 has a fallback mode which can be used in such circumstances and virtualization work is being done to support hardware acceleration (3D is a misnomer. GNOME Shell is not really 3D)
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-March/...
Tweaking Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:51 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font. And that is the sort of reasoning that really sets some people off. Why should I have to accept somebody else's choice of font? I stare at this screen for many, many hours over the course of the day. I honestly don't understand why I wouldn't want to optimize it for the most comfortable and efficient experience. I know that my font choices don't work for others; I like them small and dense. My advanced age notwithstanding, my eyes are still pretty sharp; I want to use that gift to maximize the density of information in front of me. My wife complains about clutter and small text on my screen; my choices don't work for her at all. There is no right choice for everybody; it amazes me when people think that they, somehow, can come up with a universally optimal setting - especially for something as fundamental as the size of the text on the screen. We're not all the same.
Tweaking Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:29 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
I totally understand. I changed something in gconf today because the "smaller" font option was ridiculous.. the window title font was too small, and wasn't proportional the rest of the fonts on the terminal window. And so it goes..
I'm arguing from a designer's perspective as a technical person. :-) So if I set people off, please understand that I'm doing my level best to try to strike a balance in my conversations between all of you and it's not my intention to show that the project is arrogant or insensitive to the feedback given. What you say is important to us, and your feed back is important. Several us on the marketing team/shell team will be looking over this thread. I wasn't quite planning on going at it alone but you guys have all been nice to me :)
Jonathan, I'm in the same boat as you (advanced age not withstanding) my eyes are sharp and my font setup is probably similar to yours. On the font issue, I suspect that we're going to probably catch some heat there and probably have to look at it again. Bugzilla is your friend, please do put in bugs for these kind of things. Especially before feature freeze.
If I have to engage any more with y'all I'm going to have to break out the scotch.
Tweaking Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:30 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Conversely, I don't mind sharing that I have a sensitivity to light. In fact, I usually have to work in a completely dark room with just the right indirect lighting, and my monitor casing are covered in electrical tape to prevent reflections. Software wise, I have very carefully adjusted the lighting, fonts, sizes, and so forth so that it is more useable. I do green on black not because it's "cool" but because it is less bothersome, etc...
I don't pretend that my configuration is anything like what others want to use, but that's the beauty of being able to have a preference.
Jon.
Tweaking Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:44 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
GNOME should support that use case. Although it won't put the electrical tape for you. Maybe GNOME 4 ;)
Tweaking Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:02 UTC (Wed) by C.Gherardi (subscriber, #4233) [Link] I've gone from an extreme settings tweaker to someone who largely uses the defaults for everything except his editor.Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font.And that is the sort of reasoning that really sets some people off. Why should I have to accept somebody else's choice of font? I stare at this screen for many, many hours over the course of the day. I honestly don't understand why I wouldn't want to optimize it for the most comfortable and efficient experience. Every time I upgrade distro the default font and size changes slightly, and I complain that the old was better than the new. It irritates me for about a week and at some point it fades from memory, to be repeated on the next upgrade. Perception is a funny thing, and "most comfortable and efficient experience" is difficult to evaluate objectively. I had a similar discussion with a tech writer at work, and his argument was that users dont know what they want (which gets no argument from me) and are rarely equipped with the knowledge to make good decisions in design, as short term irritation at (possibly beneficial) change clouds objectivity. Over time the default fonts have improved, and i'm willing to give people who know a lot more about the intricacies of fonts and viewing all the latitude they want to improve things. That said 'smaller' and 'small' would be welcome options.
Tweaking Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:22 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link] Over time the default fonts have improved, and i'm willing to give people who know a lot more about the intricacies of fonts and viewing all the latitude they want to improve things. Nobody really wants to spend hours changing all the font settings, but the attitude that "you should accept our settings because we're designers" is condescending, bordering on the offensive. Of course, changing fonts has been a necessity on, for example, Red Hat systems because of the scarcity of decent pre-installed fonts, and that situation has improved, but if someone really does prefer a serif font for their window titles, they should be able to change it fairly easily. Actually, if the "designers" can't come up with an effective interface for changing things like font styles or sizes which doesn't require choosing from a hundred separate font menus, they are not as great or innovative as they think they are. Dropping such choices altogether or neutering them just shows that they have accepted defeat on the matter. And claiming that "this is not what normal people do" is just an excuse.
Tweaking Posted Mar 17, 2011 2:45 UTC (Thu) by C.Gherardi (subscriber, #4233) [Link] Nobody really wants to spend hours changing all the font settings, but the attitude that "you should accept our settings because we're designers" is condescending, bordering on the offensive. Of course, changing fonts has been a necessity on, for example, Red Hat systems because of the scarcity of decent pre-installed fonts, and that situation has improved, but if someone really does prefer a serif font for their window titles, they should be able to change it fairly easily.I manage more than 100 users, and only 1 of them has changed their default font given the ability to do so. So I agree that this isn't something 'normal' people do. I agree that the attitude appears condescending, but I can't tell if that 'condescension' is justified (Dunning-Krueger etc). Spatial mode came and went, but other controversial things stayed. Fonts will probably be in the latter category, but I personally wont miss it and don't believe the silent majority will either. My personal gripe will be the missing laptop power options. I dont own an music player. When flying I set up a large playlist in Amarok and shut the lid is down to save screen power and my laptop battery gets me through 90%+ of my flight. Having to keep the lid open is going to force me to listen to Aeroplane channels for half the flight.
Tweaking Posted Mar 18, 2011 10:37 UTC (Fri) by jthill (guest, #56558) [Link] Unless you're managing an uncommon set of users, I think you're at the wrong vantage point to see the problem. Normal behavior on someone else's computer isn't normal behavior on your own. Very few people's work demands enough of their computer that accommodations have to be made. I've said it before: GNOME seems to be going the proprietary Apple/Microsoft route with ever-increasing doggedness, making the best environment they know how to make for 'normal' people. GNOME seems (from a distance now) to be measuring "best" as minimizing the volume of inexperienced users' baffled questions, and their vexed or bewildered responses to the answers. I think that's a strategically unsound choice, but it's not my call and it doesn't irritate me -- so long as the tools themselves remain interoperable, and can use open-system standards to full advantage. Because GNOME is not an open system. There are people posting on LWN who can't figure out how to make the simplest alterations to what they regard as their personal environment on their personal computer, and the answers they're getting aren't of the "here's the doc on how to do that" variety. That a volunteer-based project is consciously excluding the "how do I make it do that?" crowd from its user base is ... well, like I say, I don't think it can last.
Tweaking Posted Mar 18, 2011 19:03 UTC (Fri) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
It's not really headed in the proprietary direction per se, but it does seem to go in weird cycles of being more Apple-like to less Apple-like. Unlike Apple and Microsoft software, however, it isn't being designed with the corporate desktop user or developer in mind, nor with due consideration for the need to manage large numbers of those desktops and provide an interface people in such environments are used to.
My main gripe is that, instead of this, it's actually trying to cater to some weird subset of novice users who want a "My First Linux Machine" UI. But those people are going to run one of the popular other interfaces from other more embedded/tablet projects, and not GNOME (or GNOME OS, or whatever, that ship has sailed). Sure, lots of really excitable enthusiasts will run GNOME 3, and it'll get some great reviews. But people on Slashdot (and even LWN) are not the millions of the mass market.
I'd love it if they'd gracefully accept that other projects have been targeting netbooks and tablets, that things like Android and Chrome OS have won there, and move on, back to core competencies. Yes, I have an "enterprise" hat on in all of this since I want GNOME to be the desktop of choice and relevance for the enterprise first and foremost.
Jon.
Tweaking Posted Mar 28, 2011 19:27 UTC (Mon) by pcarrier (subscriber, #65446) [Link] Unlike Apple and Microsoft software, however, it isn't being designed with the corporate desktop user or developer in mindAfter spending a few months writing code under Windows, I cannot disagree more. Microsoft still hasn't implemented a dynamically resizable terminal (horizontal scrolling if you try), or proper completion in their shell. Or a configurable prompt AFAIK.
Many trivial changes could prove very pleasing to developers, but they just never, ever cared. The corporate developer can shut up and hack (win32 code).
The silent majority Posted Mar 18, 2011 12:27 UTC (Fri) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link] I manage more than 100 users, and only 1 of them has changed their default font given the ability to do so. So I agree that this isn't something 'normal' people do. ... but I personally wont miss it and don't believe the silent majority will either. A couple of observations here. "The silent majority" are fed shit, and have mostly resigned to that fact. Therefor they don't look to changing defaults. They'll just accept what they get, and try not to worry about it. That's a very far cry from being happy and content. I always believed that part of the "mission" of open source is, that we can actually teach people that they don't need to put up with shit, and deserve better. Also, that 1 percent, that's us, the geeks. The slightly unadjusted types. It just so happens that these 1-percenters are also the ones making the software, and care deeply about the quality of things. Probably the worst thing any project can do, is to tell that 1% that their opinion and desires actually doesn't matter. On a personal note, I would _never_ever_ consider using a platform, where I can not adjust font settings to my liking. Doesn't matter how great the rest is.
