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GNOME 3.16 Released
kthreadd writes Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released. Some major new features in this release include a overhauled notification system, an updated design of the calendar drop down and support for overlay scrollbars. Also, the grid view in Files has been improved with bigger thumbnail icons, making the appearance more attractive and the rows easier to read. A video is available which demonstrates the new version.
installed it. Gnome, or rather Ximian's piece of shit installer (Red Carpet?). It uninstalled PAM from my linux box. UNINSTALLED! No accounts were valid for login.
After copying the RPM to a floppy (thanks you Ximian morons) and getting back in to log in, I was unable to un-install.
fdisk.
Thanks you Ximian morons. Do you even test this stuff before you distribute it? And my only option is KDE?
boy, i must be getting old. i remember being psyched when i finally got a machine fast enough to run it.
my favorite lightweight wm: tvtwm
Gnome, KDE, Ximian Gnome are all basically programs that run on top of X. X is inefficient in some areas, but very useful in others. I personally don't like it, but some do. It doesn't support cool stuff like alpha transparency (but KDE is getting around that) and does support useful stuff like network transparency.
I've installed Ximian using their red-carpet installer on Red Hat 7.1 and 7.2 five times (five machines) now and it's worked great every time. PAM wasn't touched, only the Gnome stuff
There are a few dependancy annoyances on RH 7.1 and the new Up2date/RHN from RedHat that I've not figured out, but the 7.2 RH machines are humming along just fine.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
ah, but it does support alpha transparency!
:)
the XRender extension supports alpha-blending, useful for transparency effects and anti-aliasing fonts.
If you're running X11R6.5+ (Xfree86 4.0+) then you've got XRender installed already
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
is there anything to compete with Xfree?
So there we have it, the foot bothers you ;)
:)
Couldn't you have just said, "The foot bothers me?"
Jeremy
People are using the API's. Much of the improvements to Gtk+ and GNOME for version 2 involve making the platform and desktop accessible to more users. This includes better internationalization and rendering of text, accessibility (a major project being headed up by Sun Microsystems). This has been a very important emphasis of this release. Other improvement in the configuration system, component model, etc. allow developers to write more powerful applications quicker. And these are being used.
Making the GUI easier for first-time Linux users, which was the whole point of GNOME in the first place, wasnt it?
This has been a major focus of the GNOME Project for GNOME 2 and beyond. Check out the GNOME Usability Project and the GNOME Usability mailing list.
Celebrate the finer things in life
...the basic X-Windows system? Isn't that system supposed to be very inefficient?
Ignore the people who tell you that X is "very inefficient". In short, they don't know what they're talking about. If you compare speeds of a range of similar applications on the same hardware running Linux (all Linux GUIs use X) vs running Windows XP, you will find a lot of differences for all sorts of reasons, some things Linux does faster and other things Windows XP does faster. In so far as there is any pattern at all, most people seem to agree that Linux is faster (though I'm sure somebody will flame me for saying that). So whatever causes the differences, it can't be the use of X.
When you move beyond using a single computer and want to access applications on different machines on a LAN from a single workstation, the tremendous power of X comes into play. You can run graphical apps on any machine on your LAN, and interact with their GUIs on your screen, just as if they were running locally. Once you've gotten used to this, you'll never want to give it up.
Use what works for you, if Microsoft works then so be it. They've never worked properly for me even windows 2000 would crash every month or so which isn't acceptable for me. However they do get the desktop right but it will never look as nice as gnome. Plus gnome is functional for me even though I hate some of the ways things are done as of late..
One word of advice: get out while you still can. Take the bus or something. Linux will never be for you. Thanks. Bye.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
- The protocol is unavoidable overhead: even if client and server are running on the same host, a call to, for example, XPutPixel() still has to pack a protocol request and send it over a UNIX socket, where it is then unpacked, validated, and executed. This is tremendous overhead for something as simple as drawing a single pixel on the screen. If you're in the business of drawing pixels at a time, you probably want to use your own drawing routines, an X image, and a double-buffered window. However, doing this is a pain:
- Double-buffering is tricky to implement, and can be slow. Unless your server supports shared-memory pixmaps, in order to do double buffering you must:
Basically, X is great for usual GUI applications, but if you want to do something like, for example, an xmms plugin, you are incurring much overhead as opposed to direct access to some type of framebuffer device.- Allocate an X image of the appropriate size and depth.
