31 ms·

Linux Mint Developer Forks Gnome 3

58 points by macco 15y ago

hasmoo 15y ago
How does he support compatibility with extensions for the main line if he changes the code base?
- nknight 15y ago
  You're assuming that extension compatibility is a priority for him. I didn't see any evidence of that in the story.
thristian 15y ago
I remember reading a computer-magazine columnist back in the mid-90s talking about how Windows 95's interface was too revolutionary and different, and that we should expect Microsoft to have a parallel "Windows Classic" release with the same superior technical underpinnings as Windows 95, but with the traditional Windows interface that their millions of users were familiar with. Obviously that didn't happen, and I doubt that this "GNOME 3 with a GNOME 2 interface" will get very far either. GNOME 3 is pretty great for most people's workflow, and if you're particularly attached to some feature that's not present, you could try the GNOME 3 2D fallback mode (which looks pretty much just like GNOME 2), or XFCE, or LXDE. If those aren't conservative enough for you, there's still the various *box window managers, WindowMaker, pekwm, and dozens of others.
- egil 15y ago
  While not a seperate product, you could run the old program manager and file manager from Windows 3.x by running 'progman' and 'winfile'.
- nknight 15y ago
  > I doubt that this "GNOME 3 with a GNOME 2 interface" will get very far either It's already the default in the current release of Linux Mint, they've just been hamstrung by the limitations of extensions in fully realizing their vision.
- jsnell 15y ago
  Is there any supporting evidence for GNOME 3 being great for most people? My experience with it was so bad that I can't really imagine that being true. And it's much easier to find negative than positive comments about it on the net. Clearly the dislike isn't quite universal, but my impression is that it's the most hated "upgrade" ever. Also, recommending the fallback mode as a solution is disingenous. At least performance doesn't suck as badly as with the real shell, and it's not totally alien to existing users. But it still has a number of totally ridiculous and gratuitous differences to both GNOME 2 and every existing UI I've ever seen. For example how could the way panels are configured make sense to anybody? And if that's not enough, the word is that the fallback mode is going to get killed once performance without hardware acceleration is good enough. (And the bar for that has to be pretty damn low).
  - kamechan 15y ago
    i hated gnome3 at first. i even stayed on gnome2 for quite a while to avoid the upgrade. as it seemed inevitable, i bit the bullet and upgraded. linux is my only OS so i use gnome3 all the time. i have grown quite fond of it. what's best is that it hides so many of the distracting ui elements (either on purpose or simply because so many widgets just don't work) that used to pull me away from my work that i feel i'm actually more productive now. plus i love that my windows key launches the lens (is it called that?). i think gnome3 is much better than unity.
    - ajross 15y ago
      That's exactly my experience too. I used unity on a netbook for a while and just couldn't make it work -- too many edge cases (even to the extent of getting my preferred side-by-side terminal and emacs to work cleanly). I stuck with it for a while, but never really came around. I similarly tried gnome-shell when Fedora 15 was released and hated it, but stuck with it for the same reasons. And it paid off. I'm a convert now -- I don't like everything (app-based Alt-Tab will never work for someone with 12 terminals running, I really do want nautilus icons on my desktop, etc...) but the things I don't I know how to tune. I'm honestly more productive now than I was on gnome2. It's a great environment, and still getting better.
- acabal 15y ago
  I'd definitely disagree with that. While I'm sure there are some people who do like it, I think Gnome Shell is objectively flawed usability-wise. Just to list a couple obvious examples: -The top bar is almost entirely wasted space; -Having the bar at the top violates Fitt's law access to a window's close buttons; -Again for Fitt's law, the top-right corner is wasted because that menu is rarely accessed by most, and there's nothing in the bottom-left corner; -The messaging notifier thing frequently fails to let me know there are new messages, the accordion effect makes it hard to click individual notifications, and the popup notifications take an obscene amount of space at the bottom of the screen and often overlap