Day: Taking GNOME 3 to the next level

Day: Taking GNOME 3 to the next level

Here's my problem: I've want to like GNOME 3. And Unity. But like the grandparent poster, I'm the main tech support for my wife at home. We've been a non-Windows/Linux only household since WinME, and aren't likely to change any time soon. She runs Ubuntu's older LTS release with GNOME 2.mumble, and I generally run the latest Fedora. I like to play with the system; she likes to get work done. We both like changes that make her work easier. But frankly the prospect of training her on the tablet-centric UIs that seem to be in vogue these days holds no joy for me. A lot of the functionality, if it's there, is undiscoverable as near as I can tell. I can't in clear conscience suggest that switching her from GNOME 2 is going to make getting her work done easier.

I very much appreciate the housecleaning the GNOME code base has gone through, and I'm also glad the hear that expected functionality is being made available on top of that code base at last. Idealy, by the time my wife's LTS is no longer supported, GNOME 3 will be customizable and functional enough that she would hardly notice the transition. But the most exciting thing I've heard on the UI front lately from the stand point of "what to do once her LTS is dead" is that the next Fedora will ship with MATE.

To your other point: yes, I have submitted bug reports to GNOME — not about power management but about a problem with scrolling regions in VTE (GNOME's virtual terminal emulation). It's was reported in 2008, it's still marked "unconfirmed" even though the fix has been in their bugzilla since December 2010 and the VTE maintainer of the time claims to be able to reproduce it with the test code provided. I know GNOME is short staffed, but if others' experience of pushing fixes to GNOME are like this (rather like pushing a rope up a hill) I'm not surprised people are finding better uses for their time.

And finally, I have ranted on GNOME 3 issues on LWN in the past probably a couple of times more than was necessary. To the LWN community, I'm sorry. At some point it's difficult to say anything critical without coming across as just piling on. I hope this doesn't come across as a rant; I don't feel ranty as I type this. I'll be happy if GNOME makes the cut as my wife's next desktop.