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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 5:35 UTC (Wed) by zenaan (guest, #3778)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

"Disabling the second monitor makes things work, but with an obvious cost; one might describe it as a new form of the classic time/space tradeoff."

The best dry humour .. every time! Another lwn subscription extension coming up...

Thanks Jonathan, made my day!

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:19 UTC (Thu) by speedster1 (guest, #8143) [Link]

This jewel was my favorite from the article:

"Your editor, having been blissfully unaware of the scourge of unnecessary calculators just waiting for their opportunity to overwhelm his desktop, has not yet come to love the new way of doing things."

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted May 3, 2011 0:33 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I must (belatedly) say that, while the original line in the article amused me too, this is *exactly* what I observe every single time I see a non-technical user (co-worker or family, for instance) using GNOME or Windows. They don't understand, or want to understand, the difference between activating an already-existing application (window switcher) or launching a new application (panel launcher/quick launch icon or Applications/Start menu). The result is that their desktops *are* littered with dozens of old/empty/unused web browser windows, calculators, file manager windows, etc.

The Mac got this bit of UI exactly right back in 1988 when System 6 implemented multitasking. Activating an application (whether from the Finder [file manager], Apple menu, the Launcher [System 7-era application launcher], At Ease [dumbed down application launcher for very young or novice users], or the Dock etc.) brings the application to the front--irrespective of whether the application is already running.

When you are used to this way of working, going back to GNOME 2, KDE, Windows etc., where the sequence of user inputs necessary to bring an application to the foreground changes based on this arbitrary, technically mystifying and frankly uninteresting implementation detail of the underlying operating system feels so incredibly frustrating and backwards that I am amazed that it has taken 24 years for someone to get around to implementing task launching/switching the same way that Apple did.