We are proud to announce the release of GNOME 40. This release is the first to follow our new versioning scheme. It brings a new design for the Activities overview and improved support for input with Compose sequences and keyboard shortcuts, among many other things. Improvements to core GNOME applications include a redesigned Weather application, information popups in Maps, better tabs in Web, and many more.
A very big release, and I can’t wait to try it out and see how many extensions I need this time to make GNOME usable. Snark aside, I greatly respect the GNOME team for having a vision about how they want GNOME to work, feel, and look, and sticking to it. It may not be to everyone’s liking because of it, but there’s more than enough alternatives in the Linux world – this isn’t the take-it-or-leave-it world of macOS and Windows, after all – that finding something you do like shouldn’t be too hard.
The Gnome midlife crisis version.
+1
Web browsers come with built-in features, people cry about bloat. Gnome comes with support for extensions, people cry it needs more bloat.
The way the GNOME people write software, it’s amazing Epiphany/GNOME Web doesn’t require an extension to display (any) webpage.
Last time I used it it was as ugly as sin, however, so they’re halfway there.
Who uses Epiphany?
Quite.
I downloaded the SUSE nightly build to try out Gnome 40.
When I run the desktop, I have to go to the top left activities corner, so it pops up my dock at the bottom, so I can move my cursor to the bottom and click on a button to display all the programs. Doesn’t make sense to me.
To turn off, it requires 4 mouse clicks. One to click on the task bar icon on the top left side, then a second click to display the menu to choose if I want to turn off or restart or log off. Then a third click to choose what I want. And then it displays another option if I want to turn the computer off for sure … giving me 60 seconds to change my mind before it would do it, or I can click on shutdown, a fourth mouse click.
These are not big issues for nerds.. but for my 70 some year old mom.. learning the 4 clicks it takes to shutdown a computer is too much.
write “poweroff” in a terminal
I can’t tell if you’re trolling or just didn’t read the comment above yours, but either way, that attitude is why Windows is still dominant on the average desktop/laptop with Apple a distant second.
Actually, Chrome OS is second now, if you count it as a desktop OS https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-most-popular-desktop-operating-system-isnt-macos-anymore
Gnome3+ is keyboard centric.
The keyboard shortcuts are quicker.
– Press the left Super/Win button to quickly open Activities.
– Super+Tab to switch applications.
– Super+` to switch between application windows.
Pressing the power button will trigger a shutdown on most modern Linux distros.
This has been discussed here: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/four-clicks-to-power-off/3697/18
It’s a safety measure.
What to say about GNOME. There are a lot of good things to say about it and there are a lot of less good things too. Transition to GNOME 3 in my opinion can’t really be considered being a success story. And it doesn’t look like GNOME 4(0) will try to address this all that much. What GNOME in my opinion is good at is the back end stuff, from networking, plug and play, auto mounting, audio … Also the applications are of good quality, for example file manager, calendar … Level of integration and out of the box experience in this regard is good too. Where there more or less, my opinion, completely failed is the GNOME Shell itself. Here they live in a bubble and likely feel they do a good job and are on the right track. The reality is neither of that is true, my opinion. At best, such shell might be usable on some mobile device, but as far as i know, there are no mobile devices people could buy in some reasonable way, offering GNOME. I would be interested in trying that out, but in this segment unfortunately GNU/Linux doesn’t exist. I don’t want to buy a device that is not usable in real world applications. Ubuntu does try to patch GNOME (Shell) in a way it is barely usable, on desktop, but that is a far stretch and it doesn’t do it for me. For now i am happy i can still use Unity 7 as a desktop shell. I get best of the both worlds. GNOME back end, applications … and a usable desktop shell. In a couple of years, when Wayland might mature enough, to start making sense, likely KDE or some solution based on Wayfire is what i will end up using. GNOME 3 and 4 as a desktop Shell, that is just a no go for me. Frankly, i don’t understand people saying it works for them, but OK, to each his own.
I am not sure what you define as ‘completely unusable ‘.
I, and many others have been using it just fine for years. It is meant to stay out of your way and let you use applications. That is pretty much all a shell should be used for.
The problem with ‘it is meant for mobile devices’ argument is that Gnome is VERY usable with keyboard shortcuts. I hit the Win/Meta key and boom, there are all of my applications, and I can easily move among them with the arrow key, or I can type in a word and it will pop up matching icons that I can launch, without ever touching the screen or the mouse.
I’m not quite sure I like the updated Activities screen, I preferred the thumbnails being a proportionate size and having levels… if they all just go horizontal, it won’t take as good as advantage as before on my super ultrawide screen…
I agree with most of Geck’s comments (where I differ from him/her/them is that I never had time for Unity). As to yours, the way I’ve come to think of it, stealing a phrase from an old London Times review of Lord of the Rings, is that the open source DE world is divided into those who find KDE completely unusable, and those who find GNOME3 completely unusable. The paradigms are so completely different that anyone comfortable with one is probably going to loathe the other, and I fall into the latter group. Clearly there are plenty of people who agree with the sentiment “it gets out of your way,” but mail4asim’s comment illustrates that for some of us the workflow is completely alien. Some people might find the idea that I think KDE “just gets out of my way,” bizarre, but that’s what it does, IMO.
Myself, when KDE isn’t available (or the KDE implementation on a distro just isn’t up to scratch), I find MATE much more usable than GNOME3, and Ubuntu MATE, in particular, much more to my taste than I ever remember Ubuntu with GNOME2 being. It’s a shame nobody forked GNOME1, because I think if they had done that and simply fixed all the bugs, it had the potential to be one of the best DE’s out there. Sadly, I lack the skillz, or I’d have done it already.
