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

Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

Posted Nov 8, 2011 10:50 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576)
In reply to: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types by ebassi
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

>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?

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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.