Tweaking Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:05 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
> That said 'smaller' and 'small' would be welcome options.
That landed three weeks ago.
Tweaking Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:10 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]
The problem is that if somebody speaks positively of gnome, everyone else assumes they are in charge and believes, 'oh that is set in stone' I better complain instead of scratching that itch.
I actually disagree with the reasoning too (bad eyesight), but I also know how to change the value. The sad thing is I can count _7_ replies bashing on this as if it is an official mandate.
Of course there is going to be font change dialog (the setting just isn't presented in any gui), just as easy theming (prepackaged) will happen because it is cool and somebody will actually contribute.
It just has to be made, accepting that the first approach you try might get frown upon, just like linux....
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (subscriber, #33846) [Link]
> Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font.
Are you serious? I need a way to change the default font settings because:
a. The hinting and subpixel rendering options that GNOME 3 picks by default look terrible on my monitor. And short of creating a comprehensive database of all monitors and laptop panels out there, there is no way for GNOME 3 developers to know what settings a particular user will need.
b. In a truly stunning regression for i18n and l11n efforts, the new default UI font in GNOME 3 (Cantarell) covers *only* the basic Latin alphabet and a few extended Latin symbols for the Central European languages. Other characters will be rendered by the system's fallback font (for alphabetic scripts, this will most likely be DejaVu). And let me tell you, seeing a mixture of Cantarell and DejaVu, which are compatible neither in metrics nor in style, in every window title bar makes me want to vomit and then gouge out my eyes with rusty cutlery.
c. Independent of the the above points, Cantarell's aesthetics are not above reproach. In other words: I am sure some GNOME developers may like but, but I personally find it rather ugly. As they say, de gustibus non disputandum est; and the users who have a different taste in typography should have an easily accessible option to pick a font that, in their opinion, does not look awful.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 6:10 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Yes, that criticism is valid regarding regression. I don't have any defense for that other than it should be fixed.
As for the hinting, I'm hoping someone from GNOME can jump in and talk about the fonts. I will admit that I don't have any particular defense as I've stated above. You shouldn't be having to mix fonts of different metrics. That's wrong. We can't do anything with the interface now as we are past the visual freeze. We can address after the release. In the mean time, please file bugs and state your opinion.
If you're interested in helping improve the experience then you need to file bugs.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:00 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
> If you're interested in helping improve the experience then you need to file bugs.
This is another fallacy that many FOSS projects operate under: that it is the responsibility of anyone with a suggestion or complaint to file a bug report.
The developer of a piece of FOSS should care enough about it that if he reads a post on a forum somewhere that describes a simple, obvious problem, he should either look into the problem himself or file a bug report himself.
The Random Internet Guy who posted on a forum or mailing list already expressed the problem. He already took the time to explain it. If it's a problem worth fixing, it's a problem the devs should care about enough to take it from there. (If it's unreproducible or obscure, that's different.)
I'm operating under the assumption that developers of FOSS projects which are serious enough to have bug trackers care about their projects and want to make them the best they can be. If this isn't the case with a project, then I wouldn't expect a developer to care about a bug report, either.
This is not to say that users should never be asked to file bug reports. My point is that, especially with large rewrites, if developers really care about quality and meeting users needs, they ought to be actively seeking reports of problems and addressing them proactively, not refusing to act until someone does the right paperwork.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:13 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] It wouldn't be so bad if people didn't hide their bug trackers behind passwordwalls.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:45 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] How old are you? Given your "Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font" comment I suspect you must be in your twenties, at most. If you were older, you would know ocular focal resolution slowly but steadily degrades with age because you'd be experiencing it yourself. Hence you'd know that it's quite normal for computer users to increase font sizes with age - preferably with the finest-grain increases possible.Eye sight "issues" are not exceptional. There is a continuum of vision ability, even across any one individual's lifetime. "Small", "medium" and "large" does not cover it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 12:36 UTC (Fri) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link]
> How old are you? Given your "Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font" comment I suspect you must be in your twenties, at most. If you were older, you would know ocular focal resolution slowly but steadily degrades with age because you'd be experiencing it yourself. Hence you'd know that it's quite normal for computer users to increase font sizes with age - preferably with the finest-grain increases possible. Eye sight "issues" are not exceptional. There is a continuum of vision ability, even across any one individual's lifetime. "Small", "medium" and "large" does not cover it.
Absolutely spot on! My font requirements are quite different than they were 15 years ago (to my own amazement in the beginning).
hoping I can set nice big fonts the way I like em Posted Mar 18, 2011 21:19 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
+1
My sight is good, but my work is text-intensive and eye fatigue is the weakest link when I've a marathon work session. Long-term eye health is really important to me, so I hope GNOME3 lets me set fonts to how I like them.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 18:31 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (subscriber, #65743) [Link]
"You can browse some of the thoughts behind the design here:
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/"
I had already familiarized myself with upstream design documentation including Williams paper but my question was "Was there done any usability research before starting to develop Gnome3" and I guess you answered my question with "No" which is what I suspected.
"I realize that this is completely far afield from the usual desktop of a panels, applets, widgets and what not. But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go. We can just change the internals a little, make new themes, new widgets. There is only so many ways you're going to be able to cut this. if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years."
I'm not arguing against the need for Gnome to adopt it self to the changes that are happening now, desktop in it's sense is slowly migrating into smartphones and into the "cloud" which will serve majority of regular computer usage on the planet and that's a computer you carry around with you at all time in your pocket and you simply "dock" to hook it up to a keyboard mouse and additional larger display and a continues power source and external storage device.
That's happening right here right now and the battle is being fought between Apple IOS and Android and the traditional desktop in the sense as we know it, is dying and in couple of years it will be gone so any DE on any OS will need to adapt itself to those changes as in being able to run on smartphones,tablet pc, laptops and regular workstation if it's going to continue to exist and succeed at the same time. This is just common knowledge.
The most irony with regards to Gnome that after all these years it continues to ignore it's current and only users base it has and continues on a path of it's own failure by developing a desktop targeted only at novice end users which in return will never use it since that novice end user it is targeting is incapable of installing Gnome in the first place.
They could have exposed various configuration options in various application in "Admin" accounts if they had any intention of keeping advanced/experienced and at the same time their current and only user base happy but they did not..
Linux on Desktop wont become commonly widely used amongst home end users until that novice end user can walk into a store and buy it ( also common knowledge ) and up to this point only one distribution has done something about it which is probably the only thing it has manage to do right and that's Canonical, it has managed to deliver it's triple U distro in the hands of that novice end user right from the store and that's why it is so *popular*.
Gnome-Shell has potentiality to become a great success and already fixes some issue I know novice end users have been struggling with in Gnome2 unfortunately it seems to bring several new ones to them instead as has been pointed out by various existing Gnome users most of which I agree with thou not all.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:45 UTC (Wed) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link] It helps the discussion if everyone avoids generalizations... You claim GNOME is ignoring its current user base and is on the path to failure.I'm a power user by most meanings of the word, a software developer and a long time linux/unix user. First of all, I love the fact that different paths are being explored -- this is why it makes sense to have several desktop environments. Second, I really like the direction GNOME is now going. I think the panel implementation especially is a step in the direction of "Just Works" and the activity mode has potential. I'm also very happy that when it improves the overall experience, someone is ready to go through the painful battle that removing and rearranging configuration options always is. I hope we can agree that GNOME 3 is not "targeted only at novice end users" and that not all experienced users want problems solved by "exposing various configuration options in various applications".
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:07 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (subscriber, #65743) [Link]
"It helps the discussion if everyone avoids generalizations... You claim GNOME is ignoring its current user base and is on the path to failure."
Yes I feel that Gnome is moving further towards what it has been criticised most in the past and by doing so it is on the path to failure.
It can achieve both by exposing various option and knobs in accounts with type set as "Administrators" while keeping it's "simplicity" by completely hide all the that stuff along with for example workspaces and various other things in accounts with type set as "Supervised".
"I think the panel implementation especially is a step in the direction of "Just Works" and the activity mode has potential."
How do you feel like it's an closer step into "Just Works" as to previous experience?
From my perspective from the moment you log in you have a less usable and productive environment for example as it's currently implemented the activity mode is adding another step to the previous users experience from the moment you log in.
