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GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award
msevior writes "Although Linus Torvalds and some Slashdot commentators may disagree, GNOME 3 has many admirers. GNOME 3 was awarded the Linux Journal Readers' Choice award for 2011." Though I'm one of the complainers, I hope to be converted with the help of Gnome Shell extensions.
GNOME 3 is basically a dead project at this point. No serious developers use it these days, and when that happens to an open source project, it dies.
It was taken over by failed web designers. They screwed up the user interface and the user experience in a way that nobody can use it for real, productive work, and thus no serious users actually use it.
GNOME users have moved on. There are a small group that stick with GNOME 2. The rest now use KDE, XFCE, or a variety of apps under some standalone window manager. The only GNOME 3 users are those who try it out before moving on to a better desktop environment.
The same thing is happening with Firefox, too. The productive users are fleeing it because the failed web designers have moved on to fucking up its UI, too.
It's sad to see these once-great projects fall away like this, solely because failed web designers started trying to apply their failed web design techniques to desktop applications. I suppose that it's a self-correcting problem, however. Software projects like GNOME 3 and Firefox 4+ just don't end up surviving because they lost the users who formerly made them great.
i was gona say "let the flam wars begin. but the person above me started the hate.
Oh and I LOVE GNOME3 and GNOME SHELL!
what a load of nonsense. Talk about Linux becoming commercial!
... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.
Okay, so they picked Gnome3, but what were the other window managers they looked at to make that decision? The Fine Article doesn't seem to say.
I heard somewhere that they're working on a fork of GNOME 2, is that still going?
Like a lot of people, I hated GNOME 3 (and GNOME Shell) when 3.0 released. I skipped around a little, tried KDE4 (again), tried Unity, tried XFCE (again), but eventually came back around to GNOME 3 with the GNOME 3.2 release. The advent of extensions, as well as spending some time actually learning to use the new environment and making some small changes to the way I do things, has actually brought me to the point of liking GNOME 3 and the new Shell. I now enjoy using it, and I prefer it over the other available options.
Extensions are a big deal, and if they had been there Day One, I think a lot of the hate for GNOME 3 would not have arisen. I added lots of extensions to re-create the GNOME 2 type of environment. What I found is that in some cases the extensions duplicated functionality already in GNOME 3, but that functionality was achieved in a different way with the new environment. As I began learning the GNOME Shell and building new habits, I found myself disabling extensions one by one. At this point, I'm running with minimal extensions.
Desktop developers should take note of that. There is nothing wrong with innovative change, but you don't want to shock your users. If you are going to radically change paradigms, make it possible for your users to continue to use the old paradigms and adapt at their own pace by migrating from the old to the new. Don't try to force them down this new path. Extensions to GNOME 3 were the training wheels I needed for my brain to learn the new environment and adapt. Once I got my balance, the training wheels came off.
I have been tested all desktop for more than a decade and So far this is the best UX I can use on a touchscreen, note that KDE Active is less polished so far And I've been using also on my home laptop for months , kde at work , and lxde on older computer ...
Check how linux mint tuned g3 to keep g2 look and feel ...
-- http://rzr.online.fr/
I have a mixed views of gnome, one criticism I have with it the old one of it has been simplified to the point of being un-intuitive. When people accused gnome of this in the past I dismissed it! Now I have noted that to minimize the open application I have to point to the upper left corner, no buttons for this. File, Edit etc are not part of Gnome apps they are in the bar at the very top of the screen. Much of this change is change for changes sake, its unfamiliar (no other desktop works this way). Its a shame because the general concept is good. One area (top left corner) gives you access to all applications and parts of the system.
Oh that's right, there's somebody like you calling deathwatch on every new thing ever released. You talk about people moving to KDE - a few years ago when KDE 4 was released, you, or one of your many clones was saying exactly the same thing about KDE.
Gnome Shell will prevail. It might not look like it does in a few years but it's flexible enough and most importantly, hackable in a simple language that doesn't need compiling. Power users will latch onto that and we'll start seeing some really awesome things and then Gnome becomes desirable. And that's already starting to happen.
Anyway, thank you for yet another very incorrect prediction. You're bound to get it right one day.
The term you are looking for is "usability designers", something that is becoming more and more trendy nowadays. The problem is, there is no solid ground on that kind of theory.. only a few "gurus" here and there and a lot of decisions that seemed to have worked by pure luck. There are a lot of them making a big buck working as consultants for websites and it was only a matter of time until open source desktops were struck by this trend.
It's simple, someone comes and determines that the way you have been doing things, that worked perfect for you and everyone you know up to this point is not optimal and must be done differently. Then, they throw away something that works for everyone and replace it by something that maybe works better for most, only for a few or for no one.
It's hit or miss, really, pulled by people with a gigantic ego. Gnome 3 doesn't have access to the large amount of user test groups that Apple, Google or Microsoft do, and even the later companies don't do changes as radical as in Gnome Shell.
