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GNOME 3.26 Released (betanews.com)
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.
Does it have a rain screensaver? After all, it always rains in Manchester
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Is the default theme dull and grey?
No word on performance? Gnome 3.24 is so slow on my i5 with HD 4000 on wayland and xfree.
Be or ben't
Oh wow, that's SUCH important improvement that I can hardly contain my excitement! It's okay that the rest of the desktop-environment sucks ass as long as I get my emojis!
Makes me want to vomit. It is simply a mobile phone desktop.
People would not use that in a work environment even I would prefer to use Windows 7 then to use that mobile phone desktop.
Am I getting old? or are these people just fuck up.
Bring back the old gnome where everything was sensible and didn't try to re-invent itself *against* tried and tested UI layouts.
All 3 did was take a massive shit on the UI and it's been shit ever since.
"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"
to reach common system settings, tasks and applications? it's so fucking non-productive and counter-intuitive, having to type that shit out just to find the shit, when the old click-click-done worked so well before.
Because you haven't added it to the dash panel?
It's closer to "news for nerds" than 99% of the rest this site offers these days, be happy with what little you get.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why can't all these UI idiots face facts. The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.
All they've done since then is continually waste time reinventing the wheel. And each time it gets worse, less usable, and more of a complete PITA to get your actual work done.
Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things. If there's a working file manager, a way to adjust settings, and a way to launch programs easily then your job is done ! Now go and do somethng USEFUL with your time. Wtite some decent APPLICATIONS.
But no. These retarded clowns will spend the rest of eternity chaging pixel shading, dumbing things down and genrally pissing off what used to be their users. This week we've made the file manager circular with green icons... two months later..... now we've made the file manager triangular with all new pink icons.... two months later... now the file manager is oval with yellow icons... Rinse and repeat until the end of time.
I hope GNOME dies in a fire.
Meanwhile, NeXTSTEP and derivatives (including OS X and GNUstep) have supported 'open {file}' to open it in your preferred graphical application ('open {directory}' to open a directory in the graphical file manager) since 1988.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
xdg-open
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It sure is bloated for a desktop whose selling point is being simple and featureless and uncustomizable. At any rate, the problem is that we remember when GNOME was more powerful -- version 1.4, nearly 20 years ago.
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Meh. I like clean and uncluttered UIs that don't require much (if any) tweaking myself, but GNOME 3.x-series is just terrible in how clunky they've made it and how much useful stuff they've removed from it. Personally, Cinnamon is my current favourite, though it's terribly buggy and not well-supported at all under either Ubuntu or Debian. KDE is way too far into the "everything and the kitchen sink" - mentality, GNOME is way too far into the "back to the stone-ages," and I just find myself wishing Cinnamon got more love than it does now.
Then again, Linux on the desktop sucks in general, like e.g. I just found out that neither Chromium or Firefox, for example, still support H/W-accelerated playback of video -- this has been on the TODO-list for a decade already. Something like that affects battery-life on portable devices and can make all the difference between whether one can play higher-resolution Youtube-videos or not on a budget-laptop, for example.
.3 being the last version with a bunch of the configuration settings I use. Depending on your OGL libraries/running compositing it can be a leaky fucker though.
WindowMaker on the other hand is still basically the same as when I used it in 1997 on Slackware 3.0. The three big differences being the visible task switcher when alt-tabbing, the dynamic menu support (was still static back in those days), and the truetype font support (originally supported only bitmaped/type 1 fonts until freetype was safe/reliable to use.)
I generally use e17 on my gaming system since it provides an integrated frame rate meter when compositing is enabled, and WindowMaker everywhere else. WM is pretty good about recovering if the window manager crashes, and restoring windows more or less to the same positions they were before the crash. E17 isn't quite as good about that, although most of the time it does as well.
Having said that: No full DE has offered benefits over those two WMs in a good 10 years. About the only control panel feature that makes a full DE worth is is the lm-sensors plugins so you can monitor a half dozen temperatures at the same time. Other than that, it is all fluff and bloat eroding the usability and performance of my system.
Maybe once machine learning gets good enough there will be other benefits to all that candy, in the form of extra intelligent search capabilities or what have you, but at the moment it seems to mostly be a circle jerk for SJW/UI design types and usability experts who wouldnt' know usability if you stabled it to their yuppie/hipster asses.
I mean, for people that want to code, or browse or watch a film, maybe do some multitasking why choose GNOME over anything else?
Is it easy to use and customise? Is it fast? Is it stable? Does it need a fuckton of dependencies and forces unnecessary shit on users?
System search?! Emoji?? - what the fuck are these people doing?
Once upon a time GNOME was clean, fast and simply didnt get in the way of doing shit. KDE was a slower but was very shiny. These days they both suck.
If I wanted a horrifically bloated "flat" interface with seven layers of buried shit menus I'd just use Windows 10.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Gnome terminal insists on setting TERM=xterm but does not generate the same sequences, eg it generates the wrong escape sequence for Shift-F1. There is a good description with TERM=gnome, but they refuse to use it. Why don't they just fix it to generate the right escape sequences ? Backwards compatibility ? - That can't be the reason: if the terminfo description is wrong then no one can be using it.
Muppets
Not Cancer: it was born on the 3rd of March 1999, so it is an Aries. And Redhat were born as a public company on 11th of August 1999, so again not Cancer, but Leo.
After all these years, the only thing that has ever made me question my decision to have a Linux desktop is Gnome 3. Had it been the case that Gnome 3 was the only desktop for Linux I would probably have stopped using Linux in the desktop altogether - even Windows seems to be an attractive option, in comparison (almost, not quite). Fortunately, we do not have to eat that dog food.