The first thing you have to do after you log in is to move the mouse point and click "Activities" for you to be able to start doing any kind of work and that's a step backwards in usability and productivity compared to Gnome 2 where you logged in and you could click an icon in the panel or on the desktop of course that can be solved by by putting the user in "Activities" immediately when he logs in.
"I'm also very happy that when it improves the overall experience, someone is ready to go through the painful battle that removing and rearranging configuration options always is."
Well yes "when" this is what the novice end users complained to me one of the most about with regards to Gnome 2 as in the continues change in the Menus.
From a developers perspective it was cleaning/tidying up the menus which had the side effect that it caused the novice end user to "learn" again and again where things are which they did not like so much..
"I hope we can agree that GNOME 3 is not "targeted only at novice end users" and that not all experienced users want problems solved by "exposing various configuration options in various applications"."
Every indication in the design points otherwise...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 12:25 UTC (Thu) by deep64blue (guest, #52401) [Link]
>>>Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font. If you do, then something is wrong with the font and we need to fix the font.<<<
It's nonsense like this that is driving people away from GNOME. Why do you think you know better than me what font I prefer?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 1:25 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
" But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go"
Bullshit. I have a whole list of relatively simple changes to make, many of which solve the very same problems that the gnome-shell attempts to solve.
Every single advantage of gnome-shell could have been implemented on the old codebase. Remove the window list applet from the default config and give Metacity the overview mode behavior. Voila, you've basically got gnome-shell's main selling points for 1/200th the effort.
Problems with gnome-panels over-configurability? There are simple fixes for that. Logical fixes. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary fixes. Like, say, not shipping 50,000 applets with gnome-panel. Make the panel applet UI a private library just for the core desktop and experimental changes. Applets/launchers moving around in goofy-ass ways (my longest complaint with gnome... which oddly my suggested fix for got shot down years ago because it'd remove user-desired functionality...) can be fixed by simply getting rid of the wild-west applet placement and relying on simple ordering and start/end gravity. Important applets getting lost, or the user deleting his panels? Don't freaking let the user remove them. Want an OSX/Win7-like app launcher? Just write an applet for it, put it on the default panel, or put it on a sidebar panel like Unity/gnome-shell do. Again, all the benefits, fraction of the effort, and doesn't give the finger to people who aren't stupid enough to say things like "people crave change" when every _real_ UX engineer, therapist, or anthropologist will tell you that's the most idiotic thing anyone could possibly believe about how people work.
But no. Logical, intelligent, easy fixes to simple problems isn't fun enough. Not sexy enough. Doesn't give the new inexperienced cowboy UX engineers any glory.
Instead, let's rewrite the whole UX from scratch! It only took us 10 years to get the old one done-ish, so two years should be way more than enough to do an even bigger and more ambitious design! Yay!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 23, 2011 0:55 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]
> Applets/launchers moving around in goofy-ass ways (my longest complaint with gnome... which oddly my suggested fix for got shot down years ago because it'd remove user-desired functionality...) can be fixed by simply getting rid of the wild-west applet placement and relying on simple ordering and start/end gravity.
I haven't had that problem for the past 3 or 4 years or so - I think something like your patch must have gotten merged eventually; when I right click on a panel object now I get a menu that includes a "Lock to panel" checkbox (which can be unchecked to move or remove it, or let it float as a "wild-west" placement object.) The object order (for locked objects only, I suppose) is written in gconf.
> Important applets getting lost, or the user deleting his panels? Don't freaking let the user remove them.
Nooooooooooo! I tend to prefer a setup with a floating panel (not taking up the whole width of the screen) in either the top or bottom right corner, and no others. I use launchers and applets/notification icons/message icons/whatever-the-heck-they're-called-this-week on the panel liberally. One of my favorites at work is Remmina, as it has a pulldown menu for common RDP targets (we have a lot of Windows virtuals.)
What's an "important" panel object that shouldn't ever be removed? If you're using Blackbox or Enlightenment or FVWM as your WM then the Applications menu is completely superfluous, as it is redundant to functionality in the window manager. So somebody using GNOME as their DE but a replacement WM instead of Gnome-Shell would be stuck with a panel with an "important applet" that's vestigal, like an appendix.
This problem is already taken care of by the "Lock to panel" checkbox anyway. You have to deliberately unlock something to remove it. A bigger problem is disappearing panels - if you put the panel on your third screen, turn off your computer and then remove the USB monitor, you just lost a panel. Unless you're using a WM that doesn't respect the GNOME DE hints, you can't find it even with meta+tab. And I have no idea where the gconf entry for THAT is - last time that happened to me I ended up deleting my entire .config, .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome2_private folders so it would reset my settings to default...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 23, 2011 15:13 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
There is value in having to jump through an extra hoop to remove your launcher menu and notification area applets (think causal user), but reacting by preventing users from moving or doing anything useful with panel contents as they have done is like burning down your entire house because you don't like a color of the walls in one room.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 24, 2011 0:15 UTC (Thu) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]
Agreed, and I like the "Lock to panel" functionality that exists for that reason. I think a full lockdown is unwarranted.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:35 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]
> I realize that this is completely far afield from the usual desktop of a panels, applets, widgets and what not. But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go. We can just change the internals a little, make new themes, new widgets. There is only so many ways you're going to be able to cut this. if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.
You present that:
a) GNOME must reinvent UI from scratch, or
That is a false dichotomy. GNOME 3's design process seems to be operating under a fallacy.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 6, 2011 17:21 UTC (Wed) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link]
> if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.
You have to be kidding me.
You know some of us don't actually have a flat screen monitor yet. My screen size ratio is 3x4 at 1024x768 on a 17" monitor.
How about using less memory? or...
- fix using alt+tab while dragging (most of my windows are full screen, so dragging between apps means switching foreground windows at the same time)
- fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)
- fix all of the dialogs that are too tall to fit in smaller screens (think netbooks, or systems set to 640x480 for accessibility reasons or have larger fonts set.
- merge metacity and compiz and make sure 2d only works just fine (test it on an old Pentium III with an ati video card)
- fix the system monitor applet so it doesn't get stuck when a remote sshfs filesystem gets stuck
- change the list of cities in the weather applet so they are grouped by smaller areas like counties (in the US) instead of just state.
- convert mono based apps to java, scala, vala, etc. and remove any reference to mono in gnome. (the sun of freedom may be setting in the Java space, but it is better than .net, or use something that isn't JVM based.)
Gnome 3 should have been a branch and the 2.x mainline development should not have stopped until gnome 3 was ready to be merged.
Seriously, it's like gnome merged reiser4 or something...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 6, 2011 19:11 UTC (Wed) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link]
> You have to be kidding me.
You've got to be trolling me?
I won't do a point for point rebuttal, there's simply no need for it.
> * fix using alt+tab while dragging (most of my windows are full screen, so dragging between apps means switching foreground windows at the same time)
That's an interesting bug, should probably be fixed, yes. If you don't have a bug number already, tell me and I'll file it.
> * fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)
Already fixed. But why are you expecting things to shut down cleanly when you do not shut it down, cleanly?
> * fix all of the dialogs that are too tall to fit in smaller screens (think netbooks, or systems set to 640x480 for accessibility reasons or have larger fonts set. )
640x isn't even a usable resolution any more, most definitely not for "accessibility" reasons. However, 1024x600 resolutions are quite common on netbooks.
> * merge metacity and compiz
Why? Merging two active and distinctly separated codebases with different development policies is not a pretty option, just look at the mess it causes in kvm/qemu and similar developments. This is just you wanting others to do gruntjob for no good reason, so you can sit around and feel superior that you were such a good idea person.
> * make sure 2d only works just fine
Sure, it does, tested and working.
> * fix the system monitor applet so it doesn't get stuck when a remote sshfs filesystem gets stuck
Fixed. No more bonobo-applets, no more issues.
> * change the list of cities in the weather applet so they are grouped by smaller areas like counties (in the US) instead of just state.
That's depending on datasets import, most probably you'll have to file a bug with weather.com or weather underground.
Or perhaps just move, Seems like a reasonable solution, letting you do the work rather than you telling others what to do with bias and poor reason?
> * convert mono based apps to java, scala, vala, etc. and remove any reference to mono in gnome. (the sun of freedom may be setting in the Java space, but it is better than .net, or use something that isn't JVM based.)
Once again, going on about changing something from a negative bias. Second system syndrome and everything. In one side you _complain_ when they do it, claiming gnome-shell is horrible and bad and they should never have done it. And then you want them to do it on _other_ things, except there should be no visible change, and all the behaviours should be the same, just so you can feel smug and superior.