So, yeah, Gnome 3 is just people with large egos forcing their unproven beliefs upon us, the community.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-moXUALZtw
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Can there be a more experienced and deeply wise plebiscite? of course not! The matter is therefore once and for all time resolved - erledigt. Gnome tre has won the Linux Journal Readers' Choice award! which awards exactly what you ask? hah! if you must ask that then you know nothing *nothing*. Gnome III thereby takes it over all comers in all categories for all time, better than OS/X Lion, better than Meryl Streep, better than sliced bread -- selah. now we can get on with our sad little lives concerning ourselves over lesser matters.
Firefox is still the developers browser.
Chrome lacks the range of developer extensions, and while Opera is very standards compliant, it's actually full of nasty bugs that only developers would encounter.
Firefox doesn't come close to the arrogance of GNOME, since all the funky mods can be switched off.
After my knee jerk reaction against browser.urlbar.trimURLs, I actually switched this one back on.
Posted anon since I'm not pulling the /. party-line of hating on FF and evangelizing chrome.
Unity - At least it's not GNOME shell.
GNOME 3 has not accomplished anything to deserve an award.
While I do agree that its interface works great on touch based devices, it is not nor will it ever be optimized for PCs and laptops. Perhaps this is a sign that GNOME will slowly abandon PC users. Perhaps its time we act first and abandon GNOME.
All Open Source projects must forcefully reject any and all participation from self-labeled "designers". These people are a menace to Open Source software. They will destroy UIs. They will destroy usability. They will kill entire Open Source projects.
Don't even be polite about it. Tell them to fuck right off. If they persist, ignore them on mailing lists or forums. Ensure they don't have commit access. If they submit patches, reject them.
These faux "contributors" need to be marginalized. We need to go back to developers calling all of the shots. Developers care about usability and creating sensible UIs. They don't stand for making things look "pretty" when doing so will make the software unusable. I'd rather use a damn ugly application that works, rather than one that a "designer" has rendered useless.
It's too late for GNOME and Firefox. But it's not too late for other projects. They still have time to put down this threat to their very existence.
At least those UI designers can't touch the linux kernel!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I'm a C/Java developer who loves Gnome3. It's all javascript, so I've created buttons in the Window Manager interface to open searched files in different web services and text editors. Chat and Social Networking can be integrated directly into the notification pop up bar, so that's a plus. And it's simple. I don't need a lot of control, and what control I do need I can get from Extensions or messing with the js. The keyboard shortcuts are similar to Gnome 2 and are fairly intuitive to me.
Basically, I don't understand the vehement opposition here. It's like I'm looking at a forum with a bunch of 60+ Republicans in it. If you don't like it, don't use it. Just because you can't comprehend why another person would choose a different option from you on a poll, it doesn't mean the poll was rigged. Just because it's different and you can't get used to it doesn't mean that no one else can. Grow up.
I am disappointed in this year's "Reader's Choice." It mentions "Gmail" as the best Linux app for instant messaging, "Google Docs" as the best Linux(?) app for collaboration, and the "reader's choice" for Linux games have been the same for the past eight years, despite eight years of new developments (Battle for Wesnoth? From 2003? When there's Warzone 2100, OpenTTD, 0 A.D., Heroes of Newerth, Minecraft, Braid, Darwinia, DEFCON, MegaGlest, Amnesia Dark Descent, Aquaria, Tiny & Big, OpenClonk, SpaceChem ... jeez.
I think the "Reader's" part of the "Reader's Choice" may be out-of-touch.
I just brushed my asshole with my gnome toothbrush.
I know, I know, it's hardly news when slashdot gets something wrong. Nevertheless, it can be worth pointing out what they got wrong, and in this case, what they got wrong was the "3". Gnome won; the version wasn't specified. From TFA:
"Due to the timing of the GNOME 3 release, it's hard to tell if the victory is because of version 3 or in spite of it.
Personally, I'm waiting to judge Gnome3 till they release a working version. Same as I did with KDE4. :)
Gee for a DE that is suposta get out of your way and help you work more efficiently it sure does get in the fucking way a lot
(based on my default install)
why the hell does the top bar only show one thing at a time, its fucking annoying on my 86 mac and its still fucking annoying on my 2011 linux machine. how is me clicking on the taskbar to select a window in "old fashioned" windows style management LESS efficient than clicking on the magic corner and having to squint at reduced windows, and clicking again?
mounting filesystems, If I am in the file explorer and click on my windows partition a stupid ass popup comes up and asks me if I want to open it in the file explorer!?! and of course it does not go away unless I click in its general area.
virtual desktops? as far as I can tell by default they only appear if something is maximized, or you right click on a window and tell it to move, what if I just wanted to click on desktop 2 and open more shit up?
adding launchers to the desktop, why for the fucking love of god are modern DE designers opposed to me putting a shortcut to frequently used applications??? again how is it less efficient to double click on a icon vs clicking on the magic G spot bringing up a menu, THEN clicking on it from favorites if its even on your favorites list (which is tiny, and if its not on your favorites list add 2 more clicks and menus)? Hell before I sat down and read how to do this the only way I could get a fucking shortcut on the desktop was to log out of gnome 3 back into gnome 2, put my shit there, log back out then log back in again ... fucking fail.
