What Linux Users Are Saying About GNOME In 2012

1901: please fix the ibus problem in GNOME

1902: 1) The questions of this survey sounds somewhat biased to me and do not comply with what I learned about surveys in the university.

2) In question 9 don't mix community and technical topics. Having "Developer Attitude" in the possible answers by makes me want to throw up. A survey is supposed to be objective and this just drags the flamewars off the mailing lists into this survey. And while at the topic, please add an "other" option in question 9

3) Shell Performance (In my main laptop I got an second gen iCore but still it is slower than the old interface + it drains more battery)

4) Bugs. I stumble upon some regularly. No input is accepted anymore because some program did not release the focus properly (and no way to fix it without changing to another VT and killing some applications - which I cannot teach my mother to do).

1903: Thanks and keep working to improve, be innovative and create a desktop experience: clean, unique, fast, productive, streamlined and beautiful.

1904: Keep up the good work

1905: None really. I installed Xfce on top of Ubuntu 12.04 and am reasonably happy now. Will most likely not try Gnome again, even if it changes course.

1906: You shouldn't have removed perfectly good functionality all over the place. Make a "beginner" option somewhere if you need, maybe even set it by default, but don't strip stuff down. palimpsest wasn't the greatest benchmark for example, but why throw it out when it worked?

The Activities view to things is what made me not run gnome 3 until fedora kind of forced me to. A workstation or even a laptop isn't a tablet. Users who want that are just going to get one. And IOS and Android have that space covered, don't try to compete there.

And now that I am using it, I find it needs too much tweaks to behave somewhat similarly to what I grew to expect from my desktop. I kind of adjusted to the user interface (mostly because I am not yet annoyed enough to totally divert from my distributions default) But I severely dislike how much ressources it burns just to show a desktop. It's a bigger memory hog than firefox. And it uses up lots of cpu cycles for I don't know what, especially if there's something animated running somewhere.

Yes, my hardware is relatively decent, my systems have 4 gig minimum, accelerated graphics are available (a core2 quad with onboard intel g35 being by far the worst from the three). yet for example video playback was less processor intensive in gnome2. i've seen full hd vids stutter on gnome 3 that used to play back just fine.

And think of the environmental footprint of gnome 3. If the average power consumption of a system goes up by just 1W because Gnome3 doesn't allow the processor to idle as much and gives the graphics card more work to do (which seems a low estimate based on my measurements), that's going to be at least 1 kWh / year for each user. How many are there - a million? Or ten? Or fifty?

1907: You guys made the biggest mistake in the history of Linux!!!
After Gnome 3 was released and i saw the horror and stupidity of it, i changed with Xfce.
I used to love Gnome 2, it was the most beautiful DE ever used. Now is a stupid joke and i hope you guys receive as much negative comments as possible, perhaps you wake the fuck up.

1908: listen to users and don't remove options that user uses (like things happened in nautilus recently).

1909: Please, don’t drop support of the 2.32 branch. Its utilities are good to adjust profile settings with and are really simple for a novice user.

1910: Please give me back a perfect gnome, not a uniform hell, not a all-in-one hell. For example, I can change to other IM easily if I don't like the ibus. Please keep compatible with other WMs.
Nobody can all the things perfect.
So you'd better make a good platform for others to use and develop softwares on which, not just give us an all-in-one 'hell'!
I want to uninstall some components if I don't like them, just as the Gnome2.

1911: Please give me back a perfect gnome, not a uniform hell, not a all-in-one hell. For example, I can change to other IM easily if I don't like the ibus. Please keep compatible with other WMs.
Nobody can all the things perfect.
So you'd better make a good platform for others to use and develop softwares on which, not just give us an all-in-one 'hell'!
I want to uninstall some components if I don't like them, just as the Gnome2.

1912: I sort of like the GNOME Shell interface, but I believe that at least basic configurability out of the box is needed.

One font size won't work for everybody (old vs young people) and cantarell font (or any complex font for that matter) isn't quite that great for desktop use (change font to some Sans font, size 8 or 9, pretty clear compared to cantarell, size 11).

On normal monitors such complex fonts aren't that great. They need to be big in order to look good. Monitors and printed paper are two different things. (Google: Sans vs Serif readibility) Big fonts waste screen space anyway.

1913: The Most Important thing is , shrink the memory usage of Fucking Gnome!

1914: Improve the default gnome icon theme.Yes,it's very important.

1915: I am badly loving Gnome 2.3

1916: please get back to traditional interface

1917: Please preserve more _useful_ features from gnome2. Gnome3, although I had tried to adapted to it for a whole year, is a total mess inconvenient to use.

1918: - GNOME 3 is really an improvement!

- Fine graded and easy accessible control what/where will be searched when performing a gnome-search.