Rewriting code just in order to change the platform it's running on is never a good option. You introduce a lot of regressions and changes for marginal gains. Once again you want others to do a lot of work for no gain and no reason, other than your own self esteemed of being a managerial idea person.
> * Gnome 3 should have been a branch and the 2.x mainline development should not have stopped until gnome 3 was ready to be merged.
It was a branch, and it was merged when it was decided to be ready, then work continued on it.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 6, 2011 19:56 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]
> > fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)
> Already fixed. But why are you expecting things to shut down cleanly when you do not shut it down, cleanly?
I've seen a similar issue with desktop icons/widgets in KDE4. The expectation isn't that processes shut down cleanly during a crash or when they're killed. The expectation is that updates to the saved configuration happen only when you specifically alter the layout, such that an unclean shutdown should generally have no effect on the saved layout. In particular, programs shouldn't wait for a clean shutdown to save configuration changes.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 8, 2011 19:29 UTC (Fri) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link]
> > > if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.
> > You have to be kidding me. > You've got to be trolling me?
The implication was that gnome 2.x was done, and it certainly was not.
> > * fix using alt+tab while dragging (most of my windows are full screen, so dragging between apps means switching foreground windows at the same time)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135056
> > * fix all of the dialogs that are too tall to fit in smaller screens (think netbooks, or systems set to 640x480 for accessibility reasons or have larger fonts set. )
I'll let you tell that one to some of the co-workers I have had in the past. Good luck.
> > * fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)
> > * merge metacity and compiz
Because even though I have an ATI video card with good, working open source drivers, I end up switching back to metacity from compiz whenever I need to get work done. Compiz just doesn't have many of the usability enhancements that have been in metacity for a long time.
> > * Gnome 3 should have been a branch and the 2.x mainline development should not have stopped until gnome 3 was ready to be merged.
Gnome 2.x was 90% of the way there, now it is abandoned and any fixes will only be seen in enterprise distro patches (if any).
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:25 UTC (Tue) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
Here are some URIs that might be helpful with regard to your question about the usability research:
http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory
http://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-...
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:36 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
I like your analysis, thanks Jon. After ten years of die-hard GNOME fandom, this latest push has seen me finally decide to ditch GNOME as a desktop entirely. It's sad because I *want* to like it, but it's so far from what I want in terms of design and usability, and I've had all of the same frustrations in my own experience, that the only option to stick with GNOME would be to fork off 2.x and/or maintain some horrible hacked up build for myself. Eventually, I expect by GNOME 3.4, they will re-add all of the options, fix the lack of a panel, re-add applets, and generally head back to where GNOME 2.x is today, but that's too far away for my own uses.
I've switched to Xfce on rawhide. I'm holding out on GNOME 2.x elsewhere, but it's only a matter of time before I'm compelled to switch there, too. I *hope* this cost (losing long-time users like myself) is worth it and they get all the new shiny users they think they will get. I personally disagree and I think it won't work out like that, but I may well be wrong. I hope I am wrong because I still love many of the GNOME applications, and I think overall these guys are trying their best. But man, the new design is something I just can't use.
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:44 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Here's my initial Xfce setup:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonmasters/5524329179/
I created panels and populated them to look exactly like the old GNOME 2.x desktop. I've since switched the icons to the "gnome" ones to fix a problem pointed out in the Xfce SIG, but it looks similar. It's exactly like GNOME 2.x, except things like automounting and file manager support need a little tweaking to get going - seems I'm going to waste some weekends getting back to where I have been, but it's *very* usable :)
Jon.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:41 UTC (Wed) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]
I think I'll be heading in the same direction. My desktop generally consists of 8 workspaces with 1x Evolution, 1x Firefox, and a large number of terminals. I was gobsmacked when I saw the videos depicting the gnome3 workflow. I have no idea who this new version is aimed at but it certainly isn't me. I should imagine the technically illiterate will be completely freaked out by it.
It reminds me of when I was a teenager with an Amiga, I'd get cover disks with magazines loaded with all sorts of utilities to "optimise" the workbench. I'd spend a few hours installing them, and would have lots of flashy eye candy, I'd then have to remove them all to make the computer useable again.
At least we have choice, I may even give KDE another go, although it always strikes me as complete overkill for my needs. Also the instance of sticking a "k" in every program name drives me up the wall, I don't know why, but it does!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:22 UTC (Wed) by peter-b (subscriber, #66996) [Link] Also the instance of sticking a "k" in every program name drives me up the wall, I don't know why, but it does! Out of interest, does it bother you more or less than sticking a "g" in every program name? :-)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:46 UTC (Wed) by zzxtty (subscriber, #45175) [Link]
Good question, not so much. I've always used non-gnome programs, e.g. firefox, openoffice, evolution, no "G". When using KDE in the past it defaulted to koffice, kmail, konquere (?).
A lot of the gnome programmes start gnome-, if you're looking for something you can type "gnome-" and hit tab a couple of times and get a list of programs, this doenst work for programs with a K stuck halfway through them, and some (but not all) of the gnome program names make sense.
I remember some years ago trying kde, one look at the menus had me running for the hills. Rather than having descriptive program names (e.g. "Calculator") it had a random caKophony of words, I had no idea what anything was, it didnt help that there appeared to be 6 different music players/editors/image viewers/etc. I can't remember which distribution it was, nor how long ago, I'm sure things have changed by now.
When you start using one environment you become use to its idiosyncrasies, this makes you less forgiving when you try another.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:45 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil (guest, #72832) [Link]
In the future it will be Calligra, Kmail and Rekonq.
And you could maybe replace Kmail with Lionmail.
So KDEs future has a lot less Ks in it, although horrible names like KMyMoney will remain.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 12:13 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
If KMyMoney really is a problem, just because of the name, there's always Skrooge... Which I find a pretty cool name, even if it also contains a 'k'... By the way, KDE has defaulted to showing the short description and not the name of the application in the start menu for about ten years now.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 12:51 UTC (Fri) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link]
> At least we have choice, I may even give KDE another go, although it always strikes me as complete overkill for my needs.
I think you should. The KDE 4.4.5 environment I run, through Debian Unstable (aptosid actually), is a lean-mean-fighting-machine, and looking pretty too. Rock solid, and boots into a desktop using 110 MB RAM, and no unnecessary cycles. Of course I set it up to only run the things _I_ want to run, the _way_ I want to run them, and I can do that because it's utterly _configurable_.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 20, 2011 8:13 UTC (Sun) by idupree (subscriber, #71169) [Link]
Do you know what configuring you did to make your KDE fit in 110 MB RAM? (For some reason my KDE after cold boot uses 1 GB, vs. GNOME which uses about 300 MB, so I've stuck with GNOME.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 27, 2011 14:42 UTC (Sun) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link] Do you know what configuring you did to make your KDE fit in 110 MB RAM? (For some reason my KDE after cold boot uses 1 GB, vs. GNOME which uses about 300 MB, so I've stuck with GNOME.) (sorry for the late reply) As you would probably suspect the answer is "turn off things you don't need". Of course the trick is to learn what you don't need. So I'll show what it looks like on my system, which is an older desktop pc using wired networking. Things might need to look different on your machine. I actually checked again, and it turns out that memory usage right after startup is 98 MB RAM, which includes some services that for you might be "un-needed", such as ntp, cups and a mailer etc. The running processes after full KDE startup and login (including the shell running pstree and free): pstree:
init-+-acpid
|-console-kit-dae---64*[{console-kit-da}]
|-cron
|-cupsd
|-2*[dbus-daemon]
|-dbus-launch
|-dhclient
|-dirmngr
|-6*[getty]
|-gpm
|-hald-+-hald-runner-+-hald-addon-acpi
| | |-hald-addon-cpuf
| | |-hald-addon-inpu
| | `-3*[hald-addon-stor]
| `-{hald}
|-irqbalance
|-kaccess
|-kded4
|-kdeinit4-+-2*[kio_trash]
| |-klauncher
| `-ksmserver-+-kwin
| `-{ksmserver}
|-kdm-+-Xorg
| `-kdm---startkde-+-kwrapper4
| `-ssh-agent
|-kglobalaccel
|-kmix
|-knotify4
|-konsole-+-bash---pstree
| `-{konsole}
|-krunner---{krunner}
|-ntpd
|-nullmailer-send
|-plasma-desktop---{plasma-desktop}
|-polkitd---{polkitd}
|-rsyslogd---3*[{rsyslogd}]
|-start_kdeinit
`-udevd---2*[udevd]
And the memory usage: free -m:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1008 470 537 0 192 178
-/+ buffers/cache: 98 909
Swap: 1906 0 1906
So here's what I did to configure my system like this, mostly from memory. Again, your needs might be different from mine:
Hope you find it useful.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 27, 2011 23:00 UTC (Sun) by idupree (subscriber, #71169) [Link]
Thanks! I think the most immediately helpful information to me is: your bulleted list of places to run around to and possibly disable things. - makes it possible to experiment.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 4, 2011 23:33 UTC (Mon) by fn77 (guest, #74068) [Link]
Im a lurker 99% of time, but now i subscribed (for free) just to thank you for those hints.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 5, 2011 4:27 UTC (Tue) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link]
That's the spirit! It's worth it, I guarantee, and you'll be supporting a good thing. Like many other people in here, LWN is the only online magazine I would actually pay for, simply because it's just that much better than everything else out there. The only other possible exception might be Linux Journal. Happy reading every Thursday :-)
Gnome 2.x fork Posted Mar 18, 2011 22:48 UTC (Fri) by mstefani (subscriber, #31644) [Link]
There does seem to be a Gnome 2.x fork at http://www.exde.org/ .