- Draw the contents of the back-buffer onto the image using your own routines.
- Translate the image into a pixmap.
- Blit the pixmap to the window.
- Repeat from step 2.
This process can be very slow.Start by getting rid of the {apple,bridge,window}. It's not cute. {Apples rot,Bridges grow unstable,Windows break}, and using an "{apple,bridge,window}" for an emblem opens the door wide open to any number of {apple,bridge,window}-related jokes about your work when it bombs. Think!
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Ximian is supposed to be (and is very good at) being an all encompassing installer. When it is used along side...say kpackage...it really won't perform as they intended it too. Red Carpet is intended for this purpose:
Average Joe - start up computer (thinks to himself...hmm...I haven't clicked this icon in a while)
Average Joe - clicks icon
RedCarpet - you NEED x new software (don't worry...it's free and will make your system better).
Average Joe - ok...
RedCarpet - now go play while I upgrade your computer.
If you don't want to go through this each and every time you upgrade your software, then Red Carpet isn't for you. If you like this way of maintaining your software (which i do because i don't have to think about dependancies and all of the junk i don't care about), then Red Carpet is perfect for you.
The big thing is...Red Carpet uses Ximian's database of what should be installed and should not be installed for your system to work properly. They have to have some standard to judge that by. It is sometimes out of date, but that's the price you pay for ease of use and stability.
There...
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
Too bad Windows 2000 is just VMS in disguise.
The developer API has a lot to do with ease-of-use. If the API makes it easy to write easy-to-use applications, people will.
Think about old X applications. They were difficult to use, because Xlib is impossible to program in. A better API brings better applications.
Also, haven't you been looking at the recent announcements? Evolution 1.0, Galeon 1.0, and Gnumeric 1.0. These are all programs that are extremely easy-to-use while being powerful.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Usually X-Windows runs slower because most distributions have it running as a low priority (why is this, especially desktop versions?). Anyway, if you find the PID of X Windows, and do
renice -20 PUTTHEPIDHERE
You will be happy. You might also do the same for sawfish & panel.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Double-buffering is tricky to implement, and can be slow. Unless your server supports shared-memory pixmaps, in order to do double buffering you must
Moot point, every serious X server (including XFree86, which most Slashdot users have) _does_ implement shared-memory pixmaps. Indeed, this has been true for better than 7 years now, when I started running XFree in 1994 both MIT-SHM and XShm were certainly supported.
Basically, X is great for usual GUI applications, but if you want to do something like, for example, an xmms plugin, you are incurring much overhead as opposed to direct access to some type of framebuffer
Not at all, there are plenty of ways to bang on the framebuffer without the round-trip to the server. One of the most prevalent is GLX, the OpenGL X extension which is supported on many card for XFree these days. It's been around on other platforms for over a decade.
Remember, SGI ruled the graphics performance world for a long time _using_ X11. X was designed to be very flexible through the use of extensions. My bet is that in 1-2 years GLX will be standard on pretty much all new Linux desktop installations, combined with DRM that can give darned good performance. Of course, good drivers are a prerequisite to good performance.
And yes, GLX works great for high-performance 2D graphics as well as 3d.
Couple of other points:
The protocol is unavoidable overhead: even if client and server are running on the same host, a call to, for example, XPutPixel() still has to pack a protocol request
Not true in the general case. Xlib is quite good at buffering many Xlib calls into far fewer X protocol requests.
and send it over a UNIX socket
Even on my old PPro 200 we're talking order 5*10^-4 seconds for a server round-trip over a Unix socket. That's pretty quick. And there's work being done on X servers that don't use UNIX sockets but rather SHM or other transports for protocol submissions. Jim Gettys had a very nice post on the subject that I'll try to dig up and link here.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
As for GLX... Haven't played with it, now I will.
