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.

Comments

Personally I still like the KDE Philosophy

[Jagungal]

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.

Re:I'll take another look at it.

[CRCulver]

Really, why do Gnome developers find it so hard to allow users to change things to their likings anyway?

Gnome's reduction of customizability began in the early millennium when it partnered with some large companies who had carried out formal UI studies and found that for the vast majority of users, options only confuse them. Yes, power users like being able to tweak everything, but there are already a number of *nix graphical interfaces for nerds, and why shouldn't ordinary people get a desktop for them too? Furthermore, a niche that GNOME was chasing was the corporate desktop, where system administrators would decide how everything would work, not end users (this goal also led to the use of gconf to hold settings and allow one to roll them out en masse).