GNOME Shell Extensions Are Live

DrXym writes "GNOME Shell has been criticized for certain shortcomings when compared to GNOME 2.x. Chief amongst them was that 2.x offered panel applets whereas 3.x is seemingly lacking any such functionality. What most people don't know is that GNOME Shell has a rich extension framework similar to Mozilla Firefox add-ons. Now, the official site to install extensions has gone live. So if you yearn for an application menu, or a dock, or a status monitor, then head on over. Extensions can be installed with a few clicks and removed just as easily."

Comments

Dead

[masternerdguy]

Gnome 3 is dead. Mod me down but it's true.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Xfce is the next standard for the authentic-gnome users, I've made the migration and I'm entirely satisfied.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Xfce is great if you thought windows 95 was a little too fancy. As Torvalds said yesterday, Gnome 3 should come with gnome-tweak-tool right in settings.

Once you've used that, there's really no competition.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why it's the default on Linux Mint, the most popular linux distribution on distrowatch.com?
I'm a nerd and I love gnome shell (with MGSE for taskbar/tray icons), it looks so polished and expensive.. it's about time we had OS X quality on desktop linux. Sure, it's not flawless.. but I expect it to become more stable and provide some expected basic functionality once the developers get their "creative energy" out of the way.

Re:Dead

[mcneely.mike]

So did minecraft: why i was talking to a creeper just now and

Re:Dead

[Gusfm]

I'm sick of gnome 3. Gnome 2 was so damn good, I like it a lot, and now I just hate this Gnome 3 so much! I'm installing kde 4 right now. Let's see if it's better than this crap.

Re:Dead

[KugelKurt]

Xfce is great if you thought windows 95 was a little too fancy. As Torvalds said yesterday, Gnome 3 should come with gnome-tweak-tool right in settings.

Whether Tweak Tool is preinstalled or not is the distributor's decision.

Re:Dead

[hairyfeet]

I'll get modded worse but this is something I feel I HAVE to ask: Wasn't Linux supposed to be the "sensible" one? the one where you didn't have code just being chunked because of some new shiny? I mean here you had KDE 3 and GNOME 2, both had been battle tested, were rock solid, were certainly not ugly on the eyes, had tons of features and were getting pretty damned bug free, so what happened? Did MSFT going bling happy force everyone to be blinded by the shiny?

I swear the whole Linux situation reminds me of an old SNL skit about Bizarro world. its like "Quick users am happy and things am stable! This is no good, we must throw everything out and break lots of stuff! Now look, users am unhappy and things broken, all better now" WTF?

I don't know, maybe its all Canonical's fault as they seem to be the ones that really started doing Bizarro shit like 6 month releases and seeming to go out of their way to piss of their users. When I first tried Linux in 2004 I thought that by now me and every other retailer in America would have penguins on boxes and Linux PCs and laptops right beside the Windows and Mac machines. progress was slow but steady, every year things got better, drivers got a little more stable, things got less fiddly, it really looked to be coming along nicely.

Now it just seems more like politics and fanboyism, where every request or critique is treating like pissing on the bible, things seem a hell of a lot more unstable and all that progress seems to have been thrown right out the window into the path of a bus. I have tried damned near every "user friendly" distro I have ever heard of and can't get a single one to pass my "is it safe?" test which simulates my customer having the PC and just keeping it updated for 3 years, not a single one. Drivers break, DEs get swapped out, UIs get flaky, and when i point this out all I get is heaps of insults and accused of being one of THEM whoever the THEM is this week.

I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?

Re:Dead

[DMFNR]

I wonder how many people hate Gnome 3, without having tried it, for no other reason than the fact that it is a change from what they're used to. Now I can totally understand that, most people on a site like Slashdot use their computer for work, there is no reason for one to mess up his long developed work flow for the new shiny. Gnome 3 is quite different and it will require quite a few adjustments to get comfortable in the new environment. I recently moved from Ubuntu 10.04 to Fedora 16 after my system ended up fucked after months of maintaining a pretty much custom compiled system because I was too stubborn to make the move away from the environment I was so accustomed too, but I still wanted to take advantage of all of the improvements in the compilers and libraries. I was apprehensive at first, but I learned to adapt pretty quick, and after a week or two there really isn't any impact on my productivity using Gnome 3, and there are some great benefits. There are also some issues, but the shell is still young and I'm sure some of them will be addressed as it matures. On the good side, losing the bottom panel gives me a bit more screen real estate, which I can use all I can on a laptop with a widescreen. I always had to have that around in Gnome 2, even though all of my window/workspace switching was done by keybindings, having it taken away turned out to be a good thing. I like the way Gnome 3's workspaces function, how it just generates a new one when I need it, which is real nice for me because when I'm developing I tend to have everything I need full screen on workspaces, and it always seemed that I would end up needing one more workspace than I had when I was using Gnome 2 and I would either have to go and create a new one, or switch between multiple windows on a single workspace, which does slow me down a bit. On the bad end, it does require quite a bit more mouse movement if that is how you navigate through your desktop environment, and I'd imagine for a lot of people that's how they do it. I usually navigate via keybindings, so things work pretty much the same as Gnome 2 in that respect. I've noticed an issue with Gnome 3 where I have to enter some key combos twice to get them to work, like the shell is eating the first one before using it for what I want, and that is kind of irritating. I wish the run dialogue would also function like a sort of search dialogue like I've seen in pictures of Unity, in fact I think Gnome 2's run dialogue was better because at least it would bring up a list of options. It's fine when I know exactly what I want to do, but it's a pain in the ass trying to run a new application and running a bunch of combinations and spellings trying to get it just right with no suggestions. I also find the configuration options of the desktop to be lacking, like many others, and find it silly that I have to install a bunch of extra applications and extensions just to change some basic things like entries in the Applications menus or applets in the top panel.

My point with all of this is, I understand why there is so much hate for Gnome 3 and Unity, they're taking away the environment you're used and forcing you to change how you work. Whether you stick with Gnome, or you move to something else, you have no choice. Gnome 2 will succumb to bitrot sooner or later, and then it's gone. It's not the type of application that you'll just be able to install and run like it's 5 years ago in 2017 and have everything work just like you remembered it. I just wish people would give it a solid chance before they knocked it, at least give it a fair assessment. In a way, a lot of geeks are kind of like Gnome, they'll stick with the one thing they're used to come hell or high water. The world's changing though, Windows 95 is quite limited for the type of tasks we do today, and if you don't move forward you die, that's just how things go. If you're still writing 16 bit real mode because you're more comfortable with segment addressing and don't want to deal with all of that hipster protected

Re:Dead

[fnj]

Don't be an ass, coward. Mint 12 also comes with MATE, a repackaged Gnome2 that does not conflict with Gnome3. They give you a choice.

Re:Dead

[tqft]

https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/WTLyn7dqYoR
Linus on Gnome3
"Now I just hope those things become part of the standard gnome shell setup and made available in the regular "system config" thing rather than hidden off. Sure, make them default to off if you want that "clean default", but make them easy to find and part of the standard install.

Or would that be too close to "Ok, we admit we were wong" and thus not politically acceptable?"

Re:Dead

[Yaa 101]

The problem is that a lot of developers making things on Linux started using Macs and instead of developing things for their Macs they try to change things on Linux to what they are used to.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the dumbed-down Gnome 3 more than the next guy, but when I read something like this, I get a gag reflex.
"Authentic-gnome users"??

To be perfectly honest: No real computer user gives a shit about if his graphical shell has panels or add-ons or whatever. Because real work is done is shell scripts and with software tools that couldn't relate less to those things.
Real pros are those that looked at Gnome 3 and went: "Hey look, it has a API for add-ons! Let's mod it until it fits us like a glove!" They didn't even care about the annoying parts, because they assumed that as long as the thing isn't modded and adapted, any opinion about it is pointless, since nobody would use it that way anyway.

So listen up, all you icon clickers and mouse hustlers who think you are oh-so-experienced computer users just because you use a slightly older version of something that is already dumbed-down beyond salvation: You're about as cool as a teen wannabe who thinks he's now a professional racing driver because he can drive fast and has a bigger exhaust! Real pros are not about using something that others don't. Only hipsters do that, to compensate for their own insecurity.
Real pros are not about sticking to the old shit because that used to be cool. Conservatives do that because they can't handle changes!
Real pros don't have to distance themselves and make themselves look like they are something better. They don't care. They are called pros by *others* because they *are* something better.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

here here

I also moved to XFCE 4.8 after being a loyal GNOME user for since forever. I hate what they have done to the GNOME brand, it's all ruined now.

Re:Dead

[Duncan J Murray]

Well I've been using Fedora 15 alongside Ubuntu 10.04, and I can say that despite getting used to Gnome 3 (and recognising its advantages), I find Gnome 2 more functional. I can give three reasons:

I like my workspaces - I have four arranged horizontally, and switch between them using Alt-1/2/3/4, and I like being able to move applications between windows just by pushing it off the side of it, and then picking up the window on the next workspace. This isn't possible with vertically arranged workspaces. You have already mentioned that if you use the mouse to switch workspaces in Gnome 3, you would probably go mad and give up. But... there's more - I often work with a directory of image files open fullscreen in nautilus on workspace 1. I have GIMP open on workspace 2. I select the photo I wish to edit on workspace 1, move it to the workspace switcher's workspace 2, wait til it brings up workspace 2, and then drop it into gimp. Try doing that in Gnome 3! (Drag the file to the top left, drag to the right over the appropriate workspace, wait, drag back to the centre of the window and wait until the application comes to the fore, then release).

Secondly - 'places'. Why was this dumped??!! This is what sold me about Gnome 2 when I switched from XP. I always had direct access to my files and folders, and later learnt I could bookmark particular folders so it appeared in the menu. In gnome 3 I find a real step backwards to launch nautilus, and then navigate within it. I've also tried pressing the windows key and typing, which admittedly is a bit better, but I miss the direct option. I have also installed the 'places' extension for Gnome 3, but the button is small to press, and works in the opposite way to the rest of gnome 3 (in the shell-view, selecting a folder will open it minimised onto the workspace, whereas searching for the folder and opening it will take you out of gnome shell).

