Ten Suggestions For The GNOME Camp

[Adrinnho]

When you decide on the usability of something you don't concentrate on what you would like people to do or what you think they do. You concentrate on what they actually do. Its really nice to have all the keyboard functionality but the majority of people work differently.

You are right...we are linux users and we just love to use the mouse, and really hate keyboard. That's why a majority created Arch and Gento, for the sole purpose of using the MOUSE. Keyboard is bad and scary and makes Linux so difficult to use.

[daniels]

Since I earn my money on the hardware side my productivity can't be measured with regards to different DEs/WMs. Since you claim that Gnome 3 (I would rather think that you mean Gnome Shell) is the most productive environment you have ever used I thought that as a software developer you have ways to measure that. Seems to me that this is only subjective thing, not something that can be measured.

But anyways, I find the whole discussion about how many clicks or moves you need with the mouse flawed anyways, since you need much more time to move your hand to the mouse and back to the keyboard than for moving/clicking the mouse cursor. I try to set up my systems in a way that a mouse is mostly not necessary (except for things like using GIMP, of course), but this also is a personal thing.

And that is the whole point, I would think: It comes down to personal preference.

We're in total agreeance!

Well, almost ...

That is what the real problem with Gnome Shell is. People expected it to be Gnome, since that is what they preferred and that is what it is named. But it isn't Gnome, it is a totally new DE that shares nothing with its predecessor than the name. A simple name change could have prevented this whole uproar and "dissatisfied users" thing.

Nope - look at the GNOME 1.x → 2.0 transition, which was just as violent and jarring as 2.x → 3.0, both under the hood and in terms of user experience. There was the same uproar, the same claim that absolutely no-one will be left using GNOME, since 'idiots' use OS X or Windows and everyone else with a brain would refuse to switch, and pretty much the same arguments advanced. And the same general rejection of the idea that personal preference had anything to do with it.

(As an aside though, no, I don't have any useful objective way to measure productivity. It depends on the time of day, the weather, how tired/stressed I'm feeling, what I'm working on - am I measuring lines of code, word count on a proposal, number of papers on vertex culling read? - who I'm working with, etc, etc. I don't have a good independent way to measure that, just gut feeling, and a deep feeling of frustration when I had to drop back to fallback mode a while ago due to various breakage.)

[BO$$]

I agree with most of what you are saying. In my opinion, Gnome 3 uses desktop space much more effectively than the older GNOME 2 (I too could never figure out why you would want two horizontal panels on a widescreen monitor). Gnome 3 just fits widescreen monitors better. I have more vertical space because of it. It took some time to get used to the new GUI paradigm; however, after using Gnome 3 for several releases, I feel I'm actually more productive on it.

How can you be more productive when now when you want to switch applications you have to go to a corner and then select your application instead of clicking on a damn taskbar ONCE? Plus even after going to the corner you have to find your application if you have many of them and they also switch places around when opening more applications, how can this be easier then clicking your application is on the taskbar (and memorizing the relative position of it on the taskbar for future fast use)?

[zxy_thf]

Has anyone found the TOP1 suggestion is weird? IMO Gnome-shell has the best customization support while seeing so many extensions.

The TOP1 should be "Release the extension ASAP" and half of other suggestions could be deleted.

[Hamish Wilson]

As someone who has been using Xfce as my primary desktop as Gnome Shell does not support Zaphod Mode, I recently had the opportunity to try out Gnome 2 again on my brother's machine. I was putting CentOS on it, and while I liked the nostalgic appeal, I could not help but notice several jarring faults. The panel placement on Gnome 2 is damn stupid, with this jarring manual position locks and a lack of a proper applet editor like Xfce and LXDE has. Even then things still kept moving about upon restarts.

There were also a lot of other bugs which I had forgotten about. Nautilus and it's desktop handling was a refreshing change, and I still miss a couple of Gnome 2's applets, but in many ways Xfce offers me what Gnome 2 did only better.