- Easy way to determine what command is performed, when clicking on an icon. ("proper names") "image viewer" vs "eye of gnome" vs "eog"

- Less icons more text

- Possibility to move the titlebar sideways. (Option to save precious hight in widescreen displays without the need to enter fullscreen mode).

1919: Gnome developers should stop acting like they are fedora developers (or is that the opposite ?). Other distros have a hard time making usptream understand not everything fedora supports must be hard-enabled in new gnome releases and this is hurting Gnome as it delays adoption of new releases and upstream/downstream contribution workflow.

Last examples are forced selinux and kerberos support in some packages for Gnome 3.6, most likely extended in 3.8.

1920: 1: Keep up the good work.
2: The interface needs to be snappy.
2.1: Currently that is not always the case, even on new hardware.
2.2: I have had bad experiences with both AMD and NVidia graphics. How about a lost of gpu's which will give me:
a) no crashes
b) totem being able to play a 1080p mkv without loosing frames
c) for laptops: stable resume capability
d) bonus: allow me to run 3D programs without messing stuff up when returning to the system
3: Perhaps an option for less padding like gimp has had for ages?

1921: Stop concentrating so much on a tablet like interface and pay more attention to usability in a desktop environment, please.
Give me more customization options without the need for third party applications or extensions.

1922: KDE is better than GNOME.

1923: I find the 'raw' Gnome Shell quite confusing and an usability mess without some extensions.

Most of the functionality I miss is in extensions.
I'd like to see some of them integrated, or at least the option to activate and configure them seamlessly. (like Dash to Dock..)

1924: Speed. This does not get enough attention these days. Maybe people are assuming there is enough horsepower but that is besides the point. Stuff needs optimisation. Enlightenment for instance is a flashy *not that it matters* desktop which feels optimized. gnome does not...

1925: Give up your stupid "developers know it all, users must shut the fuck up" attitude.

1926: Given that some high-profile distributions like Linux Mint have migrated away from GNOME 3 I feel developers need to realize that they are busy creating something that users don't want and won't use. I have been using DR17 (Enlightenment) for several years now, but before DR17 I was using GNOME 2. Was it perfect? No. But it was MUCH better than the current GNOME 3. GNOME 3 certainly looks fancy, but it sacrifices much on the usability front, which quite frankly makes it not worth using. If/Until the GNOME project changes their priorities from the current course to one of actually creating a window manager that users want to use, I will continue to recommend other window managers (LXDE, XFCE, DR17) to linux users.

1927: The File Picker should be better:
- If I chose to use single click on nautilus, file picker should use single click too
- File picker should turn to default file picker, examples:
-- using KDE, Gnome file picker function should use Kde's one
-- same on Windows
It looks awful for others to have different file pickers.
ViceVersa for Kde on Gnome BTW

1928: Work better with Ubuntu developers.

1929: Please do not treat users as if they were stupid. Provide everyone with a usable config to start with, but let them tweak their system to their liking. Stop hiding options in gconf/dconf! Each time I hear/read about Gnome devs being proud of removing another few options I have to think of Orwell's 1984, because in this story every edition of the Newspeak dictionary contains less words than the one before. People are individuals and many want their desktop to represent their individuality. GNOME 3 makes this harder than necessary. For example wallpapers... why don't you offer an option to add a directory of nice pictures to the list of available wallpapers? why do I need to use external scripts and gconf (?) to have a slideshow of my favorite pictures as wallpaper? At the moment GNOME 3 customisation ist a pita! This needs to be changed!

Give the users the tools they need to make their system look and act as they like. No, gconftool/dconftool ist NOT what I am talking about! Give us a nice and easy to use gui! Take a look at KDE, in case you don't know, what I'm talking about.

1930: Bring back 2D for PC with slow video card support.

I really tried and could take wm slow respond.

1931: As the kernel does not solve all the problems for Linux graphical desktop applications, the desktop layer has to. It thus has a dual mandate to be useable by the user, and friendly to the (possibly volunteer) application developer who wants to invest their time and effort learning and developing to the API.

I agree with Miguel de Icaza's blog post. GNOME's fundamental failure is that it changes things for a perceived abstract, insular sense of goodness, thereby missing the entire developer ecosystem impact, ISV impact, the distributor ecosystem impact, let alone the end user impact. This builds the perception of "too hard to work with" and not worth the effort. Transparency has been low.

The KDE/GNOME schism has seriously hurt Linux desktop adoption.

The willingness to force developers to change their code to adopt the latest GNOME idea forces volunteers to cover old ground over and over. APIs should be deprecated only in the most extreme circumstances, and with significant warning in time. Managing the API is thus the single biggest critical success factor in a developer oriented ecosystem because developers invest their time to understand and code to these standards.

