GNOME 3.12 Released

New submitter Sri Ramkrishna writes: "Like clockwork, the next version of GNOME has been released with updated applications, bugfixes, and so forth. People can look forward to faster loading times and a little better performance than before. A video has been created to highlight the release! Check it out!" The release features "... app folders, enhanced system status and high-resolution display support. This release also includes new and redesigned applications for video, software, editing, sound recording and internet relay chat. Under the hood, support for using Wayland instead of X has progressed significantly." There are a bunch of new features for programmers too.

Comments

New and redesigned....

[irwiss]

... related to gnome already sounds negative

Re:Meet the new boss:

[erice]

Meet the new boss: same as the old boss.

You mean: "Meet the new boss, worse than the old boss". Gnome keeps removing features. Session saving for gnome-terminal was removed several versions ago supposedly because they have a new way of doing this. Only they didn't actually implement the new way. They just took out the old and left it.

Re: Meet the new boss:

[iggymanz]

even if you were at home on a desktop, GNOME would be making your screen into a big goddamn single-task-at-once cell phone anyway

Unity-ish UI

[trainman]

And I see they're still jumping on this Unity-ish sidebar UI bandwagon... ugh, I guess I'll be using xfce for a while longer so I can actually have a normal top and bottom panels. Running apps and workspace picker along the bottom, Application (etc) menus along the top with various system controls... its worked well for over a decade, yes some people might like the newer Vista/OSXy way to set things up, and fine that can be the (annoying) default, but at least give us the *option* to set up our workspace as we like. Saying "we don't support user customization anymore" is simply arrogant and not an option for open source software which was supposed to be all about the user having control.

It looks nice, and I commend them for all the hard work, I'm sure a lot of hours went in to it, but I won't be in any rush to upgrade if I still can't even do something simple like move my panels around.

Re:Unity-ish UI

[Aighearach]

The "balance" doesn't mean squat. When I came to slashdot over 15 years ago, it was normal for people to have multiple screens, of various sizes, and the open source technology already supported it. The main difference now is that we don't have to calculate (or look up) modelines and hand configure a bunch of crap. But the windowing systems already had good support for it, and the X Window System surely doesn't care how many screens you want to configure.

The newer desktop paradigms seem to be driven by devices with very small screens, so it seems that more traditional desktop environments might actually have better support than the newer ones.

New submitter

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Jezus, I've been on this site since Malda was still using it as a tab on his website. It took them this long to actually accept a submission of mine.

Re:New submitter

[drinkypoo]

You make it seem as if you've submitted dozens of stories during a period of many years.

Most of my submissions aren't shown in the interface. It only shows submissions which occurred after some psuedoarbitrary date.

Gnome = good

[Anonymous Coward]

After a few missteps, Gnome is now a pleasure on the desktop. The window management is intuitive and functional - the first desktop since the late 1980s that isn't a morass of windows. The applications menu is well laid out instead of a wobbly tree of menus. Overall it's quick and stable.

I do miss the dual pane in Nautilus, but I just installed the alternate file browser from the Mate/Cinnamon project. After all this is Linux, we have choice. Here's hoping that they put those features back, as they have done with the other features they "took away" in app rewrites.

I tried KDE for a few weeks, it claims to be ultimately configurable. But you can't even do simple stuff like assign the meta key as a shortcut, or have a menu to the left of screen that works well. KDE is too much like the familiar but difficult Windows desktop paradigm.

Re:Gnome = good

[lennier]

They took out the the duel pain feature?!?!?! WTF.

Yeah, I hate it too when I score a counter-riposte to my opponent's flying parry and there's just a beep on the referee's scoreboard and no blood.

Re:Gnome = good

[KozmoStevnNaut]

I tried KDE for a few weeks, it claims to be ultimately configurable. But you can't even do simple stuff like assign the meta key as a shortcut, or have a menu to the left of screen that works well. KDE is too much like the familiar but difficult Windows desktop paradigm.

