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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:21 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by dcbw
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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

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

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

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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

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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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

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

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

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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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

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

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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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

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

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

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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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

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

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