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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:36 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I like your analysis, thanks Jon. After ten years of die-hard GNOME fandom, this latest push has seen me finally decide to ditch GNOME as a desktop entirely. It's sad because I *want* to like it, but it's so far from what I want in terms of design and usability, and I've had all of the same frustrations in my own experience, that the only option to stick with GNOME would be to fork off 2.x and/or maintain some horrible hacked up build for myself. Eventually, I expect by GNOME 3.4, they will re-add all of the options, fix the lack of a panel, re-add applets, and generally head back to where GNOME 2.x is today, but that's too far away for my own uses.

I've switched to Xfce on rawhide. I'm holding out on GNOME 2.x elsewhere, but it's only a matter of time before I'm compelled to switch there, too. I *hope* this cost (losing long-time users like myself) is worth it and they get all the new shiny users they think they will get. I personally disagree and I think it won't work out like that, but I may well be wrong. I hope I am wrong because I still love many of the GNOME applications, and I think overall these guys are trying their best. But man, the new design is something I just can't use.

Jon.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 18:44 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (11 responses)

Here's my initial Xfce setup:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonmasters/5524329179/

I created panels and populated them to look exactly like the old GNOME 2.x desktop. I've since switched the icons to the "gnome" ones to fix a problem pointed out in the Xfce SIG, but it looks similar. It's exactly like GNOME 2.x, except things like automounting and file manager support need a little tweaking to get going - seems I'm going to waste some weekends getting back to where I have been, but it's *very* usable :)

Jon.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:41 UTC (Wed) by zzxtty (guest, #45175) [Link] (10 responses)

I think I'll be heading in the same direction. My desktop generally consists of 8 workspaces with 1x Evolution, 1x Firefox, and a large number of terminals. I was gobsmacked when I saw the videos depicting the gnome3 workflow. I have no idea who this new version is aimed at but it certainly isn't me. I should imagine the technically illiterate will be completely freaked out by it.

It reminds me of when I was a teenager with an Amiga, I'd get cover disks with magazines loaded with all sorts of utilities to "optimise" the workbench. I'd spend a few hours installing them, and would have lots of flashy eye candy, I'd then have to remove them all to make the computer useable again.

At least we have choice, I may even give KDE another go, although it always strikes me as complete overkill for my needs. Also the instance of sticking a "k" in every program name drives me up the wall, I don't know why, but it does!

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:22 UTC (Wed) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link] (3 responses)

Also the instance of sticking a "k" in every program name drives me up the wall, I don't know why, but it does!

Out of interest, does it bother you more or less than sticking a "g" in every program name? :-)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 15:46 UTC (Wed) by zzxtty (guest, #45175) [Link] (2 responses)

Good question, not so much. I've always used non-gnome programs, e.g. firefox, openoffice, evolution, no "G". When using KDE in the past it defaulted to koffice, kmail, konquere (?).

A lot of the gnome programmes start gnome-, if you're looking for something you can type "gnome-" and hit tab a couple of times and get a list of programs, this doenst work for programs with a K stuck halfway through them, and some (but not all) of the gnome program names make sense.

I remember some years ago trying kde, one look at the menus had me running for the hills. Rather than having descriptive program names (e.g. "Calculator") it had a random caKophony of words, I had no idea what anything was, it didnt help that there appeared to be 6 different music players/editors/image viewers/etc. I can't remember which distribution it was, nor how long ago, I'm sure things have changed by now.

When you start using one environment you become use to its idiosyncrasies, this makes you less forgiving when you try another.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:45 UTC (Thu) by kragilkragil (guest, #72832) [Link] (1 responses)

In the future it will be Calligra, Kmail and Rekonq.
And you could maybe replace Kmail with Lionmail.

So KDEs future has a lot less Ks in it, although horrible names like KMyMoney will remain.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 12:13 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

If KMyMoney really is a problem, just because of the name, there's always Skrooge... Which I find a pretty cool name, even if it also contains a 'k'... By the way, KDE has defaulted to showing the short description and not the name of the application in the start menu for about ten years now.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 18, 2011 12:51 UTC (Fri) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (5 responses)

> At least we have choice, I may even give KDE another go, although it always strikes me as complete overkill for my needs.