with something I'm reading; -There's no way for me to tell at a glance what programs I'm running, so I often forget that I already have a window with work open and my workspaces end up even more cluttered and disorganized. I could go on but that's just off the top of my head. All of those are objectively bad design decisions when you approach G-S from a desktop use case. Clearly they're trying to shoehorn a touch UI into a desktop UI, but they're different use cases and when an unskilled design team tries to smash them together, you get the worst of both worlds. I don't think people dislike G-S because it's revolutionary; I think people dislike it because it's genuinely--and perhaps irreversibly given the silly politics Gnome plays--flawed. The Mint guys seem smart, so if they feel that a fork is necessary then it's probably the only way to do what they want given the constraints. They've shown a good track record of putting quality solutions out, so if they release Cinnamon at some point I'm sure it'll continue to be developed. Edit: I also find it a bit funny that G-S was developed at all, because with a little customization you can get extremely similar functionality in Gnome Panel. Just install AWN, enable the Scale plugin in Compiz with a hot corner at the upper-left, move your panel to the top, and set a gconf setting to remove minimize and close buttons. There--you've just re-created 80% of G-S functionality and without having to spend years in development.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Interesting. I've never seen Fitt's law invoked to cover close buttons before. Note that serious users (who are the ones complaining the hardest about gnome-shell) never touch the close button: closing a window is a keyboard shortcut (generally Ctrl-w, though sometimes Alt-F4 if the app doesn't handle that) in my world. For a while I was running a custom metacity theme with no window controls or title bar at all, actually. And I don't follow the "no at a glance view" of your work space argument. Hit the windows button and Ctrl-Alt-Up/Down and you can actually see all your windows, with no overlap. That's something that was never possible before, and I love it. Obviously there's a lot of taste at work. Gnome 3 is a big change, and big changes break workflows and piss off experienced users. But I honestly think a lot of your "objectively flawed" argumentation is just nonsense. Smart people can like gnome-shell and use it very effectively. You just don't like it.
- noiv 15y ago
  Since the true innovation of GNOME Shell isn't mentioned here anywhere the discussion is completely off. Surely the Shell is new and of course nobody was able to customize it on day one to his old habits. Even all these blog entries with 50-things-I-do-after-installing-XXXX did not help. The result was frustration. GNOME 2 is customizable using entry points common to anyone familiar with *nix, there were scripts, CSS files, dialogs, options, configurations and more. All this thinking failed after installing GNOME Shell. You may call it offending. However UNITY showing 3D buttons looking like made with a pshop plugin from end of the last century is not an option. So how do you customize GNOME Shell? Here is the new entry point: open firefox and goto to https://extensions.gnome.org/ https://extensions.gnome.org/ Yes, you change your desktop environment from within your browser. Add, try out or disable shell plugins from your browser. And the best thing all is powered by JavaScript. The language running on every computer having a browser is used to customize your DE. So stop whining and enjoy the desktop revolution. Getting curiuos? Find the location of a extension and open it in your favorite IDE, change a string variable, save it, press ALt-F2, enter 'r' press enter and voila it is there. There is even a debugging tool, (Alt-F2, 'lg', enter). Now go and implement whatever you were missing in GNOME 2. It is time to see how users would build their perfect desktop interface.
  - thristian 15y ago
    Huh, so extensions.gnome.org works now. The last few times I've looked for it, I've gotten a "permission denied" or other "no-such-website-here-yet" error. I only knew it existed because I happened across the "Gnome Shell Integration" plugin in Firefox's plugin list. For what it's worth, when I first tried out GNOME 3, I customised it the same way I customised GNOME 2: gconf-editor (and a little later, dconf-editor).
onosendai 15y ago
Just to clarify, what the Mint developers are forking is actually just the Gnome Shell, not the entire GNOME 3 platform. In this regard it's no different than Ubuntu's Unity.
