Linus Torvalds Is Back To Using GNOME 3 Desktop

[pingufunkybeat]

All linux des are full of useless s***, and no usefull things, and no one of them is good for daily usage, not to mention terrible performance and poor looks, but when you know, what kind of guys made them, then you can see, that all linux des are kind of the same - they all made by some kind of creepy guys, and all des are only good for 1 or 2 tasks, but not for anything else. Plus all linux distributions has terrible package managements, cause if you want to remove something, you must to remove half of your system.

Finally, a man of wisdom. We were all waiting for your post filled with information.

[scionicspectre]

GNOME 3's pretty good, and if you want a task bar or some persistent menus on the side, there's no reason you shouldn't. The default interface works fine, too- nothing is perfect, but I think GNOME 3 is a big improvement over what we've seen before, from a variety of perspectives (the core interface, the app design guidelines, etc.).

I really think people blow things out of proportion and treat every small flaw with utter disdain and mistrust. We're all working towards a more impressive and useful desktop, and some are designed better or differently from others. But we've gotten to the point where we have a lot of good options, and their apps interoperate with each other better than one would expect. I hope it will keep getting better, but it is hard to get a unified experience with so many different kinds of apps. Still, Windows suffers from this fractured design much more than we do, and if things settle down a bit I'm sure we can figure something out.

The UX behind GNOME and elementary is arguably up to par with what people expect from OS X, so I don't think we're doing a bad job. People just need to keep their dogmatic idiosyncrasies out of the argument and not be afraid to use a little common sense. Even if you're right, that doesn't always mean you'll be successful, so a good interface has to be a combination of what is best for a human unfamiliar with computers, but still acknowledges the history and structure people expect from the interface.

[a user]

Ohh well how about selecting what indicators are shown in the panel and moving things from the notification tray (which is horrible) to the panel, because it doesn't belong into the notification tray like Dropbox? Oh wait that's totally radical. No one would ever want to do that. To bad the iconmanager extension was broken several times and it seems the developer is feed up fixing it everytime.

aha. so after you read my post (so i assume as you have quoted it to post this), you come up with an (this) example?

well, i give up. this proves gnome 3 is broken beyond ... never mind. i should immediately uninstall it... oh wait...

[Yorgos]

After kde 4 replaced 3.8.x in Debian, I used it for 2 weeks and then I switched to gnome before I kill my self.
I knew that with the new gnome I would suffer death, but a less painful than kde.
i was switching DEs(heck I even used MATE for a while), more of them are lightweight, others have no packages, but all those until kde 4.8.x came to debian testing.
What I want to say is that, it might not be like the 3 version, as stable and as classic as back then kde was, but damn many bugs disappeared, staff were working as supposed to do and nepomuk was STILL a piece of shit.

The reason Torvalds is complaining is because he wants an out of the box tweaked DE, with the most common settings and let it just do its job.
Both on gnome and kde you got to do tweaks, where kde has the advantage here. You want to place new widgets? just drag 'n' drop them, you want more, they are 1 click away, same for the wallpapers, same for everything else. Instead in gnome there is only one way for most things, and that way is the hard way, which makes more people confused.

The reason why cinnamon is so popular is not because gtk, or the gnome name behind it or something similar, it's because it delivers something ready to use, almost full featured and makes most things to be 1-2 clicks away.

I personally want a solid classic desktop, a task-bar on the bottom, a fully functional notification area with the proper programs about network/system info and temperature and I get all of those with no sweat in kde.
The biggest issue that I have as a user who uses 3 types of layouts is that the qwerty to programmers dvorak(english) and native language switch is a pain in the ass and it does not work as supposed in most cases.
I cannot use alt+shift to switch layout because if I miss-press on of those keys I end up "writing" up in the menus(i lose focus) and also I cannot use ctrl+shift because every time I am trying to use paste in console, well ctrl+shift+V does not paste, it changes the language and then does nothing. i think it's xorgs fault and how it manages the keyboard input.

[pdffs]

Yeah some extensions have reached EOL. So what? Some are obsolete other are simply not that great and ended in the realm of oblivion. Thats fine and a natural dynamic.

That's not the complaint - the complaint is the GNOME team's seeming policy of breaking extensions every few releases, that stops your desktop from working as expected until extension maintainers can get around to matching the new requirements. This the main thing that made me give up on GNOME Shell - expecting it to be broken any time there was an update. I don't have time for that, and I'm sure most extension developers are fed up with it too.

- normaly no desktop icons anmore

I think that was possible to set to in gnome 2, too. But you dont come automaticly to the point thinking that could be good thing, or at least a worth thing to google after... but it is good.
Because many just then use their desktop as place where there put everything, maybe even sort them by sections and whitespace between them, then you put that pc one time on a other monitor or somethint and all sorting aranging goes to hell. etc. there are more reasons why thats a bad idea, or on the other side, why a desktop that nearly needs such "features" because else you would not find your files.