Thirdly - I'm not sure I like the idea of the 'hot edges' or corners. I'm used to throwing the pointer up to the top left to reach a menu item, and frequently overshoot. In Gnome 3 this means irritatingly activating the gnome shell, and requiring an extra bosh into the corner. I have the same problem with Unity - viewing webpages I often place the mouse to the left side of the screen before scrolling in order to ensure the mouse isn't over flash or a text box before I do it - and activating the Unity menu is really irritating. It reminds me of times when using WinXP and auto-hiding the bottom bar, but quickly finding it too irritating to work with. I'm starting to believe that important parts of the desktop should have it's own area, and not share it with others - so that you can guarantee that moving your pointer to that area will do a specific thing, and not require you to consider the context. By 'important parts' I mean launching applications, select between applications, opening folders, and viewing content.

I'll admit there are good points of gnome 3. There is more screen real-estate (though I believe there is a cost to this in the paragraph above). The 'windows button and type' is well-implemented for launching applications (though I find slightly less good at opening folders). Alt-tab switching between applications is improved with being able to switch to apps on other workspaces.

It would be easy to improve gnome 3 by adding a 'places' tab in the shell - that would please me, but I can't see how the workspace switching could be fixed. Also I can't see how the 'hot corner' can never be an irritation (maybe if I could disable it and only activate it with the windows key? or clicking on it).

Re:Dead

[DMFNR]

Yeah, I didn't really think about dragging in to another workspace, I haven't had to do that yet with Gnome 3. I really do hope that some sort of "Places" functionality is moved in to Gnome Shell instead of having to explicitly launch Nautilus to navigate the file system. I'm imagining just another menu option in addition to "Windows" and "Applications" that would allow you to navigate files, and then drag and drop them in to applications open on the workspaces on the right side of the screen. That would probably go a long way towards solving at least on of your problems with opening up images with the new workspace setup. I think I saw an extension on the new site that will allow a places menu on the top panel, that might be useful to you. So far I've found the new extension system to be a pain in the ass and a lot of the available extensions to be either horribly broken, or damn near featureless.

Re:Dead

[unixisc]

Honestly, I found Gnome 2 to be really mediocre as a DE - KDE was a lot better. I really liked their Kontrol Center. However, reading about KDE 4, I just don't see why they made the default browser Rekonq, when Konquerer, while not perfect, was already far more mature & tested - just needed HTML 5 support so that one can run YouTube videos on it. I do think that once KDE refines all the dozens of KApps that they have packaged w/ the DE, they'll make a more compelling argument for getting picked.

That, and I'd like to see Etoille get up & running, so that we can have a GNUSTEP DE available as well.

Re:Dead

[Duncan J Murray]

I guess it's still early days for Gnome 3, and like KDE4, hopefully a lot of the previous functionality will return. If it's the places menu that I already have installed - it's not ideal as it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the system. A simple extra tab would do the trick - with a list of the main folders and bookmarked ones.

Re:Dead

[Kevin108]

While upgrades are something that you've displayed that Linux may be weak on, I still don't think that's a reason not to run a Linux box. There's also no hard and fast rule that Linux operating systems need to be upgraded. If it works NOW and you don't fool with it, it will still work 3 years from now. We're not talking about Windows here, we're talking about an OS with a lot of security already built in. Since 3 years worth of updates hose the systems you build, why update?

Re:Dead

[Kevin108]

KDE 3 was better than Gnome 2. KDE 4 is so bad, it made Gnome 2 better. Now we have Gnome 3, which seems poised to put Gnome at a new disadvantage to KDE.

Re:Dead

[hairyfeet]

Dude, you sound like a nice guy but you DO know that Linux has security holes like everyone else, yes? i could post a half a dozen links from Securina if you'd like, or even articles from here. Its not like I have users running update in the hope that there will be some new shiny, its because its stupid to run unpatched software because we ALL know that the script kiddies and malware guy use those patches to reverse engineer and make new malware!

I'm not asking for the moon here Kev, not asking for shiny bling bling or running Linux on a toaster. i just want to hand a box to some and know it WILL be patched AND stay running for the life of that machine. I mean I have XP boxes going on 12 years in the field and the community harps on about how inferior it is right? Well prove it and make a better product!

Re:Dead

[w0mprat]

I just think its a damned shame, that's what it is. When XP goes EOL there will be literally tens of millions of machines with frankly overpowered hardware that COULD be running Linux and offering low cost computing to the masses and instead me and every other system builder and repair guy will be scrambling for cheap Win 7 Starter and Home CALs simply because nobody will listen to us and give us a simple, easy to use, fiddly free Linux that Suzy the checkout girl can run without picking up "Bash and scripting for dummies". Is that REALLY so much to ask?

That's right. We really need something like that. These days linux stable fast reliable and has all the apps you need to get shit done. It's also a free download away, will never bother you about licencing, you don't even need to waste a DVD anymore, just use a spare usb stick. Infact, you can run the whole OS off a USB drive.

So anyone, even a newbie, could shove a distro boot disk in your computer, boot, install, and all your computing problems would be solved. It would be a fire-and forget fix for a virus infested old XP box (you know the kind), that doesn't take too much learning, and doesn't need micromanagement to maintain. You install it on your old aunty's PC, and walk out the door.

I can't put my finger on just what is going wrong. Your right, for a while it looked like it was going to be all ok and we would actually have the year of desktop linux. but WTF happend?

You know what is really really damning, right now there is an example of linux done right, of a mainstream graphical linux distro that's steamrolling over the competition and will become the #1 in it's market. It's Android. It's also coming to x86. Hell, I already have 3.2 it running on my netbook. It's much more capable than just a smartphone/tablet OS and it's early days of it's foray into the x86 world. Quite bizarrely, without much optimization it's a lot faster on anemic netbook than any major linux with any level of graphicial effects. It was also a stunningly small 86mb .iso download.

Frankly Canonical, Gnome and others should not be following the exerting Apple/Microsoft like control over design and manipulating end-user experience, because rubber stamping that method does not equal success. They should be taking a good look at what Google's done with Android's design.

Re:Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

The Rekonq as main browser thingy is a Kubuntu stupidity (one in many...).
In vanilla KDE, Konqueror is still the main browser.

Re:Dead

[Kevin108]

I understand the importance of running a fully-patched OS but I'm a Linux user and a Slashdot reader. What I'm saying is the odds are so greatly in our favor to never have problems anyway that it's likely never necessary to be OCD about patching a Linux box for personal use. Yes, things are different in the commercial world. Storing personal information or processing credit cards on an Amazon server is a totally different scenario than the average user playing Farmville at home. That's not what I'm talking about at all.

Do you really think every XP box you have out there is properly maintained? Regular users boot their computers and ignore the update messages for Windows and Norton/McAfee updates. They don't know what the updates do, why they're needed or what to do if something goes wrong. Ignoring them is the safe choice. They don't have to update their TVs and they treat their computers the same way. Take into account there are still over 3 million AOL subscribers and that Wal-Mart sells a shit-load of computers. These are the people with the systems I'm talking about. (Likely you cater to a higher class of end user but that doesn't suit my half of the argument so I will pretend it's not the case. Heh heh.)

Windows PCs and Windows-based code are where the real security concerns are. Concern for an unpatched Linux box is like working as a manager in a bank that's being held up and being concerned that the robbers will take the postage stamps from you happen to have in your desk. The target for digital miscreants is huge and glaring and it isn't our private Linux boxen.

Re:Dead

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Despite what Linus says, he still stuck with GNOME even though he complained about it. Most of all, he's like a lot of other people he just wants things to wrok without tweaking stuff. In all the loads of comments here, nobody has bothered to actually talk about the extension system. Why do you think that is?

Re:Dead

[tqft]

I did see the extensions mentioned - but they were released about the same time as LT's post.

"he still stuck with GNOME even though he complained about it"
Maybe he is hoping he can get stuff changed for everyone.

Re:Dead

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Unlikely. He has to file bugs and what not like everyone else. The extensions are there so that you can solve your own problems with the design. What people don't seem to understand is the extent to what you can manipulate the DE environment. You can pretty much manipulate anything that has gobject introspection and gnome shell allows you to expose. Including the window manager, the network manager, bluetooth whatever. So if you want different animations it should be possible to do your own animations. The extensions were created not just for users to do something interesting wtih it, but to also test out new designs and help evolve the desktop. GNOME can do more things with it with simple things like javascript and css. Recent web technologies.

Re:Dead

[AzP]

Thank you. I'll turn off the lights when I leave.

Re:Dead

[hairyfeet]

I can tell you EXACTLY what went wrong, that damned Linus Torvalds is what went wrong! between his constant kernel fiddling breaking drivers (He needs to just change the logo for Linux from tux to Goatse because frankly it feels like he's trolling) and Canonical getting everyone on an INSANE 6 month release schedule (which means nothing gets fixed, just new versions that add new bugs on top of old bugs) the quality has backslid BAD and QA is right out. I mean when one of the top 4 OEMs has to run their own repos because even on a TEENY TINY subset of hardware they can't even get enough QA from Canonical to keep the drivers from taking a big old shit if you run the default repos? Something be stinking in Linux land.

Pulse Audio, Linus kernel Goatse, DEs getting tossed, frankly the guts in Linux is as stable as the shifting sands now. I've tried Linux on just about every off lease and refurb that has come through my shop and in ALL CASES the drivers shit themselves, the DEs gets screwy such as settings not "sticking" after reboot unless you input the data by CLI, its just one big fucking mess, that's what it is.

And they can complain about "Waaah they won't give us drivers waaah!" but you know what? a company would have to be certifiably INSANE to support Linux. With Windows just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers gives you support for every version of Windows from 2000-2014 at the very least! 2K/XP XP X64/2K3 X64, Vista/7 32 bit, Vista /7 64 bit...tada! I'm done, stick a fork, my device will work now and keep working. and look what a company gets for bending over backwards to support linux? AMD not only opened the specs they hired developers to help the community write drivers, only for the drivers to constantly have to be rewritten (Linus Goatse) and the community to say in EVERY forum 'LOL Buy Nvidia". if i was AMD I'd tell the community to go fuck themselves.

