6 ms·

GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative) desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to a grea

GNOME 3 is a really great, well integrated (if not particularly innovative) desktop environment. Unfortunately, it broke existing workflows, which led to a great deal of criticism on its release. Had GNOME 3 had been a new, unrelated product rather than the next version of GNOME, there would be, if not more excitement about it, at least less criticism. Making radical changes to an incumbent system is difficult and often thankless, even when the new version is, if not objectively better than the previous, very good. Apple encountered this with the transition to OS X. Anyone who remembers the "Classic" environment can attest to how poorly this transition was perceived by many Mac fans. Microsoft has a real problem on its hands trying to convince users that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7. Ultimately, GNOME 3 feels like a much better designed environment than the previous version. For those that tried an early release and gave up on it, I'd encourage you to go back and try it again.

omi 14y ago
I tried really hard to use gnome 3 on several distros, it just doesn't work. All that pretty crap doesn't add to my workflow. No icons on desktop? Keyboard shortcuts don't work, everything freezes from time to time for no reason. Not really workable on a laptop to, CPU is constantly running hot. Went back to gnome 2 or XFCE on other systems.
CoffeeDregs 14y ago
100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2. The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect. The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.
- mertd 14y ago
  You mean something like these? https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/
  - bergie 14y ago
    Yep, this is a major part of GNOME3 that most people haven't yet noticed. Thanks to it being done in JavaScript, you can hack your desktop like a web app: https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-gnome3-like-browser/ https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-gnome3-like-... This includes stuff like reload (Alt-F2 r) and a reasonably nice data inspector (Alt-F2 lg).
    - technomancy 14y ago
      lg is much more than just a data inspector, it's a full-blown REPL. The fact that you can jump in and interactively eval code directly in the running process is huge and opens things up to a whole new level of hackability.
      - fmoralesc 14y ago
        And there is a DBUS interface for it, so you can even push code into the shell from external processes.
    - xiaomai 14y ago
      The js extensions are fantastic. It's a real shame there is little (no?) documentation to help people get started.
  - CoffeeDregs 14y ago
    Yes. Exactly that. Thanks. I think this is currently a big missed opportunity for Gnome 3. The ability to extend the shell using JS is huge and the project has done a terrible job publicizing it. I was just googling around for it and had fairly hard time finding good, official docs on how to build an extension... If they dialed that in and got the GitHub crowd excited, they'd have a vibrant community in little time. EDIT: Wow. The one click install from Chrome and auto activation is really nice. I clicked the link, approved the extension install (system dialog) and, BOOM!, pretty charts and graphs!
samdk 14y ago
Of course there'd be less criticism if Gnome 3 were a new project. If it were a new project, everyone content with using Gnome 2 would've been able to safely ignore it. Gnome 2 was boring and mediocre, but it worked. Gnome 3 is still worse in many ways than Gnome 2, and--as you said yourself--has not done anything particularly innovative. It's one thing to go through the pain of a major version transition to make something substantially better, but Gnome 3 hasn't done that. I just read through the release notes for the 3.0, 3.2, and 3.4 releases of Gnome to confirm that I wasn't missing anything, and can find literally nothing that actually makes my life significantly better. When you're making major, breaking changes, you need to be able to justify them. As a user, Gnome 3 has done nothing at all to justify the many hours I spent trying (and failing) to get Gnome 3 to a point where it wasn't actively painful to use. (And reading posts like this gives me no confidence that it's going to get any better.)
- monkeyfacebag 14y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but I'm curious how you can evaluate a desktop environment from release notes. To me, GNOME 3 is a clear demonstration of the difference between features and design. Rather than adding new features, it focuses on making them fast and easy to use. I'm not saying GNOME 3 is perfect or for good for everyone, but I don't think it can be evaluated by its feature list. For the record, I do think GNOME 3 is "substantially better" than previous versions, but I also understand that this is in no way an objective measure and it's perfectly reasonable for us not to hold the same opinion here.
  - samdk 14y ago
    I'm not evaluating it from the release notes--I was rereading them to make sure I wasn't just missing some major improvements I just hadn't noticed while using it. I don't think it's well designed at all, and it's certainly not polished at all, which is an important part of good design. I suspect that most of the major changes have been on the back end, and that it is a substantially better platform to develop on. Unfortunately, that doesn't affect me at all as a user. I want to be able to run terminals and a web browser and not much else (and I don't think I'm alone in that), and so making Gnome a better environment to develop against is unlikely to make my life any better in the foreseeable future.
mrdoob2 14y ago
Couldn't agree more.
RivieraKid 14y ago
Sometimes new version is actually better and the uproar is just resistance to change (which is 100% understandable and legit). Other times the uproar is the result of resistance to change combined with the fact, that the new version is actualy worse. It's hard to distinguish between these two. Gnome Shell feels overdesigned. I just can't used to it. It draws too much attention to itself instead of getting out of the way. Classical Win7/Gnome2-like panel + exposé would be much better.
- adambyrtek 14y ago
  This is interesting, because my impression was completely opposite. Gnome Shell hides all unnecessary visual clutter (panels, menus, launchers, indicators, desktop icons) leaving just a simple monochromatic bar on the top. It's hard to come up with a design cleaner than that.
rogerbinns 14y ago
I do like a great deal of Gnome Shell, but what they very badly broke is when you have more than one of a certain window. I always have several terminals, and on my dual screen desktop have two browser windows, two emacs windows, two eclipse windows (one on each screen). Gnome Shell really doesn't help in that scenario, nor does Unity when I tried it. (And Unity's app menu is obnoxious.) A taskbar has been the best UI solution found so far, although hopefully someone can improve on that. The people most likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the poor multiple window handling are the ones most likely to be able to moan about it. Gnome 3.4 doesn't let you use Gnome Shell with the "classic" Panel they provide. More annoying for me is if you use a classic session and try to put a panel on the left then it draws the text vertically which is almost unreadable. Modern screens have far more horizontal space available so why won't it go wider and draw horizontally?
- nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
  Alt-` allows you to switch between windows of a single app, or you can install an extension from http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org that will give you the old style of Alt-tab behavior again.
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    I don't use keystrokes to switch between windows. I look at the list of the windows in the "taskbar" and directly click on the one I want. However I do use keystrokes to switch workspaces. Switching from a current emacs to the 6th terminal window isn't particularly practical for me using keystrokes (ymmv). I also drag and drop items in the taskbar so they are in the order that makes sense for me. I gave up on extensions because they kept breaking, and of course the moment there is a gnome version change they all stop working.
    - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
      Fair enough. I generally tend to use something like tmux or multiple tabs in a single terminal window, or two windows at maximum, so I can definitely understand the limitations for you there. Something that I have picked up from using a Mac at work is using the Super key to bring up the expose-like overlay to find the window I'm looking for if it's not just a quick alt-tab or alt-` away.

