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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."
It is obviously what the people want!
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.
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
I'm surprised that KDE doesn't get more love in Slashdot. KDE is probably the most flexible and professional DE that is available for Linux.
KDE is probably the most flexible and professional DE that is available for Linux.
It may be the most flexible, but I suppose you and I have different view on what's "professional" here: it's too cluttered, there's not only one but several kitchen sinks thrown in almost everywhere, the configuration options are all over the damn place and they're pretty incoherent, I can *still* make Plasma crash if I just play around with the panel and so on. GNOME2 was a lot more "professional" IMHO, and a whole lot more useable.
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).))
tl;dr: With a few adjustments, he likes Gnome Classic.
Nope.
He started with KDE 3, didn't like KDE 4, switched to GNOME for a few years, and then he discovered how good KDE 4 had become. He switched back to KDE 4, and he how prefers it and recommends it.
Why would I want to use anything that has been abandoned by the founder?
You wouldn't, because you let your ignorance get in the way of researching the matter and making a decision on the basis of utility merit.
Hint: such things happen all the time with open source projects.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
The desktop is a place to keep your jumping-off points:
- links to programs that you really do use constantly
- symlinked directories (shortcut folders for you wintendo people) to your main work
- todo lists and possibly some sort of scheduler applet (rainlendar ftw!)
The inane desktop clutter of links to free smilies and whatever crap Google and Yahoo are pushing these days is... *insert adjective*
related: http://www.arrangebypenis.com/arrange2.jpg
Erm, I work for Red Hat too. I know there's this meme that Red Hat cares a lot about GNOME for some reason, but we really really don't.
RH sponsors GNOME development because it's one of the major F/OSS desktops, and someone has to. We used to be just one out of many companies who did; most of them have now fallen by the wayside and it's mostly us.
There is no 'implicit pressure' at RH for engineers to use any desktop whatsoever. No-one cares. There are people at RH using GNOME, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, MATE, blackbox, fluxbox, openbox, any other box you care to name, Windows, and OS X, and any other desktop or WM I forgot to put in that list. The RH 'standard desktop distro' for use by non-engineering staff uses GNOME (2) because it's basically RHEL 6 and we have to standardize on something. But if you're in engineering you can use whatever the hell you like as long as your job gets done.
Red Hat pays several people who work on KDE as well as people who work on GNOME, and the Fedora Xfce spin is maintained by a Red Hat employee (Kevin Fenzi). In Fedora, KDE and GNOME have equal support status: both are required to meet the same quality requirements as part of release validation.