GNOME 3.4.0 Officially Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME 3.4.0 Officially Released

GNOME 3.4.0 has been officially released this morning as the latest biannual update to the GNOME 3.x Shell-based desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA3ODI

[Hamish Wilson]

In general this looks to be one hell of a release and arguably a bigger improvement than 3.2 was over 3.0. Lots of nice little small details smoothed out as well as a couple larger changes. I will be sure to try it out when I install Fedora 17 before it starts complaining when I copy my old xorg.conf over.

If I do have on criticism though, it is that they are making all of the applications names boring (Epiphany now Web, Eye of Gnome now Image Viewer...). I know this is in an effort to make everything consistent, but it is a bit boring. Now, I prefer that to the KDE way of just putting a "K" in front of everything, which tends to get old really fast in my opinion. But still...

At least they have Wanda the Fish in the Shell now. Somewhere...

[ArtKun]

Great news!
Waiting for GTK 3 themes to support the new GTK 3.4, and I hope to see more applications that use menu in the top bar.

[0xCAFE]

At least they have Wanda the Fish in the Shell now. Somewhere...

Type "free the fish" in the search field (fortunes must be installed).

[Awesomeness]

In general this looks to be one hell of a release and arguably a bigger improvement than 3.2 was over 3.0. Lots of nice little small details smoothed out as well as a couple larger changes.

Huh, http://www.h-online.com/open/feature...4-1484715.html argues the opposite: No large changes, eg. still no Zeitgeist/Activity Journal despite being in development since years.
H concludes: “users of GNOME 3.2 who were hoping for big changes will be just as disappointed as those who can't stand the third generation of GNOME and hoped that the GNOME developers would use this second overhaul to drop some of the major changes introduced by GNOME 3.”

3.4 is now the 3rd release of the 3.x series. Compare that to KDE Plasma: The first two releases were lacking but each 4.1 and 4.2 were significant improvements over the previous release with 4.2 (the 3rd release) been declared stable for general use.
Since then the KDE devs are pushing large changes (although with maturity of the user interface mostly on the back-end side): OpenGL ES capability in KWin, QML in Plasma, routing in Marble,…
The only larger change on the horizon is that new Boxes VM app. Weird to see GNOME pushing such a niche product, considering that GNOME claims to be a desktop for the general public.

[ejs1920]

If you've ever witnessed someone scrolling down a really long list agonisingly slowly using only the little arrow button at the end of the scrollbar, well, GNOME 3.4 solves that problem. No more little arrows at the ends of scrollbars.

The Disk Utility (palimpsest), or just Disks as it is now called, has been somewhat dumbed down, with anything useful hidden under a "More actions" button. And probably features the least obvious button icons possible: a square, a horizontal line, and a pair of gears.

[halfline]

For those interested, there's a live image to try it out here: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/misc/.../GNOME-3.4.iso

[ssam]

any improvement for for old schoolers?
can i put a cpu/ram/network graph in the top bar yet?
can i have virtual desktops on dual monitors?

otherwise i am happy sticking with gnome2 (MATE).

[devius]

The first two releases were lacking but each 4.1 and 4.2 were significant improvements over the previous release with 4.2 (the 3rd release) been declared stable for general use.

Funny, I used KDE from 4.3 to 4.6 and I wouldn't call any of the versions I used "stable"... just saying.

[ssam]

any idea how to get to the fall back session on the live cd (in qemu)? it auto logs in to gnome shell. i tried disabling gdm auto login. (ctrl+alt+2 to get to qemu terminal, "sendkey ctrl-alt-f3", then ctrl+alt+1 to get to the guest VT, log in as root, and then edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf). however once i logg out of the orginal gnome session i just get "oh no, something has gone wrong". restarting gdm does not help.