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GNOME 3 To Support a "Classic" Mode, of Sorts
An anonymous reader writes "LWN.net is reporting that GNOME developer Matthias Clasen has announced that, with the upcoming demise of 'fallback mode,' the project will support a set of official GNOME Shell extensions to provide a more "classic" experience. 'And while we certainly hope that many users will find the new ways comfortable and refreshing after a short learning phase, we should not fault people who prefer the old way. After all, these features were a selling point of GNOME 2 for ten years!'"
Lets see what classic will mean :)
Saxa
Somebody has had a flash. Of sorts.
GNOME is paying attention to what their users say and are listening to what the users want?
Hell must be freezing over!
Too little, too late. The project has already run off too many power users and influential people within the FOSS community. The top-down, change for the sake of change dictate has led many to question the project's leadership.
News Flash: They were faulting people who preferred the traditional way. Those who wanted a minimal and unobtrusive workspace were told to stop being stodgy luddites and get with the Metro/OSX times.
"we should not fault people who prefer the old way"
Oooh, how generously big-hearted and inclusive of them!
This guy probably means "convenient" when he says "comfortable". It's one of those false friend things.
(Disclaimer: Native German speaker here, now living in the UK)
This is just another account of how amazingly full of shit the GNOME team (Red Hat, let's just call it with it real name) continues to be. On one hand they continue NACKing the problems with their environment people have been shouting into their ears from the last two years -at least-; while now on the other they tacitally ACK them but in the same vein they do everything: arrogantly, reluctantly, thinking only about [b]control[/b].
As clearly showed in [URL="https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/"]this eye-opening essay[/URL] (and the numerous links and comments that spawned in many levels deep), the GNOME team themselves have made clear both extensions and themes are detrimental to their goal of tight CONTROL over every aspect of your involvement with GNOME, whether you are a mere user, a theme or extension dev, a third app dev, or a distro dev.
So much for the argument that "Gnome shell sucks less because you can make it so by using extensions". People, they DON'T WANT THAT. They themselves say it loudly and clearly and without a trace of regret. They *won't* change what you expect them to change. Just read carefully the linked post above. They broke the extensions and themes on each release intentionally. Now they "tackle" this issue...
At this point what they are asking themselves is this:
"how do we attempt to save our project while NOT having to ackowledge the criticism, and NOT having to drop an inch of control??".
Answer: [B]We[/B] take control of the extensions, and [b]not[/b] third parties.
For them it is a good solution, they tackle many angles at once: tighten control, avoid change, pretend change, do something about public oppinion.
In the end the outcome will be decided by the sum of the personal choice each of us has to make between "do I stop, do I stand back against people that are against what this OS was always about, do I turn my back on them and take some weight on me" or "I need the short term gain of not distracting myself with ackowledging there is a problem here and reacting to it: that myself, as a user, as a contributor to this scene am not in these people plans". Do you keep pluging your ears and go "lalalalalala everything is awesome" like these people want you to do?.
You may call me delusional, I won't give a shit. I think many of the people that have been here from the beginning in the nineties, haven't (or haven't completely yet) forgot the struggles and years of effort on part of each member in this community to get to where we got a few years ago. The issue here is *money*. The issue here is *companies wanting to subvert Linux ecosystems for money*. Just take a look at what company employees the key GNOME devs are, for christ sake. To the younger, uninformed people: educate yourselves, don't take for granted what you have now, and yes, *fight* to conserve your power over it. If you are "just" a user, your power resides in your CHOICE, and in your OPPINION. If you are a dev, you also have the power of FORK, the power of NOT PLAYING THE GAME.
Maybe GNOME folks should indeed remove the classic mode and focus on whatever their goal is rather than trying to keep an unsupported classic mode, ending up with a Jekyll and Hide type of DE.
After all, the GNOME 2 fork MATE already provides an almost flawless GNOME 2 experience.
Often, "new improvements" mean surface-level improvements that don't improve use and efficiency at all.
For example, I think Microsoft's Aero and related interfaces are neat-looking, but they don't help me achieve anything using the computer. They just make it a bit slicker.
If you turn on the classic Windows interface, you eliminate a fair amount of overhead and get back to the basics of a very functional interface.
The same seems true of Linux GUIs. I appreciate what they're doing in trying to keep up with Windows and Mac OS X and the glitzy new interfaces those have implemented.
However, how much of this actually adds to the basic interface? Does it increase efficiency of the the user? I'm not so sure.
I miss the days of installing a new Linux distro on a ten-year-old machine and finding out that it ran as fast as a new machine with Windows.
