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One Week With GNOME 3 Classic
An anonymous reader writes "Stephen Gallagher, Security Software Engineer at Red Hat, has completed his week-long experiment running GNOME 3 Classic. Stephen writes: 'While I was never as much in love with GNOME 2 as I was with KDE 3, I found it to be a good fit for my workflow. It was clean and largely uncluttered and generally got out of my way. Now that Fedora 19 is in beta and GNOME Classic mode is basically ready, I decided that it was my duty to the open-source community to explore this new variant, give it a complete investigation and document my experiences each day.' I'll leave Stephen's opinion on the new Classic Mode to the Slashdot reader to discover, but I will say that it does touch on the much debated GNOME Shell Activities Overview, and the gnome-2-like Classic mode's Windows List on the taskbar."
tl;dr: With a few adjustments, he likes Gnome Classic.
It is obviously what the people want!
Why would I want to use anything that has been abandoned by the founder? http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/03/05/2256243/gnome-founder-miguel-de-icaza-moves-to-mac
I'm still using Gnome 3.4.2 (what comes with Ubuntu 12.04, via the Gnome Team I believe). I still miss a lot of Gnome 2 features (like getting rid of the top bar, and moving it to the bottom). But, overall, I appreciate many of the changes (I've grown to like the activities tab, and searching for programs, though I would like to pin the order so that LibreOffice Calc, and the Calculator don't keep switching around).
However, I think I would like to try Gnome Classic, and I think I might work out how to force it into Ubuntu 12.04...
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
It was clean and largely uncluttered and generally got out of my way.
While I will not dispute this fella's findings, I wonder whether GNOME by default, is a pleasure to look at.
That is, is it beautiful? The last time I checked (3 years ago), it was one ugly piece of software, though it generally got work done.
Both GNOME 3 and Unity simply aren't very useful for power users. Cinnamon and MATE are both useful substitutes until Gnome/Canonical start listening to their customer base again.
http://sgallagh.wordpress.com/category/fedora/
That will give you all the posts for the week, not just the first one.
something polished instead of raw should try XFCE. With a little tweaking, I have xubuntu 13.04 looking a whole lot like GNOME 2.32 from Ubuntu 10.10.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
They want their Gnome/KDE flame war back... :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This is most certainly not the way software should work.
Basically, having read to the end of the article, although it doesn't say it explicitly and I thought the article was about Gnome from the summary, it can be summed up in one of Linus's short phrases: "Use KDE".
Fuck activities, and fuck KDE's cashew with a rusty spoon. Give me a desktop that lets me have a background that I can arrange files on (not links or some index, but actual files), a task bar, and get out of my way.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I really wanted to give it a fair shake. I used it for over six months. I've got two screens and in the end I just couldn't make G3 do what I wanted to do so I switched back to Classic mode. If they change something I'll give it another try, but it's a non-starter for me.
This is one of the problems with Open Source in general: the engineers are expert in coding, and believe that this is all one needs for a great product.
There are acknowledged experts in usability and presentation (and documentation and testing and installation procedures and marketing) who have spent many years of study and have experience in these things. For some reason, few open source projects have subgroups of these types - the development is always code changes checked into a database.
A good example is the ribbon interface in XBMC. Some other computer product had a "ribbon" of program icons, so having one made from words was thought to be a good idea. Icons are mostly small and square, while words are generally wide, so the result is that only one or two selections are visible at one time. Compare with Tivo's vertical list and you'll see a marked difference - using XBMC is like reading a newspaper through a straw.
(Don't bother telling me how to skin XBMC or the obscure option in some hidden menu that makes the presentation sane. It would have been easier to just make a product that isn't frustrating or time-consuming to correct.)
There's an ocean of expertise in other areas that goes into making a good product. If any coders are bored and wanted to explore a new field of research, usability and presentation skills could be very useful.
((Apropos of nothing, there's room for innovation into different ways of presentation and control. I've seen a lot of good suggestions from fiction, such as the AirWolf cockpit altitude display, the gesture-based input from Earth: Final Conflict ship, the cell phones from Earth: Final Conflict, or the medical display in Star Trek: Into Darkness (at the very beginning, the sick girl).))
sudo apt-get -y install gnome /usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm-set-defaults -s gnome-classic
sudo
sudo apt-get -y install indicator-applet-session
1. Winkey-Alt-Rightclick on the clock in the panel and select "Remove".
(This deletes ALL the default items in the Panel, by deleting the "Indicator Applet Complete".)
2. Winkey-Alt-Rightclick on the Panel and select "Add to Panel". Select "Indicator Applet Session"
3. Winkey-Alt-Rightclick on the Panel and select "Add to Panel". Select "User Menu"
4. Winkey-Alt-Rightclick on the Panel and select "Add to Panel". Select "Clock"
5. Winkey-Alt-Rightclick on the Panel and select "Add to Panel". Select "Indicator Applet"
This makes Ubuntu 12.04 look like 10.04, and it's a lot less fuss than installing XFCE.
