Submitted by GNOME 3.2 has been released. It’s basically a collection of relatively small updates, improvements, and bug fixes. As whole, it’s a pretty big upgrade, but there’s nothing really that stands out to me – probably because I don’t use GNOME3 myself so I really have no idea where it’s lacking (if at all). Any GNOME3 users care to shine a light on this one?
It’s not lacking IMHO. It’s pretty good after all.
It lacks of good distro support, is my only problem right now.
What I’d like to see its a GNOME 3 flavor of Linux Mint.
I have to agree the effects are beautiful, the user interface is clean, those turn “ON/OFF” buttons are clever. However, I agree with Linus: GNOME 3, as in design and usability is a “unholy mess” being. What happens when you have 20 applications open? Do I really have to go to Activities every second? Workspaces? Oh no… man… I really hope GNOME 3 shifts from its original thought, but what I really wanted is a BIG FISH like Linus to fork GNOME 2 – many people would follow him.
What’s the difference of working with 20 applications in GNOME 2 and GNOME Shell?
In GNOME 2 you get a cluttered task bar, GNOME 3 doesn’t force you to use activities, you can have your 20 applications in one activity.
So I fail to see the big difference.
The difference is big. I see how many terminals I have open, I see how many instances of a certain aplication is open, right on the spot, without “having to go to Activities” which I support being called “crazy behaviour”.
My taskbar never gets cluttered with 20 applications, and if it bothered anyone, just copy Windows 7 super bar, and problem solved. At least they’re there on the spot. Now, I have to go to idiotic “Activities” to move the mouse all the way through to get a particular workspace… sorry, pretty “insane” as Linus put himself.
You probably fail to see the difference because you’re attracted to smartphones and those stupid things you need to finger and finger and finger….
Actually, your activities is only one keypress away. Once you have learnd that you will find that you do a lot less mousing around in Gnome3 than in Gnome 2, but I agree it takes a while to get used to, but I certainly wouldn’t want to go back. There is a reason why Apple copied Gnome 3 for their new Lion Mission control.
I agree. I called it “an abomination”, before I heard Linus’ comment.
I tried to use it, I tried to use it again, and just can’t. For a power user, or just a user that needs to get serious work done, it is a disaster.
I tried XFCE, reconfigured its panels to look like Gnome 2, and used it for a little while. While XFCE has potential, it is still a bit incomplete, immature, lacking. I’m hoping this will change with the influx of new users – the influx of former Gnome users.
So I ended up switching to KDE for the time being. I never thought I’d call myself a KDE user, but it is 100 times better than Gnome 3. Granted, I had to tweak the heck out of KDE, but it will do exactly what I want it to.
Edited 2011-09-29 21:54 UTC
At least power users wont be afraid to try out some shell extensions. If you don’t like how gnome3 work you can add a gnome2-like menu, or task bar, or why not a dock? But it seems you never bothered with that.
oh, I did. I tried all of the addons, tweaks, you name it.
Edited 2011-09-29 22:34 UTC
But then you know that you can get gnome3 to behave pretty much like gnome2. Just add the taskbar, menu and quick-launch bar. Yet you think it’s a “disaster”? What’s the problem with it?
Edited 2011-09-30 07:41 UTC
Again, if you replace the default UI, then GNOME Shell’s design is a failure.
You’ve got to be kidding. Those shell extensions are like putting band-aids over a festering wound. They’re useless.
You’re right about one thing. I’m not bothering with Gnome 3 anymore, since it’s damn clear that the people behind don’t give a damn about the people who prefer the way Gnome 2 did things.
In that case nej_simon, what is the point of GNOME 3 Shell’s design if you replace the default UI? If you replace GNOME Shell 3’s default UI with a GNOME2-like menu, then by definition, GNOME Shell’s UI is a failure.
Same thing here, but in my case it was fluxbox and a few more applications. That was a month or two ago. I guess we can always come back when gnom3 is ready.
It’s true. People don’t seem to remember what it was like when GNOME 2.0 came about. It was horrible, ugly, with lots of GNOME 1 features missing. But now GNOME 2 was very, very good. I say let’s wait a few years and see what GNOME 3 is capable of. And when it’s awesome, GNOME 4 will come and cripple our desktop once again.
Let us rejoice.
Edited 2011-09-29 23:43 UTC
No wonder millions still use Windows XP as their main desktop. The KDE4 thing, and now the GNOME3 thing, is a Linux killer.
Please just copy XP or 7 and all distros will embrace it… sick and tired of experimentation in Linux DE’s… many are.
While I agree with you that KDE 4 at release was a disaster, at least the KDE developers didn’t deny it. In fact, they made it crystal clear that the software was mere beta quality and in need of more work and user input. They made good on their promise and now at version 4.7, KDE is a solid, stable and powerful DE for Linux. In fact, KDE has been a pretty great desktop since 4.4. The mistake the Gnome developers made is that they released Gnome 3 as if it were finished work! They were wrong; it’s a far cry from Gnome 2.3x in usability. Rather than admit that, they presume to know all; to hell with what users want. With that attitude, users are more likely to jump ship to XFCE, LXDE, LMDE or KDE in droves until Gnome developers come back to Earth.
