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GNOME 3 Delayed Until September 2010
supersloshy writes "Contrary to popular opinion, GNOME 3 will not be released in March next year. It has been delayed until September 2010, six months later. According to the news message, this is because 'our community wants GNOME 3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more appropriate.' GNOME 3's main goal is to re-define the ways people interact with the desktop, mainly through a new UI design (currently called 'GNOME Shell'), while GNOME 2.30, set for release in March, will have a focus on being stable. An early visual tour of GNOME 3 has been posted at Digitizor."
Um... taking time doesn't necessarily mean it gets done right.
See Also: Windows Vista
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
That isn't true. Blizzard rarely releases a game on time, they are of the up-most quality, and they are money driven.
I'm glad that we can make such broad sweeping generalizations these days, that Microsoft now represents the entire private sector.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
All GUI experiences I had always were some combination of stuff that's around since ages. Artistic freedom in CS is at its best when it is heavily curbed. Hell, saving your document in MS Word has become an art form. Even my Mac, which allegedly comes with the most wonderful GUI on the planet, drives me up the wall. All I want and all we need is Firefox, Eclipse, a terminal and Openoffice and plain and simple menus with it. Anything else just plain and simple. Brothers unite and let's get back to the roots. I say "No more rotating, sliding, enlarging, diminishing menus!" Saving a document is best done using a simple key sequence :w
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Gnome3 looks unusable anyways, delay it forever. Go through the early tour and tell me that is more usable. I've no idea wtf they were thinking.
Lose the ability to 1click to open aps. Clock takes a huge chunk of real estate. The aps button is needlessly large and boring text. Opening a common folder takes more time now. This is just my first look at it but still wtf...
Do we laugh or cry? It's like KDE and Gnome are in some sort of frantic struggle for who can botch desktop Linux the most.
I hope some commercial company like Google puts grownups to work like they did with Android on some replacement for these two basketcase projects.
This isn't what I'm missing in Gnome. I'm missing desktop sharing and conferencing software like Livemeeting. I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
Instead, some *person* for want of a better word, thinks I need to have yet another new way to select the same applications, wants to "improve" (i.e. remove the choice from) the task list to be *more* application-centric (so retrograde it's laughable).. What a waste of time. What about an Object-Oriented or task-oriented desktop? How about some *actual* innovation? Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant;.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Being force-fed this kind of thing is pretty unpleasant
If the was Microsoft, and you didn't know better, then perhaps it's fair to say you are being "force fed" this change. However, this is OSS, and nobody is forcing you to use Gnome Shell. You have options: stick with Gnome 2.x, use XFCE, KDE or any of the other window managers available. Just stop whinging about how you don't like it.
Maybe they're trying to innovate and do something new and different. I don't share your doubts but if I did, I would rather give them the benefit of any doubt then criticize before I had even tried the software. It seems to me that they're in a tough spot: do what UIs have been doing for a long time and get accused of copying rather than doing something new, or do something new and get bad word from people who reject the free software out of hand at their "first look".
Digital Citizen
Why is this a preview if they don't want people to say what they think?
You really aren't going to help F/OSS by calling people whingers - it's a kind of whinging in itself.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Lack of taskbar makes it unusable.. Ubuntu remix way is so much better than this.. so gnome people.. please stop working on useless stuff like gnome 3. I was considering giving some money to the foundation but when i see where they're heading to.. no thanks.
I have many problems with gnome as well, but several of the things you mentioned are available now. But the menus do need to be more configurable. I am annoyed that everything has to be so damn big. And they could use to get single clicking right, which only KDE ever pulled of effectively.
it looks like GNOME is now copying MacOSX instead of Windows *eye roll*.
At least now their copying something that at least works, but still, they're copying, and thus ensuring that they are always playing catchup, and creating an inferior product. This is not a new problem, and has been talked about repeated on /. 2005, 2006, and even last June. With the notable exception of Firefox, there hasn't been anything original, innovative, and well good from the F/OSS community, which is very disturbing.
Hell, read some CHI, USENIX, and SIGIR papers people! Stop making a poor facsimile of two years, and start making the next five. Ask yourself, why the hell is Wave coming from Google, instead of us?
I'm also missing some ease-of-use dealing with very simple things like cutting and pasting a link to a windows share and using it to look at a remote directory without having to edit all the slashes.
If gnome (and linux in general) wants to escape the geek-in-a-basement marketshare, it has to focus on the average non-tech user. And no, pasting a link to a windows share is not what this user does.
Instead, this user is interested in finding "that god-damn file" that he saved somewhere yesterday morning and has no idea where it is. He doesn't organize his files, he doesn't care about file hierarchies, he just wants his file. He also wants to easily find that openoffice window that got lost in the 20 windows he opened and never closed in the last hour. Believe it or not, no desktop environment makes it really easy to do such basic stuff.
IMHO Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist is a step in the right direction for the average user.
Make a system any idiot can use and only idiots will use it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Yep. Gnome 3 is a mental disorder. It's what happens when you spend all your time dreaming about how to come up with a new UI paradigm when there is already a highly satisfactory, perfectly usable, and well accepted paradigm that has stood the test of time, and that no one is complaining about. It is new for the sake of new. Kde 4 was much the same thing, but at least they optimized their infrastructure and cleaned up some rough edges in the process (while hopelessly screwing up some basic stuff).