Now I know every single bit of this can be customized, which brings me to my final point, why the fuck do I have to install a tweaker tool and mod endless text files to get simple functionality that used to be a GOD DAMED RIGHT CLICK OPTION!
While Gnome3 is not as stupid / broken as KDE4 (which I really hate) its still stupid and broken. A computer interface should be something you really dont have to think about while using it, and ever since installing gnome 3 I have spent more time getting rid of dumb shit poping up out of everywhere impeding what I was doing.
Shit I accidentally bumped that fucking magic spot on the task bar 2 damned times writing this post, shrinking everything down, making me stop everything and select what window I was using. Even the show desktop spot on the windows taskbar goes the fuck away once you move the mouse away.
Oh well guess I will just keep using XFCE
I've tried Gnome 3 and I chose XFCE. It's not great, but it's a heap better than Gnome3.
I really hated that it got harder to switch between windows. Alt-Tab would switch between apps. Now all my terminal windows were on top. I eventually figured out how to select a specific terminal window, but then every time I switch, I have to think about what I want and how to get there.
Apparently it's good design for the masses, but it's really bad design for developers.
Whoops, ignore the above. Gnome (no version specified) won Best Desktop Environment, but Gnome3 won Product of the Year.
Note that neither of these is, specifically, the "Readers Choice Award", though. Those are just two of the many Readers Choice Awards from LJ. So I was right about slashdot getting it wrong; I was just wrong about what they got wrong. *sigh*
This is exactly why Apple went bankrupt back in 2007: "designers" fucking everything up. And thank God for that, because otherwise we'd have lost the smooth functionality and labor-saving keystroke memorization that Lotus 123 and WordPerfect have blessed us with... not to mention the almighty command-line, which in the general opinion of all good men far surpasses any "designer's" laborious move-hands-from-keyboard-to-mouse-and-move-mouse-and-click slavery. Free market forces and common sense have converged to refute the heresies of the designers and their shiny UI's and gradients and drop shadows, and our world is a better and more moral place because of it.
There are only two kinds of programs in the world: eye candy without functionality, and the raw power of DB-engineer-designed matrices of text input boxen! For those who don't understand, let me elucidate by analogy: there are only two kinds of women in the world: the pretty, vacuous ones, and the ugly lesbian geniuses. The world is a binary place, full of ones and zeroes, and there's no room for compromise: the shiny is always useless. Suck lied to us.
Let us all take a lesson from Firefox, which lost its entire userbase to Chrome not because of lingering perceptions of memory bloat that a better marketing team could have dispelled; nor because Google had so much name brand recognition, practically being synonymous with the internet in the minds of many thanks to the ubiquity of its search and mail, that everyone accepted its new browser as Really Hot Stuff From a Quality Company—no, Firefox lost its entire userbase to Chrome and was abandoned as a software project because a "designer" moved the tabs and consolidated the search and address bars.
I'm glad that I'm not alone in daring to hope that the GNOME team takes a good, hard look at its socialist ways and decides to return to just plain, American xterm windows with a Motif-like window manager. It's time we programmers took back our computers from the commie "designers" who want to push useless eye candy on us.
I have a mixed views of gnome, one criticism I have with it the old one of it has been simplified to the point of being un-intuitive. When people accused gnome of this in the past I dismissed it! Now I have noted that to minimize the open application I have to point to the upper left corner, no buttons for this. File, Edit etc are not part of Gnome apps they are in the bar at the very top of the screen. Much of this change is change for changes sake, its unfamiliar (no other desktop works this way). Its a shame because the general concept is good. One area (top left corner) gives you access to all applications and parts of the system.
If you want a minimize button on windows, install GnomeTweakTool. It has an option that allows you to select the arrangement of buttons on a window's title bar.
LXDE - I'm using lubuntu - does what a desktop environment should do - stays out of the way, consumes very little resources, easy to switch between apps with easy to read ALT+TAB switcher. Would be nice if it had a search box to find apps on the launcher but the ALT+F2 / run dialog box does lookup apps. If I were on a touch screen a DE designed for that would make more sense.
I have avoided the Ubuntu OS update for my main desktop for a while, and will continue to do so. The new server in the backroom has Xfce4 installed on it as of today. Its worth noting I use either Ubuntu or Debian fro all my Linux machines.
Linux Journal bribed by Gnome 3 developers. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
gnome 3 sucks
The fact this post hasn't been modded up is proof satire is lost on Slashdot.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
I know I hate Xcode 4 and I hope somethin happens about it in the future.
You have to give the Gnome team credit for trying. While I don't think Gnome 3 is fantastic, it has a lot of ideas and features that hold a lot of potential IMHO, and it is growing on me the more I get used to it. It certainly is a damn sight better than that slow and buggy mess known as Unity. The fact of the matter is that the Gnome team has attempted to give Linux something that it has never truly had: It's OWN blasted user interface. Lets face it; every prior UI has simply been aping Windows and Mac. Hence why desktop Linux has never truly gained traction. Who wants to use an OS that appears to be playing monkey-see-monkey-do when they can simply have the real thing? It needs to blaze it's own trail, and that is impossible to accomplish while pleasing everyone that wants to stay in their comfort zone. The Linux Mint team has shown us that Gnome 3 can be flexible, and now that the extensions are live we will see if it is up to the task. Only time will tell. Declaring it's death or success at this point is extremely premature.