If people are upset enough, why not fork GNOME 3 and make it behave like GNOME 2, on top of GNOME 3 technologies? All we need is a “gnome-panel”, a bottom taskbar, and some handy panel applets. So if a group of people re-write these modules as they were in GNOME 2 and configure a “gnome-session” to be just like it was before, it will actually reap the benefits of the GNOME 3 technology, because, despite the “Shell” being annoying, some improvements are really good (like I said, ON/OFF buttons, there are really good usability improvements, but the “Shell” behaviour isn’t actually an usability improvement.
Seriously, we don’t need this “Shell”, this is for the crazy or blind followers. Fallback mode is for the weak. We need perhaps a fork of GNOME 3, to be done as in a way it could have been done. There’s enough people to do it, and Linux Mint guys are already planning something up.
KDE on the other hand, “gives” a thousand cards of usability. Dealing with KDE is like going through a double pack of cards, it is so much to configure and to tweak, plainly overwhelming upon users. I know, if you can spend 5 hours tweaking every KDE setting to your liking, to be productive, fine. But I find GNOME takes the edge on that. Both 2 and 3 versions. So after KDE 4 fiasco, yes,there is stable KDE now, but it crashes a lot, much more like GNOME. KDE isn’t for me. It’s pretty, and it’s fast, if you have a good proper working video card, binary blob full on. Didn’t seem fast to me using radeon driver on 980FX chipsets. And eats more memory, much more memory. GNOME kept memory usage to a minimum.
GNOME 3 should be forked into HOBBIT 1.0 desktop.
“KDE on the other hand, “gives” a thousand cards of usability. Dealing with KDE is like going through a double pack of cards, it is so much to configure and to tweak, plainly overwhelming upon users. I know, if you can spend 5 hours tweaking every KDE setting to your liking, to be productive, fine.”
It doesn’t take five hours to tweak KDE. For one, KDE retains the “traditional” desktop paradigm of a taskbar, desktop, and desktop icons. Moreover, window controls remain on the right and taskbar applets are in the tray, where they belong. I would argue that a user spends far less time “tweaking” KDE than they would getting to grips with the massive changes present in Gnome 3 or Unity. Further, KDE while offering myriad customizations options, at least recognizes that control of the desktop is up to users, not developers. Gnome and Canonical seem to regard users as too stupid to know what they need and so make decisions for users. I for one dislike “users are idiots” mentality and prefer to set things the way I want them; not the way the developers *think* I want them (and then hide away the controls I need to make the changes I want.)
You are absolutely right!!! KDE gives users to the power to customize it, but it does not force the user to customize it both in theory and IN PRACTICE. Does anyone think the default KDE configuration of your distribution is so bad that you are practically forced to spend a lot of time to re-adjust it?
It seems to me that they cleaned up a couple of really glaring mistakes they made but there’s still lots of stuff that needs to be polished. For my part I’d love to have a better application launcher, I am really unimpressed by the inflexible and clunky text-based search in the activities. Especially as there have been already much, much better alternatives like GNOME Do. From my perspective I hope that the extensions that I use to make it usable will still be compatible or will be made so. Things like the new alt-tab behavior are so annoying they would make it unusable for me if I couldn’t fix them.
I had to switch to it for a while, I’m using ubuntu 11.10 beta and Unity is too unstable and crashing all the time, so i switched to Gnome 3.
Activities is simply unusable. Even if i have only 6 applications open (xchat, firefox, gedit, empathy, transmission and terminal), they all do look like white squares when zoomed out, it’s very confusing.
Using favorites solves this, but having to move to activities, then wait for the favorites to appear and click it is also annoying because there’s so much going on on-scren just for clicking an icon that it feels uncomfortable.
For those of you wishing for a Gnome2 fork, an Arch Linux user has made one called the Mate Desktop Environment. I use it on my laptop. It’s pretty good, but it still needs a lot of work though:
https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162
I honestly don’t understand all this Gnome3 hate. OK, I’ve only tried the demo liveCD on my laptop a few times, but it took me about 30 minutes to get used to. In fact, the usability first came as a pleasant surprise with all negative reactions I had read about prior. People complain that it turns their $2000 desktop into a gigantic smartphone, but once you “get” its design concept, you’d realize the Shell is very efficient when used in combination with a keyboard. You all have a keyboard, right?
Out of the box, Gnome3 blows Gnome2 out of the water. Think about it, how many of you using Gnome2 are actually happy with the default look and layout? It feels quite amateurish without a third-party window manager and some major tweaking. Torvalds’s bitching means nothing to me, as he has a reputation of being undeservedly opinionated about things outside his expertise. And he actually complained about the lack of wobbly windows, for chrissake…
GNOME Shell design wants people TO DO things in the desktop. GNOME Shell design doesn’t want to users to dictate what are the things to do with the design, the argument is:
You need to do this and that so that you can enjoy the experience.
