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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Apr 15, 2011 16:33 UTC (Fri) by pgoetz (guest, #4931)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

With regard to this discussion, I think Larry Wall got it right: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

The ideal desktop defaults to an easy to use interface which works for the masses but is configurable to allow power users and developers to work. Both gnome 3 and Unity appear to fail at the latter.

Perhaps it's time for a complete reset; a new window manager built from the ground up on Wayland using modern conveniences like dbus?

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Jun 14, 2011 1:56 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> With regard to this discussion, I think Larry Wall got it right: "Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

I agree. That's probably somewhere at the core of why I'm not such a personal fan of it. Granted things that I think should be "easy" is off from the general public (being able to work without touching a mouse should be "easy", but DEs as a whole tend to have issues there these days, hence my custom setup I've been running for 18 months now).

> The ideal desktop defaults to an easy to use interface which works for the masses but is configurable to allow power users and developers to work. Both gnome 3 and Unity appear to fail at the latter.

I agree. However, I just got my sister set up with a new laptop (Windows 7) and took about 5 hours getting it ready with Firefox, VLC, Pidgin, kdegames, Simon Tatham's Puzzles, LibreOffice (and a short explanation of the name change), making backup DVDs since they don't ship with them anymore, and some other system-level things. Setting up an old netbook of mine (was Fedora 14, but it got unplugged during an upgrade and paniced on boot) with Fedora 15. Took about 30 minutes (RPMFusion, acpi_osi=Linux kernel boot parameter for brightness, and updates) to prepare and 90 seconds to 1) show how to update packages and where to install new ones, 2) show her that the upper left corner is "magic" and you can type to search for things, and 3) hold "Alt" to turn "Suspend" to "Power off". After getting her wallpaper setup, she was ready to go. I will give GNOME 3 credit that it was the quickest setup for a machine I ever did for anyone in my family. Firefox Sync also makes her life a lot easier in that the machines are basically the same except one is much easier for going to class with, battery life, and the OS.

> Perhaps it's time for a complete reset; a new window manager built from the ground up on Wayland using modern conveniences like dbus?

Personally, I'd just like XMonad to be ported to Wayland which I'd like to help with given the time. I would then be able to survive crashes of my session (minus the session-preserving applications themselves) all the way down to the machine turning off. Instances of applications would also be able to be transported to any machine given network access (opening tmux to access already open shells and Wayland for open non-curses applications). I also run without a session bus, so dbus would be adding to my setup :) .