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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 14:57 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by psankar
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

It is not the intention that the top panel will ever be movable, officially, though it is conceivable that a third-party JS extension could change it. The top panel is intended as a safe harbor: it's always there looking exactly like its supposed to look and nothing can install applets in to it that do god-knows-what (that's what the message tray is for). The white-list of top panel functions is: overview access, application-level functions like ("Quit" or "Open a File"), the clock, and *hardware* applets (a11y, sound, network, bluetooth, power, always in that order) and the user menu for setting IM status and session-specific tasks (logout, settings).

Workspaces are *only* vertical. There is no horizontal movement and though there are some extensions in the works that do modify this it, it is not the intention that there will ever be permanent workspaces. We do realize that this is a workflow change for some people, such as yourself, but this does a couple of things: it makes the mental model of a workspace discoverable via the animation associated with the act of creation and it emphasizes task-oriented work.

For example, last week I had a number of conflicting tasks on-going and a lot of things distracting me with this GNOME 3 launch coming up. To complete a paper I was working on, I moved all the related PDF's, websites and LibreOffice windows to a new workspace and Shell kept things from distracting me while I was completing the task. By setting my status to "Away" in the user menu, this told Shell to suppress all IM, IRC, Updates and jhbuild notifications and allowed me to focus on my work. When I took a break, I flipped back to my main workspace and all the pending "jclinton: ping" notifications were waiting for me in the Shell Message Tray.

When I go back to Fallback Mode now, I feel like I've lost something.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:11 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (13 responses)

it is not the intention that there will ever be permanent workspaces

FWIW, a number of older window managers (including the venerable fvwm2) have much the same underlying implementation. I have never seen a single user of these window managers (who use workspaces at all) who does not immediately congeal into a standard layout of workspaces and move from it only when forced: and I've seen a lot of users of fvwm.

I've been using the same workspace layout for more than eight years now, and its change from the layout I started with seventeen years ago is not great. There are 'spare' workspaces on it, but a core set of applications remain on the same workspaces forever. This is wired into my fingers and wired into my wm hotkeys: I can get to any of them, and navigate between them, in very nearly no time at all, without conscious thought.

It seems to me that you're destroying this working pattern. This if nothing else would render GNOME 3 forever unusable for me, no matter what other nifty features it gained. From experience, I can relearn *typing* more easily than I can relearn this.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:19 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (9 responses)

As a happy fvwm2 user, I submit that there will *never* be anything that makes you happy except it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:48 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Oh no, fvwm2 has big problems. I use it mostly out of inertia. (The biggest of its problems are an absence of proper programmability and a deep-seated architectural inability to handle double-buffering, which rules out compositing forever. Compositing bling may be pointless but a little subtle bling -- not giant desktop cubes, just things like subtle glows around active window edges and the like -- *does* make the desktop look prettier and slightly easier to use.)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 17:49 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

btw, I note that you totally ignored the actual point I was making, which was not 'I am a total stick-in-the-mud' but rather 'constant workspaces wire themselves into your fingers and mind, promote the formation of unconscious habits, and thus improve working speed'.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 13:10 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433) [Link] (2 responses)

I note that you totally ignored the actual point I was making

Welcome to the wonderful world of GNOME. One of the reasons I still use fvwm, despite its faults, is that GNOME and other similar desktop projects have no desire to cater to my needs, and whenever I've asked how to do something I've been told that I'm wrong to want it. By all means provide defaults that you think will work for the majority of users. But it's my computer, and I want it to work the way I want it to work, not the way some desktop developer thinks I should want it to work. Fvwm lets me do that. People are not the same, no matter how much some might wish it so. The GNOME project in particular is unwilling to acknowledge that point. They're wrong. But they've made it clear they have no intention of changing their viewpoint.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 15:59 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (1 responses)

You are wrong to demand *your* needs from others. The 'developer' tries to cater to as many as possible, i doubt fvwm does that. Remember, you are not more important than anyone else, and free software is not about solving *your* needs.

But you are free to *create on your own* whatever extension you need.
With metacity there was devilspie, the shell should be much easier to extend.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 7:55 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> You are wrong to demand *your* needs from others. The 'developer' tries to cater to as many as possible, i doubt fvwm does that. Remember, you are not more important than anyone else, and free software is not about solving *your* needs.

