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Unity, first commit:

Committer: Neil Jagdish Patel
Date: 2009-10-15 10:40:35 UTC
Revision ID: neil.patel@canonical.com-20091015104035-ijthyaoq3rwqu8r7
[build] Initial commit

Gnome-shell, first commit:

tag name 2.27.0 (37b3bb8ab0012a3ba39e775d78772c652eacf804)
tag date 2009-08-10 22:37:47 (GMT)
tagged by Owen W. Taylor

And early development was done in SVN rather than git, so the true start date is much earlier. The first mock-ups appeared in April of that year:

    https://wiki.gnome.org/action/info/GnomeShell/Design/Iterations/AppBrowsingAlternative?action=info

The first public demo was at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit:

    http://blogs.gnome.org/marina/2009/07/05/gcds-and-the-gnome-shell-sneak-peak/

So relatively close, but Gnome-Shell was definitely first.

With Mir and Wayland, it isn't even close. The first commit to Mir was in Feburary of this year. Wayland hit 1.0 in October 2012.

Can't you guys just let us have a menu where we can select a program from a list of all the ones already installed and let us put our crap on the desktop?

Every GUI OS designer wants to present stuff stylishly and enforce some good file housekeeping paradigm, must of us users just want to be able to select (not find) our installed programs and store files were we expect them.

Screen organization and the other stuff of elementary is nice, if you are going to be inspired by Apple, include letting us put stuff on the desktop and give us a thing like "applications folder" were we can quickly browse installed programs.

xfce in pure form without some cludged up distros' customizations. Nothing around runs faster than good old slackware and a pure xfce DE. Simple mouse activated menu anywhere on the desktop and easily customizable. Zenwalk was great at one time but seems to have gone down hill.

Patrick has it nailed, keep the OS clean as a whistle and avoid too much ln -s crap built in the install scripts. This is the whole problem with most distros, you spend way too much time trying to find how the linked libs work and each distro pollutes usr and obfuscates how to compile source! If someone uses a lib then you can bet instead of keeping the build environment simple they will change core directories to make their build not work with other distros. MINT has become a hodge podge of libs splattered all over the place in usr so have all the Ubuntu variants. LSB is a joke when distros deliberately obfuscate core functionality.

For instance once upon a time you could just go to usr/lib/*browser/plugins folder and drop adobe flash.so into it. Now installing a flash plugin is so stupidly obfuscated that you need a frigging distro specific plugin installer to do the deed. THIS IS WHY Adobe and others have stopped supporting linux. Can you blame them for not wanting to field questions on their forums from Linux newbees wondering why they can't use flash from Adobe like they can with Windows?

Why did Patrick drop Gnome? It was because these guys pulled the same crap and obfuscated where things go and made including gnome on in a distro a royal PITA. Once upon a time installing linux and running it was fun, now because of differences between how distros splatter around libs it is a steep learning curve to even do something as simple as install the latest Google Earth.

I do not see this distro as being any different except that being coded in vala it might just be more multimedia friendly as there was some good work being done with DLNA and vala for GNOME 3 of all places. So if anything this distro could beat Ubuntu to the punch with communication through DLNA to things like Samsung phones and the like. Nifty things like playing vids pictures, and music through DLNA directly to your laptop desktop, something that should happen very soon with Linux if the distros stop bashing each other by obfuscating access to libs.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The change was too big for most people and they stopped accepting that as the "real" GNOME which I very much agree with. GNOME 2 with compiz especially had some incredible functionality and looked fantastic whereas the GNOME Shell at the transition point to GNOME 3 was lackng in functionality, unstable, didn't look that great and above all was missing a decent task bar which if you are used to having a highly functional task bar like in GNOME 2 was a pretty big and damning change.

Personally I'm very much a power user and I have a lot of different things going on on different desktops. It sounds like I am at the opposite end of the spectrum than you, but the simplicity is exactly what makes GNOME Shell more powerful for me. I can hit the super key and accurately change tasks, launch programs and do a variety of other things without moving my hands off the keyboard and as soon as I do whatever I need to do the interface gets out of my way. I still like having a preview of what programs are being run on the current workspace so I am using YAWL: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/674/yawl-yet-another-window-list/ which is very very nice. That's really about it though - the core functionality just works for me, stays out of my way, and lets me work faster/concentrate on my work.

