“Today, the GNOME Project celebrates the release of GNOME 3.6, the latest version of the popular free desktop, as well as the GNOME developer platform. GNOME 3.6 is the third major update of GNOME 3. It builds on the foundations that we have laid with the previous 3.x releases and offers a greatly enhanced experience. The exciting new features and improvements in this release include a new login experience, integrated input methods, a refresh of the message tray, support for more online accounts, improved accessibility, and many more.”
In Operations Management there is a certain notion that the technology should always have a visual and intuitive features. Now if you understand this concept well, you will figure out why the Linux Desktop keeps failing through projects like GNOME 3. People should intuitively know how to use it and adapt fast to it. Notice that even though Windows 95 had a long way until the birth of Windows 7, it did keep its essence, visually and intuitively.
Now GNOME 3 reaches version 3.6 and I get that nothing major has changed. There are some cool features, but my workflow is quite the same: unproductive. One of the designers behind the concept (a Red Hat worker) told the internet that GNOME 3 is for people who “fit it”. Among other things, he also told that “the opponents of GNOME 3 were the same people who were dissatisfied with GNOME 2 after its release”. I am sorry? How is that? How does he know for a fact that these are the same people? I think this guy should be questioned why he thinks the analogy of GNOME 1 towards 2 reflects anything similar as in GNOME 2 towards 3. Let me tell you something: this software designer understands NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING about computing productivity. Using GNOME 3 is unproductive. Changing applications is annoying. Finding stuff is time consuming. Going to “Activities” is more than time consuming.
I’m sorry but I need to quote Dedoimedo now: “On the other hand, the self-professed philosophy of idiocy that guides Gnome 3 remains completely unchanged. The desktop is empty, bland, boring. The Activity panel is so difficult to access and use. The contrast and sharpness of icons and fonts is appalling. The GUI dynamics are equivalent to slamming a door on your gonads. All in all, it remains probably the least efficient, least user-friendly framework ever developed, being even worse than Windows 8, IceWM and Scrotwm combined.”
Dedo just said something that is the exact size and magnitude of what GNOME 3 really is: The worse ever made user interface. And I know he’s not going on about just visuals, but production. It’s because of GNOME 3 that Fedora is losing more and more ground. It’s because of Unity that Ubuntu just started to dig its grave. These “software leaders” who made “brave decisions” on how users should “interact with their computer”, just don’t know how to conciliate production environment with user interfaces. So GNOME 3 and Unity remain those silly dream toys. The community is the real loser. Red Hat will be losing. I know people who operates RHEL don’t give a damn about a GUI, but I also know people who operates RHEL completely on top of the GUI. It’s even funny to think of a company like Red Hat be supporting design decisions like GNOME 3, even more coming from employees. Any production manager would fire away all these people, straight away. But when the money runs short, heads will roll. Gnomes’ heads mainly.
You could try the Xfce desktop. It does not get in the way of being productive.
I am a big fan of Xfce myself but the problem lays elsewhere.
We used to have a major popular desktop – Gnome 2 that was seen by all new Linux users. It wasn’t perfect but it was adequate and it became a de-facto standard Linux desktop. That standardization was perhaps its biggest achievement.
We know what happened later. The desktop has been abandoned by its developers. Worse, by making Gnome 3 explicitly incompatible with Gnome 2 they have effectively killed the latter. Yes, there is Mate but (1) it no longer has the support Gnome 2 enjoyed, (2) it is 3 years behind in development (2 years for development of Gnome 3 plus 1 year for renaming all components so that they don’t clash with Gnome 3).
Yes, we can say we still have Xfce (I’ve been using it even in Gnome 2 days because in many was it was better than it), Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, LXDE, E17 and, yes, Gnome 3 and Unity. But we no longer have that ecosystem Gnome 2 was.
You seem to be smart enough to just use Gnome Shell, as any other WM.
?
zima pondered…
To put it in words that those who’ve been around the Alternate operating Systems scene a while would understand, Canonical’s “Unity” is the equivalent of Be’s infamous “focus shift” shortly before it went under.
Worse actually, because their Gnome 2.xx desktop was becoming the standard Linux desktop for many users and their “focus shift” has led to them sacrificing existing users in exchange for potential users.
–bornagainpenguin
Edited 2012-10-02 19:28 UTC
Yeah, yeah, so are the claims of some loud pundits, largely of the kind who praise Mint or increase its meaningless score on Distrowatch …but what they claim is not what’s actually happening
Now, reliable stats are hard to come by, however there happens to be one source of them that is certainly much more illustrative than Distrowatch – proportions of hits on all Wikimedia services: http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-08/SquidRepor…
August stats show almost a billion of them from Ubuntu, 959 million to be exact.
