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GNOME 3 Winning Back Users
Mcusanelli writes: GNOME 3, the open source desktop environment for Linux systems that once earned a lot of ire, is receiving newfound praise for the maturity of GNOME Shell and other improvements. The recent release of version 3.14 capped off a series of updates that have gone a long way toward resolving users' problems and addressing complaints. One of the big pieces was the addition of "Classic mode" in 3.8, which got it into RHEL 7, and Debian is switching back as well.
At least developers - whether open or proprietary - are implementing what their users ask for. GNOME 3 and Windows 8 shell were both disasters yet over time they have both responded to user feedback. Sure you could make the argument that change is bad and you shouldn't change from the status quo but its good to see that software (no matter the ideology) chosen is moving forward.
Pointing out Debian and RHEL are now at parity is probably unhelpful at this point. Only makes readers wonder how much of Gnome's new found success is really "winning back users" how much is "making the right deals".
Personally I still like KDE's way of thinking about things, that you are far better off creating multiple workspaces all based on a common desktop environment that suit different types of hardware (Desktop, Netbook and future touch interfaces) rather than creating a monolithic interface that tries to bridge across all types of hardware it might be used on.
In any case anything is better than Unity and they both beat the rubbish Windows 8 interface.
impossible to remove without borking Gnome.
Just install Adblock.
But if it still tries to force someone else's idea of how a desktop should behave I doubt that I will move back. Really, why do Gnome developers find it so hard to allow users to change things to their likings anyway?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
No matter what Gnome does, systemd is still driving people away from Linux and toward other unices. Debian will eventually be a fringe distro.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
I've discovered LXDE, and I think the lighter desktop options and alternatives in general got a lot of love when Gnome dropped the ball. And (at least for me) that has turned out to be a great thing... I've rediscovered "snap".
Linux sheeple only like familiar things. Want security blanket! Made of penguin wool! Gimmee me precioussss!!
GNOME 3, bad.
Slashdot Beta, bad.
systemd, bad.
Windows 8, bad.
Why the fuck are you even using Linux? Unix came first, LINUX IS CHANGE. But of course you never used Unix, because you fuckers were born yesterday.
Linux, bad!
Their problem solving approach for many years was something along the lines of:
1. Users complain about a feature having problems, or the feature exists
2. Lobotomize it
3. Users complain about not having enough options because the feature was lobotomized, or the feature exists
4. Lobotomize it
5. GOTO step 1 or 3
Meanwhile they spent all the organization's money trying to pull people from special interest groups into coding with absolutely no connection whatsoever to their central mission.
This sort of meltdown was to be expected. I am not going to be so arrogant as to say "RIP Gnome," but seriously, they've been killing themselves for a while now.
...I cannot believe this crap is what passes for trolling these days. I mean, you could have put some effort into it.
Kids these days...
Look slashdot: If you don't like something stop being whiny luddite bitches and fix it. That's what open source is about.
And while you're at it stop trashing good work that's going on in other projects - even if you don't agree with the direction it's going in.
From the static menu and pre-truetype days. The current shenanigans annoy me in part because wdm has been a suitable replacement for lightdm/gdm/kdm, etc for a number of years, its only shortcomings generally being script related (when various things changed in X or other system related settings) or as in the case of Ubuntu, when somebody doesn't ensure the vt framebuffer it's popping up on top of stops having the loading dots animation running (I'm still not sure how the hell that was possible, but it switched me to either lightdm, or textmode until it was resolved) :)
One of the problems with the Gnome inertia is it causes a lot of people to forget just how many alternatives there are on linux/X, interestingly enough very similiar to the gnome/kde wars from a decade or more ago.
KDE is too buggy compared to GNOME.
There is change for the better and change for the sake of degree.. What seems to be happening across the board (closed and open source software alike) is the latter. Change because I have a CS degree and what I think is better _IS_ better and you'all have to put up with it! To list but a few I've had trouble with lately:
systemd
Nvidia Optimus
Touch pads with no buttons
Cars infested with unwarranted tech
This is where all tech is heading. I'm all for change but to change things because someone _thinks_ it's better but never really steps back to see if it is... That's not for me!