Finally as for Android, lets break it down shall we? what IS Android? its the SAME DAMNED THING we retailers have been BEGGING the community to give us for X86/64. Its an ALL GUI no CLI OS where everything is "clicky clicky" and there are NO driver borkage because Google doesn't allow Linus "The Goatse" Torvalds to touch "their" kernel, that's why. Hell read his thoughts on the kernel and tell me if your ass wouldn't get a pink slip if you tried that! No roadmap, no plans, he scratches itches like its 1993 and he is still passing the kernel around over IRC.

Frankly I've given up. I've talked and written articles and begged until i'm blue in the face only to have the community throw shit and insults and say "Your a dirty poo poo head M$ Ninja!", I've tried every damned Linux there is and watched them shit themselves over tasks that frankly Windows could do a decade ago, hell they still don't even have a "Find drivers" or "roll back drivers" button and when i point this out I get a lecture on how my "duty" is to waste my time for free teaching my customers to do forum hunts and CLI tweaking copypasta that they have NO desire to learn or do, because they HAVE to "embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the God damned force!

Insanity friend, that's what it is, sheer mass insanity! To this very day they truly believe that the masses are all gonna abandon GUIs for terminals and go back to the 1970s! Frankly it shouldn't surprise me though, just look at their hero RMS. I swear to God the man still calls everyone "hackers" and acts like he is at a computer club meeting in 1978!

Re:Dead

[rapidreload]

It's frighting how much we think the same. You're already one of my Slashdot friends, but if Slashdot ever adds a BFF or "Bestie" relationship option, you're gonna be a worthy contender. :)

Re:Dead

[unixisc]

Let us know how PC-BSD 9 is once you've tried it. I've read some good things about it.

DAMNIT

[atari2600a]

Not compatible w/ GNOME 3.0-- I guess I'm waiting 5 months...fucking Shuttleworth...

And yet...

[DoofusOfDeath]

Gnome 3 has nasty visual artifacts on Ubuntu 11.10 with my notebook's ATI chip.

I appreciate all Shuttleworth has done for the Linux community, but he's really got to take quality more seriously if he wants to win me back to Ubuntu.

Re:And yet...

[revcompgeek]

Gnome 3 had artifacts for me until I stopped using Catalyst and switched to the Open Source driver. Unfortunately that means lower graphics performance, but I don't play games much anyway.

Re:And yet...

[DoofusOfDeath]

Thanks for the tip. Maybe I'll try that out. Can the open-source driver do video okay?

Also, how do you tell Ubuntu to stop using the proprietary driver?

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

Gnome 3 has nasty visual artifacts on Ubuntu 11.10 with my notebook's ATI chip.

I appreciate all Shuttleworth has done for the Linux community, but he's really got to take quality more seriously if he wants to win me back to Ubuntu.

Linux Mint seems to work great with Gnome3 and their own Shell extensions. They used it mostly to restore the missing bits that Gnome3 lost. I found it very stable am quite pleased with it. Its no KDE in terms of richness of functionality and flexibility, but its pretty sweet.

I'm starting to like this LinuxMint distro more and more, especially for casual use.

Re:And yet...

[revcompgeek]

Yeah, it does video fine for me. Try looking here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/FglrxInteferesWithRadeonDriver#Problem:%20%20Need%20to%20fully%20remove%20-fglrx%20and%20reinstall%20-ati%20from%20scratch

Re:And yet...

[mrmeval]

Even that is drool compared to what I have had in the past. I just want to get shit done and soon I'll either accept the meager offerings in lieu of the degenerating main stream or pretty much just use a server version and get either Win7 or a Mac.

It would be about as disruptive to what I normally do with the same level of guarantee they won't fuck up anything in a short time frame.

I note that Google also shit on their stable UI.

Re:And yet...

[sunderland56]

I'm starting to like this LinuxMint distro more and more, especially for casual use.

I heard all of the great press, so I downloaded Mint 11, which was okay, and Mint 12, which is so horribly bad I fed the DVD to my paper shredder.

User Interface Manifesto:

1. We do not want a dock. If we wanted a dock, we'd be Apple fanboys.
2. Calling a dock something else, like an "Activities Panel", does not get you around rule #1.
3. We will launch programs via a menu system, or via shortcuts. No other nonsense, please. I'm looking at you, Mr. Activities Panel.
4. Once you have a facility like panel applets, that people like and use, do NOT take them away. If you want to add some other way of doing the same thing - like "Gnome Shell Extensions" - then keep the ability to run panel applets for at LEAST one major revision, so that all existing applets can be ported.

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

Maybe You do not want a dock.

I DO want a dock, (depending on what you call a dock).
Taskbar, TaskManager type of thing, Quick Launch bar, etc: OK, almost essential.

KDE Activities: a stunning failure rammed thru by a pigheaded minority to meet a need that did not exist,replacing perfectly good alternatives, and in the process, alienated the vast majority of the KDE user base to the extent that latest releases pretty well banishes it to invisibility.

But I'm not sure KDE Activities qualify as a DOCK.

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

I heard all of the great press, so I downloaded Mint 11, which was okay, and Mint 12, which is so horribly bad I fed the DVD to my paper shredder.
 

I had no great problems with 12. It worked.

Too bad the Mint team needed to spend all that time re-inventing the things that were stripped out of Gnome3 rather than improving the distro. But they largely succeeded.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried linux mint. The desktop UI was still pretty awful compared to Gnome 2, and the whole thing felt unfinished. I noticed these obvious bugs in the first 10 minutes.

1. The "start" menu isn't in the corner of the screen. It is slightly to the right. How many times must people get this wrong?!

2. Similarly the scroll-bars aren't right against the edge of the screen when windows are maximised. If you click right at the edge, in firefox it does nothing; in other apps it is the same as page down!

3. For some reason they changed the firefox icon to something unfamiliar.

4. The shell (gnome shell? whatever they use) crashed three times in the first five minutes of use. Fortunately it restarts quickly. Still...

5. Can't seem to add shortcuts to the top panel like you could in gnome 2. It just shows a useless copy of the window title. I can't work out the point of this.

6. The start menu is kind of awful. I have a 19" screen! Why does it only show 9 items at once?! Also by default it shows the "recently used" apps, but to click them you have to carefully navigate around the hover-activated app category menus. Not a great design!

7. I think this might be gnome's fault. But there's not central place to set file associations.

8. Software centre has lots of buttons which give no feedback and perform blocking operations. When you click on a package, the software centre freezes for a second or two.

9. They have disabled the ability to move and resize many windows (e.g. application-modal dialogs).

10. The graphical sudo prompt doesn't remember your authentication for any length of time, so if you want to install several packages from the software centre you have to enter your password once for each package!

I also tried Kubuntu 11.10, but I'm sad to say the catastrophe of plasma is still very much present. You can kind of disable the "activities", and you can disable the awful "start menu" (seriously, why are these all so terrible) in preference for the old one. But you can't really get away from the general ugliness and the idiocy of plasma.

I finally settled on Ubunto 11.10. Unity has some fairly major flaws (no feedback on launcher button presses!), and, like every single recent start menu, Unity's is awful. But I actually quite like the mac-style launcher bar, and I can see where they're going with the global menu bar (god knows why they auto-hide though). I had to tweak things a bit though - make the launcher bar smaller, and always-on.

Re:And yet...

[sunderland56]

By "dock" I mean, some form graphical display that lists currently running programs intermingled with programs that you can lauch if you wish.

So, a mashup of popular items from the 'Start' menu and the currently running windows list. A list of two completely different things - action buttons and status buttons - slammed together in a random sort of order.

I suppose this follows the trend of using nouns as verbs, and vice versa.

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

By "dock" I mean, some form graphical display that lists currently running programs intermingled with programs that you can lauch if you wish.

So, a mashup of popular items from the 'Start' menu and the currently running windows list. A list of two completely different things - action buttons and status buttons

See, that doesn't bother me a bit. The only thing I use that type of facility for is High Frequency items, email, browser, file manager, command shells. If one of those is ALREADY open I want the open one 99.94444% of the time, and if I want a new one, its left click.

You keep most menu items in the start-bar menu / what ever you want to call it. But the high frequency items I want handy, and If they are running already chances are I want the running one, and not another one.

It may not be to your liking, but it is very well thought out in all the implementations I've see of something like that. Why dig thru application menus? Computers are supposed to be intuitive. See icon, click Icon, get the desired result. They are not two completely different things. Its the way people work.

Re:And yet...

[KugelKurt]

Gnome 3 has nasty visual artifacts on Ubuntu 11.10 with my notebook's ATI chip.

I appreciate all Shuttleworth has done for the Linux community, but he's really got to take quality more seriously if he wants to win me back to Ubuntu.

Shuttleworth would say that because Canonical does not contribute to driver development, Canonical is not guilty of lacking quality there.
Critics would say that Canonical should help driver development for a change.

Decide for yourself which side you're on.

Re:And yet...

[KugelKurt]

KDE Activities: a stunning failure rammed thru by a pigheaded minority to meet a need that did not exist,replacing perfectly good alternatives, and in the process, alienated the vast majority of the KDE user base

WTF?!? Activities in Plasma Desktop were never ever forced on anyone. Everybody who doesn't want them simply doesn't use them.

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

You couldn't avoid them if you want multiple desktops with different wall paper.
The stripped out any ability to do that an foisted activities on you.

Like I said, its better now, because the bitch level got so high they made an option that "looks" like the old way, but its still using activities. You really can't avoid activities.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't avoid them if you want multiple desktops with different wall paper.
The stripped out any ability to do that an foisted activities on you.

Like I said, its better now, because the bitch level got so high they made an option that "looks" like the old way, but its still using activities. You really can't avoid activities.

System Settings > Workspace Behaviour > Virtual Desktops, check "Different widgets for each desktop". It doesn't say it, but this also lets you set different wallpapers for each desktop, and doesn't seem to use activities to do it. At least, the activities list doesn't show any additional ones created.