In that respect, you agree with the Shell’s design command, so you get use to it.
While other people do not want to obey the GNOME Shell’s command so that they will get use to it.
That is the difference.
Linus do not want to take time on how to get use on that system by changing his desktop habits and so are the rest of power users, while you belong to the people (quite a minority at this time) who obeyed and followed whatever GNOME Shell’s wishes.
Some people claim that GNOME 2.x was so much better.
I for one am hooked. Badly.
I use XP and GNOME 2.x at work. I can’t stand it.
Once I went GNOME 3 there just ain’t no going back.
GNOME 3 made me love my windows key.
There are two thing I do not like about GNOME 3.
1) There is no “proper” Ubuntu support
2) Some of the components are a bit crash prone
Also, I’d really like some sort of project views for switching between open applications, but hey – I love this already
About GNOME3: it’s pretty funny how people now defend the use of the Super/Windows key. But dude, do you have the brains to actually think that now you are doing more movements with your left hand to get to that key, instead of using just the mouse? You have a mind, right? I prefer to have a mind than the keyboard you say.
I tell you dudes, if you ever worked on a vertical touch screen for a week, you would ask to be dismissed. We humans aren’t for this “Minority Report” shite.
About KDE: The problem with KDE is that it needs to be a “complete desktop environmentâ€. Their “K†applications are not often the best out there, except for K3B (which is the one I really use as a KDE application). I can’t care less about KOffice, or any other K* app. This is where KDE really fails. If the KDE purpose was just to deliver a decent desktop instead a complete whole set of applications having this paradigm of ignoring that LibreOffice is better than KOffice, or that sort of thing, KDE would be the leading desktop on Linux ever. So much effort on put a whole “Windows” out there, instead of simply a basic desktop. All these modules should be separated. If you want KDE, fine. But if you want K3B, oh well, install it! And why not have the superior apps from GNOME into KDE desktop them? Why not integrate them tightly with their themes?
It’s something more or less like this… “We’ll, I’m a KDE developer, so I need to favour KDE apps, and we need to integrate every crap which starts with letter K…, forget GTK theme integration, let them run behind us…let that with GNOME.â€
Another possible problem I have with KDE is that Oxygen is the only decent theme/style available. Did you see other window styles in KDE? From “Win95†to “CDEâ€, QT offers too little in that arena. I said Oxygen was “decentâ€, and never perfect. Default dialog buttons too small, default titlebar buttons too small. Oh sure I can resize them, and make the crap out of them. I can even change styles! But wait, isn’t default GNOME 3 title bar so much better? I praise the new Adwaita theme and those title bar buttons, they’re just perfect. Why not copy them? I see a bunch of people denying the benefit that is created from someone else, and there lies the real undeclared competition and the refusal to implement something good between desktops in favor of a one cause. Perhaps if KDE implememented Adwaita as a theme, that would be the perfect desktop. ON/OFF buttons? But… We get that Plasma Config panel with “Widgets” which 99% I don’t use or will ever use it.
Now, I see that a lot of KDE devs come here and mod me down. Particurlaly KDE guys. Oh well. If the truth is hard do something about it. Don’t try to discredit someone’s opinion.
I for one thing approve Linus Torvalds comments, which are very appropriate. He was right about GNOME 2 mouse buttons remapping, he was right about KDE4 breaking everything mentality, and I’m sorry… He is also right about GNOME 3 Activities and the whole paradigm shift. He is just right. And people should show more respect to the god of Linux. If it was not him, we all would be using Windows or Mac… or Solaris or whatever underground OS…
I don’t dislike the Gnome shell at all, I still use it on my desktop. I might switch it out to Mate if they don’t fix that memory leak issue, but I’ll wait until 3.2 is available in the Arch repos before I make a decision. My only real gripe with it is that they got rid of the bottom panel that I always used for tabs and my workspace switcher and don’t give anyone an option to add it back unless you go into fallback mode which is just a crippled Gnome 2 imo. Personally I find having to go to into the shell just view my minimized applications and switch a workspace kind of annoying, and if I wanted to use shortcut keys I’d install openbox or some other window manager. I understand that a lot of people may not care about customizing their OS to fit their preferences, but for me, that was one of things that made fall in love with linux and Gnome in the first place. I like to tinker with my operating system and Gnome 3 doesn’t give me the option to do it, and if they do they make it incredibly difficult. I’m personally very happy someone forked Gnome 2 and I hope it succeeds. It gives the users more options… And that is good.
By the way, what’s the deal with the long winded KDE bashing? This article was about Gnome…
Edited 2011-10-01 16:36 UTC
Because whenever there is a GNOME talk, there will be someone mentioning KDE as a “great” alternative. There’s nothing wrong with it. I think it’s in context. DE’s in Linux suffer from… what Thom said once… I forgot, lack of consistency? Whenever one is going to be brought up, fatally the other will be mentioned.
probably because I don’t use GNOME3 myself so I really have no idea where it’s lacking (if at all)
What Gnome 3 is lacking is a clue.
And yes, it’s *STILL* an unholy mess…