Submitted by “GNOME 3.4 introduces a range of new features. A new document search facility allows quick access to content stored both on your device and online. Smooth scrolling means that moving through content is slick and graceful. New application menus, which are located on the top bar, provide a useful way to access application options and actions.” And a lot more.
Still takes too many motions and clicks and extensions keep bitrotting. Will wait for Cinnamon to get better.
Gnome 3 is crap. Pure and utter crap. No wonder Fedora refused to include an option to install Gnome2 instead of this pile of stinking garbage in Fedora 15.
Beyond being a complete troll, are you aware that:
1. GNOME 2 is no longer maintained.
2. As far as I know, no one was willing to take over the huge task of maintaining it.
3. An attempt to get MATE into Fedora failed due to lack of interest by packagers.
4. Nothing stops you from packaging Mate and adding it to Fedora.
I assume that beyond trolling *YOU* are willing to take on the task of bring MATE to Fedora, right?
Oh, and before you begin, I don’t use GNOME 3, I use KDE…
– Gilboa
Edited 2012-04-01 14:21 UTC
wait for it…
gnome2 was better.
there you go, enjoy.
Not at 2.4 it wasn’t.
I have already bashed gnome-shell to death here. However, to be honest, I had been using Fedora 16 with it, since it was released. A couple of days back, I just proved myself I can no longer stand this interface. Looking around, I saw no other option as well, through KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Unity, abandoned GNOME 2…
Cinnamon looks alright, perhaps it will gain momentum. Still looks horrible and looks count.
For now, I will stick with Windows 7 which is what I see everywhere I go (alongside with XP and some Ubuntu 10.04 copies).
This is supposed to be the release that now works without 3D drivers, correct? If so, many thanks to Gnome for finally resolving this Achilles tendon of Gnome 3.x. And if this has in fact been resolved, is there anyway to preemptively enable the 2D mode even if my graphics card does support 3D?
At what point to gnome developers and designer realize they need to radically rethink their direction?
I mean they’ve lost, what, 99% of their userbase in a year?? (no idea but at least 90%). How does this not throw them into a panic and total firefighting mode?
So far we’ve heard nothing and they appear to be staying the course! How is that possible? A new way to quickly find documents and smooth scrolling???? That is what they are working on while their world burns??? WTF? That is just mind boggling.
At least before they were largely just copying windows/mac ui elements which kept them from screwing up too badly. Going off into the weeds unchained them from mediocrity but also allowed them to fall on their faces.
Edited 2012-03-31 03:05 UTC
What are your basis for these numbers? Just because you made a number up doesn’t make it a fact.
I would guess because they haven’t lost nearly as many users as you think.
(Note, I don’t use gnome3)
Where do you make up your numbers from? I was pretty clear my estimate was a guess.
How many end users do you estimate they’ve lost?
50%? 40%?
Anything about 25% should make them rethink which they clearly are not doing.
All the Gnome 2.x using people I know, me included, have jumped ship: sadly some of them have gone back to Windows, nobody is using Unity either.
So, as far my little anecdotical evidence goes, it’s more 100% than 80% or 90%. Of course it is nearly impossible to have more precise figures, and in all fairness there are people who seem very happy with Gnome Shell / Unity. But I remember the Gnome 1.x > 2.x controversy and this looks much more serious both in numbers and wrt the issues at stake (it’s not simply a matter of lost features and/or regressions, it’s the new UI paradigm that has driven many people away).
Today I still follow Gnome development as that’s the foundation of Cinnamon, but that’s it.
Rehdon
Hmm.. I’m still at gnome-2.32 using gentoo and all. XFCE, LXDE, razor-qt or possibly KDE4 will be the next desktop – if I don’t switch fully to GNUStep/Windowmaker.