That's admittedly not very obvious, and I only found it by chance, but it seems to be what you want. It wasn't available in the first few KDE4 releases, but it's been possible for a year or two.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad the Mint team needed to spend all that time re-inventing the things that were stripped out of Gnome3 rather than improving the distro. But they largely succeeded.

That's a great point. I wonder how many thousands of wasted man hours are created by the selfishly small minded gnome three developers. I bet if they had to pay for all those wasted hours they'd all declare personal bankruptcy.

This whole gnome 2 vs gnome 3 thing very much reminds me of the original apple vs android issues. People (including me) said the iphone was too small, especially if you had big hands. The same was true for many initial android devices because they wanted to an iphone. Rabidly the apple and wannabe android folks stated, "Its the perfect size and anything larger is horrible and bad (and keyboards are for douche bags); exactly as Apple brainwashed me." Next, a larger device came out and all the brainless morons now repeat the same mantra, "its the perfect size and anything larger (or smaller) is horrible and bad; exactly as Apple brainwashed me." It wonderfully invalidates the opinion of these irrationally brainwashed fanboyz and validates everyone who has a contrary view - again and again. And it is the same with Gnome 3.x. The same type of mentally impaired people are clamoring to say, "gnome three is perfect, everything else is horrible, exactly as the gnome three developers programmed me."

Far too many people don't know how to critically think for themselves, be them apple or gnome fanboyz and can only parrot the same brainwashed and invalid garbage.. The fact is, gnome three continues to suck. The mint extensions do wonders to improve usability but its still a large step back from gnome 2.x. Which in itself does wonders to accurately depict just how incredibly shitty gnome 3 is without Mint. And nothing changes the fact that a verbose minority, who dumbly believe they are a majority, absolutely fucking hate the POS direction gnome 3.x has taken. Gnome 3.x lovers can continue with their reality distortion field to maximum; but the rest of us will continue to nod our heads with the knowledge gnome 3 lovers are ignorant, brainwashed, minority, twerps.

And if I have to hear the stupidity of these brainwashed minority one more time about how only people who fear change are against, I might have to punch their stupid, ignorant, selfish, brainwashed, retarded face really, really, really hard. Sorry, but anyone how parrots such retarded, brainwashed garbage needs to see how long they can hold their breath 1000 feet under the waves so as to benefit all of mankind. But I'm sure they're too selfish for that too.

Re:And yet...

[allo]

whats you problem with kde?
activities: always wanted to start using them, but i never think of it. I have some different desktops as activities, but using activities for different working-sets of windows ... never got the hang up to now
startmenu: who needs a startmenu? alt-f2 or hotkey to launch a terminal and typing the command name. the rest is in the panel as quicklaunch icon.

The rest of plasma is pretty usable since 4.2 or something like this. 4.0 was crap and 4.1 was like a hotfix.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on now, AC, don't hold back, tell us how you really feel.

Re:And yet...

[KugelKurt]

You couldn't avoid them if you want multiple desktops with different wall paper.

You were writing about the "vast majority" of users, not some niche. (I doubt that you can provide hard evidence that a "vast majority" of users uses multiple desktops.)

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

Since every distro installs that way by default, I believe no evidence is needed.

You must run windows all day I'm guessing.....

Re:And yet...

[KugelKurt]

Since every distro installs that way by default, I believe no evidence is needed.

You must run windows all day I'm guessing.....

In both cases your belief is wrong. I do not run Windows at all and evidence is needed.
So provide evidence that multiple desktops are actually used by the "vast majority" and that they were in fact "alienated" by Plasma Desktop because of this.
'sed' is installed by default on all distributions I'm aware, yet I would not conclude that the "vast majority" of users actually uses 'sed'. Just because something is there, it is not necessarily actually used.
Once you base an argument on a claim, you do in fact have to provide evidence for said claim.

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

I did provide evidence.

All modern distros install KDE or Gnome in such a way that there are multiple desktops by default.
Even XFCE4 installs that way.
Complete with a pager at the bottom.

Now it is up to you to provide evidence that the majority of users disable this feature.

Re:And yet...

[KugelKurt]

I did provide evidence.

All modern distros install KDE or Gnome in such a way that there are multiple desktops by default.
Even XFCE4 installs that way.
Complete with a pager at the bottom.

You gave no evidence at all that it's actually used.
And what's more important: You gave no evidence at all that the "vast majority" of users was "alienated" by Plasma activities.
By your logic -- something is preinstalled and therefore used by most -- Plasma activities have to be used now.
As you did not give any evidence at all for any alienation, I could just as well claim that an imaginary "vast majority of users" welcomes activities as improvements over regular virtual desktops and haters are just a vocal minority. I could even give the (made up) evidence that since GNOME adopted it after research conducted by Red Hat that activities are well received and therefore GNOME Shell adopted them.

You are making false arguments. You conclude from one thing a completely unrelated result just because you like the result you conclude.
The scientific method does not work this way.

Now it is up to you to provide evidence that the majority of users disable this feature.

No, it's not because I never made any claim about actual usage numbers. You did and it's still up to you to prove it.
Either you do it or you leave.

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, I am using ubuntu 11.10 and love more what they are trying to accomplish than the product. They definitely need to take quality serious.

Fixed* in two commands

[OliWarner]

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions

*Fixed but may break everything else.

Re:Fixed* in two commands

[OliWarner]

Ooo, there probably aught to be a `sudo apt-get update` between those lines. I aliased that into the command so keep forgetting to tell other people to do it >_

Re:Fixed* in two commands

[atari2600a]

Breaking everything else is what I'm worried about. It's bad enough using the prerelease channels breaks the little things just enough to warrant a / wipe every release cycle. (actually what I do is I use the beta & once it goes stable I wipe /)

Re:First Post

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I loved it for a few weeks on Oneiric with nVidia. Then? A new kernel last week - and now the shell captures all mouse and KB events - won't release focus to apps!

overlap with Mint's MATE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I kicked Ubuntu to the curb over Unity (I'm all for tweaking the OS, but adapting a tablet UI back to desktop? Gimme a break.)
Been really happy with Linux Mint -- all the ease of Ubuntu10.x without the authoritarian BS, and a UI that doesn't require much retraining.
So... since Mint's using Gnome3, does this conflict with MATE?

Re:overlap with Mint's MATE?

[Kevin108]

Mate does not conflict with Gnome 3. The whole point of Mate is to create a Gnome 2 fork that can be run alongside Gnome 3.

and just when

[lee n. field]

And just when I'd gotten XFCE to look the way I want....

It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of major open source projects that have gone stupid over the past year or two. Firefox is the other big one, of course. But we've seen similar stupidity from Thunderbird and Ubuntu, for instance.

It's like a big mass of unemployed web designers have moved on to fucking up real applications, perhaps because nobody will hire them to do web development any more, given similar fuck-ups in the past.

No, we don't want gradients and curved corners all over the place. No, we don't want the menus to be removed. No, we don't want the status bar to be hidden. We just want software that works, and these failed designers just can't provide that!

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

How dare you! They have a pedigree of owning Macbook pros and multiple thousands of dollars in skinny jeans and emo glasses. How dare you question their qualifications!

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[mehemiah]

thats why linux values freedom of choice most of all. If you don't like it, switch and quit your bitchen. try fluxbox or Awsome. The gnome expatriate DE of choice has been XFCE but i think theres a branch of metacity being mantained like there's a kde3 branch being maintained

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

and us admins don't want user installed extensions ffs.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Brian Feldman]

I doubt most sysadmins are dumb enough to care what a user installs in their home directory used solely by themselves.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[rapidreload]

thats why linux values freedom of choice most of all. If you don't like it, switch and quit your bitchen. try fluxbox or Awsome. The gnome expatriate DE of choice has been XFCE but i think theres a branch of metacity being mantained like there's a kde3 branch being maintained

I really hate this retort. A lot of people used GNOME 2 because it was the best at what it did. Either KDE was too complicated (too many options/controls) or XFCE was too lean (lacking in functionality). GNOME 2 had a nice middle-ground. With GNOME 3 fucking up things, we have a problem. We can stick with GNOME 2 until it falls into disrepair (which does happen when libraries are upgraded but the DE is not), or we can switch to something like MATE which is still in development.

The problem with the argument of how Linux provides options is that they aren't necessarily any good. People generally use one DE over another because it provides something the others don't. If the development direction of said DE makes it no longer desirable, all the freedom of choice doesn't help much if now ALL of your options are lackluster as opposed to all but one.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[mehemiah]

What else is different between gnome2 and gnome 3 other than the use of metacity being replaced by clutter with the gnome_shell plugin? The Mint guy's are trying their best to please the gnome_shell detractors, give them a chance. What does gnome 2 do that XFCE doesn't exactly? KDE4 kind of did this thing where they broke everything by moving to the new libraries and then ported the old functionality and behavior to the new libraries. The new libraries improved functionality, portability, and (theoretically) stability. This strategy seems to be what MATE is. Now, if you really don't like the changes I would bet money that the BSD people are probably maintaining a Gnome2 that will remain static, stable and functional (considering the gnome linux people have already given bsd the finger already) . Please explain what you want here, what would make you happy?

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[shish]

If the user has clue, fine. If extensions are really easy to install, dumb users will use this extra power to fuck shit up in spectacular ways and have no idea how to fix it for themselves.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[jdege]

I need a desktop that I can remote.

That is, something that renders in a responsive way, without GPU extensions. Something I can run in a Virtual, on a box that has other Virtuals running, or access remotely over DSL.

Glitz has it's place, but that place isn't in core OS functionality.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[DarwinSurvivor]

xfce, lmde, openbox, gnome-fallback, the list goes on...

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, what would make me happy is if Gnome shell wasn't so bloody task oriented. Try running virtualbox in dual screen and you will see what I mean. With Gnome2 I was able to keep the two application windows running together -- in gnome3 (or rather gnome shell) I often found one half of the virtual desktop minimized/hidden while the other half remained open.