Nice to see the primary article admit that the launch was immature I guess.
Once again, the media around Gnome seems to display tone-deafness. The third article gave not a single specific other than Linus uses it though he still has problems. The first article lists all the "improvements" that are supposed to lure me back into the fold. Let's see how they stack up.
FTFA:
1) Classic mode offers "enough familiarity" -- at this point XFCE does what I need it to do. I don't need to use Gnome's idea of how the "old folks" used to work. I heard enough times that "classic" was going to die anyway -- too much risk in switching to something with no clear future.
2) "Weather app" -- okay. Yeah that increases my productivity!
3) Evince has less interface -- great. You guys do realize it was the LACK OF CONTROLS on your apps that drove me away, right?
4) Multitouch support -- worthless to me, no touch interfaces, don't want them.
5) Photo app gained support for Google accounts -- so it reached feature parity with my smartphone. Yay!
6) "Captive portal handling" -- this was an actual problem? I don't recall every failing in that task.
Are you kidding me? That adds up to a lot of shined poo.
Neither article answered a single question I actually would have:
Can I configure it simply without third party plugins?
Can I kill the hot corners? In fact, the whole "Fisher Price Activities" screen?
Can I set unchangable defaults on the launcher instead of it deciding incorrectly what I think is important.
Can I change the terminal and screen layout so my 30" monitor is not trying to make one huge xterm all the time?
Can I get a "heads up display" of my multiple desktops that I don't have to cycle through buttons or move the mouse to see?
Does the terminal launcher continue to assume I need just one terminal and unhelpfully bring up the last instance when I actually wanted a new one?
Does the file browser do something sane finally?
Do I still have to have a global menu?
Can I have focus follows the fricking mouse please? I have a huge legacy program that won't work if this doesn't and I am not rewriting it.
Nope. I don't see a lot of evidence from the articles that it is worth my time to come back. Gnome's new design was for intro users who wanted lots of pizzaz. They were VERY clear about how my problems were because I knew nothing about how I should use the computer. The problem is, I know what jobs I am trying to do, and Gnome just didn't work.
Stop sucking. I'm sitting on a bucket load of mod points and I have ads disabled.
Yay!!!
The problems:
Standard Gnome 3 is desktop/power user hostile.
Mate and Cinnamon don't do touch screens.
Cinnamon depends on Gnome 3
Because of it's Gnome 2 underpinnings, Mate does not scale well, but I am sure they can add to the final product.
Reform the Gnome organization, giving the Cinnamon and Mate devs a good voice in the final product.
BTW, I am using Cinnamon right now.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
So Debian is in bed with Redhat now?
Who is paying, how much, and what's the objective?
I use a baked bean tin and a piece of string for my Linux terminal because I'm a real sad fucker who doesn't do any work. I'm also a penniless bastard using a worn out fingerprints smeared nicotine stained fucked up geriatric laptop. But now for real people not the penniless hermits. Gnome is an unprofessional interfering non-productive piece of shit. You do not turn somebody's productive desktop into a prophetic toy without even asking or considering people who actually do work on their desktops. You pathetic anus sucking muppets. And KDE it takes you so long to customise it into a working environment that you never want to do it again because it takes up too much of your time. KDE misty Windows makes you feel like you're going blind. Little box window to the side and so on. For goodness sake just fuck off. Why there isn't an option to select a working environment to begin with without the misty Windows and all that toy looking nonsense to begin with I don't know. Linux and Linux desktop users don't do any work, they are constantly looking for an alternative desktop. You unproductive rectum sniffing pathetic bastards.
Seriously - give them a shot, try as many as possible until you find one which works for you. There are a lot of them. Don't be fooled into thinking you need KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc.
