The 2012 GNOME User Survey Begins, Take It Now

[log0]

My personal problem with Gnome 3 besides the Gnome devs attitude problems, is the technical design of the Shell.

I'm no developer, but the design of Shell, and Unity for that matter, concern me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems Unity is essentially a plugin for Compiz and Gnome-Shell is probably similar in it's dependance on Mutter. Basically these environments are dependant and tied into the compositer/WM and not modular.

If something in the window manager crashes, the whole environment can go down (I'm sure we're all familiar with the 'Oh no! Something went wrong' messages).

I guess they are trying to create tightly integrated environments yet it still seems odd. KDE, XFCE or E17 for example, can switch their compositors on and off (that in itself is handy) and don't rely on 3D acceleration. You still get the same desktop either way.

And now Unity and Shell are trying to push non 3D users through software rendering and boy, that seems pretty slow and horrible.

I think the Elementary team, despite being such a tight and integrated experience, have the right idea. I'm not sure about the need for 3D yet, but parts of the desktop like Wingpanel (the main panel), Plank (the dock) and even the menu (Slingshot) are modular and can be replaced if you wish it.

<sarcasm> How dare you to question the gnome shell vision? You are obviously a hater. Go away! </sarcasm>

[ElderSnake]

Everyone keeps repeating this. I followed the development of Gnome-Shell and GNOME3 as much as I could, and I never saw anything like it. Are you all sure that you are not confusing "attitude problems" and "not having the same vision as you"? It's funny how Linus is hold to such high esteem here despite sometimes saying really horrible things (don't get me wrong, I like the guy!) but as soon as anyone from GNOME (or even worse, the great satan Lennart!) you all go ballistic. It's interesting to observe, really...

Hello random GNOME dev? Hehe.

Anyway for me, and it seems many others, it's more the "GNOME brand" and "shaping the user experience"... kind of thing they keep spouting. I'm sure for some this seems like a great vision but it doesn't feel right. To me. But hey, that's why I use KDE nowadays. I'm just giving my views.

As a developer, I disagree.

But why? For example in KDE, if Plasma desktop crashes, it restarts itself and everything else is still running just fine. So, minor annoyance to the user, but everything still intact.
Any time something goes boom in Gnome-Shell, in my experience, after a error screen that is as useful as most Windows error messages (as in, not very) you end up back at the login manager and have to start again.

Also I actually don't mind Unity when its working well. But it's a concern to me why someone would build a desktop into a, at times, fragile accelerated environment when instead you could build the desktop itself and then add the compositing integration.

This also would have helped Ubuntu instead of having to build an additional 2D desktop (which they then scrapped because of the maintaining work of an extra environment) they could just, you know, switch off effects.

Just my 2c.

[disi]

Drop Down Terminal
Cool

I put into the config to run a tmux session as custom command, now I don't have to run terminal on workspace 1

[ElderSnake]

after a error screen that is as useful as most Windows error messages (as in, not very)

Not one to quote myself... but apparently these days Windows is actually a bit more informative than even Gnome-Shell and gives you an error keyword to at least search online with http://i.imgur.com/lk57d.jpg

Although the restarting thing is pretty drastic lol.

[kigurai]

Hello random GNOME dev? Hehe.

If time permitted, that would likely be true. Unfortunately, it is not.

Anyway for me, and it seems many others, it's more the "GNOME brand" and "shaping the user experience"... kind of thing they keep spouting. I'm sure for some this seems like a great vision but it doesn't feel right. To me. But hey, that's why I use KDE nowadays. I'm just giving my views.

I have no problem with people disagreeing. It's the bitching and name calling that ticks me off. If their vision does not fit yours (people in general, not you in particular) then switch to something else. I was a hardcore Ubuntu-user for quite a few years. But since I felt they were going in the wrong direction, I switched to Fedora a few releases ago. And that was the end of that.

But why? For example in KDE, if Plasma desktop crashes, it restarts itself and everything else is still running just fine. So, minor annoyance to the user, but everything still intact.
Any time something goes boom in Gnome-Shell, in my experience, after a error screen that is as useful as most Windows error messages (as in, not very) you end up back at the login manager and have to start again.

Also I actually don't mind Unity when its working well. But it's a concern to me why someone would build a desktop into a, at times, fragile accelerated environment when instead you could build the desktop itself and then add the compositing integration.