Simply put, Gnome Shelll is NOT for the business desktop.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[hufter]

It's good that someone forked Gnome 2 into Mate, however Gnome 3 should have been the fork, because it's more of a new product rather than upgrade of the old.
Usually when you upgrade you get something similar, but with new features. Now you'll lose features if you upgrade. But I will not join Gnome 3 bashers. It's not "dumbed down" as some folks claim, It's an early version of the new DE.
When Mate fork is finished it will be just like Gnome 2 was, and Gnome 3 will get more customisability while it develops, things will be good again.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny how all this GNOME 3 flaming happens in the comments of a newsitem that basically is about the solution to one of the main gripes people are (rightfully, to an extent) complaining about. GNOME 3 extensions can basically turn the whole thing back to like how GNOME 2 worked, if that's how you preferred it. Many power user extensions are out there, and very likely now that GNOME 3 has most distributions it wouldn't surprise me of many many new extensions popup filling every possible niche. What's more, it's fairly straightforward to create your own, if you know some CSS/JS (which are pretty easy to pick up anyway). GNOME 3 may have stripped out a lot of stuff, and for sure I defiintely felt lost for a while after switching to GNOME 3, but it put in place a very nice extension system that easily makes up for it, if you ask me.

The only thing that still bothers me is GNOME 3's heavy dependance on accelerated 3D graphics, given that Linux GPU drivers are generally in such a poor state (improving, but still..), and because somehow, despite today's GPU's power, things still feel more sluggish than they did in GNOME 2

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

What else is different between gnome2 and gnome 3

Ok, I'll bite.

- inability to disable the screensaver: you can choose between 1 and 59 minutes. Great if you used G2 for running as a keyboardless monitoring dashboard.
- inability to actually save the screen. The gnome screensaver blanks the desktop, but not the top bar. Also, doesn't use DPMS.
- inability to use Mod4 (winkey, tuxkey, oskey, poikey) for anything else. With g2, I used that key for all DE operations (move window, raise window, global shortcuts). I have the same configuration in g3, but all shortcuts are now occasionally broken (i.e. work one time, do not work the next)
- where have my auto-startup programs gone?
- why is alt right-click better than right-click?
- workspace switching is a needlessly heavy operation. It requires two hands on the keyboard (in non-default positions), or it requires your mouse to travel 150% of your screen width (on average)
- hiding window controls? Why?
- default window placement is even worse than G2. Whoever decided that if you press ctrl-shift-n in a terminal window, the new one should overlap the previous while 80% of the screen estate is still unused? Even worse, why do you not overlap the title bar even though you have already butchered it beyond usability? Why is the new window slightly to the right of the previous, other than to show off the fancy shadow effect?
- why doesn't the personal menu open when the mouse touches the upper right corner?
- why can't I switch applications by using the scroll wheel in the application icon in the top bar?
- why can't I switch workspaces by scrolling on activities in the top bar?

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Certhas]

I don't get it. Do you really miss the menu in Firefox? I like the new interface, with a little bit of tweaking (less then I did before!) it has everything I need right there and nothing else.

You know how many clicks it takes to activate the menu in Firefox BTW? Three: Firefox -> Options -> Menu

Firefox might not be perfect, but to say its lost its way is ridiculous. They have sped up the browser drammatically recently, they are working on threading it, which should help stability, etc... The new release schedule brings problems, for sure. But it also makes enormous amounts of sense from a logical point of view.

It's idiotic really. On the one hand supposedly Firefox UI is terribly because they are imitating Chrome to much, and in the next thread people say they are switc hing over to Chrome because its much faster (obviously not minding the Chrome UI at all). And the fact that it's slower is partly due to it's extendability (which is why I'm sticking with it), in other words due to the fact that it gives you enormous customizability.

Now Gnome 3 fucked up, but it's not beyond repair, and it's technically sound. Mint proves that (http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851) "From a technological point of view, Gnome 3 is a fantastic desktop, and it’s getting better with every new release. It will take time for Linux Mint to develop a Gnome 3 desktop that is on-par with what we had with Gnome 2, but eventually we’ll be able to do much more with it than was possible with the traditional desktop."

Innovation means that you sometimes have to make high profile mistakes. KDE 4 was such a mistake but everybody seems to be very happy with the latest releases. Gnome 3 was such a mistake, but that doesn't mean that experimentation with UI paradigms isn't necessary. And now people like Mint and others are building on their technological foundation. The way we use computers has shifted dramatically since the paradigms Gnome 2 is based on were established.

tl;dr: Quit your whinning, sometimes big projects make mistakes, innovation is needed, the vast majority of the whinning is resenting change.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[DaVince21]

They're apparently working hard to make GNOME 3 work without hardware acceleration, so that's also a gripe you won't have any more soon enough.

Another big gripe I have read about, though, is that the source code is designed in such a way that it can hardly be optimized - it's slow by nature. I can sort of see that, running Gnome 3 from a 4-core i7 system.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[mehemiah]

Thanks, I'm not a gnome user so I've been curious. Well, while gnome2 is still stable, unless the gnome people are extremely incompetent or the KDE people are gods I really think you gnome people are over reacting. I was no long time user of kde3 but I think kde4 has replicated 100% of the functionality and behavior of kde3 (and am curious if there are any objections to this). In the mean time, get these fixes to the MATE devs some how. I call your list of differences fixes because of the project goals of MATE. Also, see here if that previous link didn't make their intentions clear. I really think they're trying, you all would just give them a chance.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[mehemiah]

Task oriented ... you have no idea how right you are

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Cyberax]

For example, GNOME2 has a very nice weather/clock applet. Or an equally nice power manager applet.

XFCE lacks both.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

I call your list of differences fixes because of the project goals of MATE

I agree, they are fixes. Problem is, in the view of many users, these fixes only hide the sympoms, they do not cure the disease. Especially these:

- inability to disable the screensaver
- [screensaver] doesn't use DPMS.
- hiding window controls

Scream such a mighty holier-than-thou attitude that the only cure to the disease is perpetual quarantine.

And before anyone asks, I use E17 as my default desktop, and have done so for years. If you care enough to champion my list anywhere, you have my blessing.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[jdege]

Yep. There are plenty of options. And whatever I use for remoting, I'll use for my primary desktop. And it won't be Gnome 3 or Unity.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Kevin108]

Rumors on the Mint forum are that Gnome-Fallback is to lead a short life.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[DarwinSurvivor]

And there's nothing wrong with that. If you feel more comfortable using one environment for all your machines, more power to you. Personally I like gnome3 on the desktop and stumpwm on the laptop where I don't usually have my mouse.

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[Sri Ramkrishna]

You're beginning to understand. It's quite likely you could create all new GUIs completely using the GNOME extension system including XFCE. All this bitching is just transitory crap. People bitched up and down when GNOME 2 came out. GNOME 2 pushed the limits of usability. Being able to mount cdroms automatically, detect when a flash drive was added.. udev came into existence because of what GNOME wanted to do. You all would still be out there modifying text files if usability wasn't a main driver for GNOME 2. The same thing is going to happen with GNOME 3. In about 4 releases, things are going to look pretty interesting.

Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Pausanias]

The biggest idiocy of GNOME 3 last time I tried it (Ubuntu 11.10) was that Right click on the panel didn't work. You had to alt-right-click for everything. This is because the GNUssolini decided it was too distracting for me to right click and I wouldn't get any work done if I right clicked. So they changed all context menus to alt-right-click.

So, is there a GNOME Shell Extension that makes right-click work the way it used to?

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Anonymous Coward]

> So, is there a GNOME Shell Extension that makes right-click work the way it used to?

Yeah. It's called KDE4. It conveniently replaces gnome3 with a non-dumbed-down highly configurable power user desktop.

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME fucktard designers can't wrap their tiny brains around a simple fact : The power of a GUI resides in the user being able to use you know THE FUCKING MOUSE to control things. Having a GUI and being obliged to use MOUSE+KEYBOARD for control is braindead STUPID. Why oh why can't we fire these morons ?

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you don't pay them.

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[maztuhblastah]

The biggest idiocy of GNOME 3 last time I tried it (Ubuntu 11.10) was that Right click on the panel didn't work.

I hate to break it to you, but Ubuntu's UI is Unity, not GNOME Shell. It has nothing to do with GNOME.

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Pausanias]

I hate to break it to you but you can switch between unity and gnome shell in Ubuntu. My statement is correct as it stands.

The biggest idiocy of GNOME 3 last time I tried it (Ubuntu 11.10) was that Right click on the panel didn't work.

I hate to break it to you, but Ubuntu's UI is Unity, not GNOME Shell. It has nothing to do with GNOME.

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Anonymous Coward]

odd i run gnome 3 in ubuntu 11.10 everything stock and i can rigth click on that panel.
No need for alt rigth click for me

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[CaptnMArk]

May be true, but I think we also need a no-mouse Friday for gui/app designers/developers.

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! I had two folders dragged to the panel and couldn't remove them haha. Thanks!

Re:Alt-right click vs. right click?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another thank you from here. I had assumed I wasn't allowed to add anything to the panel. I thought 'Show desktop' had been declared verboten!
It's a stupid change in my opinion.

Re:turd

[rubycodez]

waiter: but looky 'ere, if we poke this pile o' large fruit extensions on a stick into this 'ere turd, the lot ain't got much turd innit now, does it?

where's the de-Suck extension?

[rubycodez]

where's the extension to take the rest of the SUCKAGE out of GNOME 3, or maybe one to take the SHIT out of the head of the Gnome 3 developers who are ignoring user desires and dictating workflow, what can be displayed at one time, and how screen real estate will be used?

Re:where's the de-Suck extension?

[Desler]

You're welcome.

Re:where's the de-Suck extension?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up Ruby faggot.

Re:where's the de-Suck extension?

[rubycodez]

oh, is that your fantasy about my sexual orientation? put some lube on that cucumber so you don't chafe your poop chute wanking to your Rubycodez dreaming, by the light of your GNOME-3 desktop-turned-cellphone-UI

Re:where's the de-Suck extension?

[Anonymous Coward]

De-suck extension for Gnome 3? That would be here: http://www.linuxmint.com/

Re:where's the de-Suck extension?

[rubycodez]

Clem and team are trying very hard, Mint 12 is still rough though thus far. maybe by Mint 13 they'll have it smoothed

Re:where's the de-Suck extension?

