Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
| From: | Adam Jackson <ajax-AT-redhat.com> | |
| To: | devel-AT-lists.fedoraproject.org | |
| Subject: | F17 heads up: gnome-shell for everyone! | |
| Date: | Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:57:32 -0400 | |
| Message-ID: | <1320357452.10590.92.camel@atropine> | |
| Archive‑link: | Article |
As of tomorrow's rawhide [1], gnome-session will no longer treat llvmpipe as an unsupported driver. This means gnome-shell will run even on hardware without a native 3D driver, including virt guests. There are probably bugs! I've done some quick tests on the hardware I have handy and in kvm, and things do appear to work. You, lucky contestant, might have a different experience. If you do, bugzilla is standing by and ready to take your call; please file against the 'mesa' component and set me as the assignee. In the meantime you can still get to fallback mode through the Graphics section of the System Info control panel. Very little performance work has been done on this yet - like, literally, none - though there are some things you can do [2]. Outside of virt you will probably want to tell your driver to use ShadowFB in xorg.conf. This will disable hardware acceleration, but in exchange you won't be doing very slow GetImages all the time to get textures loaded into the compositor. In virt, however, the double-buffering done by ShadowFB just slows you down, so you're probably best off switching your driver to NoAccel instead. The vesa driver should get this right for you already, as should cirrus under virt. Beyond that, most of the performance work is going to require new kernel and Mesa features. For details, please see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_softw... If you're interested in contributing to this effort, please follow up on dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org. [1] - In particular, you'll need these packages or newer for things to work: mesa-*-7.11-9.fc17 cogl-1.8.2-4.fc17 gnome-session-3.3.1-2.fc17 [2] - It's something of a policy decision to get some of these things "right" by default, because you're deciding to throw away hardware accel on old chips, and some people who aren't using gnome-shell might think that's worth keeping. We'll figure something out, I'm sure, but contributions are most welcome. - ajax -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Posted Nov 4, 2011 14:15 UTC (Fri)
by mordae (guest, #54701)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 6, 2011 20:49 UTC (Sun)
by benh (subscriber, #43720)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 14:37 UTC (Fri)
by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
[Link] (39 responses)
I am pretty sure I saw a blog post from some Gnome guy recently that said that Gnome3 was designed with fallback mode in mind and that it will stay for a long time.(Sorry, but Google(I) can't find the post atm)
So no fallback in Fedora, or no fallback at all?
Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:55 UTC (Fri)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (22 responses)
For GNOME, we haven't decided yet. Seems most are switching to other desktop environments if they don't want GNOME shell, so would ease maintenance to not have fallback mode.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:16 UTC (Fri)
by hadess (subscriber, #24252)
[Link] (17 responses)
Huh, we've already decided that we don't want to have to reimplement everything twice when we add a new feature to GNOME Shell, or a feature that uses GNOME Shell. For example, there's about 5 reimplementations of system status icons in various modules I maintain, and no fallback support for Zoom, or On-Screen Keyboard a11y features.
It was always going to go away, the only thing we haven't decided is when.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 17:23 UTC (Fri)
by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
[Link] (15 responses)
So if one likes Gnome programms and some of the Gnome3 tech(notifications etc), but also wants a task bar and simple menu and not Gnome-Shell(and you don't have the time to maintain FBM yourself) one is screwed, right?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 14:56 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (14 responses)
Seems that people just switch to something else instead. Which is fine as then fallback can be dropped earlier without impact.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 21:09 UTC (Sat)
by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
[Link] (13 responses)
It _seems_ that way, at least if you look at internet comments. No way to be sure or is there? So for a hunch you might alienate another part of your user base.
I am really not sure this KDE4/Gnome3/Unity thing where you introduce lots of regressions and try to live with the fallout is really the right way of doing things.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 15:28 UTC (Sun)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (12 responses)
Anyway, bringing up a kernel hacker and "lots of regressions" is not going to impress me much. Instead I rather look at GNOME 3.4 and see what we can improve. Just like GNOME 2.x.
We called gnome-panel v3 fallback mode for a reason. I know at least one distribution renamed it to "GNOME classic". That is wrong. You can get the same experience (was intended to make possible), but that was never going to stay forever. This all was communicated before GNOME 3.0 was released.
Having concrete data on how much fallback mode is used would be helpful. Fact is that it is really difficult to obtain that. I find it interesting in this light that you say "KDE hasn't recovered from KDE4". Where is the data to support this claim?
Standing at the sidelines and second guessing is cool, but bit of trust would be nice. I've been around GNOME since around the 1.4 days, same for many others involved with GNOME. Various developers returned with the plan to do GNOME 3.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 19:16 UTC (Sun)
by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
[Link] (10 responses)
That will probably happen, but my point is that resetting major parts of what your users come to exspect from a desktop is not going to win you lots of roses.
>This all was communicated before GNOME 3.0 was released.
I doubt that. See above.
>I find it interesting in this light that you say "KDE hasn't recovered from KDE4". Where is the data to support this claim?
Nearly every KDE4 post on any website that allows comments since 2007.
>Standing at the sidelines and second guessing is cool, but bit of trust would be nice.
Oh I trust that by the time Gnome 3.10 is released most complains will be gone, but I wish user facing components would see gentler migrations, even if that would mean maintaining older components a lot longer and not making progress in other parts that fast. The kernel is a good example IMO. Maybe doing it that way would encourage more people/companies to participate and therefore reduce the burden on devs.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 19:53 UTC (Sun)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (2 responses)
I don't get what you mean with marketing and hasn't recovered. I disagree that FOSS marketing is only done on the internet. Ubuntu is very well known, and it is not due to just internet marketing. You still haven't provided data on KDE marketing. I don't think it is possible to get such data, so we make the best decision. But keeping fallback around forever was never the plan, nor in line with the choices we've made over the last years. Our decisions are pretty predictable.
Comparing GNOME3, to KDE4 is inaccurate. We've been giving pretty much the same answers and promises for a long time. GNOME 3.0 was really stable, we didn't say "oh just a development release" just before releasing. This is mostly what I surprised me about KDE4 (bit buggy + change of message just before release). We have delayed GNOME3 various times to increase the quality.
Think getting lots of criticism on big changes is close to impossible to avoid. The more users something has, the more bugs are discovered. What is stable for 1000 people might be really buggy once 100.000 people use it. But you have to release at one point, because 6 additional months with the same amount of people (1000) will have the same benefit as just having 100x the amount of people using it.
Regarding your clarification on what you meant with regressions: I agree that changing user expectations is going to cause frustrations. It is annoying to suddenly have things work in a totally different way. I find most of that criticism totally logical and expected it. I saw the same during 2.0 though, except people seemed to be a bit more patient at that time.
IMO people have really high expectations of what a project can do and that bar raises each time you try and reach it.
Posted Nov 22, 2011 2:59 UTC (Tue)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link] (1 responses)
Change the font size? No.
It was like a "high quality" Hello World in my eyes.
I think most people complained about KDE4 for the same reasons. The functionality they were used to was gone. Not because it was buggy.
When something is buggy at least you can be reasonably sure it will eventually stabilize. It's even pretty easy to fix crashers and bugs as someone unfamiliar with the project. Major features, not so much.
When functionality is missing and the devs are saying, "you don't need that, you were doing it wrong!", that is what really annoys people.
Posted Nov 22, 2011 7:36 UTC (Tue)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Nope. KDE 4.0 was as buggy as the come. It leaked memory, it crashed all the time. Limited functionality is was just an icing on the cake. GNOME3 is paradise in comparison: sure, some functions are missing, but at least the ones that are there work reliably.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 19:57 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (6 responses)
"Gentler migration" is expensive and userspace is much larger then kernel. This is chicken-and-egg problem: there are very few customers which are ready to pay for desktop thus it's hard to do things like "gentler migrations" and because of regular "rough migrations" it's hard to attract users who will pay for desktop. It's not clear how this circle can broken. They tried - but looks like "fallback mode" was just a waste of resources: looks like people either use GNOME Shell or they drop GNOME completely.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 7:43 UTC (Mon)
by hein.zelle (guest, #33324)
[Link] (4 responses)
I haven't switched away, and since ubuntu 11.04 I've definitely started using the "classic" interface. I've tried unity for a week, and couldn't find half of the things I wanted to get working, not even with a lot of searching. I think if you want real data, a software-based poll or at least a widely announced poll on the web is required. Guessing either way is probably not adequate.
Personally, what I think is missing (for unity, I haven't tried gnome3) is documentation on how to use it. One of the major strong points of ubuntu was a well organized menu. In unity, I can't find anything. A "how to use unity effectively" tutorial would be a welcome addition, and could resolve a lot of the issues people are having. Having to search on the internet for hotkeys is not the right way, if you ask me.
- how do I change the look/feel/behaviour? (answer: install a separate, non-default package. Found via google, not the menu or help)
I'll try again in a little while with ubuntu 11.10 to see if things have improved, but that list of problems is a bit too long for my taste. Add to that a couple of software bugs (image viewer won't go full screen, etc), and the fun is complete.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 10:16 UTC (Mon)
by jku (subscriber, #42379)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 9:00 UTC (Tue)
by hein.zelle (guest, #33324)
[Link] (2 responses)
Anyway, I agree that getting objective data is hard no matter which method you choose. It may be enough to get a feeling for how intensively the fallback mode is used, though.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 16:15 UTC (Tue)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
That said, if we'd have something used by many, it would be interesting to see.
Posted Nov 9, 2011 8:27 UTC (Wed)
by jku (subscriber, #42379)
[Link]
Posted Nov 8, 2011 18:53 UTC (Tue)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link]
I had Gnome on my netbook, and found it easier just to switch to XFCE while Gnome shell didn't work there. The fallback mode was too different from real Gnome 2 for my liking (or perhaps too similar, with just the right annoying minor differences).
Posted Nov 9, 2011 1:48 UTC (Wed)
by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698)
[Link]
Posted Nov 5, 2011 14:53 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:19 UTC (Fri)
by csigler (subscriber, #1224)
[Link] (3 responses)
Clemmitt
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:26 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
If fallback mode is never going make people happy that hate Gnome shell, then what is the point? Just waste man hours supporting yet another half-assed 'alternative'?
