Ah yes, that's true. Most of the GNOME libraries are stable, but GNOME Shell and the extensions ystem is still considered "work in progress" and have not yet stabilized since it's going through that cycle of responding to various bugs, user enhancement and so forth. Once they move to a more stable api, extensions shouldn't break from release to release.
I think you're being distracted by "touch screen" interface. It isn't exactly designed around a touch screen. It's designed around "application centric" vs "workspace centric". The animations are used to make a distinction that you're moving from one task to another.
The reason you see similarity is because on mobile devices, it's also application specific. But there is still a different domain involved.
The new way *is* better mostly because we have greater control to make changes over the entire desktop than we could before. In the old way, we had a lot of inconsistency between various parts. Applets didn't behave like other applets, the network applet didn't have a uniform GUI.
GNOME 3 also made theming both apps and the desktop easier by using CSS instead of some custom.gtkrc or some other insanity. There are a lot of cool things under the hood. But it's all not being talked about because of issues around user interaction.
We can do things with GNOME 3 that we likely couldn't do with GNOME 2. I expect that you'll see some interesting things that people have come up with once extensions hit critical mass.
GNOME 3 requires that you change how you interact with your computer. Some people find that hard to do. It's not they are "stubborn old fools", but rather it's hard to adjust to a new way of doing something. The rate of adjustment is variable. But there are plenty of people who have adapted to using the new way and are productive.
I've had a similar experience when moving from Perl to Python, you spend 3 weeks struggling to learn the python way of doing things knowing full well that if you move back to Perl you can get this piece of code working in minutes instead of an hour because you're google searching relevant docs to figure out how to do it in the new way.
Eventually, you'll figure out how to do it. If not, in GNOME 3's case, there are extensions that can help ease the transition. Mint for instance, completely changed the paradigm back to something similar to GNOME 2. Extensions are extensive, you can pretty much mix and match just about every desktop component that has a GObject interface that is exposed through javascript. I expect GNOME 3 to go places that other desktops won't be able to do as easily.
I'm much older. But I know that IOS and Windows 8 are all going to be pursuing similar avenues. I do not think that you can avoid that OS GUIs are going to be developed primarily for mobile devices and that there will be a convergence of the OS to use the same GUI for all hardware types.
In this case, GNOME has reached that point earlier and will be able to develop their ideas ahead of Windows.
There is no "if" about releasing a DE that looks like GNOME3Shell. Search for windows 8 on youtube.
Very well, we can use your term "widely despised" if you wish, but it still stands that it's a widely known general purpose language that crosses a lot of boundaries.
Hah, that's what some of us thought too. I'm sure people who want to show off their Linux desktop and how cool it is that they have a windows 95 desktop compared to all the shiny stuff coming out with windows 8 and IOS on Macbook.
Why would they do that? You realize that most of GNOME's api have been stable since 2.0. The goal was not to break API compatibility unless it happens. Also you don't quite understand how extensions. Extensions are done using something called GObject introspections, it basically means that you can write a library and put meta data into the code that exports its interfaces. Then languages automatically pick up the API from the core C library. So python, ruby, javascript will all pick up the new API. So, you don't have to play catch up or break anything.
If you break the API, you break everything including all the software on the C library. They won't be doing that.
The new noveau driver seems to be heading towards fixing that. I almost had mine working, and I'm hoping that subsequent versions will finally get it working properly.
Javascript is by far one of the most popular languages for emerging developers. Javascript has it's problems of course, but by far there is a very large base of people who know it, much more than C these days.
Actually, if you read Clem's post on it, you'll see that he does in fact thinks it's great technology. He may not like all elements of it but what he is happy with is that he'll be able to modify it to provide a hybrid user experience.
All you've enunciated is that you don't like it because it wasn't what you've been used to. I believe we went through this before with GNOME 1.x -> GNOME 2.x. Go back and look at that thread on slashdot and see if it doesn't sound like the same thing.
You are exactly right that people see Linux as an exclusive club and they don't want the noobs comign in and spoiling it for them. I've long suspected that. Good observation.
sri
Let's see how you feel about that after 10 years. I started off like that.. scripting my functionality, making my desktop conform to whatever I wanted to do to make it totally efficient. Wasted days perfecting it. As I got older, I didn't give a rats ass because everytime a new version came out I had to do re-do it. I just want a desktop that works, because these days I'm more concentrating on my tasks than I am my desktop. The modern linux desktop is all about that. KDE4, GNOME 3, Unity, all of that is about doing it. If you want to stick with Windowmaker or just use console, hey more power to you.