Gnome 3 may be getting better... and I do think that many of the their engineering decissions were addressing real needs even if I personally would have preferred addressing them differently. But I still don't care for the UI and I can NEVER forgive Gnome for the way they pulled the rug out under my workflow. I had something that worked, that was well tuned to my needs, and these self-righteous ASSHOLES just plain simply and utterly BROKE it. For a year and a half after Gnome 3 went into Fedora I stayed with Gnome 2 by not upgrading my system, but I needed up-to-date apps, security fixes, etc. I did give Gnome 3 a chance... but aside from hating the UI it was missing features I needed and worse, at the time it was unstable on the graphics in my laptop! For a while I ended up using Xfce, which is ok but getting rather stale, then I switched to MATE which I'm still using now.
But the real point of this message is this... by breaking my desktop the Gnome people cost me hundreds of hours of lost productivity, and the same was probably true for tens of thousands of other Linux desktop users, so we're talking about millions of lost hour of productivity, amounting to probably several billion dollars. The sheer arrogance of this is staggering to me. Linus never did anything like this, it was always a principle of Linux development not to break userland exactly for this reason. Yeah, Gnome is "only UI", but it isn't as easy as just switching some habits... people have developed workflows around their UIs, so it amounts to the same thing... breakage.
So I'll never forgive Gnome, I'll never trust my productivity to them again. And I'm that many other Linux desktop uses feel the same way... although most of us are techies, we want to work, not wrestle with our desktop UI. I suspect this debacle has been a massive setback for Linux on the desktop. I'm as hardcore an open source you'll find, I haven't run a closed-source OS in over 20 years, but I was almost ready to throw in the towel and install Windows during the height of this!
Why even take the time to write this? The very first thing there is to know about Gnome 3 is that it's a simplified design intended for normal users doing things normal users do. It's the entire raison d'etre FOR Gnome 3. You can't not know this.
Yet for some reason you're harping on about obscure edge-cases like "huge legacy programs that break without follow-focus." Why?
Get Noscript (or ScriptSafe for Chrome) and Adblock Plus with Easylist, Easyprivacy, Malware Domains and Fanboy's Annoyance List.
You'll never be bothered with bullshit video ads again.
Eat the rich.
While I'd argue the more recent versions of GNOME 3 are looking prettier (bar excessive padding), IMHO the developers are still sticking to a "Our way or the highway" attitude, just look at the changes to gedit in 3.12. Likewise, needing to download the tweak tool and 3rd party extensions just to get some degree of flexibility is unacceptable.
However IMHO a far more fundamental issue the impact the GNOME 3 problems has had on GTK+. These days it seems that the GTK+ developers are keen on catering only to the demands of the GNOME developers, much to the detriment of other projects. For example, the poor cross platform support. Without a decent toolkit backed by a diverse community using and developing it, I don't see how GNOME can succeed in the long term.
I, for one, want to see the results of their massive spending on their womens outreach projects. They spent the bulk of their money on getting women into tech, with no apparent results and slashed their hackfest budget to 20% of it's previous budget. I want to see the results of this - how did it help the gnome project?
Why even take the time to write this? The very first thing there is to know about Gnome 3 is that it's a simplified design intended for normal users doing things normal users do. It's the entire raison d'etre FOR Gnome 3. You can't not know this.
Yet for some reason you're harping on about obscure edge-cases like "huge legacy programs that break without follow-focus." Why?
Because u=id/ot
Slashdot has ads? I never noticed.
Once I got used to Gnome 3, I had no real issue with it.
On Pale Moon I use "Adblock Edge". It works great!
This is an attitude that I see a lot and no doubt will come up multiple in times in this thread, and I've got to say - I just don't get it.
When Gnome 3 came out I hated it as well so I switched to Xfce and I've been happy with that. I didn't rant and rave about the Gnome guys though because the way I see it, they're volunteers. The attitude above is tinged with a real sense of entitlement like they owe you something, but they absolutely don't.
I'm sorry that you don't like their changes, I didn't either. However, it's not their responsibility to do things the way you want. These guys have an offering and they're competing with a number of others. It's up to you to either pick the one that most suits you (which will never provide with you with a perfect fit) or make your own solution that does things exactly as you like it. You can then make it available to the public and who knows other people might use it as well!