Posted Nov 16, 2011 21:46 UTC (Wed)
by cas (guest, #52554)
[Link]
The potential for fallback-mode to improve to the point where it *IS* an adequate replacement for gnome2 panel is the only reason I persist with Gnome 3 on my desktop machine at work (on my home desktops, I've stayed with Gnome 2, and was planning on doing so until fallback mode became good enough). If the story has now changed, and fallback mode will vanish completely at some point, then there's no reason for me to persist. I may as well switch to XFCE or something, and do it sooner rather than later. Even though i don't want to.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 23:28 UTC (Fri)
by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:00 UTC (Fri)
by sgordon (guest, #70042)
[Link]
"That's really a policy decision for the GNOME / Fedora desktop teams,
I wouldn't take it as a definitive statement of anything.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:11 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (14 responses)
The Linux/Mesa software OpenGL stack has improved to the point were it can provide the necessary APIs at (hopefully) decent performance on composited desktops.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:29 UTC (Fri)
by clump (subscriber, #27801)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:15 UTC (Fri)
by luya (subscriber, #50741)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:27 UTC (Fri)
by clump (subscriber, #27801)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:43 UTC (Fri)
by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:59 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (9 responses)
I expect that some scripts will need to be updated between major releases, but hopefully Gnome developers will be smart enough to keep required changes to a minimum.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 13:53 UTC (Sat)
by clump (subscriber, #27801)
[Link] (8 responses)
Perhaps a decent comprimise would be to drop fallback mode, but allow more customisation without needing extensions?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 15:00 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (7 responses)
Before various extensions were all imported to GNOME git and maintenance was taken over by one person. Giving a bus factor of one. The new infrastructure around it has as goal to ensure the extensions really can be used in practice. But then you need not only allow multiple extension developers, but also scale the review of them.. extensions can do anything. E.g. abuse the latest kernel root bug.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 16:53 UTC (Sat)
by clump (subscriber, #27801)
[Link] (6 responses)
Extensions are beautiful for shaping software far beyond its original design. Rather than shape the software, I simply wish to have more control. It would be reasonable to control certain defaults of GNOME Shell, if even only by command line tools, rather than require extensions.
Currently GNOME Shell and its fallback mode aren't equal because I can control more with the latter. Why keep fallback mode around if GNOME Shell can offer the same degree of control?
Does this idea sound reasonable?
Posted Nov 6, 2011 20:08 UTC (Sun)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (1 responses)
So there is a reason for keeping panel+applets.
But I think we both agree. Seems logical to 'remove' fallback and extensions + gnome-tweak-tool/dconf is good for people who want more control. Problem is not so much with giving control, but should be clear it is a tweak. Once it is clear that we consider it a tweak, it avoids giving the impression that it is guaranteed always work. A tweak might of course break sometimes, eventhough there is no intention to have bugs in them.
Cannot think of a good example, but maybe networkmanager/pulseaudio. We rely on it, if you do not you're on your own (sort of, this is not the best example).
Note: remove fallback in practice that it just means it is still available, but not taken into account during development. So could become more buggy (e.g. on screen keyboard might only work in gnome-shell, not in gnome-panel). Not sure though how quickly it'll become buggy or unusable. I know that system settings sometimes does things differently (hacks) to ensure it works in both.
Posted Nov 10, 2011 22:00 UTC (Thu)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link]
Why? If XFCE's panel can import an applet why can't GNOME Shell? Is there some technical limitation, is it purely political or simply a lack of round 'tuits?
Posted Nov 7, 2011 0:29 UTC (Mon)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link] (3 responses)
If thats the way it works then the commands will be undocumented, buggy, and frequently broken by changes. You'd be better off without them in gnome best to convince your Linux distribution that gnome doesn't meet your needs and that you'd rather they not so tightly integrate it so that you could use something else.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 18:09 UTC (Mon)
by tuna (guest, #44480)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 16:17 UTC (Tue)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 19:28 UTC (Tue)
by tuna (guest, #44480)
[Link]
Lots of bugs are fixed in 3.2.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:12 UTC (Fri)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (58 responses)
All this when tablets that don't have glowing fruit on the back are a fraction of a percent of computing devices shipped and even if you count Apple they are just an interesting new market. It isn't like Corporate America is about to bin their Dells and put iPads on people's desks.... are they? Really? Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoints on an tablet? Sharepoint and Outlook on a tablet? SAP? On a tablet?
But you don't have to go along with it. Fedora ships other desktops, try them out and pick a new one. XFCE is still a roach motel in F15, hoping some of the critical flaws are fixed in F16. If they can't at least get shortcuts to terminal apps and the SSH Key Agent working right I'll probably have to go back to looking at other desktops again.
Of course, on the other hand, to a great extent GNOME == Fedora in that far too many of the lunatics responsible for the GNOME fiasco are RH staff who have commit rights on Fedora and RHEL... and are also responsible for so much of the other hostility to UNIX tradition we are seeing lately. And the constant, incessant, all but undocumented (heck, undocumentable because it churns so fast) changes in the plumbing.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:47 UTC (Fri)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link] (22 responses)
Was compiz tablet crazy? Was Apple tablet crazy when they started adding visual feedback? Was Microsoft with Vista and Windows 7 Aero? The answer is no.
In fact, many new elements of GNOME 3 and even Unity are there for advanced keyboard users who can hotkey much of what they do. I'm guessing hotkeys are used much on tablets.
It is also primarily a switch to a search driven interface as well... again which DID NOT originate on the tablet.
Tablets have lots of icons on the screen... mainly because their interfaces came from smartphones. Do Unity and GNOME 3 have icons all over the screen? Again, no.
Since you want to use the word crazy I'm happy to swat it back at you and say that you are crazy for trying to map everything tablet onto GNOME 3 and Unity when that simply is not the case.
Of course Canonical recently said that they want Unity to be the single interface for everything so that doesn't help the case I'm trying to defend but much of the GNOME 3 design was around before the iPad even had a name.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:01 UTC (Fri)
by alankila (guest, #47141)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:21 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
Visually, while in application mode, it looks and behaves very closely like a BB-style window manager; No icons, no task manager to connect to.
The biggest difference between the functionality of Gnome Shell and BlackBox/FuseBox/OpenBox is that the background is inert.
Instead of creating a context to interact with on the background like the BB systems support (scroll on background to switch desktops + click to access menus) it creates a modal 'activities' mode.
Thus it seems to me much more actually along the Linux tradition of having minimal desktops rather then either a Tablet or WIMP-style interface.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:49 UTC (Fri)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (19 responses)
It certainly wasn't designed for anyone who actually uses a desktop. Or it was just designed really poorly. Pick one. If you thought the Mac's contribution to repetitive motion health issues with the menu bar locked to the top of the primary display was bad, come on over and try GNOME Shell and we will put ya into early disability pronto! But those design decisions would flow naturally from a use case imagining a tablet with a touch interface. Holding a tablet in both hands would make GNOME Shell a totally different, and more natural, experience because touching opposite sides of the screen wouldn't be a problem. Too bad there aren't any tablets that can run GNOME Shell. However we mortal users are capable of noticing these things.
And it is annoying the heck out of us when an interface that we are familiar with and actually liked is removed and replaced with one that is pretty obviously designed for hardware we DON'T HAVE and CAN'T BUY. We might could be convinced that we want a touch screen but the point is moot since there aren't any to be had. Then we complain and are told to shut up and accept the change, because there will be NO discussion of reviving the old desktop. It is onward and upward into the sunny uplands of history. If we were the sort who could be bullied like that we would be using iProducts.
As far as I'm concerned anger long ago faded into disgust and distrust. Used GNOME from pre 1.0 on RedHat up through F12; now I'm on XFCE and doubt I'd go back to GNOME unless some outside group forked 3.0 and ported the old desktop to it because I no longer trust the judgement of the current GNOMEs.
> Of course Canonical recently said that they want Unity
And KDE is blabbering on about tablets. Microsoft's impending Metro/Windows 8 trainwreck is all about the notion that everybody wants a touchscreen and is willing to toss all displays that don't have a multi-touch interface. Apple is making each release of OS X more like iOS. And yes I have heard enough tablet/touch talk from the GNOMEs to justify the suspicion that you too are infected with touch madness.
> so that doesn't help the case I'm trying to defend but much of
No, the iPad didn't exist yet. But everyone has been obsessed over iOS since the first iPhone. What works on a four inch screen isn't right on a twenty four inch screen.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:05 UTC (Fri)
by tuna (guest, #44480)
[Link]
I personally feel that I use the mouse less than in Gnome 2.X, so it would be interesting if you could expand on this issue.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:32 UTC (Fri)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link] (17 responses)
... we aren't altering the desktop shell to do this, however. We use the same underlying frameworks and implementations to create a touch-centric tablet focussed user experience that is separate from the Plasma Desktop shell.
that they share an amazing amount of code between them is what allows us to do this, but we have no desire nor intention to either abandon the desktop nor to diminish the desktop shell due to having a parallel tablet environment.
form factor optimized interfaces that work together ... or put another way, diversity with compatibility.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:18 UTC (Fri)
by RCL (guest, #63264)
[Link] (16 responses)
I am not in position to complain, though - these days, running free software (and not being otherwise involved in its development) is basically participating in someone's experiment or PR campaign - akin to using free email or reading free (and ad-filled) newspapers.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:40 UTC (Fri)
by aseigo (guest, #18394)
[Link] (15 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:07 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (13 responses)
My KDE taskbar doesn't work correctly on KUbuntu 11.10, but I can share it over the network (what for?!?!). KDE 3.5 had wonderful multi-desktop support but now I not only have multi-desktop, but multiple activities each with its own widget set.
Then there's a question of usability. Nepomuk allows me to reassure myself that all my music is in ~/Music, but there's no way to find which program uses a certain keyboard shortcut.
So, what are the use-cases for the whole 'semantic desktop' thingie? I have yet been able to find one.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 12:27 UTC (Sat)
by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978)
[Link] (10 responses)
What do you mean by "doesn't work correctly"?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 13:08 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (9 responses)
KDE is busted for me, too, in some respects - it's not network transparent! I have an old system I use as a terminal.
Log in locally on the main system, stick in a CD or usb stick, and up pops the notification window. And it mounts fine.
Log in over xdm, and I get NO notification window. And mounting comes back "only root can mount this device". WHY? That's important to me because I switch between computers and would like my experience to be identical!
Cheers,
Posted Nov 6, 2011 0:08 UTC (Sun)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (4 responses)
Placing the following text in a .pkla file under /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/ should allow you to access removable devices via the udisks service (as used by recent KDE versions, or on the command-line via "udisks --mount $dev") regardless of whether you are a local or remote user:
[udisk Permissions]
Note that the org.freedesktop.* action IDs are all on one line, with no spaces. Replace "$your_username" with your actual UNIX username. The first line is just a label; feel free to change it.
See also pklocalauthority(8) or <http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/polkit/pklocalauthority.8...>.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 3:13 UTC (Sun)
by butlerm (subscriber, #13312)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 6, 2011 6:07 UTC (Sun)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link] (2 responses)
It would have been helpful of the action names were grouped a bit better; you can use glob patterns, but the org.freedesktop.udisks.* actions are a mixture of normal user actions (e.g. "mount removable filesystem") and things which should require administrative privileges (e.g. "manage the LVM subsystem" or "lock encrypted LUKS devices unlocked by other users"). I didn't see any obvious combination of positive glob patterns which would be sure to select just the normal user actions, short of listing them all. Renaming the actions enabled by default for interactive sessions to something like org.freedesktop.udisks.safe.* would have allowed for a much more compact configuration, but I realize that has its own issues. Groups, or multiple Action= lines, would be nice. Perhaps the ability to filter actions based on a glob pattern plus the current Result* settings ("allow all udisk actions which this user could use in an active session"). Or at least some (documented) way to break values over multiple lines.
