GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 24, 2011 15:39 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513)
In reply to: GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released by am
Parent article: GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

> How much this mirrors the sentiments of KDE 3.5 users a few years back is not even funny.

Sort of. KDE 4.0 got trashed for being a buggy, incomplete mess. That was true -- it was buggy and incomplete -- but that was kind of by design. The KDE devs stated numerous times that 4.0 was not meant to be a stable release for general use! (Of course why they chose to bump the major version for what was essentially a development milestone release is beyond me... but they did.)

GNOME 3, on the other hand, is getting trashed not for being buggy, but for adopting a variety of new UI approaches, killing off long-time features and flexibility left and right, all with (seemingly) little concern for what the core, long-time user base wants.

Now I'm not averse to trying new UI concepts, and I'm willing to bet a good bit of cash that anything that the GNOME designers can come up with is slicker than anything I've ever designed or will design... but I still don't think that change for the sake of change is a good thing. Who is asking for these new designs? What users are clamoring for a wild break from many of the conventions established over the last decade or so of computing? Why is this break so urgent, so crucial that it *must* immediately be implemented as the sole design of one of the largest DEs in the open source world?

</rant>

Adopting a whole slew of new UI styles and forcing a bunch of new UI principles on users all in a single release with no option to keep using the current design(s) seems to me to be tantamount to saying "we've decided this is better for you, so use it or leave".

My prediction is that many of the long-time GNOME users will do just that: leave. I expect XFCE and other DEs will see an influx of new users when GNOME 3 starts making its way into the major distros.

GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 24, 2011 20:37 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

(Of course why they chose to bump the major version for what was essentially a development milestone release is beyond me... but they did.)

Because the changes were so drastic (I think some things had basically been rewritten from scratch) that it couldn't reasonably be called 3.anything. (Sadly, one can't get away with calling things "X.-1". ISAGN.)

GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 24, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (1 responses)

> Because the changes were so drastic (I think some things had basically been rewritten from scratch) that it couldn't reasonably be called 3.anything. (Sadly, one can't get away with calling things "X.-1". ISAGN.)

Fair point. That certainly makes sense. I do remember reading about how drastic the changes were.

Still, I can't help but wonder if maybe the versioning scheme that GNOME (and other projects) have used/are using wouldn't be better PR-wise (i.e. M.99 etc., where M is the current major version, becoming N.0 (N=M+1) when ready for general consumption).

GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 24, 2011 22:56 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the problem is that you may still make additional M releases, either before N is shipping, or even afterwords as a transition.

do you really want to have to explain to people how 3.4.5 is newer than 2.99?

GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 25, 2011 0:50 UTC (Fri) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (1 responses)

Please check up your facts. You can keep using the old workflow/design. Just use gnome-panel/metacity instead of gnome shell. It still works, nothing has been taken away from you. It has even been updated to use gtk3.

Why are you writing all this without checking up on the facts? You might actually influence others who then could make a misinformed descision. What's your motive?

GNOME Shell 2.91.90 released

Posted Feb 25, 2011 23:12 UTC (Fri) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]

That's what any reasonable person would think, but for GNOME 3 "designers" there's no "classic-mode", there is only a "fallback mode" that should be as uncomfortable as possible to force people to use the new shell.

So the panels should be locked down to resemble the pseudo-panels of the shell, the applets shouldn't exist anymore (there were calls to completely remove them, even after they had been ported), etc. etc.

Just check the mailing list archives (desktop-devel and gnome-shell), this was discussed in January IIRC. Or https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631553

I quote from the bug:

User: "Please don't diverge too much from how gnome-panel 2.32 works/looks. A lot of the people who will be using the gtk3 port are interested in it because it is a familiar setup, look and feel and not because of concerns over whether gnome-shell will work on their machines or not. In my setup for example, I have deleted one of the two panels (the top one)."

Designer: "Sorry, that is not what the fallback mode is designed for."