Finally, I must disagree about the UNIX socket. 5*10^-4 seconds seems short, but if that is the time it takes to draw several pixels (assuming the draw requests are buffered in Xlib), then you are in trouble. In that amount of time, a 500 MHz CPU goes through 250,000 cycles. Imagine how many pixels you could draw into a framebuffer in that amount of time...
I was under the impression that MITSHM supported shared memory images, but that shared memory pixmaps were something different
Yeah, I mentioned Xshm as well. Forgot to mention Xvideo, which is also worth looking at for video applications.
Finally, I must disagree about the UNIX socket. 5*10^-4 seconds seems short, but if that is the time it takes to draw several pixels (assuming the draw requests are buffered in Xlib), then you are in trouble. In that amount of time, a 500 MHz CPU goes through 250,000 cycles. Imagine how many pixels you could draw into a framebuffer in that amount of time
Not nearly that many. Going over the PCI or AGP bus is not going to run anywhere near that 500 MHz CPU, not to mention that drawing a pixel is more than one cycle _and_ you're going to be limited by memory bandwidth to get at your render data, _and_ most importantly if you update faster than the refresh rate of your display then you're just doing work that'll never be displayed. 85-90 Hz is about as fast as most displays are set.
Moreover, you're generally doing actual work to determine what pixel to display. If you're just blitting images as fast as possible to the screen, then either Xshm or or Xvideo or GLX extensions are probably what you want (XFree has them all).
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Look, Ximian's stated goal is to provide "simple, intuitive set-up tools for first time users". Failure to anticipate such a conflict on a widely-used Linux distro is pretty serious. Yeah, we all make mistakes, but this was a biggie.
blah, blah, Systemd, blah, blah, KDE, blah, blah...
I use MATE, anything is better than Gnome 3.x. It's a shame, Gnome 2.x was great.
Dispite desparate attempts of the linux user base to move to alternatives and avoid wholesale changes to the linux userspace, distribution leadership and paid developers continue their push toward 'unification and control'.
When gnomish developers develop on macs to produce a desktop centric operating system in the hope of capturing the windows/mac market, where mac users are happy with macs, windows users are happy using windows and all the linux users go anywhere else the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'
I am looking forward to this code to be ported into Cinnamon.
Really, I wish Cinnamon, Gnome, and XFCE could all be merged, each giving meaningful input for Desktop, Tablet, and Lightweight.
It's time to get it together!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Big far Meh.
So GNOME, unlike even Motif and Athena lacks an arbitrary filter on file selection dialog boxes specified by the user. This makes finding spefic files in a large directory hard. If you have usability regressions compared to Athena and Motif, you have fucked up royally.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems"
Well, well, aren't we full of ourselves...
Mod the hell out of this. This person gets it!
Version 3.16 of GNOME, the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems has been released.
The "primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux"? Really? Does the poster just speak Marketing as your primary tongue, or is this a simply characteristic of the arrogance of a project that has loudly shouted down every rational discussion about the merits of its interface design, the merits of requiring systemd to the exclusion of all else (not really true despite what the gnome developers say: Funtoo Linux, a Gentoo derivative manged by drobbins, has gnome3 ebuilds and straightforward patches that allow gnome3 to work flawlessly with openrc instead), and the merits of embedding splashscreen code into an init system?
I suspect the latter, given the broader context, but really. Gnome isn't any more the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux than KDE is, or any number of other desktops. Just because Red Hat's marketing department says so doesn't make it so. In my work at numerous Linux shops (including large banks like Deutsche, and smaller Red Hat shops that will remain nameless to protect the innocent), nearly everywhere a Linux desktop is run the choice has defaulted to KDE, with a small minority of users choosing to run Gnome instead, or other less common desktops (Mate, etc.).