The hate against GNOME 3 has mixed origins. Some are natural, as "they changed now it sucks" reactions; the fact GNOME 2 was/is great also doesn't help at all. Some are because the software is new and nowhere mature. But some are genuine complaints from the users for GNOME 3 not actually improving their experience, but getting in the way to do common tasks - the devs confused "simple" with "simplistic" and are completely deaf for users' requests (some as simple as putting back in 3.7 a background configuration already present in 3.6.

As for me, I just moved to MATE when the whole thing happened and I'm quite happy with it.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2012-November/msg00044.html

Can you give a reference to where you found that GTK 3.x wouldn't provide backwards compatibility?

Sure. I strongly recommend clicking on this link from the summary, where you will find this sentence in the first paragraph: "GTK+ 3 is a major new version of GTK+ that breaks both API and ABI compared to GTK+ 2.x." It then goes on to discuss in more detail the changes that will break compatibility.

"I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?

Gingerbread? Honeycomb?"

Well, no. There's a very superficial similarity, but in practice the difference is huge. On Android there is a top panel with icons in it, but you're not expected to actually touch those icons. They're purely indicators. They'd be terrible touch targets; far too small.

In GNOME 3 the stuff on the top panel isn't just informational, it is a bunch of targets you're actually supposed to use. You click on the network icon to configure the network, you click on your user name to get the User menu, etc etc. This would make a terrible tablet UI; those elements are far too tiny to be viable targets for finger touching.

"Sure Gnome3 isn't exactly the same but there most certainly are similarities especially in how applications are presented to the user.""

Here is the design document for the overview: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design#Activities_Overview . Here is the reasoning for the application picker design: "This enables new applications to be launched and open applications to be switched to. The avoidance of exclusive application categories and nested sub-menus is a distinct advantage of application launching in the shell compared with the GNOME 2 desktop. Users do not have to guess which category an application is in, and the motor control demands of the application picker are lower than those of menus. The application picker also utilises spatial memory, making it quick and easy to relocate applications." Nothing at all about tablets. (The key point is the thing about 'motor control demands': IIRC, the GNOME team did some usability testing on GNOME 2, and found testers often made errors in launching applications through nested menus, especially when using touchpads, because of how close items are together and how easy it is to move the pointer a bit wrongly and lose your spot in the menus).

"Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not "mobile inspired" in the same way that Unity on Ubuntu and Metro/Modern on Windows 8 are."

It just isn't. I don't know why you're so determined to believe something to be the case which is not, in fact, the case. It's not like the Shell design is some kind of huge top secret, the files are right there on the Wiki. You can go and look at them. If it was 'mobile inspired', they would say so. It just isn't. This is a plain fact, it isn't up for debate.

"Rahul Sundaram also keeps saying the same thing."

He keeps saying the same thing because it's true. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time accepting that. Why would we lie about it? If GNOME Shell was 'mobile inspired' I'd say it was. I don't see what mileage there'd be in lying about it.

"But ......you just said, " 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'". Fedora and Gnome developers can't have it both ways!"

I don't know why you keep trying to lump us together, we are not the same thing at all. As I've said a thousand times, I like to talk about GNOME 3 because I like GNOME 3, I think it gets an unfair rap around here. It's entirely a personal choice, and has nothing to do with Fedora in particular. I was using GNOME Shell (the very early versions) before I ever used Fedora, on Mandriva, which is generally considered a KDE-native distro.

What I meant by the 'keep them in mind, kinda' thing was this single bit from the design document I linked above:

"Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind"

That's it, that's all it has to say about 'tablets'. It's the last bullet point in a six bullet point list of 'Goals and advantages'. If you think that makes it 'mobile inspired', well, I dunno what to say.

Yeah, that's a Known Issue in general. It's not really something to be solved at the distro level, though (well, there will likely be bits we'll have to make sure are in place), but at the desktop level. There is someone working on high DPI support for GNOME:

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2013/06/28/hidpi-support-in-gnome/

So you might want to keep an eye on that.

Well, File menus frequently don't let you do operations on files either. *Firefox* has a 'File' menu. Which has "Work Offline" and "Quit" on it. How are those actions on Files, exactly?