- bkor 15y ago
  Unity is a bit more than just a different shell. They have all kinds of things because of the menubar, libappindicator, etc.
- dimmuborgir 15y ago
  "In this regard it's no different than Ubuntu's Unity." Unity isn't a fork of Gnome Shell. Unity-3D is a Compiz plugin and Unity-2D is written in Qt.
  - onosendai 15y ago
    I meant that Ubuntu is still built on top of GNOME 3, using a different graphical shell called Unity, much as Mint will also be built on top of GNOME 3 using Cinnamon as the graphical shell. I wasn't implying that Unity was a fork of Gnome Shell.
ch0wn 15y ago
Why don't just link to the original source instead? I don't see how Slashdot adds anything to the article. http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/cinnamon-gnome-shell-fork-with-gnome2.html http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/cinnamon-gnome-shell-fork-wit...
- jdkramar 15y ago
  I was going to say the same thing. Seems silly to link to ./ instead of the article.
Tomek_ 15y ago
So we have Gnome3, Gnome2, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Unity, this + gazillions more I don't even remember about. Anyone still believes Linux has any chance on a desktop market?
- darklajid 15y ago
  Gnome2 is dead. Sure, it's still installed all over the place (just like Windows 98 and XP might be), but it is by all means a dead project. Unity (and this fork, as I understand it) are based on Gnome (3!) and just replace the shell. So your list becomes - Gnome (Gnome-Shell, Unity, this fork) - KDE - (list of minorities) For me - while being a Gnome guy and preferring the gnome-shell option from that list - the choice doesn't really matter. It's as moot as arguments during the times of Windows XP were, about whether you should enable the classic mode or use the Luna theme.
  - Tomek_ 15y ago
    1) think the differences between those shells are much bigger than between Luna and classic in XP 2) that it's a different shell, not a fully different desktop environment isn't really that important, for a normal user it will already cause confusion (maybe even more as it requires additional explanation what's the difference between the two). Don't get me wrong: the thing that you have a choice is one of the virtues of Linux, but at the same time what it causes is that: a) Linux is doomed to fail on a mainstream desktop market b) none of the available choices is and probably will never be as polished as commercial competitors (and fragmentation is one of the reasons of that)
    - darklajid 15y ago
      1) ~Maybe~. In absolutes, I agree. I don't think it matters much though. 2) Sticking with Windows comparisons: Moving from 98 to XP was different in quite some ways, to Vista and beyond was another change in lots of things. We agree that choice is good. We disagree about whether there's too much choice right now. I see only two technical choices, KDE or Gnome, with the Gnome-Shell/Unity variants for the latter. No idea if this fork will prevail and be part of the list in the future. The average user, the "grandma" that often comes up during these discussions, doesn't care. My gut feeling says that she'll end up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu installed (Maybe Mint. Maybe Fedora) and use what is available. And quite frankly, what _is_ available is ready for every casual/average home user, in my opinion.
davidw 15y ago
Speaking of which, anyone know what the state of Focus Follows Mouse is on all these various platforms? I could not live without it.
- paol 15y ago
  Works well in Gnome 3 fallback mode. Works well in unity as well, provided you get rid of the global menu which is fundamentally incompatible with FFM.
- bkor 15y ago
  Broken in GNOME 3.0, workable in 3.2. Hopefully better in 3.4.
edu 15y ago
He's not forking the whole Gnome 3, just the shell so it looks more like Gnome 2. Keeping the backend untouched should keep the compatibility issues to a minimum and guarantee that libraries are up to date and no work is unnecessarily duplicated.
nyellin 15y ago
This (Cinnamon) is different than MATE, another GNOME fork that Mint was involved in. As far as I can tell, MATE extends GNOME 2 and Cinammon plans to build an alternative GNOME 3 shell. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=205&t=89411 http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=205&t=89411 https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment
tvon 15y ago
Reminds me of GoneME (http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html), though I suspect this will be more successful.