How will you feel when they tell you that they want you to change it do something else though but you don't want to go that way? You'd be well within your rights to say "I'm a volunteer, this is the way I want to go, if you don't like it then I'm sorry but take a look at one of our competitors".
You are perfectly entitled to ask them to do things differently and try to influence the future direction but if they don't agree with you, sorry but they're the guys writing the code so they'll do it the way they think is right. If they get that wrong too many times then nobody will use their product and people will flock to the better alternatives. That's the beauty of open source.
How can you genuinely consider switching to Microsoft in response to this - how much choice do they give you exactly?
In this age of widescreen LCDs, the vertical space is limited. Yet, Gnome seems to be wasting it with not just one, but two horizontal panels. Wouldn't it make more sense to make them vertical?
I use adblock, but explicitly block by site and by ad provider.
Slashdot made it on the blacklist when they started experimenting with those annoying ads that slide in from the bottom.
no
Please login to access my lawn
Gnome is a piece of the Linux pie that I used to love to use. I just downloaded the latest Fedora to give it a spin since everyone said it was getting better and I couldn't figure out right off the bat how to get it to classic mode. The setup options during the install didn't give me that choice and trying to find it in the new interface is giving me a headache. I think I'll stick with either XFCE or KDE in this contest.
People are also hoot'n and hollaring over SystemD which is some sort of startup program that helps get things along if I'm understanding things right? Long as it does the job and doesn't get in my way to using the computer I'm fine with it. From what I've been reading on the web it's the real reason Debian is switching to Gnome again. It's a shame, I really like their XFCE release they did because it came out of the box with a near Windows 9x style look with extra bells and whistles you could turn on if you wanted real easy. It was the most familiar looking desktop I've ever seen Linux start up with right away coming from Windows land.
Listen up you navel-gazer.
Linux is not generally used by "normal people". "Edge-cases" are not, because the entire user base is pretty much an edge-case in it self.
Gnome 3 is a failure, produced by navel-gazers and unrealistic dreamers with fascist agendas: It's made for a special naive, uneducated, unquestioning, non-learning and ignorant breed of users that probably never existed, and hopefully never will.
Combine that with distributions with their embedded gnomeite agents who seem hellbent on force feeding this utter shite on the existing Linux user base, who pretty much by definition is characterized by the opposite kind of traits.
Yeah, Gnome 3 has failed, as dictatorships tend to do, and no wonder people are complaining about this continued peddling in failware.
I am happy with Gnome 3 (via CentOS 7) on my home laptop and work desktop machine. It looks great and I was able to configure it to my taste. CentOS 7 also comes with systemd. Never had to give it a second thought. For my needs this is a great desktop OS for home use and the development work I do in the office.
yes
It'll be fun to go back to Fedora.
The Gnome Project's true value is as a cautionary tale about knowing your user base. The Gnome foundation badly misjudged who would use their stuff and were so sure that they'd tap into millions of normal users that they didn't mind being really insulting to the users they lost in the process.
Today's articles seem to admit they are not reaching "normal users doing things normal users do" and since they need some sort of user base back, they must appeal to the ones they drove away. Really, it's right there in the titles: "How GNOME 3.14 is winning back disillusioned Linux users" and "Open Source GNOME 3 Desktop Environment Wins Back Fans."
I decided to post just to point out that the "features" that are supposed to win their users back are superficial at best and they do even get close to the core of their problems.
Reading tip 101: Typically the last thing in a list occupies that position because it is generally not as important to the main argument as what came before.
Privacy Badger. I just let it manage my blocking automatically and I don't see ads here.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
D
i
v
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Outside of that I kinda like the new "workflow" of Gnome, but knowing that your favourite feature might be dropped on the next release doesn't look really good.
Install APK's Host Files Engine v. 37.0.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
> normal users doing things normal users do.
Like running steam games? How's that working out for you?