The sheer hubris of a project claiming to be "the primary desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems" in their press release, regurgitated mindlessly by slashdot, boggles the mind.
I've heard this before and finally looked up old Slashdot threads to confirm or deny.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... and most of the highest rated comments are positive.
What I'm still missing is KDE 3.5 but maybe I'll give Trinity a try.
I used to hate GNOME 3!
I tried out 3.14, and I have to say, it has gotten a lot better.
Also you can install GNOME shell extensions, to get it more in line with the classic GNOME 2. :)
Also you need get a new shell theme. But its possibly to get GNOME 3 pretty nice.
Again, new Gnome features match OS X stuff introduced years ago:
3.16 introduces a new style of scrollbar for GNOME 3. Instead of being shown all the time, these new overlay scrollbars are only shown when needed
Most major distributions ship with GNOME as the default desktop environment. Debian, Fedora, RHEL for example all ship with GNOME by default. Ubuntu did but no longer does.
All you need to know about the mirage of "Linux on the Desktop" can be seen in recent GNOME releases. The developers spend far too much time either not adding things people desperately need and want (like a really first-rate file manager, instead of the toy versions various distros leave on users' doorsteps in a flaming paper bag), or screwing up things that do work at least reasonably well.
"Linux on the Desktop" is almost entirely a "solution" that only works for hardcore hobbyists/ideologues and those with very significant in-house technical support.
What an utter waste. I've been experimenting with Linux since the days of buying a book with an attached Slackware floppy disk, and I really believed at one point that Linux would become a serious challenger to Windows and other desktop OSs with at least a 25% market share. I was a naive fool, as is anyone who still thinks Linux has a chance of coming close to that level of success.
I posted the text below almost as-is for the 3.14 release, only later finding out that no, this bug is still present. So here goes again....
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It's mainly on the file manager (that I've found) but you can click OUTSIDE the window and still interact with the window. For example if you have two file-managers close to each other with another window below them both and visible in the gap then you can't click the lower window directly even though you can see it and put your mouse over the visible part of it. All you do is focus one or the other of the file manager windows.
You can also hold down the windows key and click outside the file manager window and drag it around the screen just as if you had clicked inside the window (I can't remember if I changed the default key from alt to windows in my settings but the point applies).
Generally I'm OK with Gnome3 (providing you get the right extensions) but these invisible borders are such a fundamental breakage of the basic concept of a graphical windowed user interface.
Oh it now displays notification history in...the calendar?
What.
Who thought that was a good idea? what's next? Calendar inside WiFi settings?
Everyone is all down on it, but the terminal notifications thing looked sweet.
ref: http://fedoramagazine.org/terminal-job-notifications-in-fedora-22-workstation/
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
When facing badly broken software like GNOME 3, submitting patches is the worst thing you can do.
First it means you have to deal with this broken software's source code. If you aren't a C programmer already, you're out of luck. If you want to become one, it'll take a while before you're proficient enough. Even if you know C, you will have to waste a lot of time learning the code base.
Then you have to waste your time getting a development environment set up, and then you have to waste more time making and testing your change.
If you get the change made, then you'll have to fight just to get it committed into the main source tree. This usually involves a few snobby dickheads "reviewing" your code. They usually lack the context to really understand the change. In some cases, these people are responsible for the problem in the first place, and they fight against the fix because it undermines whatever authority they think they have. Get ready to waste yet more time with political squabbles!
As you can see, any smart person wouldn't put themselves through that hell. Such a person would just do the intelligent thing and switch to KDE or Xfce.
So that they can be bigger idiots? You feel lonely?
Indeed, Gnome 2 / MATE has little advanced configurability, yet it has basic configurability. Want to add an icon, drag'n'drop the icon to where you want it on the bar, how easy can that be.
Most visible part that gets maintained/updated : the file manager.
Applications/Places/System : corresponds to Programs, Favorites and Settings in the classic start menu from Windows 98 (and perhaps 95 + Internet Explorer shell) and XP. It's not convenient to add your own application shortcuts to the app menu though, so they go to the top bar (or bottom bar) or on the desktop.