Meanwhile, the supposed alternatives stealing the momentum from Ubuntu hardly register – in particular, Mint has 11.3 M, two orders of magnitude less.
But wait, what about trends, you say? Let’s check out the beginning of the year ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-01/SquidRepor… )
Ubuntu 947 million, Mint 18.9 million …yeah ( actually, all notable distros lost number of hits in that half a year …except for Ubuntu, which rose)
As far as very large portion of desktop Linux users are concerned, it seems that Unity is becoming the standard Linux desktop; and overall seems to work out rather fine. It certainly doesn’t look like Ubuntu is among the distros which might have starter to dig their graves…
Edited 2012-10-06 00:18 UTC
Their used to be a time when this would excite me. Now not so much.
MATE and Cinnamon on the other hand are very exciting.
Popular? When did that happen?
I used to criticize Gnome 3 a lot. Then I realized (IMHO) :
– most of the underlying technologies are essential to Ubuntu, Cinnamon etc. and are of very good quality
– it managed to be stable almost right from the start which is far to be the case of other DEs. I spent years trying all combos of common distros / DEs etc. and G3 + Debian is the only combination that didn’t disappoint me
– you can tweak it a lot if you don’t like the default workflow. Install Axe Menu, Panel Docklet and turn it into a regular desktop in two clicks and in a very clean & integrated way (from extensions.gnome.org)
– it’s a bit tiring to hear so many people hailing “forks” of Gnome Shell, when SO MUCH good work is put into it and when the essential was done by the GS team. OK, the defaults are not good for everyone but you have 1) extensions 2) fallback mode.
– it’s a bit tiring to hear complains about removed feature etc., when people don’t try to understand what was also added. The new Nautilus removes a few little useful features, but adds some clever ones, and fixes important broken feature. And I hear people spitting at the developers and hailing developers who re-implement a button toolbar or things like that.
It’s not perfect. Depending on the use cases, it might make you lose quite some time with the defaults (but it’s also a matter of getting used to it).
But overall (stability, quality, extensibility, consistency) this is the best we can get, IMHO, in the OSS world. And I can tell you I was a Gnome 3 hater for a long time until I realized the real state of the other alternatives (even if, also, so much good work is also put in KDE, Cinnamon, Unity etc., so much good work wasted, IMHO, but poor testing, useless splits / divisions, bad management)
A good development model, with a wide scope (not just tweaking the desktop !!!), and good testing is really what counts the most, in the end, IMHO.
Edited 2012-09-29 11:31 UTC
Gnome 3 could become the leading Linux desktop again, provided that:
1. reversed some technical decisions (bring back a panel, get rid of the modal design),
2. detach from the designers and their ideas that brought (1).
Only then Gnome could become useful to their users, and only then the project could win back their trust. And that would still mean that Gnome would have to work their way up from a much user-base than it used to have 3 years ago.
As it is, it is a nice toy for 10-20% of Linux users but it won’t be the dominant Linux desktop, and it won’t be setting the direction of Linux development.
Agreed, you just summarized what needs to be done.
What exactly would bringing back the panel do? Similarly, what’s wrong with the modal design?
Honestly, there’s really nothing particularly wrong with GNOME 3. It works fine, I didn’t have any troubles using it when I sat down with it for a month when it first came out.
That said, I don’t use a DE on a regular basis. I’m a tiling kind of guy.
You need a panel, a dock or a desktop gadget to access information that you need at all times. Be it a window list, a desktop pager, a CPU usage monitor etc.
Having modes in the UI is almost always a bad thing. They add complexity (you have to remember in which mode you are, how to switch between them, what you can find in each mode, and accept some functionality isn’t available in the current mode) for no benefit to the user. Sometimes modes are necessary because of technological limitations (that’s why original vi used them) but in most cases they are brought by laziness and lack of insight of the designer.
These are objective design flaws of Gnome Shell. It isn’t just stubbornness and lack of appreciation of new ideas that is driving users away.
Cinnamon guys attempt to fix technical flaws but since they do not control the direction of Gnome they can’t fix everything and, more importantly, they can’t change the image of Gnome 3 devs working against the users.
All above doesn’t matter if Gnome devs are happy with <20% of Linux desktop share (early adopters) but they won’t recover their past position without changing the process and some of their technical decisions.
GNOME has a dock and that top bar thing. You’d need an extension to get CPU usage, but otherwise all of those are provided.
Modes are almost always a good thing. Modes make operation simpler and faster. They concentrate concepts into logical units and reduce the distance to access them. You don’t have to remember what mode you’re in because the UI should indicate what mode you’re in.
Now, maybe GNOME doesn’t do a good job of indicating mode, I don’t know. I don’t use it, but I don’t remember having any issues.
