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.

Comments

There will be no GNOME 4.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[InsightIn140Bytes]

I never understood why someone would use Gnome over KDE anyway. Gnome always felt kind of a toy or candy interface. All the windows were full of useless spacing and the style just gave it sort of a broken feeling. Like the apps would be incomplete or in debug state when programmers just throw controls and finish the interface later. I always liked KDE much more, it was way more professional. Still, both suffered (and still do) from crappy and blurry font rendering and kind of slow interface. Linux interfaces have never felt exactly as quick as Windows. I don't know if its some driver issue or something, but Firefox and XUL suffer from the same issue even on Windows.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[masternerdguy]

I call bullshit, sorry, but GNOME 3 is fucked. There's no way that with all its hate and problems it was picked in a fair poll in any competition, except for shittiest GUI. I bet that these people are either trolling or just pushing the GNOME 3 agenda.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Anonymous Coward]

GNOME was nothing but NIH combined with FSF fud over Trolltech's licensing of Qt. It would be nice if we could retroactively abort it.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[tomhudson]

And they didn't publish the vote tallies, which means that "voter turn-out" was embarrassingly low. Same as their readership numbers, I guess.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[amiga3D]

Man I don't know what you're talking about and I don't think you do either. While really UI choice is up to the individual's personal prejudices I can't see where you think that windows interfaces are quicker than KDE and Gnome. I've used KDE and Gnome in various distros as well as XFCE and Enlightenment. I've never found anything anywhere that lagged like window's UI......well maybe Mac OS 9. I personally loved Ubuntu 10.10 and loathed 11.04. I'm forcing myself now to use 11.10 as Unity is mostly stable now on my hardware but really it's ugly and hard to take but it's still better than windows. I use Win 7 at work and it's better than.....Vista. Lord if I had to use that shit at home I'd seriously think about digging my A3000 out of storage.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[0123456]

I never understood why someone would use Gnome over KDE anyway. Gnome always felt kind of a toy or candy interface.

That's odd, because that's how I've always felt about KDE. I try to use it every now and again but rapidly go back to Gnome 2, which generally stays out of the way and doesn't waste my time with stupid animations.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[hydrofix]

I am tempted to mod you troll, but I'll post instead. I can not at all share your bad experience with the latest GNOME. I use GNOME 3 and Ubuntu 11.10 on my work laptop, and it works like a dream. GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt, and the end product is much more stable. Okay, it does not necessarily have the latest and sleekest bells and whistles – such as GPU accelerated annoying desktop effects or an integrated browser. Instead, it is a solid and fast codebase with practical (as opposed to superfluous) UI decisions, and the best Mozilla Firefox interoperation.

GNOME 3 is very well-suited for people who use their computer to do work or browse the Internet – that is to say – a great majority of the userbase. If you want the latest eye-candy and less stability, go KDE. If you want to pretend that you have a Mac and don't care at all about stability, go Unity. Or maybe something else, if you want multimedia integration on desktop etc. But your GNOME-bashing is very hard to comprehend, as I have found it very usable on modern hardware. And yes, it is still the default window manager in most distros for a good reason.

It almost begs the question: are you sure you are not mistaking GNOME 3 to the Ubuntu's new and unstable Unity? It would fit the description better – UI does not work conceptually, and overall stability is something like alpha-level.

Oh and by the way, at home I still use WindowMaker. Kicks ass.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Billly Gates]

What about workflow? How do I minimize a window? Can I run my cpu and weather applet on top bar? What about having more than one window open on the desktop? What if I want to see all that running while not leaving my libraoffice out of view or closed? Can I move my cursor over the icons and get a shrunken preview? Windows and gnome 2 had these abilities for years with the exception of the gpu accelerated preview. Windows NT 4 and win95 had these for over 15 years. Even Grandma would be frustrated by the limitations of gnome shell. It is not a resistant to change. It is the worst gui ever made. Even windows 1.0 made it easier to find things. It is so horrible and so unusable that I switched back to Windows and will leave Unix on a VM. If gnome 2 wont be updated it means it will eventually not compile. That makes us angry as we dont want linux to fade away but kde and gnome killed it on the desktop. Thats why there is so much hate

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the parent modded "Troll"?

There are almost 50 comments in this thread, and I count 3 that aren't saying something negative about GNOME 3. The general consensus is that GNOME 3 is no good. That's exactly why we see major Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Linux Mint rejecting it, and putting considerable effort into projects like Unity and MATÉ.

The parent is exactly right to question how GNOME 3 could be picked as "Product of the Year" when it's universally despised.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[afgam28]

What exactly stops you from using GNOME Shell for "real, productive work"? I use it and I have no problems getting things done.

And exactly what "failed web design techniques" have been applied? Can you name one web interface, failed or otherwise, that looks and feels like GNOME Shell?

After using GNOME 3 for a couple of months, I'm finding that I struggle when I have to go back to a GNOME 2 machine and use it. My problem with GNOME 2, KDE and even Mint's new desktop environment, is that they all look and feel like Windows 95 clones. This is fine if you like Windows, but if you do then why not just use the real thing?

Something that a lot of people seem to complain about is switching tasks in GNOME 3. I'm pretty sure that these people are just complaining about change without trying it first to understand the reasons behind the change.

Let's compare switching tasks in GNOME 2 and 3. In GNOME 3 I can move my mouse over to the hot corner just as quickly, if not more quickly, than I can move my eyes there. The corner of the screen is a very easy target to hit. This brings up the overview where I get a thumbnail of every window on my virtual desktop. The animation is fast enough that I don't have to sit there waiting, and smooth enough so that I don't lose context of which windows are where. Each window is as big as it can be, while still fitting everything on the screen. Because of their size they're extremely easy targets to click.

So that's just one click on a very big target. Not really that hard.

In GNOME 2, I have to use a Windows-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen. When I've got enough windows open, each task becomes tiny! The only information I get is an application icon and a truncated window title, which is useless if window titles have common prefixes. This is harder and slower than GNOME 3.

After having used both methods for a while, I'd much rather use an Expose-like task switcher than a Windows-like taskbar.

As for Firefox, the the reason it's losing users because everyone is migrating to Chrome. And GNOME Shell is based on one of the same UI design principle as Chrome: "less chrome, more content". Chrome gets out of the way and gives maximum space to the website, and GNOME Shell gives maximum space to your apps.

I'd encourage you to try GNOME Shell for a few weeks before deciding whether it's good or bad. I had to spend this time to unlearn some old habits, but once I did I found I was actually much more productive, not less.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Tarlus]

Though still, nobody can find that they're looking for...

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Billly Gates]

Wake me up when gnome 3 can do the ultimate task of minizing a window from 1984 gui era mac and windows 1.0

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arose]

Yes, no one uses GNOME 3. Apparently No One is the only Linux Journal reader.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[broken_chaos]

Gnome 2? Feh. Real Gnome admirers are nostalgic for Gnome 1.

...I know the first time I ever tried using Nautilus, I was turned off of Gnome 2+ forever more (though I've heard it got not-as-bad after a few years). If I remember correctly, my pains were due to it's web browser-like approach to file managing, and its obsession with mime types (making it near-impossible, at least originally, to just assign opening a file extension with a certain command).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[shutdown -p now]

I try to use it every now and again but rapidly go back to Gnome 2, which generally stays out of the way and doesn't waste my time with stupid animations.

Funny you should mention stupid animations. For a long time, I was looking for a way to turn off that unspeakably ugly "wireframe" minimize animation for windows in Gnome2. I mean, it looked like something from early 90s, and took long enough that it was seriously distracting. Turned out that there was a very non-obvious way to do so, but once you do that, your windows will show up in wireframe mode when you drag them around, rather than showing window content. One way or another, Gnome2 would make you feel like it was early 90s.

The real solution to the problem, of course, was to install XFCE. Now that really doesn't have any animations, if you don't want it to have them.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arth1]

... or try using Gnome 3 with multiple large monitors. You quickly get tired of moving the mouse the extra kilometers every day.

Or use remote X11 or VMs, and you can't even get gnome shell, so users have to deal with two different UIs. That's so clever!

Gnome 3 was made for single-taskers by single-taskers.
It was apparently designed by people too young to even know about standard x mouse functionality and the power of having focus separate from z order, nor aware that X is a TCP/IP protocol, nor a myriad of other things completely lost on the cell phone generation.

Yes, get off my lawn, kids. You haven't earned the right to camp here yet, cause you're BLOODY IGNORANT.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[shutdown -p now]

GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt

Care to give some specifics?

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arose]

How do I minimize a window?

Window menu or Alt-F9 but oddly enough I haven't actually felt any desire to.

Can I run my cpu and weather applet on top bar?

Sure.

What about having more than one window open on the desktop?

What about it?

What if I want to see all that running while not leaving my libraoffice out of view or closed?

It sounds like you want a list of running apps while typing up documents and I fail to see the usage scenario. You are either switching apps, closing apps or running a new app (because whatever isn't running)... Are you routinely writing down all the running apps or something?

Can I move my cursor over the icons and get a shrunken preview?

The dash gives you thumbnails of all the windows. Having the whole screen for switching windows turns out to be much more efficient than using a small strip of the screen. It makes sense too, since you can never both switch and use applications.

It is not a resistant to change.

Of course it is, you are trying to work as if on Windows 95 (where the window management scaled up to five windows and GPU interface acceleration meant faster line drawing) instead of trying to use the interface on it's own merits. If you answered any of the above with "I shouldn't have to adapt my workflow, doesn't matter why I want to do two incompatible things at the same time", then you most certainly are resistant to change.

Even windows 1.0 made it easier to find things.

Non-overlapping windows would do that, yes. But DOS made it even easier: only one thing was running at a time, can't get lost with that.

That makes us angry as we dont want linux to fade away but kde and gnome killed it on the desktop.

So your "questions" were apparently only a thinly veiled rant. Oh well.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[bonch]

Ah, yes, the valuable consensus of Slashdot. The same community that decided both the original iPod and the iPod mini would flop.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arth1]

Let's compare switching tasks in GNOME 2 and 3. In GNOME 3 I can move my mouse over to the hot corner just as quickly, if not more quickly, than I can move my eyes there.

You must have a very small monitor and a very fast mouse. Or suffer from an eye disease.

The corner of the screen is a very easy target to hit.

What do you mean, "the" screen? Try using multiple monitors (or a virtual machine in a window, if gnome shell had even worked with that) and you'll find it's not all that easy.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[dbraden]

Wakey wakey! ;)

You can right-click the titlebar and then click Minimize, which can also be done with Alt-F9.

Or, you can use the gconf-editor to add the minimize button back to the windows. The lack of minimize/maximize buttons is just the default, you can change it.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[synthespian]

On my laptop, my Mandriva ("mandreeva") runs Nepomuk semantic ontology-based file archiving and search on KDE.
This is real innovation.
Definitely not impressed with Gnome 3. From what I saw, there wasn't anything much there except nice cosmetics, which your post confirms. Besides, I still think Gnome eats too much visual space.
Nah. Sticking to my KDE.

Semantic sense for the desktop: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21840/?a=f
Goals and objectives of the Nepomuk project: http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/Project+Objectives

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved on before Gnome 3 came out. Gnome 2 was difficult enough to customize - I can't imagine Gnome 3 is any better. What the Gnome devs need to realize is that it's impossible to make one UI for everyone. If they make it 'simple enough'

The only thorn that's left in my side is Evince. It has this infuriating function which makes the window change size every time you open a document. It would be great if you could disable it, or set some default window size, but in the devs' words, Evince tries to determine the optimum window size for you. I find it incredible that the Gnome devs have gotten to know me so well that they understand exactly how I like to view my documents because I assume that everyone else like myself likes to be able to view multiple windows at once, so it's great that they decided to make that decision for me. Not only that, this system is so intelligent that it totally ignores my xfce-panels when it decides that it needs to engorge my entire screen, most of the time at least 70% of the window is drawn off-screen, sometimes it comes up with atrocious aspect ratios for documents with _square_ pages, and what I run dual monitors it often decides to take up the entire X canvas. And there's nothing I can do about it - it's the only open source pdf viewer I know of that supports continuous page viewing and doesn't rely on Qt. It just makes me dread opening pdfs.