There used to be a GUI for configuring PolicyKit permissions, but apparently no one's updated it for the PolKit-1 redesign.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 16:32 UTC (Sun)
by ABCD (subscriber, #53650)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2011 20:26 UTC (Mon)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
And I run gentoo :-)
iirc it used to work the way I want, until a recent KDE update dragged in polkit, consolekit, etc etc. Then I started swearing ... :-) part of the trouble is I haven't got the knack of finding the docu - whether I can't think of the right keywords for Google or not I don't know.
Cheers,
Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:08 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Additionally, windows are added to the _right_ side of the taskbar, not to the left (and no, I don't have Arabic or Hebrew locale set).
I've reported it, but no result so far.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 23:38 UTC (Sun)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 6, 2011 23:59 UTC (Sun)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link] (1 responses)
sending notifications to all users, local or remote is something that has been done for decades on unix systems.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:22 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Posted Nov 5, 2011 15:06 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (1 responses)
I expect semanic desktop to be similar. Added value atm is low (it seems, don't use KDE), in future: everything it provides would be considered normal by the users and if you don't have it your phone/pc is just ancient.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:12 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
I kinda like KDE visually, especially compared to GNOME3 [S]hell is. But that semantic desktop fixation is killing me.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:08 UTC (Fri)
by RCL (guest, #63264)
[Link]
If you could point me to a comprehensible and practical use case of Semantic Desktop/Tablet features, I'll gladly be educated.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:53 UTC (Fri)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (24 responses)
Kind of funny that you call people hostile at the same time. :P
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:16 UTC (Fri)
by clump (subscriber, #27801)
[Link] (23 responses)
I'm not saying user feedback should be dismissed, but I do think that a free-of-charge/free-as-in-freedom project should have more users pitching in and less complaining.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 22:23 UTC (Fri)
by RCL (guest, #63264)
[Link]
Probably, FOSS user base grew older and more change-averse. Also, software world seems to have stabilized in the last 10 years and reinventing the wheel became less popular (compare Windows XP popularity in proprietary universe).
And finally, it may be UNIX-specific thing. I guess users of an OS with 40 years of tradition, who use software written according to UX guidelines of 1970s, value their habits too much to change them with every new fad.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:01 UTC (Sat)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (2 responses)
And I can see how people get frustrated. If their preferred software becomes unmaintained, they have to step up and maintain it, which is what we all expect. But then, they might also need to step up and maintain various dependencies, which is why the Trinity people have to also maintain Qt 3, for example. And on top of all this, if their preferred OS distribution decides that such software isn't welcome any more, they also have to find a distribution they can live with or maintain their own variant.
So from the end-user perspective, it goes from having a stable and dependable environment one minute to having to maintain large tracts of the software stack the next. Sure, they should "pitch in", but you can't blame them for complaining about it.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:44 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (1 responses)
I still find it logical that most users are not aware. But people on LWN, well, no, I find that odd.
And I don't mind arguments. So if I find something strange in someones argumentation, I like a discussion. Don't mind changing my mind in the process (discussion is pointless otherwise anyway).
Posted Nov 5, 2011 22:54 UTC (Sat)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
Of course, not everyone follows the mailing lists, and there is a class of end-user that not only won't be following the lists, but also won't have any power to dictate what they will be running in future. Those people have been mentioned a few times in discussions around this topic, presumably by people whose jobs are made more uncomfortable if they impose sudden changes on this particular class of end-user, but I can imagine that there are environments where sudden changes are imposed and the end-users just have to live with it.
All this works its way into the matter of open source adoption. If the end-users get too upset because things keep changing in ways they can't understand or didn't ask for, it becomes very easy for people to start claiming that "we would never have had this problem with Windows" even if that is a lie. Sadly, not everyone is enthusiastic about radical change, and those who don't want it don't seem to have a convenient way of supporting (or, more precisely, bankrolling) measures to avoid it.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 9:22 UTC (Mon)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (18 responses)
For each user that complains there are 100 that avoid your software like the plague. If you don't listen, users get frustrated and angry. That is the most valuable lesson your users can give you.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 9:49 UTC (Mon)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (17 responses)
Er, no. It isn't. It's the least useful for of helping, and if takes the form of the rant-fests we've seen on lwn recently, it's actually worse than silently stopping to use the software. A bug report is useful. A suggestion on a forum or a mailing is useful. Triaging existing bug reports is useful. Helping out with writing stuff for the website is useful. Donating money so developers can get together is useful. Complaining is not. It doesn't motivate, it doesn't bring any new information to the table -- someone doesn't like my program? Well, it's hardly likely to appeal to everyone, and I made it like this for a reason.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 10:06 UTC (Mon)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (5 responses)
Of course you would prefer if they were doing your designated job (the tasks you enumerate), but sometimes it is more useful to take a step back and look around than going further along the same way. Widespread criticism looks like a good moment.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 11:30 UTC (Mon)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
And as soon as complaining turns into a rantfest, like we've seen so many of, it's still actively harmful. If a current user tells me "I hate what you did, I hate you for having done it, I think you're a blinking idiot for having done it", that that is in no way a useful contribution to the project, and it wouldn't all motivate me to go back on my decisions within the project. So it's distracting, impolite, improductive, hurtful and not helpful.
And whether criticism is actually widespread or just seems widespread because the same people are echoing their bile and spite on as many web forums as they can does make a difference. I've had one user post the same uninformed rant about Krita on at least three forums. He was stupid, or lazy, so he cut and pasted, which made the pattern very clear. But it's amazing how much time people can spend on their rants all over the place.
Posted Nov 22, 2011 4:24 UTC (Tue)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link] (3 responses)
They are crufty, grumpy old beards. Kernel hacker types.
GNOME doesn't want those users. They want to configure silly things like the font size on their desktop. They think that launching an application should take a single click.
With the new Gnome shell interface millions of new users will suddenly be attracted to GNOME and Linux. It's market share will explode as a result of all the locked-down 3D goodness.
From my point of view I think it is funny. Those that want those things are already on OS X. GNOME will wither and die.
The interesting part is what takes it's place. XFCE?
Posted Nov 22, 2011 17:27 UTC (Tue)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link] (2 responses)
That's possible in GNOME 3, in GNOME 2 you needed at least two clicks or three + n keypressed. In GNOME3, you need one click for favourites, two for others, and zero clicks and 1 + n keypresses if you want keyboard only.
Posted Nov 23, 2011 18:50 UTC (Wed)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link] (1 responses)
In GNOME 2 I can put as many launchers in my panel as I like. And I don't need to wait for some stupid overlay to animate onto the screen.
And keyboard shortcuts exist in GNOME 2, so don't pretend GNOME 3 is a win there.
Posted Nov 23, 2011 19:19 UTC (Wed)
by juliank (guest, #45896)
[Link]
Yeah, I forgot those, I didn't really use those.
> And I don't need to wait for some stupid
Wait? It's there almost immediately, basically as soon as the key is released.
> And keyboard shortcuts exist in GNOME 2,
Same in GNOME 3.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 12:28 UTC (Mon)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (7 responses)
No it isn't. I'm pretty sure I already mentioned this, but there was an interesting article I read not that long ago where some hotel executive pointed out that the worst thing for someone providing a service is the customer just leaving and deciding never to come back, because at that point the customer no longer sees the point in complaining. Complaining is an act to try and rectify a situation, often because the customer actually wants to continue the relationship. Running a business and wondering where all the customers went requires some good guesswork to get people back through the doors and to avoid the failure of the business. That's an acceptable attitude to have if you don't need users, of course. If someone told me they didn't like my software, I'd point them to the code and tell them to get on with it. But I think my software is a bit different from the kinds of large projects that are continually trying to whip up enthusiasm, support and usage where one would think that a degree of popularity might be advantageous. One can, of course, decide that some users/customers just aren't important because there'll be more along in a moment. I'm not sure that this is a good way of building trust in a project/product, however.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:09 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (6 responses)
Nope. The people who constantly complain rarely bring new users. People who like the what you are doing and offer some constructive suggestions instead of self-righteous demands often bring them. Yes, having enthusiastic users is very advantageous, but acting on rant-fests rarely help. If you fix one thing these people will just find something else to complain. This spiral never ends and so you just continue to do more and more stuff which had nothing to do with your plans and which affects very few users. For GNOME-like project? It's the only way. Very small percentage of GNOME users are programmers. That means that they can not fix things themselves and rely on project developers for that. Things you need to fix first are things which affect biggest number of people - but there are very poor correlation between number of complains and number of users. Every time Unity is mentioned someone raises the "selection follows mouse" question - but in reality there are so few users who use that option it's not even funny. Combine it with the design which makes said option pretty hard to use and solution becomes obvious.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:01 UTC (Mon)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (4 responses)
I don't see how what you say follows from what I wrote: if your software works a particular way because that's what you prefer yourself, you can ignore any feedback on that topic. If you're just sharing things on a "take it or leave it" basis, you don't need to care about getting new users. For some projects having fewer users is arguably better because it means that developers don't need to spend their scarce amounts of time doing things that other people want. That kind of project is not the same as a GNOME-type project because the two kinds of projects are structured and sustained in completely different ways. Really? Word gets round, and it's not just people ranting that puts the word out there. Look at KDE 4 or Windows Vista as some reasonable examples. This is what everyone hides behind. On the one hand, the complaints merely vocalise the frustrations of the silent majority; on the other, the silent majority are so content that they never speak up. When people are so motivated to write down their frustrations (see elsewhere in this discussion for a really good example), this is material that people in the "customer satisfaction" business would pay good money for: you have someone legitimately trying to offer feedback, even solutions, that no tick-box survey with bland questions and a 1-to-4 scale can ever attempt to match. Sure, there are also people who just flame the developers in almost coherent all-caps exclamations, but I dislike the somewhat dishonest use of various rationalisations ("criticism is self-selecting and thus invalid", "users don't really know what they want") used to belittle and ultimately discard legitimate feedback. And, yes, Apple's designers have famously claimed that they lead their users to what they (the users, not the designers, supposedly) really want - I knew this would come up - but their designers don't get it as right as everyone likes to think, and other designers are probably not as skilled as the ones working for Apple, contrary to what they themselves might believe. And Apple's designers also have someone to shout at them for getting it wrong. What they do doesn't happen in a complete vacuum either.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:55 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Surveys with checkboxes are just a way to show that you do something. I've participated in the usability studies and the rule #1 is: never trust the user. Never. If ask him or her to do something (for example find the document and print it), you videotape his or her efforts and then you analyze these videos. If you'll ask why s/he spent so much time looking for the printer icon you'll hear that said icon is of unfamiliar shape or size or something equally nonsensical, but if you'll take a look on the video you'll see that in reality s/he tried to print using "Print Preview" panel - and this panel just does not have such icon at all! Obvious problem, but not even close to what you'll hear from user. I'm not saying that GNOME developers did many studies (probably not: there are obvious problems in GNOME Shell), but the fact that they ignore loud complains is fine - these are not a good sources of UX ideas anyway. P.S. I remember one stricking example: one [relatively large] company did a usability study related to Office switch. They used Office 2003 and the question was: should they go with Office 2007 (with it's all-new ribbon interface) or with OfficeOffice.org? First they did 5-minutes test (Office 2007 and OpenOffice.org were just shown and the task was just to print "hello, world" on printer) - and OpenOffice.org was clear winner: 80% liked it more then MS Office 2007. Then they did few more tests - and results were disastrous for OpenOffice.org. It was hated now and failure rate was much higher. Why? Because underlying technology means more then buttons. One example: when you need to insert page number and use appropriate item in menu of Office 2003 or on ribbon of Office 2007 the reaction is the same: you are given choice - do you need to put it on the top or on the bottom of page. When you do the same thing with OpenOffice.org you can page number in the middle of page. To do what any sane user will want (put number in header or footer) you must go and manually create header or footer, switch to it and then insert page number. Great idea from mathematical abstraction POV, but the end result - over 50% failure rate.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 18:22 UTC (Mon)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
Saying things like this just gives people the wrong idea: "This guy on LWN said that you can't trust the user, so shut up, users!". In fact, you can and should trust the user when they tell you they can't do something, but you can't rely on them to accurately report what went wrong. Again, when people give you qualitative feedback of a reasonable quality, it is frequently of far higher value than, "How easy did you find it to launch Firefox? (1 = very hard, 4 = very easy)" And even people's "wrong" descriptions of their experiences are enlightening to anyone willing to listen. Telling users that they "don't get the conceptual metaphor" or whatever conveniently avoids the issue of why they didn't "get" it.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 18:02 UTC (Mon)
by man_ls (guest, #15091)
[Link] (1 responses)
The equivalent of the Gnome and KDE projects complaining about critics is a child covering their ears and shouting "La-la-la". Not a good impression on critics or on users. I have seen first hand how positively customers react when their criticisms are heard and redressed (as best as the complaints department could); they gave even better scores than those customers which had no complaints to begin with!
