GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 13:29 UTC (Fri) by aryonoco (guest, #55563)
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

And here I am, thinking about what laptop to buy next, and thinking maybe I should try OS X, but then I LOVE Gnome Shell/Gnome 3 so much that the mere thought of using something else makes me really unhappy.

Reading LWN, it feels like the Gnome devs have designed Gnome 3 just for 'me'. It's so bizarre to feel that such a huge project has went out of its way to design my perfect desktop UI, when in fact I was a diehard KDE user for a long time...

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GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 13:38 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (15 responses)

Yeah, exactly. Gnome3 meshes very well with my workflow.

Aside from the occasional bug, it has been made of epic win. And that was before the extension list started to grow.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:00 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (14 responses)

It may be interesting if you could elaborate a bit more regarding what's your workflow and how gnome shell helps.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 15:54 UTC (Fri) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link] (12 responses)

Software development. I used to use workspaces (web on one, huge terminal + tabs on another, irc on another) but I just don't anymore. Alt+Tab between mostly full-screen windows is basically the same thing I was using workspaces for. And because I use tabs in my terminal, I don't need 30 terminal windows tiled on my desktop, plus my laptop screen is 1280x800 so it's pretty hard to have more than 4 tiles at any time if I did use tiles. The overview works well to find something visually. Instead of moving the mouse to a panel to click firefox/evolution/terminal/etc I now just Win + name the program and boom it's there. I find myself doing this all the time on older distros (RHEL) and even Windows sometimes and then wondering WTF the program didn't start.

Granted, I'm not doing much that requires me to view two windows at the same time and transcribe data between them, which is usually what people who use focus-follows-mouse and tiled windows tell me they do. Now that GNOME 3 is more keyboard friendly people will just find something else to complain about.

People. Will. Always. Complain. No matter what you do. That's just life.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 16:18 UTC (Fri) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

Actually there are programs that you could place tabs in vertical or horizontal split if you want to compare/copy-paste.
I tried the tab-instead-of-app paradigm, the biggest problem for me was the lack of consistency in different applications for new-tab, and tab navigation, and as soon as I open vim in a terminal it could get even more confusing. The other problem is that if some tab misbehaves I had to close all of them, which made me mad.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 18:30 UTC (Fri) by luto (subscriber, #39314) [Link] (10 responses)

"plus my laptop screen is 1280x800 so it's pretty hard to have more than 4 tiles at any time if I did use tiles"

This is my main objection to GNOME 3. I really like GNOME 3 on my laptop. It's a major step backwards on my multimonitor desktop. I think MS is making exactly the same mistake with Windows 8. On small devices, optimizing use of single applications (whether those applications be tabbed or otherwise) makes sense -- keeping lots of terminals and such around on a little screen doesn't work very well.

Sadly, having the GNOME 3 big-screen experience be different from the small-screen experience would be "inconsistent". Sigh.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 20:03 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (9 responses)

I actually use GNOME on a 1920x1200 monitor. I'd like to buy a bigger monitor, but didn't find anything I like yet. Plus my GPU is pretty old.

I never ever got used to multiple monitors. I tried during GNOME 2, but quickly removed the extra monitor. Also at work it is easy to request an additional monitor.. I just don't like it.

Quite interesting to read about the different experiences. Would be nice to analyse the way you work :)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 20:21 UTC (Fri) by luto (subscriber, #39314) [Link]

I'm not quite sure how to be analyzed.

At work, I tend to have a web browser opened (usually Firefox, with a handful of tabs), two or three gnome-terminals (some of which are tabbed), and four or so emacs windows. I tend to move the windows around all the time. I currently have two 1680x1050 monitors, but I'll probably move to one 2560x1600 (or 1400 or however they come these days) and one smaller one off to the side eventually. I've never used multiple desktops effectively -- I'm usually working roughly on one task at a time, but that task involves looking back and forth between reference code (in emacs), reference material (in Firefox or maybe evince), and terminal output.

This is a lot of windows. I am very unproductive without some kind of efficient navigation. I have decent short-term spatial memory, so finding things on a dock (currently Cinnamon's, but I'm not really partial) is efficient; using fancy overviews is not because windows move around and, zoomed out, they all look more or less the same. (I can imagine this being reversed if I edited graphics or something like that.)

The Alt-Tab to change applications feature is counter-productive for me. My emacs windows are <i>not</i> all related to one task -- I'm much more likely to have an emacs window logically paired with a terminal.

