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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:10 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

From the looks of it they took what seem to be usable and popular in other OS stuffed it together then reduced the functionality of it and label it Gnome without doing any kind of usability research before hand and then they seem to be going about adding things back that get complained most about or simply turn out to not work in $next_release and they call that improvements?

Does anyone know if they actually did perform any usability research to back up those changes as in stuffed x amount of completely novice end users in a room full of computers with "Gnome" installed on them, observed without any interaction and took notes on what they where struggling with and improved those areas in Gnome3 basically a research that shows that those changes are not something they think they might be improving?

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:24 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (77 responses)

You can browse some of the thoughts behind the design here:

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/

I realize that this is completely far afield from the usual desktop of a panels, applets, widgets and what not. But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go. We can just change the internals a little, make new themes, new widgets. There is only so many ways you're going to be able to cut this. if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.

Or we can try something new. Yeah, if you're used to the old interface and you've setup specific setup for your work flow, it is going to suck. I'll even agree that perhaps the font stuff might need a second look and time will tell if we have to go back and tweak that design based on the feedback we get on it. I had a similar experience regarding the fonts. I've gotten over it for the most part since it wasn't that big of change. I eventually forgot font set ups altogether. Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font. If you do, then something is wrong with the font and we need to fix the font.

As for launchers, most of the tools like docky are still going to be there and work as well as apps like gnome-do (which I still personally use). Eventually like 2.0, 3.0 is going to mature as well. I think the overview idea is a super idea.. it's like vi, baby. Command mode and work mode.

Someone mentioned the use of 3D.. let's consider this. We have graphic cards with all this power and we're not using it. When we don't use it there is nothing is driving us to make those 3D drivers better. When the drivers get better we have even new uses for them. Interactions too slow, we're going to start hitting X developers to make those drivers better.

I'll argue that when we pursue these things it creates new avenues to improve the rest of the Linux ecosystem. This isn't just good for GNOME, its users, but it's good for Linux.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:41 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (23 responses)

"we've taken this interface as far as it will go [...] if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years."

I have difficulty grasping this point of view. At the point where you have developed a tool as far as it will go, it is not "dead", it is "perfected". Other words that come to mind are "mature" or "stable" or "reliable". If new tools are also needed, so be it. But you should not throw out the old reliable ones while you are still struggling with the design of the new ones.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:54 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (19 responses)

It's dead.. because nobody wants to work on a perfected tool. If it is in fact perfected, there is nothing else to do is there? Just sit around and move chess pieces around. We won't be keeping many volunteers around with that attitude.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:13 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link] (3 responses)

Do you *NEED* as many volunteers? If it's down to just minor bug and security fixes, is that so out of line? Just churning to keep people busy is make-work, not real innovation.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:37 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (2 responses)

Your question doesn't make any sense. For some people, the desktop experience reached perfection when bash3 was released. Without the drive of "just works" you would not have had the kind of ease of use you get today.

I suspect distros would also be unhappy (you know all those companies that hire free software people?) if we just stopped doing things.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 11:26 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]

The key difference is that when bash3 was released the bash team didn't decide that bash4 needed to have incompatible syntax and require 3D acceleration in order to remain relevant. Instead bash4 builds on bash3 in a backwards compatible way, adding and not subtracting.

> I suspect distros would also be unhappy ... if we just stopped doing things.

How about solving new problems and not re-hashing old problems? A lack of feature density is a sign of immaturity, not a sign of usability.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:50 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Without the drive of "just works" you would not have had the kind of ease of use you get today.

Umm? I do not believe computers today are significantly easier to use than they were 10 or 15 years ago. In fact, I find some of the modern desktop trends in GNOME and KDE making computers harder to use.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:24 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (5 responses)

Volunteers for what? Having people reinvent the wheel just to keep them busy is possibly the worst idea ever. Think about it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:35 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (4 responses)

Volunteers to invent spokes, vulcanized rubber, and all sorts of other improvements. You're welcome to continue using your stone wheels as long as you'd like.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:56 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (3 responses)

Great, now instead of inventing paper or penicillin, let's just reinvent our wheels every five years, just because. Next iteration we will do them squared, on the basis that:

* they are more compact and easy to store.
* people are great a handling square things, they do not roll away by mistake.
* they are more beautiful.
* they *are* more *beautiful*.
* Did I mention square is more beautiful?

Don't mention that old roads will not adapt very well to those new wheels, but hey, it's all in the name of progress.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 22:12 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

How lame. I'm sorry I paid any attention to you.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 1:17 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

No, lame is using the interests of volunteers to excuse a bad technical decision, that is, throwing out the window all experience gained with a currently working environment, all in the pursuit of some questionable usability nirvana.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for improvement, but I seriously object to two things:
1. the mentality that once something is done, it's dead. Not. It's done. Most software projects should aim at being done some day, at least the parts others have to rely upon. That's what originated my initial post.
2. the way Gnome has chosen to release Shell. Make a new point zero release and rush a half baked idea with a half baked implementation. And make it mandatory! What's that familiar smell? Oh, yes! smells like KDE4 all over again! Why would it be so difficult to maintain the current, working, environment for the (millions!) of current users, and give the radically new stuff as an option for the adventurous?

But I guess they will make the same mistake again, who is going to test it if it's not mandatory, anyway? Excuse my lameness, but I have been through all this before, and it was not pretty.

All this would be moot, though, if Gnome tried to finish something. But can Gnome 2 be considered "done"? Nope, it was never written with that in mind. There are piles of bugs that will *never* get a fix, because in the minds of those developers Gnome 2 is not mature, but deprecated.

Of course, I may equally well be wrong. It happens to me all the time.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 3:23 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

As usual, Jamie Zawinski had something to say about this years ago...

http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

His choice of language and attack vector aside, many people have written about this kind of problem, for a long time now. And I don't mean GNOME, I mean the general problem of never really getting to a finish state.

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:43 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (8 responses)

The point is not to work on the shell indefinitely. The shell itself it utterly uninteresting by itself.

The point is to have more apps that perform useful tasks for users.