Posted Nov 8, 2011 16:22 UTC (Tue)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Posted Nov 16, 2011 22:02 UTC (Wed)
by cas (guest, #52554)
[Link]
like the existing userbase who didn't want radical changes to the way they interact with their computers? who just wanted bug fixes and incremental improvements?
Posted Nov 7, 2011 13:08 UTC (Mon)
by ekj (guest, #1524)
[Link]
This is true if, but only if, you where *already* aware of precisely which changes annoy users the most - and have *already* decided that you're not going to do anything to rectify the problems those users experience.
In that case, hearing about the problems is just noise. You seem to hint at that with "Well, it's hardly likely to appeal to everyone, and I made it like this for a reason."
If that's the response to any and all feedback, i.e. "the user is always wrong", then obviously hearing from users is unwanted and pointless. You know best anyway - "I made it like this for a reason" (and implied: "my reason is better/more-important than the reasons people dislike it)
Sometimes this attitude is legitimate. If I don't care about users, for example. (if I write a program to solve a problem for ME, I don't nessecarily care at all if I'm the only user, or if there's many)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 8:52 UTC (Tue)
by TRS-80 (guest, #1804)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 21:37 UTC (Tue)
by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
[Link]
Otherwise, developers are going to think, "why should I work on that project? The users are flaming [redacted] who can't even file proper bug reports."
Posted Nov 4, 2011 23:33 UTC (Fri)
by rqosa (subscriber, #24136)
[Link] (3 responses)
> If they can't at least get […] the SSH Key Agent working right Have you tried putting
Posted Nov 9, 2011 3:12 UTC (Wed)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link] (2 responses)
Nah, it is far stranger than that. I'm the sorta dweeb who has the O'Reilly SSH book three feet away; I already tried the easy stuff. XFCE kinda sorta ties into the cool plumbing GNOME uses. So when I login it will load up the agent by itself without a separate password. Except it doesn't work... except when it does.
Open a terminal and type ssh hostname and that works as expected. Put a shortcut on the desktop that opens an ssh session in a terminal window and it will prompt for the keyring password. Open a terminal window first and then click on the shortcut and it will work. Put a more complex ssh invocation in a shortcut that invokes a remote X11 app (that works fine on GNOME2) and it won't work at all (doesn't invoke the graphical password gadget) unless you already have a manually opened window running AND you take the option to run it in a terminal. You get an extraneous empty xterm that way but it does work without prompting for a password.
Then some things in shortcuts just silently fail (no logs anywhere I can find) even if they only invoke curses apps in a terminal window. Things I would kinda like to have in a shortcut, like ipmiconsole. But if I open a terminal and manually type the command it works perfectly.
All I can conclude is something subtle is horked up after switching desktops and it might require nuking huge swaths of my dot files or a full reload of the OS to solve.
Posted Nov 9, 2011 4:05 UTC (Wed)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 9, 2011 16:13 UTC (Wed)
by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
[Link]
Hmm. Now that ya have me looking again at the guts of the thing, I think the clue is in /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc. Looks like it wants to use gpg-agent to do everything. And I have both it and ssh-agent running so bad things are almost certain to be happening. Will have to go slowly over it until it makes sense and figure out how to kill one of them off.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 8:44 UTC (Sat)
by spongy (guest, #59953)
[Link] (4 responses)
Since Fedora is deeply intertwined with Gnome, we have stopped installing and maintaining it at our shop for the last year or so.
By wasting time, trying or otherwise struggling to make it work for them has led to our admins and helpdesk abandoning support. We continue to work with KDE 3/4 on openSUSE, Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Debian and with CentOS on our server farm. We have stopped supporting those Gnome boxes which some users (mostly developers) insist upon running. They are on their own.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 15:37 UTC (Sun)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (3 responses)
Equalling user friendly to documented? User friendly is much more than that. If some behaviour is totally unexpected, but documented, it doesn't make it user friendly.
Trying/struggling to make it work? I don't get it. I know GNOME doesn't have much support offerings atm (people are working on it), but GNOME is far from alpha level quality. So what do you mean?
Posted Nov 8, 2011 3:58 UTC (Tue)
by sciurus (guest, #58832)
[Link] (2 responses)
http://library.gnome.org/admin/ has none of it. http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/Deploy... briefly touches on a few of them. With enough searching you can find some manuals on freedesktop.org, but nothing that seems well-curated.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 15:32 UTC (Tue)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
[Link]
Polkit documentation lists how to grant actions[2] which no longer exists. It allowed listing known actions which made it discoverable. AFAIK, there is nothing to replace that part of it. UPower docs[3] state that polkit controls the return value of org.freedesktop.UPower.SuspendAllowed...but offers nothing about what the 'action' for polkit is or how to change it with a polkit file.
[1]Strictly speaking, autofs is handling things for me rather than udisks and I don't see much reason why it would be better than a "* -fstype=auto,rw,noexec,relatime,nodev :/dev/&" (along with similar lines for fat and ntfs disks to set the uid) line.
Posted Nov 22, 2011 4:33 UTC (Tue)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link]
You can see from the responses by bkor and others affiliated with GNOME that they don't see any problems or issues with GNOME 3+. It's perfect.
If you don't find it perfect, then you are a simple refusenik.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 10:57 UTC (Sun)
by mst@redhat.com (subscriber, #60682)
[Link]
xfconf-query -n -c xfce4-session -p /startup/ssh-agent/enabled -t bool -s true
and
xfconf-query -n -c xfce4-session -p /startup/ssh-agent/enabled -t string -s ssh-agent
Hope this helps.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:51 UTC (Fri)
by RCL (guest, #63264)
[Link] (7 responses)
Thank you gNOme for making this clear, I wish you good luck in your attempt to reinvent yourself as a tablet interface. I hope that you will enjoy a large user base after being installed on ATMs, vending machines and the like.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 15:57 UTC (Fri)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:00 UTC (Fri)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link] (1 responses)
Of course if you look at the origin of beatnik, according to the wikipedia page anyway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatnik) it says that it was coined from Sputnik which was launched about six months prior.
Anyway, words change and get adopted and change again... so don't assume they have a particular meaning just because that is the way where it is wherever you are.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 17:31 UTC (Fri)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:26 UTC (Fri)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (3 responses)
(FWIW, the end of fallback mode seems inevitable to me. How long can we really expect the GNOME developers to continue to maintain something that none of them really have an interest in or actually use? At some point it has to be overtly deprecated or it will go into slow bitrot; the end result will be about the same.)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 20:58 UTC (Fri)
by RCL (guest, #63264)
[Link]
Posted Nov 6, 2011 13:24 UTC (Sun)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (1 responses)
Maybe there wasn't malice in it, but belittling seems clear.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 21:12 UTC (Sun)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:22 UTC (Fri)
by hadess (subscriber, #24252)
[Link] (2 responses)
Just why would we want to spend time keeping a "not quite GNOME 2" environment working when we could spend that time on new features and bug fixes for the real GNOME 3 experience?
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:31 UTC (Fri)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link]
But neither did the GNOME developers say it was a temporary thing. Instead, a lot of them were saying "you don't like GNOME shell? No problem, just use the fallback mode." Can you see how that might give rise to an expectation, in some users' minds, that fallback mode was actually a supported GNOME 3 feature?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:40 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:27 UTC (Fri)
by gowen (guest, #23914)
[Link] (2 responses)
[gowen, happily using Gnome 2]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 16:53 UTC (Fri)
by Tara_Li (guest, #26706)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 23:15 UTC (Fri)
by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
[Link]
For people who have really liked Ubuntu with GNOME 2, the next best thing seems to be Linux Mint.
It seems unlikely that GNOME 2 will continue to be maintained longer term though which is why so many GNOME 2 fans have been moving to XFCE. XFCE uses so many GNOME libraries these days that it's status as a GNOME alternative is more than skin deep.
The Freedesktop.org standards have really made moving between DEs much less painful. Also, there are so many desktops reusing GNOME libraries that there is really a "family" of GNOME desktops. For example, the Elementary guys have a completely independent desktop vision but since they use things like GVFS, Evolution data server, and notifications, it is really a pretty natural environment for GNOME apps.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 17:16 UTC (Fri)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (15 responses)
If users want to use the older style desktop, a quick Google search found people with Gnome3 ports of gnome-panel. I'm sure Nautilus hasn't completely lost the ability to display desktop icons either. And if it has, the patch to put that back in can't be very complicated.