58 points by macco 15y ago

hasmoo 15y ago

How does he support compatibility with extensions for the main line if he changes the code base?

nknight 15y ago
You're assuming that extension compatibility is a priority for him. I didn't see any evidence of that in the story.

thristian 15y ago

I remember reading a computer-magazine columnist back in the mid-90s talking about how Windows 95's interface was too revolutionary and different, and that we should expect Microsoft to have a parallel "Windows Classic" release with the same superior technical underpinnings as Windows 95, but with the traditional Windows interface that their millions of users were familiar with. Obviously that didn't happen, and I doubt that this "GNOME 3 with a GNOME 2 interface" will get very far either. GNOME 3 is pretty great for most people's workflow, and if you're particularly attached to some feature that's not present, you could try the GNOME 3 2D fallback mode (which looks pretty much just like GNOME 2), or XFCE, or LXDE. If those aren't conservative enough for you, there's still the various *box window managers, WindowMaker, pekwm, and dozens of others.

egil 15y ago
While not a seperate product, you could run the old program manager and file manager from Windows 3.x by running 'progman' and 'winfile'.
nknight 15y ago
> I doubt that this "GNOME 3 with a GNOME 2 interface" will get very far either It's already the default in the current release of Linux Mint, they've just been hamstrung by the limitations of extensions in fully realizing their vision.
jsnell 15y ago
Is there any supporting evidence for GNOME 3 being great for most people? My experience with it was so bad that I can't really imagine that being true. And it's much easier to find negative than positive comments about it on the net. Clearly the dislike isn't quite universal, but my impression is that it's the most hated "upgrade" ever. Also, recommending the fallback mode as a solution is disingenous. At least performance doesn't suck as badly as with the real shell, and it's not totally alien to existing users. But it still has a number of totally ridiculous and gratuitous differences to both GNOME 2 and every existing UI I've ever seen. For example how could the way panels are configured make sense to anybody? And if that's not enough, the word is that the fallback mode is going to get killed once performance without hardware acceleration is good enough. (And the bar for that has to be pretty damn low).
- kamechan 15y ago
  i hated gnome3 at first. i even stayed on gnome2 for quite a while to avoid the upgrade. as it seemed inevitable, i bit the bullet and upgraded. linux is my only OS so i use gnome3 all the time. i have grown quite fond of it. what's best is that it hides so many of the distracting ui elements (either on purpose or simply because so many widgets just don't work) that used to pull me away from my work that i feel i'm actually more productive now. plus i love that my windows key launches the lens (is it called that?). i think gnome3 is much better than unity.
  - ajross 15y ago
    That's exactly my experience too. I used unity on a netbook for a while and just couldn't make it work -- too many edge cases (even to the extent of getting my preferred side-by-side terminal and emacs to work cleanly). I stuck with it for a while, but never really came around. I similarly tried gnome-shell when Fedora 15 was released and hated it, but stuck with it for the same reasons. And it paid off. I'm a convert now -- I don't like everything (app-based Alt-Tab will never work for someone with 12 terminals running, I really do want nautilus icons on my desktop, etc...) but the things I don't I know how to tune. I'm honestly more productive now than I was on gnome2. It's a great environment, and still getting better.
acabal 15y ago
I'd definitely disagree with that. While I'm sure there are some people who do like it, I think Gnome Shell is objectively flawed usability-wise. Just to list a couple obvious examples: -The top bar is almost entirely wasted space; -Having the bar at the top violates Fitt's law access to a window's close buttons; -Again for Fitt's law, the top-right corner is wasted because that menu is rarely accessed by most, and there's nothing in the bottom-left corner; -The messaging notifier thing frequently fails to let me know there are new messages, the accordion effect makes it hard to click individual notifications, and the popup notifications take an obscene amount of space at the bottom of the screen and often overlap with something I'm reading; -There's