I just found out that neither Chromium or Firefox, for example, still support H/W-accelerated playback of video -- this has been on the TODO-list for a decade already. Something like that affects battery-life on portable devices and can make all the difference between whether one can play higher-resolution Youtube-videos or not on a budget-laptop, for example.
Gee, I was wondering why I couldn't watch fullscreen video on my antique single-core netbooks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So there's time for this shit but no time for a decent file manager ?
They have been trying to clone MS explorer in gtk for ever but can't quite get it to do anything useful. That is why systemd was born so that changing settings would be more like doing a regedit in gnome land instead of just a simple text edit in a config file. You see we all have to come to understand that obfuscation is how to make things more stable by making us uncircumcised sysv addicts shut up and stop configuring things the way we want them to work. Now everything has to be hidden in a parsed encoded file whose location is changed regularly by those who do not want everyone else easily learning how to configure their interface.
By constantly changing the names of targets and moving things around the level of obfuscation ensures that only the interface coders at Red Hat can work on gnome. Precisely the reason why Patrick dropped a the gnome desktop from Slackware years before systemd sealed the fate for most Linux users. For years the cross dependency to run things broke so much that he gave up trying to release a preconfigured Gnome desktop install.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
Simple? Sure. The default screen is uncluttered, there aren't a lot of right-click or modifier-click actions by default.
Featureless? Arguable. KDE lets you customize everything down to the pixel. I prefer having the one selector for a theme in Gnome (via Gnome Tweak) to trying to remember the 2-3 places in KDE to change the overall look/feel. Why do I need to remember to change where I go to switch window colors, window borders, desktop theme (which only changes the panel and menu), and more just to give my desktop a new theme?
Uncustomizable? Look at the plugins. Vanilla Gnome 3 is pretty unusable for a power user... but for a non-techie, its pretty damn close to Mac OS usable in its simplicity. For power users, there's always the plugins to get the old-style start menu, assorted taskbar entries, change window behavior, add/remove taskbars, add a fully customizable dock, and so on.
Powerful? 20 years ago Gnome was a mess too. I still have a hard time divining what the difference is between Applications->System Tools and System->Administration. At least in Windows 95 there was "Control Panel" (to say nothing of Windows 10's mess of configuration windows)
Compared to 20 years ago, EVERY UI is bloated. Windows 95 came on a CD and could be installed (with some work) in 200 MB. Windows 7 comes along at 50 GB, Windows 10 is about the same. My Ubuntu Gnome install sits somewhere around 8GB with dev software installed. Computers have changed a lot in 20 years - we've gone from 600 MHz Pentiums to 4.2 GHz 8-core desktops.
"GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience." The status icon tray was not in the way at all, it was hidden in the lower left corner of the screen. And since the applications that uses the tray will assume that the tray is still there, I'm guessing that they will continue to run in the background without the user knowing?
According to Gnome developers, removing of the system tray is so insignificant, that it is not even worth mentioning in the short list of changes. It is mentioned at the end of the long list, outside of the bullet points.
This means that if you don't have the latest TopIcons extension already installed, a lot of programs that minimize to Status Bar will become inaccessible. That's mainly non-Gnome programs.
Gnome developers are trying to force application developers to not use the "pretty old" standard that "predated Gnome 2.0" and instead to use Gnome specific API's like their notification.
The big problem is that they do not seem to understand what is the purpose of the Status Bar, how people use it and why it exists in all Desktop platforms - Linux, Windows and Mac.
The Status Bar is for checking the status of an application, with single glance, without need for any actions from the user, like moving mouse to specific position on the screen, having to click, switch desktops or open the program window.
In comparison, notification are for signaling change or event. Their use is not only different, they also could be quite annoying and actively ignored.
Here are few more links to read:
https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gnome/
https://lwn.net/Articles/732622/
Is it managed by a grumpy Portuguese guy, though?
dinner: it's what's for beer
I only use GNOME because KDE uses the nonfree Qt widget set.
dinner: it's what's for beer
It happened yesterday.
People still use Gnome.
GNOME was born on August 15 1997.
"Just search for common system settings, go into the settings section, click on dash panel configuration....."
What is GNOME terminal? Is that what you type 'xterm&' into to get a terminal to open? What a waste of time.
Wouldn't it be easier just to put an 'exec xterm&' line in my .fvwm2rc file? Or even better, put an 'xterm' line as the last line in my ~/.xinitrc file? (after the 'fvwm&' line, most likely)
Truly, it is a new era.
I used to use Gnome back when it was powerful, customization, intuitive and easy to use. In other words, back when it didn't suck and before it jumped the shark. When the Gnome devs lost their collective minds I switched to Xfce and have been on that ever since. However, I miss the days when Gnome was great and would love to see the project actually listen to its users and steer itself back onto the track of sanity.
It makes me sad, reading the comments here, to realize we're still eons away from that ever happening. With Gnome continuing its campaign of being a dumbed-down exercise in frustration, and KDE being a visual clusterfuck, it's no wonder that Linux continues to struggle to get traction.
I'll admit I wasn't a fan of gnome 3 from the beginning, and it took a few years before it started to work well.. but these days it's working really well.
I actually enjoy using gnome... what is up with all this negative sentiment?
Note: Don't get me wrong I still can't live without type-ahead in nautilus and will probably have to patch it when I upgrade again, but all in all gnome is nice...
agree. have a config that makes the keypad numbers different virtual desktops and use those on my right side monitor and the numbers on the top of the keyboard as the displays for my left monitor.
The people who worked on this is a font expert and the GTK+ maintainer. The nautilus maintainer was not involved, he was, working on nautilus. Developer time is not fungible. The font guy cannot turn around and work on nautilus. He works fonts and he provided a capability that we accepted.
What happened is that it stopped being a CDE clone, and decided to just be a sensible generic DE - a goal that it has achieved.