That won't happen if the platform is changed upside down every five years. That's why people are still writing TCL/TK and motif apps, and no sane isv wants to touch GTK stuff if it can avoid it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:11 UTC (Thu) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Exactly right.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:34 UTC (Thu) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]

We obviously don't have a lot of ISVs (in the sense you mean) - but what applications are you talking about?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 19:02 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (5 responses)

> That's why people are still writing TCL/TK

That is one reason I still use it. That and documentation.

Challenge: Point me to a source for hardcopy documentation to develop a GNOME application. Can't, can you. Now in a scripting language.

Closest I came was an online GTK+ 2.x in Python document that looked pretty good but GTK isn't GNOME. All those wonderful GNOME technologies that churn almost annually and the only way one can learn how to use them correctly is to look at the source of an existing app and HOPE it is using it correctly since odds are that author learned the same way.

So last time I needed to knock out a graphical app for Linux I grabbed my worn copy of Practical Programming in TCL and Tk and got r done.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 20:36 UTC (Thu) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (2 responses)

http://www.amazon.com/Official-GNOME-Developers-Guide/dp/...

Is that good enough?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:48 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

It came out in 2004. The latest review on Amazon is from 2007. Whether what is in that book is of any use with current GNOME is anybody's guess.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 22:44 UTC (Sat) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]

Nope. As someone else has already noted it is old. It is also out of print. Even the web docs on www.gnome.org are bad. Describing a libraries under a banner noting it's deprecation. And look at the language bindings.

C? Duh.

C++ also looks well maintained.

Java? Tutorials "Coming Soon" for about five years now. "has been used to develop non-trivial applications" and "coverage level is reaching maturity" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence to jump in and find out what works and what doesn't while developing code intended for production.

Perl? "Our documentation isn't what we'd like it to be..." is truthful. A look around leads me to think most of the GNOME APIs are supported at some level.

Python? A lot of GNOME apps are written in Python so one would think there would be documentation out there.... one would be mistaken. All pointers in the FAQ are to information dated between 2001 and 2003 so considering how many APIs have been deprecated since then...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 23:47 UTC (Sat) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, but that's not a fair assessment. TCL/TK, like GTK+, is a _toolkit_ not a desktop environment. I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.

Tcl/Tk

Posted Mar 21, 2011 15:36 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I can't think of any desktop environment based on TK that you could still write a program for today.

I don't know of any desktop environments based on Tk, period. However, I love Tcl/Tk and I think the GNOME developers could learn a lot by studying it. Here's why:

Tcl/Tk has extensive and well-written documentation in good old UNIX troff format. The API is completely documented both at the Tcl level and at the C integration level.
The C code is very clean and well-documented.
Tcl/Tk has continued to evolve over the decades, but retains the essence of what Tcl and Tk are. New features are carefully considered and added, but only when they fit in with the existing design philosophy. There's never been a "the entire Universe has changed" release of Tcl/Tk. GNOME could do well to study this last point.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:43 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

> I have difficulty grasping this point of view. At the point where you have developed a tool as far as it will go, it is not "dead", it is "perfected". Other words that come to mind are "mature" or "stable" or "reliable". If new tools are also needed, so be it. But you should not throw out the old reliable ones while you are still struggling with the design of the new ones.

Just a thought - I share many of the thoughts and worries of people commenting on this article. But I also wonder - are the GNOME people actively preventing anyone from maintaining GNOME 2, or are they just not doing it as much themselves? If the second is true then perhaps something is broken outside of GNOME, if so many people (or is it just that those people are more vocal?) badly want just an ever more polished GNOME 2 and no one is doing it? And if a high percentage of their users would appreciate it why do distributions not step in to do something?

Is it that a lot of people really do want the new GNOME? Or not enough people care? Or do we need a way to pay people to work on that sort of boring thing? Or some other way to make people want to? Or am I completely off?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:02 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

GNOME Fallback Mode is very much in need of developer attention and we would *love* someone or someones to step up to improve its status.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

I actually disagree with Sri on this. The motivation for GNOME 3 was that GNOME 2 had serious problems. See here: https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 22:50 UTC (Tue) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132) [Link] (19 responses)

> Someone mentioned the use of 3D.. let's consider this. We have graphic
> cards with all this power and we're not using it. When we don't use it
> there is nothing is driving us to make those 3D drivers better. When the > drivers get better we have even new uses for them.

This is the comment that really made me shiver. I bought a Dell Studio laptop early in June 2010 with a Radeon 5000 GPU. I've used Gnome 2 on it perfectly happily, but 10 months later I'm still waiting for full 3D support to appear in the xorg driver (it's present in preliminary but buggy form in xorg 1.10; most 3D applications still freeze the X server). There is no reason to think that conditions are going to change such that the pace of development in this difficult area is going to be any faster in the future than it is at present. In this context, it's lunacy to make something as basic as the desktop environment depend on 3D support.

The actual consequence of this decision will surely be to pressure people in my current situation to use ATI/AMD's proprietary drivers and thereby to decrease the user base for the open-source drivers. This is not going to make the open source 3D drivers better. Rather the opposite.

Very sad.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:08 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (18 responses)

Well it seems kind of broken that we can't have a consistent 3D experience across the board. Every other OS does? Don't think that's a gap that we need to bridge?

Now, I'll grant you, depending on 3D when we aren't quite there is going to painful. We have our own internal arguments regarding relying on 3D features. But the flip argument is that we don't rely on it we have no way to push for a consistent 3D experience in the first place on par with what you get with another OS. You paid a price for your laptop, and you should be able to get your moneys worth out of the hardware you have.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:20 UTC (Wed) by Tara_Li (guest, #26706) [Link] (1 responses)

Why do we *NEED* so desperately this 3D experience? Look at what 3D has done to the gaming industry. It's turned it into a wasteland of Yet Another First Person Shooters, and other similar wastes. All the 3D I really need is generally provided by making the top outline of the box being drawn lighter, and the bottom outline darker.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 8:55 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Just about everything that is wrong with the mass-market video game industry can be blamed on it being largely run by a handful of large publicly listed companies or their subsidiaries, turning it into a case of "we need you to write a game we know how to sell", with only a few "rockstar" designers like Peter Molyneux or Will Wright really getting free rein to do whatever the hell they like because the companies can sell the damn thing by slapping the rockstar's name on the front cover.