Personally I'd switch to XFCE if I wanted a different Gnomeish experience.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 18:32 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (13 responses)
That would be fixed in the next release in favor of displaying 'scribbles' consisting of mouse-drawn sketches of documents pulled from users' Facebook pages and shared over the Twitter. Or am I confusing GNOME3 with KDE?
Anyway, the attitude of developers: "Use Gnome Shell or GTFO" is kinda shocking.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 1:33 UTC (Sat)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link]
Posted Nov 6, 2011 15:45 UTC (Sun)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (11 responses)
Your assumption of knowing the attitude of GNOME developers seems to be incorrect. General attidue is NOT "GTFO".
See https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct for how developers are supposed to behave. Some might not always behave in the best way, but saying that the general attitude is GTFO is wrong.
I don't like acronymns like GTFO. I don't see it used within GNOME.
That GNOME develops and provides GNOME shell. Well, we're not developing KDE/XFCE. Seems totally logical.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 18:06 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (10 responses)
That leads to the attitude "GNOME Shell or switch to other projects".
Posted Nov 7, 2011 1:12 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (9 responses)
I don't see what is so horrible about a group of free software developers choosing what they want to spend their time working on.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 2:01 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (8 responses)
Which is actually happing right now.
However, kernel developers seem to recognize that maybe (just maybe) it's worth to listen to users and not insist on making them to rewrite all the software to suit kernel developers' tastes.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 14:04 UTC (Mon)
by coulamac (guest, #21690)
[Link] (7 responses)
The GNOME 3 developers made the conscious decision to put more power in the hands of power users to alter the desktop experience. Then they created a default which they felt would significantly improve the desktop experience for the rest of the users. You don't like their default? Fine. Then download the extensions that will make you happy, create them where they do not exist, or pay a developer to create them for you. But don't disparage the Gnome developers for allegedly hating/ignoring their users. That is a disservice to everything they have tried to achieve.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:26 UTC (Mon)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
To determine if it's a disservice or not, one would have to understand exactly what it is that Gnome 3 developers are trying to achieve. Maybe you could say a bit more here? From the outside, it looks like they're trying to put a tablet-like UI onto every computer of every screen size and configuration...?
Posted Nov 7, 2011 18:16 UTC (Mon)
by sorpigal (guest, #36106)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 4:31 UTC (Tue)
by luya (subscriber, #50741)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 8, 2011 15:14 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
Posted Nov 10, 2011 14:44 UTC (Thu)
by uravanbob (guest, #4050)
[Link]
Posted Nov 16, 2011 21:38 UTC (Wed)
by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
[Link]
What do you mean youve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh for heaven sake mankind its only four light years away you know! Im sorry but if you cant be bothered to take an interest in local affairs thats your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God I dont know
apathetic bloody planet, Ive no sympathy at all...
Scene 7: Ext. Space.
Sorry... I just couldn't resist.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 18:48 UTC (Tue)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link]
That there are some people complaining loudly doesn't mean that they are up to the task of creating the "Gnome 2 clone" (or even that they really are interested in such a beast).
Posted Nov 16, 2011 22:15 UTC (Wed)
by cas (guest, #52554)
[Link]
i've been searching for this (on and off) for months. a quick Google search (or even a long google searching session) hasn't revealed its existence, let alone its location. All i can ever find are links to articles about fallback mode. Where can i find the port of gnome-panel to gnome 3?
Posted Nov 4, 2011 17:41 UTC (Fri)
by wtogami (subscriber, #32325)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 17:49 UTC (Fri)
by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
[Link] (5 responses)
[And now for the 40 posts saying, but you didn't count Y]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 18:02 UTC (Fri)
by wtogami (subscriber, #32325)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:36 UTC (Fri)
by jonabbey (guest, #2736)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:43 UTC (Fri)
by AdamW (subscriber, #48457)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:48 UTC (Fri)
by mindfaq (guest, #72880)
[Link] (1 responses)
You can read about this on Hans' Blog:
I am not aware that any kind of closed library is needed to use this. Instructions for building from source are available from Hans' Blog.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:22 UTC (Fri)
by wtogami (subscriber, #32325)
[Link]
Posted Nov 4, 2011 20:23 UTC (Fri)
by nwnk (guest, #52271)
[Link] (2 responses)
Will this Gnome Shell work for Remote X? This was one of the reasons why LTSP and http://k12linux.org has not supported Fedora 15+. If GNOME Shell will work for future remote X where the thin client hardware often lacks Composite then I will need to adapt LTSP to work with systemd of Fedora 17+. This is a very confusing set of sentences. I'm going to try to sort them out, but please do correct me if I've misunderstood. "Composite" isn't a hardware feature, it's an X server feature. If you can choose the X server running on your thin client, then it's something you can have. I'm going to assume you instead meant "hardware GL acceleration". Remoting a composited desktop requires deciding where to put the compositor. If LTSP is doing XDMCP-style sessions (and I think it is, but it's been a while since I've looked), then your options are either to run the compositor on the thin client, or on the shared compute server. You probably want to run the compositor on the client, since that way it stands a chance of sharing an address space with the X server; if you ran it on the compute node then you'd be doing massive image transfers all the time. But the compositor is also the window manager, and LTSP might currently run the WM on the compute node instead of on the thin client. If it is, that's already kind of a bad decision in terms of performance: you want window management to be low latency, so you shouldn't do it over the network. So, sure, it's technically feasible to run gnome-shell like this. Will you be happy with the performance? I don't know, try it and see. There's plenty of low-hanging fruit in terms of performance work, see the Fedora feature page I linked to for details. llvmpipe's not intended to be a replacement for good hardware 3D drivers, but I suspect we can make it sufficiently fast for gnome-shell and similar compositors. Related question ... earlier versions of Fedora worked with remote X for compiz in cases where the thin client hardware did support composite. But I noticed this is now broken in Fedora 14 and RHEL6. Any idea what changed? I don't know what "remote X for compiz" is meant to mean. But I don't have any reason to believe that we intentionally broke compiz between F14 and now; if it worked in F14 it still should. If it doesn't, bugzilla's -> that way.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 21:20 UTC (Fri)
by wtogami (subscriber, #32325)
[Link]
Posted Nov 7, 2011 7:19 UTC (Mon)
by lindi (subscriber, #53135)
[Link]
X11 clients to talk to a dummy Xorg on the server. xpra connects to this dummy Xorg and acts as a compositor. It then forwards updates to composition buffers over the network. On the client machine xpra just creates stub windows and fills their composition buffers with data that it gets from network. Finally the real compositor (compiz) can work with these stub windows.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 23:39 UTC (Fri)
by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
[Link] (2 responses)
You might be referring to the lack of hardware acceleration for common Composite operations (e.g. accelerated Render, or in particular an accelerated zero-copy GL texture-from-pixmap path), but that's exactly what this post was about: enabling a fast software path for (eventually) zero-copy TFP.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:11 UTC (Sat)
by wtogami (subscriber, #32325)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:19 UTC (Sat)
by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
[Link]
As I said earlier, the entire point of ajax's work (as you can see by reading the email) is providing a fast and competent software-only OpenGL stack (which we have never had on open systems: Mesa's classic swrast is very correct but also excruciatingly slow) using LLVM, so environments like GNOME Shell and Compiz can use GL without any hardware acceleration.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 18:03 UTC (Fri)
by linusw (subscriber, #40300)
[Link] (3 responses)
100.
1 that change it and 99 that complain the old lightbulb was much better.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 9:27 UTC (Sat)
by blujay (guest, #39961)
[Link]
Posted Nov 22, 2011 4:40 UTC (Tue)
by Zizzle (guest, #67739)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 22, 2011 8:04 UTC (Tue)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link]
Hope it doesn't get in the way of your work.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 18:31 UTC (Fri)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (27 responses)
Why do they need a 3D API for a 2D UI?
I can understand special effects or in general better aesthestics being only turned on if a 3D API is available, but I fail to see how non-frills UI can possible require 3D.
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:14 UTC (Fri)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (21 responses)
Posted Nov 4, 2011 19:58 UTC (Fri)
by nwnk (guest, #52271)
[Link]
Posted Nov 5, 2011 8:59 UTC (Sat)
by ikm (guest, #493)
[Link] (19 responses)
They don't. But software APIs do. So what you talk about is interesting at driver-level only. Meanwhile, users of older cards which do have 2D acceleration but limited 3D capabilities suffer.
> treat the card as a simple framebuffer, modern CPUs make that fast enough to not totally suck
I have never seen a completely unaccelerated framebuffer to perform anywhere near good. Especially when the underlying hardware can do accelerated blits and the like.
> It doesn't make sense to have a highly capable GPU attached to your system and not use it to process graphics data.
It does. It's called "conserving power". That's why we have highly capable CPUs which are idle and throttled most of the time.
Carbon dioxide aside, what if you don't have that highly capable GPU to begin with?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 9:58 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (18 responses)
They you are screwed. End of story. Seriously, this ship sailed long ago. One instructive example is "Android vs iOS". iOS was designed from the ground up to use OpenGL. Android was designed to support dumb devices. The end result: it took years to reach the state comparable to iOS (only Ice Cream Sanditch added GPU acceleration) and in general Android requires more power to do the same things. s/conserving power/wasting power/ Difference between CPU and GPU is striking here: it's not percents. It's times. For a lot of operations we are talking about 10x-20x savings. You can do 3-5 times more "work" and still save power. Not anymore. Intel dropped XAA, Nouveau never included it at all, Radeon drivers are still supporting it but slowly start to go in this direction too (XAA Render is not suppored on R/RV/RS[456]xx). You must support EXA, UXA, etc - and all this is kinda pointless because it does not match the underlying hardware anyway. Why introduce additional energy-sucking complexity where it's not needed? Why not use 3D hardware as 3D hardware?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 10:11 UTC (Sat)
by ikm (guest, #493)
[Link] (4 responses)
I miss the times when showing doodads on screen wasn't considered "work".
> Then you are screwed. End of story.
I think this summarizes this whole topic quite nicely.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 14:34 UTC (Sat)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link] (3 responses)
A lot of people seem obsessed with the idea that OpenGL is specifically about 3D, as if that was somehow in contrast to 2D rather than a superset. But it isn't. These devices accelerate arbitrary vector drawing operations, to them 2D is merely a specific chosen value in one matrix. It's as though we got upset because someone introduced CPUs which do floating point, bemoaning the loss of the "good old days" when CPUs only did integer arithmetic.
