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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 18, 2011 1:25 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (guest, #6227)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

" 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!

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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.