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."

Comments

found a GNOME replacement

[poppopret]

It takes just a minute to make XFCE look and act pretty much like GNOME 1.

I think you can clone GNOME 2 as well, but I always configured that to be like GNOME 1 so quickly that I barely saw it. :-) Why you'd want bars at top AND bottom of the screen is a mystery to me, but XFCE does support it. The same goes for desktop icons: you can have it if you want it.

I have my menu, my task switcher, my desktop switcher, my clock, and my xterm launcher. Life is good with XFCE.

I didn't think it was possible

[erroneus]

Just when I thought I could maybe settle in with Gnome3 on my Fedora 16 running, 11" laptop, I read this and was reminded why I hated Gnome3.

They go on about the efficiencies of maximized windows? REALLY? I'm not one of those users. I prefer overlapping windows so I can see movement in them when something changes. Yes, I know I can still do that, but tweaks are necessary.

Another thing that's getting to me is the wild mouse movements required to navigate around. Go to one corner to change to the window changing mode, then go to the opposite corner to do something with the windows like move it to another virtual display or something. Did they consider what a pain that actually is for people with touchpads or those stupid keyboard joysticks? Worse, what does it mean for the disabled?

It's not just different. It's different without a cause or a purpose. It's really stretching things to assert "an old person's user philosophy" where windows should always be maximized over others where people like to be able to easily and more quickly select and work with objects between windows. (Ain't much drag-n-drop with maximized windows is there?)

Linus Torvald's words keep coming back to mind... "unholy abomination" I believe they were.

Re:Do you really?

[garyebickford]

Sorry, I take exception. :) I'm one of those old farts, and I've been using and advocating multiple screens since at least 1978. Some folks are visual thinkers, some are linear. I'm definitely in the visual group. Those others, I think, are in the linear group. And Emacs has supported multiple windows since the beginning, IIRC. So even the text-mode types are not necessarily linear either.

In 1979 I was using three graphics terminals side by side (each of them 640x480 to 1280x1024). I hacked up a custom RS232 switch to direct output from the mainframe output to each one as needed, while input to the mainframe was always from one of them for the keyboard. On one terminal I had the code I was editing, on the second was my command line interaction, and on the third was the 3D graphics output that resulted from running the code.

Today in my normal workspace (a Compiz cube on dual 1680x1050 monitors) I have four virtual 3360x1050 desktops, all visible in the background in my transparent cube (when there aren't working windows in the way). I can spin the cube with one middle click & pan. The first desktop has housekeeping - mail, timeclock, Pidgin, sometimes a web page open, sometimes a terminal as I deal with email and office matters. My second 'working desktop' has one (sometimes two) Terminal, usually with three tabs for three different machines I'm logged into, two GVim windows one of which is broken into from one to several separate subwindows (vertically and horizontally) for different class files and the other of which contains one to three output log files. At any given time there may be diffs of log files or diffs of code files. Then, because I don't have a third screen, I keep three Firefox windows rolled up except when I'm using them, each of which has several tabs. One of the three, visible on all four sides of the virtual desktop, contains database interfaces for two machines (phpMyAdmin), dotProject, Trac, Mercurial, and the development portal. The second contains tabs for various sorts of documentation, the third contains reference material for the project I'm working on - usually web pages that I'm either scraping or reviewing.

If I'm working on more than one project this week, I will have a similar setup open on the third face of the cube, and the fourth usually has some more casual stuff such as a webpage that shows Slashdot, the news, etc.

I'm seriously considering going to a third screen (and 1920x1200 monitors), so I don't have to flip between windows for the Firefox stuff and the logfile views. Why should I have to flip between windows instead of just scanning my eyes over to the right? I want CONTEXT, dammit! :D I guess my workspace is more analogous to the bridge of a ship than a computer terminal. There's a lot going on, and I want access to all of it right now, and a visual indication of everything that's going on while I work on each individual task.

If you have sufficient resolution, the only reason to use a single window full screen is to get the maximum amount of data for one application on there, temporarily. I sometimes do this with an editing file, because I need just 'one more line' of text for context.

I think the ideal progression would be to stop trying to squeeze everything into a single screen, and instead make that screen a true viewport into an unlimited virtual space. As we move to head-up displays, we should be able to hang a window anywhere in space. The real world is a big space that surrounds us - why not our 'desktop' as well? And why can't I read a virtual newspaper the same way I do a real one, with the full spread visible and readable? And other parts of my environment visible around it - the stove, the clock, the coffee pot, my SO, etc.