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GNOME 3 Released
Blacklaw writes "The GNOME Desktop team has sent its latest creation into the wild, officially launching GNOME 3.0 — the biggest redesign the project has enjoyed in around nine years. 'We've taken a pretty different approach in the GNOME 3 design that focuses on the desired experience and lets the interface design follow from that,' designer Jon McCann explained during the launch. 'With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.'"
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Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
There's always Xfce for those of you who still want a traditional, stable environment. Uses the same Gtk+ themes that Gnome used, and the panel is flexible enough to emulate Gnome 2.x, KDE/Windows, or CDE.
I know, they turned their back on the *BSD's with Xfce 4.8, but it's still the only desktop environment worth using anymore.
Oh yeah, and they plan on sticking with Gtk+ 2.2 for the next couple of years.
The World is Yours.
I _do_ feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease... of course, that might just be the Ritalin...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Read the release notes in your favorite language here: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.0/
The press release link is a moving target. It's now: http://www.gnome.org/press/2011/04/gnome-3-0-released-better-for-users-developers-3/
Here's a link to the official GNOME 3 site.
To me it looks more like a smartphone interface (nice for a tablet PC), but errrr.... quite a paradigm change for notebook and desktop users.
Now, before I get flamed for what I have written, let me remind everyone that what I have written reflects my personal opinion...and I am entitled to that.
And remember...I am not alone. When will these GNOME folks produce a shell that is a beauty to look at by default?
Actually, the UI is fairly unique. Well, sure, it still uses windows, and it's entirely true that the window decorations are awful with far too wide grey title bars, but I'm pretty sure the menu system is different from any other desktop and tablet.
I wrote a blog post all about how to tweak GNOME 3's hidden settings to be more like how you want it to be. You can read it at my blog, here. To summarize, I explain how to go back to GNOME 2, install extensions, change themes, and much more. However, I do want to note that I don't even use my own tips; GNOME 3 so far has been nearly perfect for me and I see very little need to change the settings I mention, or even use any extensions. In fact, I wrote another blog post detailing the 10 things that I love about GNOME 3 in a sort of mini-review.
To summarize my latter post, I love how GNOME 3 "puts me in the driver's seat". There's no annoying, blinking lights, there's no "are you sure?" dialogs, the design is minimalist and takes up very little screen space, and it only gives me things like the window list, application list, and even notifications when I explicitly ask for them. If I don't want notifications I just mark myself as "busy" and check up on them at my leisure. If I want to switch a window I just tap the Windows key and click the one I want; fast and simple! Yes, that's "one more step", but it takes barely any more time than any persistent window list would take up (and less screen space, too). I love how easy and fast searching for applications and places in the Activities search bar is (you don't even need to click it; just start typing!), which gives it a GNOME Do vibe. Regardless of the search, I also love how easy it is to launch applications with the favorites list on the dashboard. GNOME 3 lets me add extensions as well just like any modern web browser so I can customize it or add features as I choose. No other desktop combines empowerment, distraction-free working, extensibility, and simplicity like GNOME 3 does and I have to say that it is the greatest desktop environment I've ever had the pleasure of working with so far. Even better, it looks like it will only get more awesome as time goes on!
Congrats, GNOME team, for your amazing work! :)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
"With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease."
So... they're outsourcing their marketing to Taiwan?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Think different.
Yes, let's all flock to a company that thinks that having improper grammar in it's slogan is hip and cool.
Respected? Right. "The reason we take away all the UI for configuring options is because we respect you. It certainly wouldn't be because we feel you're too dumb to decide how you want your own desktop configured or because we worry that users, if left to themselves, might configure their software to work the mundane way they want it rather than the superior way we UI elite have envisioned."
Maybe it just escaped.
Changing the user experience for the sake of "changing the user experience" doesn't do it for me. Gnome3 is a downgrade for me and a nudge to check out KDE.
I guess you can't please all the people all the time, but this effort is headed in the wrong direction.
Best,
I just noticed that on gnome.org it says "Hosted by Canonical" at the bottom. Isn't it great how they're getting along, what with all the drama? :)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
That’d be “its”.
I am all for rethinking the desktop paradigm, but I'm not sure whether Gnome 3 is a complete rethink or a desperate attempt to break out of the Windows 95 mould (which I think most linux users, given the popularity of mint and pclinuxos, would grudgingly admit is a sensible way of organising a desktop).
When I moved from Win XP to Gnome 2, I appreciated the rapid access the upper and lower bars gave me to applications, places, open applications, control of access, desktop, shortcuts, other panels and a full calendar - something that greatly improved productivity. Gone were the days of clicking on the same spot in the lower left, and then trying to manoeuvre your mouse around the nested menu upon menu just to find the setting or application you were after, which often led to the mouse losing focus and frustration all round. I feel like Gnome 3 is a step back in this regard, channelling almost all operations through the same spot in the corner could create exactly the same sort of inefficiency and bottleneck.
