Slashdot Mirror
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.
... and you can pry it from my cold, dead, hands! Wot ain't broke didn't need fixin' and now this GNOME 3 monstrosity is trying to impose its strait jacket upon us just like KDE 4. As soon as you can make GNOME 3 look and behave 99% like normal, usable, GNOME 2.3 then I'll upgrade my distro. GNOME Shell Extensions is perhaps a first step in improving what is a terrible rewrite, but it still looks too irritating for people that care not for the one-app-at-a-time netbook experience.
Okay, so they picked Gnome3, but what were the other window managers they looked at to make that decision? The Fine Article doesn't seem to say.
Like a lot of people, I hated GNOME 3 (and GNOME Shell) when 3.0 released. I skipped around a little, tried KDE4 (again), tried Unity, tried XFCE (again), but eventually came back around to GNOME 3 with the GNOME 3.2 release. The advent of extensions, as well as spending some time actually learning to use the new environment and making some small changes to the way I do things, has actually brought me to the point of liking GNOME 3 and the new Shell. I now enjoy using it, and I prefer it over the other available options.
Extensions are a big deal, and if they had been there Day One, I think a lot of the hate for GNOME 3 would not have arisen. I added lots of extensions to re-create the GNOME 2 type of environment. What I found is that in some cases the extensions duplicated functionality already in GNOME 3, but that functionality was achieved in a different way with the new environment. As I began learning the GNOME Shell and building new habits, I found myself disabling extensions one by one. At this point, I'm running with minimal extensions.
Desktop developers should take note of that. There is nothing wrong with innovative change, but you don't want to shock your users. If you are going to radically change paradigms, make it possible for your users to continue to use the old paradigms and adapt at their own pace by migrating from the old to the new. Don't try to force them down this new path. Extensions to GNOME 3 were the training wheels I needed for my brain to learn the new environment and adapt. Once I got my balance, the training wheels came off.
I 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.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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.
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.
The term you are looking for is "usability designers", something that is becoming more and more trendy nowadays. The problem is, there is no solid ground on that kind of theory.. only a few "gurus" here and there and a lot of decisions that seemed to have worked by pure luck. There are a lot of them making a big buck working as consultants for websites and it was only a matter of time until open source desktops were struck by this trend.
It's simple, someone comes and determines that the way you have been doing things, that worked perfect for you and everyone you know up to this point is not optimal and must be done differently. Then, they throw away something that works for everyone and replace it by something that maybe works better for most, only for a few or for no one.
It's hit or miss, really, pulled by people with a gigantic ego. Gnome 3 doesn't have access to the large amount of user test groups that Apple, Google or Microsoft do, and even the later companies don't do changes as radical as in Gnome Shell.
So, yeah, Gnome 3 is just people with large egos forcing their unproven beliefs upon us, the community.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-moXUALZtw
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
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.
At least those UI designers can't touch the linux kernel!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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.
"It's a trick. Get an axe."
I am disappointed in this year's "Reader's Choice." It mentions "Gmail" as the best Linux app for instant messaging, "Google Docs" as the best Linux(?) app for collaboration, and the "reader's choice" for Linux games have been the same for the past eight years, despite eight years of new developments (Battle for Wesnoth? From 2003? When there's Warzone 2100, OpenTTD, 0 A.D., Heroes of Newerth, Minecraft, Braid, Darwinia, DEFCON, MegaGlest, Amnesia Dark Descent, Aquaria, Tiny & Big, OpenClonk, SpaceChem ... jeez.
I think the "Reader's" part of the "Reader's Choice" may be out-of-touch.
I 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.
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.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
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
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.
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
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
... 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.
GTK, as done by people who know how to write it, is still superior to Qt
Care to give some specifics?
What is wrong with gnome 2? I loved Ubuntu until Unity was crammed down my throat, I switched to Mint. I tried 12 (w/Gnome3) but quickly went back to 11. Can someone please explain why we are "fixing" something that doesn't seem to be broken at all?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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.
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.
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
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Pass the crack pipe bro.