I played with Red Hat back in the day and had Fedora 11 on my spare laptop, just cuz. But mostly I used Windows, occasionally a Mac. Everything I am about to say is filtered through that lens....
I was used to Gnome 2 on Fedora 11. It was similar enough to the windows and mac ui so that I could get around it very easily. When I installed Fedora 16 and used Gnome 3.x, I had to struggle to find things. Gnome Shell Extension allowed me to put back the features I liked from Gnome 2, while keeping the clean look of 3. I just would like to see GSE as a standard install item, not an add-on
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
I haven't used GNOME 3, but from what I have seen in user feed back, it is not a positive release for GNOME.
I find the people that like it, are new users to LINUX and never used GNOME 2.
If you previously used GNOME 2, most people don't like GNOME 3.
But, everyone knows, there will be a GNOME 4 and like the KDE 4 release, which was a disaster I think, things will improve.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I'll stick with Enlightenment, thanks.
Gnome 3 (or more commonly known as, Vista for Linux) is an ugly rip-off of what happens when the Windows GUI and the Mac OS 10 GUI raeped KDE's GUI while raeping the LCARS interface and have a failed abortion (see Children), proving once again that all open source applications are made from stolen source code rearranged randomly with gay little scripts made by epic fail intarwebz designers. GNOMEs development philosophy is our users are stupid, and task based workflows that we force on them is what we as "pretty kewl guys" should do, and thus every new release is actually smaller than the last,[1] proving the developers (aspies) are just removing features in the name of "usability" and instead use donations to buy Prozac and Microsoft stocks. All this and yet somehow, GNOME manages to remain slow and bloated, thanks to the over 9000 dependencies and libraries GNOME needs to function.
What is wrong with gnome 2? I loved Ubuntu until Unity was crammed down my throat, I switched to Mint. I tried 12 (w/Gnome3) but quickly went back to 11. Can someone please explain why we are "fixing" something that doesn't seem to be broken at all?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
There is nothing "intuitive" about minimizing a window.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
You're describing Unity, not Gnome 3.
These are the same people who voted ...
All of which goes to say - with a voting track record like that, I'm not putting too much stock in their choice for Product of the Year ;)
The problem with Gnome is that it was predicated on the human interface guidelines copied from Mac OS 8.
The updates they've done, IIRC, are not substantial, and very ad hoc. Nothing in Gnome seems to indicate they're knowledgeable in the area of human-computer interfaces. Meanwhile, KDE embraces a state of the art artificial intelligence project in usability (the KDE implementation of NEPOMUK - Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge)...
KDE has cooler graphics too...I (and a lot of people) would argue.
Furthermore, Gnome hasn't conducted any serious usability studies (only ones with sample sizes so small they don't count). For a company that had a millionaire astronaut supporting it (indirectly through Ubuntu) and used to have Red Hat's support, it's too little, too late.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
...1938. These good, old "XY-Of The Year"-stories just never get boring.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
*File, Edit etc are not part of Gnome apps they are in the bar at the very top of the screen.*
this is the biggest hate I have for osx too. it's not intuitive. the larger your screen is, the more monitors you have, the worse it gets!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Really? I switched to KDE 4 when it hit 4.2 or in my opinion a stable release. Prior to that I was very happy with Gnome 2. To me Gnome 3 and Windows 8 look like they will be at more at home on a tablet or a cell phone but not on my desktop.
Chris Sheppard
In fact, I think Word Perfect in the late 90s is still more useful than Word 2007/2010.
Could someone tell me what more does a man need from a window manager? Instead of bickering about UIs (and let's not forget that "the only intuitive interface is the nipple"), shouldn't the linux community (users and developers alike) focus on what has always been the staple of Unices: stability, performance, security?
I mean come on, the gnome shell extensions? They're written in JavaScript. What comes next? Spreadsheets in Django? There's a reason each tool is better suited to a task. Would you remove a nail with a blowtorch?
If people want to use Gnome 3, or twm, it's none of my business. But seriously the folks that develop these kinds of dead weights are simply putting effort into a bad idea.
Next thing you know, there'll be no terminal. And then someone will replace regex with a wizard ("How many letters? What kind of letters? Should they be preceded by a space or followed by a tab? Do you want colons and double quotes with that?").
Seriously, the UI is fine. It won't get more people to switch to Linux. It won't make everyone more productive, or happier. Unless you're still changing themes each day and going "WOW" when you're switching workspaces (circa 1997), for God's sake.
You are describing Unity, not GNOME 3.
I hate to say I told you so
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgsoymLte20
Do what I want cause I can and if I don't
because I wanna be ignored by the stiff and the bored
because I'm gonna.
Spit and retrieve cause I give and receive
because I wanna gonna get through your head what the mystery man said
because I'm gonna.