The vision statement says that it will be boring aka fix bugs, be a good tool and stay out of the way of the user. Sounds promising :) How viable it will be it remains to be seen.
Gnome 2.x fork Posted Mar 19, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
One can only hope this works out! This would be exactly what enterprise computing users like myself need.
Jon.
Gnome 2.x fork Posted Apr 18, 2011 20:05 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
... and it's gone away.
Emacs window corruption with compositing problems should be fixed Posted Mar 15, 2011 19:15 UTC (Tue) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link]
it was another intel driver issue
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32734
I don't think the fix is in many distros yet, though
Emacs window corruption with compositing problems should be fixed Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:38 UTC (Tue) by jjmarin (guest, #53201) [Link]
GNOME 3.0 isn't neither in many distros at the moment.
So I think there is a chance that this fix will be dropped in distros on time for GNOME 3.0. Anyway, fixes can be distributed on distros at any time :)
Emacs window corruption with compositing problems should be fixed Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:01 UTC (Tue) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link]
> GNOME 3.0 isn't neither in many distros at the moment.
> So I think there is a chance that this fix will be dropped in distros onn time for GNOME 3.0. Anyway, fixes can be distributed on distros at any time :)
If you actually read the bug report, you'll see it's not a gnome bug or anything like 3.0 related. It's a compositing bug in one of the released intel drivers. It manifests on Jon's test because he picked it up from rawhide.
Emacs window corruption with compositing problems should be fixed Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:45 UTC (Wed) by jjmarin (guest, #53201) [Link]
>If you actually read the bug report, you'll see it's not a gnome bug or
>anything like 3.0 related. It's a compositing bug in one of the released >intel drivers. It manifests on Jon's test because he picked it up from >rawhide.
Because you mention this bug in this context, I only wanted to note that the fix for this particular bug in a intel driver could reach the distros (included Fedora) when GNOME 3.0 is released.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 19:50 UTC (Tue) by SLi (subscriber, #53131) [Link]
It's relieving to see that someone else has the same kind of gripes (I haven't tried GNOME 3 yet) that make me actively hate GNOME, although your reaction seems to be comparatively mild to mine. I've been wondering about my sanity when many other (power) users seem to be quite happy with GNOME. Most of them do seem to gravitate towards more minimalistic window managers, but I see the value in an entire desktop environment.
There was a point in time when I used GNOME as my desktop. I think it was after I got fed up with KDE 1.x. I *think* it used to be more sanely configurable back then, but cannot remember for sure. KDE 2.x was good enough that after that the very occasional dose of GNOME at school was the extent I would put up with it. And, frankly, every release seems to have made it worse (usability-wise, not featurewise).
That's a strange achievement for a desktop environment. I never understood why people like the Windows user experience either, and it makes me feel powerless if I have to use it, but at least I cannot say I actively hate it.
Small screens Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:46 UTC (Tue) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
I am playing with Fedora 15 Alpha's default Gnome 3 environment on a EeePC 701. So far the biggest problem with Gnome 3 for me is that it does not play well with small screens.
The EeePC 701 has a very small screen (800x480 according to xdpyinfo), and a lot of dialog boxes are taller than that (or in the case of disk utility, wider too). One frequently has to alt-drag and resize dialog boxes to be able to see their bottom parts. One place where Gnome 3 is better is that it by default has a single space-wasting horizontal bar, instead of two.
But one place where it is much worse is that modal dialogs seem to be "stuck" to some place in the screen and unmovable (and their top is not even near the top of the screen, there is a lot of vertical space wasted). So, if a modal dialog is too tall, the only way you can change things on the lower part of it is by blindly using the keyboard.
The activities screen is another place which does not play too well with this screen size (the categories list gets almost cut off, and the fifth "dock" item is hard to click due to the shaded "bar" in the bottom being in the way).
Other than that, and the missing shutdown option ("fixed" by configuring the power button back from suspend to shutdown, since I mostly shutdown by pressing it followed by enter), it is working fine so far.
Small screens Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:43 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Can you file a bug in our bugzilla? http://bugzilla.gnome.org/, choose the gnome-shell component
Small screens Posted Mar 17, 2011 0:20 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Will do, probably this weekend. That is the reason I am playing with an alpha release, after all.
Small screens Posted Mar 31, 2011 0:43 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
Better late than never.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=646287
Small screens Posted Mar 16, 2011 12:31 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Hang on. We're told that the reason for all this redesigning is to make GNOME 3 nice to use on devices with small screens... but this makes it seem like nobody is doing any testing on such devices!
I find this conflicting evidence very conflicting.
Small screens Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:20 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]
No, that is not the reason for the new design. The principal ethos behind the new design is managing distractions (notifications) and making it easier for users to find things (applications, windows, files).
Small screens Posted Mar 17, 2011 1:28 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] the last point of the goals of Gnome Shell, as stated here: "Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind". emphasis mine.
Small screens Posted Mar 23, 2011 1:13 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]
> But one place where it is much worse is that modal dialogs seem to be "stuck" to some place in the screen and unmovable (and their top is not even near the top of the screen, there is a lot of vertical space wasted). So, if a modal dialog is too tall, the only way you can change things on the lower part of it is by blindly using the keyboard.
That's awful, to be sure, but one thing I personally find horrifying is that there are modal dialogs. Isn't it basically stated in the GNOME 2.x HID guidelines that if you (as an application developer) are thinking about making your dialog modal, you should stop and rethink, as they are never the right idea?
Modal dialogs are part of what makes Microsoft Windows unusable as a desktop environment. I have to work with Windows almost every day at work, due to some specialized (and closed-source) applications we use in our field.
I used to give Windows the benefit of the doubt, saying "well, I haven't used it since Windows 95. It can't still be that bad - surely they've made SOME strides in usability?" Then I got a job that involved actually working with it. Wow. Was I ever wrong.
I can't begin to describe the little frustrations that come into play every single day. They become less surprising after a while, but I can tell they're still just as irritating by how tight my back and neck muscles are after I get home from work. Modal dialogs are one of the worst ideas ever dreamed up for a user interface. Please tell me they're still strongly recommended against. If it turns out that they are now encouraged (or even tolerated) I will have to sit quietly and weep in mourning for a better world.
Small screens Posted Mar 23, 2011 1:27 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]
As an aside, I really liked the early stuff I saw in gnome-shell. If they hadn't removed it from the Ubuntu repository for Natty I'd be looking at it right now to see if it was really as bad as it sounds. I looked at Unity for about 30 seconds, but it seems to be essentially a poor-man's gnome-shell.
So I'm not a hater - even though I can't test (easily) at my desktop right now I'd love to. But I deal with poor UI often enough at work; I don't want to come home to it as well, nor to work in an environment made solely of worse UI than I'm used to seeing in GNOME 2.
Small screens Posted Mar 24, 2011 15:28 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Modal dialogs are part of what makes Microsoft Windows unusable as a desktop environment. I have to work with Windows almost every day at work, due to some specialized (and closed-source) applications we use in our field.
>I used to give Windows the benefit of the doubt, saying "well, I haven't used it since Windows 95. It can't still be that bad
While I don't disagree with the general gist of your point, it sounds like you are expecting newer versions of Windows to have somehow forced all applications not to have modal dialogs, which is surely impossible?
Small screens Posted Mar 24, 2011 18:43 UTC (Thu) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]
No, of course not - but there is the matter of the HID guidelines. If Microsoft has also put out a document strongly recommending against modal dialogs and application developers just ignore it, well, at least they tried right? I've never heard such a thing, but then, I haven't looked for it either.