PS - GNOME is for wankers
is pr0n illegal on KDE and xfce?
The screen shots from https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Tour show that this interface is not using sub-pixel font rendering. I have noticed this on most if not all other Linux-type screen shots. Apparently the favored font rendering method on Linux is the old-fashioned "treat every pixel as some shade between the font color and the background color". The characters so rendered are substantially less well-formed and harder to read. And this surely isn't a matter of intellectual property: https://www.grc.com/cleartype.htm.
Lightweight, no-nonsense, highly configurable, everything I NEED from a desktop.
With Synapse semantic launcher - launch anything/open any directory directly from brain to keyboard - no long menus.
Some Linux distributions like Fedora are paranoid about patents on certain font rendering techniques. You can fix it by using the infinality repos or you can use a distribution that isn't so fucking paranoid about patents. Ubuntu and Arch both include far better font rendering by default.
I still miss KDE 3. On of these days I may install Trinity to kick the tires.
I can't understand how you can't love the "type ahead find" workflow especially when the most of the "haters" are often, if not, mainly CLI users.
My only complain is about "exposé mode", it's simply useless, you can't be sure where the window you were using is.
I have been enjoying it for about 8 months. I put some. debs in a repo at vin-dit. Org for 64 bit wheezy and squeeze. enlightenment.org has links to packages for other distros or it may be in yours already. doesn't cost anything to try it.
Thanks. That's helpful.
Mint is a proper fork, not a temporary fix. Not just the desktop, but reversing the dumbing-down of daily applications such as Nautilus.
Mate is "Gnome 2" back in the hands of people who /like/ Gnome 2, and it's fabulous.
Canonical is not going to reverse. For better or for worse, this is their vision forward. Shuttleworth dropped hints about this at least six years ago. He has always wanted a different desktop. It's not just a sudden hiccup of fashion.
And yeah it sucks in my view, but I'm not convinced at all yet that he's got it wrong for the vast majority who are not yet running Linux.
That's a fair point. I'll try to be more attentive in future posts. (Thanks)
I generally dislike "subpixel" rendering, I didnt buy a high res monitor to look at fuzzy text like my Apple II displays
http://mrob.com/apple2/lin32.jpg
Infinality does *much more* than re-activate the previously patented code. Infinality makes fonts on Linux look GOOD. Without it I doubt I could stand using Linux for any substantial period.
The headline is misleading. This article is about Gnome Shell and a bit about KDE. The author says he has just started using Gnome Classic, and will report on it later.
He makes no comments about Gnome Classic in this article.
I find windows 8 metro more intuitive, easy to manage, better looking than the old 95/xp/7/kde/xfce/mate/cinnamon/lxde start menus. Hopefully in the future, with windows 9, the metro will replace the old taskbar UI. Anyway, windows 8.1 will let you customize the metro a lot more which is a big plus. But, for now, I barely use the metro except for mail, youtube fm, gmaps, and opening applications that I use but not often like gimp, office 2010, blender, etc... the applications that I use so often are pinned to the taskbar.
Unity is kind of a mess, you still can't pin your programs to the dash like you can on metro. Linux needs to adopt the metro and just dump all those other 95 clone menu's which there are too many of anyway.
I was happy with standard gnome 3 + all the Frippery shell extensions. They make the DE just like it used to be. Simple.
For some reason sub-pixel font rendering is not the default, maybe because of CRT legacy. On the gnome2 interface it's turned on from "desktop settings" then "fonts" hidden under that and it's one of the four rendering method choices. In other environments it's probably more directly accessible.
That's because one hand operation of GNOME is far superior to that of KDE.
I'm actually a bit puzzled about the hatred of Gnome 3. I only started using it very recently (I use Debian, so I'm not exactly on the bleeding edge for my Linux workstation), and Gnome 3 came with the recent upgrade to Debian 7.
It took me all of 30 minutes to get used to. It's uncluttered and doesn't get in my way, I kind of like the hot corner thing too, and it's become my preferred DE with Mac OSX coming a very close second.
Maybe it's because being a Debian user I missed the early buggy versions or something, or maybe because the only customization I really care about is focus-follows-mouse and Gnome 3 still does this. I do have a multi-monitor setup, and I agree that the default should be that both monitors change workspace when you want a workspace change, but I've not run into any problems after setting it to do that.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Who gives a fig what it's like ? The gnome developers have shown they don't give a shit about their users.
I no longer give a shit about gnome.