Biggest pain in the ass is if you changed something with dconf-editor. Or did I change a start up script. I made it so caja doesn't manage the desktop anymore, but I can't manage to get the desktop back. That's customizability.
Moreover, I don't bother customizing/changing the theme! That's the fault of Gnome 3. I won't even bother or attempt anything till GTK3 is stable.
Better than the command line? I hardly think so. Bash, KSH, and even csh (as much as I hate csh) are heart of the ability to use and administer a Unix host, incredibly flexible and have decades of refinement behind their usability. Gnome is off on a rampage to remove features and force someone else's idea of how you should do your work down the throat of ever gnome user. If I had to make the choice, I'll take a serial console over an X desktop running Gnome.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
opensuse ships KDE by default, but SLES and SLED all have GNOME as default.
the question becomes 'who is going to use it?'
The paid developers (you mean Red Hat mainly) are funded by enterprise software sales and service. That's why their bosses want control of the stack. And without radical changes, those developers and designers don't have a way to become king of the mountain. So, change for change's sake, and enterprise users will have to choke all that bloated dick down, while the rest of us either put up with it or move away. Systemd's borg-like spreading is an attempt to make it difficult to get away from this corporate-controlled Linux bloatware.
This is an interesting, though rather off-topic conversation starter. I'll toss in my view:
To address the last point first, the consequences of "the community" being accepting of openly misogynistic people is possibly that the FOSS community gains a reputation (which it's already fighting) of being a haven for such people, and that anyone involved with it is like this. This isn't very good for the employment prospects for anyone who is prominently involved in FOSS, or attempts to evangelize its use in their organization. At worst, we could see a schism where FOSS advocates are all seen as misogynistic "neckbeards", and clean-cut "professional software developers" who aren't likely to expose a company to sexual harassment lawsuits are all Microsoft (or other proprietary software) advocates.
The quality of a product really doesn't matter as much as other factors, including public reputation, public image, and inertia. We've seen this over and over with Microsoft software over the years. Even back in the Windows 95/98 days, MS software was seen as "high quality" (even though it blue-screened every 30 minutes). Image is everything. Even outside of computing, there's countless cases of a technically-superior product or standard being sidelined in favor of something inferior, and inside computing cases abound (IE6 for example, being a standard for so long even though it's horrible, largely because of ActiveX even though it's a security nightmare). Most people do not look at technical specs for things; their perspectives involve other variables, especially the people involved in something.
However, the FOSS community has no "gatekeepers" as such, and is not a hierarchal organization. People are free to associate how they will here. But this might be something to think about if you're in charge of a project, and one of your peers is a highly outspoken misogynist or racist: he's going to cast a light on your project by association. There's a good reason companies don't employ people like this; the last thing they need is some news article that goes like this: "John Smith, a vocal advocate of amending the Constitution to make women second-class citizens, and also a lead programmer for XYZ Technologies, on Monday declared that..." Guilt by association and all that.
Now of course, there's a difference between refusing to associate with someone because of their outspoken views, and having a witch-hunt. If you're running some little 5-developer FOSS project on GitHub that no one's heard of, and one of your developers says something slightly misogynistic in an IRC chat, big deal. If you're running a FOSS company with millions in revenue and you hire a CEO who publicly spouts misogynistic views, that's an entirely different thing.
Agh! It's even ambiguous in their video. Is it pronounced "Nome", or "G'nome"? The female narrator in the video says g'nome at the beginning, and then makes the 'g' silent toward the end.
I can't take this anymore. And that, my friends, is why I use KDE.
sig: sauer
Last I checked another Ubuntu based disto which has team that made two fine alternatives to GNOME was the dominant desktop. And others are using KDE. I'm in the Linux architecture/admin biz and don't know anyone who uses GNOME any more.
This is GNOME 3.16. Why would I compare a .0 with the 8th release?