The failure to build a robust developer ecosystem has seriously hurt Linux desktop adoption by making it very hard to create what end users value: quality applications.

The view from outside is that GNOME is highly inwardly focused, and makes arbitrary changes based on its own internal developer's assessment of "best". While potentially well meaning, it has seriously impaired application developer adoption. In other words, GNOME appears to miss its responsibility to the application developer community. This is exemplified by the lack of a strong application developer ecosystem.

For what it might be worth, if I were the GNOME BDFL I would:
- adopt QT with its 600+ developers instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. The conditions that led to the Gnome/KDE schism are over now.
- bring the KDE & Gnome environments together to halt the linux desktop factionalism.
- put a GTK+ et al shim over top of QT to ensure backwards compatibility.
- build an explicit distro ecosystem with an evangelist role to manage it to ensure distro input is heard and to change the current tone of the existing relationships. Welcome ideas from anywhere.
- create a GNOME developer ecosystem evangelist role to build a developer ecosystem and hunt down every obstacle to developing great applications.
- listen carefully to the ecosystem input, and build a development roadmap based on this input
- create a system architecture team to keep the roadmap for technical architecture of the overall system aligned to the community input, and understand the developer impacts of proposed changes
- create a API team and an open API standards process to ensure a predictable evolution of the desktop API aligned to the technical architecture. Look to the IETF as a possible model here, or POSIX or Khronos GRoup process.
- make the isolation of the app developers from distro / kernel changes as a major mission of the desktop API & implementation.
- focus on modular subsystems within a unified look and feel held together by a standards driven API and quality systems architecture. Anyone should be able to implement a subsystem piece and if properly done, you won't feel the edges at all.
- substantially increase the quality of API documentation as part of the commitment to the developer ecosystem.
- aggressively support the transition to Wayland as part of the technical architecture roadmap.

1932: If you REALLY want to innovate on the desktop, why not focus on providing as robust, flexible user (not just developer) toolset as possible, instead of inflicting your "vision" on the community? Let the users themselves do their own little *in vivo* UX studies.

Perhaps you can remember what it was like when you were children: we'd all rather have had Legos than a pose-and-play dollhouse that simply looked like a space station. Well, that's Gnome3, and it's Unity.

There's a reason the "traditional" desktop came to dominate: natural selection in its domain. Changes can't really be enforced, even by Micsosoft. Give us a better-configurable desktop, icons, panels, and throw the innovations into the toolbox. Let us configure it the way we want. We won't disappoint!

1933: Keep consistency of the desktop UI design and improve it constantly.Big changing frequently from an idea to another is bad.

1934: It'd be great to have an easy way to get the latest releases of GNOME without having to work around distribution modifications. A Debian/Ubuntu based pure GNOME3 distribution would be great!

1935: 0) Talk talk talk and also listen to the community in a more social way before baking decisions. Take polls, draft standards, allow feature voting try to be OPEN AS IN BE DEMOCRATIC (the real deal i mean)

1) Clear and structured configuration backend being hackable by editing files instead of clicking buttons. Of course i don't need .local/config .config .gconf .gconf2 /etc/foo /usr/foo/whatever and 30 places where file<->app associations are looked up. It's a pain and simply not manageable.

2) That "shell" stuff belongs to a tablet (touch controlled) maybe, and forced compositing using hw acceleration is a waste of watts - let the user decide. Bring back the old fashioned ui to the desktops/laptop version.

3) Reduce dependencies, promote "standard" apps. There are like a trillion image / pdf viewers whatever. None of these can be called mature and/or feature complete.

4) Act like a steering committee, define rules, create a unique experience and, assure quality. I like the Linux Mint themes and stuff, trying to get kde/gtk apps look like each other, it's not complete but more ideally as anything I've seen before… (in the end it just hides the mess and is also unmanageable [sadly])

5) If you still feel like changing how things used to be once a year than better abandon GNOME and define rules and do the paperwork first before pulling out the next messed up version no one can handle

1936: I think we need a better way to launch applications and a better default theme with bit small fonts.

1937: Network-manager feels broken!

1938: Keep the black theme and good work!

1939: don't ever remove configuration options from the GUI!
the theme has way to much whitespace, reduce that by some square meters!

1940: The main goal for me is to have the most space for the applications and control everything with mouse + keyboard + sometimes onscreen keyboard.
The unity-amazon datatrading is another huge factor for me.

Just found out that there is a global menu for gnome. Thanks Phoronix for making me think about gnome and start searching. Will test today.

Thanks GNOME team for making this awesome desktop environment!

1941: Recently I switched to KDE for the desktop equipment. It felt more pleasant. I think in Gnome 3.x I feel myself a bit constraint. It makes the desktop feel a bit boring.