no way for me to tell at a glance what programs I'm running, so I often forget that I already have a window with work open and my workspaces end up even more cluttered and disorganized. I could go on but that's just off the top of my head. All of those are objectively bad design decisions when you approach G-S from a desktop use case. Clearly they're trying to shoehorn a touch UI into a desktop UI, but they're different use cases and when an unskilled design team tries to smash them together, you get the worst of both worlds. I don't think people dislike G-S because it's revolutionary; I think people dislike it because it's genuinely--and perhaps irreversibly given the silly politics Gnome plays--flawed. The Mint guys seem smart, so if they feel that a fork is necessary then it's probably the only way to do what they want given the constraints. They've shown a good track record of putting quality solutions out, so if they release Cinnamon at some point I'm sure it'll continue to be developed. Edit: I also find it a bit funny that G-S was developed at all, because with a little customization you can get extremely similar functionality in Gnome Panel. Just install AWN, enable the Scale plugin in Compiz with a hot corner at the upper-left, move your panel to the top, and set a gconf setting to remove minimize and close buttons. There--you've just re-created 80% of G-S functionality and without having to spend years in development.
- ajross 15y ago
  Interesting. I've never seen Fitt's law invoked to cover close buttons before. Note that serious users (who are the ones complaining the hardest about gnome-shell) never touch the close button: closing a window is a keyboard shortcut (generally Ctrl-w, though sometimes Alt-F4 if the app doesn't handle that) in my world. For a while I was running a custom metacity theme with no window controls or title bar at all, actually. And I don't follow the "no at a glance view" of your work space argument. Hit the windows button and Ctrl-Alt-Up/Down and you can actually see all your windows, with no overlap. That's something that was never possible before, and I love it. Obviously there's a lot of taste at work. Gnome 3 is a big change, and big changes break workflows and piss off experienced users. But I honestly think a lot of your "objectively flawed" argumentation is just nonsense. Smart people can like gnome-shell and use it very effectively. You just don't like it.
noiv 15y ago
Since the true innovation of GNOME Shell isn't mentioned here anywhere the discussion is completely off. Surely the Shell is new and of course nobody was able to customize it on day one to his old habits. Even all these blog entries with 50-things-I-do-after-installing-XXXX did not help. The result was frustration. GNOME 2 is customizable using entry points common to anyone familiar with *nix, there were scripts, CSS files, dialogs, options, configurations and more. All this thinking failed after installing GNOME Shell. You may call it offending. However UNITY showing 3D buttons looking like made with a pshop plugin from end of the last century is not an option. So how do you customize GNOME Shell? Here is the new entry point: open firefox and goto to https://extensions.gnome.org/ https://extensions.gnome.org/ Yes, you change your desktop environment from within your browser. Add, try out or disable shell plugins from your browser. And the best thing all is powered by JavaScript. The language running on every computer having a browser is used to customize your DE. So stop whining and enjoy the desktop revolution. Getting curiuos? Find the location of a extension and open it in your favorite IDE, change a string variable, save it, press ALt-F2, enter 'r' press enter and voila it is there. There is even a debugging tool, (Alt-F2, 'lg', enter). Now go and implement whatever you were missing in GNOME 2. It is time to see how users would build their perfect desktop interface.
- thristian 15y ago
  Huh, so extensions.gnome.org works now. The last few times I've looked for it, I've gotten a "permission denied" or other "no-such-website-here-yet" error. I only knew it existed because I happened across the "Gnome Shell Integration" plugin in Firefox's plugin list. For what it's worth, when I first tried out GNOME 3, I customised it the same way I customised GNOME 2: gconf-editor (and a little later, dconf-editor).

onosendai 15y ago

Just to clarify, what the Mint developers are forking is actually just the Gnome Shell, not the entire GNOME 3 platform. In this regard it's no different than Ubuntu's Unity.

