GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 13:38 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: GNOME 3.2 released by NRArnot
Parent article: GNOME 3.2 released

Wow.

I've been fairly outspoken on how I feel about the GNOME 3 changes; after using it for months I still have not really come to love it. But how does that lead to talk of "hating" developers who have given away a lot of their work for free? Hate is not appropriate here at all, and talking about hating free software developers is not the way to build a functional and productive (or fun) community.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 14:53 UTC (Fri) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] (22 responses)

OK, don't take it too seriously, "hate" in this context has an element of hyperbole.

But rest assured, I'm pretty darned annoyed with whoever took the decision that meant having Gnome 3 on a system or in a distribution meant that I couldn't use Gnome 2 any more. How would you like it if while you were away, someone redecorated YOUR home in THEIR choice of colours and materials without your permission, which YOU, er, hated, and were were told it was the height of the latest interior design fashion and no way could you go back to how it was before?

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 15:08 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (11 responses)

I am not sure how the analogy fits since GNOME 2.x isn't your home. In any case, if you want to use GNOME 2.x with Fedora 15, maybe this is of interest

http://k3rnel.net/tag/bluebubble/

It is rough round the edges but maybe a feasible solution for you. I personally recommend GNOME fallback mode or Xfce instead if GNOME Shell isn't the UI you like.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 1:46 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (10 responses)

I bet a number people here spend more time in their Gnome setups than they do at home, and you might even find some who, if forced, would choose their finely-tuned desktops over the grubby apartments they live in. :)

It's a good thing that Gnome endears itself so strongly to people! That's why it would be nice if major upgrades tried to be a little less... traumatic.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 12:47 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (9 responses)

well except that it is someone else's home that you got to stay in for free and enjoy and can continue to do so for as long as you want. upgrading will often result in a slightly improved home or (rarely) a renovated new home. If you don't want that, there are some resorts (enterprise releases) which allow you to stay in the same place for much longer.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 15:46 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (8 responses)

I guess the analogy still has legs... Lots of places have laws that prevent landlords from making changes, even when the renter is paying nothing. Municipalities recognize that society works better when there are a few things that people can rely upon.

I hope in the future the Gnome team tries to make life a little easier on their renters and not just assume that people who don't like it can always go live in resorts. It would have been nice to be able to plan the move a little better. :)

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 21:01 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (7 responses)

If you want to stay in the old home, you are free to. There is no laws preventing a landlord from offering a new home especially if the house has some rooms that functions just like the old one. The landlord has been considerate enough to do that. Some people want to move to the new home and have all the rooms like just like the old home and refuse to move over to the resort as well. These people are bound to be unhappy.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 2, 2011 14:52 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

It's true, but users are often forced to upgrade to a new home. You buy a new printer or webcam, you want to open a new document format, etc.

Distros aren't granular.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 2, 2011 14:57 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

Also, nobody expects all the rooms look the same. But complaining might be expected if they discover they're been given a studio apartment with cement walls and broken heating.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 2, 2011 16:00 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't see any broken homes. I see people complaining about the wall being painted black when they got the home for free. There are alternative homes with different arrangements. Go forth and use it! Xfce works for me just like GNOME 2.x does.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 3, 2011 23:30 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Broken homes (3.0 regressions) have been belabored on LWN, on Gnome bugzilla, and elsewhere. If you said that they are regrettable but necessary then I might disagree but I could hear where you're coming from.

But, you say that 3.0 only painted the walls black? A few cosmetic changes? You sure we're talking about the same release?

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 4, 2011 2:09 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes. We certainly are. Having gone through the 1.4 to 2.x transition before, I know and heard such talks about "regressions" before and we just have different perspectives. GNOME Shell is just a different UI to the same underlying components and very much a robust release compared to GNOME 2.0 or KDE 4.0. GNOME 3.2 has made some incremental progress and I am pretty sure when GNOME 4.0 gets released, people will be talking about how perfect 3.x was and how GNOME 4.x has destroyed all that. If you don't like the new UI, try out alternatives and there is a large amount of choices.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 4, 2011 8:17 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm talking about failing to work on hardware that previously ran Gnome 2. These seem like real regressions:

not working in VMs
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=263733
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=264530
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=264331
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6637295.html?sid=8d1...
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-May/...

Like you, I'm confident the driver issues will be worked out, the UI will be improved, and things will settle down again. All I'm saying is, judging by forum posts and mailing list messages, it feels like Gnome 3 did more than just paint the walls black!

(regretting speculating about someone liking Gnome more than his home... it seemed like an entertaining analogy at the time.)

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 4, 2011 11:32 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Sure. This is true of pretty much any major .0 release.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 15:56 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (9 responses)

Except of course, they had your permission. You made a choice to upgrade. ou made a calculated decision to upgrade to gnome3 instead of expending the manpower locally to maintain the entire gnome2 codebase for yourself.
You might not have liked coming to the realization that was the position you were in, and have always been in, but its your choice. Luckily the licensing is such that you have that choice. If this were a proprietary desktop product, you wouldn't have the choice to maintain the older codebase for yourself.

Products come and go. Sometimes if the product is very popular and there is a lot of money at stake, dead products come back. But most of the time they don't. I'm still mourning the lost of the Carnation Instant Breakfast bar formulation that was available 15 years ago which was replaced by a softer gummier product using the same name. I was able to stockpile about 2 years worth of those in a vein effort to ride it out and wait for the older formulation to be re-introduced as Classic Instant Breakfast bar..but it never happened.

