Slashdot Mirror
What's New In GNOME 3.18
prisoninmate writes: In this release, GNOME improves the general user experience for users and new developers alike. GNOME 3.18 adds a feature called "Automatic Brightness," which, when enabled, it will make use of your laptop's light sensor to dim or increase the screen's brightness depending on the surrounding lighting. GNOME 3.18 also improves the touch screen experience, especially when selecting and modifying text, implements a new view in the Nautilus (Files) sidebar, which collects all the remote and internal locations in a single place.
> Screenshot on that page showing a screen you'd only love to use on a tablet.
Is that the extent of your research?
The video shows a number of useful incremental improvements to GNOME 3, and a few new features that make GNOME more tablet-friendly. I checked out the beta in a VM yesterday, no feeling that tabletization was a threat.
I do understand you were spring-boarding off the new GNOME release to say something about Windows 8.1, but still...
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Despite all the negative buzz against GNOME 3, latest releases are, in my opinion, very good (and I hated GNOME 3 with a passion when it came up).
Also, they're putting efforts on style consistency and usability which is very welcome.
Same thing here. GNOME 3.10 finally made me leave fvwm and switch to GNOME full-time. Before that it was still an unfinished experience in many ways.
Yeah, that's the point. What you're given by default (and what GNOME's developers seem to focus on) is the touch oriented interface. Getting the desktop means installing extensions.
Microsoft made the same mistake with Windows 8. You could get to the desktop with the default UI, and you could add extensions to make it more optimal (albeit not from Microsoft, at least GNOME's own developers are doing the equivalent of "giving you a start menu"), but it wasn't what desktop users wanted.
Windows 10, for all its faults (and it has a million of them) fixed that and focuses on the desktop. It's time GNOME did the same thing.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Thanks to Gnome3 I moved back to XFCE. This is a good way to prepare for next step, as systemd is enforcing a move back to FreeBSD.
Check out Slackware before you run all the way back to FreeBSD (not that there's anything wrong with FreeBSD). Slack ships with a good XFCE desktop. It's a great Linux distribution without the systemd infection.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
It seems that the only acceptable change to Gnome for slashdotters is going back to the version 2 interface.
I think you'll find that most of us never left. MATE runs fine on my Linux machines.
All I want is to use a modern Linux distro without systemd.
Gentoo is one option for that.
When looking at the big picture, no, you don't exist. The huge majority (we're talking over 90%) of Linux desktop users are now using Unity, KDE, or XFCE, or MATE, or one of the many other window managers that exist. GNOME 3 and Cinnamon users like you are irrelevant, given your small number.
And your evidence for this amazing claim is...?
The Debian popcon results certainly seem to suggest otherwise:
* gnome-shell: 30% installed, 18% recently used.
* kde-runtime: 19% installed, 11% recently used.
* xfce4-panel: 14% installed, 7.6% recently used.
* lxde-common:5.6% installed, 2.5% recently used.
* mate-panel: 4.6% installed, 2.3% recently used.
* cinnamon: 3.5% installed, 1.6% recently used.
* Unity: not available for Debian.
(When looking at those numbers, you have to take into account the fact that a lot of Debian systems are servers, and don't have X11 installed at all.)
Of course Debian isn't representative of the whole world, but it is generally among the most popular systems, and one that has a disproportionate number of experienced users compared to systems like Ubuntu or Mint. Users who like choice. And they seem to be mostly choosing Gnome 3.
Factoring in Ubuntu and Mint, well, Ubuntu users will heavily use Unity, but there's still a lot using Gnome or KDE or Xfce. Plus, Unity is basically Gnome with a replacement for gnome-shell. And Mint users will most likely be using Cinnamon (which probably makes it a lot more popular than you suggest) or KDE. So those will likely balance out the strong Gnome lead we see on Debian. But as a rough estimate, I think it's safe to say that Gnome 3 is easily in the same ballpark as KDE and Unity. And the Debian results certainly suggest that Gnome 3 is more popular among experienced users than a lot of people like to claim. Which matches what I've been hearing:that many people have been going back to Gnome since 3.8 finally gave us "classic" mode.
(I tried to go through the Ubuntu popcon results, but they don't seem to be as well organized or easy to search, and I gave up in frustration. Feel free to check the numbers yourself. I think you may be surprised at how high in the rankings gnome-shell is, though. Mint doesn't support popcon at this point in time.)
I'd try to factor in Fedora, but Ihave no idea how to estimate what's going on in that part of the world. But I'd say your "over 90%" claim is on pretty shaky ground. (To describe it with more politeness than it probably deserves.)