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GNOME 3.6 To Include Major Revisions
supersloshy writes "The launch of the GNOME 3 desktop environment sparked heated debate and criticism. GNOME developers have been listening to the concerns of its users and it is rolling out several significant changes in GNOME 3.6. The message tray, often called hard to use, was made much more visible in addition to being harder to accidentally trigger. The "lock" screen can now optionally control your music player, the system volume, and display notifications so you don't have to type in a password. GNOME will also support different input sources directly instead of requiring an add-on program. Nautilus, the GNOME file browser, is also getting a major face lift with a new, more compact UI, properly working search features, a "move to" and "copy to" option as an alternative to dragging and dropping, and a new "recent files" section. These changes, among many others including improvements to system settings, will be present in GNOME 3.6 when it is released later this month. Any other additions or changes not currently implemented by the GNOME team can be easily applied with only one click at the GNOME Extensions website."
GNOME 3 users are extremely excited!
Over 6 releases to have them starting to listen to their user? I am out!
After a few more iterations, it'll look just like OS X.
:P
"Now with only ONE button".
the window/desktop manager I'm still using?
WindowMaker.
As I have been since 1998 or so, whenever I originally started using X on linux. It was intended as a clone of the NeXT workspace, and was for a time the official windowmaker of GNUstep. And you know what? They haven't fucked with it beyond a few minor usability improvements in 10 years. Basically the only changes were adding truetype fonts (Which helped with a few font related issues on later X servers, but otherwise hasn't added much), 'live' editable menus (previously text files that required a restart to change the right-click/f12 menu layout), and some inter-desktop fixes that came out whenever the release popped up on slashdot earlier this year.
It doesn't have a desktop shell, and finding updated wmapplets can be a hassle, but the former can be fixed by borrowing thunar from XFCE, the latter by fixing them yourself (or suc...er 'convincing' someone else to), but it'll run on any computer you have dating back to at least the pentium era (and would probably run on older if it wasn't for the 'mandatory' freetype support.)
Point being: What has gnome offered in either the 2.x or 3.x releases that made it so much better than the original versions, and did any of those features make up for it's unusable bloat on legacy systems?
I know nobody bothers to code for legacy systems anymore, unless they already were, but the point is program efficiency and usability is being reduced by wasting cycles on things that.... don't add to the apparent front-end usability! A problem that the GNOME project seems to be embracing from the wrong end wholeheartedly.
Actually they removed compact view. To say it's "more compact" is the opposite of what happened.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...can (3.0 + 0.6) be less than 2.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Hipsters and people that sway easily to trendiness, are why computers are starting to suck. Whoever let these monkeys program needs to be drawn and quartered. "Oooh, let's take the close button, and not actually close or exit the application, let's just make it disappear but still running in the background, because users don't know what they want to do anyway." (Banshee, Pidgin, just to name a few). Let's just throw away 40+ years of HCI and ergonomics because touch screens are the new rage.
I'm glad to see GNOME finally adopt Copy To and Move To in their file manager. That was one feature which I loved in KDE and drew me away from GNOME, oh, about ten years ago. Odd it has taken them this long to include the feature, but I'm glad they finally did. The summary doesn't mention it, but have the developers finally enabled the shutdown button by default? The "press ALT to show" concept was really silly.
Nowhere in the post does the word performance even come up. As computers become faster, there are those of us who want to use that increased speed and power for the applications we run (whether it is video processing, video games, or just a ton of youtube tabs open in our bulky web browser of choice). Don't get me wrong, we want a desktop environment that is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive to our workflow. I just don't see why we need to keep significantly bumping up the performance cost of the desktop to get there.
Please enforce a 12 month moratorium on copying anything, absolutely anything, from Windows 8 that is not already in common usage. Do not under any circumstances tolerate or condone Windows 8 penis envy.
No, the problem is people like these on /. who criticise everything.
That's stupid. You're stupid. Everything is stupid. Nyah :P
Compare this to games developers that give in to their fans and give them whatever they want, usually go bankrupt.
Like how Valve started circling the drain the moment TF2 went free to play?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I don't want to mention the Apple Effect, but still, I mention the Apple Effect: it's the Apple Effect. Developers think more and more often that there exists a holy path of usage, one that is so smooth, elegant and minimal that everyone finds it pleasing. Mayor usage patterns are becoming linear, and the user is left with the fact that changing background, color, and font-size are now billed advanced and sophisticated personalization options. Less options, less support problems, less things to understand.