Hate to say I told you so.
I do believe I told you so.
Now it's all out and you knew cause I wanted to.
Turn my back on the rot that's been planning the plot - because I'm gonna.
No need for me to wait - because I wanna.
No need two, three and too late - because I'm gonna.
Hate to say I told you so.
I do believe I told you so.
Do what I please gonna spread the disease
because I wanna gonna call all the shots for the "No"s and the "Not"s
because I wanna.
Ask me once I'll answer twice cause what I know I'll tell
because I wanna.
Sound device and lots of ice I'll spell my name out loud
because I wanna, oh yeah?
Hmmm is this, with The Hives song about computers, sound devices, and ice?
As a KDE fanboi, I urge distros to start thinking of KDE as their main DE. Here is a video of Unity on KDE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtE3XlloLxU
No need for Gnome 3
KDE has all the features, editability, polish, backing, and relevant licenses (GPL/LGPL)
Or proof that /. moderation is a slow process and you commented way too early.
It's modded "+4 Funny" right now.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Except for the 100% of all desktop users that know and use that same concept on a day to day basis. I learned about minimized windows in Computer literacy in maybe grade 7/8 whenever they had Windows 3.0 released. Out with the old, in with the different.
Bye!
Stop generalizing about everything, you twat. Firefox lost its entire userbase? How is that even remotely possible to say?
...with my new Mint 12 install.
I'm not a coder, not a designer, but instead a linguist, language learner (all this involving a lot of scripts, different keyboards, audio and document manipulation) and general user (music, a little image editing, web browsing) I don't need 50 windows open at once, nor just one. The average is between 3 and 5, depending on the task, but the minimum is 2. I do need the window list and extensions to make it useful. I have to use extensions with Firefox for it to meet my needs, as do most others. There will develop a good community around that, so that will be welcomed.
When Gnome 3 came out, I was somewhat shocked. I'd used Gnome 2.x from the start of my Linux days (4+ years ago now) and I couldn't believe that they would want to dumb things down so much. I still couldn't use plain Gnome 3.x without the extensions as it would be far too unintuitive and would slow my research/study process down too much. Mint 12 has really done a good job at things, I feel. I don't feel restricted. I never needed to change what I see as obscure preferences on my desktop, so the general lack of preferences hasn't really caused any problems. However, I will admit that there are a few things which need to be looked at more. The one which stands out to me is having international times being an option in the clock application (in development, however). Apart from that, I can't thing of anything else personally, though I'm sure that other people will.
Certainly, it won't suit all people. But then again, it isn't supposed to. There are quite a number of other DEs which can be used by programmers and other types of users.
In summary, I think that some of the Gnome developers need a slap around the head, because they don't understand some pretty important things, but It's not so terrible as the nay-sayers have been saying - at least, with Mint12's extensions. Also, coders in general need to understand that non-coders are not idiots (though I admit that there are many of these out there! haha). I'm happy with it.
File, Edit etc are not part of Gnome apps they are in the bar at the very top of the screen.
Um, no. File Edit etc are exactly the same place they were in GNOME 2. I think you're confusing GNOME 3 with Ubuntu's Unity.
I've been a Gnome user since the pre-October Gnome days and I booted Fedore 15 for about 5 minutes before shutting it down.
Since then I have tried XFCE and KDE and I'm still running KDE on my new sandy bridge (not my everyday box yet).
I remembered the other night about the reception for Gnome 2 and it was not pretty.
Anywho, I just booted Fedora 16 and it's not so bad, I'm gonna run it on this little Atom for awhile and see if it grows on me.
He likes it! Hey Mikey!
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
*File, Edit etc are not part of Gnome apps they are in the bar at the very top of the screen.*
Except that in gnome3 File edit etc are a part of the application.
You must be using unity or some third party plugin because default gnome3 does not have it
Well, let's try this out.
Ok. I am using a â3000 workstation with 16 Gig of Ram, 2 SSDs, a drive array beyond anything. I use it to WORK. Usually I have about 20 windows open, usually there are three to six VMs running at the same time (various linux, various MS win).
Gnome 3? FUCK YOU. Go FUCKING DIE. There is simple no fucking way to get serious work done. Why?
Because "those people" want me to use a â3000 workstation like a FUCKING SMARTPHONE. Go fucking die. XFCE it is.
Not as angry as before... But still some default which need to be corrected. Gnome 3 is maturing ;-)
https://plus.google.com/u/0/102150693225130002912/posts/WTLyn7dqYoR
FOSS hackers can make some nice kernels (Linux, BSD), but a Desktop Environment they can not. It has been nearly 15 years. I think Microsoft is right on this one. I use Windows 7 Desktop, and there are drivers for everything, including printers, webcam, and wierd peripherals, and X11 is a distant nightmare, and the default desktop has minor visual appeal, and compatibility with most major software.
I'm a C/Java developer who loves Gnome3. It's all javascript
Javascript. ick. It may be the only language for client side web programming, but they can not force me to like it.
The rest now use KDE, XFCE, or a variety of apps under some standalone window manager.
