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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."
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell-extensions
*Fixed but may break everything else.
Xfce is the next standard for the authentic-gnome users, I've made the migration and I'm entirely satisfied.
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!
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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?
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.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
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.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
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?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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