Super/Meta is a modifier key. You wouldn't assign a shortcut directly to Ctrl or Alt, would you? If you truly want to use Super/Meta as a single-key shortcut, ksuperkey does what you want.

I've been using my main panel on the left ever since I got my 2560x1440 monitor. I assume that's what you meant by "menu to the left of screen". It works perfectly fine, BTW. Just drag the panel there and resize it a bit.

Re:Meet the new boss:

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Session saving is a hard problem and it requires apps to participate. Since it was never working correctly, it was removed so a better way could be done. But sometimes those things take awhile.

File, Edit, View.... gone!

[jabberw0k]

Wonderful, the unusable interface of 'evince' (Print is hidden under a sun icon or a gear, or something -- with no known way to open the menu from the keyboard) now comes to gedit. Now editing a file becomes impossible too! Please, folks, follow CUA , the Common User Access protocols, with named menus we can access with Alt+keystroke or F10. Arrrrrgh! Stupid! Make it stop! Give us back our File, Edit, View menus and all the rest!

Re:File, Edit, View.... gone!

[drinkypoo]

Besides the fact that Print is accessible, like everywhere else, through Ctrl-P, the "gear" menu can be opened with the keyboard by hitting Tab until the focus goes to the toolbar, then using the arrow-keys to move focus to the gear icon, then hitting Return.

Oh yes, tab arrow key return. How obvious. I mean, sure it's obvious to you and I, but even KDE has menus which are obvious to anyone who's used a computer before. I don't think most people who haven't will even know what a gear is, or why it would make sense for it to be used for settings. Woops, that's not even what they're using it for, is it? Fail, fail.

GNOME should stop trying to invent the new thing in the mainline. They're not very good at it. That's okay, most people/projects aren't, but most people/projects accept that.

Why not extensions

[efitton]

Because:

• -They are Beta software
• -They are not typically upgraded when Gnome upgrades, if at all
• -They are an attack vector
• -They can and do conflict causing stability and speed problems
• -Only can be installed when online

But mostly because just about every extension is really something that should be a preference and is every way inferior to a checkbox.

Re:Why not extensions

[efitton]

Also forgot the "wack-a-mole" effect. 46 pages of extensions, many that do the same thing. Have fun finding and picking the right extension. Again, clearly inferior to system settings and checkboxes.

Re:Why not extensions

[Sri Ramkrishna]

Anything added to the web site is code reviewed for attack vectors. Most of the extensions are fairly simple and easy to write. The extension I wrote to put a lockscreen on the topbar was all of 20 lines. Yes, only online because of attack vectors as you said earlier. We should see some improvements, some of the breakages come from the fact that gnome-shell is in active development and so some times extemsopms break because the code is getting refactored. In the past, we were not able to put out an image for extension writers to test. Now we have both a continuous integration build that extension writers can literally test everyday for breakage and also a QA team is spinning up so that we can at least check the popular extensions and bug extension writers to port. Once gnome-shell becomes more stable extension breakage will happen less.

Putting in prefs and checkboxes also increase code complexity as that is just more than you have to test and secondly the behaviour should be correct the first time without having to modify the behaviour. Basically it should do the right thing 99% of the time. If there are cases that it doesn't work that way then agree a preference should be put or if there something that a user does need a choice due to hardware or some behaviour.

The irony is that if created a bunch of preferences, a number of you will abandon the platform because it is bloated and move to i3 or awesome or something perceivably "light" like XFCE.

Re:Why not extensions

[efitton]

http://www.ioccc.org/

But yes, the attack vector is the least of my worries. You write: "Putting in prefs and checkboxes also increases code complexity." True, having the extension increases the code complexity by at least the same amount. But no testing, no planning, no updates, no review. Just an unorganized mess of hundreds upon hundreds of extensions that conflict.

Gnome has the reputation, and for very good reason, of not acknowledging when users need a choice of behavior. Look at your own plus.google post about the negative feedback on Nautilus. Users want those options, you and I both know it. The response: 1) We don't acknowledge that people don't like the changes. 2) People who don't like the change are elitist. 3) Yes, it is worse but it works better for touch.