But I know that the number of modal dialogs I see per week on my Linux desktop can be numbered in the single digits, if at all. The number of times I've needed to find some data in a parent window before answering a question asked in a child window - and been unable to because I can't interact with the parent at all while the child is open... countless on Windows. Regardless of the cause, the effect as a whole is the same.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:03 UTC (Tue) by ceswiedler (subscriber, #24638) [Link]
It does sound like GNOME is going a bit too far in the "we do the thinking so you don't have to" direction. But I'm actually kind of glad-- it would be a shame if every desktop environment was designed for people who have used Linux desktops long enough to know exactly what they want. I'm certainly not worried that power users will be left without a desktop environment that they can customize to their liking.
Apple does something similar, though unsurprisingly with a massively larger budget they do a better job than GNOME. And there, too, I applaud an effort to make the system as usable as possible for everyone, even if it means leaving power users like myself unhappy with the lack of options.
XFCE Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:31 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
Meanwhile, XFCE has moved in to closely match GNOME 2 functionality. I expect most people who want their desktop to "just work" will move to XFCE (or LXDE) instead of catering their workflow to GNOME 3. No harm done.
XFCE Posted Mar 15, 2011 21:47 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Ah yes, I remember those good ol days of GNOME 1.x -> GNOME 2.0 when after slashing options and going for a "just works" mentality we had a loads of people telling us that we were just doing it wrong and it was just not the "Linux" way. At least admit that we were doing the right thing and your desktop at the end of the 2.0 series indeed "just work".
XFCE is an awesome project and I'm glad they exist. They are good people. It was my desktop of choice to run under VNC.
XFCE Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:11 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
Gnome 2.0 I've had little problem with (maybe the removal of screensaver options, like image source), but this does look like it is rushed and nothing really works (small screen fails, large screen fails, dual screen fails, speed fails, ...). I do really hope that some sanity will prevail, just like in Gnome 2.x - many initial decisions were reversed eventually.
XFCE Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:17 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Not really, a lot of options were re-added later. Some things never worked again and people just had to get used to them.
Mostly because competition sucked in a different way (though KDE looked pretty good up until KDE4.0). Personally, I think I'll switch to KDE once GNOME2 support starts deteriorating.
XFCE Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:02 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
I'd like to see a project like Xfce with an active stance to remain more like GNOME 2.x, as a matter of unbreakable, unchangeable policy.
XFCE Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:57 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] I like XFCE and use it on all my machines. However, it may follow the path of other window managers that morphed into "desktop environments" and get big and heavy. Then I'll have to move to LXDE or something... until that one gets grandiose... rinse, repeat... Someone posted something about a stable desktop design being "mature and perfected" rather than "dead". I agree with that. Mucking about with radical new desktop concepts may be good for cutting-edge experimenters (who might even find one or two useful ideas out of the dozens they try), but it's jarring and annoying for most people.
XFCE Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:43 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
I think you should just pick up fvwm2 or windowmaker. They have a firm and stable interface that will not change. I'm not trying to be sarcastic but really an active project is going to have some kind of change horizon. If you picked one that is just in support mode you're going to get a consistent user interface over a long period of time.. until the next processor/motherboard change. :-)
XFCE Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:27 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] So far (fingers crossed....) XFCE has remained sane. :)
Windowmaker Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:13 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]
Yes, wmaker for the win!
Quite stable, relatively low resources, has a convenient gui for settings AND sensible text config files that can be directly edited; what more do you need for hosting a slew of terminals plus a couple firefox, gimp, and/or wireshark windows?
Windowmaker Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:23 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
have they made it able to work across multiple monitors yet? (I used to use windowmaker but a combination of a bad release in my primary distro and moving to a multi-monitor setup pushed me away from it a couple of years ago)
Windowmaker Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:52 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]
Multi-monitor as in xinerama?
Don't use multiple monitors myself, but the windowmaker-user mailing list shows a happy user of xinerama on version 0.92, which is still current.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.window-managers.windo...
Also there was a gentoo bug a while back about adding libxinerama as a dependency, but no complaints about xinerama being broken, so that's another piece of evidence in favor of it working.
Windowmaker Posted Mar 17, 2011 23:03 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
on KDE and Gnome with Ubuntu I've been using xrandr to do the configuration, I don't know about xinerama (I've never tried to configure it)
when I asked at the windowmaker booth at Scale (last year or the year before), I was told that windowmaker didn't currently support multi-monitor configurations, but it was a commonly asked for feature.
Windowmaker Posted Mar 18, 2011 0:37 UTC (Fri) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]
meh... generally I agree, but having to RTFS quite a bit before figuring out how to get rid of idiotic panel thrown up on Alt-Tab had been annoying, to put it mildly (SwitchPanelImages = None; in GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker, FWIW). Not documented, not doable via their GUI config (verified by RTFS, again - it's not just hard to find)... And the way they launch stuff when restoring the session is racy - event at the wrong time and the damn thing gets confused, slapping everything into one workspace.
Still far less annoying than GNOME, wrt both the program behaviour and not employing marketing teams that would spew forth the gems about Craving For Change(tm)...
XFCE Posted Mar 16, 2011 18:26 UTC (Wed) by meyert (subscriber, #32097) [Link]
:-) yes, indeed. XFCE looks really nice today AND has a great keyboard only usability!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 2:23 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
OK guys, I'm going to have to quit for now. :-) It takes a lot of time to write my responses to you all. I know we agree on some fundamental things about change. Just realize that we're in the business of interaction and we want to always struggle towards trying to find better ways of interaction. Just as someone would struggle to get the most performance, or be the most conservative with resources. We each have our niche.
Technically, we have a strong development platform, you can write code against it and be assured that it's not going to change underneath you and have to re-write your application. Maybe the UI is not everyone's cup of tea. We accept that. People don't like 3D interfaces, it isn't that we are using 3D, but you are using the 3D hardware and taking advantage of it. If you're using compiz, you're using the 3D hardware today. If it isn't working right now, it'll work in the next iteration. We in the Linux community know that we are always under gun when it comes to drivers for hardware manufacturers and we're playing catch up.
If anything, we're giving you a reason to hack the kernel or xorg server some more. Otherwise, what's the point? If we just did 2d what's there left to do in xorg other than bug fixes?
The desktops are driving where kernel and xorg are going today and has been for the past 10 years. Consumer devices, netbooks, embedded devices, are where the kernel is going. The desktop needs to go there too.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 3:23 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]
Hey - thanks for the engaging discussion. It's great. Let's talk more sometime, perhaps at a conference, etc.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 3:46 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (guest, #72628) [Link]
Absolutely!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 1:33 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Thank you for your time and patience, and specially for your niceness.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:35 UTC (Wed) by zenaan (subscriber, #3778) [Link]
"Disabling the second monitor makes things work, but with an obvious cost; one might describe it as a new form of the classic time/space tradeoff."
The best dry humour .. every time! Another lwn subscription extension coming up...
Thanks Jonathan, made my day!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 12:05 UTC (Thu) by s_hoop (subscriber, #49503) [Link]
Was about to post the same, it cracked me up bigtime. Thanks Jon!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:19 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (subscriber, #8143) [Link]
This jewel was my favorite from the article:
"Your editor, having been blissfully unaware of the scourge of unnecessary calculators just waiting for their opportunity to overwhelm his desktop, has not yet come to love the new way of doing things."
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted May 3, 2011 0:33 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
I must (belatedly) say that, while the original line in the article amused me too, this is *exactly* what I observe every single time I see a non-technical user (co-worker or family, for instance) using GNOME or Windows. They don't understand, or want to understand, the difference between activating an already-existing application (window switcher) or launching a new application (panel launcher/quick launch icon or Applications/Start menu). The result is that their desktops *are* littered with dozens of old/empty/unused web browser windows, calculators, file manager windows, etc.
The Mac got this bit of UI exactly right back in 1988 when System 6 implemented multitasking. Activating an application (whether from the Finder [file manager], Apple menu, the Launcher [System 7-era application launcher], At Ease [dumbed down application launcher for very young or novice users], or the Dock etc.) brings the application to the front--irrespective of whether the application is already running.
When you are used to this way of working, going back to GNOME 2, KDE, Windows etc., where the sequence of user inputs necessary to bring an application to the foreground changes based on this arbitrary, technically mystifying and frankly uninteresting implementation detail of the underlying operating system feels so incredibly frustrating and backwards that I am amazed that it has taken 24 years for someone to get around to implementing task launching/switching the same way that Apple did.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 8:03 UTC (Wed) by allquixotic (subscriber, #61671) [Link]
I don't find the bugs, omissions, and new release dust to be a problem at all. In fact, I like that they are cleaning up things and destabilizing the stack with the intention to reduce kludges and support modern desktops and modern features out of the box, without hacky Python extensions hosted on gnome-look.org.