My interest in Gnome was killed by the uselessness of Compiz, long before Gnome 3 was a sprite in the eye of any delusional developer.
I switched from Gnome 2 to LXDE (Fedora, Lubuntu). LXDE is simple, easy to tweak, and does what it is supposed to do. I don't even care what happens with Gnome. First they chased all the users with four video cards and four LCDs, then they chased all the users with tablets.
I have never, not even for five minutes, liked KDE. Some kManner of kRevulsion.
Maybe Gnome 3, KDE, and Unity will find success. Unlike you, the only prophesy I will hazard is that banks will make money hand over fist while working people lose.
The same thing is happening with Firefox, too. The productive users are fleeing it because the failed web designers
The recent UI dross that has been added to Firefox is of no use to me (nor to most people, I believe). However, it is still possible to ignore the UI dross and use Firefox productively.
Useless features could be a sign of delusional product management or developers living in their typical reality distortion field. Or both.
I think Firefox's release numbering is a bigger problem.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Is there any data on the various DEs in both the BSD & Linux user bases, and a breakdown of which DE has more marketshare? Preferably drilled down by version# if possible, such as Gnome 2.x vs Gnome 3.x vs KDE 3.x vs KDE 4.x vs XFCE vs LDXE vs WindowMaker vs Awesome vs.... Or even a simple KDE vs Gnome vs XFCE vs LXDE vs others?
Can someone please explain why we are "fixing" something that doesn't seem to be broken at all?
My theory about Linux desktops is that no capable Linux developer actually uses a GUI for their day-to-day work. The requirements for a desktop have long been:
1) Can launch bash and vim
2) Looks like the current coolest thing (used to be NeXTStep, then OS X, now iOS).
After all, bash (or your alternative CLI shell of choice) is the most powerful and flexible way of controlling a computer ever devised. Developers like vi because it is based on the paradigm of issuing logical commands that transform a set of data, rather than the awful touchy-feely appoach of visually interacting with the text. GUI Perfection is a translucent vim window hovering over a nice picture from the Hubble.
Gnome 3/Unity aren't there to be used - they're there to be looked at and to embody certain academic theories about GUI design.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I've read that Windowmaker & Afterstep are just windowing managers, but is there a complete GNUSTEP based DE? How complete is Etoille? In fact, more specifically, are there any GNUSTEP projects to have the GNU UX running w/o X, just like NEXTSTEP and OS/X do - using Display Postscropt or something similar? Something that one can simply start on Linux/BSD/Minix, just like one uses startx to start X?
What is the non-free 3D driver requirement that Gnome 3 has that makes it unsuitable for use? Doesn't FSF control what those guys do?
Just wait until someone produces javascript wrappers for linux/kernel.h and linux/module.h.
He,he. What I find funny about the venom from some people is that Gnome 3 without a touch screen _forces_ me to use 2 or 3 times more hot key combinations and quick loads than I'm used to. Stuff people have been _telling_ us would be great for ages if we would just _use_ it. And they were right. Sometimes, it is almost like the speed and freedom of being back at a terminal.
I suspect part of the venom is that it's a bit like making a commitment to the Dvorak keyboard and if you work in an environment that requires you to switch back and forth between a Windows scheme and a Gnome 3 scheme, that can be disconcerting.
Given all the unfavorable user comments about GNOME3, this smacks of political spin-doctoring and ballot-stuffing.
I'm surprised nobody figured this out.
Speak your mind and your modded down into the dungeons of -1, 0, and the Troll Kingdom.
Practically why I never bother logging into Slashdot anymore. My account is fucked anyway.
Next thing you know it'll be like fucking facebook. You can buy points to mod yourself out..
FTW
How typical. "Loooook there's a solution for that annoyance! ANOTHER HOOP TO JUMP THROUGH!" When will you gnomers wake up? Or are your brains as diminutive as your mascot?
I'd like to know what version of Firefox you are using where the tabs moved and the search and url bars are combined. Tha Help: About section in Firefox says my version is 8.0, whereas the most recent version from Mozilla is 8.0.1.
I'd like a search urlbar combination, though I would like one that uses Google Instant.
Designers' input would be all right as long as they would not insist that their vision is the only right one and remove the functionality that was already there justifying it by "users won't get it, it's too advanced". Removing the taskbar, hiding tray (the primary function of tray is to store indicators that should be visible all the time), removing tab switching by mouse wheel, are just some of the examples. But that is not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that Gnome3 developers are basically saying: this is the only way to do it. No customization, no settings.
That would not be a big problem in itself if the default settings would be comfortable for majority of the users. But judging from personal experience and outcry on the forums they crewed up big time.
I love Gnome Shell. I am the 1%.
Gnome3 is fantastic and this is all you need to start loving it too. Oh and maybe this one too.
Search/URL combined: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Smart%20keywords
It's called the "Awesome Bar" and has been around since 3.0, I think.
The tabs have moved around back and forth a few times, actually. Here's a blog post and video by one of the Mozilla designers from 4.0: http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-on-top-in-firefox-4/
Or, you could just download Chrome.
perl, bash, python, CUDA, all on Linux. I'd prefer BSD, but the big support isn't there.