Not just the UI paradigm, I think, but also some technical decisions that just do not make sense on a desktop computer running Linux, such as mandatory GPU compositing, hiding the power off button (though thankfully it seems they have brought it back recently), huge icons in a mouse-driven interface, half-assed window management facilities…
It seems that when designing Gnome 3, the Gnome team took much care into producing a high-quality interface for tablet computers, without much consideration to desktop user experience. What they apparently forgot, however, was that almost no one uses Linux on a tablet.
Edited 2012-03-31 10:07 UTC
People keep speaking about this GNOME 1.x to 2.x controversy. In my opinion, it was not anything like this now. I remember very well. The paradigm was the same, menus and sub-menus. They just had rearranged the menus and used two panels. Now this is an entire different paradigm. Not true when comparing to that transition in 2001.
I’m using Unity :p
ORLY?
Last time I checked the three most popular distros on distrowatch all use gnome 3 as their main DE. Fedora has a vanilla gnome 3 + gnome-shell, Mint has gnome 3 + gnome-shell with some customizations and Ubuntu has gnome 3 + their own unity shell with gnome-shell as an alternative. Oh, and the fallback desktop that looks and works like gnome 2 is also available on these distros if you like that better (in fact I’m using it on Ubuntu now).
It surely doesn’t look like gnome lost 90-99% of their users…
You are *really* stretching the facts by claiming that ubuntu and mint use gnome3 as their default DE. The distinction your are drawing between gnome3 and gnome-shell is misleading.
Do you mean gtk3? All use gtk3 which is not the same thing at all. Mint uses a fork for gnome3. Only Fedora is using stock gnome3 which is what we’re all complaining about here.
If you’re claiming that gnome == gnome-shell then your post is misleading.
According to https://www.gnome.org gnome-shell does look a core part of GNOME.
So? Metacity and gnome-panel are also core components, yet a distro that only ships gnome-shell obviously isn’t going to use them. Does that mean the distro doesn’t have gnome? *sigh*
Edited 2012-04-01 12:48 UTC
I know lots of people disagree but I think gnome-shell and “fallback mode” is the core of GNOME UX. Many people thinks that anyone can make a new shell and replace gnome-shell and still call it GNOME.
And even then… the GNOME 2-like “fallback desktop” that the grandparent poster mentioned is only there because the real GNOME 3 does not support non-3D-hardware-accelerated display. So, enjoy it while it lasts, because as soon as the actual GNOME 3 desktop can run without 3D hardware acceleration, your precious fallback desktop will be removed.
Luckily, a large handful of replacements–from complete forks (Cinnamon) to continuations of the previous version (MATE) have been started for those of use who just don’t like the nutty, arrogant marketing direction GNOME team is taking. And of course there are more alternative environments, both window managers and complete desktop environments, that should be able to please the rest of us.
KDE 4.8.x is powerful, beautiful and retains the desktop paradigm everyone knows and loves… and it’s a safe harbor from the GTK fragmentation mess going on with Gnome 3.x, Unity, and Cinnamon. If you can’t stomach the full blown KDE experience for some reason, razor-qt is another nice lightweight option.
KDE UI is just too overkill, and the K applications have horrible UI layout. Bash me if you want, but that’s the reality most users see it. Not to mention that it is a pain in the frigging butt to make other toolkits look perfect. Take LibreOffice for instance, how horrible is the oxygen integration. And of course, the overall slowness that Thom lived to talk about many headlines before (which is really true).
yup, KDE still gives us a taskbar, a minimize button and is awesomely beautiful!
I sure hope they keep it this way
If you forget the fact that they have messed up everything they could.
Kmail 2 was a complete disaster, and even if it is kind of usable now, I still don’t know if I should try to import my old mails into Kmail or just forget it and continue using gmail with a browser (which I loath).
There is no video player; instead of the old Kaffeine, which was as easy to use as Media Player 6.4, we have to put up with VLC, and it sticks out as a sore thumb.
The last time I checked, Amarok didn’t play audio CDs.
And of course there’s Nepomuk, which makes my machine unusably slow with its disk-churning (even if desktop search is off), and of course no contacts in Kontact if I don’t turn it on (WHY? Why isn’t Akonadi enough?).