The point is that the whole Gnome philosophy is thoroughly misguided. Nothing will be so easy that the learning curve will be zero, and taking away customizability really just breaks functionality like the above.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're typing up a document and want to reference other things in a different window.

You're writing code and want to keep it's documentation/requirements. your code, and your language's/libraries' API all viewable by a glance. It would be too mentally jarring to have the screen switch to a task switcher then having to think for a moment which item you want to view than simply glancing at a different part of the screen to get the info you want.

I don't understand how other people can't understand this.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[synthespian]

You mean the stupid animations that allow you to switch desktops in a flash and make Windows 7's "rad" desktop look like a poor wannabe? Or do you mean the ontology-based (A.I.) desktop search? Or the full-blown office package, complete with a project management application that is completely lacking in OpenOffice.org? I really don't know what's so bad about KDE or what's so good about Gnome. I guess if you don't have complex searches for documents or all you write are text files, yeah, Gnome fits the bill.

If Windows 7 got rad software reviews because of its cool interface, I can't imagine what the "specialized press" people would write about KDE.

Now, if anyone is low on resources and wants a kewl, rad, slick desktop that is not a toy project, then please do checkout Enlightenment. If it was good enough for Yellow Dog Linux to choose it for their PS3 Linux distro (in the days before Sony betrayed us all - fuck you Sony, I will buy an XBox just out of spite), presenting cool graphics on those 8 parallel-processing chips, then it's good enough for the rest of us.

But, really, Gnome 3 looks like it's same-old, same-old. Polishing an old shoe does not make it turn into a new shoe.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arose]

It would be too mentally jarring to have the screen switch to a task switcher then having to think for a moment which item you want to view than simply glancing at a different part of the screen to get the info you want.

You can't see the content of other windows in the task bar, if the window was visible without switching that what the hell does Gnome Shell vs a taskbar to do with it, if you need to quickly switch applications while typing... alt-tab was the best way to do it before, and continues to be it.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[synthespian]

MATÉ? WTFIT?

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arose]

...though I personally tend to separate creation vs. lookup into desktops and switch with Super+ if I'm going to do a lot of back and forth.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[dslbrian]

IMO, look and feel is hardly the biggest failing of the GNOME system. There are more fundamental problems with their user philosophy. Years ago when a new set of workstations were deployed where I work everyone had the option of running either GNOME 2 or KDE 3. Officially the admins only wanted to support GNOME, but within a short time everyone in our location was on KDE 3.

Why? Well it turns out the admins never really did a thorough test of our tool flow on GNOME. We use a lot of expensive tools that come from legacy Unix backgrounds (they aren't recent GTK devel), so it turns out we had major problems with things like focus stealing. This would be where the app would pop up a messagebox and GNOME would happily yank you from whatever desktop you were working on to wherever the messagebox was. At the time there were no options in GNOME to handle this kind of thing, whereas KDE had a number of focus stealing controls.

Then there was the issue of resizing windows. At the time GNOME had one method of resizing windows, and that was to continually redraw the content in it - no wireframe or outline methods, only continuous redraw. That's great and all if your most complex app is a web browser, but when you got an app showing a couple gigs of visual data and every window resize event triggers a redraw, it quickly locks up the machine.

And then there was the question of the right-click menu. WTF was with this menu. It was loaded with a bunch of useless options for creating folders and crap. It was like someone who had never used a Unix machine before just decided to shoehorn in some crap there so the menu did something. KDE at least allowed the menu to be customized into something useful.

This is all regarding GNOME 2 at the time, but it gets to the core of what I perceive as GNOMEs problem - and as I understand it, this is both widely understood, and truly a development target of GNOME (and I fully expect GNOME 3 to be no different) - and that is that the GUI is not designed to be flexible or changeable, it is designed to be rigid and idiotproof. They are providing a fixed GUI interface for the lowest common denominator of user, and anyone who wants something different can STFU.

This is of course further compounded by their method of burying the GUI settings in a hundred different files across a dozen hidden directories, perhaps wrapping it in some obscure XML pseudo-code, so nobody can figure out WTF the options really are or what they do (perhaps it's some kind of subtle method of eliminating those annoying hacker types who might undo their GUI "vision"). KDE is no better in this regard. I remember when at least one GUI I used to use kept its menus in plain text format that was easily understood and modifiable, what the heck ever happened to that concept?

I'm sure if I were to relate to a GNOME dev the problems I had with focus stealing, he would turn around and tell me the problem was with my app, not the GUI. And if I were to relate how I like to launch programs from the right-click menu I would be told I'm doing it wrong and I should learn how to do it the "right" or "better" way. And thus I become yet another alienated user who has moved on to something else. Radically changing an interface and then pushing it as a rigid right-and-only way is going to piss off a lot of people. Lots of people left KDE when they did it, and the same will happen to GNOME.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[synthespian]

Should we take your post to mean that you really, really would put your chips on Gnome 3 as the thing that will bring Linux to the masses?

Hey, I'll share this: my little lady thinks KDE is better than Windows. But what she really digs is Mac OS X. What does that have to do with Gnome? Exactly. Nothing. Gnome stopped being funny in the 90s, when Mac OS 8 was still around. (Nowdays there's Unity, which seems to have divided the community of Ubuntusers or whatever it is they call themselves).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[synthespian]

How is the GUI design is so dumb that users are confused about the simplest of tasks, and have to rely on information stumbled upon a web forum? How is that good, solid design? It means the use is *not* intuitive.

Look, we could all be driving cars with joysticks. But we stick to the steering wheel because it's a pretty good interface design. If you want to redesign something, then you ought to pull your very own personal internal Steve Jobs out of your ass. It had better be something better than a joystick.

That is stupid design. You are raising the user's cognitive load, instead of unloading it. That's why we have GUIs, because it's so much simpler than learning to concatenate Korn shell syntax, Bash syntax, and remember a shitload of esoteric commands (although all Unixheads do...). We unload the user's cognitive load, his/her working memory, etc. The user becomes more relaxed, productive...GUIs are not necessarily or always better, though, as we know from experience (see below GUIs X CLIs).

Mac OS X is a wonderful example where GUI can meet Unix-style CLI intelligently (Automator): http://www.macosxautomation.com/automator/

You wanna see example of a simple and intelligent interface, done by people who thought long and hard about how to do these things? Try this demo of the Enso interface (follow on-screen instructions):

http://www.schuderer.net/ensoid/

Enso is now open source (it used to be Windows-only - BTW, I just learned this today), with the nice New BSD license.

http://code.google.com/p/enso/

Here's more brainfood on interfaces (GUIs X CLIs): http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2007/07/05/the-graphical-keyboard-user-interface/

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[dead_cthulhu]

It's Spanish. It means "I killed."

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[bejiitas_wrath]

That expose style of swtching windows was present in Gnome 2 with Compiz. And it is a very good way of switching windows. The extensions website will help with adding some missing features to Gnome 3.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[epyT-R]

1. what about the conventions that've been around forever for minimize/maximize? they have staying power for a reason. they're simple enough to be intuitive. even if this can be turned back on, it's something that should be there by default.
2. can I do it without typing a buttload of javascript? ..or using someone else's?
3. can you answer the question without being a pedantic asshole?
4. referencing a window while switching to another is a common scenario.
5-6. windows 95 (along with the others) for all its faults, got the core interface right. being able to see the output of more than one window at a time during a focus switch was considered a good thing. it still is. the single tasking tablet/phone trendhopping idiots behind gnome 3 don't get this I guess. there is such a thing as drawing too many borders around a picture.
7. ..missing the point entirely.
8. so your answers were apparently only a thinly veiled troll or astroturf. oh well.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[rasmusbr]

I'm not too happy about Gnome 3 either and it has made me Switch to Windows 7 as my primary OS, but I think it's unfair to say that nobody uses it considering the fact that the three major desktop distros all rely on it in one form or another.

I don't really give a crap about the user interface as long as it allows me to do everything I need and as long as it allows my programs to be fast and responsive. Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell are not there. Gnome Shell has a neat user interface, but it's a little bit slow sometimes and it freezes too often and there are tens of tiny bugs that needs fixing. A lot of those should be fixed in Gnome 3.4. We'll see. I log into an Xfce session when I need speed and stability.

By the way, I've ditched Chrome and switched back to FF again because it runs faster on my computers (YMMV).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lister king of smeg]

in this particular case yes the slashdot opinion is important. because it is us not the general public that use desktop linux bsd or other non-fruity unix. the problem is gnome thinks by making a more "intuitive" tablet / web bastardization that the masses will flock away from there proprietary shackles of mac and windows and fly to their gnuniverse. but lets be honest the average person just wants to be able to stick a cd in the drive or click the .exe and have their program run, most people are afraid of even installing the os, it is only people like us who install *nix and thus only us who use this product they are making, but gnome has shown that they want to chase people who hate and fear the idea of them instead of listening to their user base and making a functional desktop . desktops are not tablet they are not smart phones. the idea that people will want one gui to rule them all is flawed it was tried b4 by pushing the desktop onto the mobile devices that failed apple saw it first and they built new products with a new interface that would not work on a desktop. now everyone thinks that because it works on mobile it will work on the desktop and it will fail to. when it comes to different devices the need different interface because they do a different job

servers work best with a cli
desktops work with toolbars icons or the traditional desktop,
tv's tablets and phones work best with widgets and thumbnails

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lister king of smeg]

mate = gnome 2.32 fork

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your whole rant seems to be based on the idea that Gnome Shell doesn't allow you to display more than one window at the same window. I don't know where you got that idea, but it is utterly wrong. (also "always on top", "focus follows mouse" etc. still exist).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lucidlyTwisted]

I am not sure which VM you are using, but Gnome Shell has been available under VirtualBox for a while now. I would guess that the same is true for VMWare as well.
I don't like Gnome Shell (or Unity) for the same reason; they are a touch interface for a desktop and that is fairly silly IMHO. A monitor should be beyond arm's length, so why the hell do I want it to behave like a touch interface?
KDE is processor heavy and has so many switches/options/gadgets that workflow is interfered with and required functionality masked. Yes I could RTFM and configure to be the way I want, but like is too short to waste days pissing around with GUI options. Obviously "KISS" is a concept that has passed KDE by entirely.
For now I'll stick with Gnome 2 for GUI until I have to change. Gnome 2 is the worst desktop environment imaginable, apart from all the others.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Nemetz]

Minor disagree here, firefox is dying for the memory leaks and occasional crashes and so on caused by developers changing focus to something that doesn't really matter; the design is just a generic copy of chrome that is used by explorer 9+ too. I think that it become too big, and the developers started to think like the big corporations and broke it because of that. After all, what made firefox get so many adepts is probably the way it made the things different from microsoft and explorer. Maybe gnome suffered from the same disease.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[khipu]

It wasn't FSF FUD: Qt really had serious licensing problems. Those have been resolved. But Qt is still a C++ toolkit, with the usual bloat and design compromises that that implies. And it isn't even standard C++, they had to invent their own build system and non-standard language extensions.

I don't like either Gnome 3 or Unity. So, I gave KDE a serious try again and absolutely hated it: it is full of NIH apps, not-quite-right-graphics, and unnecessary complexity and gimmicks.

I ended up using XFCE4. It's a little rough around the edges, but on the whole, it's a simple, unobtrusive desktop interface that I can live with. I hope Gnome 4 will go that direction again.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[w0mprat]

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.

As someone trained in web design (and failed myself along with others, then changed industry) I nod knowingly at their failure. Further, if I was to teach design now I'd use Gnome Shell as a working example of how not to design a modern UI, it's full of mistakes and poor decisions, things that just don't work properly and in the midst of all this "innovation" there are simple standard mistakes the evergreen shit-that-needs-fixing (don't we all have a mental list of pet hates?) that have always been there in GUIs like some kind of tradition. Hmm perhaps it has some use as a teaching tool and cautionary tale.

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.

That's the problem with such open source software projects, they can continue as long as coders want to participate, they really don't actually need anyone to use the software. They are certainly demonstrating they don't care about users.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[aklinux]

I have no real problem w/ it either. I use it for my work (I sell Real Estate) desktop and laptop running recent versions of Fedora.