Wouldn’t the modern equivalent be LXQt of XFCE?
It might be an equivalent of sorts, but it wouldn’t be a fork of GNOME1.
I happen to think GNOME1 looked beautiful, by the standards of the mid-to-late 1990s. And it had what I consider to be both a sensible layout and an innovative separation between DE and WM (essentially, you could run whichever window manager you liked, and many did run WMs that were not default). It was quite disappointing to find that it was so buggy, and whilst GNOME2 and MATE’s layout is serviceable, it’s a bit wasteful of space in its default configuration.
LXQt was forked from LXDE though, not XFCE.
@Flatland_Spider: Personally I think Cinnamon is the best kept secret in modern Linux desktops. Still underpinned on Gnome, but perfectly usable out of the box, and yet it’s right up there with Plasma/KDE in customizability if so desired.
@JeffR
Aren’t they close enough considering no one is forking Gnome1 fork anytime soon.
I don’t think anyone suggested LXQt or LXDE have any relation to Xfce.
Yes, that is the thing i noticed too, reading comments under some news related to GNOME 40. People that actually defended GNOME 3 direction, on desktop, a lot of the same people are now not happy about the switch from the vertical to horizontal paradigm. Basically a sub group (GNOME 40) of a sub group (GNOME 3) of some old GNOME 2 group of people is i guess now happy. As for pressing on a meta key and being presented with a list of applications and an additional search bar. Unity, KDE … all offer that option too.
@Geck
Yeah they support the meta key / search now, but they didn’t until after Gnome-shell had it forever. KDE was a hack you had to do, as it used the meta key much like alt+control for many things (still does, but they fixed it so a single press works right.)
Unity was always terrible to me (performance, usage, etc). Now that I have been using gnome-shell for years, I actually hate task bars. But then again I came from mostly the Atari ST and Amiga, which the first of course didn’t initially have multi-tasking at all. The Amiga did, but certainly didn’t have any built in task bar at all either. Ah, how I miss the simplicity of the Amiga…
But yeah these people that scream that any DE is ‘unusable’ clearly haven’t used things like twm, or fvwm very much. 🙂
Gnome3 isn’t 100% what I would like in a DE, but it’s pretty close. I’d like a little more CDE influence, like being able to minimize applications to the desktop, but Gnome3 works for me.
XD Those were so primitive.
I find GNOME more unusable than twm or fvwm, certainly. They do very little but what they do is intuitive. And the easiest way of starting a program from a (pure) wm is often just to type its name in at the command line. You can certainly do that in any DE, but the idea of a DE is that you’re not supposed to have to. There are, admittedly, wms that are considerably more awkward to use (particularly to configure) than those two, until you learn them. But most people who dislike GNOME aren’t comparing it to fvwm et al., they’re comparing it to KDE, MATE, XFCE, Enlightenment even.
Besides, fvwm and twm are decades old and designed for the kind of people who were used to text terminals. GNOME3/40 are *new* and supposedly designed to be usable *now*.
That was the original idea, but the devs quickly dropped it when they realized Linux support for touch hardware wasn’t materializing and the touch monitor fad burned out. Instead, Gnome has focused on being keyboard-centric for a while now, and it works really well being a keyboard-centric DE. It’s not as hardcore as some keyboard driver DEs, but it’s more then others.
I wouldn’t base my opinion of Gnome on Ubuntu. Gnome on Fedora is a better representation.
IMHO they never dropped that idea, mobile first. That would likely be OK if we would actually use GNOME on mobile devices and not trying to use GNOME on desktop. Never tried it and don’t know. Maybe GNOME is not all that great on mobile and this is just an assumption, that it could be. As for keyboard driven. 90% of people can get a good keyboard driven experience in most desktop environments. People that actually are 100% into keyboard driven aspect of it, such people will use something like a tiling window manager instead. As for GNOME 3 and up experience in Ubuntu/Fedora. I test them occasionally, once in a year. On desktop both are rather bad, compared to the alternatives, such as Unity 7 or KDE. Bottom line GNOME 3 and 4(0) are just not desktop first oriented environments and it shows.
As someone that uses Gnome daily, I would never want to use Gnome on a mobile device (without the keyboard). So, I just don’t think it is true (anymore) that they are have a mobile first approach, since the experience is built so much around using the keyboard to move around in the UI.
Yeah, Gnome shell is based on Maemo’s shell. Which was mobile, but also when mobile devices had a keyboard. I might use it on a tablet, and eventually I’ll be using it on my Librem when it shows up. But Gnome-shell is quite at home on a desktop, as all the keyboard shortcuts make it extremely efficient to use.
Why does every software vendor think that higher version numbers mean you get taken more seriously?
I use Gnome on all my systems. When I first started I used extensions to modify it to something more normal, but over time I decided to try as it was intended and after awhile it made sense. Now, that doesn’t mean everyone will like it, but I think there is a lot to like. It’s simple, clean and as of recently very performant.
It’s not perfect and still needs some work in certain places, such as handling of apps with tray icons/indicators. Unless you use an extension there is no such thing as a tray in Gnome and apps that have tray icons stay running without a user realizing (Telegram and Microsoft Teams are two I use that do this). I know in the Gnome world view tray icons would either have gone away or a new system would have come about, but that hasn’t happened so I think we need to revisit this situation.
I have been very impressed with the direction of Gnome since about 3.34 and Gnome 40 has been great on my Fedora 34 beta install so far.
They tried with the little tray in the bottom left corner, but that didn’t really work. It was also kind of annoying.
Tray icons are too handy and work too well. I think they would like a dedicated extension to be created, but that’s inconvenient for something which is going to be running all of the time.