Frankly I think a lot of the criticism in 2.0 was justified and it isn't this blink hate of GNOME from slashdot that gets portrayed in the GNOME community, which looking at later releases of GNOME 2 adequately demonstrates.
Personally I find DEs with overview mode hostile to those with ADHD. And some of the bugs with regressions are simply too painful to fathom. I use minimize to change the order of alt-tab. This was impossible in GNOME for well over a year in both Shell and Classic because Jon McCann thought fullscreen was "ugly." People using fullscreen were also more than a bit put out.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/sho...
So while it is nice that you think it is improving, any group that claims to say form follows function and then does crap like that while treating its users and former users with such disdain is certainly not for me. That and I just can't get past the overview mode. I don't need additional flashing.
The GNU project has two desktop environments: GNUstep and GNOME. Of the two, GNOME is the primary one.
For the history: in the late 90s, the KDE desktop was getting popular but it required people to install non-free Qt libraries. Two GNU projects were launched to counter this problem. One was Harmony, which aimed to be a Qt replacement, to allow KDE be run without installing non-free software. The other was GNOME.
Years later, when GNOME was successful, the Qt libraries were released as free software.
There was a third GNU project which aimed to make a graphical desktop, but they decided to first focus on a Scheme scripting engine. This effort produced GNU Guile, but no graphical desktop got made.
I think there was even a fourth project, but I can't think of it right now.
Help build the anti-software-patent wiki
I think it's not the same. Gnome 2 spawned briefly the GoneMe fork, but as soon as Gnome developers started implementing new features this fork dissapeared. Right now you have 2 Gnome forks, Mate and Cinnamon, and both of them are gaining popularity and some developers are even considering switching to another toolkit for their apps.
I don't hate Gnome 3, I used it, and worked for me (until the feature removal thing got ridiculous). The problem seems with the removal of useful features that are NOT coming back, and there were really nicely implemented stuff that got removed:
Also Gnome 3 it's NOT EASY, and it's NOT INTUITIVE. When presented with both desktops and a list of simple tasks new users simply cannot figure out what to do. Gnome 2 had made a lot of progress to be intuitive, gnome 3 sets those back by: hiding menus, removing descriptive text in favor of monochromatic icons (which might not be meaningful for many users).
The thing is that these criticism is taken as "oh you hate gnome", no I love gnome that's why it makes me sad to go from a very good DE to an experimental shell. This time I think gnome devs should listen a little and just put a decent settings manager with some checkboxes instead of just blindly removing features.
In other words, stupidity like the Metro interface (aka "Change for the sake of change because CHANGE MUST BE BETTER") is not reserved to just Microsoft, but is a symptom of a much bigger problem that permeates many projects and companies across the technological landscape.
Change is fine IF AND ONLY IF it can actually outperform the incumbent. Being different doesn't automatically make it better. Nobody complains that we should completely redesign current bicycles merely because they're old. They haven't changed drastically because they already went through a huge amount of experimentation. They're already a great fit for the problem they solve.
I vaguely remember some business proverb along the lines of: Ask your customers to change once, and they'll let you. Twice, and they'll hate you. Three times and they'll leave you.
If they want to force everyone to change user interfaces, they better be damn well sure that they've tested it and it clearly improves are ability to do real work. Because if it doesn't, we're leaving for more stable pastures.
How's that working for GNOME? Year of Linux on the Desktop? *sigh*
Because Macs suck even more? The Dock isn't fixed position so you can use memory to start the pointer to the correct spot. Can't get normal alt-tab to work. Can't get menu bars on the actual window. Maximize doesn't.
It comes down to people not wanting to do janitorial stuff, but want the glitz and fame of making something new.
This is further compounded by the tech press fawning over changes and "new", resulting in the mentality that a project that is not introducing massive changes or new features constantly is a dead project.