GS/Mutter have been very stable to me, so I have not seen that error message. I am just saying that I don't see it as a problem that software builds on other software. All software on my machine is tied to some other piece of software. If anything lower in the chain falls over, everything on top of it will obviously do too. GS sitting on top of Mutter is really no different than all environments sitting on top of X, which sits on top of the kernel, and so on.
Modularity is of course nice when it makes sense. If it is trivial to make something modular, then go ahead. Often, it is not, so unless you have good reasons to make your software modular, the problems are likely to be bigger than the benefits. Since I can think of zero benefits to GNOME to have GS running on anything other than Mutter, I can see why they did as they did.

[Fenrin]

[...]
Anyway for me, and it seems many others, it's more the "GNOME brand" and "shaping the user experience"... kind of thing they keep spouting. I'm sure for some this seems like a great vision but it doesn't feel right. To me. But hey, that's why I use KDE nowadays. I'm just giving my views.
[...]

if their policy of "shaping the user experience" is so strict like your pretending it to be, why did they even work on extension support for gnome3? This doesn't make any sense. The configurability of gnome 2 is actually considerable worse than it is in Gnome 3.

[Fenrin]

Drop Down Terminal
Cool

[...]

I also found this extension a few days ago. It is really helpful. Other extensions I like: Wikipedia Search Provider, Pomodoro, system-monitor

[ElderSnake]

if their policy of "shaping the user experience" is so strict like your pretending it to be, why did they even work on extension support for gnome3? This doesn't make any sense. The configurability of gnome 2 is actually considerable worse than it is in Gnome 3.

Even I'm a bit confused by that one. From what I've seen from some of their main devs, they really don't LIKE the fact there are extensions to change themes and just generally change the shell etc.

I can only think it's there to appease the masses but I believe, without trawling every single mailing list, they are a tad conflicted by it internally.

For example this quote by Allan Day:

Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design. We’ve fought long and hard to give GNOME 3 a consistent visual appearance, to make it synonymous with a single user experience and to ensure that that experience is of a consistently high quality. A general purpose extensions and themes distribution system seems to threaten much of that.

And

I agree with Allan. I am really concerned about this effort to encourage and sanction themes and extensions.

In addition to the things Allan mentioned in the preceding mails, I think there are a few other issues to consider.

1. We rely on enthusiasts for testing
2. We rely on enthusiasts for building our brand

I think it is clearly detrimental to both to have more fragmentation and reshaping, recoloring, and replacing the user experience – especially in this critically important group of early adopters.

The issue is not whether extensions may be useful. The issue is whether they will be harmful to our larger goals.

If we aren’t careful they will be. I agree with Allan that, if we insist on going through with this idea, we at least have a few places in the design that remain unchanged. I think that themes should notbe included, that the top bar should not be changed, and that the overview should not be fundamentally altered.

Which may be why the Theme Extension always seems rather broken..hmm. Not only broken extensions, but adding a decent amount of extensions, to me, it seems like the Shell gets slower/choppier. Whether this is a Javascript thing or what I don't know.

Of course KDE4 took quite some time to get more efficient and stable so that could be a similar thing here.

It's quite okay if people like Gnome 3, indeed they are probably the audience Gnome are targeting. But the sheer bashing and exodus of the Gnome desktop suggests that not all is well and they have alienated a great number of their original users.

This is a good article to read over, including the quotes http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/...ing-in-threes/

[Delgarde]

Its different enough that it should have been spun off into a separate, optional project. I don't like it for the same reasons I don't like LXDE and XFCE.

I'm not disputing that it's different - I'm disputing the claim that it represents "wholesale changing the UI paradigm". Because it really doesn't.

[Delgarde]

Add shutdown / restart / suspend options <<-- this comes in 3.6 but we lose the logout option

Add support for tiled window management <<-- this is something I miss

Other than that, Gnome 3 is great

Actually, the menu item I miss most is Hibernate. My elderly netbook *can* suspend, but since the battery life is almost non-existent, suspend isn't all that useful - the battery will probably still be dead by the time I switch it on again. Hibernating it is much more useful to me, and works fine on the hardware. I have extensions to add it back, but I'd rather do without them.

As for tiling, it's not something I care much for, but Shell *does* at least have minimal support for splitting the screen between two windows...