I will admit to a couple of initial issues with it as on the default install of Fedora, it was configured to be an extreemly clean desktop. Nearly naked. Once I got the hang of configuring to my tastes, I have no real issues with it. Isn't this on of the reasons we use Linux? I want it my way...

A clean desk(top) is the sign of an empty mind ;-)

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[EponymousCustard]

the answer to your questions is extensions.gnome.org

I hated gnome shell until this site came online. Distros will fix the gnome usability issues as usual - give it some time.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[itsdapead]

I am not sure which VM you are using, but Gnome Shell has been available under VirtualBox for a while now.

Gnome 3 and Unity depend on Compiz and 3D acceleration - when I've tried them on VirtualBox (on Mac) they've been unusably glitchy (just like Windows Aero Glass). This also means that you have to install the guest tools before the default desktop on recent distros will work - not insurmountable, but messy.

The latest version of Parallels Desktop seems to cope OK with Unity - but in the past I'd only have recommended paying for Parallels (& its interminable paid updates) for people who primarily wanted the (good) Windows integration - VirtualBox used to be much better for Linux.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[RocketRabbit]

They understand this, but they are Jesuitical liars.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[MaskedSlacker]

Pass the crack pipe bro.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[nschubach]

That interface suffers from the same problem I have with Gnome3... try opening multiple copies of notepad. In Gnome3 I have to hold shift to get more than one instance. In this interface (Ensoid) I can't seem to find the command to do that at all. Maybe it can be added, but the demo doesn't seem to have it. Also, having the icons in the background make you think that you can type the computer name to get to that icon... not so.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[unixisc]

Yeah, but if you look in KDE apps, it's still full of apps like Kaffeine, Konversation, Krita, Karbon, etc. It's good that their newer applications are named differently, but the older ones are worth some name changes as they cross major versions.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[allo]

seriously, you do not want to use a programming language without object orientation for GUI programming.

int button = gtk_make_some_button_method();
do_something_with_the_Button(button, parameter, parameter);
do_something_else_with_the_Button(button, parameter, parameter);

instead of button->do_something(...);

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lucidlyTwisted]

Gnome 3 and Unity depend on Compiz and 3D acceleration - when I've tried them on VirtualBox (on Mac) they've been unusably glitchy (just like Windows Aero Glass). This also means that you have to install the guest tools before the default desktop on recent distros will work - not insurmountable, but messy.

Even under the likes of VMWare one needs to install the guest utils to get all the features (host folder shares, proper mouse focus etc). I installed Mint 12 yesterday under VBox 4.1.6 with Ubuntu 10.10 as the host - no issues with Gnome 3. Even Arch with KDE4 in the same environment is quite happy.
Windows uses DirectX and Gnome/Unity OpenGL, the fact that both of those do not seem to work well on your Mac points more to something environmental rather than a fault with Gnome/Unity. As I don't use a Mac, I am not sure if the hardware or OS could be the cause.
Disclaimer: I am using the evil, anti-freedom extension pack with VBox, but I do not think that affects 3D.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[pizzap]

Gnome 3 is great. I'm looking forward to the next release. I used Unity for two days and switched.

I'm certain the Gnome team will get most issues fixed soon, as did the KDE team with their 4.0 version.

Gnome is still heavily backed by Redhat, as Unity is by Ubuntu. And seriously, who do you think will write the better code?

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[segedunum]

GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt, and the end product is much more stable.

ROTFL.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[pizzap]

Well, of course that doesn't mean Linus is wrong with his comments on Gnome.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[tenco]

It sounds like you want a list of running apps while typing up documents and I fail to see the usage scenario.

Flash the entry in the taskbar when an application changes it's state in a predefinded way.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[buchner.johannes]

seriously, you do not want to use a programming language without object orientation for GUI programming.

GNOME does use OOP.

If you don't like the syntax of GObject (understandable), just use Vala. It compiles to C (no performance loss).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[tenco]

What exactly stops you from using GNOME Shell for "real, productive work"?

It crawls to a halt when i connect an external display. Right-click context menus (nautilus) can be partially hidden by the panel.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[tenco]

You mean the stupid animations that allow you to switch desktops in a flash and make Windows 7's "rad" desktop look like a poor wannabe?

Yeah, that one. ctrl-alt-up/down/left/right was always faster for me without a stupid animation.

Or the full-blown office package, complete with a project management application that is completely lacking in OpenOffice.org?

Why would i want to use an office package from a project that has a habit off toppling it's well established and proven paradigms? LaTeX is enough for me, thankyouverymuch.

Or do you mean the ontology-based (A.I.) desktop search?

AFAICS Nepomuk is not a KDE project but one with many participants (of which no one seems to be the KDE project). KDE only implements it.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[khipu]

seriously, you do not want to use a programming language without object orientation for GUI programming.

Oh, I completely agree. Hence, you shouldn't use Qt, because it is based on C++. And as Alan Kay has said:

Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

I think KDE apps feel so bad because many of them are written in C++. Qt/KDE really was just an imitation of Microsoft's approach to writing GUI software, and even Microsoft eventually figured out that this was a dead end.

Gtk and Gnome are not too bad; GObject is actually a tolerable runtime for an object system, it just needs to be bound to a decent language, and there are plenty to choose from. Personally, I prefer Python:

button = gtk.Button("Hello World")
button.connect("clicked", handler, None)

Of course, Qt can be bound to Python as well, but the fact that there is C++ underneath it with its broken object system just can't be hidden completely.

Gnome gives me a decent object system and a choice of decent object-oriented languages. I'm open to other alternatives, but if it involves C++, it's a non-starter.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arth1]

I am not sure which VM you are using, but Gnome Shell has been available under VirtualBox for a while now.

You must work for Microsoft TechNet; while your answer is technically correct, it is also useless for the person who asks.

I would guess that the same is true for VMWare as well.

Neither VMware nor VBox support 3D acceleration for remote or shared images. And that is one of the main reasons for using virtualization.

I can test my software on 30 different systems, without having to run between 30 different machines. But not how it works under Gnome Shell, cause you can't run that in a shared VM.

So the choice is either having one set of hardware dedicated for testing each distro/version combo that uses Gnome Shell by default, or say "Gnome 3 is not supported. It may or may not work, but no support will be provided."
Guess what.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[kubusja]

Trolling... and you probably used GNOME 3 for something like 5 minutes.... My first impression was bad but then I switched to KDE, then to XFCE then to LXCE then Unity and I didn't like them as well. So I went back to GNOME 3 and started customization - GNOME Shell Extensions etc. etc. At the moment I am using GNOME 3 all the time and I am very happy with it - I think it is actually an improvement wrt GNOME 2. At the moment it is the best environment I ever used. I love it.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[jiggak]

GNOME 3 is basically a dead project at this point. No serious developers use it these days

I hope it's not a dead project because I'm a serious developer and I use GNOME 3... and I like it. I think the UI is actually a refreshing change to the "old way" (ie: standard task bar and start button) and I've become very efficient with it thank you very much.

I feel bad for the GNOME developers these days. It seems like every week there is a new slashdot post with clowns like you berating their efforts.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arth1]

No, the Windows key does not work in virtualized or remote environments - assigning key functionality to it is an exceedingly ignorant design decision. Just think about it - in a VM, should the windows keypress go to the host or to the guest? Someone hits Windows-L to lock their screen when a customer/boss/spouse arrives. It shouldn't work anymore if running a guest, because the guest takes over the WIndows key?

No, there are reasons why the UI level should never rely on keys that are global at the display manager level and not local to the window manager. Again, it shows how exceedingly ignorant the Gnome 3 devs are.

And that's not even considering the keyboards which don't have a windows key, because the user doesn't, you know, run Microsoft Windows.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[hey!]

Gnome 1? Feh. It's Emacs shell buffer all the way, baby. You never have to take your hands off the keyboard.

Oh, and kids, a *real* computer has switches and lights on the front panel so you can examine and set the contents of CPU registers.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[supersloshy]

How do I minimize a window?

Why would you need to? Just Alt+Tab or use the activities key to switch windows. Some add-ons can help with this as well. Minimizing is a thing of the past since the only good reason I can think of to do it, clicking on icons on your desktop, has been made obsolete by the activities overview.

Can I run my cpu and weather applet on top bar?

1) Do they need to be on the top bar?
2) Sure you can. Just write an extension for it. I've been using a weather extension and it works pretty well.

What about having more than one window open on the desktop?

Just click the window you want? How hard can that be? Tapping the activities key and clicking the window you want is also helpful, and you can always install a dock extension.

What if I want to see all that running while not leaving my libraoffice out of view or closed?

Tap the activities key or use Alt+Tab. Alt+Tab is mouse-navigable as well and gives you window previews.

Can I move my cursor over the icons and get a shrunken preview?

The activities overview has this as well as Alt+Tab.

Tell me, have you even tried to learn how to use GNOME Shell? Your entire comment reeks of anti-GNOME ignorance.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[HiThere]

IIUC, MATE require that your system be able to run Gnome3. Because of this I doubt that I could even try it.

And the "classic mode" that Gnome3 reverts it's install to is eye-burningly ugly. Black, for gods sake, panels. I could probably work around it, but I'd need to do it all over again every upgrade. So when Debian stable stops supporting Gnome2, I'll try something else. Even KDE4 is better than Gnome3. Gnome2 is better than KDE4, and KDE3 was better than Gnome2. Perhaps Pearson will finish their Trinity edition of KDE3. Perhaps LXDE will fix their broken support of left-handed mice. If all else fails I'll switch to KDE4.

(Yeah, I'm not considering FVWM or blackbox. Sorry, they don't fit my use-case. I am considering a few others, but they're currently rated below KDE4 for my purposes.)

N.B.: **FOR MY PURPOSES**. One size does NOT fit all. I don't have, or desire, a tablet. If I did, then Gnome3 might be a reasonable choice. But I'm damn well not going to use it on a desktop. MATE is promising, but if it requires Gnome3 to run, then it's not compatible with my hardware. (Am I satisfied with my hardware? No. But it's what I've got. And if I had extra cash I wouldn't want to spend it on fancy video drivers, but rather on more RAM, larger hard disk, better backup, etc. If I replace the system and it comes with a fancy video card, I still won't want to spend CPU cycles that way. (I even disable most of the fancier stuff that Gnome2 comes with.) I *DO* understand that this isn't everybody's use case, but it's mine. And it makes me despise Gnome3, and the designers who discarded the Gnome2 GUI, And the designers who discarded the KDE3 GUI. And Unity, which is, for me, not any better at all than Gnome3. (Well, I don't really despise the Unity designers. They didn't destroy a perfectly adequate interface to push their brand new atrocity. But I sure can't use Unity.)

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[diego.viola]

Wayland should improve most of those things a lot.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Korin43]

Ever heard of selection bias? The people saying "Gnome 3 sucks" are much more likely to leave comments (especially on Slashdot, since Gnome 3 was designed for less technical users).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arose]

That's not a usage scenario, it's a particular (and arguably hackish) way to implement notifications. GNOME 3 has an excellent notification system that doesn't take up a whole slice of screen while not in use.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[spasm]

"Let's compare switching tasks in GNOME 2 and 3. In GNOME 3 I can move my mouse over to the hot corner just as quickly, if not more quickly, than I can move my eyes there."

Yeah, lets - Ctrl-Alt-Arrow vs take hand from keyboard, reach to mouse, mouse up to a corner. Or Alt-Tab to switch between apps vs more mouse crap. I do like gnome 3's Alt-tab to switch between windows opened by the same app (something I miss from os x), but dear God, the sudden amount of mouse-for-everything shit gnome 3 requires is a wrist-numbing productivity killer.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[xiando]

I am guessing you are a GNOME developer (or perhaps part of the smartphone generation).

How do I minimize a window?

Why would you need to?

That's exactly how GNOME developers think these days, and that's why I have given up on the arrogant GNOME bullshit. The removal of features from GNOME 1 to GNOME 2 was bad enough, GNOME 3 is a bad joke in my opinion.

1) Do they need to be on the top bar? 2) Sure you can. Just write an extension for it. I've been using a weather extension and it works pretty well.