1942: Thank you guys!!

1943: 1.Improve nautilus performance
2.improve copy speed for multiple file copies
3.add nvidia/amd hardware acceleration to totem
4.better integrate gnome-mplayer with gnome-shell
5.add flashsupport to epiphany
6.improve gnome-shell performance like windows7 explorer
7.need builtin download manager/accclerator for gnome/epiphany
8.black theme looks good keep it

1944: Please work faster, as I cannot wait 6 months for having so much greatness

1945: Stop crippling GNOME! Stop killing it!!

1946: Waiting for Debian Wheezy before losing the fine desktop that is Gnome 2. Having said that the extensions site looks like a good idea. How about an official "Traditional Desktop" extension as the very first option?

1947: Please listen to your users! They are your customers, so to speak. And please be careful of interface designs that might look pretty, but can handle a *REAL* usability test.

1948: Why not splitting the project so that one branch supports desktop/laptop users and the other tablet users like KDE is doing?
It seems much more convenient since regardless of all the talks that tablets are the future right now it's impossible to do any serious work on such interfaces. Desktop and tablet users just have different needs having a unified interface means compromises that are at the expense of usability and productivity which I think is not acceptable. Also I don't think many people use gnome on a tablet, right now it just doesn't make much sense as it would also require decent 3d support which is hard to find.

1949: I personally prefer Xfce 4.8 to GNOME (2 and 3) – not because I believe the GNOME Project is making bad decisions; not because I miss the GNOME 2 shell; and especially not because Linus Torvalds, my friends, or anyone else uses or used Xfce. I simply prefer the simple but attractive styling of Xfce's window manager and panels and the low memory requirements of the Xfce programs and libraries.

In fact, I think the GNOME Project is doing a good and important job of continuing to make the free desktop more attractive and accessible to all users regardless of technical skill. As a hacker and advocate of free software, I feel a bit of pride when I see the work of projects like GNOME. It's great to be able to show people not only the ethical advantages, but also the high quality and ease of use of free software.

I recognize – and appreciate – that GNOME 3 isn't primarily designed for me or my workflow – that it diverges a bit from the traditional desktop metaphor in favor of something that many people should find new, interesting, and intuitive. Those of us who want lots of workspaces, shade and iconify buttons on our window decorations, tabbed windows, and keyboard shortcuts for window tiling are better served by other window managers like Xfwm4 and Fluxbox.

No one is forced to use any particular window manager, and the itch scratchers who write these programs need not try to satisfy every last user. We have dozens of window managers and panel applications. It's healthy for some of them to experiment with new directions; doing so can make the free desktop more diverse and more appealing to a wider range of users.

Note that these words are in part inspired by those of Bradley M. Kuhn (<http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/08/05/living-in-the-past.html>), but they reflect the thoughts I've had on GNOME 3 since even before Bradley wrote his blog post.

Having said that, as someone who doesn't use GNOME but wants to see GNOME succeed as a viable and competitive desktop solution for a wide range of users, I have two concerns about the future of GNOME and GNOME's ability to reach as many users as possible.

First, I worry that the addition of dependencies (such as systemd) may make GNOME unsuitable for some free software distributions, like Debian, Gentoo, and FreeBSD. Portability is an important feature for any piece of software. GNOME's libraries and programs should not be written only for a certain group of GNU/Linux distributions. Nor should GNOME's development conflict with the goals of, or demand an unreasonable amount of work from, the maintainers of distribution projects.

My second concern is one of hardware and drivers support. Many people are still using GNU/Linux and other Linux-based operating systems on computers that don't have powerful GPUs or for which there are no free Linux and X.org video drivers. These computers include older (but still fully functional) PCs and new personal electronics with ARM or MIPS CPUs. It's great that GNOME aims to offer a compelling interface to owners of recently built and carefully purchased PCs, but other users should still be left with a decent and usable desktop. Projects like Trisquel and KDE have for a long time maintained a good balance between eye candy and hardware support; it's important that GNOME and similarly wide-reaching projects do the same.

1950: I would at the very least like the Gnome 2 configuration back. In the upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 I lost my screensaver and my electric sheep which has cost me a day of total hassle. It took ages to find how to access the panel using alt and right click, and the drawers I had with shortcuts to working documents in has gone from the options.
I would like someone to fix the bug in java I reported to Oracle about it not working with the MMORPG Runescape a few years ago. They made a page about it on the Oracle bug pages. I had to put a second drive in with Windows on to play it and ended up leaving the game a couple of years ago because I hate windows.
I would like to be able to access open source software that I could before without having to search for ages for source code manually.
I am now looking for an alternative environment within Linux to my present one