So no, those aren’t objective issues. It really does sound like you just can’t adapt.
Instead of modes, I really like virtual desktops way more.
The implementations that exist are not perfect, e.g. I would like if applications would startup on the virtual desktop were you started it (double-click, terminal, whatever), but overally, I liked the my GNOME2, with 4×2 permament desktops.
Now I am not using virtual desktops anymore at all, because I permanently have to fight against GNOME3 creating and closing new desktops.
I am still homeless.
The argument is no longer “I choose Linux/Desktop because I love it the most”, it has seriously become “I choose Linux/Desktop because it is the least evil” (mathematically the same, but you get it).
Edited 2012-10-01 11:39 UTC
I’ve never found DE virtual desktops to be particularly useful. In fact, whenever I use KDE, GNOME, or Xfce I turn them off.
Conversely, when using dwm I use tags all the time (I even set up apps to use specific ones.)
I wonder why my behavior is so different, it’s not like KDE, GNOME, etc. have hard to use virtual desktops… I just find that I don’t use them.
I generally agree. I’m a vim user, but it’s not because it’s modal. It’s because I want a highly-extensible editor with a minimal UI (minimal distraction), minimal system requirements, and both GTK+ and ncurses UIs and vim is closer to how I naturally work than emacs.
Plus it’s got things that’d be a major pain to implement myself like the :gui command and the SnipMate script.
If it weren’t so hard to implement without breaking things, I’d set up my Vim so it behaves as much like a non-modal editor as possible and just prefix all my commands with Ctrl+O. (Among other things, it’d simplify my muscle memory to not have to keep one set of habits for vim and another for every other app which uses CUA keybindings because its vim-like mode is incapable of parsing the keybinds out of my .vimrc)
It still annoys the hell out of me that “cursor will stay in the viewport even if that means scrolling has to drag it along for the ride” is hard-coded into vim. I’ve taken to tapping undo and then redo to recover my old place since I can’t tap left then right like in any other editor. (I never remember to set a mark before scrolling)
It quite possibly distracts you more, but on a more fundamental level so you don’t notice it…
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Mouse_vs._keyboard/index.html
What’s “wrong” is that it’s different.
Everyone always want the OSS desktop to evolve but, you know, only in ways that does not really impact them.
I find that amusing. When things don’t change, people bitch about stagnation. When things do change, people bitch about the changes. Major software projects can’t win for loosing.
Around here, especially; the OS News SNR has gotten pretty terrible.
Thats not true. There are plenty of projects (most I would think) that don’t have this problem. But when you take a project with an established user base, disregard everything they want/ask for, and change things in a completely illogical way, then yes, people get upset.
Here are what I see as the problems with Gnome 3:
1. Top bar contains certain info (app name, activities, clock, and a few icons) with no way to change it. Why do I need accessibility? I don’t use those features. Yet weather, which is important to me, cant be displayed.
2. Windows title bars contain title and close button. Yet they are huge. Combined with the top bar, you lose almost an inch of space. Displays are getting shorter and wider, yet the interface is not taking advantage of this by using the sides.
3. Hot corner in the upper left corner? WTF? Yes, lets put a location sensitive area right next to the spot where ALL app menus are top left aligned. I can’t count the number of time I over shoot the menus and end up in hell mode, which then requires me to move somewhere else and click to get out of it.
4. Default view in activities is just a huge grid of icons for every app installed? Tree menus were invented for a reason: so we didn’t just have to make a giant pile.
I could keep going on, but the point is that Gnome 3 is bad. Its got great software behind it. The features that exist are very cool. But the UI design and philosophy behind the DE is just crap, If your users are screaming at your changes, and then spawning new DE’s and extensions to add back in old features, guess what? You FAILED. This isn’t just a few sour people. The common trend is to install Gnome 3 and then add extensions for what you are missing. (mentioned in pretty much every review, even by gnome 3 devs) To me that is an inherently flawed design goal.
1. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/112/remove-accesibility/
https://github.com/simon04/gnome-shell-extension-weather
2. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/354/maximus/
3. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/118/no-topleft-hot-corner/
4. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/327/axe-menu/
C’mon people, dammit! We’re Linux users, we can tweak IceWM, Fluxbox, edit xorg.conf, fstab, add 3rd party repos and edit SPEC files from SRPMs. What’s wrong with clicking “ON” to install few extensions from a web page?
Edited 2012-09-30 06:58 UTC
The thing I find most amusing about every Gnome-Shell article is that there are a ton of people that always say;
“Oh, Gnome-Shell sucks so bad!! But it’s okay, ’cause I don’t even use a DE…”
If you don’t use a DE then why are you even commenting about Gnome-Shell?