The applets I have on my top bar in XFCE do not NEED to be there. They are there because I want them to be there. You do not strictly need to have a toilet in your bathroom, yet most people do have a toilet in the bathroom. The GNOME solution you suggest is basically "There is no toilet in your bathroom because you do not need one and if you think you need one then you should go buy a pot to piss in and put that in there".

Tell me, have you even tried to learn how to use GNOME Shell? Your entire comment reeks of anti-GNOME ignorance.

Yes. I have tried it, and I wasted more time trying it than I should have because of comments like yours who claim that I would love the pile of crap if I just tried it long enough. Bullshit. Shit will taste like shit even if you eat it every day for a month.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[xiando]

GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt Care to give some specifics?

Try file, open in a KDE program and a GNOME program. The GNOME file dialog box is obviously better because you can not open files on remote filesystems using fish/ssh. GNOME programs do not let you right click a file and delete it, get it's properties and so on. You can not change between short, detailed and tree view in GNOME. And so on. The lack of features and configuration in GNOME "to make it simple" obviously makes it superior in all ways (if you are dumb as a cow).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[shutdown -p now]

Note that I was asking about Qt vs Gtk - i.e. frameworks / widget toolkits - not about KDE vs Gnome. I don't think this can even be reasonably evaluated from user perspective (except possibly for performance, where Qt is objectively better); one needs to be a developer to make meaningful comparisons.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[diego.viola]

Windows 8? I don't think that's consistent UI.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[crutchy]

I started using Gnome 3 on my laptop just to test it out, and it was clumsy (still is) so I doubt I'll use it that much till it improves, but it was good from the point of view that it is different to most things I've used before. People are naturally averse to change, which is most likely why experienced users of previous gnome versions are getting all pissy (especially the ones with a dented god complex because heaven forbid they might not know how to do something). Just because a pissy old fart that is afraid of change doesn't see any reason to change something doesn't mean there is no reason. Gnome 3 indicated to me of something inside the organization that isn't specific to software; a desire to innovate. They are thinking outside the square and ahead of the game (well, further ahead than projects like xfce anyway), which is always risky. Its also impossible to keep everyone happy, and that they were awarded comes as no surprise because we rarely hear from people who like Gnome 3 (they just use it) so its more difficult to measure how much people like it unless you have a vote like RC did. In contrast its easy to measure how much people hate it because they are so much more likely to bitch about it on slashdot (misery loves company). Gnome 3 isn't dead. Parent AC is just a pissy old fart having his bitch on slashdot (of course there is nothing wrong with that).

I would like to congratulate the Gnome 3 developers for their win, and I hope they can continue to ignore the pissy old farts that are afraid of change. After all, those old farts will be dead soon and their opinions won't matter anyway. The younger trendier generations are as important to the survival of an GUI platform as the established developer community. They are also more unpredictable so even if Gnome 3 got some things wrong, they have tested concepts and have plenty of feedback to put back into their innovation engine (and thankfully not just bitching from pissy old farts).

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[A7thStone]

Do you mean the same Ubuntu that's been crashing on distrowatch ever since Unity became the default interface, and check Mint's site again they use Gnome Shell, though highly customized, it's still Shell.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Grishnakh]

You don't need to suffer with Unity. Move over to Linux Mint; it's based on Ubuntu and is binary compatible with its repos. Or switch to Kubuntu, which is Ubuntu - Unity + KDE.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lsatenstein]

As a developer who uses a workbench -- SDK, the SDK and the workbench concept sort of eliminate the need for Gnome 3.

When not using Gnome 3, which is 39 hours out of 40, I have reverted to Compiz and Gnome3, giving me Gnome 2 with wobbly windows. If in the next release of Fedora, I do not have a way to continue with multiple desktops, then G3 will be permenantly replaced by xfce, which I am enjoying as well.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lsatenstein]

Gnome 3 won because it was compared to Unity. If it was compared to Compiz with 4 desktops or xfce it would win, but with reservations.

Expect to see Gnome4 with an ability to work like linux mint 12

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[shutdown -p now]

Well, themes look the way their authors want them to look. In fact, Qt, out of the box has a theme that uses the current Gtk theme, so that Qt apps would look more native in GNOME. Similarly, there are themes for both that are specifically designed to match the look - e.g. QtCurve, which is otherwise an excellent clean theme for both DEs.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lucidlyTwisted]

You must work for Microsoft TechNet; while your answer is technically correct, it is also useless for the person who asks.

Ah, an ad hominem as the very first thing. It's kind of hard to offer support (which I wasn't trying to do) without knowing which VM and I would suggest a forum dedicated to that VM would be a more appropriate place rather than /. especially as there are conflicting comments about 3D working/not working under OS X depending on the exact VM and OS X. Perhaps some combinations are simply a no-go.

Neither VMware nor VBox support 3D acceleration for remote or shared images.

3D Acceleration has been available in VBox since around version 2.1, they're now on 4.1.6. One does need to have the guest additions installed
https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#guestadd-video

As to VMWare, one of the things that kept me on VMWare Workstation for so long as the fact that it did 3D accelerations whilst VBox did not. It seems that even Server offers 3D acceleration (I have not tried it myself) although server hardware is not usually known for its killer graphics card.
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualization-3d-support-vmware.html

You are quite correct on remote/shared images. Whilst the server might be able to do the acceleration and the guest set-up to run the acceleration, it simply will not work/appear on the remote client. There may be some help in getting that to work, but I'm afraid I don't have the time to look into it just now
http://blogs.oracle.com/vizsun/entry/hardware_accelerated_remote_3d_windows

I have run Mint 12 and Fedora 16 (Gnome 3 Shell) and Arch (KDE) amongst others without issue (not as a remote, obviously). All with full transparencies, eye candy etc. One can even run 3D games in these virtualised environments without issue (as a quick test, "Extreme Tux Racer" at 60fps, Saurebraten [high settings] at 20fps in a Mint 12 guest).
XPsp3 (checked via dxdiag) had failures for DirectX 7 and 8, but the test for 9 worked perfectly.

The acceleration offered isn't as good as native hardware acceleration and one doesn't get all the latest features due to the nature of the virtualised hardware exposed to the guest.
Hardware: Dell Dimension 9200, 4GB with a NVidia GT240, Ubuntu 10.10 (proprietary NVidia drivers installed); not cutting edge by any means.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Coryoth]

You do realise Ctrl-Alt-up/down work for desktop switching in GNOME3? In fact, while being very mouse focussed in some ways, they have shortcut alternatives for almost everything, and you can drive GNOME3 surprisingly easily and efficiently from keyboard only.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[tenco]

If you mean notifyd: those vanish after some time while notifications via taskbar are visible till acted upon. That's a huge difference.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arth1]

As to VMWare, one of the things that kept me on VMWare Workstation for so long as the fact that it did 3D accelerations whilst VBox did not.

Unfortunately, only DirectX and OpenGL at a lower level than what Gnome Shell requires.

And it doesn't work too stably if you have noveau as the host OS drivers - it really wants the proprietary drivers.

It seems that even Server offers 3D acceleration (I have not tried it myself) although server hardware is not usually known for its killer graphics card.

Most VMs, you can assign hardware directly to a VM, but the problem is that you need a graphics card for each VM that way, cause few if any[*] graphics card allow for shared operation. And it doesn't help remotely, of course.

[*]: I may remember wrong, but I think SGI had an Onyx "in the making" where two Onyx CPU cards in one chassis used the same graphics card. I don't think I ever saw such a beast released, though.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[supersloshy]

You never did give a good reason for minimizing. You don't need to click anything on the desktop and you can use Alt+Tab and the overview to switch windows, so it's obsolete.

And I said there's a weather extension for the top bar. GNOME 3 is very new. Don't blame the developers for not having every single tiny feature that barely anybody uses when it's a very new OS.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[Meditato]

Looks like you haven't even tried Gnome 3, and/or else you're confusing it with Unity.

You can have more than one window open in Gnome 3 by default. You can also overlap them. You're both confusing Gnome 3 with Unity.

I currently have min/max buttons...they don't show up in the Window Manager view because you're supposed to manipulate which Windows are on what desktop in WM view. In the normal desktop, I have min/max buttons. You can set the button order and left-top/right-top positioning from the settings.

Use the dock extension if you want to see running apps while using a window. Or you can use Docky or Cairo-dock. Or you can just switch to WM view which takes less than a second, then return from it. It's just the super key. Focus is maintained in the current app. so if you're running LibreOffice, you won't lose focus.

I like the "grow up kid" troll reply you posted on my previous comment, it makes seeing that you apparently haven't even tried Gnome 3 before complaining about it all the funnier.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[CustomDesigned]

Actually, I showed gnome3 to a Mac user from Ecuador (legal immigrant, but low on funds) who can't afford the required upgrade to his MacOSX. He was totally sold. So at least a few masses are flocking away. On the other hand, gnome2 users are a harder sell.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[AmbushBug]

So just hit the super key (ie. windows key). Even easier...

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[lister king of smeg]

one person hardly equates a small mass or a flocking, also gnome can be compiled and run on a mac. secondly i have shown people with gnome 2 with compiz and they are interested in it. again two or three people do not constitute a flocking and i have installed and run gnome 3 and unity and people i showed them were not impresses. but everyone has there own tastes and some will like gnome 3 others will not. mind you i am not questioning your story but my experience's have been the exact opposite of yours.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arth1]

Think. Should the Windows keypress be sent to the HOST or the GUEST in a VM situation?

This is why GUI designers need to step back and look not only at what people have done before, but also WHY they did them. Like the strict separation between display manager and desktop environment.

Re:There will be no GNOME 4.

[arose]

I'm not sure if notifyd is used by the Gnome Shell, but important notifications don't go away until dismissed and the rest are available in the notification area (bottom right hot-corner) until dismissed, there's an extension that puts a reminder icon in the top bar as well. Besides, not all flashing taskbar button implementations flash forever and by default you can only get notifications from windows on the given desktop. It's a hack.

Flame wars

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Flame wars

[masternerdguy]

My favourite part about these posts is how people get modded to +3 troll and +2 flamebait because of all the mixed opinions on GNOME 3. It really shows how those mod points are really being used.

pfff!

[Anonymous Coward]

what a load of nonsense. Talk about Linux becoming commercial!

2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[mfearby]

... 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.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[rrohbeck]

... but if you run mixed repos (wheezy/sid) on squeeze, whenever you want to upgrade anything, it tries to pull in the entire Gnome 3 stack - even when you try to just install the 3.1 kernel build environment :(
But it seems this only hinges on two library packages, glib2 and gdk-pixbuf2 IIRC, and they often get pulled in via python7. No time to really look into it alas...

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[mfearby]

which is why I don't run mixed repos, at least not for the past few years. Stable suits me just fine now that the fascination of testing the latest and greatest crap has worn off.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[antdude]

A couple weeks ago, I did a clean install of stable Debian to replace my 2005's Debian installation with KDE v3.5.10 (awesome). I was upset with KDE v4.4.3 and I remember reading that it was supposed to be better than early v4 releases. Not for me!

I tried the default Gnome v2.3, and it was OK. I like it more than KDE v4.4.3. However, it is not good as KDE v3.5.10. I read about Trinity that is a fork of KDE v3.5.10. I would use it if it had a lot of support and users, and a good future.

Oh and I hated Unity in Ubuntu's live CD. :(

It seems like all these new GUI designs suck!! Ugh!

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[MemoryDragon]

Ahem I am a kde4 user and i cannot find a strait jacket, actually by today the desktop is quite good, the early versions were buggy and missed stuff from kde 3.5 but now I cannot see anything lacking, and the desktop itself is awesome.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't mix Debian stable with testing/unstable. You're asking for maintenance hell, and it's not supported either. Over the past months, Wheezy has seen a multiarch transition that makes it incompatible with Squeeze unless you upgrade libc and libgcc/libstdc++.

So, you're now either running a 99% Squeeze system (only arch:all can be upgraded without issues), or you're running a lot of stable programs on base libraries from testing. You're now in fully uncharted territory: your "stable" programs have a quicksand foundation that has never been tested. Great that it works for you, but I hope no one else relies on your machine for productive use.