-jef"I really really miss Gnome 1.4"spaleta

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 23:21 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] (8 responses)

Suppose Ford offered to upgrade your Mustang to have better engine performance at no cost to you. You drop it off at the dealership. When you return to pick it up, you discover that the steering wheel has been replaced by a joystick. They insist that a joystick is better and that many people like it. You say that you prefer a steering wheel, but they just say that you're in the minority, and that you "made a calculated decision to upgrade", so if you don't like it, it's your own fault.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 23:59 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (6 responses)

Are you saying there was something not communicated with regard to the extent of the change? You may not like the changes. And you might not have bothered to ask what was being changed. But if you were unaware that gnome 3.0 was a significant change in UI and not simply a performance boost... then yes its your own fault for not paying attention and not asking questions before making the change...absolutely...yes.

-jef

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 1:16 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

Strange analogy but I'll try to work with it... When the dealership gave the car back, only then did the customer discover that it no longer works on dual-screen setups, no longer works on the Thinkpad x120e, and focus follows mouse has been removed. What should have been a nice little upgrade turned into an 2-day ordeal where the customer had to sell the Mustang for scrap and switch to a Ford Focus XFCE.

Maybe Fedora dropped the ball for not warning: if you use dual screens and focus-follows-mouse then DO NOT UPGRADE!

> its your own fault for not paying attention and not asking questions before making the change

Really? What questions should I have asked before doing the F14->F15 upgrade? Isn't it reasonable to assume that laptops and dual-screen setups will continue to work? They always have in the past. (Well, I can think of one or two _minor_ exceptions like ALSA, but nothing like Fedora 15's break-the-world).

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 6:15 UTC (Sat) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I have no idea what you are talking about. Gnome Shell works on my dual screen setup in my office at work using my work laptop. Laptop into a dock with 2 external displays and the laptop screen off. Works like a charm, no regression from F14 and gnome2 on the same hardware. No weird graphics artifacts, overview animations are smooth enough that I don't notice. I haven in fact previously conversed in a previous lwn thread about how I like how the dual head works better than previous design.

Works on my older personal laptop which I'm writing on right now. I haven't tried the s-video output yet, so I can't comment on that functionality. External vga output works dual head with the lcd display.

Works on my wife's laptop, external vga output works dual head with lcd display.

Suspend/resume appears to work on all 3 laptops.

Bugs are bugs. Fedora does not make a zero regression promise, never has...and never will. There are bugs every single Fedora release that cause a hardware regression for someone, considering the complexity of the system you can't lay any particular hardware issues at the feet of Gnome 3 even if it appears to be the cause and the only thing affected.

-jef

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 15:29 UTC (Sat) by ean5533 (guest, #69480) [Link] (3 responses)

Add me to the list of people that had no trouble using dual monitors in GNOME Shell. Of the three things you listed, two of them are *bugs*, not intentional feature removals. So submit some bug reports.

As for focus-follows-mouse, I have no opinion on the matter because I don't use it. I don't know the usage statistics of FFM, but my instinct tells me that it's rarely a rarely used option (I have no data and will fully accept someone disproving me), which would explain why they've dropped support for it.

But regardless, the responsibility to research feature changes lies with you. The rest of the world is not obligated to enumerate every difference between their new default setup and your current one. It's not as though you were forced to do an upgrade -- you had as much time as you needed to read the numerous reviews and watch videos and read announcements. You could have even loaded F15 into a VM to test it out ahead of time.

Following this silly Mustang analogy: you willingly brought your car to the dealer for an upgrade which you knew nothing about. You didn't try taking an upgraded model for a test drive, nor did you even look at an example of what the upgraded model looked like. You just blindly did the upgrade. So why is this the dealer's fault?

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 16:07 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

> you willingly brought your car to the dealer for an upgrade which you knew nothing about. ... You just blindly did the upgrade. So why is this the dealer's fault?

Because I've bring my car in for this maintenance every six months without trouble. The dealer knew that this one was going to be brutal but didn't say anything ahead of time and had no plans for expected problems.

You can't seriously be suggesting end-users should bench-test every new release in a VM? What a waste of time that would be! The day distros demonstrate this much contempt for their users is the day I'll reluctantly buy a Mac.

According to the Gnome team, focus-follows-mouse wasn't dropped. The release notes mention fixes in 3.2.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 17:41 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

On re-reading, I realize my post is too one-sided. Just wanted to make it clear that I'm not saying that Gnome or Fedora have all blame here, just some of it. Next time, when presented by a huge upgrade like this, I hope they spend some time to make the transition go smoother. Flag days will always suck.

Fallback mode was good but seems to have suffered a lot of the same driver problems as Gnome 3.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 18:21 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

Fallback mode uses exactly the same driver paths as Gnome 2 did.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Oct 1, 2011 0:00 UTC (Sat) by ean5533 (guest, #69480) [Link]

And what if many people DO like the joystick? What if (gasp!) MOST people like the joystick better?

Let me stop you before you respond with "haven't you been reading the forums? No one likes GNOME 3.x". Two words: confirmation bias. Yes, if you search for examples of GNOME 3.x hatred, you can find plenty of examples of GNOME 3.x hatred. However, if you actually read the reviews and responses objectively then you will find praise as well -- nevermind that people are much more apt to complain than complement anyway.

Besides, if you don't like it then just go back to that Mustang you liked before. GNOME 2.x is out there for anyone to get their hands on. Yes, it isn't actually supported by the GNOME foundation anymore, but then again, neither is GNOME 1.x, yet somehow we manage to get through the day.

For the record, this is coming from someone who doesn't like GNOME 3.x at all.

GNOME 3.2 released

Posted Sep 30, 2011 16:40 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Add that in Fedora's case there are plenty other environments available...