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GNOME 3.8 Released Featuring New "Classic" Mode
Hot on the heels of the Gtk+ 3.8 release comes GNOME 3.8. There are a few general UI improvements, but the highlight for many is the new Classic mode that replaces fallback. Instead of using code based on the old GNOME panel, Classic emulates the feel of GNOME 2 through Shell extensions (just like Linux Mint's Cinnamon interface). From the release notes: "Classic mode is a new feature for those people who prefer a more traditional desktop experience. Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies, it adds a number of features such as an application menu, a places menu and a window switcher along the bottom of the screen. Each of these features can be used individually or in combination with other GNOME extensions."
Sadly, the KDE experience had a SEVERE problem when they "upgraded" Kmail. The import was severely broken and for several days I was simply unable to get email at all until I have up on kmail (having used it since KDE 1.x days!) and switched to Thunderbird. It's not bad, but I sorely wish I could go back to Kmail on KDE 3.
Yes, I like now mostly like KDE4 and it's finally stabilized to something I don't mind much, but they've lost me for years when it comes to trusting my data.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Personally, I wonder if there are any use metrics for Gnome3's default mode, vs running on fallback/classic.
Personally, I can't stand either Unity or Gnome3-standard modes. One of the first things I do with Ubuntu boxes is nuke LightDM and Unity from orbit, and replace them with something less resembling a botched ST:NG computer interface. I actually happen to LIKE menus. That Gnome has listened to the sound of angry feet stampeding to XCFE and KDE over the issue makes me happier, but still displeased over the "No, we don't do it that way anymore, nanaananananannaa" mantra they were using for so long previously.
You're like an Ubuntu user that shuns Debian.
Moved on, XFCE and it's at least replaced all uses for what Gnome was doing for me. Instead of creating a rich unified DE for all to use (with small enhancements and extensions), they flushed down all their good will in re-inventing something that many/most? of their community didn't seem to want.
I wish you well, but this is one ship I simply refuse to sail on (In the same likes as Windows 8 and unity alas).
Bye!
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I used Mint 14.1 and I found the alternate but included MATE interface to be far more stable than cinnamon.
When I realized they took away my minimize button I damn sure needed some free beer
"He's using a quantum encryption scheme! That'll take hours to break!"
Wait, wait, wait... wait, just wait... I thought the world DIDN'T end in 2012 like those crazy Maya believers said. The gnome team listening to feedback... wow what's next, no wait don't tell me. Microsoft will realize the folly of Windowz 8 in time to 'add' a feature in Windowz 9 SP1 that'll make the IT industry happy again. There it is, you heard it first here kiddies!
It is so frustrating to fire up a new install of "linux" and have all the important parts of the OS hidden away from access, requiring more than a couple of clicks to get to or even requiring you to open a Search Dialog and search for the app that you want.
UI designers should really take notice of the reception things like Windows 8 and Gnome 3 and Unity have been getting lately. Remember that most business is still done with a mouse and keyboard at least.
Over at datamation.com they have two reviews worth reading. One general review on GNOME 3.8 and a separate review on the all new GNOME Classic.
...and did something about it that didn't ruin their code base. Kudos Gnome Team. I kinda like the KDE they forced me to try with their second-to-latest abortion, but I'll give Gnome 3.8 a try.
I still don't understand what all the hullaballoo is about, I like the new Gnome 3 interface. I can use the search tool to locate and/or launch practically anything I need which means that I am blessedly rid of that horrid Winodows-esque Applications button with it's sub-menus and endless click paths. Now I just hit the search button with my thumb, type app name, hit return and my app launches. Since I got a keyboard with an integrated trackpad I could also dump that useless bloody mouse so now I hardly ever have to take my hand off the keyboard. I only use the trackpad to reposition the cursor, move/resize windows and click buttons and that I can do with the thumb or index finger of my right hand.
I tried Cinnamon on Mint 14.1 and found it to be freezing frequently
Very little I install on my computer does not just work. I don't mind Unity, and prefer it to Gnome shell but Cinnamon has been an incredible project. I am more than happy to provide you with a working video of my desktop :) I suspect your overstating the position. BTW you can install cinnamon on Ubuntu.
It looks plasticky and cheap
Don't use the 'Plastick' theme, then.
/* No Comment */
They keep breaking keyboard switching every release. Here's the story in 3.6:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681685
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=684210
(If you read the comments, you'll see the usual attitude of Gnome devs - bilingual users who actually use this functionality are telling them that it's been broken, while devs who don't really use it but own it reply by coming up with invented reasons as to why the new behavior is the right thing, and everyone else should just shut up and learn it.)