Erm, this sounds like it should be fixed by not screwing up the icon placement when resolution changes, not by deciding that things don't belong on the desktop. I use the desktop as a sort of inbox, and find it very convenient. I don't really see how disabling desktop icons improves things, since you can just choose not put things there...

- dynamic workplaces

love this because you dont have to think of how many do you need, just create them automaticly if you open a new application

One of my pet hates in GNOME Shell - I use workspaces to organize application groups, one for communications, one for browsing, one for terminals, etc. I really don't think this was a problem that needed solving, or they could have at least included an option to set a minimum number of workspaces for people who prefer a fixed number.

- better task-switcher

its great to have a seperate key for switching different windows of the same programm, so if you have 20 terminals open (or let it be 5 and 3 other windows) you can easily switch between the different apps, without pressing 25 times on tab

Many DEs have allowed binding a key combo for this for some time.

- better keyboard support

if you are writing surving etc, you nearly always need the keyboard, of course there are ways to nearly always use your mouse instead, as example instead of typing each time phoronix.com (and somewhere between tab for complition) you can go to your bookmarks and klick on them. But you never can only use the mouse, because for writing stuff like this post, you need a keyboard or it would at least be very hard to type it with a soft-keyboard with a mouse ^^ and gnome-shell doesnt make using it with mouse harder, but makes it way better to use than gnome 2 was.

I actually found keyboard support to be the most frustrating aspect of GNOME Shell - hard-coded keys that are extremely difficult to unbind (or re-bind), and inability to bind keys to anything but the most rudimentary functionality were the major pain-points. And if anything, because of the lack of bindable actions, I found it forced me to use the mouse significantly more than other DEs.

- the search funktionality (of course basicly the biggest change, again with better keyboard support)

There have been solutions to this for a while, it's not really anything new.

- better app finder menu, no searching through menus, just type in a few letters of what you want, or dynamicly make a menu, but of course there is still a menu if you in rare cases would need it anyway (never happend to me)

Again, there have been solutions to this for a while. These last two points were nicely integrated additions to the standard DE though...

[pingufunkybeat]

The biggest issue that I have as a user who uses 3 types of layouts is that the qwerty to programmers dvorak(english) and native language switch is a pain in the ass and it does not work as supposed in most cases.
I cannot use alt+shift to switch layout because if I miss-press on of those keys I end up "writing" up in the menus(i lose focus) and also I cannot use ctrl+shift because every time I am trying to use paste in console, well ctrl+shift+V does not paste, it changes the language and then does nothing. i think it's xorgs fault and how it manages the keyboard input.

Yeah, most of the Shift and Ctrl combinations interfere with some thing or the other.

Personally, I use the Win key for switching layouts (I regularly switch between 4), and it works great. Ctrl+Space, of course, is for ibus and CJK input.

[pingufunkybeat]

I actually found keyboard support to be the most frustrating aspect of GNOME Shell - hard-coded keys that are extremely difficult to unbind (or re-bind), and inability to bind keys to anything but the most rudimentary functionality were the major pain-points. And if anything, because of the lack of bindable actions, I found it forced me to use the mouse significantly more than other DEs.

This is one thing I find mind-boggling.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was told that the "Run application" shortcut is Ctrl-Space. That conveniently breaks every desktop in Asia, because this is the default CJK input shortcut.

[Feared]

Gnome3 has come a long way, I've been using it since 3.2 (you know when you were still looking for the shutdown button) and It's currently my favourite DE by far. I do admit it did/does a lot of stupid things that need to be fixed however the developers do seem to be mostly aware of the short comings and are preparing to fix most if not all of them. Gnome3 to me is for users who want speed and efficiency. While other DE's like XFCE/lxde only bring traditionalism and speed.

I was using failsafe-gnome until they announced its demise. I switched to Xfce but found that Thunar is the weak point. No integrated file search (just a hack to run Catfish in a target directory) and no tabbed browsing.

Thunar has tabs... at least in newer versions (1.6.2). I'm using it instead of Nautilus under Gnome 3.6
I've always liked Thunar due to how lightweight it is and it's speed. I'm not in a position where I need to search for files often so I have no need to have a file searching system in my file manager. You might which is fine but me and a lot of other people prefer the speed of Thunar don't need everything integrated into our file managers.

[tvall]

.....I just use fluxbox

[Grawp]

I was using failsafe-gnome until they announced its demise. I switched to Xfce but found that Thunar is the weak point. No integrated file search (just a hack to run Catfish in a target directory) and no tabbed browsing.

Yeah. I really missed the tabbed browsing when I was trying to switch to Xfce from KDE. There's also no way to assign keyboard shortcut to 'Open terminal here' or a way to have embedded terminal.
There's also really stupid address bar which is hard set to icons or text path and doesn't support automatic switching like in Dolphin or even Windows 7 file manager. I also miss the ability to throw all buttons and menus away like in KDE applications. I know KDE is slow and I'd like to get rid of it and get something faster but the tenths of second I miss doing some action in KDE can't compare to seconds I miss in other WMs.
Btw. I also tried using Krusader but it doesn't have a tree view where I can choose between expanding tree with right arrow or actually entering the folder with enter.