3D is a red herring in that argument.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:38 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (3 responses)

I don't want a 3D desktop, period. I have a 3D capable graphics card so that I can run glxgears occasionally. Once upon a time, I used to play Quake 3, but that's about it. I'm not a gamer and I don't care (at all) about 3D desktop effects, or any of these things. The only reason I can think of for using 3D effects on my desktop is to be distracting, or to look cool in reviews/demos, etc. It's ok that these features exist, but many of us are not asking for them :)

It's a similar story with things like smooth-transition from bootloader to X with KMS. Sure, it's a nice pretty thing, but I don't care at all (the first thing I do is turn off this and go back to a real bootloader setup). One thing I would have liked to see is a Mac-style graphical panic screen. That would actually be useful, but the rest is just pretty dressing to me :)

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 8:29 UTC (Wed) by alexl (guest, #19068) [Link]

I think using "3D" to describe this is a bit ingenious, as it doesn't at all describe what e.g. gnome-shell does. Its nothing like Quake 3.

However, what gnome-shell does is use the graphics card hardware in the way that modern graphics accelerators really work, not like the previous generation of graphics hardware worked.

Current graphics cards have none of the traditional bitblit or drawing primitives in hardware, and the "native" way to program them is with an API like OpenGL or Direct3D. That doesn't mean you can only program a 3D game using them, it just means that is how you program them.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 19:59 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link] (1 responses)

so you claim you use Mac OSX on weekends because it does things the Linux desktop isn't sufficient for your needs and yet when anyone tries to improve the Linux desktop, you moan like a kid. Go use Mac OSX full time if you like it so much.

You are using a 3D desktop on Mac OSX every time you sit at it. You are seeing a smooth boot when Mac OSX boots. Why be a whiner when Linux tries to be better?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 21:14 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

we might need some working 3d-enabled graphics/video drivers first ;-)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 4:40 UTC (Wed) by cunagcleas (subscriber, #29132) [Link] (9 responses)

> You paid a price for your laptop, and you should be able to get your
> moneys worth out of the hardware you have.

I did get my money's worth. I don't want the `3D experience'. I'm completely happy with my 2D laptop.

But that's neither here nor there (just my preference). More important is that linux has always been about giving users *a choice* about such things and control over their working environment. And it's disappointment about that fundamental point that runs all through this thread. I don't want to stop using GNOME, but if you push this through, then my choice will be between (i) giving up on GNOME (ii) turning to the proprietary drivers. Me, I'll give up on GNOME first, but I'm sure I'm in a minority.

> But the flip argument is that we don't rely on it we have no way to push > for a consistent 3D experience in the first place on par with what you
> get with another OS.

The Xorg developers are already working flat out on the 3D drivers for these cards and they've made amazing progress recently. But the open source drivers for ATI and NVIDIA cards are probably always going to lag behind the proprietary drivers by about a year. This decision on your part is not going to make AMD/ATI any more cooperative than they are at present, nor is it going to suddenly produce a flood of money to hire new xorg developers. What it will do is push yet more users to the proprietary drivers (and thereby give AMD/ATI an incentive to be even less forthcoming than they are at present).

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 9:41 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (6 responses)

btw, I think it's *not* "neither here nor there" when it comes to the 3D stuff. It's a key point actually. Many of us could care less about 3D effects, smooth transitions, and all of these bells and whistles we are being given in return for losing even basic functionality that was there before. It's like we're getting all these great prizes, but I for one never entered the prize draw. I just wanted my desktop to keep going as before.

I make no pretence that I don't look at these things mostly from the point of view of a corporate/enterprise user. Users like myself care more about having a consistent experience that is well understood and easily adjusted than they do about having any of these bells and whistles.

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 13:20 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

The problem with this is that current graphics cards generally no longer accelerate 2D graphics in hardware. All modern OSes (except Linux) use 3D primitives even for their desktop drawing (as opposed to »real« 3D stuff such as games) already, anyway, so there is no point for graphics card manufactures to actually go to the trouble of including accelerated 2D graphics, and a reasonable incentive to leave out stuff that will just clutter up the chip while it isn't even being used.

So, from the point of view of a Linux desktop environment developer, it's either stay with 2D drawing even if it is unaccelerated and you need to jump through hoops to do it at all, or else move over to 3D primitives for desktop drawing, which will be accelerated even though the desktop doesn't actually »look« 3D. Since using the accelerated 3D primitives enables all sorts of other cool and indispensable things that 2D drawing doesn't give one (like a bunch of virtual desktops on the faces of a cube with video playback windows hanging across the edges), this decision is mostly a no-brainer.

As for the lost basic functionality, that's a different kettle of fish altogether which is nothing to do with 2D vs. 3D. If the GNOME developers, in the process of upgrading their software offerings, want to provide us with a radically changed (I'm deliberately not saying improved or worsened – as a KDE user I wouldn't know) user experience then that is their privilege. Users can always vote with their feet.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:35 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

2D still tends to use less power than 3D desktop though. Which means it's certainly still being implemented efficiently in hardware.

But hey, who wants longer battery hardware? Look at the shiny...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:46 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (3 responses)

That's not true. When Clutter is rendering animations, it actively throttles itself to avoid drawing faster than the VSync rate of the monitor to save power and avoid visual tearing. When Clutter is idle, the graphics hardware is completely idle. So since we're avoiding CPU-intensive expose events with a compositor, you actually likely have a net power savings, at least with Intel graphics. AMD and NVidia haven't yet managed to idle low enough and so they are frequently tied to an Intel graphics implementation. On proprietary OS's, if a game is not running, the Intel graphics are used. (We cannot do this in Linux, yet. Though it is on the horizon.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:54 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

Compiz with GNOME2 certainly used more power than normal metacity on my intel graphics laptop. I'm glad to hear that clutter tries to make efficient use of the hardware.

For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.

Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:59 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

> For the sake of clarity, are you saying that clutter ought to be more energy efficient than 2D metacity on modern hardware generally? That seems to be the implication given you're contradicting my comment.

Yes, that is what you should find. It's likely to be very close but a good test is a bunch of open windows and then dragging one window around the desktop rapidly.

> Re dual-graphics and switching, I thought airlied has got that working?