[Kevin108]

I love Mint but 11 is as far as I can go right now. I'm aware of the work of bimsebasse and esteban1uy but myself and many other users aren't interested in manually editing one XML file after another and installing myriad extensions in a special order. I'm actually hoping they'll get things sorted out in the current version of Mint. If not, I'm sure it will be ready for 13.

Thanks, but happy with KDE

[gtirloni]

Thanks, but no, thanks.... been happy with KDE4 after GNOME screwed GNOME3.

Re:Thanks, but happy with KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto. After Gnome3 i moved to KDE and havent looked back. It's far more powerful an environment.

Re:Thanks, but happy with KDE

[antdude]

I couldn't get into KDE 4 (v4.4.3 with stable Debian) after being a loyal KDE v2 and v3 user. I kind of like Gnome v2.3. I don't want to use Trinity KDE since I am not sure hown well it will be supported in the future. :(

Re:Thanks, but happy with KDE

[ThePhilips]

Thanks, but no, thanks.... been happy with KDE4 after GNOME screwed GNOME3.

But I still wish somebody made a port of Xfce for KDE...

Re:Thanks, but happy with KDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, but no, thanks.... been happy with KDE4 after GNOME screwed GNOME3.

But I still wish somebody made a port of Xfce for KDE...

Um..that doesn't even make sense. Xfce is its own WM. FWIW, I run XFCE4 on all my distros now, since it's the only one that hasn't succumbed to the dumbing down of my interface.

Dead -- to nerds

[MrEricSir]

Here's the problem: they're trying to make a desktop that has a broad appeal. Gnome 2 was mostly used by nerds (such as myself!) and nerds don't like change, nor do they like things that have broad appeal.

Getting new users/customers vs. making your existing users/customers happy is perhaps the oldest problem in business, and it's the minefield that Gnome 3, KDE 4, Unity, etc. etc. have all stepped into recently.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Shadow of Eternity]

No, it's not a problem at all. The problem is the fallacy that in order to make a UI that appeals to new users you must automatically get rid of everything that your old users liked about the original. You CAN have both, just bury the option to switch somewhere that only the old power users will find and you're fine.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

they're trying to make a desktop that has a broad appeal

And that is completelly understandable. They need to abandon nerds and prepare for a broad audience because next year is, definitely, the year of linux on the desktop.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

You CAN have both, just bury the option to switch somewhere that only the old power users will find and you're fine.

That's exactly what gnome-tweak-tool and extensions are: buried options for power users. So what's the problem

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[DemonGenius]

I'm a nerd, but I also like to get meaningful work done without having to tweak a UI everyday. Up until Ubuntu 10.10 I had the benefit of an attractive AND functional desktop, heck, I even finally perfected my ideal desktop configuration with 10.10, even with warming up to the stupid-application-buttons-on-the-left-side-of-the-title-bar-because-we-want-to-be-like-Apple. However, as much as I like change, the kind of change that prevents me from effectively using my main computer exactly the way I want will drive me away. They could have at least had the courtesy to make the new UI into a separate DE that can be selected at the login screen, but apparently that was too much to ask... bastards. This is why I've switched to Mint and will not look back until the Mint team gets on the idiot UI bandwagon.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I've switched to Mint and will not look back until the Mint team gets on the idiot UI bandwagon.

This time is now: Linux Mint 12 comes with Gnome 3

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[FatLittleMonkey]

"just bury the option to switch somewhere that only the old power users will find and you're fine."

Seriously? You didn't see the wave of outrage over the default tabs on top?

(If you don't use FF, it's reversed forever by right-clicking on a blank part of any toolbar and unticking "Tabs on Top". Real Power User stuff.)

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I've switched to Mint and will not look back until the Mint team gets on the idiot UI bandwagon.

This time is now: Linux Mint 12 comes with Gnome 3

Hahahaha, poor guy. I bet he'll keep trying to use Gnome because even though Gnome always hurts him he believes that deep inside Gnome still loves him.
Those irritated with Gnome should try a tiling WM, they're awesome.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[KugelKurt]

And that is completelly understandable. They need to abandon nerds and prepare for a broad audience because next year is, definitely, the year of linux on the desktop.

The desktop PC is dead. The actual trend since a few years is that the distinction between Personal Computer and Workstation matters again. In the mid to late 1990s the workstation died because PCs became powerful enough that the only differentiating factor was if Win9x ("PC") or WinNT/2k ("workstation") was installed as OS (and since XP it's all NT-based for the majority of users).

Smaller formfactors take the place as new personal computers: Mostly laptops and tablets. GNOME is making sure that its GUI is adapted to those formfactors.
Desktop computers are mostly used for work these days. The demographic that requires desktop workstations is relatively small compared to the rest. The GNOME community focuses on the majority as target audience.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

... nerds don't like change, nor do they like things that have broad appeal.

Getting new users/customers vs. making your existing users/customers happy is perhaps the oldest problem in business, and it's the minefield that Gnome 3, KDE 4, Unity, etc. etc. have all stepped into recently.

Strange. It's the ordinary users that seem to go ballistic when core UI stuff changes. "What you you mean that "Network Neighborhood" is now "My Network Places"????!

Sometimes people just want to get on with it, warts and all.

Isn't "good enough" supposed to be the law of software?

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[MrEricSir]

"The problem is the fallacy that in order to make a UI that appeals to new users you must automatically get rid of everything that your old users liked about the original."

DOS had a lot of powerful features that Microsoft dropped with Windows 95. Do you think Microsoft would be doing better now if they'd stuck with DOS?

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[jdege]

The desktop PC is dead.

So, when can I expect to see multiple monitors on my tablet?

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Shadow of Eternity]

I repeat: ...the FALLACY that in order to make a UI that appeals to new users you MUST automatically get rid...

Do you think they would've been doing worse if they'd still gone to windows 95 but kept the powerful features available for when people needed/wanted them?

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[fnj]

Both of you cowards are S-T-U-P-I-D.

1) Mint 12 gives you MATE, which is a repackaged Gnome2 with the signal advantage that it can be installed together with Gnome3 and they do not conflict with each other. So Mint gives you a choice of which one to log in under.

2) Mint 12 has gone to a lot of trouble with extensions for Gnome3 to mitigate the pain. It's only to get better.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

Mint 12 has gone to a lot of trouble with extensions for Gnome3 to mitigate the pain.

Yes, and when I choose an OS and GUI, I look for one that involves mitigating pain...

Besides you're all lame, Mint is for noobs, everyone else moved to Arch.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[fnj]

Linux is for lazy bums. BSD forever :-)

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

History fail. They didn't drop anything with Win95. XP was the death of DOS as a consumer OS -- 95 and 98 were both DE's, not operating systems.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

My feelings almost exactly. Unity may work fine on a tablet or smaller but on dual 20" screens or single 23" it is just a pain. I left Windows and never went to OSx because I don't want other people forcing me to do things their way. They seem to think I have no input and that their special opinion is all that is valid. I'm on Mint and won't go back.

By the way this is being typed on a very old ubuntu laptop that thankfully WON'T run UN-ity (UNbelievable, UNworable). Ubuntu has gotten as arrogant as Microsoft.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what gnome-tweak-tool and extensions are: buried options for power users. So what's the problem

At the moment, they only restore about half of the features than GNOME 3 removed. That may get better over time, though.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[KugelKurt]

The desktop PC is dead.

So, when can I expect to see multiple monitors on my tablet?

As soon as you hook up a monitor to the Mini HDMI port many tablets have.
Either that or you really want a workstation to do -- well -- work. On computers for personal use (hence "personal computer") multiple monitors are actually an oddity.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[jdege]

They won't be, for much longer.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[lennier]

The desktop PC is dead.

It is? So what is this odd black box under my desk with a keyboard and mouse that I'm browsing the web, playing games, keeping my spreadsheets and buying music on and which I just jacked the HDMI cable into my widescreen TV?

I guess the kids must call it some kind of cellphone? Well, call it whatever makes you happy, I suppose. I'm just glad it's still there, and isn't going anywhere. Cos you could try to put a widescreen TV in your pocket, but I'm not sure you'd enjoy doing that.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[w0mprat]

Broad appeal? Gnome Shell would be a step back for any novice picking up Linux. The from-scratch learning curve has gone way up, there are things unique to Gnome shell that are not terribly discover-able. It thows away a lot of what they already know how to do with Windows or OSX machine, Gnome 2.x was familiar enough for anyone coming from one of those GUIs.

My aging parents have been happily using Ubuntu for some time, I'll be keeping their machine with a Gnome 2.x based LTS until Gnome Shell is fixed.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the super key to bring up my customised applications menu, and one, two, three, or however many up arrow key presses gets me the app I want. I do this literally hundreds of times some days. Using the mouse for these kinds of repetive tasks rapidly induces rsi. Typing the names of apps is not an option, it takes too long. So. You show me how to implement this in gnome 3. Be my guest.

As the man said above, there is absolutely no need to bin functionality which large numbers of users depend on. I am one of them that will be using g2 until it drops, hoping and trusting that by then someone will have reinstated the functionality we have now come to depend on.

Extensions suck

[0123456]

Sure, they're good in theory, but after you've been using some extension for years the Gnome developers decide that they want Change and then your extension breaks and the developer hasn't updated it in a long time because it's done and there's really no way to improve it, and now it's dead unless someone else learns whatever arcane Gnome-isms are required to fix it.

Users simply can't rely on anything outside the main code development tree, and with Gnome you can't even rely on that.

Re:Extensions suck

[ThePhilips]

Facing all the complexity of the extensions, the fact that the dumb Xfce appeals to so many users seems to be almost miraculous.

P.S. Though IceWM remains my personal favorite.

Re:Extensions suck

[allo]

when only using a WM without a DE, i would prefer icewm, too.

noooo..

[Anonymous Coward]

just when i thought i was out they pull me back in..

Will GNOME get a clue now?

[gtirloni]

Now that they will have statistics to show which extensions are most used (i.e. what users are missing the most). Will GNOME undo the mess?

Re:Will GNOME get a clue now?

