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Red Hat Confirms GNOME Classic Mode For RHEL 7
An anonymous reader writes "The H-Online is reporting that the upcoming RHEL 7 will use GNOME Classic Mode over Gnome Shell as its Default Desktop GUI. Speaking to TechTarget ahead of the 2013 Red Hat Summit, Red Hat engineering director Denise Dumas said this regarding the decision: "I think it's been hard for the Gnome guys, because they really, really love modern mode, because that's where their hearts are." She added that the same team had "done a great job putting together classic mode" and that it was eventually decided to use it in favour of the more radical modern interface to spare customers the effort of relearning their way around the desktop again."
It's the future of desktop Linux. They will have to relearn anyway.
The fonts are a mess on that screenshot. How does that not hurt anyone's eyes?
GNOME definitely has a long way to go with the new UI theme. I found it fitting for Ubuntu (obviously), but as for Debian 7's default theme... I found myself caught off guard. As "conservative" as the Debian development team is, I'm surprised they defaulted to that.
As for Red Hat, I'm glad they chose classic mode. Maybe it will make the GNOME team step back and fix the annoyances associated with their modern mode.
I have been using the GNOME shell in Fedora 15 -> 17. Once they added the "extensions" interface it made it palatable as I have a number of extensions that give me back some of the old features. I do like the http://extensions.gnome.org/ interface though...makes it easy to find and add the needed extensions. But I can't honestly say that the changes GNOME3 introduced were worth the trouble. The workflow isn't greatly enhanced and the learning curve was bad enough to make me curse more than once.
I haven't seen a single interface enhancement that I can say was worth the headache: Windows XP -> Windows 7 ( I finally turned off Aero). I won't try Windows 8 unless I have to. Firefox upcoming v25 changes have me scared. MS-office ribbons suck.
In most cases I see these as a solution looking for a problem...
Our Corporate customers have Demanded that we don't make the interface change for only trendiness, so we are sticking with what works best for fur paying customers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I love the smell of classic GNOME in the morning, it smells like... Victory!
I can't think of any good reason to put a "modern" (i.e. tablet) interface on a server or workstation. Those interfaces are for home systems, unless I'm missing something. And RHEL is targeted at servers and workstations, unless I'm missing something again.
When Red Hat 6 or 7 are mentioned in close proximity I automatically think of the CDs I was installing on my PIII 450 MHz many years ago. Before I visited Fedora, *buntu and Debian.
I still have that PIII... maybe I should boot it up and frustrate myself trying to get LILO to install and then unfrustrate myself looking at pixelated pr0n at 28.8 kbps :-)
Surely this level of pandering is an extremely bad thing?
If we're telling our sysadmins that they don't have to learn a new desktop environment, what's the point in them learning anything else? For example, at some point, their favourite firewall software might be discontinued, but we shouldn't pander to them telling them that the old way was certainly best. If they don't want to learn about new firewall software, they're not going to be in their job much longer as their network is hacked.
New != Bad
Old != Good
We should be looking at everything in terms of their own merits, not based on what is going to cause the least tension for stuffy users that want things to always be done their way.
I tried using the new Gnome and found it slowed me down. I now use either Mate or just Fluxbox.
It isn't a tablet interface. It is a more efficient desktop interface. I wish I could get it on my workstations where I work, I am much more productive in it. With the initial release I had the same complaint as most everyone, that when you selected terminal (or any app) the second time it just took you to the first instance. I tried holding control while I selected it thinking that would obviously start a second instance, but it did not. But the second release they added the control thing and it is essentially my perfect UI. I think they could use a little more intelligence with the smart docking, but other than that nothing.
Using it for a tablet I would find very rough, every time I start an app I'm typing its name and hitting enter, (I remove all the favorites, I don't like clicky icons and you can't have one for everything you might run anyway), and text entry on a tablet is universally painful until they get the speech thing to work robustly.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Dodged that bullet. In all sincerity, thank you redhat.