Futurist Traditionalism
As part of the planning for the DropOrFixFallbackMode feature[1], we've decided that we will compile a list of supported gnome-shell extensions. This will be a small list, focused on just bringing back some central 'classic' UX elements: classic alt tab, task bar, min/max buttons, main menu. To ensure that these extensions keep working, we will release them as a tarball, just like any other module. Giovanni already added an --enable-extensions=classic-mode configure option to the gnome-shell-extensions repository, which we will use for this work.
Also, they make it clear that this is not their preference:
Q: Why not just make gnome-shell itself more tweakable ?
A: We still believe that there should be a single, well-defined UX for GNOME 3, and extensions provide a great mechanism to allow tweaks without giving up on this vision. That being said, there are examples like the a11y menu[2] or search[3], where the shell will become more configurable in the future.
For further details please see comment topic.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
After the Gnome 3 debacle, I am surely not going to migrate back after going through the painful transition from Gnome 2 to KDE. Because KDE works the way I want to work, I am keeping it as my desktop.
Having used the new desktop for a year+ now I'm quite into it; find it productive and fast, don't need the classic one back thanks.
BUT the latest builds have by far the most moronic UI regression I have ever seen.
Pop up dialogs in windows cannot be moved/resized (*).
If I do a print-preview in (say) Firefox the 'print dialog' appears; and cannot be moved out of the way so I can see the actual print preview itself.
If I want to print images this huge printer options screen, full of whitespace, can totally obscure the image I want to print! therefore negating the point of having a print preview system in the first place since I'm still printing 'blind'.
That is a specific example, many more occur in daily use when, for instance, a dialog appears in which you need to reference or enter details from the screen behind it, which it obscures, and prevents copy/paste from operating. Etc. Ad Nauseum.
An almost daily irritation. I know it is a change made for Tablet Users.. But they are irrelevant to be honest, Gnome is a desktop OS and will remain that way, tablet users have proper tablet OS's to use.
The Idiot Gnome weiners who argued for this, and implemented it, need to be expelled from the project; only by ridding the project of such incompetence will it be able to proceed.
(I think these are Modal dialogues, but I'm not a UI expert so apologies if terminology not quite right, I alos remember that Micro$oft dropped this in their UI after Windoze 3.5.. it is a shame Gnome chose to regress back to the late 80's.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Hopefully their designs will become more earthy now.
FTA: "And while we certainly hope that many users will find the new ways comfortable and refreshing after a short learning phase, we should not fault people who prefer the old way."
Translation: "We've lost so many users and had so many complaints that we have to do something, but we're not willing to totally capitulate, so we'll toss them something that looks like a compromise and see if they swallow it."
FTA: "After all, these features were a selling point of GNOME 2 for ten years!"
Note the exclamation point. I'd expect that from someone who's been fighting all along to keep some of GNOME 2's legacy intact - I don't expect it, and don't trust it, from someone who was, and possibly still is, ready and willing to throw all of GNOME 2 under a bus.
I'm glad they're finally making some concessions to their users, but I'd be more convinced of their sincerity if they'd been more responsive to criticism earlier on, instead of covering their ears and digging in their heels for so long.
For the time being I'm just fine with XFCE, and regardless of GNOME 3's newfound tweakability, I don't think I'll be looking to move back to the GNOME fold any time soon.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I thought GNOME already had a "classic" experience extension - called MATE. (Or Cinnamon. YMMV)
The obvious question in terms of 'why not just let gnome-shell be tweakable answered with:
<quote>We still believe that there should be a single, well-defined UX for
GNOME 3, and extensions provide a great mechanism to allow tweaks
without giving up on this vision</quote>
I don't understand how this remotely makes sense. I'll preface this by commending the extensible of gnome shell, it allows changes that most other environments cannot offer. However, it's maddening that even the most trivial options mandate extensions to fiddle with. The two sides of the argument are pro-configurability and pro-single UX. What this solution offers is the worst of both worlds. For pro-configurability people, the configuration is not discoverable and its really hard sometimes to find what you want. On top of that, popular extensions break version to version. For pro-single UX people, extensions mean gnome can be anything. This is a single sentence that isn't internally consistent, which can be rephrased as "we don't want configurability because it can create too varied an experience, that's why we think its great that we provide a trivial mechanism that can be used to vary your experience all day long".