You'd think they would pay more attention to this area in the new release, but apparently they have emasculated (the official press release calls it "simplified", in the usual Gnome bullshit-speak) it even further in 3.8, and there are bugs reported about erratic behavior of the new switcher. All that because XKB is, apparently, not good enough anymore.
With this kind of attitude towards their users (of which the above is but a single example), how come they still have any?
It's terrible with multi-monitor, relative to windows anyway.
add an external monitor to my left, It's automatically the primary, my plasma desktop and panels resize and move to it to my left. Ok, fine, I add a new panel (i actually like one on each monitor), but when I remove the monitor, my panels stack on top of each other on the laptop (right). Now when I re add the external monitor I have 2 panels on the left, on top of each other.
also, I've lost windows off screen and couldnt get them back on an unplug. It makes me miss windows.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
How do you launch something when you don't know its name? Sit a newbie down in front of gnome panel and they'll never find all of the "hidden" programs.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/08/gnome-founder-says-desktop-linux-is-dead
I guess this guy could be considered an expert on the subject!
One of the things in Gnome 2 that I rely on every day is the fact that in the pager applet, I can see the outlines of the windows on that desktop, and if the app is big enough, it's icon. This is invaluable feedback to me. I can tell at a glance where things are if I should forget. I typically never alter my desktops use, but it's nice to be able to see this. Cinnamon fails completely in this regard. It's pager is nothing but a dark square to identify which desktop I'm on. It gives no feed back other than this and may as well be just a number, which the screen shot of the new classic mode appears to do.
If either Gnome classic or Cinnamon could do this one small thing, I'm ready to switch. Until then, It's still Mate for me. That and I really like the way I have compiz set up with Mate.
Same here. Xfce is mature, and everything just works. I don't have time to beta-test in my everyday work.
It's still impossible to do very essential things in GNOME Classic, such as moving the panels around or fully configuring them. So, in many ways GNOME 3 hasn't reached feature parity with GNOME 2 or Xfce.
That said, it's really nice to see GNOME listening to users. An especially important part of GNOME 3.8, in my view, is that more options were added to the settings rather than removing them. This shows that the team really is trying to stabilize the core before adding more features, which is really the right way to go about things. I think in a few years GNOME 3 will be a great desktop, suitable for various work styles.
Change for change's sake is hardly progress. When I have to search for a damned TERMINAL window, one of the more used things in Linux, it's pretty damned sad. Why must I remember the name of every app I might want to use? Why can I not be given a selection of apps so that I can find that one I use least often who's name escapes me? Why must I be trapped in a Win8 like HELL trying to use my computer?
Sorry, the "new" Gnome sucked ass and I along with MANY others avoid it like the plague. Enough apparently that the Gnome team heard the cries of agony and gave us a way to, in theory, alleviate the damned pain. Should that not be evidence enough that it was a bad damned UI decision?!
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Every distro I've used allows you to do the same after hitting ALT+F2, regardless of window manager/desktop environment.
It "just works" if you have 3d graphics hardware. It's useless on a toughbook. Unity is an epic failure that it requires a 3d acellerated video card.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's going to be hard for them to maintain a critical mass in the long term.
Gnome is no worse off today that KDE was after KDE 4. United Linux with the big pro KDE players was dead, KDE was a disaster or most distributions and even long term supporters like Mandrake were becoming supportive of Gnome. Gnome was the standard and KDE was grouped with XFCE and later LXDE as one of the 2nd string GUIs. They recovered.
Why should he have to go hunt for something that was a standard feature since about 1995?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
1. having search boxes on menus and windows is just a crutch. the whole point is to see what you're looking for in a graphically intuitive way. Adding search boxes is just admitting the design sucks.
2. Hotkeys easily make window/menu based search boxes redundant, but if you want a keyboard only experience, just dump your gui entirely and run applications from the shell, using xinit when you need a gui application. bash and its brothers are a lot more powerful than some idiotic 'semantic' search box.
That's not quite fair. Cinnamon and Gnome forked off in two different directions with different UI philosophies. It's perfectly valid to praise one over the other, as they are two different projects now.
I'm glad Gnome has wised up and brought 'classic mode' back. I know that there's an expectation that you have to keep changing things in order to have a sense of progress, but there's a problem when you break traditional desktop metaphors that have really stood the test of time at this point. If you want progress, keep adding customization, so anyone can optimize their desktop to maximize their own workflow. I wanna make my environment look like Windows? Sure. Mac? OK. Unity? Fine.
