An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 2, 2011 13:12 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106)
Parent article: An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

This is so amazingly disappointing I really don't know how to react.

It appears that the stance of GNOME 3 is that user customization is bad because a user might change his environment to the point where it no longer conforms to the GNOME 3 design document. This is so backwards I can't comprehend how anyone can stomach it. What's the scenario for a user who specifically does not want to use the GNOME Shell's "better" workflow? Until now I thought the answer was "It's okay, you can just ignore it and keep using the GNOME 2 UI" but now it appears that the fallback mode is being deliberately crippled to discourage its use. So what's the alternative? Not using GNOME?

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An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 2, 2011 14:04 UTC (Wed) by xxiao (guest, #9631) [Link] (4 responses)

Haven't tried 3.0, from what I read so far it appears it could end up like KDE4, a fiasco, how sad.

An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 2, 2011 18:46 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

worse, the KDE problem was a matter of misunderstanding about what was ready, not about what was intended.

the Gnome issue is over what's intended.

things not yet being ready will be fixed over time.

intent not matching what users want requires a change in the project goals.

An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 3, 2011 9:19 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

> worse, the KDE problem was a matter of misunderstanding about what was ready, not about what was intended.

That's not the whole truth: I read regularly complaints about the 'semantic desktop' (file indexing) tools because developers didn't provide an easy way to disable them (I think that this has changed in the last release, not sure).

And to take one data point, Carla Schroeder switched for KDE4 to XFCE on January 2010, so much more recently than KDE4.0, she is just one user though so this doesn't mean much..

An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 3, 2011 18:02 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I've been using KDE4 since about 4.0 or 4.1 and haven't had any problems disabling the file indexing tools on any of the versions.

one mans fiasco...

Posted Mar 2, 2011 22:30 UTC (Wed) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link]

Then again, many people are very good at being dramatic pessimists... If a feature they happen to use is changed, the whole new design is deemed an absolute fiasco.

I'm not trying to dismiss the true criticisms but I do want to give a counter point: I'm using gnome-shell from jhbuild and while there are lots of things to improve, I'm not missing any major functions and I really like the general direction it's going. I admit my needs in this area are very simple, but I'm still a data point, right?

Desktop environments are complex beasts and people are bound to invent really different ways of using them. This means that the developers need to be careful when changing things: they may break usage patterns they didn't even know existed. The other side of the coin is this: progress is only possible by breaking things a little (because users do the weirdest things). Some people will always be disturbed, that's inevitable and we should accept that -- as long as the group or the disturbance is small enough.

tl;dr: Let's not call things "fiascos" before properly testing.

An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 2, 2011 14:16 UTC (Wed) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link] (2 responses)

> It appears that the stance of GNOME 3 is that user customization is bad because a user might change his environment to the point where it no longer conforms to the GNOME 3 design document.

Not true, this is what the extension system is for.

An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 7, 2011 15:40 UTC (Mon) by kakadu (guest, #73363) [Link]

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An Early Look at GNOME 3.0 (Linux.com)

Posted Mar 7, 2011 17:11 UTC (Mon) by kakadu (guest, #73363) [Link]

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