GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:03 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode by vonbrand
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

After a few releases of Gnome 2, the loud complainers were silently using Gnome 2... and AFAICS the very same thing is happening right now, again.

Maybe. I think there are a number of ways this is playing out:

Some people like GNOME 3. For them, it's a win.
Some technically-savvy people dislike GNOME 3 and are able to switch to XFCE, KDE, or whatever. I'm in this camp.
Some technically-naive people dislike GNOME 3, but grumble and adjust to it. These people are in the same position as Windows users, I guess.
Some technically-naive people think that "Linux" developers are idiots and jump ship for Windows or Mac OS X. And this, I think, is the greatest danger of GNOME 3 (and to some extent KDE 4): Drastic UI changes that bewilder people and turn them off the "Linux" desktop and on to proprietary OSes. (Never mind that Microsoft is making the same sort of mistakes with Windows 8 ... MSFT users can't even imagine something called "choice", so MSFT has a lock on them.)

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GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 14:42 UTC (Fri) by alexl (guest, #19068) [Link] (8 responses)

Why would a switch to Windows/Mac be any different for the last type?
Its not like they then have control over what happens to their desktop.
OS X keeps changing, and Windows 8 is hardly the same as Windows 7.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 16:05 UTC (Fri) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

> Why would a switch to Windows/Mac be any different for the last type?
> Its not like they then have control over what happens to their desktop.
> OS X keeps changing, and Windows 8 is hardly the same as Windows 7.

I would argue that while all these desktops change, the rate of changes is (IMO) a lot higher in Linux.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 17:07 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (5 responses)

Why would a switch to Windows/Mac be any different for the last type?

It wouldn't. But two things: (1) there's a perception that proprietary vendors are somehow more "professional" or do more in-depth UI research than FOSS vendors, and (2) once people do switch to a proprietary system, they're locked in and it's extremely hard to get them back into the free software community.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 19:11 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (4 responses)

It's so easy to believe the grass is greener on the other side... That if some company makes billions with their software it must be really good and immune to the goofs that the stuff we hack together ourselves suffers from.

Only... I got a nice new Lenovo T430 with Win7 pro, 64 bit. I was a good boy and I created restore media. Well done! Then I plopped the disk from my old laptop in the second bay and started dual booting.

All was well -- except that Windows 7 couldn't install the majority of its crucial system updates because it couldn't install them over locked files. But every reboot iteration helped a little there, and I got it up to date.

Then, after two weeks of heavy software development under Windows, I booted the laptop one morning to find it felt it had to check the disk. And yes, the night before I had performed a clean shutdown. And it felt it to repair stuff.

So I let it repair stuff. Turns out that the wifi and "internet time" services got damages. Zut... Let's try that restore media. Zut... It doesn't want to restore: indeed, restore silently fails. Wonderful. Still, deadlines are deadlines, so now laptop is tethered to its cable when doing Windows stuff.

The grass is not greener on the OSX side, either, where a regular OS update made my Mac Mini unbootable. Fortunately, that still came with OS dvd's, so I could reinstall, which is impossible with the Win7 partition on the T430.

Software sucks, hardware sucks, prices are doubling, pleasures are dwindling and nothing is as it should be!

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 13, 2012 13:04 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (3 responses)

Wow, so Windows isn't completely immune to problems when your hardware fails?

Well it's a good think Linux runs tickety-boo when your disk starts returning bad data.

(PS:
>All was well -- except that Windows 7 couldn't install the majority of its crucial system updates because it couldn't install them over locked files. But every reboot iteration helped a little there, and I got it up to date.

I imagine many people here don't have direct recent experience of Windows Update; suffice it to say that the above is a major exaggeration. Windows does indeed still have the crazy file locking semantics and has no equivalent to ksplice, so some updates will still require a reboot, but this talk of 'reboot cycles' is a tired old canard. The only Linux distribution I have recent 'desktop' experience of is Ubuntu, and that pops up 'reboot required' reminders somewhat more often than Windows does.)

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 13, 2012 13:31 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (2 responses)

No, my hardware didn't fail Windows failed. The disk wasn't actually broken, Windows 7 was broken.

And no, Nye, I did not lie about the windows update problems. I did not exaggerate, let alone majorly.