(Disclaimer: very disappointed KDE user here.)
Edited 2012-03-31 20:20 UTC
Have you tried reporting bugs to the developers (https://bugs.kde.org/)?
Since when KDE developers listen to users? All that KDE brainstorm spot is pure bullsh*t. Just take a look at the heavy horrible laid out user interface. It looks as it was designed by someone drunk.
Edited 2012-03-31 22:10 UTC
Patches welcome.
I have somewhere between 10 and 20 bug reports at bugs.kde.org, and there’s another 20 I voted for. A few of them were fixed some month later, but most of them haven’t. Some were set to nofix — there’s one that had been open for 10 years!
So excuse me if I have lost my enthusiasm in this matter.
(Edit: As far as I remember, most of the problems mentioned in my last comment had already been reported by the time I discovered them.)
Edited 2012-04-01 19:30 UTC
KDE 4.0 shipped with Dragon Player, which is pretty much the simplest, easiest-to-use video player out there. Open it, it gives you the option to open a file or a CD/DVD. Click Open File and a standard file picker appears. Double-click the file to play, and away it goes. Anything your current Phonon backend supports will be played.
Sure, but dragon player feels absolutely tacky. The way the panels work and the lack of features. It is essentially just a phonon demo. There is no comparison to kaffeine which was powerful AND easy to use.
I was a happy Gnome 2 user for many years. I gave Gnome 3 a shot and stuck with it until 3.2 was released and when all my extensions, that actually made it somewhat usuable, stopped working I decided to explore a bit, with 4 years of using Linux I had only used Gnome 2 as my desktop, so I dabbled with Mate, Xfce, KDE and later, and very briefly, Cinnamon before I just gave up on Linux DE’s and installed Openbox on my laptop & PC. I’m quite happy with the way it balances simplicity and advanced customization. I have no plans on ever switching anymore
I’m sure they’ll fix everything about Gnome 3 eventually, probably within a release or two before Gnome 4 is released and everything gets messed up again and then everyone can complain about missing the good ole days of Gnome 3…
Edited 2012-03-31 16:11 UTC
Nobody will complain about what 4 series will be because there won’t be much people using the 3 series apart from Red Hat servers.
I switched from KDE to Gnome 3 once Fedora 15 was released and haven’t looked back. I can tell I’m in the minority around this site but I like the dashboard-like application menu.
When I’m going application hunting I might as well use the whole screen rather than stare at a small pop-up menu tree in the bottom left or top right corner. In addition to having a large go to space to get an overview of everything I appreciate the automatic text entry to search for applications.
Previously I had to make icon favorites, or bother with organizing the menu tree so that things were quick to find and click. Like most people I have programs I use all the time, ones I use daily, and those I seldom to never use. The largest group is that middle group which makes it inefficient to make favorites for all of them, and time consuming to make a menu devoted to them so I don’t have to multiple menus deep to find them. Now I just push the win key, and then start typing what I want and it narrows the main menu for me – its a lot quicker and requires no work to setup.
The window management paradigm matches my workflow pretty well, although not perfect. I have a lot of large spreadsheets and being able to full screen them to see more of a sheet just makes life easier (so does zooming out till my eyes bleed). I used to hide the taskbar (it would give 2 – 3 more rows on the sheet) and use ‘alt tab’ to move between programs, or have them on separate virtual desktops. This is why the single key press to text search my applications rather than mousing through a popup menu in the taskbar is a nice feature.
I used to have multiple sheets open with a word processor and just alt-tab them back and forth. I’d put one project per virtual desktop to organize things (activities seemed like overkill for what I needed). The problem was that with lots of virtual desktops the pager in the taskbar got really small and I ended up putting it in the dashboard like it is in Gnome 3.
Now with dynamically allocated desktops is easy to expand to new projects, or on to side distractions without having to close old projects or manually add another desktop. Its a small thing but just makes life nice and easy. I just wish there was a way to limit alt-tab and alt-~ to only the applications that virtual desktop as opposed to all of them.