I think you should. The KDE 4.4.5 environment I run, through Debian Unstable (aptosid actually), is a lean-mean-fighting-machine, and looking pretty too. Rock solid, and boots into a desktop using 110 MB RAM, and no unnecessary cycles. Of course I set it up to only run the things _I_ want to run, the _way_ I want to run them, and I can do that because it's utterly _configurable_.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 20, 2011 8:13 UTC (Sun) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link] (4 responses)

Do you know what configuring you did to make your KDE fit in 110 MB RAM? (For some reason my KDE after cold boot uses 1 GB, vs. GNOME which uses about 300 MB, so I've stuck with GNOME.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 27, 2011 14:42 UTC (Sun) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link] (3 responses)

Do you know what configuring you did to make your KDE fit in 110 MB RAM? (For some reason my KDE after cold boot uses 1 GB, vs. GNOME which uses about 300 MB, so I've stuck with GNOME.)

(sorry for the late reply)

As you would probably suspect the answer is "turn off things you don't need". Of course the trick is to learn what you don't need.

So I'll show what it looks like on my system, which is an older desktop pc using wired networking. Things might need to look different on your machine.

I actually checked again, and it turns out that memory usage right after startup is 98 MB RAM, which includes some services that for you might be "un-needed", such as ntp, cups and a mailer etc.

The running processes after full KDE startup and login (including the shell running pstree and free):

pstree:

init-+-acpid
     |-console-kit-dae---64*[{console-kit-da}]
     |-cron
     |-cupsd
     |-2*[dbus-daemon]
     |-dbus-launch
     |-dhclient
     |-dirmngr
     |-6*[getty]
     |-gpm
     |-hald-+-hald-runner-+-hald-addon-acpi
     |      |             |-hald-addon-cpuf
     |      |             |-hald-addon-inpu
     |      |             `-3*[hald-addon-stor]
     |      `-{hald}
     |-irqbalance
     |-kaccess
     |-kded4
     |-kdeinit4-+-2*[kio_trash]
     |          |-klauncher
     |          `-ksmserver-+-kwin
     |                      `-{ksmserver}
     |-kdm-+-Xorg
     |     `-kdm---startkde-+-kwrapper4
     |                      `-ssh-agent
     |-kglobalaccel
     |-kmix
     |-knotify4
     |-konsole-+-bash---pstree
     |         `-{konsole}
     |-krunner---{krunner}
     |-ntpd
     |-nullmailer-send
     |-plasma-desktop---{plasma-desktop}
     |-polkitd---{polkitd}
     |-rsyslogd---3*[{rsyslogd}]
     |-start_kdeinit
     `-udevd---2*[udevd]

And the memory usage:

free -m:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1008        470        537          0        192        178
-/+ buffers/cache:         98        909
Swap:         1906          0       1906

So here's what I did to configure my system like this, mostly from memory. Again, your needs might be different from mine:

Configure what services run in my default runlevel with 'rcconf'
Ran 'kwriteconfig file kres-migratorrc group Migration key Enabled type bool false' (once) to stop Nepomuk's migration business on every login. (I believe).
Turn off un-needed taskbar applets in KDE.
Run the 'System Settings' applet/program in KDE and performed the following:
In network settings -> network monitor unchecked "Start Knemo...."
In autostart uncheck the services not needed to autostart.
In desktop search uncheck nepomuk and strigi.
In service manager uncheck all the startup services not needed. The ones I have unchecked in my system are: KDE write daemon and PowerDevil.

Hope you find it useful.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 27, 2011 23:00 UTC (Sun) by idupree (guest, #71169) [Link]

Thanks! I think the most immediately helpful information to me is: your bulleted list of places to run around to and possibly disable things. - makes it possible to experiment.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 4, 2011 23:33 UTC (Mon) by fn77 (guest, #74068) [Link] (1 responses)

Im a lurker 99% of time, but now i subscribed (for free) just to thank you for those hints.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 5, 2011 4:27 UTC (Tue) by lab (guest, #51153) [Link]

That's the spirit! It's worth it, I guarantee, and you'll be supporting a good thing. Like many other people in here, LWN is the only online magazine I would actually pay for, simply because it's just that much better than everything else out there. The only other possible exception might be Linux Journal. Happy reading every Thursday :-)

Gnome 2.x fork

Posted Mar 18, 2011 22:48 UTC (Fri) by mstefani (guest, #31644) [Link] (2 responses)

There does seem to be a Gnome 2.x fork at http://www.exde.org/ .
The vision statement says that it will be boring aka fix bugs, be a good tool and stay out of the way of the user. Sounds promising :)
How viable it will be it remains to be seen.

Gnome 2.x fork

Posted Mar 19, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

One can only hope this works out! This would be exactly what enterprise computing users like myself need.

Jon.

Gnome 2.x fork

Posted Apr 18, 2011 20:05 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

... and it's gone away.