Think about leaving the laptop on when the lid closes. No one has argued that that should be the default. Many gave reasons why it should be a preference. Users were not given an option but you can easily read the snarky comments from developers: "you can run this line of code and keep both halves if your system breaks" on blog posts. And self congratulation for doing the tough work while users fume or leave. Same story with power off as the only option under the name. I read that bug report with my mouth hanging open. I honestly claim that 50% of users would want the other option and Gnome developers would not give their users the check box. Moreover, there is a good chance most would come across as arrogant asses while discussing it. You and Emily do a fantastic job, but I read what others write and I don't want to even give Gnome a fair shot; not that it much matters.

Re:Good riddance Gnome (and KDE)

[enter to exit]

You're right about GNOME. Those guys won't be happy until they've reduced the Desktop to a single close button and a window.

I think you're being too harsh on KDE though. The usual KDE criticism is that they have too many advanced options. On my machine, KDE (and all it's related processes) are consuming about 90MB of RAM (even with some bling turned on), to compare Chromium is consuming about 400MB.

KDE4 has a unfair reputation for being wasteful. I think the stigma is mainly caused by Anakondi's initial one-time file indexing processes being heavy. People tend to switch to something else before it finishes and leave with bad impressions.

Re: Meet the new boss:

[lister king of smeg]

I have been using MATE on ubuntu 12.04 its pretty stable and usable but lacking polish. Been a couple of years since I looked at Cinnamon.

After watching the video..

[sc0ob5]

After watching the video I find I have been pronouncing Gnome incorrectly for all these years. Ga-nome, I've been saying Nome..

Slightly more user friendly than Windows 8

[lophophore]

Gnome 3.12: **slighltly** more user friendly than Windows 8, which is like saying it is slightly more user friendly than a rabid zombie wolverine in a kindergarten playground.

I watched the video. Gnome 3.12 still sucks. It is an embarrassment to Linux; it is one of the reasons why after 10 years we still don't have "the year of the Linux Desktop". This is a continuing example of the developers deciding how the users should work, not thinning about how the users are used to doing things. Yecch.

Thank goodness for XFCE. XFCE's developers seem to actually have the user experience in mind.

Re:Slightly more user friendly than Windows 8

[dbIII]

Some people like it (there's one in my worplace - others look at his screens in horror), but the thing I hate the most is you can't use the old gnome and the new gimp at the same time unless you run one or the other remotely from another machine. Some utter bastards in the gnome team deliberately created name conflicts to prevent old gnome applications working at the same time as new ones. That's something like bringing DLL hell to *nix for the first time, but with required background applications instead of libraries.

Re:Meet the new boss:

[Sri Ramkrishna]

It doesn't work for anyone properly, that was the point. If you have a featuer that is unreliable, it's not really much of a feature.

Re:Meet the new boss:

[erice]

Session Saving in gnome-terminal was as reliable as anything else in Gnome and highly useful. Where session saving was not reliable is that it didn't work for all apps. But removing the code from gnome-terminal doesn't help that cause. Gnome-shell still supports session-saving which means you it still saves state for Firefox and Thunderbird. (window location and size, mostly. Firefox has it's own session saving ability)

Are We That Resistant to Change?

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I had major issues with Gnome 3, but I kept an open mind. After a little while, I became more productive with it than with a traditional desktop UI. My favorite thing is that I don't have to point and click anywhere near as much as I did before. I can do almost anything with my keyboard.

Re:Are We That Resistant to Change?

[Roxoff]

No. We aren't resistant to change. We're resistant to unusable desktop environments.

Re:Good riddance Gnome (and KDE)

[drinkypoo]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, KDE looks like a widget factory exploded on your desktop. Of course, GNOME looks like they're experiencing a widget shortage, perhaps due to a widget factory somewhere being out of production due to an explosion.

I'm all in favor of many complex options, but there's no need to present all of them at once.