Gnome Archive

GNOME 3.32 is awesome, but still needs improvements in key areas

Thom Holwerda 2019-05-01 Gnome 22 Comments

GNOME 3.32 is the latest release of the most popular Linux Desktop Environment (Interface+Apps) that is used by Ubuntu, Fedora and many other Linux distributions as their default experience (with or without changes). GNOME 3.32 packs itself with new niceties such as a refreshed theme and icon set, many much-needed performance fixes, updated apps, etc. However, GNOME continues to have key areas that stick out like a sore thumb in terms of intuitiveness or convenience. I have laid them down below with links to bug reports, please treat my feedback as constructive criticism of a project that I respect, but find confusing. As a former heavy user of GNOME 2.x, I find GNOME 3 wholly unpleasant – unlike its predecessor, it seems to want to force a certain way of working on me that I just can’t wrap my head around. Add to that the numerous problems – many of which are highlighted in this article – and I just don’t see myself ever returning to the world of GNOME any time soon. KDE all the way for me.

Lobotomizing GNOME

Thom Holwerda 2018-05-30 Gnome 6 Comments

But I'll be honest: GNOME is huge and kind of bloated, and it's hard to disable various unwanted components. GNOME Shell is amazing, but a lot of the other components of GNOME are simply unwanted. This is what turns a lot of power users away from GNOME, which I think is a shame given all of the other amazing things about GNOME. While you won't find these instructions in the GNOME manuals, if you know what you're doing modern GNOME releases make it very easy to lobotomize a lot of the unneeded and unwanted features.

Remote desktop finally coming to GNOME on Wayland

Thom Holwerda 2017-08-29 Gnome 15 Comments

Daniel Aleksandersen writes:

Jonas Ã…dahl from Red Hat has been busy adding new D-Bus APIs to libmutter. Mutter is the GNOME window manager and Wayland compositor. The two new APIs, org.gnome.Mutter.RemoteDesktop and org.gnome.Mutter.ScreenCast, expose a PipeWire stream containing the contents of the system's screens. The new APIs can create full-screen streams, or streams for individual windows. Only the former has been implemented.

These new APIs finally allows for services such as RDP and VNC servers and screen recording under Wayland. Once again, Mr. Ã…hdahl delivers! He has also created GNOME Remote Desktop, a new user-level systemd service daemon that is built on the new RemoteDesktop API in libmutter, plus VNC support from libvncserver. The new service can be used to connect up a remote VNC client to your local screen’s session. GNOME Remote Desktop appears to be a drop-in replacement for Vino server.

GNOME has been without its own Remote Desktop option since the switch to Wayland, and this work fills that gap.

GNOME 3.16, Builder released

Thom Holwerda 2015-03-27 Gnome 20 Comments

GNOME 3.16 brings a brand new notification system and updated calendar design, which helps you to easily keep track of what’s happened, and includes useful information like world times and event reminders. Other features include overlaid scrollbars, updated visuals, improved content views in Files, and a redesigned image viewer.

Major additions have also been made to the GNOME developer experience: GTK+ support for OpenGL now allows GTK+ apps to support 3D natively, a new GLib reference counting feature will help with debugging, and GTK+ Inspector has also had a major update.

Also released: GNOME Builder, an IDE for GNOME.

GNOME defending trademark against Groupon

Submitted by Wes 2014-11-11 Gnome 17 Comments

Recently Groupon announced a product with the same product name as GNOME. Groupon's product is a tablet based point of sale "operating system for merchants to run their entire operation." The GNOME community was shocked that Groupon would use our mark for a product so closely related to the GNOME desktop and technology. It was almost inconceivable to us that Groupon, with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, a full legal team and a huge engineering staff would not have heard of the GNOME project, found our trademark registration using a casual search, or even found our website, but we nevertheless got in touch with them and asked them to pick another name. Not only did Groupon refuse, but it has now filed even more trademark applications (the full list of applications they filed can be found here, here and here). To use the GNOME name for a proprietary software product that is antithetical to the fundamental ideas of the GNOME community, the free software community and the GNU project is outrageous. Please help us fight this huge company as they try to trade on our goodwill and hard earned reputation.

Groupon acting scummy. Say it ain't so.

Update: Groupon has decided to abandon the trademark applications. Situation resolved!

My Trip to GNOME: a 3.10 Review

Howard Fosdick 2014-05-23 Gnome 30 Comments

Remember back when GNOME and KDE dominated Linux desktops? Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it? Yet it was only three years ago, in April 2011, that GNOME 3 was released. Its radically redesigned interface shook up everyone. Some eagerly adopted it. Others left GNOME.

In this brief review I take a fresh look at GNOME today, as it's currently distributed in several popular Linux distributions.

GNOME 3.12 released

Thom Holwerda 2014-03-27 Gnome 37 Comments

Major new features for this release include a significant update to the experience for finding and installing applications, as well as major facelifts for the Videos and gedit applications. Those who have high resolution displays will benefit from greater support, and users will experience better start up times as well as more efficient resource usage. They will also be able to quickly organize their applications with the new application folders feature.

I remember a time when GNOME and KDE releases were big deals here. Feels like eons ago, a distant memory from an irrelevant past.