[grcumb]

Now that they will have statistics to show which extensions are most used (i.e. what users are missing the most). Will GNOME undo the mess?

To quote Linus:

"They don't need a bug report. Trust me on this. They seem to feel that they need different users."

So no, I think the die is cast on this issue. GNOME devs have decided that they know better than their users, and if we would just open our minds to enlightenment (sorry), we'd all get along better.

Again, many people don't even have a huge problem with GNOME deciding what we need; it's the fact that they've removed a bunch of things that they've arbitrarily decided we don't need that's getting everyone's panties in a twist.

Re:Will GNOME get a clue now?

[KugelKurt]

Now that they will have statistics to show which extensions are most used (i.e. what users are missing the most). Will GNOME undo the mess?

Why do you think that most users would a traditional GUI back that GNOME can "undo" to?
Fedora hasn't suffered at all since it ships GNOME 3.x as default.

Re:Will GNOME get a clue now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless Alt+Tab is changed by default to display windows instead of apps, I'm not using gnome-shell.

Eeek...

[BrookHarty]

Ive been a long time ubuntu user, and with the ubuntu unity/gnome fiasco I've been looking at going back to SuSE or even switch to Fedora since I work on redhat boxes all day.

But I decided to go with Mint, and with the extensions installed, its back to what Gnome 3 should have been. I do like being able to reload the desktop without closing my apps, and the looking glass debugger is a nice touch. I think now that extensions are out, and distros can start using them again, Ubuntu will make a comback. But now that I'm switched to Mint, its basically Ubuntu with the better desktop, I might not go back.

I just wish the gnome extensions were installed by default, so people didnt have to learn about them 2nd hand after they already get pissed off at a crippled and funny looking desktop.

Re:Eeek...

[tenchikaibyaku]

I think now that extensions are out, and distros can start using them again, Ubuntu will make a comback.

Ubuntu doesn't even come with gnome-shell installed by default, why would they profit (much) from this?

Re:Eeek...

[Zebedeu]

I think now that extensions are out, and distros can start using them again, Ubuntu will make a comback. But now that I'm switched to Mint, its basically Ubuntu with the better desktop, I might not go back.

The problem with Ubuntu these days is that it's designed for Unity.
Sure, people say you're an apt-get install gnome-shell away from a Gnome 3 desktop, but in my experience that's not exactly true.
At least in my install there were a few annoyances which always made me feel that I was using the software in a non-approved manner, and because this configuration isn't Ubuntu's focus, it's less likely that those problems will be fixed.

Things like the automatic login always bringing me back to Unity, requiring that I always login manually, and the fact that my windows would open without a menu, which would suddenly flash into existence (because Unity hides windows menus in the top bar).

I moved to Mint and never looked back. I actually like a purer form of Gnome 3 than the Mint guys gave me, but that's the beauty of the shell extensions: I disabled the few I didn't like and installed a few more I wanted.
Now I have a desktop customized to my needs without the need to spend hours looking at configuration files/dialogs.

Compensates for some of the losses

[quixote9]

Nice to see them trying to bring G3 back to the usability levels of G2. They have a ways to go, but hey, at least they started. The more usable desktops we have to choose from, the better.

Unity or GNOME 3?

[revcompgeek]

People keep saying they tried G3 on Ubuntu, and I'm wondering if they mean Unity instead? I know G3 can be installed on Ubuntu but it doesn't come installed by default. For instance: Pausanias talking about alt-right-click. I've never seen that anywhere in G3, and I've been using it basically since it came out.

Re:Unity or GNOME 3?

[KugelKurt]

For instance: Pausanias talking about alt-right-click. I've never seen that anywhere in G3, and I've been using it basically since it came out.

He's talking about the GTK 3 port of the classic GNOME Panel (aka Fallback Mode).

Re:Unity or GNOME 3?

[squiggleslash]

If you install the "Fallback" session mode for GNOME 3, you get something that vaguely resembles GNOME 2 but has some annoying subtle differences. One of these is that to edit the panels, you need to Alt-Right Click.

There are no panels in Unity, so it's definitely G3 we're talking about :)

Anything not in core needs to play catch up.

[goruka]

Just like in Firefox, each time API version changes, extensions will break and will not work for a while. That is not cool. This is just an excuse from the Gnome developers for not fixing what users complain is broken..

Basic functionality shouldn't be "extentions"

[Anonymous Coward]

The GNOME 3 developers suffer from serious mental problems that cause them to ignore common sense and user feedback. The same also has effected the Mozilla folk with their removing of the status bar and forward button and force you to get basic features with extensions that break every six weeks unless you install them in a special way. The whole ship crippled software and fix with easily breakable extensions mentality needs to be stopped. Both Gnome and Mozilla need to be bitch slapped hard.

Until they can get a clue then I will be using software written by competent and mentally stable developers.

Re:Basic functionality shouldn't be "extentions"

[Anonymous Coward]

Do what I did: Switch to midori and xfce. These two changes allowed me to keep both my parents computers fast enough for regular everyday use. The one being a PPro workstation and the other a 2001-2002 era Pentium 3, both with only 256 megs of ram, and running Fedora and OpenSUSE. My point? Not only do you increase productivity by using the more traditional desktop layout that both you and your users are comfortable with, but you also lower your resource usage enough that even obsolete systems which according to current Linux system requirements won't meet the minimums, can and WILL run well enough for basic web use and text processing, something that seems to have become a scoffed at feature for every current linux distro.

As an addendum however: Has anyone else noticed runaway memory usage on Firefox/Seamonkey/Midori? I've been running into 2ish gig memory usage in at least 2/3 which doesn't seem to be limited to the gecko backend, but which so far hasn't happened in chrome. FF will do it with 5 or less tabs open and idle whereas midori will usually need 40-50 open. It seems to be a runaway problem that leads to disk thrashing until the application is terminated, but doesn't show up when reloaded with the same tabs. Just a curiousity for someone more technically inclined :)

Not GNU's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

Your pun GNUssolini makes it sound that the GNU folks are the major culprits behind the fucktardation of GNOME. While GNOME did start out as a GNU sponsored project, the prime movers of GNOME is now developers affiliated with Redhat. So blame the GNOmmunists that want to dumb down GNOME for the masses.

Re:Not GNU's fault

[Pausanias]

I agree with you that gnome should not belong with fsf any more. But at least on paper they are still the official desktop of GNU. I think RMS is trying to get them to behave but not having much success.

www.gnome.org/about/
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME

too late

[Anonymous Coward]

gnome so alienated me that i moved to xfce out of desperation.

and now i've come to like it. sorry, gnome, you've lost me and will probably never get me back.

one size fits all, open wide

[epine]

For no other purpose than to add to the obnoxious rumble of discontent: Me too!

And I'll add, Ubuntu did a terrible job of communication around this change of direction. I couldn't have cared less which side of the window the close box is located on, but the way they handled the change should have set my teeth on edge much sooner than it did.

But does it work on multiple monitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try running GNOME 3 with two or more video cards and multiple screens. It doesn't work.

I run two Twin-View cards in Xinerama mode and it used to work with pretty much everything. Over time it has gotten worse and worse though and nowadays the only things that work out of the box are KDE and or a manual custom setup. Even XFCE doesn't work unless I switch the window manager to OpenBox.

All these open-source projects are starting to piss me off to no end. You shouldn't break stuff that used to work fine. In the old days Linux used to handle it better than anything else but I guess the developers lost sight because now OSX and Windows handle multiple monitors way better than anything open-source. Linux is actually getting worse over time.

Re:But does it work on multiple monitors?

[bike_head]

I have several machines with multiple monitors: two desktops and a laptop with a dock. They each have a different graphics card: Nvidia, ATI, and Intel. Each one supports multiple monitors flawlessly without having to do that annoying twinview thing anymore. Docking and undocking with the laptop automatically adds or removes the second screen; I even configured Gnome 3 to move the applications bar to the larger secondary monitor when I'm docked and back to the laptop when I'm not. On one machine I have the secondary screen have an independent workspace and another I have it change with the workspace: I'm still trying to work out which I like better.

So in summary, my experience is just the opposite of what you claim: multiple monitor support, on different chips, out of the box with no configuration.

Gone back to Windows :/

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I actually switched to Windows Vista because of all these problems with Linux lately. I used to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu, but now I'm just getting tired of stupid new UIs and programs written for different desktop environments not working correctly, e.g. me not getting notified when I receive instant messages and stuff like that.

Re:Gone back to Windows :/

[rubycodez]

bad news for you, Vista has one of those "stupid new UIs" too. Windows 7 is actually somewhat less whacked. But yeah, some major open source projects are doing their damn hardest to kill GNU/Linux on the desktop. Firefox, GNOME, KDE, Ubuntu with Unity....gawd damn, its madness.

Easy solution

[future assassin]

just switch to LXDE or XFCE done....

Happy Gnome 3 User

[jon3k]

Unfortunately the people who are unhappy tend to be the loudest. I just wanted to chime in and say that I absolutely love Gnome 3 and wouldn't dream of going back to Gnome 2.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[noobermin]

Notice how you have 2 points while everyone else's idle complaints are modded up. Yeah, the unhappy people tend to be the loudest.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[ADRA]

In slashdot, all users are treated equally, and if you get modded up its because the mob generally agrees with what you're saying. That said, after the 16th or so Gnome3/unity story, I think this flame war is about as boring as grass. Us haters have found somewhere else to hang our hats, and the lovers will defend it with their dieing breath. The winner like so many other decisions won't be held by the jury of slashdot, but instead in everyone's home/office/laptop from machine to machine, and no matter how much one shouts, that fact won't change.

If OSS history's taught us anything, its that distros / programs only remain relevant as long as they continue to service the needs of their users.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[tenchikaibyaku]

Another happy user of Gnome 3 here.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. With all the negative comments you'd think the Gnome developers killed a thousand baby kittens, pissed on their carcasses and produced the most unholy window manager of all time. I have not had this experience.