It was exactly as I described. On starting the laptop after unboxing, the update center informed me that it needed to install a few dozen updates, and I said Ok. Then it informed me that it needed to reboot, and I said Ok. Then it tried to apply the updates, failed, and on showing the desktop told me it had crucial updates to apply I said Ok, and it asked me to reboot, and I said Ok -- rinse and repeat until Windows was satisfied.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:24 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I use Windows a lot and can confirm that Windows Update works like this - sometimes I will find an update fails, and can only be applied by requesting the update on a freshly booted system (sometimes in Safe Mode), and then rebooting again.

OS X (10.7 Lion) is pretty painful for me at the moment because my Macbook Air WiFi goes mad man times a day - usually turning WiFi on and off, or rebooting, or power cycling the WAP, will fix it. I resorted to installing a driver from previous OS X version just to improve the WiFi. Ultimately I think it's that OS X doesn't like working with my Asus WAP (RT-N10), which works fine with a couple of iOS devices, some Windows laptops, etc. There's a 150 page thread on the Apple forums about this WiFi issue with Lion.

Ironically enough, I got this WAP because of an iPad 3 having WiFi problems with a WRT54G running Tomato.

Macs are quite nice in some ways as a reasonably sane Unix environment that also has nice software you can buy if you want, plus a lot of open source software - but in my experience the Apple WiFi support is truly awful. I suspect Apple only tests with their own Airport WAPs.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 15, 2012 19:27 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

On 'the disk didn't fail' - I recently found Windows had 'deleted' the hal.dll file required for boot. I replace the hal.dll but it got removed again. It turned out to be that the disk was failing silently, without visible read errors in the logs - I replaced it with an SSD and it's been fine since. So in this case it was a disk failure, but on the surface it looked like a Windows failure.

If you are having unexplained file corruption, it could be a RAM error as well, of course.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 12, 2012 17:18 UTC (Mon) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Windows 8 may be a large UI change. But look at the history. The Windows UI has remained essentially the same since Windows 95. That's nearly 20 years.

Mac OS X was a large change from OS 9 but since then its desktop has remained pretty much the same. It has added a few features and changed a few minor things but I could be just as comfortable using OS 10.3 as 10.7. (10.0, .1 and .2 were a bit too clunky).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 15:06 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (2 responses)

I thing you're partially right, but I think the trouble is more lack of capability than drastic UI changes. If your environment makes hard simple tasks like shutting down your machine, you're not going to like it much.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 7:21 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link] (1 responses)

After over 20 years of using computers - including Windows 3.1 to 98 and 2000 to 7, for a total of literally THOUSANDS of hours, likely in excess of 10k, just in Windows - and having no trouble in adjusting to any of these (or six Linux desktops/WMs for that matter) I installed Windows 8 earlier. I had to ask a friend who had already tried Win8 on how to shut down (click on username -> log out -> wait -> click again -> click on shutdown -> wait more). Is this the sort of thing you mean? ;)

PS: Well, "no trouble" may be exaggerated, but I certainly managed to complete what should be trivial tasks like shutting down without assistance.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 24, 2012 9:01 UTC (Sat) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Or just do what you did all those twenty years: press ctrl-alt-del and take it from there..

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 15:20 UTC (Fri) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

There's also a set of technically-advanced users that tolerate GNOME 3 because they have bigger fish to fry / no time to try something else. No doubt other sets too. And we haven't even begun to speculate as to the relative sizes of these sets...

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 20:12 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

It would be really nice to get some accurate statistics on this. At the moment, it is pure guesswork. I do think there is a relation towards the comments on forums (etc) and usage, but difficult to estimate how much.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 9, 2012 22:32 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (3 responses)

Your second point (again, just like in Gnome 1 --> 2) should read "Some technically-savvy people dislike GNOME 3 and are able to switch to XFCE, KDE, or whatever. I'm in this camp, complain loudly on LWN and $ELSEWHERE, and will quietly switch back to Gnome once I get bored with $REPLACEMENT." (Yes, Linus famously decreed Gnome 2 was useless junk when it came out. Now he complains Gnome 3 is different...).

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 0:09 UTC (Sat) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

... and recently returned to Gnome Shell
http://bambuser.com/v/3084584

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 10, 2012 1:48 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

and will quietly switch back to Gnome once I get bored with $REPLACEMENT

Very unlikely. I've been a dedicated XFCE user for many years and see no reason to abandon it.

I'm not complaining about GNOME 3 for my own sake... I don't use it. However, it's going to be wrenching for my users (I'll probably switch them to XFCE instead) and I believe it will drive quite a few people away from Linux altogether.

GNOME 3.8 to drop fallback mode

Posted Nov 22, 2012 16:30 UTC (Thu) by TRauMa (guest, #16483) [Link]

Also, the sky is falling.