[ Somewhere between when I first used it, and today, Linux got rid of its 8087 floating point emulation, implementing all the crazy features of the genuine Intel part using integer operations. I can't say I miss it ]
What is being referred to here as "2D accelerations" was actually more or less the Windows GDI operations embedded into hardware. For every operation that you might still have some use for today (say, a blit) there were a dozen more that are useless (e.g. render Windows bitmap font glyph). None of it generalises, unlike OpenGL. So we definitely don't want that "back" in the sense that we ever had it on non-Windows systems.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 18:54 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (1 responses)
Pretty much.
To Elaborate:
...in terms of 'consumer desktop' hardware:
Back in the 'bad old days' you only had 2D acceleration. People wanted fast text drawing and games were all 2D. So video card providers created chipsets that accelerated 2D operations.
The next step was when 3D games first started coming out and people wanted those to be faster. At that point pretty much all effort to improve 2D only performance ceased completely.
Years after the first generation 3D acceleration video hardware came out you would still be able to find 2D acceleration engines. These 2D chipsets were just about the same as they were 2-3 hardware generations ago. All development halted years ago and this hardware hung around purely for the sake of old software compatibility. It was 'fast enough' and 2D performance was no longer something that customers gave any thought to.
Fast forward to today:
Nowadays there is no such thing as 2D chipsets. All that hardware is completely almost thing of the past. Some retrograde hardware may still have some vestiges of 2D-only acceleration, but they just really obsolete in the worst way (ie. Via chipsets).
3D acceleration is increasingly becoming a misnomer. It's effectively gone 365 degrees and now we are back to software.
What we are left with is GPUs. General purpose processor units designed for accelerating the sort of fuctions commonly used by graphics programmers. All 'hardware acceleration' means is that instead of just using the CPU to process your applications (software acceleration) your software now runs on both your GPU and your CPU.
So.....
What this means is that the amount of work required to get good 2D acceleration out of GPUs is just about the same amount of work required to get 3D acceleration out of GPUs.
That is you are not saving yourself any effort on the lower stacks by denying yourself the use of 3D APIs.
And since OpenGL acceleration is something that needs to be stable and functionally present on a modern desktop then... there is really no good reason NOT to use OpenGL, except that maybe you prefer other APIs for personal reasons or whatever.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:46 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
Posted Nov 9, 2011 13:37 UTC (Wed)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Posted Nov 5, 2011 10:20 UTC (Sat)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (12 responses)
Using them directly for 2D work is going to result in very inelegant and duplicated code (especially because OpenGL is a mess); but if you use an intermediate API, then you can just add a backend for it that uses more traditional 2D APIs and doesn't require a working OpenGL driver.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 10:30 UTC (Sat)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (5 responses)
So, just write a Cairo backend for (a subset of?) Clutter, and make sure GNOME Shell can detect that it is running that way and disable anything with strictly requires OpenGL.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:15 UTC (Sat)
by drago01 (subscriber, #50715)
[Link]
Posted Nov 7, 2011 0:03 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2011 6:44 UTC (Mon)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (2 responses)
And also they have a fast software rendering framework (Pixman) that doesn't require running a full optimizing compiler at runtime (LLVM) and is relatively simple.
Modern hardware definitely does not "implement OpenGL": OpenGL is actually an ungodly mess of extensions that requires an incredible amount of code to map to hardware.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:50 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
I'm not an expert but I thought that graphics acceleration required a JIT compiler to translate the standard bytecode to the underlying instruction set and capabilities of the hardware. nVidia and ATI don't have the same instruction sets or system design for their GPUs. Having this process also able to target the host CPU with fully optimized fast code just makes sense.
You may not like aesthetically how the OpenGL API has grown organically over the years but it is the standard API for creating and running programs on the GPU. Having an optimized compiler so you can build software which targets both the GPU or CPU so graphics programs can run even when there is not dedicated hardware for them seems like a good idea. I don't think it follows that having an incompatible "2d" backend is going to be any faster than optimizing the existing graphics API
Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:09 UTC (Mon)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link]
The thing is, the future of accelerated graphics on Linux (Gallium3D) already requires something like LLVM to compile hardware-agnostic shader code into binaries which can run on the GPU. It also requires CPU-based fallbacks for operations (shader code) which the GPU doesn't support efficiently. The llvmpipe software renderer is basically just a plain Gallium3D driver which relies exclusively on the fallbacks.
"Simpler", in this case, means taking advantage of the common CPU fallback code to provide a full-featured graphics driver, not relying on a completely separate software-only rendering framework with fixed primitive operations which can only be accessed via Cairo.
Due to the modularity of LLVM, much of the effort expended on optimized code generation for the x86 backend can probably be reused for various GPU backends down the road.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:08 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (5 responses)
There is increasingly no longer any such thing as '2D hardware' or '3D hardware'. 2D hardware in modern devices is completely and entirely gone.
Anyways even 2D hardware that existed on older cards had zero development resources. They are just copy and pasted designs from the earliest days of the first 3D acceleration video cards.
The amount of work required to get good 2D acceleration is just about the same as having good 3D acceleration.
So no matter what API you choose you will always end up with the pretty much the same destination if it's 'accelerated'.
To simplify your question instead of trying to compare Cairo vs OpenGL you should of just asked:
"Why didn't Gnome developers decide to limit themselves to 2D acceleration hardware?"
The answer is going to be:
"Because there is no longer any such thing as 2D acceleration hardware."
Posted Nov 6, 2011 1:36 UTC (Sun)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (4 responses)
BUT the thing is that you might not have a working 3D driver (maybe because the only stable one available is proprietary and you refuse to use it, or it doesn't work on your kernel), or might be in a limited virtual machine, or you might be printing the screen contents to PDF or to an HTML/SVG page, or perhaps you want to reserve the GPU for actual 3D games or 3D modelling software and not have the desktop hog it.
In those cases, a limited 2D API is much easier to make work efficiently and in a stable way then a generic 3D one.
For example, in software, Pixman is far more stable, much simpler, more portable and probably faster than LLVMPipe (at least if you use only a single thread).
And in the "print to PDF/PostScript/HTML/SVG" case, then you absolutely NEED a 2D API, since those formats just can't do 3D rendering (excluding WebGL and other very new innovations).
Posted Nov 7, 2011 1:27 UTC (Mon)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link] (3 responses)
Forcing yourself to use multiple backends of APIs that are poorly suited to what you want do seems incredibly counter productive.
Why should a developer abandon the use of perfectly good APIs just because some users choose to go out and buy hardware that requires closed source software to function, then refuses to run closed source software? It's that a bit weird?
What I find disturbing is that Linux users are still willing to go out and spend good money on hardware and put a great deal of time into setting up software that will invariably lead pathologically broken setup. Then they expect that everybody must work around the problems they inflicted on themselves.
[quote]In those cases, a limited 2D API is much easier to make work efficiently and in a stable way then a generic 3D one.
I think what we are trying to do is point out to you that: No, this is not a true statement at all. The work required to get decent 2D acceleration on modern hardware is not any different then what it takes to get 3D acceleration.
OpenGL is not DirectX. Hardware support is entirely optional. It's just that Mesa OpenGL software reference, sucked. Now it does not suck nearly as much.
[quote]And in the "print to PDF/PostScript/HTML/SVG" case,[/quote]
A) I don't know why this case matters at all. Can you point me to a single example of people rendering their entire desktop output to PDF?
Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:33 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Posted Nov 9, 2011 19:31 UTC (Wed)
by wookey (guest, #5501)
[Link] (1 responses)
There isn't necessarily much choice about it: This here desktop was provided by IT in a large corp. The built-in graphics is disabled and an nvidia card shoved in. I can't change that - it's locked-down by IT. More seriously, on ARM there are 6 different GPUs available and _all_ of them require binary drivers. I can't buy _any_ hardware that has accelerated graphics without getting into the above sticky situation. We both agree it's a crappy situation to be in, but short of telling me I should choose an entirely different CPU architecture, I can't really be blamed for _choosing_ this situation.
Posted Nov 9, 2011 20:41 UTC (Wed)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
And yet you can change the OS? Hard to believe. If everything is indeed nailed down then "user" here is not you, it's your IT department. You are merely a commuter. You have my condolences but I don't see why I should jump hoops to accommodate your needs. Then we should all agree that today ARM is crappy architecture - not because of CPU (which is also not all that rosy: try to find a free documentation on ARM architecture, for example), but because of GPU - and side with the Intel in it's fight with ARM. Or use binary blob if you prefer that. You can not pay money to people who push GPUs which require binary blobs and then expressly refuse to use said blobs: you are not helping anyone because producers of said GPU don't really care all that much what you do with them if you paid good money anyway. Either start cracking blob (if you live in a country which allows such activity) or use it "as is" or stop buying this stuff. In this case you don't even have my condolences. As I've noted before: if you've bought piece of hardware which requires binary blob - you've accepted it. Period. End of story. Live with the consequences. If you throw away said blob after the sale you'll just make your life more miserable - it does not affect the manufacturer at all. P.S. Of course there are possibility that you've bought ARM chip for some highly specialized project and you don't actually need a GPU at all... but then the question arises: what this have to do with GNOME? GNOME is desktop environment intended for desktops, laptops - how is it relevant to your highly specialized ARM endeavour?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:43 UTC (Sat)
by endecotp (guest, #36428)
[Link] (4 responses)
I wonder: how fast is Cairo, compared to a state-of-the-art software OpenGL implementation?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 8:48 UTC (Sat)
by rleigh (guest, #14622)
[Link] (2 responses)
Given that Cairo can use OpenVG for rendering, it should be very fast. I don't think that Cairo alone is sufficiently fast for real-time interactive graphics e.g. rendering directly to a full-screen framebuffer with SDL. It's OK when things are simple, but as the complexity and size of the scene increases, you get problems with both framerate and tearing.
I've just started looking into using either Cairo or OpenVG for producing OpenGL textures on the fly, but I've not yet fully determined the tradeoff between features/quality/speed/ease of use between the two. Doing the Cairo rendering into multiple textures means you can cache the output and should avoid some of the above issues.
Regards,
Posted Nov 6, 2011 17:56 UTC (Sun)
by endecotp (guest, #36428)
[Link] (1 responses)
Well if you have HW OpenVG then you must surely have HW OpenGL too, so that's not so interesting. The question is, when you don't have (supported) 3D hardware, is it faster to do software rendering with Cairo or emulated OpenGL. (Or I suppose Cairo with an emulated OpenVG backend.)
If this new faster OpenGL emulation is really fast, then that could rationalise the requirements for the upper layers.
> I've just started looking into using either Cairo or OpenVG for
I've been using AGG for this, but am now starting to use OpenGL. From what I've seen OpenVG doesn't give me much beyond OpenGL for the features I need.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 20:01 UTC (Sun)
by jlokier (guest, #52227)
[Link]
Posted Nov 5, 2011 13:25 UTC (Sat)
by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
[Link]
Posted Nov 5, 2011 9:17 UTC (Sat)
by ikm (guest, #493)
[Link] (7 responses)
More importantly, should we care? The only thing that worries me here is that Ubuntu, being arguably the most popular distro, is a GNOME shop. But they now have their own thingie called Unity, right? So how does this all compare to each other? What should Linus be using next, him being a popular desktop sanity benchmark?