omi 14y ago

I tried really hard to use gnome 3 on several distros, it just doesn't work. All that pretty crap doesn't add to my workflow. No icons on desktop? Keyboard shortcuts don't work, everything freezes from time to time for no reason. Not really workable on a laptop to, CPU is constantly running hot. Went back to gnome 2 or XFCE on other systems.

CoffeeDregs 14y ago

100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2. The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect. The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.

mertd 14y ago
You mean something like these? https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/120/system-monitor/
- bergie 14y ago
  Yep, this is a major part of GNOME3 that most people haven't yet noticed. Thanks to it being done in JavaScript, you can hack your desktop like a web app: https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-gnome3-like-browser/ https://cannonerd.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/hack-gnome3-like-... This includes stuff like reload (Alt-F2 r) and a reasonably nice data inspector (Alt-F2 lg).
  - technomancy 14y ago
    lg is much more than just a data inspector, it's a full-blown REPL. The fact that you can jump in and interactively eval code directly in the running process is huge and opens things up to a whole new level of hackability.
    - fmoralesc 14y ago
      And there is a DBUS interface for it, so you can even push code into the shell from external processes.
  - xiaomai 14y ago
    The js extensions are fantastic. It's a real shame there is little (no?) documentation to help people get started.
- CoffeeDregs 14y ago
  Yes. Exactly that. Thanks. I think this is currently a big missed opportunity for Gnome 3. The ability to extend the shell using JS is huge and the project has done a terrible job publicizing it. I was just googling around for it and had fairly hard time finding good, official docs on how to build an extension... If they dialed that in and got the GitHub crowd excited, they'd have a vibrant community in little time. EDIT: Wow. The one click install from Chrome and auto activation is really nice. I clicked the link, approved the extension install (system dialog) and, BOOM!, pretty charts and graphs!