Thinking about it, there is a third possibility: you have numerous pending upgrades that can't be satisfied without a dist-upgrade. Since those upgrades have higher version numbers than security updates, the security patches are not installed.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[Teun]

We're at KDE4.7.3 now and it works fine

But don't take my word, I also liked the 4.4 version.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[antdude]

Ditto for me too even though it sometimes suck to have older versions even with backports. :(

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[antdude]

Did v4.7.3 changed a lot from v4.4.3 in terms of design and usability? That is the problem I had. v3.5.10 was way better IMO.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[rrohbeck]

I wouldn't either but I have a good use case for btrfs.

Re:2.30.2 under Squeeze works just fine...

[rrohbeck]

So far I could avoid that but I'll have to dist-upgrade to wheezy sooner or later. Then it's time for xfce4. I really tried to like Gnome3 but I switched my netbook to xfce4 after a week.

What other window managers were tested?

[Sipper]

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.

Re:What other window managers were tested?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 actually took part in the vote.

The choices were:
a) GNOME 3.0
b) GNOME 3.1
c) GNOME 3.2

Re:What other window managers were tested?

[synthespian]

Gnome 2 and xterm.

Re:What other window managers were tested?

[Reservoir Penguin]

Gnome 3 = United Russia of desktop environments. I demand a full votev recount and those responsible for fraud punished severely. It's time for all geeks and nerds to unite behind the only one real non-toy DE left. I mean KDE.

Re:What other window managers were tested?

[Sipper]

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 actually took part in the vote.

The choices were:
a) GNOME 3.0
b) GNOME 3.1
c) GNOME 3.2

Wow, really hope this is sarcasm. Because if this is true then the only comparsion is different versions of Gnome, which is not terrbily meaningful.

What about...

[Goodyob]

I heard somewhere that they're working on a fork of GNOME 2, is that still going?

Re:What about...

[kvvbassboy]

Yes. The project leader of Linux Mint is also the project manager of MATE desktop. AFAIK, it has a few developers working full time on it to iron out the bugs.

Re:What about...

[hamsolo474]

i think you are talking about "Mate" which if memory serves is arch only

Re:What about...

[phaedrus5001]

Not any more. It started out on Arch, but recently Mint started using it as an optional DE for those who didn't want to use Gnome 3. The project is still pretty young, but with Mint (hopefully) helping out the development, maybe it will become more usable.

Re:What about...

[shutdown -p now]

Do they use Gtk 2.x, or Gtk 3.x?

If it's Gtk2 (as I suspect it is), it causes a big problem: because the two are not fully compatible, programs have to choose one or the other, and you get more fragmentation (a Gtk3 app will of course run in a Gtk2 desktop, just as a Qt app will - but it won't look or feel quite as native).

Re:What about...

[steveha]

Do they use Gtk 2.x, or Gtk 3.x?

They are taking all the GTK 2.x libraries and renaming them. Their goal is to allow MATE to co-exist nicely with GNOME 3 on the same computer.

Once they have it working, they might look at adopting the GNOME 3 libraries. But what they are doing right now is the fastest route to a stable MATE desktop that co-exists with GNOME 3.

If you want something that looks more like GNOME 2 but runs on the GNOME 3 libraries, take a look at MGSE.

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851

steveha

Re:What about...

[synthespian]

Oh, for fsck's sake! A fork! How stupid can people get.
This apparently is the problem with Gnome: they don't listen (it's been so for a long time - Slashdot once had a story about how Gnome devs never payed attention to user-submitted bug reports and, IIRC, there was that world-class prick Drepper telling everybody to fuck off or fix it themselves).

How to boil a frog

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How to boil a frog

[Anonymous Coward]

Another important thing for desktop developers to take note of is this. When they force a paradigm shift upon their users, make sure the new paradigm is better than the old one.

Re:How to boil a frog

[Anonymous Coward]

XFCE was unimpressive, and I found it really didn't have much of a smaller footprint than gnome. What I really liked was LXDE, especially in the form of Lubuntu.

I like overlapping resizeable draggable windows that I switch between with alt-tab, and I really don't care how much they want to deprecate it, I simply won't tolerate a DE that takes this very basic workflow away from me.

Re:How to boil a frog

[drjones78]

You do know you can change the alt-tab settings to work with windows - not apps - straight from the stock keyboard shortcuts panel in all of about 2 seconds, right?

Re:How to boil a frog

[drjones78]

Have you tried pressing Alt-Esc?

Don't like alt-esc? Make it alt-tab then (even though, I would bet in nearly every quantitative way, the alt-tab/alt-~ system makes workflows faster). But different strokes... System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts - change the binding to your hearts content. Not hard people. Bitching about non-problems is stupid!

Re:How to boil a frog

[TheLink]

Most people find it easier to change distros/OSes than it is to figure out how to customize GNOME till it works the way they want.

When the developers keep picking defaults you don't like for most things, you should realize the direction they are heading is not the direction you want to go, and stop wasting your time with their stuff (assuming there are better options :) ).

Re:How to boil a frog

[houghi]

and making some small changes to the way I do things

And theat is your problem right there. Computers should work how I want it. I should not work how computers want it.

Obviously not everybody wants to work the same way and that is why there are different desktops. KDE for one and GNOME for another. I prefer XFCE and Windowmaker. Yet somebody else will want to use something else.

So if they see there is a market, why kill off something that was liked by many? Why do the thing that people dislike from Apple and Microsoft and force people to adapt the way they work?
Sure, you could say that the source is available and that you could still use it. That is like saying there are girls out there and all you have to do is talk to them to get a relationship.

Easy for some, unpossible for others.

Re:How to boil a frog

[MemoryDragon]

In case of Gnome 3 it is not... except maybe for people who use netbooks.

Re:How to boil a frog

[tenco]

except maybe for people who use netbooks.

No. I find i pretty unusable without a large screen.

Re:How to boil a frog

[Electricity Likes Me]

Or you know, just don't do it.

Most of the forced paradigm shifts in recent years are notable because there's absolutely nothing about them which requires a forced paradigm shift. The Office "Ribbon" comes to mind (the entire UI framework easily supports traditional style toolbars, there's no reason a "2003 mode" couldn't have been left in).

Re:How to boil a frog

[Electricity Likes Me]

"Mean time to console" should probably be a UI metric - how long after installing a new DE does the average user find they need to open up a text configuration file or run a console command to fix or customize something.

Re:How to boil a frog

[Korin43]

and making some small changes to the way I do things

And theat is your problem right there. Computers should work how I want it. I should not work how computers want it.

And the creators of GNOME 3 disagree. Remember, they're making it because *they want it*.

Obviously not everybody wants to work the same way and that is why there are different desktops. KDE for one and GNOME for another. I prefer XFCE and Windowmaker. Yet somebody else will want to use something else.

So if they see there is a market, why kill off something that was liked by many? Why do the thing that people dislike from Apple and Microsoft and force people to adapt the way they work?
Sure, you could say that the source is available and that you could still use it. That is like saying there are girls out there and all you have to do is talk to them to get a relationship.

Easy for some, unpossible for others.

Choices:
* Make something yourself
* Use the stuff that's already there
* Pay for something (Windows / OSX)

You do remember that this is free right? If you don't like it, it's not like you lost anything by trying it.

Re:How to boil a frog

[arose]

Tough luck, "your" way of working is merely your adapting to the previous restrictions. You didn't pick the taskbar, the start menu or the alt-tab behavior, you adapted to the computer's way as it was and don't want to change. You should think in terms of what you want to get done and how that works now, instead of how you want to get them done and how that doesn't work anymore. Only then can you actually evaluate the workflow fairly.

Re:How to boil a frog

[lems1]

well said!

Touch friendly

[rzr]

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 ...

Re:Touch friendly

[MrHanky]

Have you actually used it on a touchscreen? Of course not. It looks like a touch UI, but it does not at all work like one. For instance, you get to the menu not by pushing an icon or through a gesture, but by sliding the pointer up into the top left corner, as if you were using Exposé with a mouse. Yeah, I thought it was a touch UI at first myself, but it's just a strange hybrid.

I still don't get the reason for the hate, though, except that whiners whine more loudly. It's not a bad UI at all, and with a few tweaks it's pretty damn good.

Oh, and as for Gnome being dead, this is nothing like Gnome 2.0. Gnome 2.0 was bad, and the complaints were the same: idiot UI duh-signers had taken over the project and crippled it. At least this time, the foundation is slightly better.

Re:Touch friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like a touch UI, but it does not at all work like one. For instance, you get to the menu not by pushing an icon or through a gesture, but by sliding the pointer up into the top left corner, as if you were using Exposé with a mouse.

You can also tap / click the activities button instead of using the hot corner sensitivity.

Re:Touch friendly

[sarhjinian]

Or press the Windows/Super key. I use that feature a lot.

Re:Touch friendly

[tenco]

You have a windows key on your touchscreen? How odd is that...

Re:Touch friendly

[lolcutusofbong]

Seriously. It's part of the panel, and says "Activities" in large bold font. GP is blind, stupid, or trolling.

Re:Touch friendly

[HiThere]

And the complaints about Gnome2 are still correct. It's a desktop that suits my use-case (though not as well as KDE3), but the crippling of user customization was not a desirable feature, and it destroyed the utility of the interface for many users who found Gnome1 perfectly adequate, because they could easily customize it. Gnome2 is a lot less flexible. If it does what you need, it's fine. If you need something that isn't there, you may not be able to customize to to do what you need. More accurately, it may be easier to do it in Java or Smalltalk or EMACS.

So the people who really needed the customizable features left for another environment, and stopped complaining. This didn't mean they hadn't been abused.

Well, Gnome2 became "good enough" for most uses, and new users never knew what they missed. But Gnome3 is next to unusable on a desktop. Others have said that it's also bad as a touch screen GUI, though I can't speak to that.

There still isn't a good replacement for some of the things that one could do with Gnome1. You can do it by programming in C and calling system libraries, but that's not really a decent replacement. (Mind you, I said "that one could do". I could never do them, because my interests didn't lead me to develop that skill set. OTOH, Gnome2 hasn't provided much in the way of improvement over Gnome1 for my purposes. There's a few things, but nothing that couldn't have been implemented in Gnome1...they fall more along the lines of refinements.

Please be aware that when I mention a Window Manager above, I'm talking strictly about the user interface, and not about the libraries. In some ways the libraries have improved dramatically. The GUIs, however, have retrogressed (from my point of view, and for my use-case).

GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award

[omar.sahal]

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.

This sounds familiar...

[OliWarner]

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.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[amiga3D]

No he's not. I remember how Gnome 2 was the end of Gnome way back. I have to admit that if you really love to fiddle with your Desktop it's hard to beat KDE.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Nautilus seems to be missing some crucial components at this point, like letting me associate a program of my choice to a certain file type.

Find a file of the type you want to associate - right click properties -> opens with

I know, it's not immediately obvious, but the functionality is there.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[DoofusOfDeath]

Don't taunt him. According to his login, he's a member of Anonymous!

Re:This sounds familiar...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

To be fair, there are so few linux users in the world that both KDE and GNOME can both be failures without contradiction.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[arose]

I think he means associating a program not in the menu/dash whatever tree. Which is cks] not possible in Nautilus 3.2.1. My personal biggest GNOME 3 WTF moment was that printer sharing is gone. Second is probably the decimation of the appearance options, I felt it was a good balance between too little and too much but those are at least right there in the tweak tool.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[forkazoo]

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.

And to this day, I don't know anybody who has done a large scale deployment of KDE4. Where I work to this day we have something like 1000 users on KDE 3.x, and the rest on Windows 7 and OSX 10.6. Part of that is simply down to the fact that I work for a relatively conservative organisation which depends on fairly stable environments for Linux and would be slow to move to any new version, no matter how good. But, that's clearly not the only explanation because the non-Linux workstations are so much newer. The last place I worked, I was also on KDE3. The other users in my immediate department were also on KDE3 or Gnome2. Gnome 2 was current at the time. (Though, Linux use wasn't officially deployed, so people just used whatever they wanted if they needed a Linux box. Presumably, somebody there was running KDE4, but I never actually noticed it if that's the case.)