When I can get Gnome 3 to work properly on my setup, and give it a go for a decent period of time, maybe I'll change my mind. But I think it's more likely I'll find the answer to my own question, and realise that the problem is Linux struggling to clearly define it's niche and uniqueness between Mac OS X and Windows 7.
'With any luck you will feel more focused, aware, effective, capable, respected, delighted, and at ease.'" ... "Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? " -- Dirty Harry
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Is the new page for GTK2 docs a horrible textvomit for anyone else? Did they break this specifically for this release?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Gnome 3 and 4 will be held until the ransom is paid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... will I still feel respected then?
You do realize that apple had to use some of that unpronounceable "open sores" (HAHA) code to make their operating system work. They did not have a decent operating system until they lifted huge chunks of BSD (hard to pronounce, I know) code.
Give them a break, they're short on time.
Gnome body Gnomes the trouble they've seen!
At least they have decided on a Gnomenclature.
and so on...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It looks like they decided to stop copying Apple indirectly by copying Windows, and start directly mimicking Apple's OS X. The universal search, the dock, and the integrated settings all look like OS X, without the fancy quartz graphics.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Slow news day...
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I look forward to using this new version of GNOME sometime around 2014.
You do realize that you are probably replying to a bot?
Really, you nailed this one fair and square.
I'll be giving it a shot in a VM. Normally I install stuff like that on my old laptop (1,7Ghz Celeron M, ATi Xpress 200M), but I haven't been a big enough fan of GNOME to install the hole thing. Also, I agree with the KDE4 releases being better then people give them credit for.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I kind of miss the old launcher that was in XFCE 3.8, which I gather was similar to CDE's. Is there something very similar to that which I can use now? I'm not too keen on awn or Cairo-Dock; they are too glitzy and have too many options.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
ssa
Now wash your hands.
What's your "good reason" to support the blatant sociopaths at Microsoft?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
of course, that might just be the Ritalin...
Where can I find that. Is that under the accessories menu?
What is it with projects having to complete change the way they do things when they decide to "clean up" the code? I understand the need to make your mark on a project, but this is like the Amarok rewrite disaster. I wonder if it is even possible to rewrite something while retaining the "core values." Looking at the latest flop of Hollywood remakes, it seems a universal issue.
Maybe as a society we are becoming less capable, living up to the society that was portrayed in Idiocracy....
--WooooHoooo--
...fairly unique...
Is that like 'almost exactly'?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Is that supposed to be sarcasm? KDE never labeled their releases as beta -- 4.0 was supposed to be a fully usable release, it's just users fled from it in horror. Indeed, either 4.3 or 4.4 was the version that users found actually usable, so this is what was picked up by distributions.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
He was just trying to be hip and cool!
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
KDE4 is a joke. Now Gnome has become a joke.
Why is it that the leading GUIs have to suck so damn much ? Either provide fantastic functionality, or get the fuck out of my way. This is why XFCE and Fluxbox have so many proponents, they do little, but they do it well.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Yeah...heck, Torvalds is a self-proclaimed git.
looks like they learned a lot from the NeXT-inspired UIs like WindowMaker
-- An image is worth about 2.5E4 characters.
OS X has run on Thinkpads for a while now, unofficially of course.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
You will only be able to give it a shot in a VM if your VM supports 3D acceleration in the guest in a way that compiz works without glitches. Good luck with that. The dependence on hardware accelerated 3D is the #1 reason for me to stay away from Gnome3 as long as possible because this would make my ability to work depend on the (lacking) quality and stability of Xorg graphics drivers as far as 3D hw acceleration is concerned.
Linus Torvalds is switching back to KDE. (j\k)
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
In terms of GUI, the OSX interface is simply superior to anything Microsoft, or any of the other *nixes (who all seem to make the mistake of copying Windows) have to offer.
The OSX GUI is a straight ripoff of very early XFCE.
A few questions:
How well does nautilus work in Xfce? Doesn't launching nautilus also launch the Gnome DE?
Is it compatible with Gnome applets (the ones you put on the panel)? I don't know if there's a FreeDesktop standard for that which is implemented by Xfce. I'm particularly interested in the Tracker applet.
Does Thunar performance degrade over time? Nautilus is fast in opening a folder with a lot of files in it when you first launch it. But after a few days, it gets more and more sluggish and then takes a few seconds to show you a folder.
Does Xfce have a UI panel thing for virtual desktops?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Its' the Slashdot jinx: every post correcting somebody's grammar has to have a grammar mistake of its own (including this one).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
No maximize/minimize buttons. Less functionality than a KDE. Lame.
Actually works ? The sound often gets statics in my USB headset after a few hours. Plugging and unpluging it to fix it triggers an avalanche of notification sounds that somehow accumulated in the meantime. Resizing a window which lower right corner is near the taskbar is fun too. MacOSX is far from impressive for me. Just another OS like Debian or Windows.
it does put you into the driver's seat alright - that of a train on a single track.
Hint: the passive voice was used in the summary.