Now listen up, dumbfuck. And yes, your truly deserve that monicker. Normal users doing normal things do not run linux. They run windows or a tablet. All their games run on those. All their programs run on those. They can take those to Best Buy and pay someone $200 to format and reinstall for them. That is what normal users do. No one, by definition, who is a normal user uses GNOME. That team figuratively started eating their own shit believing it to be steak. They literally have no fucking clue how to make a system people want to use.
Capcha: swallows. I hope they bought you a nice dinner in return for your 'services'.
To me, it seems the only source this PCWorld article bases it's claim that GNOME 3 wins back users on, is the PCWorld article that claims that GNOME 3 is winning back users...
I had no idea, mostly because I don't care about ads, but I run requestpolicy because, I consider the whole mode of operation on the web these days a bit like if every time you ran into a person you knew with a group of their random friends who you may or may not have met before, you went and immediately gave oral sex to each person in the group every time.
If they want me to see ads, they should host them on the same site I wanted to load, otherwise I am not going to see it. Sorry I don't trust that every affiliate site that every site I go to decides to allow to accept money to link is "clean enough to raw dog"
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
No matter what the UX department says, most Gnome users actually have used computers before. If the Gnome wanted normal people who do things normal users do, they would follow the same paradigms as any other UI since the Windows 1.0. Windows would have their close/minimize/maximize buttons at their normal locations. The power-button would actually provide a way to hibernate or power off the system, without secret knowledge of alt-key. Alt-tab would be able to cycle the open windows, as it has happened in every other dekstops: there is a continuous list of windows, not some 2d-crossbar as in PS3, where having a 5 Firefox windows and 7 xterms would result into some treasure hunt; two steps left and 6 to up. The applications would have menus on top of their windows, not some hamburger button which just opens a 2D-array of icons, which do not provide a faintest clue what they do before one presses them.
For a bunch of self-proclamed hardcore Unix neckbeard you seems to have a sand-in-the-vagina problem lately...
If you are so sure that all these "new" stuff is evil (and I use the term new but...) just don't use it. Switch to arch, or slackware or even LFS and build your own desktop. Or even better start neckBeard-Linux. here is your motto "Older is better". I'm sure millions upon millions of people will soon be users since you seem to think you know what users want..
Yes, but only for Japanese, Chinese, Korean and any other vertical writing language.
I use KDE on my laptop, from DM to working desktop takes several minutes, the interface is pretty good, but that startup time is just shockingly bad.
maybe
I wonder, how far back the "Classic" goes... Does it offer the look-and-feel of Motif X-sessions of the early 1990ies — or the skimpy twm? Or the fvwm of the slightly later years? What exactly is "classic" today?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just to inform some here, you can use Gnome 3 without systemd on Funtoo Linux.
Have they fixed it yet?
Gnome 3 may be great, but if they make an update to it and that breaks all the apps or components whose support groups can't keep up with releases, who cares?
Have gnu, will travel.
Very happy with MATE. Even the wife and the parents, who are your typical casual computer users, find Gnome 2 and like interfaces to be much more useable than Gnome 3.
As somebody mentioned earlier, Gnome team lost the trust of their main userbase.
I think Gnome 3 is the New Coke of the DE world. It wasn't so much that it was a horrible idea... taste tests seemed promising, and change is good, right? It just seems to be what happens when makers 'mess' with a product. Now that they've reintroduced Gnome 'Classic', (see where I went with the Coke thing?), people are simmering down a bit and reluctantly muttering, "Oh, well.... that's okay then, I guess. Watch it - we've got our eyes on you!"
Where it's nothing like New Coke is that the Gnome developers get to mess with the formula while they try to, (often unsuccessfully), balance needs and vision, (whose vision?). In this case, I think the vision preceded the needs department for a lot of people. I actually like the standard Gnome 3 interface, but I also see how it pissed a lot of people off... especially with earlier versions.
There are two types of people in the world; those who believe there are two types of people, and those who don't.
The #1 reason I left Gnome for KDE was the fact that Gnome 3 didn't have fixed virtual desktops. For over a decade, I have segregated workflows to different desktops. I have 10 in two rows of 5 and have muscle memory of how to click them to get where I want. Gnome 3 destroyed this by making virtual desktops transient. You never know which desktop is which because they're not fixed.