This seems to be a offshot of the eternal growth mentality of Wall Street, where the moment a market segment (say Laptop computers) are not showing some quarterly growth it is all doom, gloom, and rats leaving sinking ships.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
GNOME people thought to remove GUI Setting to turn off cursor BLINKING, but have font, color, transparency settings still be in place. /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_blink_mode --type string off
The only way to turn off blinking of cursor is . . . gconftool-2 --set
CAN I NOW TURN IT OFF IN THE GUI AGAIN? This is the only thing I wonder with GNOME update. And yes, a lot of people requested this "feature" getting back, going back 4 years as wish . . . and still waiting. Is the waiting over?
Not sure what you mean, computer memory or brain memory? I use folder shortcuts on the right-hand side of the dock and set the view to "list." Then I click in the same spot each time and start typing the name of the item I need. Very efficient.
All I know is that by default the applications change position on the bottom of the doc as you open up files and programs. Dislike.
Again, not sure what you mean. I have no difficulty using Command-tab to switch applications and Command-~ to switch windows. I hate using Exposé and trackpad gestures.
How nice for you. After 20 years using windows and linux systems I can't change my muscle memory to use both command-tab and command~. I want command-tab to cycle through open windows and that apparently isn't configurable. I've tried on and off for a year to adjust to the Mac way and just isn't happening. This is a blocker and I don't know why I even tried to get use to it. Computers should adjust to me, I shouldn't adjust to a computer.
On the plus side, the menu bar is always visible and you don't have to zero in on each window's narrow menu bar to click a menu. Fitts' Law and all that.
I will happily give up the fraction of a fraction of a second to Fitt's Law and look at the right damn spot. I think this is especially hostile to people with any sort of ADHD as we look at a bunch of other tasks and windows as our eyes travel to the top of the screen and away from where we are working. I'd also point out that Tog did all his Fitt's Law testing on the speeds (and I really don't care about such an insignificant time gain) back on a 6" screen.
That's because it's not a maximize button; it's a 'zoom' button. It switches between the application's default window size and the user's custom size.
I'd rather have a maximize button. A button that will give you a half dozen different sizes when you click it six times in a row is simply broken. And yes, depending on ads in a browser it will happily do that. I'm sceptical about it being a user's custom size when it merrily is any size it feels like every time I hit that tiny little button (where did Fitt's go there?)
Overall, I find the Mac interface much more pleasant to use than the alternatives, but I'm still waiting for someone to invent a GUI that is fully configurable and can load your preferred settings in one step.
I'll agree with wanting a system that would load my settings; I'd happily given $$$ for a system that let me configure it in hours let alone one step. Mac and GNOME won't do either for me. And while it is nice for you that the Apple interface works well for you, I find it about as pleasant as working with a needle in my eye.
1k upvotes. And yet, if you pointed GNOME devs to this simple reality you were either labeled as a 5 minute tester guy ("try it for a month, accept the new model of doing stuff and you'll be fine!" yeah, sure) or dismissed as a "hater" ("no point in discussing this with you, I'm picking up my marbles and going away" by all means!).
We agree the dock is fundamentally broken and that Macs don't do what I need them to do because of muscle memory (and surely this impacts others) and I can't say that Macs suck? Of course they suck. Those are all easy preference settings. And Windows should have the same preference settings for Mac refugees so Windows sucks too. But I'd happily pick Windows over Apple or GNOME.
I've been fighting with Gnome3 since it came out. Even in the later versions, it STILL isn't as stable and easy to use as was Gnome2 on a desktop PC. The Nautilus file manager has been absolutely destroyed and stripped of its useful features. I've learned to live with it, but it's just not the same, even with "classic mode". When I have to jump on legacy systems that still have Gnome2, it's noticeably faster and just better and easier to navigate, not to mention full featured. The new scrollbars in Gnome3 are extremely annoying as well.. some scroll the old way and some the new way. Overall it's messed up and causes users confusion and frustration.
This guy deserves the motherload of upvotes.
God I get sick with the lies of apple's so-called usability superiority, based on outright lies, but echoed by so many fanatics that most reasonable people seem to not dare to react anymore.