We've taken a pretty different approach in the GNOME 3 design that focuses on the desired experience and lets the interface design follow from that
Well, the experience desired by whom? Me? Well, no GNOME developer ever asked me. I bet they didn't ask you either. I think they just sat around and discussed among themselves what users should want, and then created whatever they decided people should want.
FVWM FTW :-)
I thought git was Linus's name for Andrew Tridgell?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Very helpful blog post.
You say that you don't understand why someone would want to minimize a window.
Maybe I'm missing something, but here goes:
You minimize it to get it out of the way without closing it entirely. Having to reopen it means you have to re-navigate to the file you were reading or image you were viewing.
1. If you can have only one app visible at a time, I guess you really don't need minimize. Talk about a Fischer-Price interface, though. Say goodbye to viewing information in one app while you, e.g., type up a report.
2. If all apps are visible at once, then, yes, you might want to minimize a few to concentrate on 2 or 3.
3. If you can have X number of apps visible, #2 may still apply. When you hit the Win key, are you shown a list of virtual desktops or workspace, or a list of applications?
It's amazing that the window list panel is seen as a piece of code "hard to maintain". What, were there viruses affecting the panel? It's just a list of windows. Once click, you get your window. They could have just turned it off by default, and allowed people to turn it on if they wanted.
The nanny attitude is just amazing.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yeah, it sort of reminds me of the move toward keyless ignition.
I mean, was there a great hue and cry saying that turning a key is just too hard? It's like designers think that they're useless if they're not constantly designing new and weird ways to do what people were doing just fine with already.
Not to mention the fact that you need to hold down the button for 3 seconds to turn it off.
Next they'll come out with joystick steering. (I say that sarcastically, but some auto designer out there who wants to make his mark has probably jotted it down as a brainstorm.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
.. where is it? Did they hide it really really really well as part of the hide-stuff-to-improve-the-user-experience? I'm not amused.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
The GNOME 3 UI looks very similar to the Android 3 UI. Maybe the GNOME team is trying to "bridge the gap" and bring a smart phone style user interface to the general purpose PC market. Unfortunately, this strategy will most likely fail due to the differences in input method. The PC keyboard+mouse system is vastly different than a smart phone multitouch screen system.
-Valen
I can't quite tell if your comment is supposed to be pro or con Gnone3.
It seems like it could go either way. I'll argue con:
Things were already working just fine. I hadn't heard of outbreaks of inability to open OpenOffice, Firefox, or whatever in either the NYTimes or Linux Journal. People post about their grannies or preschoolers using Linux just fine all the time on /..
So if grannies and kids were already using Gnome2 just fine, who else is there that's even dumber that needs a new interface?
Exactly how much will the new interface make things more productive in the average office that autohide of the panels wouldn't have been able to do?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
A few questions:
vi +
Apple is going in exactly the same direction as Gnome and Ubuntu are with Mac OSX 10.7.
Fuck that,
Fuck you,
Fuck Apple
Apparently you can: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-28733.html
That must be the understatement of the year amongst Linux users.
Here, here. Seemingly every OS is supersizing their icons to properly show the world how they are oh so clever and artistic. Icons have slowly changed from utilitarian shortcuts to arthouse exhibits with all the arrogant pompousness that entails.
"There's always Xfce" ..
Lubuntu is even more lightweight ..
With all the bashing and anti-fanboi talk against Apple - to which I agree to a certain extent, although I've been a happy Apple customer for the last 7-8 years - it kind of annoys me that other projects - Open Source in particular - keep copying a great deal of what comes out of Cupertino.
;) thanks for the effort folkz!
- KDE 4, IMHO lifts off quite some
- Android, well... not much to say here, but basically an iOS ripoff
- and now Gnome 3... these "iAds" that are just like the cupertinian, with a nerdy checkers shirt twist.
Come on guys, I hope Gnome 3 itself is not like: an OSX with a nerdy not-quite-mainstream UI design.
Oh, this is not a troll, BTW... just a gentle nudge
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Pick your poison: Jobs, Ballmer, RMS.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Exactly. When they devote that much space to the titlebars, what's the point of ditching the min/max buttons? It doesn't save any space.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
What's your "good reason" to support the blatant sociopaths at Microsoft?
None whatsoever.However, that's why I try to use free OSes wherever possible. I don't know why you decided to automatically polarize the conversation into Windows vs. Mac though: I didn't even mention Gates, Hell & Co. Still have to make a living and support my family, so at this point in my life I write Windows code. I'd rather not, but jobs for engineers in my age group don't exactly fall off trees (not anymore.) At home though, which is what I was talking about, we're a Linux shop (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, whatever anyone happens to prefer.)
The truth is that Apple Computer is just as much of an evil enterprise that Microsoft, Inc. at this point. Both Ballmer and Jobs dissemble very easily (I think they both practice lying when they get up in the morning, they're both so good at it.) The difference is that Microsoft's customers don't believe a word that comes from their CEO's mouth, and Apple customers will defend everything their pet corporate overlord does 'til their dying breath.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Installed it on my ASUS EEE 701, kinda like it. Made a YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn-_yOPJtOs