No, I'm not going to change my entire workflow and remap my muscle memory because of that. Switching to KDE was easier.
Besides, how many Year of Linux Desktop users does Gnome have? They could have a thousand-percent increase with a few new users.
1. The vertical space on my start bar is very small, like 1/3 of an inch on one of my 27" diagonal monitors. For that price, I can actually read contextual words on my task list which is why I don't have to click an icon then click again to find the 'right' window to jump back to. Many people do it differently, but its the way I work.
2. My 'reading' screen is vertically oriented, my 'work' screen is horizontal, but my IDE's have lots of important side-bar crap that fills in. With my current 2x27" setup, I've never thought, damn, I need more screen real-estate. All in all, I have maybe 2% of my total screen real-estate constantly occupied with static OS items. If I was using XFCE (I like the top/bottom bars for Linux), it would be double that, but still very acceptible for my use cases.
Bye!
Sorry, Windows Metro is more intuitive than the gnome 3. Gnome 3 like Ubuntu Unity Dash is like the very retarded cousin of Windows Metro.
The more items you add to the docking system the more it scales the icons down in size to the point where it gets hard to see. The docking system is not visible you have to click on Activities(or MS key) for it to show up(unless this could be changed), but in Windows 8 and Ubuntu the dock or taskbars are already on the screen.
The gnome 3 sidebar looks similar to Metro but it's for Virtual Desktop and it gets confusing. Where are the minimize and maximum corner buttons? Just like Ubuntu Unity you can't pin anything to the mode applications like you can with the Metro.
Maybe
Using the sides also means more average travel time for your mouse, slowing you down.
Granted, two bars is too much vertical space wasted, but it's not as simple as vertical vs horizontal.
Maybe you could do a notification/gnome button/task switching widget in the top middle of the screen and let everything else go to the application for example.
Cinnamon has the best out-of-the-box experience. GNOME needs to dump GnomeShell and make Cinnamon the primary shell.
Well of course you could easily do that with gnome 2, but this is gnome 3 so no, that's progress.
Moving the panel with the mouse ? Are you insane ? That's too easy, we can't allow that.
As far as I'm concerned, the allegation of the giant singleton xterm would be enough to disqualify it for me. But the article says Saint Torvalds uses Gnome 3, and I can't imagine he would tolerate such a limitation. So what must he be doing to resolve some of these glaring problems?
Maybe.
(sorry, just putting the last option out there :) )
1080 is becoming more affordable, but weirdly, that attractive price tag usually does not include an internal DVD drive. If you want it, be ready for a sticker shock.
Free software also means the right to choose.
I choose specifically not to use that crap software known as Gnome 3+.
Doesn't it have option to have vertical or horizontal? User should be able to pick which orientation to use.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Actually, you couldn't. Vertical panel in Gnome 2 was so buggy it was virtually unusable. There were patches in bugzilla that were never applied because Gnome 2 got EOL'd.
OTOH, vertical panel in Xfce works just fine and it only takes a couple of clicks in the config dialog to set it up.
KDE accessibility project is much much less advanced than Gnome's. Companies like to have default software usable by disabled people - for both ethical and legal reasons. Distributions like to have their default configurations usable by more companies.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
It defeats whole classes of vulns.
Proposal for a debian fork based on olde unix-like debian: http://youtu.be/N18rNxe3Z-o
for that good ring0 protection.
What I want to know, and hitherto have not bothered to look up, is who in the chain of responsibility decided that we should have been forced to go from something that worked to something that required you to learn how to use stupid new-age UI paradigms that don't sodding work. I don't want to swipe things in I don't want to search when I know where things are I don't want things hiding from me TBH, I'm still sticking with MATE. Coz this shit's annoying.
The configurability is nowadays considered as bad thing. The users of modern UI:s are so stupid, that they can not be allowed to do any configuration, as that would only distract and confuse them. Or at least this is what the UX guys say.