What I can't stand is the way that previously simple operations (such as moving the mouse to the top of the screen to launch an application by clicking its launcher) are gone. And I for one use minimize/maximize all the time, so yes I will miss them.
I am extremely comfortable and happy with the UI patterns and usability of KDE 4.4 or later, Windows XP / Vista / 7, Mac OS X 10.5 or later, and Gnome 2.x. Of them all, I probably prefer vanilla Gnome 2 the most, but I don't feel that any of the above-mentioned DEs interfere with my work significantly, on a purely UI/UX level. I can get stuff done -- quickly -- and without confusion (well, a few aggravations about Windows Vista/7, but it's... Windows).
But despite all my approval for the above, I just can't stomach Gnome 3 or Unity. Both of them are too different for me to swallow. It seems like there's an excess of mouse movement to and fro, where before a single mouse stroke or hotkey would handle it. And the absence of configuration settings, while extremely frustrating at first, I am sure will work itself out within the 2011-2012 releases of Gnome 3.
So I pretty much disagree with the whole design approach behind Gnome 3. And I dislike Canonical's Unity even more.
I think I would like the UI patterns of Gnome 2.x for my DE, but using GTK3 for applications, to take advantage of the enhancements at the toolkit level. That is probably what I will try to hack together for my day to day distro. And no, I don't ordinarily use Windows; I just don't find its UI patterns to be mind-warpingly complicated or confusing. I can't say the same about Gnome 3.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:41 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
With regard to Gnome Shell, rather than pushing the mouse pointer to the top left of the screen or clicking the Activities button, try pushing the super/meta/"windows" key on the keyboard and then push the cursor to the left edge of the screen where the Dash will be to click on your launcher of choice. (Pushing the super/meta/"windows" key has the same effect as pushing the Activities button.) If you designate a launcher as a "favorite," it will stay on the Dash even if no instance of the application is running. This way your launcher will be available at the edge of the screen (left, rather than top). Then you can launch the application with one click of the mouse without having the mouse pointer embark on an epic journey. :)
This use pattern should be pretty close to the one you had with Gnome 2 and may help you enjoy the Gnome Shell experience a bit more, as you get used to the new things.
Anyway, I hope this might prove helpful to you. Cheers!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:33 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I hate to point it out, but combining a keypress and a major mouse movement is not very pleasant from a UI perspective (let alone a discoverability perspective). The only way you could make it harder would be to require fine control at the end of the mouse movement or chords on physically distant keys. You're still requiring simultaneous use of two arms and relatively fine coordination in both of them at once.
I can say that for some years I would have been physically incapable of carrying out that action, and that's just RSI, not anything particularly serious. Even now I'd find it tricky. I am not alone. (Sticky keys might make this a bit less appalling.)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:07 UTC (Wed) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]
I'll try to address some of your points:
* non-discoverable: true, but this feature is certainly highlighted in the documentation. So, for those who want to read up on some short cuts in the shell, you might find some nice features. Also, feel free to look here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet
* requiring two hands: not necessarily. You don't need to keep the super/meta/"windows" key pressed down when you're using the mouse. Once you've pressed the key (and then unpressed it), you're now in the Overlay mode, which is also what happens when you click the Activities button or throw the mouse pointer to the upper left corner of the screen. So, you could push the key and then move the mouse. On the other hand, it would probably be faster to push the key with your non-mouse hand and then guide the mouse pointer to left side of the screen with your mouse hand.
* fine motor control: this criticism I don't really understand. Once you've pushed the button, you just need to throw the mouse pointer to the left side of the screen and you're at the dash. This is not unlike throwing the mouse pointer to Gnome panel at the top of the screen in Gnome 2. No extra motor control should be required. If pushing the button itself requires too much fine motor control due to RSI or some other reason, then you're right: this is probably not the best way to get to the dash for you.
Again, this is one out of several ways to get to a launcher. It will not necessarily work for everyone. There will undoubetdly be more ways to access launchers through extensions in the very near future. You could also use the dock programs out there to supplement the Shell.
At any rate, I hope this clarifies things. Thanks for your feedback!
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:45 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Aha! So it already acts like a 'sticky key'. Yeah, that fixes a lot of my concerns about this feature. (The non-discoverability remains concerning, but as an Emacs user I can't really make *too* much noise about that. ;} )
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Jun 11, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sat) by markthema3 (guest, #75626) [Link]
Just use GNOME 3 for a week. The mouse motion to the top left corner of the screen becomes so ingrained that you will begin to notice yourself trying to do it on Windows... if you are unlucky enough to have to use it regularly.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Jun 11, 2011 20:15 UTC (Sat) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
> Just use GNOME 3 for a week.
That's what I've done (actually, I've given it 3), before moving on to XFCE. I never regretted it so far.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Jun 13, 2011 16:20 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
I can do better: I forced myself to use it for a month on F15 beta. End result: still hate them with a passion.
There's a reason the whole industry fawned over hot corners in the 90s and then everyone abandoned them. They seem really neat at first. Then, after watching normal people struggle with them, you realize they're actually undiscoverable, surprising, and irritating.
My wife, a happy Ubuntu user, tried to figure out read her mail on my F15 desktop for 30 seconds ("Is this some nerdy Linux command line thing?") and giving up. Bitter failure.
I switched my computers to XFCE. Much better. She stays on Lucid of course.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 11:08 UTC (Wed) by kfiles (subscriber, #11628) [Link]
Hmm, sounds like it'll be time for me to do
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
when Ubuntu decides to pick up gnome3.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 20, 2011 23:07 UTC (Sun) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
If you've preferred GNOME over KDE thus far, you may prefer XFCE over KDE as well.
XFCE is very similar to the GNOME 2 UX, but with a lot of rough edges.
Personally, those rough edges are a lot less annoying than GNOME 3's jaggedly-sharp edges or KDE's sea of 10,000 edges. ;)
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:48 UTC (Wed) by nyfle (guest, #72967) [Link]
Thanks for posting up this review! After reading this and playing around around with Gnome 3 a little myself in the Fedora 15 Alpha, I think I'll be sticking with Gnome 2.x as well - at least until a few point-releases have passed and things have stabilised a bit.
That's not to say I don't appreciate the work the Gnome devs have done to modernise the desktop, I do, so kudos to them. Gnome 3 certainly has promise, but I don't think I'm ready to change my workflows just yet!
Missing the point? Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:39 UTC (Wed) by bkw1a (subscriber, #4101) [Link]
I think the Gnome developers are missing the point. There's only
one significant piece of information here:
* Some users find Gnome 3 difficult to use.
That's a bad thing. It doesn't matter whether they SHOULD find it
Missing the point? Posted Mar 19, 2011 7:50 UTC (Sat) by cas (subscriber, #52554) [Link]
yes, and the gnome developers agree with you that it's a bad thing.
that's why they're forcing the gnome shell on all users so that they have no choice but to get over their bad habits and just get with the program.
it's not gnome's fault - it's that all the users are wrong.
worse, some users are recalcitrant. it's just a shame that gnome devs don't have the power to send them off to re-education camps.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:49 UTC (Wed) by meyert (subscriber, #32097) [Link]
After playing around with the gnome-shell a few days I need to bring up some issues that needs to get fixed from my point of view:
- Keyboard only accessibility is more than worse. especially in the shell itself. - how to minimise/maximise a window? Left click on the title bar? seriously, why not remove all buttons? why keeping the close button? - how to bring the pidgin window back, after "closing" pidgin? I didn't find a way, but I'm eager to learn! It stays in the notification menu on the bottom of the desktop. - the desktop itself is useless. there seems no longer to be a connection between ~/Desktop and the "desktop". it's just a empty and useless space now. Why? Just to look pretty, i.e. non-cluttered?
I'm sad to see that history is repeating itself, the same happened with KDE 4. So sad.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 18:48 UTC (Wed) by BradReed (subscriber, #5917) [Link]
I appreciate the article and the lively discussion, but personally, I am glad Slackware dropped Gnome a long time ago. I like being able to configure my laptop with the fonts, workspaces, and other settings that work for me.
I can imagine some value in a corporate setting with helpdesks and cookie-cutter cubicles, but for intelligent computer-experienced users, Gnome seems to have nothing to offer.
I'll stick with my Slackware and e16 a bit longer.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:29 UTC (Wed) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
I fully agree with comments above that window-switching in gnome-shell is a a big regression. An operation that requires one mouse move to the edge to reach the task bar and click now requires movement to the corner, click, movement to a not stable location and another click.