As for this release, I think the renewed focus on modernizing the included Gnome applications will be nice as well as further enhancement and integration of the Contacts, Telephone, and Messaging applications with each other and the shell. I like what I see far with the Documents application, and hope that similar improvements and integration with Evolution will happen as well.
Last time I checked, even Linus T. was using GNOME Shell since he droped XFCE.
You’ve got it backwards-
http://digitizor.com/2011/08/04/linus-torvalds-ditches-gnome-for-xf…
” In Google+, Torvalds wrote criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an “unholy mess” and said that the user experience in
unacceptable. He said that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 – but a huge step up from GNOME 3.”
He was using GNOME 3, that’s what the reason of the post, becuase openSUSE needed root password to switch the desktop time, the discussion was if it was a GNOME 3 or openSUSE problem.
I guess he is using GNOME 3 with some extensions nowadays.
https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/WTLyn7dqYoR
Edited 2012-04-01 09:43 UTC
I’ve replaced my GNOME 3 desktop with Cinnamon, but it’s still the wrong direction. User interface elements should NOT be built in a scripted language.
I am waiting for XFCE to move up to GTK3. XFCE with GTK 3 would be the ultimate desktop experience.
Totally agree. That’s why Cinnamon is so quirky.
Xfce 4.10pre1 has just been released:
http://blog.xfce.org/2012/04/xfce-4-10pre1-released/
It is Gtk2 based but in return you get tons of real world usability improvements. Things you would probably not get if they started rewriting stuff.
I am always suspicious when announcements happen on April Fool’s day, but this feature list does look awesome. If they get that out of the door, they will have fixed most of the annoying glitches which I can still think about in Xfce.
I guess we can now safely say it isn’t an April Fools day joke. 😉
Been on fluxbox for about 7 years, never needed anything else. Downloaded a gNome 3 live cd to see what all the ruckus was about and thought what for? Fluxbox keeps working and is fine/tunable over time so that I never get hit with these stupid fads.
100% linux user who does a hellavalot on his machine and managed to miss all the frustration and whining over fad UI decisions made by fools trying to prove their manhood in the computing wilds
If you wanna play with toys, buy one of those sanitary pads that woman use, errr, IpAd I think they’re called. Otherwise grow up and become an Adult and use tools that get the job done with minimal pain
There are many to choose from, including what I use, as well as others mentioned here.
Linux the land of choice and some damn good ones at that!
The choices you talk about prevents users to use Linux, whatever that word means today. There’s too much fragmentation, too many choices. It’s like one religion tree with hundreds of denominations and sects. Choice is good however human beings have issues when they are approached with too many choices.
Edited 2012-04-01 15:01 UTC
Fragmentation is a fallacy derived in your own head or a regurgitation of anothers idiotic thought patterns.
There are thousand’s of dishes to chose from when I’m hungry, but I never seem to have a problem filling my belly with something yummy, even if it means combining some of those dishes to come up with something unique!
If you’re a regimented computer user, then stick to windows or better still – MacinTossers. Linux is Linux, the ultimate in choice. Stop complaining it’s something it’s not and hopefully never will be!
Learn its true strengths and you won’t see fragmentation but true power to do the hell you want, how you want it done
I don’t think I’ll ever understand what the deal is with fancy 3D/compositing interfaces on portable devices. My 1600 MHz x86 netbook doesn’t have GPU or CPU power to run Gnome Shell properly; so why do the developers think that an 800 MHz ARM tablet, with an even punier GPU and half as much RAM, will do any better? Likewise for Plasma Active, which is even slower than the desktop version of Plasma. Waiting a minute for the GUI to start is stupid, seeing as the desktops only a few years back all started in 5-10 seconds.
I’m not saying tablet, netbook, and other small screen GUIs shouldn’t be different. Full-screen launchers for instance make sense when you’re using touch or stylus input. But I don’t see why the full-screen launcher has to be transparent and glassy and slide into place like something out of Hollywood.