Protip: The "Post Anonymously" checkbox is located above Comment Subject ;)
And I start to wonder if these are just Apple Trolls. Listen, It's easy enough to switch to KDE or XFCE. I run Mandriva 2011. I use KDE. I have my own custom KDE theme installed with rpm. It works fine. There is no reason to abandon Linux because Gnome sucks, just run whatever programs you please under XFCE or KDE if Gnome is so awful.
You are an idiot if you switch to OSX or Windows over this.
If you are not interested in trying something new that may give you a way to do things faster and easier than you are currently doing, why are you using my new UI?
Because you stopped supporting the old one.
Support is not free. You want to keep your old ways, while I want to move on. If I am a commercial developer, I'd weigh the value of keeping you as a customer and offer you a support contract to compensate me for the work required to keep you comfortably in the past. If I am an open source developer, you are not likely to be interested in paying for my efforts, so what incentive have I to do things your way when I believe I can do things better my way? That's what forks are for. GNOME 2 has been forked and people like you who love the old interface can keep working on it. GNOME 3 in the meantime can continue trying new things that may bring about an easier and more comfortable future for users who are not already set in the ways of GNOME 2. If you want GNOME 3 developers to instead support your old ways, why not put your money where you complaints are? How much are you willing to pay for continuing GNOME2-style UI support? Nothing? Well, what did you expect for that? Slavery is not cool.
Screenshots are not encouraging...
I read through some of this and I am a user of Japanese language input. (Output too) In my recent experience with trying to get GiMP 2.8.x compiled and running on CentOS 6.x, I learned that when I was successful, I could only accomplish this feat by compiling many of GNOME's core libraries because the GIMP toolkit (you know, the GUI toolkit intended for use with GIMP) ended up as part of GNOME against the advice of the larger community. The result is that if I try to run a GTK based application in an environment which uses a different GTK, I lose theming... not the end of the world. But ALSO I loose access to my input method! Since I lose GNOME integration, input methods are also lost among other things.
This is GNOME's fault. They simply aren't mature in their development philosophies.
And what did I read in the article describing the new changes? "more tightly integrated IME!!" Uh... no. That's a bad idea. If there's one thing I learned from my experiences in breaking GNOME integration, it's that input is something of a low enough level that it should be handled by X, not by GNOME.
GNOME marches forward ruining things. If they want "a direction" they need to consider moving in a mature direction that unifies the desktop experience with X and with that other thing that is closer to the hardware... freeland or something like that?
And what was that "GNOME-OS" thing I heard about? Oh crap. Every app and environment thinks they should be an OS. Uh... no. Please no,
Agreed, Xfce on anything is the one to beat now. It's time we all switched gears and started trying to list significant missing features and capabilities in Xfce so they can be added, rather than trying to fix brain dead DE abortions. I don't think there's very much missing from the latest version of Xfce (NOT the outdated version shipping with the spring release of Fedora and Ubuntu).
Me neither, but I'll try to explain anyway.
That's not actually the point. The screen lock is a possible solution to a set of common problems. If you insist on a single solution and then use a rigorous description of that solution as your criteria for whether the problem is solved or not, that's the opposite of good software engineering practice. The point is to define and solve the problem, not force expectations of what the solution should look like to shape your perception of what the problem is.
In most cases, the screen lock exists to prevent other entities from pre-empting your input - for example, I have to protect my keyboard from cats and small children at home, at work I need to prevent other people from sending mail under my username or deleting my local filesystem. I won't give a damn if anyone sees a notice that says "you've got mail" or if they can turn down the volume of my speakers - in fact those are desirable features for nearly all real world users.
In some cases, though, you may also need to prevent others from accessing your output devices - for example if you are carrying on a torrid affair without your spouse's knowledge, performing industrial espionage on your employer, or surfing porn while you're supposed to be babysitting, you'll want your screen completely hidden and you'll want a "hot button" that invokes lockout of all video and audio output instantly. Most people with this use case are also going to be satisfied by a screen lock that displays prominent notifications (without content) and allows control on audio outputs. They aren't going to want to have to type a password to stop the moaning sounds from their speakers - that's not a sufficiently responsive control for them - but they may want the screen lock to automatically mute audio outs.
The least common use case is going to be people who want total input and output device lockdown - when they are away from the computer, they want audio, video and network to be totally inaccessible until they type a password. That use case is important, because it is the highest possible security setting, but almost nobody wants their download to stop when they step away from the computer, almost nobody wants to have to pull the battery out of their kid's laptop to make the music stop.
So instead of focusing on what the meaning of the phrase "screen lock" is, a good solution would probably default to total lock of all inputs and outputs (on the principle of maximum security defaults) but would allow the user to trivially permit notifications and external device controls through a simple settings panel (as well as during any configuration dialog you might provide at setup time).