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Translation:
"We want shiny tabletly eye candy bullshit because we'd rather be developing for Windows, but Windows already has a DE. We don't give a shit about anything but shiny change because change is progress and efficiency is shit and everyone should have to constantly re-learn how to interact with their PC and ergonomic efficiency be damned.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
> After all, these features were a selling point of GNOME 2 for ten years!'
What is this "selling" you speak of?
I'm guessing the exodus of users scared the hell out of them. What's the point of a "superior" desktop experience that nobody will use?
Too many power users ran off to what? What's the best alternative, KDE excluded, for power users that once liked GNOME?
It already exists... it's called Cinnamon. Or MATE, if you truly want the "original" environment.
The GNOME Project is just brimming with NIH. Even though... they did invent MATE originally, in the form of GNOME 3's predecessor that they tried to kill off. Pure irony.
I'm using GNOME 3.6 and it's beautiful, it's a joy to use provided that we install some extensions that turns it into something a little closer to the GNOME 2 environment. The criticisms against GNOME 3 are exaggerated. And I think GNOME Shell extensions are a killer application for GNOME, just as Firefox extensions have been for Firefox.
I've been using Linux since I was in 6th grade: Mandrake 6.something, Suse 7.something, Slackware 10, Redhat 9, a bunch of smaller live-cd and media-centric distros, Ubuntu, and now Fedora 16. I've used KDE, Gnome 2, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Windowmaker, and flirted with FVWM and a couple others. I appreciate minimal aesthetic and functionality as much as any Linux nut, but this is why I like Gnome3.
No, it's not very customizable. But I find its setup intuitive and functional. No, it's not graphically minimal, but computers are far more powerful now than they were even five minutes ago... Graphic simplicity used to be very important, then it was preferable, but now--I feel--it's okay to have a little eye candy. (Take my words with a grain of salt, though. I have become a casual user over the years.)
Still, they should have kept up Gnome2 the way people knew and loved it.
Esoteric reference.
Fuck Gnome 3. I've discovered KDE 4.9 and after a long time, I'm interested in actually reading the release notes for 4.10 beta.
but the comments(insults) by the gnome "developers"are just out of line
imho the project needs a leadership change as it seems there are a few different camps and at least one of them just still dosnt get it
posting ac because i can today
ya i iknow punctuation sucks for all the pedants out there
lmao captcha : exiles
I am not thankful for Matthias' condescension. A little more humility on his part in admitting Gnome 3 is bad design would be appropriate.
Let the Gnome devs do as they want with their extensions. If I want to run a GTK3-based desktop, I'll run Cinnamon.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
http://mate-desktop.org/
Gnome should have learned how to play chess. They are out of moves.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm a developer, and I have tried just about every windows manager out there. Ultimately, gnome 3 remains my choice for a few reasons.
Gnome 3 works in the most pleasing way of all the WM's without any configuration. With minimal configuration it gets a lot better. KDE is awesome after intense and sustained configuration, which also goes for a lot of the more classic WM's. But, I don't want to spend very much time configuring at all, even though I have the ability to read manuals and get what I want. That's because what I want most is to focus on my work, not on my work tools. This is coming from someone who almost obsessively learns hotkeys and configures them in any window manager, the default behavior should still be coherent and reasonable.
Gnome 3 also has the most superior window switching I've seen, and it has a very responsive flow to starting new applications. Its alt-tabbing with the way it shows you windows in other work spaces, the way it arranges windows when you hit the windows key, the hidden ribbon bar, the sensible default hotkeys (most of them inherited from gnome 2 I recognize) and the way the window manager seems to just try to get out of the way most of the time...
I want minimal, pretty, and fast. So, yes I have some seriously powerful hardware to run this on, and maybe if I were on an older machine I would want a more efficient WM, but from a user interface perspective, Gnome 3 is exactly what I want in a window manager. Task switching and window arrangement is just vastly superior to the other WM's pre-configuration.
... affecting my desktop. I don't even mind most of the stuff that GNOME 3 changed, except that where previously GPU driver issues affected mostly just video and gaming, it now affects *everything*. I have a RadeonHD and I have to pick to well-performing but often buggy propietary driver, or a poorly-performing and occasionally buggy OS driver.
I'm learning to love XFCE more and more everyday.