Mm... I thought I was up to date on this but perhaps you know more than I do. My understanding until now has been that dynamic graphics switching requires the same Gallium state tracker in both drivers since the entire hardware state has to be moved from one graphics card to the other. Perhaps this is the milestone that has been reached to which you are referring?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:03 UTC (Wed) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

I've only got login/out switch working,

dynamic switching where it powers up/down the second GPU for running games is something I'm playing with now.

Complete switch at runtime for all X apps is also on the list but harder.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:31 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

Linux is not about choice. https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-Ja...

Before you comment on the AMD/ATI situation you should probably be aware of the company stance on the issue: http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

And actually, the proprietary drivers have turned out to be quite buggy.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:41 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link]

Linux is not about choice

...in the opinion of ajaxxx. Now maybe you happen to agree with him. But that doesn't necessarily make it right. Sure, he makes some valid points. But he also overlooks the fact that for some of us, it is (at least partially) about choice. By removing that choice, you're pissing off a non-trivial subset of your current users. Maybe you'll gain more in the process. If so, you might deem that to be a worthwhile exchange. But that doesn't make it any less painful for those of us that you're pushing away.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 8:55 UTC (Thu) by gleb (guest, #55308) [Link] (1 responses)

By requiring 3D you basically prevent GNOME3 to be usable inside hypervisor.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 9:11 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

This is not right due to two different reasons. GNOME 3 has a fallback mode which can be used in such circumstances and virtualization work is being done to support hardware acceleration (3D is a misnomer. GNOME Shell is not really 3D)

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2011-March/...

Tweaking

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:51 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (12 responses)

Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font.

And that is the sort of reasoning that really sets some people off. Why should I have to accept somebody else's choice of font? I stare at this screen for many, many hours over the course of the day. I honestly don't understand why I wouldn't want to optimize it for the most comfortable and efficient experience.

I know that my font choices don't work for others; I like them small and dense. My advanced age notwithstanding, my eyes are still pretty sharp; I want to use that gift to maximize the density of information in front of me. My wife complains about clutter and small text on my screen; my choices don't work for her at all. There is no right choice for everybody; it amazes me when people think that they, somehow, can come up with a universally optimal setting - especially for something as fundamental as the size of the text on the screen. We're not all the same.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:29 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

I totally understand. I changed something in gconf today because the "smaller" font option was ridiculous.. the window title font was too small, and wasn't proportional the rest of the fonts on the terminal window. And so it goes..

I'm arguing from a designer's perspective as a technical person. :-) So if I set people off, please understand that I'm doing my level best to try to strike a balance in my conversations between all of you and it's not my intention to show that the project is arrogant or insensitive to the feedback given. What you say is important to us, and your feed back is important. Several us on the marketing team/shell team will be looking over this thread. I wasn't quite planning on going at it alone but you guys have all been nice to me :)

Jonathan, I'm in the same boat as you (advanced age not withstanding) my eyes are sharp and my font setup is probably similar to yours. On the font issue, I suspect that we're going to probably catch some heat there and probably have to look at it again. Bugzilla is your friend, please do put in bugs for these kind of things. Especially before feature freeze.

If I have to engage any more with y'all I'm going to have to break out the scotch.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 16, 2011 0:30 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

Conversely, I don't mind sharing that I have a sensitivity to light. In fact, I usually have to work in a completely dark room with just the right indirect lighting, and my monitor casing are covered in electrical tape to prevent reflections. Software wise, I have very carefully adjusted the lighting, fonts, sizes, and so forth so that it is more useable. I do green on black not because it's "cool" but because it is less bothersome, etc...

I don't pretend that my configuration is anything like what others want to use, but that's the beauty of being able to have a preference.

Jon.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 16, 2011 1:44 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link]

GNOME should support that use case. Although it won't put the electrical tape for you. Maybe GNOME 4 ;)

Tweaking

Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:02 UTC (Wed) by C.Gherardi (guest, #4233) [Link] (7 responses)

Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font.
And that is the sort of reasoning that really sets some people off. Why should I have to accept somebody else's choice of font? I stare at this screen for many, many hours over the course of the day. I honestly don't understand why I wouldn't want to optimize it for the most comfortable and efficient experience.

I've gone from an extreme settings tweaker to someone who largely uses the defaults for everything except his editor.

Every time I upgrade distro the default font and size changes slightly, and I complain that the old was better than the new. It irritates me for about a week and at some point it fades from memory, to be repeated on the next upgrade.

Perception is a funny thing, and "most comfortable and efficient experience" is difficult to evaluate objectively. I had a similar discussion with a tech writer at work, and his argument was that users dont know what they want (which gets no argument from me) and are rarely equipped with the knowledge to make good decisions in design, as short term irritation at (possibly beneficial) change clouds objectivity.

Over time the default fonts have improved, and i'm willing to give people who know a lot more about the intricacies of fonts and viewing all the latitude they want to improve things.

That said 'smaller' and 'small' would be welcome options.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:22 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (5 responses)

Over time the default fonts have improved, and i'm willing to give people who know a lot more about the intricacies of fonts and viewing all the latitude they want to improve things.

Nobody really wants to spend hours changing all the font settings, but the attitude that "you should accept our settings because we're designers" is condescending, bordering on the offensive. Of course, changing fonts has been a necessity on, for example, Red Hat systems because of the scarcity of decent pre-installed fonts, and that situation has improved, but if someone really does prefer a serif font for their window titles, they should be able to change it fairly easily.

Actually, if the "designers" can't come up with an effective interface for changing things like font styles or sizes which doesn't require choosing from a hundred separate font menus, they are not as great or innovative as they think they are. Dropping such choices altogether or neutering them just shows that they have accepted defeat on the matter. And claiming that "this is not what normal people do" is just an excuse.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 17, 2011 2:45 UTC (Thu) by C.Gherardi (guest, #4233) [Link] (4 responses)

Nobody really wants to spend hours changing all the font settings, but the attitude that "you should accept our settings because we're designers" is condescending, bordering on the offensive. Of course, changing fonts has been a necessity on, for example, Red Hat systems because of the scarcity of decent pre-installed fonts, and that situation has improved, but if someone really does prefer a serif font for their window titles, they should be able to change it fairly easily.