Despair not, however. There is still Xfce, and it shows no sign of succumbing to a mental disorder.
You are aware that OS X natively supports NFS and MacFUSE works exactly like Linux FUSE?
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
nobody cares.
Nobody except the millions of people like me who use Gnome. The current version is near-perfect and the new one seems to have lost all the good points and added nothing. OK, all the desktops on screen at once could be useful once in a while, but WTF! If it ain't broke (and it ain't), don't "fix" it.
Smivs on the intertubes!
I'm yet to be convinced that that is the correct approach. Users should learn to save their god-damned files somewhere sensible so they can actually find them again, and close windows when they're done with them. This isn't a technical user, this is a user with a clue, for goodness sakes. If you're so dumb you can't learn the concepts behind these tasks, I really do wonder whether you are suited to the operation of a Turing machine.
[FUCK BETA]
They will fix this issue, by removing workspaces, which will be deemed far too confusing for most people, especially since the developer's grandmother doesn't use them or know what they are.
It looks like the task bar is missing. It looks like you have to click more to get where you want to go. It looks shiny. If I wanted all that I'd go to windows. Maybe I will. Windows 7 isn't bad at all. Hopefully when 3.0 IS released it will be customizable to get it back to where it was!
Imagine you were looking to buy a new car. Going to a dealership, you are presented with a sedan that is marketed as "redefining the way drivers interact with their automobile." Getting behind the wheel, you discover that standard conventions like the steering wheel, turn indicator, gear shift, accelerator and brake pedals have all been replaced with New and Improved devices that the salesman assures you are so much Better.
Would you buy the damned thing?
I'm sick and tired of coders who pretend they are cognitive psychologists or ergonomics experts.
Just implement a standard GUI using normal conventions. Anything more and people like me will either find ways to turn the bullshit off, or we'll avoid using your product.
Microsoft is about to learn this the hard way with their new bullshit replacement for the task bar.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The idea of designing a new approach to the desktop is commendable and shows one of the advantages of open source. If people doesn't like it they can switch to other alternatives. The idea of making it work well is also a positive innovation on some well established practices of both the FOSS and proprietary camps.
However there are for sure some strange things in this Gnome Shell.
On the positive side, the large Activities menu could be very useful on the forthcoming generation of touchscreen computers because it provides a larger target for fingers than the menu items we have now. It reminds me a lot of the interfaces used by some Linux distributions for netbooks it is seems good. Maybe it's not so handy for computers that only have a mouse (too much travel).
Finally I hope that the top bar can be moved to the bottom because I just hate top bars. They are placed right where my eyes look by default but they are the less important piece of information on the screen. Apple made it totally wrong IMHO and MS improved their design, maybe the only time they did it.
So, I'll be using Gnome Shell in its present form? Maybe I'll give a try but I bet I'll soon switch to something else, back to Gnome 2 if I can. Other desktops I so for Linux look to much like Windows, something that cannot be good considering all the years I had to use it and never liked the way it worked.
KDE also now has the advantage of being able to more or less replicate the "Traditionalist" desktop paradigm. I'm not convinced that will be the case with Gnome 3 from the screenshots I've seen. Big oops.
My experience with *inexperienced* users always shows one thing that no Desktop GUI seems to have addressed/solved yet: the User who does not care whether the program they want is already running or not, they just want to use it. At the moment you look to see in one area if, say, you have a web browser already running and if not then you start one. This is one step too many. The User should just have one button to press per app and then the GUI decides whether to simple bring an existing app window to the front, or start the app for the first time. (Some programs play well with multiple startups, others do not.)
I find I get closest to what I had on real kde running xfce with the kde backend and the kde applications. I use the new QGtkStyle which makes the kde /qt applications use gtk to draw the widgets. and compiz expose and cairo-dock (I don't like the always on top of the xfce panel). This gives me most of what I had with kde 3.5 and compiz except different wallpaper per desktop.
I just got done trying kde 4.3 for 3 weeks. It is to much of pain to get it to give me MY desktop not what they fucking want to give me.
Most of the applications are as good as the old ones (the only complaints I see are 2 i don't use konq. and amorock).
Since the kde devs. now talk about options being bad! sort of like gnome did from 1.4 ->2 i don't see kde ever going back to a useful desktop os again. I think they are going for the new name of KCE K Cellphone Environment.
Oh I was the same as you in I used gnome 1.4 and tried gnome 2 could not get used to how unfriendly it was to configuring what you want and moved to kde.
Might want to use a different calculator, though. By my count, you have accounted for 105% of your computing time...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I hope they use the extra time to make things stable, organized, configurable and documented. More descriptive tooltips would help, too.
I recently installed Fedora 11 and in only 3 weeks I've lost the abilty to see the top of the cube, to focus on no windows, to zoom using the scroll wheel, and to bring up a menu by clicking over the desktop. Compiz configuration is hopelessly disorganized. Advice from user forums points to menu entries that don't exist and suggest changes that have no effect.
On the plus side, gnome has the first edge flip I've ever used that is good enough that I don't turn it off after a few days. Now if they'd only make an option to require an ALT key or button press for edge flip and I'd be a lot happier.
Also, it crashes occasionally, but I don't know for sure that the fault is with gnome and not firefox or something else.
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