Now, Xfce has it's fair share of annoyances, most notably Thunar and xfdesktop. But it was interesting to note that after using Gnome 2 again I did not fall in love with it as much as some might have suspected. I wonder how many other people are looking back at it with rose tinted glasses as well.

[TobiSGD]

Nope - look at the GNOME 1.x → 2.0 transition, which was just as violent and jarring as 2.x → 3.0, both under the hood and in terms of user experience.

The change from Gnome 1 to Gnome 2 was before I changed to Linux, so I had to look up some screenshots how it looked. It seems to me that it, like Gnome 2, used the classic desktop layout with a menu, a panel and desktop icons. So the change from Gnome 1 to Gnome 2 seems, at least to me, not as radical as the change from Gnome 2 to Gnome Shell, with its more tablet oriented interface.
As I stated, in my opinion is the real problem with Gnome Shell that it changed its type of usage in a radical way. This is what really bothers people, they should just have said: "Hey look people, we have this new ideas that want we use to develop a new environment. Everyone that rather not wants to use the tablet interface but the old Gnome 2 style can do so if he finds some developers that take over Gnome, we will, because of the radical change, give our new desktop a new name". Instead they said: "We don't care what our users want, we just abandon Gnome 2, develop something completely new and name it Gnome 3, so that we have it placed in all major distros from the beginning, since it has this established name." Worked not really that way, with Ubuntu creating Unity and distros like Debian rather changing the default desktop to XFCE.

Just my point of view on that, this whole mess could have easily been avoided with a different name.

[F i L]

I love my Gnome-Shell Here's a Screenshot

[scionicspectre]

There are some good suggestions here that are being actively worked on- I'm glad the input wasn't entirely 'bring back GNOME 2'. Of course, the main issue with taking this poll seriously is the Phoronix part- the kinds of users who read Phoronix passionately enough to vote in a poll about GNOME might not be quite the core audience. Not to say we're not important, but I think that our opinions differ quite a lot amongst ourselves, and comparing those numbers to the entire user base GNOME supports may give you a slightly different perspective (I'm guessing, at most, less than half of Linux users read Phoronix).

Again, not saying the results aren't valid, only that it's a small part of the picture. We would do better to poll where Linux users of all types (and biases) can vote. The only polls I've seen about GNOME 3 are the Phoronix and some OMG Ubuntu! polls, and I think it's needless to say that's not representative.

[HokTar]

Wait, what?
And why in the name of God wouldn't you want to use the keyboard? Is it that awkward, uncommon, hard, strange to use a keyboard these days???

Yeh, now we know who's trolling LKML these days...Gnome 2 mouse lovers

Well, I have no issues with this at work. But when I just browse on my laptop while I'm also doing other stuff (e.g. eating) and I want to use one hand or just a few fingers then typing becomes a pain.
For the exact same reason massive mouse movements are annoying when your on a touchpad.

But I guess - according to your "definition" - I'm using Linux in the wrong way. I also guess that your solution would be along the Apple lines: hold it differently, instead of acknowledging and fixing the issue. (And I haven't even though of people with disabilities who can't use a keyboard properly.)

But hey, it's not your problem, right? Then all is well!

[ssam]

Wait, what?
And why in the name of God wouldn't you want to use the keyboard? Is it that awkward, uncommon, hard, strange to use a keyboard these days???

Yeh, now we know who's trolling LKML these days...Gnome 2 mouse lovers

sometimes i have a cup of tea in one hand and a mouse in the other. ctrl+alt+right is hard to do 1 handed.

On space usage gnome 2 panel is great, i have 2 and they are full of useful things. in gnome3 the panel takes up lots of precious pixels, and only gives me a clock. when i tried to get a system monitor in my panel i had a day of fail. i installed a gnome-shell extension through yum, which did nothing and had not documentation, eventually found i needed to type something in to the shell debug terminal to enable it. i gave my a next to useless, unconfigurable cpu graph that was only visible in the zoomed out mode. the shell extension website made my session crash, and my gnome non-login-to-able.

xfce feels like stepping back 10 years in terms of missing features. kde is good if you love control panels (can't i just remember where i like my external monitor).

MATE has kept me happy and productive.