samdk 14y ago

Of course there'd be less criticism if Gnome 3 were a new project. If it were a new project, everyone content with using Gnome 2 would've been able to safely ignore it. Gnome 2 was boring and mediocre, but it worked. Gnome 3 is still worse in many ways than Gnome 2, and--as you said yourself--has not done anything particularly innovative. It's one thing to go through the pain of a major version transition to make something substantially better, but Gnome 3 hasn't done that. I just read through the release notes for the 3.0, 3.2, and 3.4 releases of Gnome to confirm that I wasn't missing anything, and can find literally nothing that actually makes my life significantly better. When you're making major, breaking changes, you need to be able to justify them. As a user, Gnome 3 has done nothing at all to justify the many hours I spent trying (and failing) to get Gnome 3 to a point where it wasn't actively painful to use. (And reading posts like this gives me no confidence that it's going to get any better.)

monkeyfacebag 14y ago
I get where you're coming from, but I'm curious how you can evaluate a desktop environment from release notes. To me, GNOME 3 is a clear demonstration of the difference between features and design. Rather than adding new features, it focuses on making them fast and easy to use. I'm not saying GNOME 3 is perfect or for good for everyone, but I don't think it can be evaluated by its feature list. For the record, I do think GNOME 3 is "substantially better" than previous versions, but I also understand that this is in no way an objective measure and it's perfectly reasonable for us not to hold the same opinion here.
- samdk 14y ago
  I'm not evaluating it from the release notes--I was rereading them to make sure I wasn't just missing some major improvements I just hadn't noticed while using it. I don't think it's well designed at all, and it's certainly not polished at all, which is an important part of good design. I suspect that most of the major changes have been on the back end, and that it is a substantially better platform to develop on. Unfortunately, that doesn't affect me at all as a user. I want to be able to run terminals and a web browser and not much else (and I don't think I'm alone in that), and so making Gnome a better environment to develop against is unlikely to make my life any better in the foreseeable future.

mrdoob2 14y ago

Couldn't agree more.

RivieraKid 14y ago

Sometimes new version is actually better and the uproar is just resistance to change (which is 100% understandable and legit). Other times the uproar is the result of resistance to change combined with the fact, that the new version is actualy worse. It's hard to distinguish between these two. Gnome Shell feels overdesigned. I just can't used to it. It draws too much attention to itself instead of getting out of the way. Classical Win7/Gnome2-like panel + exposé would be much better.

adambyrtek 14y ago
This is interesting, because my impression was completely opposite. Gnome Shell hides all unnecessary visual clutter (panels, menus, launchers, indicators, desktop icons) leaving just a simple monochromatic bar on the top. It's hard to come up with a design cleaner than that.

rogerbinns 14y ago

I do like a great deal of Gnome Shell, but what they very badly broke is when you have more than one of a certain window. I always have several terminals, and on my dual screen desktop have two browser windows, two emacs windows, two eclipse windows (one on each screen). Gnome Shell really doesn't help in that scenario, nor does Unity when I tried it. (And Unity's app menu is obnoxious.) A taskbar has been the best UI solution found so far, although hopefully someone can improve on that. The people most likely to be seriously inconvenienced by the poor multiple window handling are the ones most likely to be able to moan about it. Gnome 3.4 doesn't let you use Gnome Shell with the "classic" Panel they provide. More annoying for me is if you use a classic session and try to put a panel on the left then it draws the text vertically which is almost unreadable. Modern screens have far more horizontal space available so why won't it go wider and draw horizontally?

nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
Alt-` allows you to switch between windows of a single app, or you can install an extension from http://extensions.gnome.org http://extensions.gnome.org that will give you the old style of Alt-tab behavior again.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  I don't use keystrokes to switch between windows. I look at the list of the windows in the "taskbar" and directly click on the one I want. However I do use keystrokes to switch workspaces. Switching from a current emacs to the 6th terminal window isn't particularly practical for me using keystrokes (ymmv). I also drag and drop items in the taskbar so they are in the order that makes sense for me. I gave up on extensions because they kept breaking, and of course the moment there is a gnome version change they all stop working.
  - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
    Fair enough. I generally tend to use something like tmux or multiple tabs in a single terminal window, or two windows at maximum, so I can definitely understand the limitations for you there. Something that I have picked up from using a Mac at work is using the Super key to bring up the expose-like overlay to find the window I'm looking for if it's not just a quick alt-tab or alt-` away.