That is amber monospace characters.
so many other distros have such superior and polished desktops. And other distros, not redhat, allow access to their repositories by anyone since paying customer pay for *support* and having public access to repos is way of advertising, marketing and getting community goodwill. All have which became foreign concepts to Red Hat long ago. I haven't seen a RedHat enterprise desktop in a decade. and that's a good thing.
We will be upgrading some of the workstations in our ops center in the future and some of those workstations have three monitors on them. If I had to hop across three monitors every time I need to get to the app's menu under the new unified Gnome menu, I would probably be throwing things across the room in a very short period of time.
It's not just Linux, it's everybody.
Windows 8
iOS 7
Pending OSX
Who even uses a desktop on RHEL server? I have X installed to remotely tunnel a few apps through ssh, but I won't ever run a full desktop on a server...
I don't even have X installed on my CentOS and RHEL servers. It's so much easier to manage from the command line... especially remotely.
But then I'm the kinda guy MS had to come out with "Server Core" for, I suppose.
-=JML=-
A great improvement, but it still seems to use that stupid window skin by default - it appears to be designed to waste as much vertical space as possible in the header of the window. Obviously this makes a lot of sense in a world of 16:9 monitors where vertical space is at a premium.
I can understand the Gnome guys re-working the internals of the desktop to make it more maintainable in the long term, and having been using it now for six months I find some of the features of Gnome 3 are quite nice - e.g. the ability to start a program just by hitting the command key and then typing the first few letters of its name. The bit that drags Gnome 3 down though is their insistence on taking away so many other useful time-saving features. There's no reason why the internals couldn't have been tidied up, and new time saving bits added, without crippling it at the same time.
My personal pet hate is the adoption of Windows's brain-dead approach to problem reporting - "Something went wrong". This is one of the worst possible mis-features of Windows, so why port it to Gnome?
Will 2013 be the Year of the User? If both Red Hat and Microsoft capitulate to the people who have to actually use their software, maybe it will be! Much like the people rose up against SOPA and got the government to back down, now users are rising up against user interface disasters and getting big companies who don't want to listen to users to back down!
I bet Gnome kills classic mode because too many people are using it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
RHEL is a conservative release anyway, but this move is a good one. I suspected they would either pick "Classic mode" or use the MATE desktop environment instead.
This shows a lot of maturity on the part of the GNOME devs (for creating a usable classic mode), and on the part of RedHat for defaulting on it.
Radical change may be exciting for developers and vendors, who are too aware of the usability issues with the "old" desktop paradigm, but it's not trivial to change a culture overnight. We're not all Steve Jobs clones who understand what people want better than they seem to know. iPhones were greeted with love, but the new experimental desktops coming out of the free software world seem to cause more angst than adoration. It takes maturity to recognize that maybe you are going too far all at once.
Slow but steady is the smart way to go: allow for radical experimentations while not breaking usability patterns built over years of using computers.
Good show, everyone involved.
They'll all just end up copying Windows eventually anyway. There was some really interesting desktop development going on back in the late 90s (and I assume several of those projects are still going) but the tendency has appeared to be to, for the most part, stay with the crowd and suck in Microsoft GUI elements (both good and bad). The pressure to continue doing so, even in the face of the awful Windows 8 will be immense and likely impossible to resist for the KDE and Gnome guys.
Ever since KDE stopped sucking around 4.2.6, I've gone back to KDE after hiding out in Gnome 2.x
It has the least amount of derp out of all the desktop environments. The KDE devs flirted with the "hey, let's remove features" fad, but actually came to their senses a lot quicker than the Gnome guys when they started having to don Nomex underwear.
KDE 4.10.x is spectacular. It's chock full of features, and not that much bigger in footprint than XFCE.
As for server stuff, who the heck puts a desktop on a server?
--
BMO
Kasbar back?
But it makes perfect sense to swap the pedals over. Which idiot did the original design?
Think logically instead of hanging onto tradition. The brake stops you, OK? If you're stopped, you haven't left. Therefore it should be on the right. It's much more intuitive!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."