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GNOME 3.26 Released (betanews.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the onward-and-upward dept.

BrianFagioli shares a report from BetaNews: Today, GNOME 3.26 codenamed "Manchester" sees release. It is chock full of improvements, such as a much-needed refreshed settings menu, enhanced search, and color emoji! Yes, Linux users like using the silly symbols too! "System search has been improved for GNOME 3.26. Results have an updated layout which makes them easier to read and shows more items at once. Additionally, it's now possible to search for system actions, including power off, suspend, lock screen, log out, switch user and orientation lock. (Log out and switch user only appear if there's more than one user. Orientation lock is only available if the device supports automatic screen rotation.) These search features can be accessed in the usual way: click Activities and type into the search box, or simply press 'super' and start typing," says the GNOME Project. The full release notes are available here.

7 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Can't Log Out? by Pikoro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Log out and switch user only appear if there's more than one user."

    Um, so I can't log out unless someone else is already logged in? How does someone else get a login prompt then? Stop removing shit!

    --
    "Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
    1. Re:Can't Log Out? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I've been trying to figure out why all Linux desktops suck so much. I think it must be due to barriers to contributing.

      I looked at working on KDE, since it's the least bad one I found. They have a page that tells you to start by spending hours on IRC, hoping that helpful people are in your time-zone and suffering from the same level on insomnia as you are. The relevant section on their forum is dead, hardly anyone gets replies. They then start talking about how you should do all the boring, trivial bug fixing crap they can't be bothered with as a way to get started.

      Sod that. I want to fix the start menu, fix it opening slowly and sort out the half-baked Windows-clone layout. I'm an experienced programmer. The barriers are too high, KDE loses a potential improvement.

      GNOME is basically the same, their guide eventually just tells you to go on IRC and ask someone, and they don't seem interested in fixing the horrible mess they have created. In fact their current goal seems to be to remove as many options and alternative settings as possible.

      Maybe one of the other desktops is better. How long am I supposed to spend checking them? This is the kind of thing that keeps people on Windows, because the pain that Microsoft inflicts is not quite as bad as the average Linux desktop.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  2. Re:More pointless moving things about by rjforster · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You forgot to mention making the invisible border a little bit bigger. You know, the thing that breaks the fundamental point of mouse driven GUIs: if I can see it I can click it.
    Try getting two file manager windows and place them with a small but visible gap between them. Place another window, say a terminal in the middle and click both file managers to raise them over the top of the terminal. Now you can see the terminal in between the two file manager windows. But can you click on it, expecting it to raise to the top? No! Fricking invisible borders!
    (If you can click on the terminal, make the gap smaller and try again).

  3. Re:Performance by ArchieBunker · · Score: 1, Interesting

    X has always been slow as fuck. I'm really considering a hackintosh at this point. A nice BSD unix subsystem with fast graphics, what more could you ask for?

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  4. Re:Still a bag of unusable shit by Misagon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I run Mate which is a clone of the more sensible GNOME 2. Mate is based on the GTK+ user interface toolkit.

    Unfortunately, development of the GTK+ toolkit was also taken over by the same idiots that "develop" GNOME 3.
    They have done things such as breaking the API on minor version number revisions, and added requirements to those of GNOME 3.
    They changed the tried and true behaviour of scrollbars and sliders to not paging when you click in the trough and which stops if you move the knob too slowly.
    They removed the way that submenus stay open longer if you move the mouse pointer towards it.
    Text has smooth - but delayed - scrolling that can't be sped up to instantaneous.
    I thought about writing a theme engine that patched the behaviour (which I did in the GTK+ 1.2 days) but they "deprecated" theme engines, so now I would have to fork the entire toolkit if I want to fix it.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
  5. Re:More pointless moving things about by Tranzistors · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Did you attend the last GUADEC?

    The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.

    GNOME devs felt the same way, until the Sun Microsystems conducted the usability study of GNOME in 2000. It was not useable, it was a confusing mess. Who do you think the GNOME people are going to believe, some AC on slashdot or actual usability studies? If you in particular prefer different desktop environment, good for you, there are others out there.

    Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things.

    A rather informative presentation on this subject was given in GUADEC by Jakub Steiner, about how animations improve usability.

    As for the rest of your rant. I hope you find another desktop that fits your needs. Why you want other people to fail, if they don't serve you for free, is beyond me.

  6. Re:Still a bag of unusable shit by caseih · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Mate is now pretty much been ported to GTK+ 3, and they've managed to keep much of the look and feel that it had with GTK+ 2. So apparently most of what you dislike about Gnome 3's behavior must be tweakable in GTK+ already.

    GTK+ 3 themes can now be made much simpler than the old engine days. You can now do it with CSS to good effect. And there are GTK+ 3 versions of older themes like Clearlooks that look pretty good.