Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types [LWN.net]

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 7, 2011 6:55 UTC (Mon) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Anyway the bottom line of the issue is that the UI that most users are familiar with and that works best is the one in Microsoft Windows 95.

Microsoft hasn't replaced it since Windows 95, and it has now been 15 years, so clearly it is quite good and anyway it is strongly familiar to everyone.

Inventing partially non-functional and exoteric interfaces providing no added value (such as GNOME Shell) just reduces your user base for no reason.

What GNOME should do is simply go back to GNOME Panel, and configure it to look by default like the Windows 7 taskbar, without any weird stuff.

That will work out of the box on all hardware, and does what people expect.

If anyone wants fancy 3D effects, they can enable Compiz, turn on wobbly windows, snow, water, fishes and gears in the desktop cube, and have fun.

to post comments

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:14 UTC (Mon) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (6 responses)

Anyway the bottom line of the issue is that the UI that most users are familiar with and that works best is the one in Microsoft Windows 95.

[citation needed]

Microsoft hasn't replaced it since Windows 95, and it has now been 15 years, so clearly it is quite good and anyway it is strongly familiar to everyone.

you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. zero. nada.

the UX of Windows has been constantly changing over the past 15 years. some basic tenets stayed, but they are continuously user-tested, tweaked, re-evaluated — to the point that Windows 8 now is effectively removing stuff like the Start button, or the desktop.

only somebody that has been cursorily using Windows every once in a while (or not used Windows at all, and just looked at the pretty pictures) could say something so far detached from reality.

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 7, 2011 19:41 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

To be fair, "classic" Windows themes are not that much removed from the Win9x era. Which I quite like, btw.

Up until Windows 7 the classic theme replicated Win9x behavior pretty accurately.

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 8, 2011 10:50 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

>the UX of Windows has been constantly changing over the past 15 years. some basic tenets stayed, but they are continuously user-tested, tweaked, re-evaluated

Or more accurately, there've been a couple of minor tweaks until Windows 7, which also (optionally) changed the behaviour of the taskbar.

>to the point that Windows 8 now is effectively removing stuff like the Start button, or the desktop.

Have you tried the Windows 8 developer preview? To describe it as 'unusable' would be too kind; I'd rather use KDE 4.0. But I have every expectation that by release they'll be a lot less 'ambitious' or it'll make Vista look like the warmest product reception ever.

>only somebody that has been cursorily using Windows every once in a while (or not used Windows at all, and just looked at the pretty pictures) could say something so far detached from reality.

Well maybe you should try using it then, rather than saying those things?

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 8, 2011 11:18 UTC (Tue) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (1 responses)

As far as I can tell from videos/screenshots, Windows 8 still has the same taskbar that Windows 7 has.

The only difference seems to be that the Start button brings up a fullscreen UI instead of a popup menu.

And indeed that UI seems quite dubious, but since it looks rather primitive and it's not a released product, I guess it's premature to draw any conclusion.

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 8, 2011 14:11 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

There's a lot more to it than that. Not only is the new Start screen absolutely awful, but large bits of important functionality have been made undiscoverable. I managed to figure out how to *log in* within a minute or two, but my gf and I spent about half an hour working out how to shut down.

The new control panel seems designed to make the computer as obnoxious to use as possible, etc...

When I tried using it I assumed that what I was looking at was a platform demo, for tesing out underlying operation, platform APIs, etc, with a crappy UI bolted on just as a demo of how to use some of the new APIs. Apparently though that's actually the direction they want to head in for the real thing.

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 8, 2011 10:58 UTC (Tue) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (1 responses)

Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4, 2000, XP, Vista and 7 share the same basic desktop UI paradigm, consisting in a bar at the bottom, containing from left to right:
1. A start button, which opens a menu allowing access to programs
2. Optionally, a launcher bar
3. A window list
4. Notification icons
5. A clock

Since Windows has the most market share, this is the UI that most people expect to be there, and that Microsoft hasn't apparently found a better alternative to in 15 years.

The only significant additions have been:
1. Windows Vista: added a search box in the start menu
2. Windows 7: the window list only shows a single icon for an application, and clicking it opens a menu with the title and window preview for each window of the application; also, you can "pin" applications, allowing quick launch functionality
3. Windows Vista/7 (not sure which): the user can ask to put some notification icons in a sub-menu

More in general, the 3D-requiring "Aero" window decoration/management style has been added in Windows Vista, which adds some candy, a 3D version of alt-tab and some mechanisms to snap Windows to the edge and put thumbnails in alt-tab and taskbar menus.

Note that, unlike GNOME, Microsoft allows users to turn off all of those changes, and in general in Windows 7 you can easily get almost the same look & feel that Windows 95 had.

And this all works fine without 3D acceleration (or with Aero turned off), and UI behavior (and even appearance) is not significantly affected by turning it off.

There is already free software to do all of this with minimal configuration, it just needs to be made the default, and whoever is in charge of GNOME needs to stop being crazy.

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 9, 2011 17:33 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Using Windows 7 task-bar tweaker I can get almost the same look and feel XP had, all but the over-shiny active taskbar buttons.
I agree it is a bit easier to have a sane (classic?) Windows desktop, but at the end it was a tweak that also exists and is getting improved for GNOME3.
At least there is a chance we keep having a classic DM, thanks to FOSS. For Windows their marketing has the ultimate power to dictate their view and may throw a bone to power users just to keep them thankful.