The reason for the inconsistencies you identify is very simple and I know for a fact it has been explained to you *multiple* times before, so I conclude that you are acting in bad faith by posting as if you had no idea about it, but for the sake of the rest of the audience, I'll explain it again: the GNOME applications are in the process of being revised to meet new design guidelines. This process is not complete yet; until it is, you'll see inconsistencies between apps which have been fully converted, apps which have not yet been fully converted, and apps which haven't been converted at all.

See https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/HIG/ApplicationMenus for the guidelines on using application menus (the menu in the top panel).

Joomla is acting like the library component here, because the extensions are using its APIs. If Joomla added an exception that said "you can use the Joomla API under conditions X in non-GPL programs", yes that would be similar to things like the OpenSSL exception. But if the Joomla is GPL and is serious about advocating that license for their own ecosystem, they shouldn't do that without a seriously good reason. One-off licenses with exceptions create legal headaches that make them less useful than ones using a standard license.

This sort of thing is a hack to cope with projects with bad license, not something you should be relying on for code where you can influence them to pick the "right" license--where rightness means aligning with upstream code license choices. All of the GPL-with-exception licenses are pragmatic choices, where crappy license terms are worked around because they can't be easily removed. That's not a model anyone should use if it's possible to avoid it, and it seems Joomla could avoid it here if they tried. That's why the spirit of the license is relevant for the right thing to do in this situation.

"In an effort to further perturb the free software market which has been threatening its middleware, application server and database markets recently, the management in Oracle has come up with the masterly stroke of buying Sun Microsystems, and with it a chief competitor, MySQL.

Oracle had already announced their intention to undermine MySQL a few years ago when they bought InnoDB, the ACID database engine used by MySQL, just 18 months before their licensing agreement with the Swedes was due to expire. If you donâ(TM)t understand why a licensing agreement was needed, you need to think about what licence MySQL was distributing InnoDB under when selling commercial MySQL licences."

I have been using the GNOME shell in Fedora 15 -> 17. Once they added the "extensions" interface it made it palatable as I have a number of extensions that give me back some of the old features. I do like the http://extensions.gnome.org/ interface though...makes it easy to find and add the needed extensions. But I can't honestly say that the changes GNOME3 introduced were worth the trouble. The workflow isn't greatly enhanced and the learning curve was bad enough to make me curse more than once.

I haven't seen a single interface enhancement that I can say was worth the headache: Windows XP -> Windows 7 ( I finally turned off Aero). I won't try Windows 8 unless I have to. Firefox upcoming v25 changes have me scared. MS-office ribbons suck.

In most cases I see these as a solution looking for a problem...

Hmm...

For Spreadsheets, have you had a look at:

        http://www.libreoffice.org/features/calc
and

        http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric

>

Excel is so far removed from those two options that the fact that you even mention them tells me you either:

A) Don't actually use them (because you would know how shitty they are and wouldn't recommend them)
B) Have never used Excel beyond "Hurr derr my first mail merge and pivot table!"

You might as well compare Photoshop to MS Paint.

Hmm...

For Spreadsheets, have you had a look at:
        http://www.libreoffice.org/features/calc
and
        http://projects.gnome.org/gnumeric

For a Desktop Environment:
        http://mate-desktop.org/

When I have to use a Microsoft O/S, I feel I'm flying blind with one hand tied behind my back with the undercarriage still deployed. Microsoft O/S's are slow, cumbersome, lacking in customisability, and inherently insecure - I first started using a box with a Microsoft O/S back in the early days of MS-DOS, and I've seen Microsoft Windows 8.

Linux is the most widely used O/S on embedded devices and servers. It is also growing on the desktop.

In our household we have:
2 Linux desktops
2 Linux laptops
1 Linux phone (Android 4.2)
1 Linux gaming console (wii)
1 iPhone
1 Apple Mac desktop
(Note absence Microsoft O/S, and I suspect we will not get another Mac!)

Metro, is a good reason to switch to Linux.

The screen shots from https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Tour show that this interface is not using sub-pixel font rendering. I have noticed this on most if not all other Linux-type screen shots. Apparently the favored font rendering method on Linux is the old-fashioned "treat every pixel as some shade between the font color and the background color". The characters so rendered are substantially less well-formed and harder to read. And this surely isn't a matter of intellectual property: https://www.grc.com/cleartype.htm.