I manage more than 100 users, and only 1 of them has changed their default font given the ability to do so. So I agree that this isn't something 'normal' people do.

I agree that the attitude appears condescending, but I can't tell if that 'condescension' is justified (Dunning-Krueger etc). Spatial mode came and went, but other controversial things stayed. Fonts will probably be in the latter category, but I personally wont miss it and don't believe the silent majority will either.

My personal gripe will be the missing laptop power options. I dont own an music player. When flying I set up a large playlist in Amarok and shut the lid is down to save screen power and my laptop battery gets me through 90%+ of my flight. Having to keep the lid open is going to force me to listen to Aeroplane channels for half the flight.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 18, 2011 10:37 UTC (Fri) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link] (2 responses)

Unless you're managing an uncommon set of users, I think you're at the wrong vantage point to see the problem.

Normal behavior on someone else's computer isn't normal behavior on your own.

Very few people's work demands enough of their computer that accommodations have to be made.

I've said it before: GNOME seems to be going the proprietary Apple/Microsoft route with ever-increasing doggedness, making the best environment they know how to make for 'normal' people. GNOME seems (from a distance now) to be measuring "best" as minimizing the volume of inexperienced users' baffled questions, and their vexed or bewildered responses to the answers.

I think that's a strategically unsound choice, but it's not my call and it doesn't irritate me -- so long as the tools themselves remain interoperable, and can use open-system standards to full advantage.

Because GNOME is not an open system. There are people posting on LWN who can't figure out how to make the simplest alterations to what they regard as their personal environment on their personal computer, and the answers they're getting aren't of the "here's the doc on how to do that" variety.

That a volunteer-based project is consciously excluding the "how do I make it do that?" crowd from its user base is ... well, like I say, I don't think it can last.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 18, 2011 19:03 UTC (Fri) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not really headed in the proprietary direction per se, but it does seem to go in weird cycles of being more Apple-like to less Apple-like. Unlike Apple and Microsoft software, however, it isn't being designed with the corporate desktop user or developer in mind, nor with due consideration for the need to manage large numbers of those desktops and provide an interface people in such environments are used to.

My main gripe is that, instead of this, it's actually trying to cater to some weird subset of novice users who want a "My First Linux Machine" UI. But those people are going to run one of the popular other interfaces from other more embedded/tablet projects, and not GNOME (or GNOME OS, or whatever, that ship has sailed). Sure, lots of really excitable enthusiasts will run GNOME 3, and it'll get some great reviews. But people on Slashdot (and even LWN) are not the millions of the mass market.

I'd love it if they'd gracefully accept that other projects have been targeting netbooks and tablets, that things like Android and Chrome OS have won there, and move on, back to core competencies. Yes, I have an "enterprise" hat on in all of this since I want GNOME to be the desktop of choice and relevance for the enterprise first and foremost.

Jon.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 28, 2011 19:27 UTC (Mon) by pcarrier (guest, #65446) [Link]

Unlike Apple and Microsoft software, however, it isn't being designed with the corporate desktop user or developer in mind

After spending a few months writing code under Windows, I cannot disagree more. Microsoft still hasn't implemented a dynamically resizable terminal (horizontal scrolling if you try), or proper completion in their shell. Or a configurable prompt AFAIK.

Many trivial changes could prove very pleasing to developers, but they just never, ever cared. The corporate developer can shut up and hack (win32 code).

The silent majority

Posted Mar 18, 2011 12:27 UTC (Fri) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link]

I manage more than 100 users, and only 1 of them has changed their default font given the ability to do so. So I agree that this isn't something 'normal' people do. ... but I personally wont miss it and don't believe the silent majority will either.

A couple of observations here.

"The silent majority" are fed shit, and have mostly resigned to that fact. Therefor they don't look to changing defaults. They'll just accept what they get, and try not to worry about it. That's a very far cry from being happy and content. I always believed that part of the "mission" of open source is, that we can actually teach people that they don't need to put up with shit, and deserve better.

Also, that 1 percent, that's us, the geeks. The slightly unadjusted types. It just so happens that these 1-percenters are also the ones making the software, and care deeply about the quality of things. Probably the worst thing any project can do, is to tell that 1% that their opinion and desires actually doesn't matter.

On a personal note, I would _never_ever_ consider using a platform, where I can not adjust font settings to my liking. Doesn't matter how great the rest is.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 16, 2011 16:05 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

> That said 'smaller' and 'small' would be welcome options.

That landed three weeks ago.

Tweaking

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:10 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

The problem is that if somebody speaks positively of gnome, everyone else assumes they are in charge and believes, 'oh that is set in stone' I better complain instead of scratching that itch.

I actually disagree with the reasoning too (bad eyesight), but I also know how to change the value. The sad thing is I can count _7_ replies bashing on this as if it is an official mandate.

Of course there is going to be font change dialog (the setting just isn't presented in any gui), just as easy theming (prepackaged) will happen because it is cool and somebody will actually contribute.

It just has to be made, accepting that the first approach you try might get frown upon, just like linux....

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:00 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link] (3 responses)

> Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font.

Are you serious? I need a way to change the default font settings because:

a. The hinting and subpixel rendering options that GNOME 3 picks by default look terrible on my monitor. And short of creating a comprehensive database of all monitors and laptop panels out there, there is no way for GNOME 3 developers to know what settings a particular user will need.

b. In a truly stunning regression for i18n and l11n efforts, the new default UI font in GNOME 3 (Cantarell) covers *only* the basic Latin alphabet and a few extended Latin symbols for the Central European languages. Other characters will be rendered by the system's fallback font (for alphabetic scripts, this will most likely be DejaVu). And let me tell you, seeing a mixture of Cantarell and DejaVu, which are compatible neither in metrics nor in style, in every window title bar makes me want to vomit and then gouge out my eyes with rusty cutlery.

c. Independent of the the above points, Cantarell's aesthetics are not above reproach. In other words: I am sure some GNOME developers may like but, but I personally find it rather ugly. As they say, de gustibus non disputandum est; and the users who have a different taste in typography should have an easily accessible option to pick a font that, in their opinion, does not look awful.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 6:10 UTC (Wed) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, that criticism is valid regarding regression. I don't have any defense for that other than it should be fixed.