I started using G3 in Fedora 15 and it was different, but not in a bad way. Sure it had a lot of rough spots, but I'm using Fedora so I'm supposed to expect this. I found it quite easy to start writing my own extensions using javascript and found it was possible to modify the environment to my liking without having to recompile the window manager. My big gripe is that the documentation for writing extensions is almost non-existent, so the only guides are other extensions and lots of googling.

It was obvious that the next step was an on-line repository of extensions that encouraged an ecosystem of extension development that would extend outside of the core G3 development. This website seems to fulfils this promise and I expect better things in the future.

I'm finding G3 to be a great development.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Prune]

Ditto.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Zebedeu]

Agreed.
Gnome 3 + shell extensions = desktop bliss.

It's like Firefox: give the users the basic usability and functionality, and let them enable/disable the parts according to their taste.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[jon3k]

I love the new virtual desktop system. Once I figured out a few tricks I've found Gnome3 to be fantastic.

1. Use CTRL+click to open a second copy of an already open application, instead of switching to the currently running instance
2. Press alt+~ to switch between different instances of an open application (eg - multiple terminals) without switching between different apps, like alt+tab
3. To shutdown, click on your username in the top right, then press alt. You'll see at the bottom of the list "Suspend" will change to "Power Off"

I really enjoy being able to launch applications so quickly by just pressing the "Windows" key and beginning to type the application name, then pressing enter. I really feel like Gnome 3 gets out of my way and let's me use my applications.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[jon3k]

Any shell extensions you can recommend so far? I haven't had much time to play with them.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Zebedeu]

I don't know which of these came with Mint and which I got somewhere else.
I'm sorry, but I also don't remember where I got them from, but they should be easy enough to Google.

system-monitor-extension replaces the old system monitor panel widget. It includes network speed, so it's a bit better.
media-player-extension adds an icon in the panel when you have your media player open (I like to keep mine in the last desktop).
alt-tab extension reverts to the alt-tab behaviour from Gnome 2 which switched between windows instead of applications.
weather indicator extension adds a weather icon and temperature next to the clock. It's a bit of a bitch to configure because you need to know the weather station code for your city. Also, remember to press enter once you paste the code on the field, otherwise it won't be set.
static workspaces extension this is the most valuable of all. I hate the dynamic workspaces in Gnome 3 because my desktops have defined uses: 1 is for browsing, 2 is for programming, 3 and 4 are for documentation and running tests, 5 is for the music player.
Besides, I hated the fact that you'd have something on desktop 3, close the last app on desktop 2 and suddenly your windows from desktop 3 get moved to desktop 2, so when you try to go back there, you get an empty desktop.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey thanks.. I don't know about it :)
Gnome should publish this and other features so user know what they are getting.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Dammital]

You're one of only a few people who have written positively about Gnome 3 (in the places I hang out, anyway). Would you add some detail about your experience?

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Thanks for writing something that is on topic and relevant to the title instead of the miles of miles of butt hurt comments. You'd think GNOME 3 stole their chidren and won't give them back.

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[hfranz]

All of this is not discoverable unless you click on every GUI element with every combination of left, right and middle mouse click with shift, control, alt, super, hyper and no modifier. WTF?

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[jc79]

Hey thanks.. I don't know about it :)
Gnome should publish this and other features so user know what they are getting.

They did, a long time ago: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

Re:Happy Gnome 3 User

[jc79]

Yeah, too bad none of that is documented in a place which is easily discoverable by reading the release notes, or using google. It's a shame people have to brute force everything about the learning curve instead of reading a manual or something like this:

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

too little too late

[Gravis Zero]

after a forced/inadvertent migration that i couldnt undo to gnome 3 (thanks debian. -_-), i bailed. i tried to use the new UI, i really did but it was horrid. i couldnt get anything done and kde was just as bad. i'm still working on finding/writing programs to make a good desktop environment but i refuse to be a victim of Gnome developer stupidity again.

i've left you Gnome and i'm not coming back.

Hipster GNOME users

[qxcv]

I used XFCE before it was authentic.

Nice

[GoingDown]

I have been using Gnome 3.2 since Ubuntu 11.10 came out. So far I have been liking it quite a lot, it feels really natural and clean way to work. Before Gnome 3, I have been using Awesome & Gnome 2 desktops for years.

Gnome 3 extensions seem to be really easy to install, just two clicks and that was. I was already using some via ppa's, but this seems nicer.

Now, just if I can get automatic window tiling extension Gnome 3 would be perfect (there is manual tiling extension available, and one automatic one, but it is still buggy). Also, there is some small bugs in Gnome 3 still, but nothing earth-breaking anymore.

Gnome 3 sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll install gnome 3 just after it becomes the last window manager on earth (like 2 though).
Notice that the webpage can detect gnome 3. Yeah no thank you.

i love shell

[nickferber]

I know a lot of people hate Gnome Shell, but I want to let you know that there are a substantial number of people like me, who love vanilla gnome shell. And no, I don't work for Gnome. Before shell came out, I had a similar setup on my ubuntu 10.04 with synapse as a launcher, and a hot corner using compiz for selecting between apps. Having said that, shell needs to work on their performance issues, but I think their vision isn't really bad.

Re:i love shell

[sgt scrub]

That is good to hear. I'm happy their vision works for some people. I hope you support them in return.

Where is My Gnome2?

[deepclutch]

Gnome developers! stop using mac os now!!! we've had enough. every fcuking turd knows that Linux Gui or Desktop Environments are blatant copies of Windows or Mac! KDE = way too much windows! ya fans will definitely denyy Gnome = mac os x el copy... When WIll Linux Get a Real Desktop Environment? GNOME 2 was the closest thing. People are really settled with it. Now, they want to show us a tablet/mobile UI called Gnome3! Why? Gnome3 has problems with window manager mutter and clutter(libs). Many applications render like sh1t especially firefox,eye of gnome etc when pages gets garbled,stuck. this is in addition to the frustration of not having Gnome2.. tbh

Re:Where is My Gnome2?

[Anonymous Coward]

search for Mate. some dude forked gnome2 and apparently trying to maintain it.

Re:Where is My Gnome2?

[KugelKurt]

search for Mate. some dude forked gnome2 and apparently trying to maintain it.

By "maintain" he means to make sure it can be installed in parallel to GNOME 3.
There are no plans to write bugfixes or enhance Mate in any other way than to resolve installation conflicts.

Wrong direction.

[sgt scrub]

It isn't what needs to be added it is what needs to be removed. If I can't remove something from the Window Manager then I will have to remove the Window Manager.

MY issues with Gnome 3

[PenquinCoder]

Is it -has- taken away my productivity. I have used GNOME 2.x and Compiz ever since there was such a matchup available, and it has come to be my 'perfect' desktop. For me, this involves being able to group and switch between windows ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_uAA9OK-jQ ) and window opacity based on mouse position ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg1qbw8pML4 ) . Unity, and GNOME 3 both cannot handle either of these, and so I still WANT to use Gnome 2 with Compiz. My other issues involve Unity and GNome 3 utilizing way more ram/cpu cycles than they should be, just for some fancy effects; craptacular decision to 'lets be like mac and put the menubar in the top panel' retardations; and one of the worst decisions I've seen to menu system, EVER.... that horrible 'take up 75% of your screen 'menu' box where you have to TYPE AND SEARCH for your program' . I Can do that just fine in a damn terminal, but when I'm using a GUI, point and click based DE, I -want- and need to be able to see all my items laid out in a logical manner, so I can quickly get to the item I want to use. Not spend longer attempting to find it through your convoluted search box.

Re:MY issues with Gnome 3

[KugelKurt]

Is it -has- taken away my productivity. I have used GNOME 2.x and Compiz ever since there was such a matchup available, and it has come to be my 'perfect' desktop. For me, this involves being able to group and switch between windows ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_uAA9OK-jQ ) and window opacity based on mouse position ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg1qbw8pML4 ) . Unity, and GNOME 3 both cannot handle either of these

Strange, considering that Unity is built on top of Compiz. Seems you simply didn't install/activate the needed plugins.
GNOME 3 also works just fine with Compiz. Only GNOME Shell requires Mutter but GNOME Panel (aka Fallback Mode) does not.

Re:MY issues with Gnome 3

[PenquinCoder]

Right, the default in GNOME 3 is the gnome shell, which does not use Compiz. So in order to get my usable desktop back, I'd have to go to 'gnome fallback mode' and install/use compiz. Thus, it is not truly GNOME 3 that is usable or active for me, its a compromise. Personally, I won't use Unity because it is worse then Gnome shell!

Gnome 3 and dual monitors

[lsatenstein]

Can someone describe their experience with G3 and dual monitors. I usually work with one monitor showing the online documentation, while I code with the other.
Without dual monitor support, I am, as I did in the past, keep two systems side by side.
I am after productivity. With Fedora 16, I went the compiz route, and only use the extensions for four desktops and for wobbly windows. (That is how I justify compiz)

Re:Gnome 3 and dual monitors

[Sri Ramkrishna]

pretty decent, however might not be exactly what you're used to. The main panel you can move from desktop to desktop and the second monitor remains fixed. You can change the behavior using gsettings, it's not exposed in gnome-tweak-tool. So multi-monitor mode works out of the box. (I should know, it was my bug that was fixed)

Request...

[Junta]

I've made the same request before and I'll make it again.

Give me some way to search window titles to filter the window preview. KDE does this, compiz does this. I have lots of windows and searching with keyboard would be nice.

Mouseover an application icon in the 'activities' view should filter away windows not belonging to that icon and make the windows belonging to that app take up the full screen.

KDE 4.7+Icon Tasks has been a fairly decent experience though. I wish the single window and multi-window case of an application behaved more similarly though. If I click on an icon with only one window, it toggles minimize. If multi-window, present windows. I can make the multi-window do minimize toggle, but I actually kind of want the converse change...

Another Happy Gnome 3 User Here

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

Sadly, i don't have modpoints today I would have thrown a bunch into this thread of happy Gnome 3 users.

I got a taste of Gnome 3 on Ubuntu. (I used the Gnome Shell login option to get Gnome 3 rather than Unity.) I loved it and the increased productivity it gave me so much I switched back to Debian so I could get Gnome 3 in unmolested form rather than the hacked up Ubuntu version.