No, it's not just a single person, even if the person peddling his "lennart-wares" probably has more damage to the linux desktop than any other single person. The same applies equally to the people behind gnome. Read this for another example of this shit-faced idiocy, and how the group-mind springs into action to defend it.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9/systemmonitor/ There you go, and it's reasonably similar to the gnome 2 one.

can you file a bug? We certainly don't want to see tendonitis (or whatever) while using the interface. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/ and file against gnome-shell.

Canonical had already pre-determined that they were going to do their own thing. Mark has the gall to even say that they had come with the design first. As you can see that Canonical is moving Unity to QT.

I meant before that. The http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/ . Ubuntu has decided to fork. Before they decided to fork they wanted to play a more prominent role. Letting them move from the later opinion to the former was a huge mistake.

____

As for Google, Microsoft... I agree with the touchscreen move.

Also, what part of a project dating from way back is not legacy?

You are saying this as if there is some functionality problem from the project being more than a few years old. Surely KDE has a lot of legacy too? Are you happy with the developments that led to Phonon (where the most widely used backend on Linux is, ironically, GStreamer)?

As for your bizarre love of G_OBJECT... I don't know how to react to that... It's a bit like a priest admitting a really nasty kink whilst preaching to a group of nuns. You want objects and inheritance and introspection ? Use a language which supports that. C is not meant to be used that way.

Don't tell me in what ways C can or cannot be used. I may consider it a challenge :-)

You like GTK? use gtkmm.

Umm, no. If I want to use a more productive language than C, there are a few viable options, but C++ is not one of them.

Also, the GNOME core team knows this. And because they have decided c++ is anathema, they keep coming up with new languages-of-the-day each sold as the standard for future GNOME apps. There was C# and mono.

Heh, how much this KDE fanboy knows. Mono was never popular outside of a clique centered around Miguel de Icaza, and neither the platform nor the desktop ever depended on it.

These days it is Vala. Of course, it'll never work, because you have to pick a language which is not yours (so Vala won't work)

What the hell does this even mean? Among other things, Vala allows you to create libraries that are fully usable from C, or any other languages that can work with GObject introspection. Try that with C++.

Basically, you have C, C++, and possibly Java.

And JavaScript, and Python, and...

It is true. The Ubuntu Tweak tool, and Gnome 3, along with whatever extension a user feels they need (like adding a restart button), works very well. Gnome 3 is an affordable, modern OS IMHO and I like it a lot. I have Ubuntu 12.04/Gnome 3 on all my PCs, from large double-monitor rigs to a 10" netbook display. And I am thrilled I don't have to reconfigure anything until October 2017 according to this chart:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

Also, the low-tech folks with no budget who 'just needed a (recycled) computer' that I've turned on to it, have all taken to it well so far, with the most-minimal of hand-holding. So they are all good until October 2017 too. And I already know when to be ready for them, and when to get them ready too. October 2017 folks. Write it down.
__
https://extensions.gnome.org/
http://ubuntu-tweak.com/
----

I hate gnome shell, but considering Gnome continues to be a great product, and moves forward. I just replace Gnome Shell with Cinnamon, and plan to continue to do so, considering the cripples "classic"(sic) mode.

...but seriously https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/more-apps.html.en look at the applications those look like nice improvements, and look there is a weather application, they will be adding a stock application next. Holy Jesus on a donkey!!! is that a new note Application.

Seriously did nobody notice the replacement of Tomboy, my last dependency on mono...because its great. I've been waiting for an Android version for *forever*, but this http://worldofgnome.org/bijiben-or-just-gnome-notes/ looks like something I like more.

They keep breaking keyboard switching every release. Here's the story in 3.6:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681685
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684210

(If you read the comments, you'll see the usual attitude of Gnome devs - bilingual users who actually use this functionality are telling them that it's been broken, while devs who don't really use it but own it reply by coming up with invented reasons as to why the new behavior is the right thing, and everyone else should just shut up and learn it.)

You'd think they would pay more attention to this area in the new release, but apparently they have emasculated (the official press release calls it "simplified", in the usual Gnome bullshit-speak) it even further in 3.8, and there are bugs reported about erratic behavior of the new switcher. All that because XKB is, apparently, not good enough anymore.

With this kind of attitude towards their users (of which the above is but a single example), how come they still have any?