You're wrong about GNOME developers: they are not trying to cater to as many as possible--this whole article is about that very point.

You're ignoring the fact that GNOME devs (and "designers") are claiming to be making software for other people to use--people besides said devs and "designers." They *want marketshare*, yet they stubbornly refuse to cater to the voiced needs of the market.

They aren't catering to as many as possible--they are catering to an imagined user, one who's nearly computer-illiterate, and is unable to learn or adapt, too. Self-proclaimed "designers" are "designing" based on "research" and ignoring in-their-face, real-world, practical problems brought to their attention by their *actual* audience.

They are being hypocrites: they claim to be making software for others, yet they're actually just pleasing themselves.

And that's fine: we're not paying them--they should scratch their own itches if that's what they want to do.

The problem is that they are either dishonest or delusional. They should just admit that they are going to do what *they* want to do, so that other people can stop wasting their time trying to convince them that GNOME 3 isn't what anyone besides GNOME devs and "designers" want.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:56 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (3 responses)

So, have you anything else to say about his *actual* complaint and insight? Which is not fvwm-related whatsoever.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:13 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (2 responses)

You assume it will never happen, assmuning we are talking about fixed workspace for app X. There is a real usability case for keeping the same workspaces open across sessions.

Also, i'm sure a simple extension/plugin can be made to force certain apps opening on certain workspaces. Just because it won't be enabled or distributed by default, doesn't mean it's not appreciated.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:30 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, but I don't get the gist of your message. Might be because I'm not a native English speaker.

Do you agree with nix that the ability to have fixed static workspace arrangements is important, or do you disagree?
(FTR, I agree. That's exactly my MO, too.)

Or do you agree with the GNOME3 developers that workspaces should be dynamic all the time, only created as needed? (At least that seems to be their assumption that's reported here. That's why I asked Jason if he could please stop with his cheap fvwm shots, actually react to nix's argument, and confirm or deny that this reported viewpoint is true or not.)

Actually, I don't use GNOME. But I try to keep educated in the design decisions of the various Linux desktop environments. And this is an important design decision, IMHO.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 18, 2011 0:54 UTC (Fri) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link]

I'm no native English speaker either :).

I think i missed what you meant with fixed workspaces. If it's app X in workspace Y at all times, i'm sure an extension is doable.

I was agreeing that the workspace layout should be remembered across sessions (login/logout, boot etc.). That's fixed enough for me..

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 4:49 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (2 responses)

I have a 4x2 workspace layout, and I usually fly from one workspace to another by zipping my mouse to the edge, wait a half second and then pop to the next workspace. This has long been deprecated by the gnome folks, which I've been using sawfish to take over. Lately, since sawfish is now pretty much unmaintained, I've been using xfwm4.

Gnome3 scares the crap out of me. My box doesn't support 3D (I build my boxes, and always buy the cheapest video card I can find). It sounds like I can't even use most of the new features that come with it.

I'll have to remember to press "HOLD" in aptitude on gnome (like I did for grub) and stick it out for as long as possible. By the time I'm forced to go to gnome3, I think I may be switching to KDE.

As I believe Linus once said: You make a desktop environment made for idiots, only idiots will use it.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:07 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

> Lately, since sawfish is now pretty much unmaintained, I've been using xfwm4.

There's a new release, 1.8.0, but I haven't tried it yet. Recent versions in the Unbuntu repository have been broken, so I've been using something quite old. There's something about writing themes in lisp that I can't seem to give up. :)

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 8:22 UTC (Sat) by cas (guest, #52554) [Link]

This has long been deprecated by the gnome folks, which I've been using sawfish to take over. Lately, since sawfish is now pretty much unmaintained, I've been using xfwm4.

I stuck with sawfish for years but ended up switching to openbox (after briefly trying metacity) for the same reason.

i'm pretty happy with it. can't say i really miss anything from sawfish. OB gives me a no-fuss WM without forcing animation and other annoying & distracting bling on me.

i'm going to have to look for a decent replacement for gnome-panel sometime soon. i expect it will be "deprecated" to force people into gnome's Glorious Vision whether they like it or not. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found one that is an adequate replacement.