Posted Nov 5, 2011 12:09 UTC (Sat)
by tuna (guest, #44480)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Nov 6, 2011 20:06 UTC (Sun)
by jlokier (guest, #52227)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2011 0:21 UTC (Mon)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2011 22:07 UTC (Mon)
by jlokier (guest, #52227)
[Link]
If you're running non-OpenGL capable hardware in the last half-decade, it's almost certainly native memory for the framebuffer so the CPU is not disadvantaged. On older hardware, you might use a shadow framebuffer or similar buffering technique, but still keep track of blitted regions via data structures.
Scrolling is still common in apps! With older hardware, or slow current hardware, scrolling large screen areas using blits vs. CPU updates remains user-visible (i.e. slower than vsync rate). It's visible because it's a big animation. Fills are less important (because they're not animations) unless it's a big screen and slow CPU (see "media player"), in which even pretty vector systems can benefit from algorithms which extract big rectangles and leave just the detail to the CPU.
I think the reason blits are no longer of much interest is because applications and toolkits no longer target the class of hardware where it's worth doing, as it's such a minority of systems and shrinking, software rendering is good enough everywhere, and when such systems were more common, there wasn't yet much effort put into optimising desktop rendering performance on Linux. Except for games, but games have different needs.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 15:09 UTC (Sat)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link]
I don't expect it to be as fast as hardware, ever. But to me that is logical, not clearly disrespectful.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:00 UTC (Sat)
by drag (guest, #31333)
[Link]
It may. The newer LLVM-pipe style software acceleration is many times faster then the old Mesa software OpenGL reference implementation.
http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html
It's to the point now were on modern CPUs games like OpenArena are actually playable without using a GPU.
I haven't tried it yet so it's difficult to say. Some OpenGL functions will run faster then others and it depends on what Gnome-shell uses I suppose.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 8:26 UTC (Sun)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
BTW, classic software Mesa rasterizer resulted in unplayable framerates.
Posted Nov 5, 2011 15:15 UTC (Sat)
by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
[Link]
Right now I'm running KDE4 inside a VM, and am connected to it wirelessly with an X server that's using the fbdev driver and I pretty much can't tell the much difference between that and running X natively and with the Intel DRM drivers. I get the transparency and all the other effects.
$ glxinfo |grep renderer
I'm not using gallium or anything. I wonder why can't Fedora just "copy" what the KDE folks did.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 1:00 UTC (Sun)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (9 responses)
I have written a piece of constructive criticism on Gnome 3 on my own site (which you can google if you so desire) in which I explain in detail why _overview_ (and some other, less important details) is (are) a bad idea. I reiterated some of the points in that thread on fedora-devel list - none of which can be refuted - simply because they are facts. Silly rationalisations offered by overview supporters/designers along the lines of "users cannot walk and chew gum at the same time" are amusing. In the end most overview defenders resort to "but you can use keyboard shortcuts", which neatly proves the point that the _graphical_ UI is indeed broken.
The many shell extensions that have sprung up between Gnome 3.0 and 3.2 are not an accident - many of them are essentially fixes for the insanity that is overview. Sure, overview looks great on YouTube - unfortunately, that's not a use case.
A laptop or a desktop is not a smartphone and is not a tablet. Hiding workspaces from view of users while they are doing work is irrational. Attacking users with UI elements they never asked for in order to open a new app is equally irrational. Claiming that taskbar doesn't represent running apps and then offering advice to use the dash to switch tasks is just as equally irrational.
In the end, Gnome 3 with shell and overview has reduced visibility, complicated the graphical UI and made things more cumbersome to use. That bit, I'm afraid, is not progress.
PS. The fact that 3D software rendering will now work everywhere is, of course, excellent. And I do agree Gnome should look the same everywhere - something I have also argued in my critique.
Posted Nov 6, 2011 22:25 UTC (Sun)
by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133)
[Link] (1 responses)
In the end the developers began to shut down everyone who tried to raise the matter because it was a design decision already discussed multiple times without considering that if a lot of people are so annoyed by your design that they decide to subscribe to a mailing list to complain, maybe you should question the design, not the users.
It seems simple enough to me: there's something wrong with a desktop environment that can't be used efficiently without a cheat sheet, so I'll stay with GNOME 2 as long as possible and then I'll move to XFCE.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 0:00 UTC (Mon)
by tonyblackwell (guest, #43641)
[Link]
Posted Nov 6, 2011 22:41 UTC (Sun)
by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2011 0:14 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Nov 7, 2011 5:46 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (4 responses)
The correct page is: http://www.rexursive.com/articles/ongnome3.html
Posted Nov 7, 2011 14:54 UTC (Mon)
by alankila (guest, #47141)
[Link] (3 responses)
I think I agree with gnome 3 design team's idea that they want people to focus on one task and to minimize any distraction that interfere with the work being done. Do you remember how awful using Windows XP was, how the design sensibilities of that era made companies load a dozen of backgrounded applications, each which their own, bizarrely multicolored icon adding visual noise at the bottom of screen, and worse, all of them pop up notifications that say something you don't care about while you try to work?
OS X imo has the best virtual desktop scheme of all the operating systems right now. For instance, desktop switching is enabled by 4-finger gesture: 4-finger flick up moves into overview mode where you see every virtual desktop at glance in the top row, and all the windows inside, and you can rearrange the order of the desktops and even move windows between them. While using applications, 4-finger flicks left/right switch between desktops, so you can switch between neighboring virtual desktops (= neighboring fullscreen applications) very comfortably.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 15:00 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Even now virtual desktops and simple taskbars in practice are much better than continuous expose-style previews. And the fact that design is 'ugly' should not stop it from being useful.
And expose-style desktop switching also quickly gets old. Personally, I know what my desktops contain and do not need to even consciously think about switching - it happens automatically. For new users - sure, expose-style switching is great, but Compiz does it fine.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 22:44 UTC (Mon)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link] (1 responses)
Which is not surprising - I'm not a designer (and I also never claimed the proposed solution is best). I'm sure that workspace switcher can be elsewhere on the top bar (say right), doesn't have to have colours etc.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 2:15 UTC (Tue)
by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
[Link]
Actually, it would probably be more efficient to have it to the left, just next to Applications button. In other words, pick workspace, start app - close together.
PS. Disclosure: this is what my fallback layout actually looks right now.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 6:55 UTC (Mon)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (7 responses)
Microsoft hasn't replaced it since Windows 95, and it has now been 15 years, so clearly it is quite good and anyway it is strongly familiar to everyone.
Inventing partially non-functional and exoteric interfaces providing no added value (such as GNOME Shell) just reduces your user base for no reason.
What GNOME should do is simply go back to GNOME Panel, and configure it to look by default like the Windows 7 taskbar, without any weird stuff.
That will work out of the box on all hardware, and does what people expect.
If anyone wants fancy 3D effects, they can enable Compiz, turn on wobbly windows, snow, water, fishes and gears in the desktop cube, and have fun.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:14 UTC (Mon)
by ebassi (subscriber, #54855)
[Link] (6 responses)
[citation needed] you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. zero. nada. the UX of Windows has been constantly changing over the past 15 years. some basic tenets stayed, but they are continuously user-tested, tweaked, re-evaluated — to the point that Windows 8 now is effectively removing stuff like the Start button, or the desktop. only somebody that has been cursorily using Windows every once in a while (or not used Windows at all, and just looked at the pretty pictures) could say something so far detached from reality.
Posted Nov 7, 2011 19:41 UTC (Mon)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
Up until Windows 7 the classic theme replicated Win9x behavior pretty accurately.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 10:50 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link] (2 responses)
Or more accurately, there've been a couple of minor tweaks until Windows 7, which also (optionally) changed the behaviour of the taskbar.
>to the point that Windows 8 now is effectively removing stuff like the Start button, or the desktop.
Have you tried the Windows 8 developer preview? To describe it as 'unusable' would be too kind; I'd rather use KDE 4.0. But I have every expectation that by release they'll be a lot less 'ambitious' or it'll make Vista look like the warmest product reception ever.
>only somebody that has been cursorily using Windows every once in a while (or not used Windows at all, and just looked at the pretty pictures) could say something so far detached from reality.
Well maybe you should try using it then, rather than saying those things?
Posted Nov 8, 2011 11:18 UTC (Tue)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (1 responses)
The only difference seems to be that the Start button brings up a fullscreen UI instead of a popup menu.
And indeed that UI seems quite dubious, but since it looks rather primitive and it's not a released product, I guess it's premature to draw any conclusion.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 14:11 UTC (Tue)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
The new control panel seems designed to make the computer as obnoxious to use as possible, etc...
When I tried using it I assumed that what I was looking at was a platform demo, for tesing out underlying operation, platform APIs, etc, with a crappy UI bolted on just as a demo of how to use some of the new APIs. Apparently though that's actually the direction they want to head in for the real thing.
Posted Nov 8, 2011 10:58 UTC (Tue)
by slashdot (guest, #22014)
[Link] (1 responses)
Since Windows has the most market share, this is the UI that most people expect to be there, and that Microsoft hasn't apparently found a better alternative to in 15 years.
The only significant additions have been:
More in general, the 3D-requiring "Aero" window decoration/management style has been added in Windows Vista, which adds some candy, a 3D version of alt-tab and some mechanisms to snap Windows to the edge and put thumbnails in alt-tab and taskbar menus.
Note that, unlike GNOME, Microsoft allows users to turn off all of those changes, and in general in Windows 7 you can easily get almost the same look & feel that Windows 95 had.
And this all works fine without 3D acceleration (or with Aero turned off), and UI behavior (and even appearance) is not significantly affected by turning it off.
There is already free software to do all of this with minimal configuration, it just needs to be made the default, and whoever is in charge of GNOME needs to stop being crazy.
Posted Nov 9, 2011 17:33 UTC (Wed)
by dashesy (guest, #74652)
[Link]
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Confused
Confused
Confused
>
> For GNOME, we haven't decided yet. Seems most are switching to other
> desktop environments if they don't want GNOME shell, so would ease
> maintenance to not have fallback mode.
Confused
Confused
Confused
FOSS marketing is basically the people who use it, alienating large parts of those people does not seem like the way to success. If every internet post of your new product sees only lots of bitching on the internet it is hard to get the buzz going. KDE hasn't recovered from KDE4 and it has been nearly 4 years. Every KDE4 post sees major whining, just look below.
Slow gradual change where every version builds on the basis of its predessor seems like the much better way of doing things. Linus&Miguel seem to know that. Desktop designers .. not so much.