They keep breaking keyboard switching every release. Here's the story in 3.6:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681685
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684210

(If you read the comments, you'll see the usual attitude of Gnome devs - bilingual users who actually use this functionality are telling them that it's been broken, while devs who don't really use it but own it reply by coming up with invented reasons as to why the new behavior is the right thing, and everyone else should just shut up and learn it.)

You'd think they would pay more attention to this area in the new release, but apparently they have emasculated (the official press release calls it "simplified", in the usual Gnome bullshit-speak) it even further in 3.8, and there are bugs reported about erratic behavior of the new switcher. All that because XKB is, apparently, not good enough anymore.

With this kind of attitude towards their users (of which the above is but a single example), how come they still have any?

They keep breaking keyboard switching every release. Here's the story in 3.6:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681685
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684210

(If you read the comments, you'll see the usual attitude of Gnome devs - bilingual users who actually use this functionality are telling them that it's been broken, while devs who don't really use it but own it reply by coming up with invented reasons as to why the new behavior is the right thing, and everyone else should just shut up and learn it.)

You'd think they would pay more attention to this area in the new release, but apparently they have emasculated (the official press release calls it "simplified", in the usual Gnome bullshit-speak) it even further in 3.8, and there are bugs reported about erratic behavior of the new switcher. All that because XKB is, apparently, not good enough anymore.

With this kind of attitude towards their users (of which the above is but a single example), how come they still have any?

One of the big criticisms of MS is that it did not start with how humans were going to interact with it's equipment.

One must be careful when using this definition of human. This wide net catches up the technophiles and the feature freaks with the technophobes and the Alzheimer's patients. The wider market is all that Google is courting here with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). That group is made up of very different people from the early adopters. It should be obvious that majority of users of computing devices today are not going to use these devices the same way someone who would come to slashdot or install GNOME 3 would.

It's not like a google search wouldn't uncover the massive industry dedicated to showing how foolish such generalizations are. Yet we continue to make bad UI choices and target the wrong crowds, often poorly like armchair quarterbacks at the human interface Superbowl. Your average human has more than the average number of legs, that still doesn't mean you make one legged pants. Why do developers continue to churn out the proverbial pocket, pant and half-a-fly?

I claim it's only partially this 'every human' culture but mainly lack of training. Outside of the craft industries the engineers, developers and other creators of our stuff start off learning how to solder circuits to breadboards and sling code at a compiler without even the idea they need to consider how people will use this stuff. Run tar --help verses git --help verses gpg -h and see for ask yourself which one was designed to be used by people and which one was slapped together to be run by a machine.

What Google is doing here is something salespeople, marketers, Apple and the military have known since the first rock got sold to the first caveman. You can sell to everyone on envy what you cannot sell to everyone on features. And Google is out to "sell" to everyone (i.e. put ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible.)

I wish them the best of luck with their Not Dorky Glasses(tm). The very existence of contacts and their popularity among the visually impaired strongly argues against their success in Western markets.

I think GNOME 3 is a great UI for non-techies: my mom and sister use it - https://extensions.gnome.org/ is very useful, thought

I have a Samsung S24A450UW (1920x1200) + a legacy secondary screen (an odd 1680x1050).

I like having two screens. The main screen has most of my work stuff, and has multiple virtual-desktops. The secondary screen is static, and shows mostly mail, irc, todo lists, and a secondary firefox window for reference stuff. (I use Gnome 3, but presumably most window managers have that option, although I moved to Gnome 3 after 10 years with FVWM, but it had become too annoying to configure correctly)

I also find it nice to have 1920x1200, and not a 1920x1080, unless you plan using the screen vertically. I even use an extention to hide Gnome's panel, which I found was a waste of space. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/545/hide-top-bar/

Try GBrainy. It's a brain teaser sort of thing. I found it when it came with Edubuntu.
https://live.gnome.org/gbrainy

http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/

/ducks

Finnish does not have a direct translations for "yes" and "no;"

You're not supposed to use yes/no dialogs anyway. For example: "Shall the file be closed? Close - Cancel" or "May the file run? Run - Cancel". Or does the button phrasing practice apply only to English?