Cheap unlimited power will only create a larger population.. you will continue to have wars and pollution due to consumption. You'll also create great pressure on the environment causing something to break. Most likely this ends up with habitats being destroyed.. habitats that conceivably we rely on. Eventually that will lead to a war as a method to create balance or simple self destruction. Either way, the planet won't care, it will achieve balance again.. it's life span is in the millions of years, it will recover, but we will be gone and turned into oil for the next race to do it all over again.:-) I wonder who the new Jesus will be.
We have it on Roku, and now it's on the android as well. You can get Al-Jazeera anywhere. And yeah, their english version is a lot more of a serious news network that presents news. CNN/FOX/MSNBC provides entertainment + news and shows that make you fear, laugh, or maybe both.
That's pretty shallow statement. If you're going to base technology you use based on the contributor list, I don't know what to tell you. Frankly, good riddance.
er tha's why we have extensions? We already have an extension that puts a dock on the right hand side of the screen. There is already a way to put back the proper window controls. Very likely someone will write an extension to bring back window lists. The extension system is pretty damn powerful. You can do stuff with it you can't do on other desktops. When your extension system can connect to printers, bluetooth, networking, the animation system, and everything else you can pretty much do whatever you want.
The goal for the project is to have a default setup that works for the majority of people.
Threatening me with jumping ship to XFCE is not a very effective method of getting a project to listen to your concerns. When did I say maximize a window? You took "desktop to fade away" to mean maximize everything?
From the way you describe what you're doing it seems GNOME 3 would work the way you wanted it to. Workspaces are cheap, create as many as you want. If you want a row of icons, there is an extension that will put the shortcut bar on your desktop instead of the overview. I don't think there is a way to remove the top panel but perhaps someone will find a way to do that.
Remember this is a dot oh release. That means that a new path of maturity occurs from here. It'll take some time to get back or some of the things you saw before. You don't have to switch, you can stick with GNOME 2 if you wanted to. Why would you go and move to another desktop environment if the current one satisfies your requirements? Just because there is a new release doesn't mean you have to immediately switch to it.
Hell you can move to Mint I think they are going to keep the old gnome 2 experience on gnome 3 libraries.
One could say the same for the horse right? It still got you places didn't it? Again, I think I make the argument that when we ask more from the Linux eco system we'll raise the bar. I think the fact that we want to keep raising the bar improves everything. Also, taking risks is also a benefit. GNOME took the same risks back in 2.0 and it is pretty successful today is it not?
Again, you need to try it for a week and wrap your mind around it.
sri
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes, that's true. Most of the GNOME libraries are stable, but GNOME Shell and the extensions ystem is still considered "work in progress" and have not yet stabilized since it's going through that cycle of responding to various bugs, user enhancement and so forth. Once they move to a more stable api, extensions shouldn't break from release to release.
The reason you see similarity is because on mobile devices, it's also application specific. But there is still a different domain involved.
The new way *is* better mostly because we have greater control to make changes over the entire desktop than we could before. In the old way, we had a lot of inconsistency between various parts. Applets didn't behave like other applets, the network applet didn't have a uniform GUI.
GNOME 3 also made theming both apps and the desktop easier by using CSS instead of some custom .gtkrc or some other insanity. There are a lot of cool things under the hood. But it's all not being talked about because of issues around user interaction.
We can do things with GNOME 3 that we likely couldn't do with GNOME 2. I expect that you'll see some interesting things that people have come up with once extensions hit critical mass.
The hope is that it will be better, but like everything GNOME 3 will continue to evolve just like KDE4 evolved and GNOME 2 evolved over time.
GNOME 3 requires that you change how you interact with your computer. Some people find that hard to do. It's not they are "stubborn old fools", but rather it's hard to adjust to a new way of doing something. The rate of adjustment is variable. But there are plenty of people who have adapted to using the new way and are productive. I've had a similar experience when moving from Perl to Python, you spend 3 weeks struggling to learn the python way of doing things knowing full well that if you move back to Perl you can get this piece of code working in minutes instead of an hour because you're google searching relevant docs to figure out how to do it in the new way. Eventually, you'll figure out how to do it. If not, in GNOME 3's case, there are extensions that can help ease the transition. Mint for instance, completely changed the paradigm back to something similar to GNOME 2. Extensions are extensive, you can pretty much mix and match just about every desktop component that has a GObject interface that is exposed through javascript. I expect GNOME 3 to go places that other desktops won't be able to do as easily.
I'm much older. But I know that IOS and Windows 8 are all going to be pursuing similar avenues. I do not think that you can avoid that OS GUIs are going to be developed primarily for mobile devices and that there will be a convergence of the OS to use the same GUI for all hardware types. In this case, GNOME has reached that point earlier and will be able to develop their ideas ahead of Windows. There is no "if" about releasing a DE that looks like GNOME3Shell. Search for windows 8 on youtube.