It wouldn't surprise me if Linux is really just a front for the big tech companies to have a high quality OS for big scale computing. The masses can take OS X or Windows for their small scale computing.
Ah, criticism of KDE still gets you modded down. Here's some more food for thought for you guys:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde+desktop%2Cgnome+desktop&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kde+3%2Ckde+4%2Cgnome+2%2Cgnome+3&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0
Not much risk anymore of Qt and KDE taking over the world, fortunately. Let's hope that C++ based GUIs will be a thing of the past soon.
how is me clicking on the taskbar to select a window in "old fashioned" windows style management LESS efficient than clicking on the magic corner and having to squint at reduced windows, and clicking again?
Try hitting the magical windows key and tell me what happens. I seriously think most most users must have a deformed left hand or something.
While Gnome3 is not as stupid / broken as KDE4 (which I really hate) its still stupid and broken. A computer interface should be something you really dont have to think about while using it,
I noticed people say that most often when they don't want to learn something new rather than something that constantly engaging them mind and will continue to do so. People really are slaves to their habits.
The thought of hanging myself at my student loan organization doesn't bug me as much when I think it might make a differ
That is both made up and has no bearing on intuition. You learned to do it, that's your first hint on intuitiveness.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
There is so much impassioned and irrational hemming and hawing about desktop environments. Yak, yak, yak. Get jobs, people. Better yet, go have sex. Once you experience that, you will worry less about your user interface. Trust me.
Those who rate this down will die virgins, and never propagate their DNA. But they will have the most scriptable and extensible desktop environments! Yay!
Please. I am begging you. Stop quibbling over these unimportant trifles, and go get laid. So what if GNOME 3 removed the minimize and maximize buttons? Who cares? Will worrying about that help get you fucked? No!
I have seen the light. I have opted for personal growth over technology. I have chosen to experience warm, moist vaginas. And, wrapped around my dick, they feel so much better than winning pointless arguments about user interface themes with so many basement-dwelling nerds on the Internet.
Do not miss out. The world is waiting for you.
When you moderators inevitably rate me down, I will understand. I know your plight. I have been there. Know that you are already forgiven for your action. Because, deep down, you know how right I am.
You yearn for that precious moment when some woman will invite you to explore her nether regions. You pray for the night that woman will welcome you into her delicious, velvety pleasure hole. That day will come. But, first, you have to stop hanging out on Slashdot and accept that this message, and those preceding it, are the plain simple truth. It may take some time, but soon... After you emerge from your basement and discard your Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia... After you step out into the sunlight, eat healthy food, get exercise, and nice clothes... You will lose your virginity.
I promise.
If you want a minimize button on windows, install GnomeTweakTool. It has an option that allows you to select the arrangement of buttons on a window's title bar.
Yes, yes, we know, if you want feature X then install GnomeTweakTool or some JavaScript extension and jada svada. Guess what, there's a few other things you can install while you are at it, they are called XFCE and LXDE and even Fluxbox is a far superior alternative to the GNOME 3 joke. GNOME 3 developers say flat out that they believe their user-base is wrong and they are gods who are always right and that's exactly why I am sure GNOME will continue to be a joke.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
at least you can configure firefox 8 to behave like 3.6 and look like it. disable tabs on top, install rssicon-in-urlbar, status-4-evar, disable the firefox-button and you're almost done.
"The problem with Gnome is that it was predicated on the human interface guidelines copied from Mac OS 8."
What are you talking about?
http://www.aresluna.org/attached/pics/usability/articles/biurkonaekranie/macos8.big.png
How is the above a "copy" of GNOME 3 for any stretch of meaning of the word "copy"? The top bar has the menu, Gnome 3 doesn't. The bottom bar has some kind of system tray, Gnome 3 puts it on the completely opposite side. There is a desktop with RTL icons, Gnome 3 doesn't *have* a desktop. Gnome 3 has the task launching and managing screen, OS8 doesn't. Gnome 3 has that very cool notification system, OS8 doesn't.
What's left? Both have, um, windows you can drag around or maximize? Oh right, except Mac OSes don't do maximization (except when they do).
What are you talking about?
"The updates they've done, IIRC, are not substantial, and very ad hoc."
The updates over what? OS8? We've just established that's simply bullshit. Are we talking about updates over GNOME 2 then? Seriously? Are you for real? I'm not even going to try and list the differences between Gnome 2 and Gnome 3. Call them "downgrades" if you want to hate change that much, but they're certainly not "not substantial" or "ad hoc" or no one would care.
"Nothing in Gnome seems to indicate they're knowledgeable in the area of human-computer interfaces."
Given that nothing in your post seems to indicate that you understand jack shit about this topic, I'd say this sentence is pretty worthless.
"KDE embraces a state of the art artificial intelligence project in usability (the KDE implementation of NEPOMUK"
How is that even relevant to anything? It's not something related to usability, it's about search and associations. Whether it's usable or not is a completely different matter.
"KDE has cooler graphics too...I (and a lot of people) would argue."