As for the hinting, I'm hoping someone from GNOME can jump in and talk about the fonts. I will admit that I don't have any particular defense as I've stated above. You shouldn't be having to mix fonts of different metrics. That's wrong. We can't do anything with the interface now as we are past the visual freeze. We can address after the release. In the mean time, please file bugs and state your opinion.

If you're interested in helping improve the experience then you need to file bugs.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:00 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link] (1 responses)

> If you're interested in helping improve the experience then you need to file bugs.

This is another fallacy that many FOSS projects operate under: that it is the responsibility of anyone with a suggestion or complaint to file a bug report.

The developer of a piece of FOSS should care enough about it that if he reads a post on a forum somewhere that describes a simple, obvious problem, he should either look into the problem himself or file a bug report himself.

The Random Internet Guy who posted on a forum or mailing list already expressed the problem. He already took the time to explain it. If it's a problem worth fixing, it's a problem the devs should care about enough to take it from there. (If it's unreproducible or obscure, that's different.)

I'm operating under the assumption that developers of FOSS projects which are serious enough to have bug trackers care about their projects and want to make them the best they can be. If this isn't the case with a project, then I wouldn't expect a developer to care about a bug report, either.

This is not to say that users should never be asked to file bug reports. My point is that, especially with large rewrites, if developers really care about quality and meeting users needs, they ought to be actively seeking reports of problems and addressing them proactively, not refusing to act until someone does the right paperwork.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:13 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It wouldn't be so bad if people didn't hide their bug trackers behind passwordwalls.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:45 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

How old are you? Given your "Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font" comment I suspect you must be in your twenties, at most. If you were older, you would know ocular focal resolution slowly but steadily degrades with age because you'd be experiencing it yourself. Hence you'd know that it's quite normal for computer users to increase font sizes with age - preferably with the finest-grain increases possible.

Eye sight "issues" are not exceptional. There is a continuum of vision ability, even across any one individual's lifetime. "Small", "medium" and "large" does not cover it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 18, 2011 12:36 UTC (Fri) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (1 responses)

> How old are you? Given your "Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font" comment I suspect you must be in your twenties, at most. If you were older, you would know ocular focal resolution slowly but steadily degrades with age because you'd be experiencing it yourself. Hence you'd know that it's quite normal for computer users to increase font sizes with age - preferably with the finest-grain increases possible. Eye sight "issues" are not exceptional. There is a continuum of vision ability, even across any one individual's lifetime. "Small", "medium" and "large" does not cover it.

Absolutely spot on! My font requirements are quite different than they were 15 years ago (to my own amazement in the beginning).

hoping I can set nice big fonts the way I like em

Posted Mar 18, 2011 21:19 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

My sight is good, but my work is text-intensive and eye fatigue is the weakest link when I've a marathon work session. Long-term eye health is really important to me, so I hope GNOME3 lets me set fonts to how I like them.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 18:31 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

"You can browse some of the thoughts behind the design here:

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/"

I had already familiarized myself with upstream design documentation including Williams paper but my question was "Was there done any usability research before starting to develop Gnome3" and I guess you answered my question with "No" which is what I suspected.

"I realize that this is completely far afield from the usual desktop of a panels, applets, widgets and what not. But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go. We can just change the internals a little, make new themes, new widgets. There is only so many ways you're going to be able to cut this. if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years."

I'm not arguing against the need for Gnome to adopt it self to the changes that are happening now, desktop in it's sense is slowly migrating into smartphones and into the "cloud" which will serve majority of regular computer usage on the planet and that's a computer you carry around with you at all time in your pocket and you simply "dock" to hook it up to a keyboard mouse and additional larger display and a continues power source and external storage device.

That's happening right here right now and the battle is being fought between Apple IOS and Android and the traditional desktop in the sense as we know it, is dying and in couple of years it will be gone so any DE on any OS will need to adapt itself to those changes as in being able to run on smartphones,tablet pc, laptops and regular workstation if it's going to continue to exist and succeed at the same time. This is just common knowledge.

The most irony with regards to Gnome that after all these years it continues to ignore it's current and only users base it has and continues on a path of it's own failure by developing a desktop targeted only at novice end users which in return will never use it since that novice end user it is targeting is incapable of installing Gnome in the first place.

They could have exposed various configuration options in various application in "Admin" accounts if they had any intention of keeping advanced/experienced and at the same time their current and only user base happy but they did not..

Linux on Desktop wont become commonly widely used amongst home end users until that novice end user can walk into a store and buy it ( also common knowledge ) and up to this point only one distribution has done something about it which is probably the only thing it has manage to do right and that's Canonical, it has managed to deliver it's triple U distro in the hands of that novice end user right from the store and that's why it is so *popular*.

Gnome-Shell has potentiality to become a great success and already fixes some issue I know novice end users have been struggling with in Gnome2 unfortunately it seems to bring several new ones to them instead as has been pointed out by various existing Gnome users most of which I agree with thou not all.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 20:45 UTC (Wed) by jku (subscriber, #42379) [Link] (1 responses)

It helps the discussion if everyone avoids generalizations... You claim GNOME is ignoring its current user base and is on the path to failure.

I'm a power user by most meanings of the word, a software developer and a long time linux/unix user. First of all, I love the fact that different paths are being explored -- this is why it makes sense to have several desktop environments. Second, I really like the direction GNOME is now going. I think the panel implementation especially is a step in the direction of "Just Works" and the activity mode has potential. I'm also very happy that when it improves the overall experience, someone is ready to go through the painful battle that removing and rearranging configuration options always is.

I hope we can agree that GNOME 3 is not "targeted only at novice end users" and that not all experienced users want problems solved by "exposing various configuration options in various applications".

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:07 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

"It helps the discussion if everyone avoids generalizations... You claim GNOME is ignoring its current user base and is on the path to failure."

Yes I feel that Gnome is moving further towards what it has been criticised most in the past and by doing so it is on the path to failure.

It can achieve both by exposing various option and knobs in accounts with type set as "Administrators" while keeping it's "simplicity" by completely hide all the that stuff along with for example workspaces and various other things in accounts with type set as "Supervised".

"I think the panel implementation especially is a step in the direction of "Just Works" and the activity mode has potential."