Very well, we can use your term "widely despised" if you wish, but it still stands that it's a widely known general purpose language that crosses a lot of boundaries.
Hah, that's what some of us thought too. I'm sure people who want to show off their Linux desktop and how cool it is that they have a windows 95 desktop compared to all the shiny stuff coming out with windows 8 and IOS on Macbook.
See above.
Why would they do that? You realize that most of GNOME's api have been stable since 2.0. The goal was not to break API compatibility unless it happens. Also you don't quite understand how extensions. Extensions are done using something called GObject introspections, it basically means that you can write a library and put meta data into the code that exports its interfaces. Then languages automatically pick up the API from the core C library. So python, ruby, javascript will all pick up the new API. So, you don't have to play catch up or break anything. If you break the API, you break everything including all the software on the C library. They won't be doing that.
The new noveau driver seems to be heading towards fixing that. I almost had mine working, and I'm hoping that subsequent versions will finally get it working properly.
I can see why you posted as Anonymous Coward. :)
Javascript is by far one of the most popular languages for emerging developers. Javascript has it's problems of course, but by far there is a very large base of people who know it, much more than C these days.
Actually, if you read Clem's post on it, you'll see that he does in fact thinks it's great technology. He may not like all elements of it but what he is happy with is that he'll be able to modify it to provide a hybrid user experience.
Exactly. GNOME Extensions are pretty extensive. You could theoretically implement any user interface using it.
All you've enunciated is that you don't like it because it wasn't what you've been used to. I believe we went through this before with GNOME 1.x -> GNOME 2.x. Go back and look at that thread on slashdot and see if it doesn't sound like the same thing.
You are exactly right that people see Linux as an exclusive club and they don't want the noobs comign in and spoiling it for them. I've long suspected that. Good observation. sri
Let's see how you feel about that after 10 years. I started off like that.. scripting my functionality, making my desktop conform to whatever I wanted to do to make it totally efficient. Wasted days perfecting it. As I got older, I didn't give a rats ass because everytime a new version came out I had to do re-do it. I just want a desktop that works, because these days I'm more concentrating on my tasks than I am my desktop. The modern linux desktop is all about that. KDE4, GNOME 3, Unity, all of that is about doing it. If you want to stick with Windowmaker or just use console, hey more power to you.
So, do they quit or what? How do they settle the issue inside their minds? And what the hell arethey doing attending such a class in the first place?
Cheap unlimited power will only create a larger population.. you will continue to have wars and pollution due to consumption. You'll also create great pressure on the environment causing something to break. Most likely this ends up with habitats being destroyed.. habitats that conceivably we rely on. Eventually that will lead to a war as a method to create balance or simple self destruction. Either way, the planet won't care, it will achieve balance again.. it's life span is in the millions of years, it will recover, but we will be gone and turned into oil for the next race to do it all over again. :-) I wonder who the new Jesus will be.
We have it on Roku, and now it's on the android as well. You can get Al-Jazeera anywhere. And yeah, their english version is a lot more of a serious news network that presents news. CNN/FOX/MSNBC provides entertainment + news and shows that make you fear, laugh, or maybe both.
That's pretty shallow statement. If you're going to base technology you use based on the contributor list, I don't know what to tell you. Frankly, good riddance.
er tha's why we have extensions? We already have an extension that puts a dock on the right hand side of the screen. There is already a way to put back the proper window controls. Very likely someone will write an extension to bring back window lists. The extension system is pretty damn powerful. You can do stuff with it you can't do on other desktops. When your extension system can connect to printers, bluetooth, networking, the animation system, and everything else you can pretty much do whatever you want. The goal for the project is to have a default setup that works for the majority of people.
Well, why not just stick with GNOME 2 until it moves what you call experimental stage? Why move to something else at all?
Remember this is a dot oh release. That means that a new path of maturity occurs from here. It'll take some time to get back or some of the things you saw before. You don't have to switch, you can stick with GNOME 2 if you wanted to. Why would you go and move to another desktop environment if the current one satisfies your requirements? Just because there is a new release doesn't mean you have to immediately switch to it.
Hell you can move to Mint I think they are going to keep the old gnome 2 experience on gnome 3 libraries.
sri
One could say the same for the horse right? It still got you places didn't it? Again, I think I make the argument that when we ask more from the Linux eco system we'll raise the bar. I think the fact that we want to keep raising the bar improves everything. Also, taking risks is also a benefit. GNOME took the same risks back in 2.0 and it is pretty successful today is it not? Again, you need to try it for a week and wrap your mind around it. sri