bkor 15y ago
Unity is a bit more than just a different shell. They have all kinds of things because of the menubar, libappindicator, etc.
dimmuborgir 15y ago
"In this regard it's no different than Ubuntu's Unity." Unity isn't a fork of Gnome Shell. Unity-3D is a Compiz plugin and Unity-2D is written in Qt.
- onosendai 15y ago
  I meant that Ubuntu is still built on top of GNOME 3, using a different graphical shell called Unity, much as Mint will also be built on top of GNOME 3 using Cinnamon as the graphical shell. I wasn't implying that Unity was a fork of Gnome Shell.

ch0wn 15y ago

Why don't just link to the original source instead? I don't see how Slashdot adds anything to the article. http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/cinnamon-gnome-shell-fork-with-gnome2.html http://www.webupd8.org/2011/12/cinnamon-gnome-shell-fork-wit...

jdkramar 15y ago
I was going to say the same thing. Seems silly to link to ./ instead of the article.

Tomek_ 15y ago

So we have Gnome3, Gnome2, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, Unity, this + gazillions more I don't even remember about. Anyone still believes Linux has any chance on a desktop market?

darklajid 15y ago
Gnome2 is dead. Sure, it's still installed all over the place (just like Windows 98 and XP might be), but it is by all means a dead project. Unity (and this fork, as I understand it) are based on Gnome (3!) and just replace the shell. So your list becomes - Gnome (Gnome-Shell, Unity, this fork) - KDE - (list of minorities) For me - while being a Gnome guy and preferring the gnome-shell option from that list - the choice doesn't really matter. It's as moot as arguments during the times of Windows XP were, about whether you should enable the classic mode or use the Luna theme.
- Tomek_ 15y ago
  1) think the differences between those shells are much bigger than between Luna and classic in XP 2) that it's a different shell, not a fully different desktop environment isn't really that important, for a normal user it will already cause confusion (maybe even more as it requires additional explanation what's the difference between the two). Don't get me wrong: the thing that you have a choice is one of the virtues of Linux, but at the same time what it causes is that: a) Linux is doomed to fail on a mainstream desktop market b) none of the available choices is and probably will never be as polished as commercial competitors (and fragmentation is one of the reasons of that)
  - darklajid 15y ago
    1) ~Maybe~. In absolutes, I agree. I don't think it matters much though. 2) Sticking with Windows comparisons: Moving from 98 to XP was different in quite some ways, to Vista and beyond was another change in lots of things. We agree that choice is good. We disagree about whether there's too much choice right now. I see only two technical choices, KDE or Gnome, with the Gnome-Shell/Unity variants for the latter. No idea if this fork will prevail and be part of the list in the future. The average user, the "grandma" that often comes up during these discussions, doesn't care. My gut feeling says that she'll end up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu installed (Maybe Mint. Maybe Fedora) and use what is available. And quite frankly, what _is_ available is ready for every casual/average home user, in my opinion.

davidw 15y ago

Speaking of which, anyone know what the state of Focus Follows Mouse is on all these various platforms? I could not live without it.

paol 15y ago
Works well in Gnome 3 fallback mode. Works well in unity as well, provided you get rid of the global menu which is fundamentally incompatible with FFM.
bkor 15y ago
Broken in GNOME 3.0, workable in 3.2. Hopefully better in 3.4.

edu 15y ago

He's not forking the whole Gnome 3, just the shell so it looks more like Gnome 2. Keeping the backend untouched should keep the compatibility issues to a minimum and guarantee that libraries are up to date and no work is unnecessarily duplicated.

nyellin 15y ago

This (Cinnamon) is different than MATE, another GNOME fork that Mint was involved in. As far as I can tell, MATE extends GNOME 2 and Cinammon plans to build an alternative GNOME 3 shell. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=205&t=89411 http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=205&t=89411 https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment https://github.com/Perberos/Mate-Desktop-Environment

tvon 15y ago

Reminds me of GoneME (http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html), though I suspect this will be more successful.