A lot of people who? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WEASEL
Graphics are not correlated with usability. You can have the mostest beautiful desktop in the world with 3D everything and spinning cubes of doom and flames and bloom and raytracing and it'd run at 0.15 FPS on proprietary gfx drivers only and it'd be completely and totally unusuable. It's also very hardly a "substantial" criticism you can make to GNOME 3.
"Gnome hasn't conducted any serious usability studies (only ones with sample sizes so small they don't count)"
You don't need to run usability tests on 5 million people to get meaningful results out of them. Law of diminishing returns, yo. Besides, the number of people who tested the early builds and whatnot of GNOME 3 would be "small" by what meaning of "small"?
When you trim all the bullshit, your post amounts to: "I don't like it." It's fine if you don't like it. It's certainly not something that's "+4, Insightful." So here's all the reply your post really deserved:
"your a retard. GNOME 3 is good. Problem?"
I continually see trolls posting how Gnome Shell (Gnome 3 is the framework Gnome Shell is the ui) is an aborted interface meant for touchscreens. I challenge you all to prove it. Is everyone just afraid of the changed desktop metaphor? Do you really want to stick with the antiquated MS designed paradigm? I've found it to be incredibly usable. Having used it as my main DE since it was in early beta I've watched them polish and improve many areas. The devs have responded quickly to many of the issues raised. If there are real problems you have why don't you say what they are so they can be addressed, rather than just saying "It sucks, I hate it." If that's too much to ask keep your useless opinions to yourself, and quit trying to spread FUD about what some of us see as the first truly innovative DE change in years. I do see it as an attempt to merge the desktop an touchscreen interfaces, but not at the cost of usability of it on the desktop. Unlike some *coughMetrocough*
There's a big difference between Apple and OSS "designers". The ones at Apple are professionals, and their work approved by Jobs who apparently had a real knack for figuring out what regular people wanted in their computing devices. The ones in OSS aren't professionals, and obviously weren't able to get a job at Apple.
Finally, the markets are totally different. Apple caters to nontechnical people. OSS largely caters to highly technical users, programmers, etc. It gets adopted by other people because these technical users like it, and when their nontechnical friends and family complain about their Windows PC breaking down again or whatever and ask their programmer friend what to do, he says, "Easy! I'll install Linux for you and you can try it out." (Of course, in some/many cases it doesn't work out because of specialized applications compatibility, but in other cases like where a family member just needs a PC for browsing and documents, it's fine.) But when an OSS project abandons the technical users, it now no longer has any free evangelists to push it on other people. If all the nerds and geeks decide that Gnome sucks, and tell their friends/family to use KDE or LXDE instead, how is anyone else going to try it? If all the nerds and geeks decide that Ubuntu sucks now because of Unity, they're going to be encouraging all their friends to use Mint or some other distro instead. The thing many of these OSS project leaders miss is that nontechnical people do not download operating systems and desktop environments and try them out; nontechnical people go to the Apple store or www.dell.com and buy a computer with OS X, iOS (for iPads), or Windows 7 preinstalled, and that's it. The primary method of adoption of OSS software is through evangelization by technical users, so if you piss them off, you're toast.
Did redhat move away from gnome for the next rhel?
-- no sig today
with you 100% been using gnome for ages and on any version I always hotkeyed most of the things I do. Sure it takes some getting used to and if you (like me) customize functionality to your needs you also might have a lot of setting up to do, even though usually you can directly move your keymaps, aliases, ENVs between releases.
In fact when working I rarely use the mouse at all, mostly only when looking up something on the net (requires clicking links)
-- no sig today
Working with designers is brilliant. You just have to pick the right designer.
Nowadays UI design is pretty much the new hotness around design circles and bars and many an adobe Photoshop monkey fancies himself one. No matter they havent ever 'actually' thought about UI design, no matter they think human factorsis something about blind people, no matter they can't be bothered to test the work flows they create or don't create because they cannot program, no matter their cognitive capacity can only accommodate as much as one state change, no matter they don't know what a state change is.
If you pick a guy for the job of UI design that even remotely resembles above rant you pretty much asked for it...
-- no sig today
Depends. Does the designer actually know what he's doing? Do other people acknowledge what he has done?
Because seriously. A designer will actually *think* about usability. And a good one won't think that changing it necessarily makes it better.
I am not devoid of humor.
Thanks for a little sense in this bitch fight. I have said previously, I use G3, a lot and in work and home environments. It took time, I gave it and now prefer it. I find G2 to be slower and less intuitive now, and I can say that since I have it still in an Ubuntu LTS laptop my wife uses. My daughter uses and loves KDE for her graphics workstation, but I don't. Saying that one is any great amount better than the others is sheer foolishness, however. I like and adapted to G3, it is not that big a deal. Grow up and focus on something that needs your attention, like SOPA, or occupy or something that actually is worth caring about
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
There is nothing "intuitive" about minimizing a window.
Among technical people you are right. However, it's been my experience that most non-technical people over 30 do not understand minimizing windows. They don't seem to be able to understand that the set of visible windows is not a 1:1 mapping to the set of running programs.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."