My box doesn't support 3D (I build my boxes, and always buy the cheapest video card I can find).

even the cheapest video cards available these days can do 3d acceleration. and that's been true for years (but until fairly recently only if you're willing to install proprietary drivers for them)

not that that is an excuse to force 3d crap in your WM on you if you don't want it.

and that, i believe, is the reason why Gnome's changes generate so much hostility - they come up with what is, to them, an amazing idea and expend all of their development effort on it. but instead of making it available as an option to allow people to try it and gradually get used to it (or decide "it's not for me, i'll stick with what i like") they force it on everyone...and not even as the default option, but as the ONLY option

personally, i'd rather they concentrated on fixing existing bugs than go chasing shiny new things all the time, but volunteers have the right to work on what they want to.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:50 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (guest, #56959) [Link] (15 responses)

> It is not the intention that the top panel will ever be movable, officially, though it is conceivable that a third-party JS extension could change it. The top panel is intended as a safe harbor: it's always there looking exactly like its supposed to look and nothing can install applets in to it that do god-knows-what (that's what the message tray is for).

I run GNOME 2.x on a netbook, and when I moved the top panel to the left edge of the screen, the vertical space for each web page increased by at least 10 percent. Since vertical space is at a greater premium than horizontal space, shouldn't any safe harbor be on the left or right sides of the screen?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:55 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (14 responses)

Three points:

1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.
2. 90 deg. rotated text is not legible so it's likely never going to be an out-of-the box option though you may be able to use an extension to get some of what you want.
3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:17 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

> Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.

Useful content: yes; large content: no.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 18:57 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (guest, #56959) [Link]

> > Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.
> Useful content: yes; large content: no.

Another completely ridiculous statement.

foom didn't say anything about large content. Their comment was that users with a small screen may "want to use the whole thing."

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 18:54 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (guest, #56959) [Link] (1 responses)

> Three points:
> 1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.

I don't have a bottom panel. As I explained in my earlier comment, I only have a panel on the left side of the screen. I don't have a panel on the top or the bottom. Adding an unmovable top panel removes vertical space--a huge amount of space on a netbook screen.

> 2. 90 deg. rotated text is not legible so it's likely never going to be an out-of-the box option though you may be able to use an extension to get some of what you want.

The main menu pops out to the right, so there is almost no rotated text. But my main problem is the removal of useful out-of-the-box options for purely dogmatic reasons.

> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

In GNOME 2.x, I was able to easily configure the panel on the left, and I have made no complaints about the screen real-estate of the device. GNOME 2.x is perfectly usable (with customization) on a netbook. Why take a step backwards in GNOME 3.x? And please don't tell me I have to buy new hardware when I upgrade.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 13:12 UTC (Sat) by gjmarter (guest, #5777) [Link]

>> Three points:
>> 1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.

> I don't have a bottom panel. As I explained in my earlier comment, I only
> have a panel on the left side of the screen. I don't have a panel on the
> top or the bottom. Adding an unmovable top panel removes vertical space--a
> huge amount of space on a netbook screen.

Seconded, since the decline of full-height monitors I can't understand why we keep forcing the dead screen space to be along the top (or bottom). Most users have more width than height.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 21, 2011 12:03 UTC (Mon) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (5 responses)

> 90 deg. rotated text is not legible

没
问
题

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:03 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (4 responses)

Han characters don't rotate when you go between traditional and Westernized layouts.
The Latin alphabet is not well designed for reading in traditional East Asian text layout.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 20:59 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (2 responses)

Whoosh!

pjm's comment went completely over your head. Your statements are true, but they are completely irrelevant to both pjm's point and the point to which he was responding.

The original comment from me@jasonclinton.com was "90 deg. rotated text is not legible." This statement is false to the point of absurdity, unless you have some hopelessly myopic and restrictive definition of text along the lines of "text = latin text". pjm was pointing out the obvious falsehood: East Asian languages use vertical text by default, and under no reasonable interpretation is such text "not legible".

It is true that Han characters don't rotate, but how is this at all relevant to the legibility of vertically oriented text? It isn't.

Similarly, the latin alphabet is not well designed for vertical text, but this is not relevant to any point that was being made in pjm's comment.

Vertical text

Posted Mar 24, 2011 21:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, vertical Latin text works just fine for the GNOME 2 panel. I can read it without twisting my neck too badly (and without lifting the laptop from the table). But even that matters little: what's there to read on the panel? The Applications/Places/System pulldowns are pretty clear no matter what their orientation is, I really don't have to sound them out every time.