Julio Henrique Morimoto juliohm@gmail.com
I use XFCE 4.10 + lightdm now (i used it in the past along with gnome 2). It is very good and has pretty much everything you need including network mounts. Its more stable than Gnome 2 ever was plus its not that heavy on dependencies and desktop services. Its also noticeably faster (on nvidia cards with the proprietary driver with core2duo/Athlon II level CPUs) than Gnome even on basic window drawing. Granted it doesnt have the Gnome's OOtB bazillion of services and integration, but i regard this as a plus. I did try Gnome 3 and Unity and wasnt pleased at all - Unity seems to be ok for touchscreens, but Gnome 3 doesnt seem to be - both are crap for desktop usage, either you have to learn entirely new skills for basic stuff, either you accomplish a previously-point-and-click operation with multiple maneuvers. Well done Gnome devs - you have accomplished the task of neuthering your own DE with unprecedented effectiveness - it was THE de-facto Linux DE, you probably thought you could pull a Microsoft/Vista/8 and still have the backing of most users? Well, seems didnt work like that not in this world (Linux/Open Source, that is). Would have been that hard to make changes gradually or do a fork, as previously mentioned? Or just tweak the hell out of Gnome 2 with the many hours of work that went into this crapfest...
Gnome Shell is still an alternative, you don't have to use it if you don't want to. Personally i use xfce, but from time to time i'll look at unity and gnome shell just to get a look of how much it's improving, not for my case, but for more 'generic' people. Cause if they want to switch to linux, at least i want to be able to show them CHOICES. Don't hate, there are lots of alternatives here ;)
Xubuntu.
Please send me a share of your consultancy fees.
I hate printers.
The mistake the Gnome developers made was calling the new desktop "Gnome 3". Had they presented it as an experimental new environment and named it "Project Harmony" or "Desktop Zen", or something like that, they would have stepped on less toes and met less resistance to the radical changes, and people would have seen it in better light.
Then again, calling Gnome 3 something more honest like "Project Puke" or "Desktop Dunny" would have been too obvious to their intended victims^W audience. We moved all our home systems (2 desktops, 2 laptops) to xfce4, and are quite happy with it. We're not likely to evaluate Gnome 3 again for quite a while.
I still suspect that Microsoft or Apple might have planted some rotters in a few of the Linux desktop projects. Ubuntu's Unity and Red Hat's Gnome 3 are just too awful to have erupted without assistance from the nether world.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
...the fact that Gnome 3 is incredibly fucking slow.
I run fallback mode because Gnome 3 is just unusable on my laptop - that is, unusable due to being so friggen slow, not just the confusing interface with a terribly long learning curve. My laptop is only a year old, and on the few occasions I've run Windows on it, it performs fine. Fallback mode works well, as does XFCE ... but fullblown Gnome 3, I shouldn't have to be waiting for several seconds for something as simple as a terminal to open. I still don't understand why a desktop NEEDS 3d functionality to work. It should just be fast, and get out of my way.
Seriously, only the Gnome people could remove huge chunks of functionality from their product, and end up with something even more bloated and slow than it was before.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/08/06/1335258/cde-open-sourced
Just put a cairo/compiz backend on that stuff, and wow. The Xt Intrinsics and Motif are well-designed software, hailing from 80's MIT culture, influenced by Lisp. All configurable by XResources, including keybindings.
install libmotif-dev
man VirtualBindings
This software is superior in design.
For me (still using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for that) GNOME 2 is good and efficient UI. I love it. I'm still looking for a way to run GNOME 2.x environment on newer distros. MATE is still buggy as an ant farm. I'm using GNOME 2 with Compiz and Emerald on a quite new machine, it works really fast. GNOME 3 with panel or Cinnamon work too slow.
I want my old GNOME back!
Screw 'em. I've already switched to the MATE desktop. Its developers actually want to listen to users.
Its less bloat than gnome3!
Why would one, who likes the classic desktop paradigm would ever want to use gnome3 again?
I am happy to have gotten rid of gnome and definitely not going back
Some idiot code monkey to tell me how I want my computer to work. These guys really need a time out, they're like two steps from flinging feces at the wall and divining code from the splatter marks. What I wouldn't give for the good old days of Fedora 9 or even Fiesty Fawn when you could do any damn thing you wanted with your desktop
I do not consult, I see software services. Xubuntu uses xfce, not Gnome 2, no thanks. The interface has to be the same across all stores, so for now they'll have to stick to Ubuntu 11.04
Not many people running RHEL are going to want to pay for Gnome3 as it is now.
It breaks too many things currently in RHEL.
Could the last GNOME developer to leave the building please not forget to put the lights out ?
Goodbye and thanks for GNOME 2.
XFCE is very similar to Gnome 2, can run all Gnome applications and has a long track record of UI stability. I doubt the average user would even notice if you switched Gnome 2 for XFCE.
http://udeproject.sourceforge.net/ Give these guys a chance!
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.