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GNOME 3: Beauty To the Bone?
someWebGeek writes "According to the GNOME design crew, as reported by Allan over at As Far as I Know, GNOME 3 will represent a new approach to GNOME application design. The design patterns being developed and employed may effect a new, prettier interface, but more importantly a new mindset about the entire project, a mindset intended to encourage greater deep beauty in the application layers below the user interface. Maybe...for now, I'm sticking to the sinking ship of KDE in the Ubuntu ocean."
Things I like:
- Look seems updated & clean (simple top menu bar)
- Hidden dock (containing my favorite apps)
- Hot corner (shows all running apps)
- Instant app / file search
Things I hate:
- No minimize buttons
- Hidden desktop icons
- The bottom notification area
- Needs better UI consistency behind the scenes (ex. System Settings looks unorganized and messy, etc...)
- Consider putting any common app menu items in the top menu bar
I do prefer it over Ubuntu's default UI and KDE so far... :)
Just my two cents
- stoops
I for one, love cinnamon. http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/ :D
g0t b33r?
At work I have a maximised IDE on my left monitor (with the editor split vertically so I can see a .c and .h file side by side).
On my right monitor I have my IM client up against the right hand side, email against the left, browser in the middle and taller than the email, music player in the top left. I put IM windows to the right, so they touch the left-hand edge of the IM contact list.
This lets me work on code and watch for incoming emails while referencing a document off the wiki, see when someone comes back from lunch or gets out of a meeting (their IM status) and if someone messages me I can click straight to the window to reply. Similarly, I can click the music player to the front and immediately get at the volume or track list or whatever, without having to alt-tab or go down to the taskbar.
If all that stuff was maximised or tiled it would be a big pain in the ass for me. I don't log out or turn off the computer for weeks at a time, so once the windows are positioned I'm good - and most of them remember where they were last time anyway.
Graham
The Linux community is ridiculously conservative.
Probably because many of us use Linux for real work, rather than Facebook and Youtube.
From the article:
Judging by the comments it would seem that there is a bit of confusion about what is meant by maximising windows by default, so let me try and clarify:
1.) Not all applications will use this behaviour – only those that have been designed to do so. If an app won’t work being maximised, it won’t be.
2.) Although these applications will maximise by default, it will still be possible to unmaximise them. If you want to be able to view more than one window at once you will still be able to do so.
3.) There will be mechanisms put in place that will adjust the behaviour to compensate for large screens. We are currently investigating a number of options here, including not automatically maximising windows on these large screens or adjusting their layout to make best use of the extra space. Everyone involved is well aware of the need to work well with large screens!
i.e. "Yeah, we know this wont work in every case, you ninnies who are going to nit pick at the corner cases like they're the only things that exist."
I, for one, like gnome3. I use it when I reboot this machine and it works great.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The only difference to Gnome 2 I've found is that it's now easy to maximize by pulling the window to the top, or left/right edges for maximizing or half-maximizing respectively. Maybe everything will be forced full screen in the future, but Gnome 3 is fine.
Ugh, aside from the application menu being separated from the window, the whole pulling the window to the top/sides is the most frustrating aspect of the new paradigm. Its so irritating when you're repositioning multiple windows to have one of them decide to maximise when you get even near the edge of the screen. XFCE ftw.
I can't wait for a system where each application automatically takes up the entire screen!
use fvwm and put this in your .fvwm2rc:
What are you talking about? GNOME 3 supports display of multiple non-maximised windows. Have you even used it?
Sort of. But it doesn't really seem to like that. Go to the Dash or Application menu to open a new terminal window, and instead Gnome says - "oh - Terminal! Here's your terminal window right HERE", and just maximizes the one already open. So I have to get Terminal to open a new one for me. Every application works like that. "You don't want ANOTHER application window - use THIS OPEN ONE INSTEAD!"
So Gnome does what it wants, not what I want it to do. And it takes me more mouse click and keystrokes to do anything than it did in Gnome 2. Why?!?
Middle click the terminal button will open a fresh instance, or just use a keyboard shortcut. Vanilla Gnome 3 is terrible, but with Shell Extensions, and Tweak Tools you can have a great DE back. Of course we should not have to install plugins to restore functionality, but I have to say it's a pleasant surprise. I started with FreeBSD in 2001, and tried all the major DEs and WMs (tiling and floating) since then. I'm still waiting for KDE4 to reach the dizzy usabillity heights of KDE3.
Once you become consistent, you know that you can use a keyboard shortcut to switch to any of these windows, without having to Alt+Tab cycle through them
If that's mostly what you want, if you ever use windows you can use a utility I wrote: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/
Or you could try Windows 7 with their winkey+number shortcut - with that you can switch to a particular app (LinkKey is to a particular window).
I am going to be horrendously pedantic here and may be accused of trolling and being a grammar nazi, for which I apologise. But this is really annoying!!!
Use LESS when you are talking about stuff that you CANNOT COUNT. Like water, sand or hardware.
Use FEWER for things that you CAN COUNT. Like buttons, moving parts, warranty problems.
Apart from that, spot on.
Let them do what they want. There's always XFCE.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
As for the "if it isn't busted, don't fix it" comment, problem is that GNOME (and KDE) were busted. Both were essentially a cobbled together pastiche of like Windows and OS X circa year 2002 built on top of X11. Fast forward a decade and they're looking increasingly mouldy partly due to technological limitations (X11, drivers) and partly because they ignore usability innovations that have occurred during that time. Furthermore, being pastiches they often imperfectly copied the notes of their inspiration without understanding the tune. At least GNOME appears to be going off and trying to do something its own way and IMO it is succeeding.
Perhaps some people prefer to be technological Amish, drawing a line in the sand circa 2002 and deciding that's the way their desktop should behave and no different. So fine, stick with GNOME 2 / MATE or KDE 3 or Xfce and get that experience. I do not see that as being healthy for Linux going forward though. Personally I believe GNOME 3.x is going the right way. It has a few rough edges but its still at the start of its lifecycle and it will continue to improve with each iteration.
you can easily install KDE on either.
I can also install it on Microsoft Windows as well.
Don't you think that Gnome 3 can piss people off all by itself...
Sadly, in my case, yes. I had been a fan of Gnome since the late '90s, and have played with just about every UI available for X11. Gnome's most full-featured "competitor" (as far as the term has any meaning in the OSS world) KDE was for many years kluttered and ugly.
I really did try to learn to like Gnome 3, but I found so many obstacles in the way of getting any work done, I had to put it to one side in favour of a hybrid of KDE and compiz-fusion, which I am quite happy with, now that I have disabled all those mysterious "services" with meaningless and peculiar names.
I'll keep my eye on Gnome, but I suspect the developers are going to have to grow up a bit before I go back.
It was TechRadar.
Mada mada dane.