Sub-pixel rendering is heavily covered by Microsoft Patents. Blame them, or the rest of the industry that's stalling innovation with software patents; Apple does the same thing. Sub-pixel rendering is math you graph, and the idea that it's patentable is ridiculous. But since it is a real problem, free software can either avoid the major patents or risk getting pulled into a patent war that wastes a lot of money. Right now RedHat is avoiding them.
There is a whole section to that article describing why Steve Gibson's piece on this subject was worthless. You have to specifically attack the claims of the specific patent with prior art to kill it off, not just reference something that kinda sorta did something similar before.
GNOME genuinely looks like it is getting better.
It would have to. Gnome 3 couldn't possibly have got much worse.
BTW, I'm not flamebaiting here: I was a big fan of Gnome since pre-1.0, right up to the end of the 2.x versions, while KDE (although more feature-rich and reliable) was still kluttered and kfugly. Sure, there are other desktops, among which XFCE is (IMO) one of the best, but I like to have a more full-featured desktop environment.
Trouble is, the Gnome developers have a long-standing habit of removing or breaking features, and defending their perspective by being condescending to the user. It seems the author of TFA had a taste of this at the start (and yes, I know I'm not supposed to RTFA, but too bad):
I found a hidden option that enabled workspaces on all monitors, but as of GNOME 3.0 it was thoroughly broken and caused a lot of crashes (which I was told by the GNOME developers they weren’t going to look at, since it wasn’t a supported configuration), so I was forced to revert.
This seems a comparatively minor aspect of their asshattery, but I would have thought it might be politic to give a RedHat employee more of a hearing than that. I, and most other users often didn't merit any kind of response.
Fortunately, when Gnome 3.0 came out, KDE had got over the worst atrocities of its 4.0 release and was quite usable, and 3 years on, I have nothing but praise for KDE 4.10 running on my Slackware box.
What's the difference between "sub-pixel font rendering" and "treat every pixel as some shade between the font color and the background color"? I mean, how else would you do it?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
> bring back windows for workgroups... how slick would that be on today's hardware :)
Um, Microsoft did better than that.
Ever hear the phrase "kill two birds with one stone" ?
That is a statement of efficiency.
Inspired, Microsoft created Windows 8. It's new interface kills desktop computing, while its requirement of a keyboard kills tablet computing.
So now why would you want WfWg again? That OS was written in a past millennium long ago swept away in the sands of time before Microsoft had compensated for the performance improvements that Intel kept successively adding.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
kde is fatware... always has been
Use Razor-qt in that case. Qt based, but leaner than KDE
The latter only works at the pixel level. Subpixel font rendering takes advantage of the layout of the subpixels on and LCD screen to work at what's effectively (for the purpose of something like fonts) a greater resolution.
Considering how central Red Hat is to GNOME development, and with GNOME being the default desktop of RHEL (still GNOME 2, last I heard, but of course RHEL is extremely conservative) the central tendency of any Red Hat employee is going to be to use GNOME. Most Red Hat software is GTK/GNOME based, after all. It shows much about how broken for many people GNOME 3 has been that even a Red Hat employee was using KDE. If GNOME 3 now has a mode built-in that's usable by him (as opposed back when the GNOME developers were publicly decrying the Extensions folks and saying they'd never integrate such features), the implicit pressure will be for him to use it.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
In my experience, when trying to make KDE behave in some weird and idiosyncratic way I've been told "oh, cool, yeah we added an option that might help you do that a while back, wasn't sure anybody'd ever use it". Whereas with GNOME, trying to make it behave in a previously standard way will prompt criticism and ridicule for not being with the times and for being an unimportant minority interest.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Debian is shipping GNOME 3.4, right? I know that the changes yanking out a bunch of the customization options in Gnome Terminal hadn't hit yet back then, and I don't think Nautilus was as gimped as it is now, either.
I haven't used GNOME extensively, but what's put me off has been less the desktop environment itself (not the biggest fan, but I can see how it's workable) and more the problems with the default applications and their steady loss of features, alongside the snotty and condescending attitude of many of the developers. Well, and the launcher still can't remotely compete with KRunner---I often run an Openbox+tint2+KRunner setup when I'm in a minimalist mood.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
I mean seriously, despite being the founder of the competing "big" desktop environment, he's complained that the Linux desktop is all fragmented and there isn't a standard desktop interface. I'm no fan of GNOME, but I don't think it's fair to use his words or stances as representative of the GNOME project or of anyone else.
(Other than maybe hypocrites, or earthly embodiments of cosmic irony.)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
You are just looking at the wrong screenshots, I have always used subpixel rendering. It's likely off by default because it's probably not possible to guess subpixel layout so while most have LCDs with RGB it could also be a CRT or an LCD with some other subpixel order. Also until a year or two ago lcdfilter wasn't widely used and without that it could arguably get a bit too colourful.