From where I'm sitting, a lot of the people complaining about KDE 4 seem to have been right. Which is a shame, because I like the Qt4 API's much better than the Qt3 API's, and the abstract component model of Kparts is really cool in KDE4. It just fucking sucked to use in practice.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[synthespian]

I've seen this before - a system so fucked up its users need to go on line, on "communities", on "forums" to switch on or off some badly designed asinine shitty smelling wart they call feature. That was Windows. Congrats, Gnomers, way to go!

When you design your interface in such an annoying manner that it creates emotional pain, it becomes ingrained in the victims memory and the experience never goes away - and then you win! You win, Gnome! Win!

Re:This sounds familiar...

[Anonymous Coward]

The baffling under-reported KDE deployments in Brazil (which serve *10s of millions* of people) have upgraded from KDE3 to KDE4, though apparently they took some persuasion to do so.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[epyT-R]

except that javascript is a horrible choice. there are far better languages that have had bindings with gnome (and kde) since 1999.

oh and of course it needs compiling.. it's 'compiled' every time it's run, slowing down everything even more. just what I want on my desktop, a bunch of slow, memory hungry widget-app-things.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[EdgeCreeper]

People still have the choice to use Linux and its desktop environments. I would say Linux has truly failed if that choice is taken away.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[MaskedSlacker]

I don't get this. I see people repeat this over and over, and, yet, every KDE setup I see looks essentially the same. A new color scheme does not count as fiddling.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[arose]

Yet we have these masses of people saying how great GNOME 2 was and how Unity/GNOME 3 destroyed that. Ergo GNOME 2 quite obviously didn't kill GNOME.

Re:This sounds familiar...

[waferhead]

When you design your interface in such an annoying manner that it creates emotional pain, it becomes ingrained in the victims memory and the experience never goes away - and then you win! You win, Gnome! Win!

I felt the pain from the very first release, and after awhile, the only time I spent in Gnome was trying to figure out where Redhat had hidden the desktop switcher... this time. I could never understand why they would make THAT fugly, buggy, cartoonish and damn near unusable GUI (that managed to incorporate a Windows-like registry for settings, for gods sake) the default, with crud for other options.

Sorry, not meaning to troll, but I have ALWAYS loathed Gnome, all versions.

One of the main reasons I grew away from Redhat many, many moons ago.

So much for internet polls, eh? The sheeple rule.

Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[goruka]

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.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[Anonymous Coward]

Joel on Software is good on usability. One of the most important thing about usability is that the four corners are used...this article was written over 10 years ago, yet except for GNOME3 -- which doesn't have universal menus at the top of the screen -- no interface has used all four corners. Unity used two corners in the version that came with Ubuntu 11.04. That's ruined in 11.10. The upper left corner does nothing useful.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000063.html

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[Arker]

Actually there has been some good work done in the area of usability. Tog (ask Tog) really did lay out some basic principles that make sense and work well when applied - and he is largely responsible for the fact that the old Mac interface was so easy to learn and, for some purposes, to use. (Of course for some purposes it was awful, but for the target audience it was a pretty good tradeoff - making things they were likely to do easy, and things they werent likely to even think about hard.)

But you are largely right. With OSX Apple seemed to largely forget his work, and the whole usability scene such as it is seems to be mostly off in lalaland and engaged in make-work for designers, constantly fixing things that arent broken, and often regressing in the name of progress. The Gnome project seems to have jumped on that bandwagon with both feet.

Change for the sake of change is fundamentally incompatible with any sane usability doctrine. Even experts and 'power users' get angry and frustrated when an 'upgrade' changes their workflow and/or forces them to learn new ways to do things they have been doing just fine for years. Programs that get a reputation for capricious, arbitrary breakage like that (and GNOME I am looking right at you) are only cutting their own throats.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[arose]

I don't the the bottom left corner does anything...

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[synthespian]

What do you mean "no solid ground"? It shows you never made the effort to read what usability researchers published. Eye-tracking, motion-tracking and even brain-activity (NASA project researching pilot attention to the spaceship's control panel).

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[TheLink]

the old Mac interface was so easy to learn and, for some purposes, to use

The "hold down mouse button" on menu, drag and release on desired menu item, was a pretty crap idea though. I remember seeing many users struggling with that.

Double-clicking is also hard for most people to learn. Steve Jobs/Apple only wanted one mouse button. It's ridiculous to assume people will have difficulty figuring out multiple buttons but not have difficulty figuring out whether to single click, double click, or hold-drag-release. People who drive cars have two or three "buttons" at their feet, so they can certainly learn about buttons. But many people have never learned the differences between single-click and double-click, they double-click for everything, or try various combinations of it, every time.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[Arker]

The "hold down mouse button" on menu, drag and release on desired menu item, was a pretty crap idea though. I remember seeing many users struggling with that.

That was an awful design choice. By contrast the right way to do it can be seen in WIndowMaker, where each mouse click is a distinct event and navigating a menu to a certain end can be reduced to a series of clicks - with any meanderings of the mouse irrelevant as long as the clicks occur in the correct regions.

Double-clicking is also hard for most people to learn.

Yes, but at the same time once learned it comes to be very 'intuitive' and any system without it comes to be difficult to use. Which means it is critical that the user be given a choice as to which style of interface to use, no matter how much that freedom of choice may irritate some designer somewhere.

Steve Jobs/Apple only wanted one mouse button.

However the practical vocabulary needs of the interface then forced him to add the concept of using meta-keys on the keyboard to modify mouse clicks. It's hard to seriously argue that using meta-clicks is any more confusing for the poor user than a multi-button mouse. And ergonomically it adds unecessary complication. The user has already paid the price of removing one hand from the keyboard to grasp the mouse, and we know s/he has a hand on said mouse, but may or may not have the other hand on the keyboard.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[JanneM]

The upper left corner is the place for the basic window controls - close, minimize and maximize. The topmost item in the panel is only a little below. If a mouse movement into the top left corner actually did anything in Unity users would be trigging it by accident all the time, with frustration and perfectly understandable anger as a result.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[w0mprat]

There is actually a lot of good science out there about human interfaces, you can dredge up lots of papers on it if you search. Otherwise it seems to be invisible.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[itsdapead]

However the practical vocabulary needs of the interface then forced him to add the concept of using meta-keys on the keyboard to modify mouse clicks.

The long-term payoff of Jobs' decision is that, even today, the majority of actions in Mac software can be performed with a single button. Meta-keys and right-clicks tend to be "shortcuts" for actions that can be done from the main menu. Most of the long-term, low-tech Mac users I work with look bemused if I ctrl-click to pop up a context menu.

The exceptions are if you want to copy rather than move files (but most people seem to cope: you can always duplicate + move or copy + paste... my experience is that low-end windows users are even less capable of copying files). Plus, even I was thrown by one option in the Lion Server app* that only appeared on a right-click context menu, because my experience was that Apple just didn't do that.

(* The train wreck that is Lion Server is proof that, in hell, Linux developers write the applications and Apple developers write the servers).

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[Electricity Likes Me]

The "four corners" idea gets implemented to the detriment of other ideas though. It's just not that important, and its probably the number 1 thing I despise about Mac OS (and by extension, Unity) - constantly swapping around my application menus at the top of the screen.

Re:Gnome 3 is people with large egos.

[Raenex]

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.

Just to pick on Microsoft, the Office 2007 changes were quite radical, and they're doing it again with Metro in Windows 8.

Obligatory

[MrEricSir]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-moXUALZtw

Linux Journal Readers Choice?? that settles that

[smoothnorman]

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.

Don't compare firefox with gnome

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Don't compare firefox with gnome

[Compaqt]

What does trimURLs do?

Still on FF3.

Re:Don't compare firefox with gnome

[nightfell]

Posted anon since I'm not pulling the /. party-line of hating on FF and evangelizing chrome.

Watch out, we got a bad ass over here.

Unity

[sakdoctor]

Unity - At least it's not GNOME shell.

Re:Unity

[hedwards]

Unity is sort of like if Goatse man had a baby with tub girl, nothing but an elaborate effort to troll teh internetz.

Re:Unity

[Billly Gates]

... And gnome3 is 2girls1cup. To top it off, your asked which you would prefer to wack off too?

Personally nothing would be the best seeing all of that. Seriously!

Re:Unity

[synthespian]

I don't know who is funnier - you or the dude who modded your post as "informative"! LOL.

Re:Unity

[Tamran]

Unity is sort of like if Goatse man had a baby with tub girl, nothing but an elaborate effort to troll teh internetz.

In other words, Unity is NSFW.

Perhaps its time we act first and abandon GNOME.

[Foxhoundz]

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 reject "designers".

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[masternerdguy]

At least those UI designers can't touch the linux kernel!

OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Meditato]

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.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[0123456]

Basically, I don't understand the vehement opposition here.

Hint: most normal users want a UI that just works and stays out of their way _WITHOUT_ having to write a load of javascript to make it not be shit.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Seriman]

This happened with Daikatana as well, so I hear. You have to go to option and find the, 'sucks balls' option. Uncheck it.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Meditato]

I haven't had to write a load of javascript. I kept it at default for a while, then decided I wanted some extra functionality- stuff that wasn't even really present in Gnome 2 or KDE, like automatically opening various files in a specific text editor based on what search parameters I added to a search term.

Based on a number of people I've had this conversation with, I imagine very few people have honestly given Gnome 3 a try, as opposed to loading it up for an hour, deciding they hate it, then making angry circlejerk posts to various tech related social networking sites.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Pretty much. You need about a week or so and do it the "GNOME 3 way" so to speak. It's a decent design it has some flaws but extensions can override most of the behavior. slashdot usually hates stuff. It always seem slike it is full of 50+ year old sysadmins who hate change. I'm sure they probably hate all the stuff that is going on with init and systemd. It's going to be all kinds of fun when wayland comes in too.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[bonch]

Well, "normal users" just gave the Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award to GNOME3.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Billly Gates]

So does that mean you think windows 8 is the best thing since sliced bread right? After all it is changed. Same with Firefox and its updated release cycle right? Just abunch of whiners when your tickets at the help desk at work go through +999 from angry workers whose extensions just broke. Its better because its change and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot.

I would love to work the way only how some cs grad at gnome who has no UI experience say I should use it and decide for me.

End of rant but Windows 95 was a BIG change. Did you see people.whinng and refusing to use it? It should not take a week to learn a gui. Windows 95 took 5 mins and I was set. Maybe a week to discover all the right mouse button settings. XP was a big change too. True some.were not eager to buy it right away but no one flamed and screamed and cried when win98 was taken away. Almost everyone likes win7 but keep XP because of costs and apps. Again it is proof that not everyone is irrational fearing change.

But gnome 3? It is the worst gui ever made and I do not say that lightly. I switched back to windows because I ould rather be in that world again than be forced into that gui. That says a lot

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[epyT-R]

I'm a $SELF_PROFESSED_GENERIC_COMPUTAR_HAXOR_KING who hates gnome 3. It's all javascript, which adds yet another layer of complexity on top of the already expanding linux desktop stack without any clear advantage to simple configuration files managed by a gui. if i need something scripted, I'll write a script in bash/perl/python/whatever. any of these are superior to javascript and have had bindings for all major widget and desktop environments since the late 90s. integration with the latest $MANAGED_RUNTIME_LANG of the day does not automatically make software relevant. it should be useful and flexible, but out of the box, it should provide a relatively traditional interface for the user to get his bearings (or stagnate if he so chooses). this interface should provide basic amenities that its predecessor had (a sensible file manager, task manager, hot key config, window manager, etc). gnome 3 has serious shortcomings here. I won't even get into unity as that doesn't even belong on a desktop.

Basically, I don't understand why everyone is so wow'd by change for changes sake + race-to-the-bottom reductionism. It's like I'm looking at a forum with a bunch of 16yo college bound liberals who know nothing of politics other than what the public schools taught them; democrat good, republican bad. If I like it, I'll use it. I'll recommend it. If I hate it, I won't, and I'll criticize it. Just because you can't comprehend why people can and do still judge things objectively in this brave new world of infinite tolerance and acceptance, doesn't mean the poll wasn't rigged and/or pwnt by robotrolls run by bandwagoneers. newness does not equate to better. perhaps the rest of the people that poll was trying to reach were too busy getting work done with their more sensible guis. grow up kid.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Sri Ramkrishna]

I think you're just used to a panel and screen. Windows 8 is going to force you tochange one way to another. it's the same problem, if you tried to add all interface from the past, you're just going to get bloated software. That said, it's going to be fun watching corporate warriorrs try to learn windows 8 with office. It only makes learning windows 8 software.