Apple user with less the 8% computer market share are remapping the keyboard for the other 90%. New keyboard shortcut mappings adopts Apple's OSX style , yet will trouble user that don't use a mac. Gnome needs to be forked again stop these Apple user from turning Gnome into a carbon copy of OSX.

So how do you patch a GUI that you consider "counterintutive and confusing" unless you fork it?

The installer GUI is python code. You can patch it the same way you'd patch any other code. Except in this case, one complaint is inconsistent fonts, so you don't even have to be a programmer. Just search-replace font names.

Alternatively, the GUI is mainly developed using the Glade"IDE", http://glade.gnome.org/ so you can edit the GUI graphically, right in Glade. Glade generates Python source, from from there run "diff -Nrup" just like any other patch.

For something that's more completely considered a bug, check the long and sorry history of bug 108951. Only about 6 years old, but one of the more irritating ones. Sad to see such an issue bounced from distro to project to DE and back again, then finally closed because the feature it affects is removed.

Gnome actually has very good, standardized, readable and easy-to-implement Human Interface Guidelines. Of course, it's up to developers to decide whether to follow it.

yes, me too. There are quite a lot of more imaginative (and probably better written) extensions on https://extensions.gnome.org/ I would encourage you to have a browse and see what else you can do with your computer. Then buy stuff. This volcano won't hollow itself out you know - I need the commissions.

Do yourself a favour and take a look at glib. God's gift to C programming -- the string handling alone is worth its weight in, well, gstrings...

It requires a memory dump of the system where the keys are used. Bad submitter. Is anyone filtering the submissions? This is starting to look like reddit.

Which you can get VERY easily if the computer has a firewire port.
http://blogs.gnome.org/muelli/2010/04/reading-ram-using-firewire/

But does it run Linux?

NO!
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/42
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/43
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/58
Mostly stemming from this 10+ year old GNOME bug
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

I was an early widescreen Linux adopter and these bugs drove me nuts. Now Unity is optimized for widescreen monitors. KDE and XFCE also work fairly well w/ vertical task bars.

See here and here for a sampling. Canonical is listed, but they're hardly the only one. Then there's also the famous (infamous?) Gnome Census from a couple of years ago.

This friendly fire stuff is uncalled for. Everyone who claims to be the only one who really cares about Linux, on the desktop or as a whole, should be reminded of the Judgment of Solomon.

And if the laptop has a firewire port, i'm fairly certain RAM can be dumped on ANY operating system.

Ah, this must be the reason that Apple is dropping Firewire in it's laptops. Always looking out for us. Thanks Steve! (wherever you are)

And if the laptop has a firewire port, i'm fairly certain RAM can be dumped on ANY operating system.

I'll reconsider gnome the day they fix this 12 year old bug so that the panel is can be used vertically.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382
Xfce could use some polish, but at least it's passable for people with widescreen monitors.

Linux Mint is a distribution of Linux that is based off of Ubuntu. Like Ubuntu, it uses Debian packages.

When Ubuntu made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("Unity") and the GNOME project made the decision to make a new desktop environment ("GNOME Shell"), Linux Mint in turn made the decision to support those of us who loved GNOME 2. We have two options: MATE and Cinnamon. Both are well-supported by Linux Mint (and in fact primary development on both is by Linux Mint guys).

MATE is simply a fork of GNOME 2. For reasons that are not clear to me, GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 cannot co-exist on the same system... something about library conflicts. (Doesn't Linux have library versioning that should make it possible to avoid these conflicts? Eh, moving on.) The MATE project did a mass rename on everything in GNOME ("libgnome" -> "libmate", etc.) so MATE can co-exist on the same system with GNOME 3. So, those of us who loved the smooth polish that came from man-decades of development in GNOME can still use it.

But MATE isn't the future. From what I have heard, the library underpinnings of GNOME 3 really have improved over GNOME 2, and the new technology is a step up. Who wants to be locked into a frozen clone of GNOME 2 forever? Thus, Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a project to build on top of GNOME 3 and provide a user experience similar to GNOME 2. New plugins, new themes, etc. all go together to make a very usable desktop; but GNOME 3 apps will work seamlessly with it.

Many disgruntled Ubuntu users have abandoned Ubuntu for Linux Mint. Mint is now the top Linux distribution on distrowatch.com; I'm not sure it was even in the top ten before the whole Unity/GNOME Shell fiasco, but now it's number one.