I always find it amusing because I own a Nokia N900, and you can tell through and through that a lot of the design philosophy of Gnome-Shell came from it. It was even mentioned on the Gnome website and some mailing lists. By the way, I still think my N900 has the best interface. Yeah, it takes some getting used to, but it’s brilliant for a touch interface.
That huge mess of icons in Gnome-Shell… it was the same issue with a non-modified version of Maemo 5. Some awesome programmer created a package called Catagorise, which then puts all the applications under normal headers like Gnome 2 and 3 do. The main difference is that when you hit the ‘activities’ menu on the N900, the first thing you see is the categories, instead of a big mass of icons. Gnome-Shell just has a menu next to it that shows the categories, and you can sort by that. But that’s not a terrible design in and of itself, it’s actually designed for a touch interface. Works pretty well too, I may add, since I have an HP touchsmart laptop to play around on.
For what it’s worth, I put Windows 8 on it and it was the most horrible experience I have ever had…
All you are doing is reinforcing my point. If the default action after installing Gnome and install extensions, then the Gnome designers failed at giving the user what they want/need. That means its time to go back and rethink your UI design. Not go on and on about how you don’t care what people think, this is for the new users….screw the people that actually got Linux to where it is now.
Because they are useless extentions that aren’t worth a damn just like Gnome 3 itself despite the claims of idiot-losers who’ve never actually used them like yourself?
Also why the hell should I have to download some lame-assed extentions from some lame-assed WWW site when they should have built into the software to begin with?
Edited 2012-10-01 02:45 UTC
My point is, that Linux users can do really crazy thing to have a scanner, or wifi, or graphics card working. It really needs some skill to properly configure xorg, or ndiswrapper&ifcfg file. And it’s okay, always were, since it works. For newcomers it takes hours with mc and various blogs to really make it right.
And now we have official Gnome site with switches, screenshots, basically like AppStore. It’s so easy. Than why complain?
Edited 2012-10-01 04:53 UTC
Look at the bold letters. So Linux desktop’s goal is not to win regular users(over 90% of the world’s computer users), but fellow geeks from other OSes???
A desktop should be:
1. Usable out of the box(NO HEADACHE)
2. Extensions are optional(NOT A MUST!)
3. Themes, enable look customization out of the box(Think of Windows XP for example)
4. Friendly to Independent developers(More apps, more users)
5. Desktop effects are optional, can be turned off/on.
6. A user can TURN OFF his computer(Obviously the developers are using laptops, won’t care how many of us who are using desktops).
I think it’s a matter of perception. With drivers, you’re fixing a problem caused by hardware makers who may not even know you exist and, if they do, they never gave a #$%^ about you. Neglect is passive.
With GNOME 3, you’re using software that is being actively designed to try to deprecate the workflow its designers previously encouraged you to adopt. Design is active and intentional.
The point is that you can’t feel betrayed unless you first feel that the other party was aware of your existence in at least an abstract sense.
Disclaimer: I run LXDE and have since I switched away from KDE 4, but I felt the same way about various changes in KDE 4. (Like the marginalization and bit rot of Konqueror in favor of Dolphin… which has crippled (locked to DolphinPart) KPart support by design to mask the fact that KIOSlaves+KParts = no-features web browser = Dolphin is a pointless reinvented wheel)
Edited 2012-10-01 08:56 UTC
But I don’t like when extensions become incompatible with the updating desktop. More than half of the extensions I used have been deactivated over time.
Gnome 3.6 fix that. You can update the extensions from their site automatically.
Generally it’s all about add 3.6 version to a json file. Sometimes it’s a bit harder, like a little javascript hacking.
In GS<3.6 you have to update them manually. Popular extensions are updated with each GS release and just works. Situation is much like in Firefox. Some extensions are maintained, some are not.
SeeM seems to have posted…
Yes and I’m sure that all those new users who are coming to the Linux desktop for the first time will get right on that….
That was the point of the redesign, right? To make it easier for new users to migrate over to the GNOME desktop, this is why the developers are aping so closely iOS and Android (touchscreen) designs, out of the belief that those interfaces are something these users are already familiar with and will transition easier if those metaphors exist on Linux?
SeeM seems to have posted…
Well maybe because like others have said it is too likely that these extensions will break because they are no longer a part of the desktop itself? Or maybe it’s because these extensions are actually poor replacements for what existed in Gnome 2.0? Could be, eh?
Here’s another thought for you. Maybe the problem is that in its pursuit of potential users the GNOME desktop lost many of its existing users and there is no one to explain to these potential new users who will show up Real Soon Now how to add extensions to their desktop? Maybe that’s it!
–bornagainpenguin