Windows 95 was a change from DOS. I think most people were quite happy with that change to doing more GUI things. I think it is was a welcome change to not having to learn and understand DOS. But we can't stay with the same panel setup as we are used to.

I have used GNOME 3 for quite some time and I think it is a wonderful thing. It has some issues, but overall it's quite good and once you make the commitment to learn GNOME 3, you'll find it hard to go back to GNOME 2 or the old panel stye windows 95 GUI.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[rasmusbr]

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.

That's certainly one aspect of the Gnome 3/Gnome Shell hate, but that's not why I dislike it. I'm one of those people who shrugs when they change the UI. I don't care much, unless they make something nearly impossible, like how they've messed up window handling with multi-window apps like GIMP.

I disliked Gnome 3.0 because they stopped working on Gnome 2 while Gnome 3.0 was still very buggy and freeze-prone and sometimes not fast enough. I get pissed off when my computer freezes and I lose anything from seconds to minutes of work. Gnome 3.2 fixed a lot of that, but it's not there yet. I happen to like the direction that Gnome Shell is taking in terms of UI design. I know that they're aware of the problems and are working on them and I hope they will get there by 3.4 or 3.6. Maybe 3.6 will be super stable and snappy and have tons of great extensions. Maybe not.

Whatever happens I think 2011 will be remembered as yet another year of lost opportunities for the Linux desktop.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Meditato]

I'll recommend it. If I hate it, I won't, and I'll criticize it.

Looks like you are presuming that I don't think people should criticize it. Except you don't see that anywhere in my original post, Mr. Sarcastic Strawman. It's one thing to generate subjective criticism directed at features individuals cannot grow accustomed to. It's quite another to disingenuously make incorrect objective-sounding statements or implications, such as that the poll was rigged or that Gnome 3 didn't provide "basic amenities".

newness does not equate to better. perhaps the rest of the people that poll was trying to reach were too busy getting work done with their more sensible guis. grow up kid.

Lovely. The classic "presumption of inferior age" troll.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[jedidiah]

No. It's the wide criticism for both GNOME3 and Unity that makes people think the poll was rigged. If you can't understand why users would dislike either, you are badly out of touch.

Trying to be the first one to engage in insults won't change that.

Your entire attitude smacks of the "change for the sake of change" attitude that some here are complaining about.

Re:OH NO, I CAN'T DEAL WITH CHANGE

[Meditato]

No. It's the wide criticism for both GNOME3 and Unity that makes people think the poll was rigged. If you can't understand why users would dislike either, you are badly out of touch.

Straw man, much? I never said that I didn't understand why people would "dislike either". That's a complete fabrication on your part, especially since I never mentioned Unity. I didn't understand the vehemence behind the dislike here, because I actually have seen a great many people embrace Gnome 3, especially now that the Mint extensions are out.

Trying to be the first one to engage in insults won't change that.

Who is engaging in insults? I'm clearly stating a fact that this community is complaining without even providing substantiation for what they're complaining about. They're making objective statements about how it's "bad" when the only issue is that they just couldn't grow accustomed to it. The latter is perfectly legitimate (if you perform better under KDE 3 or Gnome 2, then that's your affair), but don't wrap it up in objective-sounding statements and conspiracy theories about rigged polls. If you automatically engage in poll-rigging conspiracies just because you haven't done your research enough to see the growing Gnome 3 community, then you're one of those people. Don't lecture me about being out of touch until you do that.

Your entire attitude smacks of the "change for the sake of change" attitude that some here are complaining about.

Where did I ever indicate that? The number of straw man trolls on this site is amazing. I use Gnome 3 because of the superior search, the window control, and the easy to edit javascript. Those are specific changes that I like. It took more work in Gnome 2.xx + Compiz to get that stuff working to my satisfaction than to just install Gnome.

"Reader's Choice" is not "Best Choice"

[Mozai]

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.

Re:"Reader's Choice" is not "Best Choice"

[jedidiah]

Linux Journal simply isn't a very hip magazine despite the fact that they've tried to embrace the whole "no paper" thing. It's a great magazine for an admin or someone who wants to do a very geeky build. It's very much the magazine that it started out as. If I am interested in the newer Linux developments that have happened this century, it's not so great.

Other magazines seem much better suited for information about desktop stuff.

So on second thought the GNOME3 thing might make some sense. They're not really desktop users to begin with, not even "desktop power users".

Slashdot wrong again, version not specified

[Xtifr]

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. :)

Re:Slashdot wrong again, version not specified

[S.O.B.]

Not sure what link you clicked on but the one in the summary has the phrase "GNOME 3" 5 times.

Re:Slashdot wrong again, version not specified

[Xtifr]

Yeah, I already corrected myself in a sibling post. They did get it wrong (of course), but not as wrong as I initially thought.

Since you ask, though, the link I used was my LJ bookmark. Slashdot's habit of posting links to ill-informed third-party bloggers who want the hits, rather than directly to the source of the information, has trained me to avoid using their links if I can easily find the relevant information another way--like, though a bookmark or Google. For once, that tripped me up, but it's gotten me the real story so many times that I have no plans to change this habit.

Re:Slashdot wrong again, version not specified

[S.O.B.]

In this case there were no real "facts" to independently verify but I agree that your approach is generally better. Too bad more people don't inform themselves before posting here but then it wouldn't be Slashdot would it?

I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[Osgeld]

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
 

Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[skids]

again how is it less efficient to move stuff around until I can see an icon on the desktop and then double click on a icon vs clicking on the magic G spot bringing up a menu

FTFY

So far I'm finding Gnome3 to be an interesting change. I even managed to tolerate having to left-click the terminal icon to get a new window. After I spend a few months to get used to it, I'll go back to a conventional desktop and see how much I hate that. Then decide.

Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[arose]

You don't click the corner, you slide the cursor into it and right back out, it's easier because you have the whole screen for switching instead of a strip of [ Termin... ][ Firefo... ] at the flick of your wrist (if using a mouse), something you'd have to do with a taskbar as well.

Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[arose]

Try dragging the terminal window onto the desktop (or any of the other desktops to the right). Though I personally rebind terminal to Super-T, I'm going to be typing into that new window anyway.

Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[evilviper]

XFce is a good choice, but blackbox has to be, by far, the most efficient desktop environment ever. Right click ANYWHERE and you get a menu with your programs, work spaces, and iconified windows. Scroll wheel anywhere to switch workspace, or on the window title to roll it up. Free reign to layout your menu in the most efficient way possible, extremely easy to configure, etc.

Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[rasmusbr]

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?

Those reduced windows are enormous compared to any taskbar button or dock icon that I've used. Why should I have to squint at tiny dock icons? Why should I have to limit myself to a tiny fraction of the screen when I'm looking for a window?

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.

I'll grant you that one. That is annoying.

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?

You create virtual desktops in the Activities view by dragging and dropping windows to the dock on the right. The dock behavior is annoying and needs a lot of work, but I like where they're going with it.

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.

I don't know about you, but I have to click something or hit a keyboard shortcut to get to the desktop (assuming I have at least one window open). How is that more efficient?

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 haven't had those issues, except for the popups. My main issue with Gnome Shell is that it freezes up on me sometimes, which is why I I'd rather not use it for serious work.

Re:I have been using it for a few weeks now and

[MemoryDragon]

Actually why do you hate KDE4, I am currently using version 4 because of the dreadful usability of gnome, and I find it quite enjoyable, you even can switch to a classical kde 3.5 like desktop interface if you want (it is predefined as one of the deskop settings you can switch to in the latest SuSE). The desktop is fast and stable for me and it still is a desktop.

I guess most of the hatred for KDE 4 stems from the version 4.0-4.3, 4.7 which is the current one is really a nice desktop.

The nice thing about Linux is choice

[whiting]

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.

Re:The nice thing about Linux is choice

[arose]

Alt-~ is immensely faster than any method that involves picking your terminals out of a list containing all open windows.

Re:The nice thing about Linux is choice

[DaveAtFraud]

Another vote for Xfce here. I like the UI to be snappy and Xfce is supposedly designed for light weight platforms. I put it on something like my Fedora VM server box for DOM-0 (6 core Athlon and 16GB of RAM) and it's amazingly fast and does what I want instead of getting in my way.

I think of GNOME 3 as Bob for Linux. As per the other posters who note that developers don't run it, I'm guessing it will got the way of Mocrosoft Bob.

Cheers,
Dave

Correcting myself

[Xtifr]

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*

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[tkdc926]

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.

the real story

[Gravis Zero]

Linux Journal bribed by Gnome 3 developers. ;)

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[Trilkin]

The fact this post hasn't been modded up is proof satire is lost on Slashdot.

The critics are always the loudest

[Dega704]

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.

Re:The critics are always the loudest

[Arker]

Lets face it; every prior UI has simply been aping Windows and Mac.

Let' s face it, you dont know what you are talking about.

X-Windows, and window managers for it, have been around a lot longer than you have been aware of them. The aping started in the opposite direction. The first WM I can think of that could be accused of aping one of those toy OSes would be FVWM95, and there were plenty of other options that predated it. Plus it worked a lot better than Windows in any event.

Gnome didnt really start on this path until version 2. That' s when I stopped using it - when they decided to castrate the toolkit and force the Win/Mac UI abominations down the users throat. The last time I took a look at KDE, it still preserved a good set of options and could be configured to operate like a *nix machine, OR to ape Windows, OR to ape Mac, and even if the defaults are idiotic it could still be configured to perform sanely. Best I know, this is still true, though I dont often bother to check. Even though it isnt as bad as GNOME, KDE is still bloated and wedded to this silly 'desktop' paradigm and therefore annoying as well.

WindowMaker is still a far superior alternative, even if it is essentially dead in terms of development. The promise of a GNUStep system was inspiring, it's really maddening to see how all the resources over the past few years have been funnelled into polishing inferior alternatives instead of filling in the gaps to build a slick, professional system out of the box. And yes, WM 'apes' another system - the old NeXTStep system which was far and away superior to both Windows and Mac on many levels, and it isnt simply a slavish copy but an adaption of the best UI elements with improvements.

If you really want new and different, without aping inferior systems, you should check out E. I dont bother with it because WM makes me happy, but it would be hard to argue that E mimics anything else - it's quite unique and progressive.

Mac OSX builds on the old NeXT codebase, but mangles the UI so bad it makes baby cry. There are certainly technical advances under the hood, but the UI was one huge regression - at the same time WM was moving forward, Apple was tacking the worst parts of the Mac, Windows, and NeXT interfaces together. That maneuvre, from what I can see, is really what GNOME keeps trying to ape - tacking the worst parts of as many interfaces as possible together into one hideous whole.

True UI improvement tends to be incremental - you keep the elements that work best, and rethink the ones that cause problems. There is nothing wrong with 'aping' per se - when the alternative is making up something new just for the sake of new 'aping' is a positive thing. Keeping continuity on a system by only changing things that need changing is a big win for usability - the biggest UI aggravation for users on any platform is when elements they have come to rely on get yanked out from under them to make way for new and shiny.

Re:The critics are always the loudest

[Dega704]

I don't even want to try picking through and debating every single detail of your convoluted essay on desktop interface history so I will revise my comment instead. Every Linux UI has been aping windows and mac for the last decade. Happy now? I'm not sure we are even on the same page as I am not talking about what's under the hood or performance compared to W/M, only the visual layout and basic functionality(taskbar, menus, minimize-maximize-close buttons, etc). And like I said, it will never be possible to please everyone with one interface. That is why there are so many available. My opinion doesn't speak for everyone and neither does yours. You have every right to hate Gnome 3, but the religious fervor some of you are displaying over the ordeal is what amazes me. Take a stool softener or something.