That's one of the things I love about Android - all those crazy custom launchers that let you tailor your setup to your own preference.
Unity and Gnome 3 (before this release anyway) took away features and customization in the name of 'simplicity'.
How do you launch something when you don't know its name? Sit a newbie down in front of gnome panel and they'll never find all of the "hidden" programs.
The type to search applications feature searches more than just application names -- it searches a number of fields in the .desktop files, including application descriptions. Thus a search for "spreadsheet" will bring up LibreOffice Calc for example. Type what you want to do, and you'll find what you want ... that's the theory.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I realize justifying change for its own sake based on emotional needs is the current trend, but it's led us to interfaces that are frustrating to use for even the most basic tasks. Things like pointless whitespace, huge, low density text, extra clicking/dragging/touching/searching, and long winded, laggy animations and transitions do little but add stress and time to the process of getting things done. For example, what the hell happened to the basic control panel, with simple, logically named areas and which contained the whole sum of just about anything that 99% of users would want to tweak? The windows 2k/xp control panel was nothing to write home about, but compared with the overdesigned crapola that's in vista/7, it's a godsend. This is not better. It's worse.
Perhaps it's time to demote the 'designers' a bit in development hierarchies as these people obviously care more about appearance and bottom barrel 'accessibility' than capability and efficiency. In fact, many of those up and coming people you mentioned have trouble with the new designs as well. It's just that fewer and fewer of them have relevant experience with the traditional menu-in-a-corner+modeless window desktop to compare the two. It's fine to keep the interface simple for fixed function devices like media players or ATMs, but workstations are different as they're used for complex, user-defined workflows. These cannot really be optimized for. Attempts to do so cause more problems than they solve. The people who do want their interfaces on rails really don't need workstations in the first place.
It's not just gnome that suffers from this. Microsoft, apple, and google are guilty as well. In their race to the bottom, they're not differentiating at the top, where innovation happens.
Well, I have been using it just fine and my tech credentials is as good as anybody. I don't even use nautilus I use command line for my file manipulations. But I find GNOME 3 works just fine. You're used to doing something in a particular way and you're unhappy because it doesn't fit your model. I'm willing to change some of how i interact with my computer to get the benefits. You'll realize you do this as well when the benefits outweigh the cost of re-learning something. So your criticism is not enough proof to invalidate the design since I can find plenty of people who like it and work just fine. Your terminal example I can find just fine, as I use teh alt-tab to do that just like I did with GNOME 2. Hell I used an extension to revert it back to the old gnome 2 behavior so that I can use it just like before, that's how I found terminals before. No change there. GNOME 3 is nothing like Win 8. So I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm not sure that's true - plenty of folks such as myself had the hardware that could run it but barfed when we saw it and hated it. This had little to do with apps, my apps ran on it but finding them or finding apps who's name I couldn't recall was a joke. I hated the experience and I stopped using it - simple as that. In fact of the Linux users I know all of them, in unison, pretty much tell me they HATE Unity and recommend everything from Kbuntu to Mint to other options just to get rid of it. Hell I've still got a box on 10.04 just so I don't have to deal with this mess of a UI.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Sort of. In order to evolve the desktop for new hardware you have to have a desktop that isn't so rigid and also uses the building blocks of the web. So, we use javascript, css, and c libraries. Of course, you can use other languages, but this is the prime platform for applications. This works well with where development is going in tech. As well, hardware is starting to get touch sensitive for laptop screens, possibly gps and so forth. With all this new capabilities coming in, do you really think a design that started in 1995 (yes all this stuff came from windows) is going to absorb it? Let's look at the marketing angle as well. GNOME 3 is a fresh new face, whereas XFCE, Mate, and others are all part of a ui design from an older era. Do you think younger folks are going to gravitate to the old design or to the new one as a matter of visual appeal? Designing for today will get you a dwindling user set. It might make sense to take a risk and work towards younger and upcoming users. In the end, everyone is going to be ending up on a UI that is going to take advantage of new hardware capabilities and the old stuff is going to quickly go.
So we're back to playing "guess the verb"? Is it called a "console", a "command prompt", a "shell", or a "terminal"?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
If Gnome users aren't the target audience for gnome 3 who the hell did they think was going to use it?
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Willful ignorance? The point of Coryoth's post is that you don't have to know exactly the right verb to get the thing right... or even a verb at all.