Compositing is slow. This may not be Gnome's fault -- I have a low-bandwidth Radeon, and the drivers are not up to the i915 standard.

The top bar doesn't help me. I want a clock*, Pidgin (so IMs don't pop up but instead get my attention when my eyes wander up there), and a list of running programs. That's it. A name telling me what program has focus does nothing for me. Similarly, the notifications that hang out invisibly on the bottom of the screen are useless, because I can't see them. Programs like Pidgin and Remmina are completely usable on other WMs; I don't see why gnome-shell should make them suck.

On my laptop, this is all different. I'd still like a dock of some sort, but screen real estate is at a premium, and there simply isn't space for the mess of windows I use. gnome-shell does pretty well in that environment. (With caveats -- the focus on pretty black system-modal dialog boxes is bad -- the first time you try to connect to a wireless network and need to look up the password in your handy list of passwords, you'll curse at it, because you can't actually get to your list of passwords. The fact that the text entry widget doesn't really work right is a bug, not a mis-design, but fixing the bug wouldn't actually make the dialog box as a whole work better.)

P.S. I wholeheartedly support the elimination of fallback mode. If people want a different WM, they should use a different WM.

* Can someone please give me a clock that doesn't show seconds on the dock / top-bar but that *does* show seconds when I click it for a full calendar? This has always seemed like the Obviously Correct (tm) way to do it, but nothing works like that. (Again, not a GNOME 3 regression; I don't think I've seen any built-in clock get this right.)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 0:12 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (7 responses)

Hm. What's changed? When I pointed out, long ago, that GNOME 3 didn't work with my workflow, and described it in some detail, you told me to bugger off and said you weren't interested in any workflow that wasn't one that suited GNOME. Perhaps the haemorrhaging of the userbase is having an effect after all...

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 3:38 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

You seem to have issues with me or something? I don't really care for your psycho analysis about me. Furthermore, "bugger off"? Wtf?

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 6:39 UTC (Sat) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Bugger off is quite a common phrase in the UK and Australia. It means to go away.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 15:06 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (4 responses)

I wonder if it's RHEL 7 looming on the horizon that might have changed things? Has RedHat internally started to realise that their ultra-conservative customer base when confronted with "the GNOME3 way is the true way, and if you don't like it go write an extension in an unstable API, fork or fuck off" may well choose the latter? Complaints from Joe Fedora User are easy to ignore (whining, ungrateful, change-resistant leachers the lot of them), but customers not so easy.

I wonder… :)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 16:20 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

Possible, but... who on earth uses RHEL on a desktop? Maybe it happens, but server-side usage is far more common (that's surely what the paying customers are paying for, right?)

RHEL on the desktop

Posted Nov 10, 2012 17:53 UTC (Sat) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

"who on earth uses RHEL on a desktop?"

One example: my university has a licensing agreement to mediate distribution and support of RHEL on all (so far as I know) campus machines, including individual desktops. So individual labs and individual desktop users have some incentive to use RHEL. I personally don't think RHEL is a good choice for my lab machines, so I don't use it. But I can certainly understand why other labs do.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 18:31 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know about RedHat specifically, but I can take a guess extrapolating from the kinds of "desktop" customers Sun had. Not desktops in the ordinary joe sense, but desktops in the "platform to deliver a limited set of applications reliably/consistently" sense. Think stock-brokers / trading workstations, banking, etc, where for whatever reason a desktop interface is still preferable to a custom, restricted "kiosk" interface.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 22:04 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> where for whatever reason a desktop interface is still preferable to a custom, restricted "kiosk" interface.

every kiosk interface needs to be built on top of some desktop interface, try it sometime.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 19:09 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

As dbcw mentioned, software development.

If nothing else, the stack-oriented workspace approach. I tend to use one workspace per active project, with anywhere from two to twenty windows on each workspace. As I type this, I have seven workspaces on this system.

And that's seven dual-1920x1200-monitor workspaces, mind you.

I love that I don't need to take my hands off the keyboard most of the time. I love that it's all dynamic. I love the simple, austere approach that stays out of my way. I love the lack of a "desktop".

I don't care about nautilus, or indeed most of the "gnome ecosystem" -- Just the gnome-shell, and the various applications/tools/whatever I use regularly. It Just Works.

Oh, as an anectdote, my linux-illiterate roommates figured out gnome3 all on their own (ie, how to launch a web browser, file manipulation, removable media) without so much as a single question. (Contrast that to them managing to get the old Win7 install rooted within two days...)