The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 17:14 UTC (Tue) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I daresay a lot of people will have a lot to complain about with GNOME 3.0. However, with a change this big, you're never really going to get it right first time, and you're going to make big mistakes.

I was one of those who had a lot of initial problems with GNOME 2.0. The 2.x series, though, has been magnificent. Yes, things like spatial mode didn't stick. But the dialog button re-ordering did, so did getting rid of Save buttons, and now it feels jarring using a system which doesn't have those.

I have high expectations of GNOME 3 going forward. It's going to be a pain initially - it's been particularly crashy on my nouveau setup :( - but 2.x repaid my time and effort many times over.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:36 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (26 responses)

> However, with a change this big, you're never really going to
> get it right first time, and you're going to make big mistakes.

That wouldn't be a problem if the GNOMEs were announcing this as a design concept instead of something several major distributions are going to ship as the default over the next couple of months.

Look at how the auto industry does it. They produce 'concept cars' and send them around to the auto mags, car shows and such. Nobody expects them to ever make it to dealer showrooms but a lot of people will see them, discuss them and comment. The good ideas eventually show up in production models while the bad ones quietly disappear. Everyone can remember the one big exception to this rule, which is why the lesson hasn't needed repeating.

GNOME3 is heading towards an Edsel moment. Ford survived the Edsel and hopefully GNOME3 will only be a setback.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 21:17 UTC (Wed) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (6 responses)

It's been in various stages of that design since 2009. There have even been preview packages in F14 and I think even F13. Ample warning about what was on the horizon. There was a design concept at the 2010 GNOME Auto Show. And that concept has now moved into production.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:21 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (5 responses)

As per my earlier my comment, those packages have rarely been useable for long. I.e. when they've worked at all, they've had quite bad bugs (like the hot-corner locking up the shell), IME. It's been perhaps a year since I've been able to try a gnome-shell preview on Fedora for more than a minute.

I have to say, I'm intrigued by GNOME3 its shell. It sounds like could be really good. What I find annoying is the lack of overlap being offered to users / the discontinuity of experience. A release or two of having both old WM & panel being supported alongside the new shell would have allowed me some choice in when to switch. It would have allowed the shell developers more time to find, fix and polish those problems that are found only when testing with a wide user-base. It might allow the plugin API to be finalised.

To not do this kind of release-management, to give users no alternative but a .0 UI experience (which even if well-tested and stable, will be feature-immature, as shell developers in this thread seem to acknowledge) comes across as a bit of a "fuck you" to many existing users.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:54 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

Metacity and GNOME Panel is offered as an alternative and is called fallback mode. It should serve the purpose or people can just choose not to upgrade for a while. Xfce can mimic GNOME 2.x really well as well.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:11 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

That'd be nice, but my understanding from GNOME bug reports is that gnome-panel in GNOME3 has been stripped down to provide close to the same UI as the top-panel in GNOME shell. Also, fallback doesn't reinstate nautilus' ability to draw icons on the desktop.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631553
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643951

It appears to be wrong and/or disingenuous to claim fallback mode offers anything like the existing GNOME 2.x desktop.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:44 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Notice, I never made that claim. So why bother implying that I did? That is really disingenuous and wrong. If fallback mode doesn't meet your requirements and If you must insist on the GNOME 2.x experience, stick to it or try Xfce as I explicitly suggested.

http://mso-chronicles.blogspot.com/2011/03/make-xfce-rock...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:03 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Your comment was made in reply to one of mine, which was talking about overlap of old and new in UIs. I, not entirely unreasonably, interpreted your reply in its prior context.

E.g. I said users had no alternative other than a .0 UI (as you point out, there's obviously also the the null choice of not upgrading, but Linux desktop software is now so intertwined these days that that choice comes with many side-effects in having to forego feature and even bug fixes - and potentially lose all bug-fix updates within a year). In that context you replied that fallback mode was an alternative - but, as I pointed out in reply, it *also* is a .0 UI - and a deliberately emasculated one at that. So that's not an alternative beyond the condition I stated.

If you meant me to understand something else, you'll have to add more information so as sufficiently the change the context stack. And I apologise for misunderstanding you in that case.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:12 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"but, as I pointed out in reply, it *also* is a .0 UI"

I can see why would you think that but have you actually used it? It is different from GNOME Shell UI in many many ways and although it has been changed to not be entirely different recently, the user experience cannot be called a .0 UI really. It is definitely a alternative among many that I have suggested earlier.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:18 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (17 responses)

If my Edsel had a switch that changed it back into a more modern version of the old care that I like, I think I would have liked the Edsel just fine.

I wonder if everyone who says "I will just have to keep using GNOME 2" know that GNOME 3 supports working with the same old GNOME panel that they know and love. It is like GNOME 3 has a "GNOME 2 with upgrades" mode.

Software desktops are a bit for flexible than cars.

PS.

I just realized that I am supposed to call it "fallback mode" and not "classic" as I have done elsewhere.