For example, webcam application is named Cheese. Type "cam" or "webcam" because that's what you want to use, and Cheese shows up (or type "cheese" and it shows up). Gnome's implementation seems leagues better than Microsoft's to me, but I only rarely use Win7 so I might be wrong about how MS has done this. And no idea about OSX or other WM's.
But this is a LONG way from having to know to type "ls" to list files or "find" to find files, etc. post
They are going after new markets. For example part of Gnome 3's genesis was when Gnome's (GTK really) inability to handle touchscreen meant they lost Maemo and instead MeeGo was based on Qt. They believed, and they were right, that there is a huge market of ARM based systems coming that overwhelm desktops and create room for a Linux GUIs.
Right now we have: Tizen (based on Enlightenment), Android, MeeGo / Sailfish (Qt), Blackberry 10 (QNX sort of Linuxy), iOS (FreeBSD cousin)... They would like to play in that space.
You can type any part of the description as well, you don't need to know the app name.
There's also the traditional category view. Press the win key to get the overview, click on the "Applications" button and you get a big grid of icons showing all the installed programs in alphabetical order. A set of filters down the right let you reduce the list to just "Sound & Video" (for example), or "System Tools".
Been using LInux since 97-98, and using Gnome pretty much most of the time (OK, did use WindowMaker and Enlightenment at first).
And now I'm using KDE (Kubuntu), because I just can't stand Unity, and Mint at work.
I just can't stand scrolling through pages of apps trying to find the infrequently used ones. I've given it a fair shot several times, and it's made me a convert.....to KDE.
Can I hear from someone the reason(s) as to why they like Unity better than the old Gnome?
..........FULL STOP.
If Gnome 3.8 still has application popup windows that are "pinned" below the app's window bar, then it still reeks.
This started at Gnome 3.0, and [as far as I can tell from a quick perusal of the source code] they removed the code [from metacity, mutter, gnome-whatever] that corresponded to the config option to allow these windows to float.
For an example, play gnomines. When you complete a game, the popup comes up and obscures the top part of the board. You can't see your time [or a portion of the board]. This can't be overridden.
As a far worse example, do an "open file" [ctrl-O] in Firefox. See how much information is obscured (tabs, toolbar, url, etc.).
To remove working code that provided a useful option to force "A Brave New Paradigm" is just asinine.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Well give up now, before its too late.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Ask the assistant. You have obviously never been to Walmart! Hint: the most successful store in the USA.
What you do is go down an aisle of relevant stuff, till you get to the section which has that kind of thing, and then look up and down. This is like having a menu bar with drop-downs with slide outs.
Your mileage may suck!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Type what you want to do, and you'll find what you want ... that's the theory.
Sure. That was the theory for Zork too.
I speak England very best
I'd even go a step further here. A huge group of the people that are the most passionate anti-Gnome3 learned Unix from Ubuntu. They have become very conservative, very much like the Windows powerusers who hated Linux in the 90s and early 2000s here on /.
I do sometimes, wonder, however, whether the unixes of today (i.e. Linux, BSD, Solaris and other Unixes) have too many DEs for their own good.
I think there is no question that choice has been a problem on the desktop. What worked well for server and embedded was a real problem for both consumer, small business and enterprise desktop. There was a push in the User Linux / Progeny / Java Desktop days to make Gnome the standard, much as the earlier United Linux had tried for KDE based Linux. Had either of those projects been successful things might have been different. Ultimately Microsoft in the early 2000s fought hard for the low end, that was unexpected.
Today they are moving away from it, with iOS and Android GUI taking the low end. Gnome isn't part of that though they need to make a play up market and/or on touch only.
I'm running Cinnamon from Mint 14.1 on an Acer Aspire TimelineX and so far the thing has worked without a hitch. I use my laptop for meetings at work and haven't had any troubles with the OS or Cinnamon.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
No. The existing Gnome 2 userbase on existing hardware was not really the intended audience for Gnome 3. It was possible a bad naming decision in taking the product in a direction likely to alienate existing customers rather than release a new product name.
You're right there, they should have called it Gnumb. Or something like Gnumb Gnuts would be even more descriptive, and delineate their intended user base fairly precisely.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I should say straight away that I will not be using classic mode because quite frankly, I like Gnome Shell as it is. I get on with it really well and running a pair of screens with it suits my needs brilliantly. We are all very aware however that many people have not taken to the new interface and putting something in place that helps those people to continue to use Gnome in a way they prefer is surely a good thing.