Confused
Confused
I was talking about marketing. FOSS marketing is done on the internet.
Gnome could have learned a lot from KDE4, but didn't IMO.
But to be totally honest I wish Qt would have been LGPL from the start, maybe we would live in a very different world right now.
Confused
The focus within 3.x is iterative design. Designers are trying things out and changing things which do not work. Meaning: overview mode works slightly different in 3.2, and might change a bit again in 3.4 or 3.6. Same for Contacts and Documents.
Confused
Taskbar? No.
Single click application lanuch? No.
Applets? No.
KDE4 was quite different
I think most people complained about KDE4 for the same reasons. The functionality they were used to was gone. Not because it was buggy.
This is chicken and egg problem
Oh I trust that by the time Gnome 3.10 is released most complains will be gone, but I wish user facing components would see gentler migrations, even if that would mean maintaining older components a lot longer and not making progress in other parts that fast.
Gnome could have learned a lot from KDE4, but didn't IMO.
This is chicken and egg problem
Examples of things I could not find:
- how do I make the icons smaller (1680 wide screen)?
- focus-follows-mouse and lazy-lock (can't do?)
- access to the original menu?
- access to the original system configuration tools?
This is chicken and egg problem
This is chicken and egg problem
This is chicken and egg problem
This is chicken and egg problem
This is chicken and egg problem
Confused
I am aware of everything you think I am not.
One wonders how you have accomplished such a stupendous feat.
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
If fallback mode is never going make people happy that hate Gnome shell, then what is the point? Just waste man hours supporting yet another half-assed 'alternative'?
Confused
Confused
not for ajax."
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
Confused
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
> to be the single interface for everything..
> the GNOME 3 design was around before the iPad even had a name.
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
My KDE taskbar doesn't work correctly on KUbuntu 11.10
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
Wol
GNOME != Fedora
Identity=unix-user:$your_username
Action=org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-mount;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-check;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-lsof;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-eject;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-detach;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-change;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-luks-unlock;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-inhibit-polling;org.freedesktop.udisks.filesystem-set-spindown
ResultAny=yes
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
Wol
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
more helping
more helping
You are forgetting that it is your current users who are doing the complaining, not random passers-by. Their complaints should be enough to rethink your reasons for doing things.
Stop and look around
Stop and look around
Stop and look around
Stop and look around
Stop and look around
Stop and look around
> overlay to animate onto the screen.
> so don't pretend GNOME 3 is a win there.
more helping
it's actually worse than silently stopping to use the software
Complaining is not. It doesn't motivate, it doesn't bring any new information to the table -- someone doesn't like my program? Well, it's hardly likely to appeal to everyone, and I made it like this for a reason.
This is attitude Apple is using - and they DO have users, strangely enough...
That's an acceptable attitude to have if you don't need users, of course.
But I think my software is a bit different from the kinds of large projects that are continually trying to whip up enthusiasm, support and usage where one would think that a degree of popularity might be advantageous.
One can, of course, decide that some users/customers just aren't important because there'll be more along in a moment. I'm not sure that this is a good way of building trust in a project/product, however.
This is attitude Apple is using - and they DO have users, strangely enough...
That's an acceptable attitude to have if you don't need users, of course.
Nope. The people who constantly complain rarely bring new users.One can, of course, decide that some users/customers just aren't important because there'll be more along in a moment. I'm not sure that this is a good way of building trust in a project/product, however.
For GNOME-like project? It's the only way.Very small percentage of GNOME users are programmers. That means that they can not fix things themselves and rely on project developers for that. Things you need to fix first are things which affect biggest number of people - but there are very poor correlation between number of complains and number of users.
Sorry, but this is not so straightforward
When people are so motivated to write down their frustrations (see elsewhere in this discussion for a really good example), this is material that people in the "customer satisfaction" business would pay good money for: you have someone legitimately trying to offer feedback, even solutions, that no tick-box survey with bland questions and a 1-to-4 scale can ever attempt to match.
Sorry, but this is not so straightforward
Surveys with checkboxes are just a way to show that you do something. I've participated in the usability studies and the rule #1 is: never trust the user.
Exactly. Focus groups and usability studies tell you what you want to know; complaints tell you what you don't want to know, and thus you will get from nowhere else. It takes a certain humility to accept this kind of criticism and it is not easy to do, but you can find examples: Google recognizing the Honeycomb closed-source debacle, or Microsoft accepting the Vista fiasco. They don't say: "complaints are not helping" (or not any more); they have swallowed their pride and tried to correct course.
Complainers are not your enemies
Complainers are not your enemies
This is attitude Apple is using - and they DO have users, strangely enough...
Things you need to fix first are things which affect biggest number of people
more helping
Bug reports have been filed and are being ignored. The level of discourse has dropped to flaming comments on LWN because users have no outlet left to them.
more helping
more helping
GNOME != Fedora
eval `ssh-agent`
into .xsession or .xinitrc?GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
[2]http://hal.freedesktop.org/docs/PolicyKit/polkit-auth.1.html
[3]http://upower.freedesktop.org/docs/UPower.html [4]
[4]As a side note, gtkdoc's habit of making tooltips *everywhere* on its documentation pages is very distracting.
GNOME != Fedora
GNOME != Fedora
/etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc and figured out a way to run ssh agent at X startup:
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
We can talk about whether the decisions being made are wise. But let's not get hung up over a word like "refuseniks". From my distinctly American point of view, I see no put-down or negative connotations from the use of that word. I can believe it might look different to a former Soviet citizen, but I can't imagine Adam was trying to offend or belittle anybody.
Language
Language
Language
Language
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Nobody promised to keep fallback mode around forever; as I noted in my other comment, it seems highly unlikely that it could ever happen.
Keeping fallback mode
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
My Gosh, LWN really has become Linux WhingingaboutGnome News of late. Do we really need another comment thread full of Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
"Gnome devs have made design choices with which I don't agree so I'm going to call them names".
At least this one doesn't have cross pollination with the regular Two Minutes Hate of Canonical.Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Gnome 2 was a total mess full of unmaintained hacks it would be ridiculous to fully replicate the same behaviour on Gnome 3 which provide a much cleaner core.
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Theres no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years so youve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints and its far too late to start making a fuss about it now.
The Earth is destroyed in a huge explosion.
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
If users want to use the older style desktop, a quick Google search found people with Gnome3 ports of gnome-panel.
Will this Gnome Shell work for Remote X? This was one of the reasons why LTSP and http://k12linux.org has not supported Fedora 15+. If GNOME Shell will work for future remote X where the thin client hardware often lacks Composite then I will need to adapt LTSP to work with systemd of Fedora 17+.
Related question ... earlier versions of Fedora worked with remote X for compiz in cases where the thin client hardware did support composite. But I noticed this is now broken in Fedora 14 and RHEL6. Any idea what changed?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
http://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
I don't know what "remote X for compiz" is meant to mean. But I don't have any reason to believe that we intentionally broke compiz between F14 and now; if it worked in F14 it still should. If it doesn't, bugzilla's -> that way.
The entire GNOME2 desktop session including compiz last was confirmed to work Fedora ~12 with a remote X server and all traffic through a ssh tunnel. Performance was surprisingly good, even with animated flash on the sides of a spinning cube. It actually reduced the amount of bandwidth going over the wire between the X clients and remote X server.
Fedora 14 and RHEL6 compiz fails with an error message. I don't have the error message handy.
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
What about remote X?
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Why do they need 3D?
Why do they need 3D?
Why do they need 3D?
Why do they need 3D?
The same discussion again and again...
Carbon dioxide aside, what if you don't have that highly capable GPU to begin with?
> It doesn't make sense to have a highly capable GPU attached to your system and not use it to process graphics data.
It does. It's called "conserving power".> modern video devices don't have any 2D acceleration or real 2D APIs anymore
They don't. But software APIs do.The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
[ Somewhere between when I first used it, and today, Linux got rid of its 8087 floating point emulation, implementing all the crazy features of the genuine Intel part using integer operations. I can't say I miss it ]
I was just digging through arch/x86/math-emu yesterday. It's still there, as is CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION.
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
that doesn't require running a full optimizing compiler at runtime (LLVM)
Modern hardware definitely does not "implement OpenGL": OpenGL is actually an ungodly mess of extensions that requires an incredible amount of code to map to hardware.
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
(for the most part)
The same discussion again and again...
The same discussion again and again...
[/quote]
B) The choice of Gnome-shell developer's API does not impact the decision of the application developer. They can use whatever APIs they please. If they want to use something that has the ability to render their output to SVG or PDF or whatever then the Window manager does not enter into it at all.
The same discussion again and again...
[quote]And in the "print to PDF/PostScript/HTML/SVG" case,[/quote]
A) I don't know why this case matters at all. Can you point me to a single example of people rendering their entire desktop output to PDF?
AFAIK MacOSX uses PDF as its display language but it is accelerated by the GPU hardware so PDF is not mutually exclusive with using the GPU.
In fact I don't understand this segue at all, what possible reason would rendering a PDF or HTML document cause you to not be able to use hardware accelerated graphics.
The same discussion again and again...
Why should a developer abandon the use of perfectly good APIs just because some users choose to go out and buy hardware that requires closed source software to function, then refuses to run closed source software?
You can change OS, but not the hardware?
This here desktop was provided by IT in a large corp. The built-in graphics is disabled and an nvidia card shoved in. I can't change that - it's locked-down by IT.
We both agree it's a crappy situation to be in, but short of telling me I should choose an entirely different CPU architecture, I can't really be blamed for _choosing_ this situation.
Why do they need 3D?
> instead of OpenGL?
Why do they need 3D?
Roger
Why do they need 3D?
> producing OpenGL textures on the fly
Why do they need 3D?
Why do they need 3D?
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Will this be a seamless as KDE4?
OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Stand by for the word from the original refusenik...
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Anyway the bottom line of the issue is that the UI that most users are familiar with and that works best is the one in Microsoft Windows 95.
Microsoft hasn't replaced it since Windows 95, and it has now been 15 years, so clearly it is quite good and anyway it is strongly familiar to everyone.
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
1. A start button, which opens a menu allowing access to programs
2. Optionally, a launcher bar
3. A window list
4. Notification icons
5. A clock
1. Windows Vista: added a search box in the start menu
2. Windows 7: the window list only shows a single icon for an application, and clicking it opens a menu with the title and window preview for each window of the application; also, you can "pin" applications, allowing quick launch functionality
3. Windows Vista/7 (not sure which): the user can ask to put some notification icons in a sub-menu
Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types
I agree it is a bit easier to have a sane (classic?) Windows desktop, but at the end it was a tweak that also exists and is getting improved for GNOME3.
At least there is a chance we keep having a classic DM, thanks to FOSS. For Windows their marketing has the ultimate power to dictate their view and may throw a bone to power users just to keep them thankful.