Guest post by nej_simon 2013-05-27 Gnome 44 Comments

"At the Tizen conference this week in San Francisco, Intel showed off an Intel Ultrabook running their next-generation Tizen 3.0 platform that's using a shell/desktop derived from GNOME 3.x."

MATE Desktop 1.6 released

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-03 Gnome 34 Comments

"The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6. This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE." Look at those screenshots. This is what GNOME is supposed to be: elegant, understated, to-the-point. I should try this.

GNOME 3.8 released

Thom Holwerda 2013-03-27 Gnome 18 Comments

"The GNOME Project has officially released GNOME 3.8 today. This latest version of GNOME 3 delivers major new features, a brand new application and a host of smaller bug fixes and enhancements."

GNOME to get sandboxing for applications

Submitted by Anonymous 2013-02-06 Gnome 34 Comments

"Some GNOME developers are planning to implement an app format that allows developers to provide their Linux programs in distribution-independent files that can be installed as easily as smartphone apps. A sandbox model is supposed to isolate the apps from each other, and from the rest of the system, in a way that goes further than the isolation in current Linux distributions. Various developers worked to conceptualise such "Linux apps" at the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest, which was held in the run-up to FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels. At the hackfest, the GNOME developers also declared JavaScript as the de-facto standard for GNOME programming." Right, because they haven't alienated enough of their users.

JavaScript becoming default language for GNOME applications

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-04 Gnome 75 Comments

"At the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest in Brussels, the GNOME developer community has tackled the problem of specifying a canonical development language for writing applications for the GNOME desktop. According to a blog post by Collabora engineer and GNOME developer Travis Reitter, members of the GNOME team are often asked what tools should be used when writing an application for the desktop environment and, up until now, there has been no definitive answer. The team has now apparently decided to standardise on JavaScript for user-facing applications while still recommending C as the language to write system libraries in." Discuss.

GNOME to officially support set of ‘classic’ extensions

Thom Holwerda 2012-11-28 Gnome 105 Comments

Not even GNOME itself could ignore the GNOME 3 criticism for much longer. "As part of the planning for the DropOrFixFallbackMode feature, we've decided that we will compile a list of supported gnome-shell extensions. This will be a small list, focused on just bringing back some central 'classic' UX elements: classic alt tab, task bar, min/max buttons, main menu. To ensure that these extensions keep working, we will release them as a tarball, just like any other module."

Guest post by pepa65 2012-11-09 Gnome 62 Comments

"I'm writing to inform you that the release team discussed Drop or Fix Fallback Mode yesterday. We've come to the conclusion that we can't maintain fallback mode in reasonable quality, and are better off dropping it." Gnome-fallback has been my refuge, as I find both Unity and Gnome 3's shell unusable. Yes, we have been warned this would happen. I thought the cost of maintaining gnome-panel would be so low that it might never need to happen. But as it appears, it is deemed necessary. As for me, I'm bound for something Qt, as I am very angry at Gnome for abandoning its 'classic' users.

Submitted by Elv13 2012-11-08 Gnome 104 Comments

"Theme development is a tedious and difficult task, and for the GTK devs to be so careless in breaking their API at every turn disrespects the many hours people put into making themes for it. I was given to believe that this breakage stems from a Microsoft-like climate of preventing users from customizing their systems, and deliberately breaking the work of others so that your 'brand' is the best. Anytime I hear the word 'brand' being used in Linux, I know something valuable is being poisoned." I find the tone of this one a bit too harsh and overly negative at times, but his point still stands.

GNOME 3.6 released

Thom Holwerda 2012-09-28 Gnome 33 Comments

"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."

Guest post by thesunnyk 2012-09-23 Gnome 51 Comments

"Gnome 3 has received a lot of disapproval of late, from the Gnome foundation being charged with not taking care of its users, or losing mindshare, to Gnome 3 itself being an unusable mess. I've been using Gnome 3 myself for a few months to sort the truth from the fiction, and to try and understand just how the Gnome foundation expects their newest shell to be used. I will end with some thoughts on how Gnome 3 can be improved. The review will require a fairly lengthy preface, however."

McCann: “Optimistic about GNOME”

Submitted by suka 2012-08-20 Gnome 48 Comments

In a recent interview with the Austrian newssite derStandard.at, GNOME designer Jon McCann talks about GNOME OS, the consequences of Canonical leaving GNOME behind, the purported removal of features and the future role of Linux distributions. "I think there was a time when GNOME had kind of a crisis, we didn't know where we wanted to go, we were lacking goals and vision - that was the end of the GNOME2 cycle. So we pulled together and formed a vision where we want to go - and actually did something about it. And now we have been marching on that plan for quite some time."

GNOME OS detailed: new application framework, SDK, and more

Thom Holwerda 2012-08-08 Gnome 74 Comments

The future of GNOME - an interesting subject. GNOME 3 has been out and about for a while, and it hasn't exactly been a smashing success. One of the efforts to take GNOME to the next level is what the team refers to as GNOME OS - but in reality, it's a set of improvements to GNOME that are just as interesting to GNOME-the-desktop-environment.

GNOME: ‘staring into the abyss’

Thom Holwerda 2012-07-27 Gnome 157 Comments

Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.