How do you feel like it's an closer step into "Just Works" as to previous experience?

From my perspective from the moment you log in you have a less usable and productive environment for example as it's currently implemented the activity mode is adding another step to the previous users experience from the moment you log in.

The first thing you have to do after you log in is to move the mouse point and click "Activities" for you to be able to start doing any kind of work and that's a step backwards in usability and productivity compared to Gnome 2 where you logged in and you could click an icon in the panel or on the desktop of course that can be solved by by putting the user in "Activities" immediately when he logs in.

"I'm also very happy that when it improves the overall experience, someone is ready to go through the painful battle that removing and rearranging configuration options always is."

Well yes "when" this is what the novice end users complained to me one of the most about with regards to Gnome 2 as in the continues change in the Menus.

From a developers perspective it was cleaning/tidying up the menus which had the side effect that it caused the novice end user to "learn" again and again where things are which they did not like so much..

"I hope we can agree that GNOME 3 is not "targeted only at novice end users" and that not all experienced users want problems solved by "exposing various configuration options in various applications"."

Every indication in the design points otherwise...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 12:25 UTC (Thu) by deep64blue (guest, #52401) [Link]

>>>Unless it's related to eye sight issues, you shouldn't need to tweak a font. If you do, then something is wrong with the font and we need to fix the font.<<<

It's nonsense like this that is driving people away from GNOME. Why do you think you know better than me what font I prefer?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 18, 2011 1:25 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (3 responses)

" But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go"

Bullshit. I have a whole list of relatively simple changes to make, many of which solve the very same problems that the gnome-shell attempts to solve.

Every single advantage of gnome-shell could have been implemented on the old codebase. Remove the window list applet from the default config and give Metacity the overview mode behavior. Voila, you've basically got gnome-shell's main selling points for 1/200th the effort.

Problems with gnome-panels over-configurability? There are simple fixes for that. Logical fixes. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary fixes. Like, say, not shipping 50,000 applets with gnome-panel. Make the panel applet UI a private library just for the core desktop and experimental changes. Applets/launchers moving around in goofy-ass ways (my longest complaint with gnome... which oddly my suggested fix for got shot down years ago because it'd remove user-desired functionality...) can be fixed by simply getting rid of the wild-west applet placement and relying on simple ordering and start/end gravity. Important applets getting lost, or the user deleting his panels? Don't freaking let the user remove them. Want an OSX/Win7-like app launcher? Just write an applet for it, put it on the default panel, or put it on a sidebar panel like Unity/gnome-shell do. Again, all the benefits, fraction of the effort, and doesn't give the finger to people who aren't stupid enough to say things like "people crave change" when every _real_ UX engineer, therapist, or anthropologist will tell you that's the most idiotic thing anyone could possibly believe about how people work.

But no. Logical, intelligent, easy fixes to simple problems isn't fun enough. Not sexy enough. Doesn't give the new inexperienced cowboy UX engineers any glory.

Instead, let's rewrite the whole UX from scratch! It only took us 10 years to get the old one done-ish, so two years should be way more than enough to do an even bigger and more ambitious design! Yay!

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 23, 2011 0:55 UTC (Wed) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link] (2 responses)

> Applets/launchers moving around in goofy-ass ways (my longest complaint with gnome... which oddly my suggested fix for got shot down years ago because it'd remove user-desired functionality...) can be fixed by simply getting rid of the wild-west applet placement and relying on simple ordering and start/end gravity.

I haven't had that problem for the past 3 or 4 years or so - I think something like your patch must have gotten merged eventually; when I right click on a panel object now I get a menu that includes a "Lock to panel" checkbox (which can be unchecked to move or remove it, or let it float as a "wild-west" placement object.) The object order (for locked objects only, I suppose) is written in gconf.

> Important applets getting lost, or the user deleting his panels? Don't freaking let the user remove them.

Nooooooooooo! I tend to prefer a setup with a floating panel (not taking up the whole width of the screen) in either the top or bottom right corner, and no others. I use launchers and applets/notification icons/message icons/whatever-the-heck-they're-called-this-week on the panel liberally. One of my favorites at work is Remmina, as it has a pulldown menu for common RDP targets (we have a lot of Windows virtuals.)

What's an "important" panel object that shouldn't ever be removed? If you're using Blackbox or Enlightenment or FVWM as your WM then the Applications menu is completely superfluous, as it is redundant to functionality in the window manager. So somebody using GNOME as their DE but a replacement WM instead of Gnome-Shell would be stuck with a panel with an "important applet" that's vestigal, like an appendix.

This problem is already taken care of by the "Lock to panel" checkbox anyway. You have to deliberately unlock something to remove it. A bigger problem is disappearing panels - if you put the panel on your third screen, turn off your computer and then remove the USB monitor, you just lost a panel. Unless you're using a WM that doesn't respect the GNOME DE hints, you can't find it even with meta+tab. And I have no idea where the gconf entry for THAT is - last time that happened to me I ended up deleting my entire .config, .gconf, .gconfd, .gnome2, and .gnome2_private folders so it would reset my settings to default...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 23, 2011 15:13 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

There is value in having to jump through an extra hoop to remove your launcher menu and notification area applets (think causal user), but reacting by preventing users from moving or doing anything useful with panel contents as they have done is like burning down your entire house because you don't like a color of the walls in one room.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 0:15 UTC (Thu) by baldridgeec (guest, #55283) [Link]

Agreed, and I like the "Lock to panel" functionality that exists for that reason. I think a full lockdown is unwarranted.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:35 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> I realize that this is completely far afield from the usual desktop of a panels, applets, widgets and what not. But really, how much more work do you think we're going to be able to do on this particular interface, honestly? At this point, we've taken this interface as far as it will go, there is no where else to go. We can just change the internals a little, make new themes, new widgets. There is only so many ways you're going to be able to cut this. if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.

You present that:

a) GNOME must reinvent UI from scratch, or
b) in a few years, no one will use existing UIs

That is a false dichotomy. GNOME 3's design process seems to be operating under a fallacy.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 6, 2011 17:21 UTC (Wed) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link] (3 responses)

> if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.

You have to be kidding me.