Another big regression is windows switching with many open windows (say, 20 or more). In Gnome 2 the task bar has the grouping option that places all window behind one application button that, when clicked, expand into a menu with windows titles sorted alphabetically. It is very easy to locate the desired window in that menu and click on it again after very short mouse move. With Gnome 3 after clicking the Activities I see a few small window thumbs randomly places on the screen. Since the thumbs are small, the picture does not help to select the proper window so it is really hard to locate the necessary window and move mouse there.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:53 UTC (Thu) by jjmarin (guest, #53201) [Link]
>I fully agree with comments above that window-switching in gnome-shell is
>a a big regression. An operation that requires one mouse move to the edge >to reach the task bar and click now requires movement to the corner, >click, movement to a not stable location and another click.
That's not exactly true, you don't need to click on the corner. This movement turns mechanical/automatic when you use gnome shell for a while.
>Another big regression is windows switching with many open windows (say,
You should group apps in workspaces instead, IMHO.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:54 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> That's not exactly true, you don't need to click on the corner. This movement turns mechanical/automatic when you use gnome shell for a while.
Still it is a regression in amount of moves and extra brain work to locate the desired window.
> You should group apps in workspaces instead, IMHO.
Often when browsing and working with various references I keep many browser and document viewer window open with all referenced articles. I do not use tabs since switching using task-bar and grouped windows is much faster. This is especially true when switching between html, pdf and office documents. With tabs I would need to switch first to the corresponding application and then try to locate the desired tab that is often not easy since the name on the tab is cut.
I do not see how using workspaces in Gnome-3 would provide the same efficiency of window switching. I would need to spent a lot of time to maintain the workspace since combination of windows is dynamic. Also it is not clear how should I split the windows in advance between workspaces since it hard to predict what would be used together.
For me the gnome-shell is a clear regression in amount of efforts to switch between windows. Judging by all the comments here I am not alone and this affects pretty much everybody with all those extra mouse moves and screen starring to locate the window.
I am puzzled why this clear usability regression did not became apparent when designing the shell. I do not see how even with a hypothetical touch screen implementation this would not be slower. On a touch screen one still needs to touch the activities button first to proceed any father instead of touching the desired window on the task bar.
The only user case where this would be faster is on a small screen when user works with full-screen applications taking the whole screen. Instead of explicit panel the interface would use a convention that touching the corner brings the activities window. But with such devices the hardware may well provide a more convenient dedicated button.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:39 UTC (Thu) by jjmarin (guest, #53201) [Link]
By experience is not what a user (well, myself) feels. If you haven't got a very high number of windows per workspace and you don't change the windows all the time, even the location of the windows isn't a problem, as I though in first place. I even made a suggestion about this [1], so I hope they can do some research about if this could be improved ot not. But hey, the current implementation works ok for the average user and for me IMHO.
If you don't have a combination of windows that works together, then it is difficult to group them in workspaces, but I think this isn't a common situation.
Anyway, try this, and if it doesn't work for you change to another UX (or maybe the GNOME fallback mode is ok for you).
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 18, 2011 16:19 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]
> But hey, the current implementation works ok for the average user and for me IMHO.
Does it work faster for you? I.e. does Gnome-3 saves the amount of mouse moves and clicks you need to do to perform a window switching? Or does "works ok" mean that there is a regression that you can live with?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:36 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
I think the shed should be blue.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 20, 2011 20:49 UTC (Sun) by jae (guest, #2369) [Link]
One thing I'm still wondering about: was there any usability testing (*actual* testing with *actual* users) done after the testing SUN did in 2001? I've googled (not for long, slooooow 'net here), and I've just found some beginning planning for it from early 2010.
Mind you, even back then... oh no, I'll not rant about it, I could, but won't. Just this: GNOME and Usability is a crazy, weird, and a lost cause.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 24, 2011 11:05 UTC (Thu) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]
Looks funny the fact that many of the comments to this article are from gnome developers suggesting to users to change platform if they do not like the new behavior, stick to gnome 2, move to kde, move to xfce, move to lxde or whatever.
Apart from this, I notice 4 facts:
1) Gnome 3 seems to have completely fragmented the gnome community users. Yesterday, gnome users made a critical mass, being all on gnome 2. Tomorrow they will not be a critical mass anymore, with a bit of them on gnome 2, a bit on gnome 3, a bit on unity, etc.
2) Taking away options, but encouraging extensions as a way to personalize behavior will additionally create fragmentation, making bug reporting and fixing a mess. Bug reports will look like: Menu so and so not working properly with gnome 3 plus <list 10 extensions to personalize behavior>.
3) Who makes a product, should probably first decide who is the market. The Linux market has traditionally been populated by more computer literate people than Windows. It is a niche, but a significant one. Now gnome seems to have moved to target those who are beyond the average windows user. I think that this will not buy a single new user (since these are anyway scared by the state of hardware support in linux) and loose many old ones.
4) If someone gives him/her an application that messes the gconf stuff (either incidentally or maliciously), a normal user will never be able to fix it by the gnome graphical interface and will likely remain with a broken desktop.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 25, 2011 19:40 UTC (Fri) by nedu (guest, #50951) [Link]
Well....
Just want to publicly say thanks to all the Gnome developers, I guess. For the past dozen years, I've been supporting some of my users on KDE. But for my own desktop, I've made the choice to use Gnome.
I don't think I'll be making the switch to Gnome 3.
I'm probably going to move to XFCE. I've already used it some.
Part of me feels like I out to write out some sort of an explanation. But after reading the 323 comments here already, well, I don't think anybody really cares to read my reasons for walking away.
So, anyhow. Thanks for the software. It's been fun. See you around, I guess. Good luck.
Thanks.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Mar 25, 2011 23:04 UTC (Fri) by awfut (guest, #73872) [Link]
I have been using the live version for just several hours.
While obviously impossible to rigorously test in this very limited environment, or even know how current it is, I discovered that I have an aversion to Gnome 3.0.
Not simply foreign, it appears to have removed the zeitgeist of the window metaphor. Maybe this says it best;
"It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience" - Albert Einstein
Sticking with what works for me Posted Mar 26, 2011 18:18 UTC (Sat) by ssavitzky (guest, #2855) [Link]
Thanks for the review -- I'll be sticking with ctwm, thanks. I've had roughly the same desktop layout for at least 20 years now.
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Apr 15, 2011 16:33 UTC (Fri) by pgoetz (subscriber, #4931) [Link]
With regard to this discussion, I think Larry Wall got it right: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."
The ideal desktop defaults to an easy to use interface which works for the masses but is configurable to allow power users and developers to work. Both gnome 3 and Unity appear to fail at the latter.
Perhaps it's time for a complete reset; a new window manager built from the ground up on Wayland using modern conveniences like dbus?
The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience Posted Jun 14, 2011 1:56 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> With regard to this discussion, I think Larry Wall got it right: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."
I agree. That's probably somewhere at the core of why I'm not such a personal fan of it. Granted things that I think should be "easy" is off from the general public (being able to work without touching a mouse should be "easy", but DEs as a whole tend to have issues there these days, hence my custom setup I've been running for 18 months now).
> The ideal desktop defaults to an easy to use interface which works for the masses but is configurable to allow power users and developers to work. Both gnome 3 and Unity appear to fail at the latter.
I agree. However, I just got my sister set up with a new laptop (Windows 7) and took about 5 hours getting it ready with Firefox, VLC, Pidgin, kdegames, Simon Tatham's Puzzles, LibreOffice (and a short explanation of the name change), making backup DVDs since they don't ship with them anymore, and some other system-level things. Setting up an old netbook of mine (was Fedora 14, but it got unplugged during an upgrade and paniced on boot) with Fedora 15. Took about 30 minutes (RPMFusion, acpi_osi=Linux kernel boot parameter for brightness, and updates) to prepare and 90 seconds to 1) show how to update packages and where to install new ones, 2) show her that the upper left corner is "magic" and you can type to search for things, and 3) hold "Alt" to turn "Suspend" to "Power off". After getting her wallpaper setup, she was ready to go. I will give GNOME 3 credit that it was the quickest setup for a machine I ever did for anyone in my family. Firefox Sync also makes her life a lot easier in that the machines are basically the same except one is much easier for going to class with, battery life, and the OS.
> Perhaps it's time for a complete reset; a new window manager built from the ground up on Wayland using modern conveniences like dbus?
Personally, I'd just like XMonad to be ported to Wayland which I'd like to help with given the time. I would then be able to survive crashes of my session (minus the session-preserving applications themselves) all the way down to the machine turning off. Instances of applications would also be able to be transported to any machine given network access (opening tmux to access already open shells and Wayland for open non-curses applications). I also run without a session bus, so dbus would be adding to my setup :) .
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![[GNOME 3 system settings]](/images/2011/gnome3-system-settings-sm.png)