It has come-up here before:

http://lwn.net/Articles/430448/rss

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:20 UTC (Wed) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link]

Sorry, "old car" not "old care"

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:03 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link] (15 responses)

It also came up that the fallback mode is being rendered unusable.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:09 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (14 responses)

"Rendered unusable" is not an accurate way of putting it. There are some sad developments, like the loss of panel applets, but fallback mode as a whole works pretty well.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:16 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link] (12 responses)

It seems to me that "rendered unusable" is a perfect description. It's not only the applets, it's everything.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643951

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:21 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (8 responses)

OK, I can see that if you like Nautilus, you'd be unhappy. I have yet to find a use for that particular tool, so I kind of didn't even notice that particular change...

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:44 UTC (Wed) by GhePeU (subscriber, #56133) [Link]

I don't particularly like Nautilus, I've got at most a couple of directories and a few symlinks on my ~/Desktop because I use it mostly as a transient area, so that alone wouldn't be a great deal.

The thing is that the "classic" or "fallback" mode has been advertised as a way to keep using a mostly traditional GNOME 2 desktop; see jmalcolm's comment I originally responded to.

Well, it's not that. Icons on desktop, themes, font selection, panel applets, the fallback mode lost all the things that were stripped from GNOME 3, and also a lot of things that were a big part of the GNOME 2.

I suppose that somebody realized that if the users could choose between a fully working GNOME 2 and the shell most of them would have preferred the former, so something had to be done...

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 3:29 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (6 responses)

Nautilus is actually surprisingly useful for quick network mount stuff where you don't want to go to the hassle of setting up fuse, nfs, or whatever, or when finding music files, and so on. It actually is a very nice piece of software these days. It took about 10 years for me to actually use it, because I was always convinced that "real" computer users (i.e. old school UNIX) wouldn't be seen dead doing anything other than on a command line. Maybe, in ten more years, I'll come around to the idea of using 3D for anything other than academia, number crunching, or pretty games.

Of course, nautilus is gone too now. Which is so sad. After about ten years, after it reaches the point of being "just works" software for me...now it's back to 5 years ago with Thunar - a great project, but it'll need time to catch up. And, of course, we'll rinse and repeat this in a few more years.

Jon.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:22 UTC (Thu) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (2 responses)

Nautilus usable ? Even on SSD and all the previews disabled it still takes ages to list a large directory.

I'm fairly certain there is an architectual mistake in Nautilus which is never gonna get fixed so it will never be faster listing 'large' directories.

I just checked, it takes 7 seconds to open a directory with 318 items every time you go to that directory. There is no caching or anything like that ? Really 7 seconds ? That makes no sense to me.

Nautilus just makes me sad to think that it would be the best/most advanced.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 18, 2011 7:28 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

> Nautilus usable ? Even on SSD and all the previews disabled it still takes
> ages to list a large directory.

Just use thunar. It lists directories with thousands of entries pretty quickly. It also caches previews of media files, etc.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 18, 2011 8:55 UTC (Fri) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

I know Thunar, I'm just surprised Nautilus is still being used in GNOME and default on so many Linux distributions.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:08 UTC (Thu) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link] (2 responses)

Nautilus is still present in both Gnome Shell and fallback mode. Just launch it. Do you mean that by default Nautilus does not handle the background?

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:28 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link] (1 responses)

We no longer show screenshots over the background, no.

(I say this jokingly because gnome-screenshot is the only app I know of that explicitly saved things to ~/Desktop; since browsers moved downloads to ~/Downloads...)

You can access the "Computer" and Trash from the Files app.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 22, 2011 22:01 UTC (Tue) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

Ah but, you can configure applications to save documents there. Or as I do, put them there when asked for each download.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 4:41 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (1 responses)

Ok, I have to step back a bit.

If "fallback mode" is to be so different from GNOME 2 then it is not as simple as I have said it was. I was completely unaware of the plan to remove desktop icons from Nautilus.

There are of course other GTK+ apps that can serve as drop-in replacements. Still, the more you have to beg and borrow the less GNOME the desktop becomes. This is is not the crisis that some people declare it to be but it is more disruptive than I understood it to be.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 18, 2011 13:02 UTC (Fri) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]

It is just disabled by default. You can enable icons on the desktop through gconf.

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:25 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

I'm sure you can enable it. You used to be able to disable it in gnome2. (gconf)

Fallback mode

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

There is a legitimate technical reason for applets not working straight away in gnome-panel.

Corba has finally been removed and applets used that and required linking to corba from gnome-panel. It should be entirely possible to run those applets out of process though, they used to in old old gnome 2.X's (still corba), but having seperate process a waste of memory.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 21, 2011 9:41 UTC (Mon) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link]

> That wouldn't be a problem if the GNOMEs were announcing this as a design concept instead of something several major distributions are going to ship as the default over the next couple of months.

Well, those major distributions you refer to, happen to be 'bleeding-edge' distributions with a 6 month release cycle, which pretty much is intended to try out software and improve things like Gnome 3.

If you'd be using an Enterprise Linux distribution, Gnome 3 will not appear for at least 2 years and by then it will be more polished and supported by the vendors.

If you don't want to run software that is not at signed-off by a large support-organization, than don't run a bleeding-edge distribution.