Vertical text

Posted Mar 25, 2011 15:05 UTC (Fri) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]

For the GNOME 2 panel (haven't yet cut myself on the GNOME 3 bleeding edge), the date and time display becomes rotated and unreadable on vertical panels (and, sadly, even in Chinese, GNOME rotates the characters, which is not the right behavior). Conversely, the window titles in the task list are not rotated and thus are never capable of being displayed on a vertical panel unless you configure your panel to be inordinately wide. These are the main items of text that I would like to be able to read on vertical panels.

giving more vertical space in an interface

Posted Mar 25, 2011 4:56 UTC (Fri) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link]

I'm sorry if my comment was interpreted as saying look how wrong you are; that wasn't my intent.

I'm excited that there are common languages that are legible in only a small amount of horizontal space, because it does allow putting some interface elements at the side of the screen or of a window when native English-speaking interface designers wouldn't usually think of that option. Icons are one tool that can help in allowing what might be a horizontal interface element (titles of windows/tabs/..., buttons, menus) to fit in a vertical space; using vertical text is another, and it's important to remember that vertically-oriented text (whether with glyph rotation or not) can work well in some languages better than in english. I thought a "one-line" response would make an impression that might inspire interface designers reading the thread, and might serve to remind them of this possibility for their creations.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:01 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

Yet another example of GNOME's "You're wrong for wanting that" attitude towards its actual userbase. Said userbase will, of course, soon shrink rapidly due to the aforementioned attitude.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:22 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

So... the users are wrong. The computers are wrong. What else will you declare unacceptable?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 25, 2011 14:00 UTC (Fri) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]

1) Good. More free space as a default and fewer panels is better.

2) Who's requesting 90-degree rotated text? I'm hearing requests to make the top-panel moveable to the left or right side of the screen.

3) This is a straw-man argument. Plenty of netbooks are available w/ a 1366x768 resolution or at least 1024x600 resolution. The former is equal to most of those 'equal cost laptops' you mention.

This mindset is also ignoring a basic physical fact:

LCD screens are becoming wider and shorter, to the point even $3k+ laptops aren't physically available except with 16:9 or in increasingly rare cases 16:10 screens.

I'd rather work in an 800x600 box than a 1024x560 box. Maximizing the smallest available dimension seems a more sane idea to me, even if it costs more overall pixel count.

The fate of non-desktop-environment applications

Posted Mar 20, 2011 23:25 UTC (Sun) by Creideiki (subscriber, #38747) [Link] (1 responses)

> By setting my status to "Away" in the user menu, this told Shell to suppress all IM, IRC, Updates and jhbuild notifications and allowed me to focus on my work.

I've seen claims in the same ballpark made before, and they always make me confused. Do people actually restrict their applications to whatever is in their current desktop environment? Otherwise, I don't understand how this could possibly work, and without working perfectly, I believe such a feature would only create confusion and irritation ("Why am I still getting messages in this one application when I told the system I didn't want to be disturbed?").

Just to provide a concrete example, I run a KDE4 desktop, with KMail (KDE) for e-mail, Psi (Qt, but not KDE) for IM, Opera (their own toolkit) as my browser and RSS reader, GnuCash (GTK+, not sure if it integrates with GNOME) for accounting, Weechat (ncurses in screen in a Konsole terminal) for IRC, Emacs with Gnus (GTK+ or terminal) for usenet news and, for what I believe is the largest part of my communications load, Emacs with LysKOM (again, GTK+ or terminal, and no, you're not expected to have heard of LysKOM). And suppressing incoming messages is just one tiny part of the problem: What's the point of adding Nepomuk metadata to my documents if Emacs in LaTeX mode can't use it? Why have Akonadi store some PIM data, when it can't see the equally important data in RSS or usenet feeds?

It's taken a number of years of testing lots of alternatives to come up with this mix of applications, and while I'm always looking for better options, this seems to be the current local optimum for me. But do "normal" people stick with whatever KDE or GNOME gives them? Do desktop environment developers therefore ignore people like me?

The fate of non-desktop-environment applications

Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:04 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> Do desktop environment developers therefore ignore people like me?

I think you know the answer to this question. :) But some DE's ignore you more than others...