Normal users like prettiness, but they will prioritize functionality over it. Software that is pretty but not functional will not be successful.
(Not that that matters for the developers, Gnome 3 and KDE 4 being Free As In Freedom and all. Which, I think, may be part of the problem; with FOSS there’s no monetary incentive for pragmatism, so ideology can just run amok. And this is a shame, because IMO having access to decent software should not be a social privilege. And if you have to spend $100+ for it, or spend $100+ to get a new computer for it, then it is definitely a social privilege.)
Actually, tablets *do* generally have a decent GPU – not a top-of-the-line gaming one, but certainly better than the miserable Intel graphics chipset in the average netbook.
The GNOME devs decided to strip out configurability, and the result is that users don’t get to tweak the environment to their preference, but rather the backlash swells until there are whole forks instead.
KDE remains a solid, single unit with only the very reasonable splinter of razor-qt for lightweight environments. It’s also an ugly, key-and-click-heavy clunker.
At this point, I’m running Compiz and XFCE with the beautiful and lightweight Plank dock – sorta. Thunar has issues. This forking is getting ridiculous, and I think the elementaryos team is the best shot at getting the GTK+ desktop back on track whether by their own success or in setting the bar for others.
Again, in the face of new opportunity everybody is trying to bash GNOME. For those claiming silly high figures of 90% migration: only Mint switched to another DE after GNOME 3 was released. That is a wonderful proof that most users just stayed with GNOME3.
If you enjoyed GNOME 2 and don’t like GNOME 3, you have two options:
∙ shut up and write code for MATE or
∙ shut up and write code for Cinnamon.
Running around the users waiting for 3.4 (3.6, 3.8, etc.) and shouting “Oh, this GNOME is shit, I left it” is too <s>torv</s>trollish to be acceptable.
Edited 2012-04-03 16:17 UTC
Ubuntu has also switched to their own alternative. On the business side, I don’t see RHEL adopting Gnome3 anytime soon either. Mind you, they are the biggest players in Linux world and (used to be or still are) large users of Gnome 2. So, ignoring Gnome 3 isn’t just a grassroot movement.
Gnome 3 isn’t only a problem for users. Linux desktop needs strong mainstream DEs or it will simply cease to exist. Gnome 2 was becoming a sort of a standard DE for Linux. It had its issues but they could have been resolved incrementally without throwing the whole thing away (porting to Gtk3 could have been a great opportunity for getting rid of some broken legacy stuff).
With Gnome Shell, we are looking at best at having a working Gnome DE again in 2-3 years. At worst, Gnome Shell will continue to go backward in terms of usability and user expectations.
I am not too worried about my own options – I’ve been using Xfce for years and couldn’t be happier with it (yes, I considered it a better DE than Gnome even before Gnome 3). But Xfce isn’t enough to stop eroding Linux user base and I don’t want to be the last user of Linux desktop.
I see lots of poeple don’t like Gnome 3…
I was one of yours a week ago… I tried Fedora 15 at its beginnings, and the font were blurry, I did not had my shortcuts in the top panel, etc… So much things that made Gnome 3 unusable for me…
But a week ago, I tried again… First of all, the text was not blurry anymore! Great!
I began to be happier with the gnome-shell-extensions provided in the official fedora repo’s…
And then I discovered https://extensions.gnome.org/
I browsed and tried a lot of extension during a complete afternoon… (you can add and start extension directly from Firefox!)
Now, I have an “Application Menu” (gnome2-like), a “Places Menu” (gnome2-like), a bottom-panel, always shown, whith my open-windows, a virtual-desktop switcher, a “back-to-desktop button”. I can easily shut down the computer, the “panel-calendar” is synchronised with my google-cal, my shortcuts are shown in the top-panel, etc.
Thanks to gnome-tweak tools, I do have 3 buttons on my windows, and a conventional desktop…
So, with a little work, I have everything that made me happy on gnome 2.X…
Still, I do agree that it’s not the perfect DE for a netbook, or server….