A comment I have seen multiple times on Slashdot from different people: the Linux Mint guys are focused on making their users happy, rather than making something new. Where the GNOME Shell guys promise a "consistent and recognisable visual identity", and Mark Shuttleworth (the head Ubuntu guy) said "This is not a democracy. [...] we are not voting on design decisions.", the Linux Mint guys promise that you will "Love your Linux, Feel at Home, Get things Done!"

Linux Mint has always focused on making a beautiful system that is out-of-the-box usable. Now they are one of the top choices for people who have rejected Unity and GNOME Shell.

For me, the most important part of the announcement is that they have the password keeper working right now. I'm using Linux Mint on a laptop at work, and I can't connect to Windows shares; I'm hoping the new updates will sort that out for me.

Since this is based on Debian packages, I can probably just update in place without needing to do a full re-install.

P.S. One of my biggest complaints about GNOME 3 is that I can no longer take sit a Windows user down and just say "it works pretty much like what you are used to". You may like GNOME Shell and you may think it is better, but you cannot argue that it is very different, and it would take a bit of training before a guest could use it. Linux Mint, on the other hand, works a lot like pre-Windows 8 versions of Windows; with a little customization and theming I'll bet you could fool people into thinking it was actually Windows XP.

Likewise with Unity, it is pretty different from Windows. But it's very similar to the Mac, so maybe users familiar with the Mac can use it?

I see now what you meant with odd about the clock (I think GNOME's reasoning is that you can get the month and date information from the calendar). gnome-tweak-tool has switches for adding the month and day, and also displaying the seconds in the clock; you might want to check that. You can disable dynamic workspaces and change the number of them with it too.

I completely agree things should be a lot more clear about the extensions operation and the website too.

The workspaces behavior is fine for me because i never have that many windows open, but I completely understand it doesn't scale well for your usage. Actually, I use https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/503/always-zoom-workspaces/ to have the workspaces always visible instead of having to move the mouse all the way to the right (To switch windows I liked using https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/317/window-display/ so I could search for window titles, but it hasn't been updated to 3.6). A pager like what you proposed would be a nice extension for gnome-shell, and I think it would be entirely doable.

I see now what you meant with odd about the clock (I think GNOME's reasoning is that you can get the month and date information from the calendar). gnome-tweak-tool has switches for adding the month and day, and also displaying the seconds in the clock; you might want to check that. You can disable dynamic workspaces and change the number of them with it too.

I completely agree things should be a lot more clear about the extensions operation and the website too.

The workspaces behavior is fine for me because i never have that many windows open, but I completely understand it doesn't scale well for your usage. Actually, I use https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/503/always-zoom-workspaces/ to have the workspaces always visible instead of having to move the mouse all the way to the right (To switch windows I liked using https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/317/window-display/ so I could search for window titles, but it hasn't been updated to 3.6). A pager like what you proposed would be a nice extension for gnome-shell, and I think it would be entirely doable.

• Install this https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/484/workspace-grid/
• Profit!

Unity is not Gnome 3. I currently use Fedora 17 (Gnome 3) which is a world of difference.

However, the thing that makes Gnome 3 worthwhile is extensions. Did you try http://extensions.gnome.org? You find the extension you like and click the ON button. No authentication or package downloads. I think this is where the power of Gnome3 comes to show = e.g. you can disable all the fancy fluff with simple CSS.

You could say that Gnome 3 should have sane defaults instead of relying on users installing 5 extensions at the end of installing the OS. And I totally agree.

I have an Asus EEE PC (900A) with NetBSD 5 that runs the stock X.org and uses the kernel Intel DRI driver (i915drm) for accelerated 3D performance -- pretty good given the hardware. There are DRI drivers for Radeon that I've also used, haven't looked into Nouveau. So the 3D support foundation is there, but the hardware pickings are still kinda slim.

Besides basic 3D acceleration, the continual 'catchup game' with desktop BSD is the explicit coding for Linux on the part of the big open source desktop environments, example: https://live.gnome.org/PortabilityMatrix

Users are even expected to open a web browser and navigated to https://extensions.gnome.org/local/ to view installed extensions. Seriously. WTF.

I have to have a connection to the public internet in order to *see my local machine's configuration?* That can't be right. Somebody tell me that's not right.