You know some of us don't actually have a flat screen monitor yet. My screen size ratio is 3x4 at 1024x768 on a 17" monitor.

How about using less memory? or...
- faster, make it awesome on 10 year old hardware too

- fix using alt+tab while dragging (most of my windows are full screen, so dragging between apps means switching foreground windows at the same time)

- fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)

- fix all of the dialogs that are too tall to fit in smaller screens (think netbooks, or systems set to 640x480 for accessibility reasons or have larger fonts set.

- merge metacity and compiz and make sure 2d only works just fine (test it on an old Pentium III with an ati video card)

- fix the system monitor applet so it doesn't get stuck when a remote sshfs filesystem gets stuck

- change the list of cities in the weather applet so they are grouped by smaller areas like counties (in the US) instead of just state.

- convert mono based apps to java, scala, vala, etc. and remove any reference to mono in gnome. (the sun of freedom may be setting in the Java space, but it is better than .net, or use something that isn't JVM based.)

Gnome 3 should have been a branch and the 2.x mainline development should not have stopped until gnome 3 was ready to be merged.

Seriously, it's like gnome merged reiser4 or something...

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 6, 2011 19:11 UTC (Wed) by Darkmere (subscriber, #53695) [Link] (2 responses)

> You have to be kidding me.

You've got to be trolling me?

I won't do a point for point rebuttal, there's simply no need for it.

> * fix using alt+tab while dragging (most of my windows are full screen, so dragging between apps means switching foreground windows at the same time)

That's an interesting bug, should probably be fixed, yes. If you don't have a bug number already, tell me and I'll file it.

> * fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)

Already fixed. But why are you expecting things to shut down cleanly when you do not shut it down, cleanly?

> * fix all of the dialogs that are too tall to fit in smaller screens (think netbooks, or systems set to 640x480 for accessibility reasons or have larger fonts set. )

640x isn't even a usable resolution any more, most definitely not for "accessibility" reasons. However, 1024x600 resolutions are quite common on netbooks.

> * merge metacity and compiz

Why? Merging two active and distinctly separated codebases with different development policies is not a pretty option, just look at the mess it causes in kvm/qemu and similar developments. This is just you wanting others to do gruntjob for no good reason, so you can sit around and feel superior that you were such a good idea person.

> * make sure 2d only works just fine

Sure, it does, tested and working.

> * fix the system monitor applet so it doesn't get stuck when a remote sshfs filesystem gets stuck

Fixed. No more bonobo-applets, no more issues.

> * change the list of cities in the weather applet so they are grouped by smaller areas like counties (in the US) instead of just state.

That's depending on datasets import, most probably you'll have to file a bug with weather.com or weather underground.

Or perhaps just move, Seems like a reasonable solution, letting you do the work rather than you telling others what to do with bias and poor reason?

> * convert mono based apps to java, scala, vala, etc. and remove any reference to mono in gnome. (the sun of freedom may be setting in the Java space, but it is better than .net, or use something that isn't JVM based.)

Once again, going on about changing something from a negative bias. Second system syndrome and everything. In one side you _complain_ when they do it, claiming gnome-shell is horrible and bad and they should never have done it. And then you want them to do it on _other_ things, except there should be no visible change, and all the behaviours should be the same, just so you can feel smug and superior.

Rewriting code just in order to change the platform it's running on is never a good option. You introduce a lot of regressions and changes for marginal gains. Once again you want others to do a lot of work for no gain and no reason, other than your own self esteemed of being a managerial idea person.

> * Gnome 3 should have been a branch and the 2.x mainline development should not have stopped until gnome 3 was ready to be merged.

It was a branch, and it was merged when it was decided to be ready, then work continued on it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 6, 2011 19:56 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> > fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)
> Already fixed. But why are you expecting things to shut down cleanly when you do not shut it down, cleanly?

I've seen a similar issue with desktop icons/widgets in KDE4. The expectation isn't that processes shut down cleanly during a crash or when they're killed. The expectation is that updates to the saved configuration happen only when you specifically alter the layout, such that an unclean shutdown should generally have no effect on the saved layout. In particular, programs shouldn't wait for a clean shutdown to save configuration changes.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 8, 2011 19:29 UTC (Fri) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link]

> > > if we didn't try something new, the whole thing is going to be dead in a couple years.
> > You have to be kidding me.
> You've got to be trolling me?

The implication was that gnome 2.x was done, and it certainly was not.

> > * fix using alt+tab while dragging (most of my windows are full screen, so dragging between apps means switching foreground windows at the same time)
> That's an interesting bug, should probably be fixed, yes. If you don't have a bug number already, tell me and I'll file it.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135056

> > * fix all of the dialogs that are too tall to fit in smaller screens (think netbooks, or systems set to 640x480 for accessibility reasons or have larger fonts set. )
> 640x isn't even a usable resolution any more, most definitely not for "accessibility" reasons. However, 1024x600 resolutions are quite common on netbooks.

I'll let you tell that one to some of the co-workers I have had in the past. Good luck.

> > * fix the problems that happen when various parts of the the desktop crash or are kill -9ed. (why do my icons move around in the panel even when they are locked?)
> Already fixed. But why are you expecting things to shut down cleanly when you do not shut it down, cleanly?
If I add an item in a list, I do not expect that doing so will randomize the list if I don't close the program down safely.

> > * merge metacity and compiz
> Why? Merging two active and distinctly separated codebases with different development policies is not a pretty option, just look at the mess it causes in kvm/qemu and similar developments. This is just you wanting others to do gruntjob for no good reason, so you can sit around and feel superior that you were such a good idea person.

Because even though I have an ATI video card with good, working open source drivers, I end up switching back to metacity from compiz whenever I need to get work done. Compiz just doesn't have many of the usability enhancements that have been in metacity for a long time.

> > * Gnome 3 should have been a branch and the 2.x mainline development should not have stopped until gnome 3 was ready to be merged.
> It was a branch, and it was merged when it was decided to be ready, then work continued on it.

Gnome 2.x was 90% of the way there, now it is abandoned and any fixes will only be seen in enterprise distro patches (if any).

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 20:25 UTC (Tue) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link]

Here are some URIs that might be helpful with regard to your question about the usability research:

http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/DesignHistory

http://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-...