Re:The critics are always the loudest

[HiThere]

No, I *don't* have to give the Gnome3 team credit for trying. If you specify what they were trying to do, then maybe I'll give them credit. E.g., if you specify that they were trying to make a window manager for a tablet computer, then I'll give them credit for trying, but if you don't specify I just going to think of them as being a pain in the ass, and while I'll admit they've accomplished that, I don't think credit is the right term for how I feel.

Re:The critics are always the loudest

[jcarr]

+1 This guy.

There seems to be some sort of scorched earth policy with regards to prior behavior. It's as if the rewrite to version 3 was really: "You are no longer allowed to have things look or work they way you want". If this new rewrite is so fancy and powerful, then why can't it trivially emulate the old look and feel?

The GNOME user interface has been very good since around 2000. (Nautilus was designed by Hertzfeld.) This "forward" looking direction feels like windowmaker. I think that GNOME should treat the UI much like kernel developers treat kernel interfaces. They are public interfaces that have to be supported for a long time.

Coming from a New User

[Macgruder]

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

Re:no no no

[Arker]

Why the heck do you have X on a server?!?!

GNOME 3

[hackus]

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

Re:GNOME 3

[MemoryDragon]

Actually the feedback was quite interesting, from about 100 messages, about 2 or so were positive on the average. The problem is, will gnome really improve to please its users.
In KDE the criticism was mostly stability and missing functionality from KDE 3.5. KDE itself now has addressed both issues and the DE really is a joy to use, but they have yet to get the users back. The Gnome 3 desaster helped to get them back to some degree but not all of them came back even now that there is a desktop option which lets you switch KDE 4 into a 3.5 like desktop mode. A user once lost is a user hard to gain again.

Gnome has bigger problems, first of all the biggest one is the stubbornness of the gnome devs which even after years ignore valid criticism.
Secondly some parts of the usability are flawed and to fix that they have to change the metaphor. For instance, the first thing which put me off was the lack of a real desktop, all the space was lost for me. Having a desktop is the reason why I chose a desktop over a window manager and the lack thereof is a big no go for me. Secondly the minimizing, this could be easily addressed, thirdly the entier usability handling with the left hand side introduces additional steps for simple tasks like opening a program hence this should be optional not enforced. The list can be extended with dozends of other things. Most of them can be fixed, but only if the Gnome guys come off their high horses and at least admit to themselves that they fucked up majorly.
(Same goes for Apple btw. with Lion which in my opinion is a screwed up release in some aspects where apple was to stubborn)

Re:GNOME 3

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

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.

I've been using Linux and other Unix's since the early 90's. I've used Gnome 1-3, KDE 1-4, LXDE, XFCE, Enlightenment, OpenStep, FluxBox, and others that I've forgotten. Gnome 3 is my favorite by a mile. Just another datapoint to show that not all Gnome 3 fans are clueless noobs.

Could someone tell me....

[Brad1138]

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?

Re:Could someone tell me....

[fnj]

Nobody can explain that coherently. It's a make-work project for frustrated "designers" who can never be happy without completely throwing away the tried and true in its entirety and "designing" their extreme idiosyncratic idea of a perfect world. There's really nothing wrong with this, but the new design should be seen for what it is - arbitrary change driven by ivory tower ego.

Re:Could someone tell me....

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing wrong with GNOME 2, that last versions are excellent. I use it daily with CentOS 5/6, Redhat 5/6 and Solaris 11.
GNOME3 appears to be a tablet thing that appeals to non-techie users. It doesn't appeal to Free software fans because it requires a non-free 3D driver.
Just switch to XFCE or try something different like: awesome, dwm, etc.

They have taken a favourite desktop, ruined it, and forced us to switch to something else. Good job.

Re:Could someone tell me....

[Brad1138]

Just switch to XFCE or try something different like: awesome, dwm, etc.

I tried Xubuntu before settling on Mint, I liked it and would go back if necessary. For now I am going to stay with Mint 11 until Mate has had more time to mature and/or GNOME 3 becomes much more like GNOME 2.

Re:Could someone tell me....

[hey!]

I think in part it's a one-size-fits-all mentality, combined with an ooh-shiny attraction to tablet interfaces.

Re:Could someone tell me....

[koubalitis]

That was my first post on /.

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[arose]

There is nothing "intuitive" about minimizing a window.

Re:no no no

[flyingfsck]

.Because his server has a keyboard mouse and screen plugged into it. You seem to be like the Gnome 3 developers and forget that lots of other people prefer to do things *their* way.

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[TennCasey]

You're describing Unity, not Gnome 3.

These are the same readers...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

These are the same people who voted ...

... Pidgin as the best IM cli ent (with Skype as runner up)
... Pidgin as the bet IRC client (wtf...)
...GIMP as the best graphic design tool, but also voted Inkscape as runner (these never should have been the same category... should blame this more on the editors than the readers I reckon...)
... Dropbox (privacy issues and all) as the best cloud storage
... VirtualBox as the best virtualization solution - do none of the LJ readers work at scale?
... rsync as the best backup solution and tar as runner up - see prior question about working at scale.
... Puppet as the best CM tool
... LibreOffice as the best office suite, while voting google docs as best collaborative editor. (If you're in for a penny you're in for a pound folks....)
... And Python as best programming and scripting language.

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 ;)

Re:These are the same readers...

[qxcv]

Some of those choices aren't too bad - Pidgin/Libpurple is a pretty awesome IM client (particularly for Jabber), GIMP could still well be classed as a design tool (and TBH Inkscape still isn't up there with most of the proprietary vector editors like AI and CorelDraw), VirtualBox is dead easy to use if you just want to fire up a VM to play around with, rsync is an awesome tool for quick backups, Libreoffice is really the only full-featured Linux office suite (KOffice and the GNOME Office collection are shaping up pretty well, though) and Python probably deserves the best scripting language award (if not best programming language).
 
Sure, a fair few of those (Skype, Dropbox?!) seem fairly bogus, but the truth is that your average Linux user likes software which is user-friendly and readily available. It's fine for /.-ers to criticise new software from their Ivory Towers of Linux expertise, but when you deal with people who've never used Linux before you begin to appreciate projects like GNOME 3.

Re:These are the same readers...

[Electricity Likes Me]

Pretty much agree with this post.

I'm always looking for a "best" way of doing something, but a lot of those choices would essentially be my "simplest" fallbacks when I want stuff to just work.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[synthespian]

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.

Re:no no no

[sowth]

To add to your point, he may not even need a keyboard mouse and screen plugged into his server to use X. X is designed to be run remotely too. That is what the DISPLAY environment variable is for.

GNOME 3: Man of the year...

[Pf0tzenpfritz]

...1938. These good, old "XY-Of The Year"-stories just never get boring.

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[gl4ss]

*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!

Really?

[inkrypted]

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.

I hate to say I told you so

[G3ckoG33k]

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)

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[mwvdlee]

Or proof that /. moderation is a slow process and you commented way too early.
It's modded "+4 Funny" right now.

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[ADRA]

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.

Let's get Mikey to try it!

[oddtodd]

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!

Fuck this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Linus has since this post changed a little....

[jylenhof]

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

Switch to LXDE and get back to work

[Dystopian Rebel]

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.

Marketshare

[unixisc]

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?

Nobody ever used Linux because they liked the GUI

[itsdapead]

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.

*STEP options

[unixisc]

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?

Re:*STEP options

[Arker]

I've read that Windowmaker & Afterstep are just windowing managers,

Right. Small programs that do one thing and do it well.

but is there a complete GNUSTEP based DE?

One you can assemble yourself if you do your homework and dont mind to do some programming yourself before it's really all together? Yes, in that sense I guess there is. But not really in the sense most people would understand that language to indicate.

Re:ED article suggestion for Gnome 3:

[unixisc]

Gnome3 is more of a Metro for Linux, than a Vista. Remember - Vista's UI was more or less unchanged from XP - one could close the sidebar, and even the Control Panel could be switched back into the Classical mode, which would give one the old list that one had under XP. But Metro looks like it would fill up the screen, and that's precisely what Gnome3 does as well. Vista's problem was not its UI, but rather its resource consumption, and the failure of a lot of apps to release resources no longer being used

Non free?

[unixisc]

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?

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[jouassou]

Just wait until someone produces javascript wrappers for linux/kernel.h and linux/module.h.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[smchris]

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.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[Nihilomnis]

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.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[Pi1grim]

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.

Don't Occupy Nothing

[nickferber]

I love Gnome Shell. I am the 1%.

Re:Don't Occupy Nothing

[zbobet2012]

I am a developer who loves gnome-shell like mad. I am the .1%. Actually come to think of it, almost everyone I know who works with linux these days does so in a virtual machine or over ssh, from a mac. Where they all use the very gnome 3 like features of lion including full screen programs, applications expose and easy access to spaces. Now if only gnome 3 supported multi-touch mouses properly...

Re:no no no

[sarhjinian]

Possibly because he's serving up X applications?

Love It

[jon3k]

Gnome3 is fantastic and this is all you need to start loving it too. Oh and maybe this one too.

Re:no no no

[Arker]

If he were doing that the machine would actually be an X client. The X server provides display and input.

Re:no no no

[sarhjinian]

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Re:LXDE

[Electricity Likes Me]

LXDE, interestingly, also has a much more "Unix" design philosophy behind it - self-contained apps which do a single-task very very well.

My first exposure to it was entirely without realizing when I was trying to figure out if I could put a touchscreen interface together using just "panel" apps that ran the appropriate commands for different tasks. The LX music player delivered.

IMO it represents a much more correct design philosophy for building a useful Linux desktop under open-source development, especially when you note that a lot of the current desktops that have pretty much gone to hell, went there around the same time they decided they were going to "integrate" everything.

mouse syndrome

[icongorilla]

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.

Re:mouse syndrome

[Osgeld]

please show me where this magical windows key is on my model M, and really I have no aversion to learning something new, I honestly try to every day, but its quite annoying to relearn something I don't want to while trying to learn something else.

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[arose]

Except for the 100% of all desktop users that know and use that same concept on a day to day basis.

That is both made up and has no bearing on intuition. You learned to do it, that's your first hint on intuitiveness.

Re:XFCE

[Electricity Likes Me]

You've put an improved "first time user experience" in opposition to "stability, performance, security" a lot of times where it doesn't need to be.

For example:

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?").

These are not mutually exclusive options. In fact, we would benefit a great deal from exposing to the user a tool which guided them through regex construction, and then showed them the regex as it was built up (and included say, tool-tips which would explain each part - I have such an app which I use for just this purpose).

I feel the "mutual exclusivity" is very much the crux of the matter though - the DE's we're all complaining about, lately, seem to be very much focused on putting these ideas in opposition.

The "simplified" interface should make way to the normal or advanced interface with an absolute minimum of effort - but I see nothing inherently wrong with trying to design the UI so that it slowly educates users about more advanced concepts in Linux/Unix (especially because, it's self-advertising as well - I've amazed people when I see them doing some repetitive task, and show them how a relatively simple shell script can automate it - but what would be even better, would be if we had a UI which got them into that mindset in the first place).

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[xiando]

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.

Re:no no no

[Arker]

There's been plenty of room to criticise X. As someone whose first computer had 4KB Ram, pretty much all modern software looks insanely bloated and silly to me.

But it does give you massive amounts of freedom. You are free to use whatever toolkit you want - or write to primitives! If you want to install every library known to man, so that you can run all of the enormous library of software available for X, then it's fair to spend some resources on it. If you can assemble all the software you want using a more limited set of libraries you can shrink it a lot. And it's not that X doesnt allow you to put together a consistent GUI, it just doesnt force you to do so. Plus you have support for a huge amount of hardware, the new 3d interfaces work quite well, AND you get network transparency on top of it. So for all the belly-aching about X, and we can all relate at one time or another, it's good enough and it's there and it saves a HUGE amount of effort reinventing the wheel.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[allo]

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.

Re:LXDE

[allo]

LXDE is for people, who are missing Win95.

Prove it

[A7thStone]

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*

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[Grishnakh]

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.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[justforgetme]

Did redhat move away from gnome for the next rhel?

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[justforgetme]

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)

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[justforgetme]

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...

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[DaVince21]

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.

Re:All Open Source projects must reject "designers

[nobodie]

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

Re:GNOME 3 Wins Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Aw

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

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.