9 ms·

GNOME 3.8 Released

107 points by krakensden 14y ago

nvrmor 14y ago
screencast http://youtu.be/ete5Us0-IpY http://youtu.be/ete5Us0-IpY
josteink 14y ago
I see there's mixed responses here, but more praise than I expected. That said, too little, too late for me. I've now moved to a tiling window manager (i3) and I'm not planning on going back.
ebtalley 14y ago
I finally got fed-up with unity on my laptop and followed some blog instructions to pull the latest apt version of gnome (3.6) and I have to say that so far I have been pleasantly impressed. Its a paradigm shift from classic window managers that I have cut my teeth on but all in all the polish is so much greater than unity. congrats to the gnome team, not everyone has bought into it but you've converted me.
aroman 14y ago
I think the "Classic mode" is really the biggest, most game-changing thing here. There are a whole lot of people who hate GNOME Shell (I am not one of them. I'm not a fan either, but I don't think the shell is a step backwards) and are either staying on the outdated GNOME2 platform or hacking on top of GNOME3 to bring back GNOME2. This, I think, is a great solution which acknowledges the desire/need, but addresses it in a way that embraces newer technologies ("classic mode" is built on GNOME3, in fact), rather than simply rolling back to older dated ones. Kudos to the GNOME team for this and the entire release!
- ovis 14y ago
  So what do you think this means for MATE and Cinnamon?
  - andyking 14y ago
    With any luck, a speedy demise. It doesn't make any sense to have in one corner, an out-of-date desktop environment in MATE, and in the other corner, Cinnamon fragmenting things yet further. I want a "traditional" DE in the GNOME 2 style, I don't feel the need to have a tablet UI on my desktop PC with keyboard and mouse. But I'd rather not have to go back to ye olde software to do this. I'd like GNOME to take into account those of us who want to use the new technologies without pretending our 17-inch monitor is a 7-inch tablet.
    - Grue3 14y ago
      After what GNOME developers did with GNOME 3, I wouldn't trust their classic mode one bit. Cinnamon devs clearly understand the UI needs of users, and Cinnamon is already superior to pretty much every DM out there in usability.
  - aroman 14y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as wishing them a speedy demise -- if building something like that makes you happy, who am I to hope that it comes to an end. I do think that those projects will naturally and healthily die out, or perhaps evolve into other forms and directions. They're good projects, I just don't think they are as needed now as they were pre-3.8. And I think for most people, the basic desire/need to have a GTK2/GNOME2-based experience will largely be satisfied by GNOME 3.8.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  I liked Gnome Shell but I have large dual monitor systems and run multiple copies of the same apps. The least worst way of dealing with those has been a taskbar. I tried to use extensions but they broke on every new release as well as having random quirks, so I gave up and use the the legacy mode. I'm hoping the new classic mode actually works well. Example issues I've found before are being unable to reorder taskbar buttons, not bringing apps to the foreground when hovering over their buttons during a drag and drop, not having a usable system monitor (I have no need to sort through 3 pages of candidates on a website) and hiding the message area.
rayiner 14y ago
It's interesting to me how all the major next-gen UIs (GNOME Shell, OS X Lion, Windows 8) are all getting huge pushback from users.
- VMG 14y ago
  I believe that to be status quo bias. I remember discussions with people who preferred Win3.1 to Win95.
  - ajross 14y ago
    Well, of course it's status quo bias. I think the deeper question is whether the bias is justified or not. In 1995 the desktop UI paradigm was still in flux. The paradigm that the world settled on in the mid-90's hasn't changed much in the last 18 years. Except now it is, driven largely by innovation in device UIs that are not desktop PCs. I think there's a real and valid question as to whether trying to unify a desktop and "tablet" UI makes sense. That said, I will say that of the recent attempts to come up with a new UI paradigm, I like Gnome 3 the best and it's what I use daily.
    - VMG 14y ago
      (I meant status quo bias in the way it is defined on Wikipedia: an irrational preference for the current state of affairs)
    - duaneb 14y ago
      The desktop paradigm only has age and video games (via mouse and power) on its side. Once the touch-oriented interfaces become polished, so I don't have to continually swear at my phone when trying to select something or move a file from app to app, I don't really see myself ever using a desktop again (unless required by my job). I suspect I couldn't use iOS in its current iteration, but a Google Chrome Pixel Book thing with android is pretty close to perfect for me.
      - frozenport 14y ago
CoffeeDregs 14y ago
I've really enjoyed Gnome3 and have appreciated the quick cycle of updates. I just looked at upgrading to 3.8 on Debian Sid/Experimental. Looks difficult, but not too bad... BUT gnome-settings-daemon 3.7.92 depends on systemd. Interesting. This may force the conversion from init... And it's systemd v44 (so pretty crusty).
kunai 14y ago
After losing faith in Unity (the workflow sucks) I reluctantly switched to Gnome Shell. Originally I thought I would have been back to Xfce or Openbox or WindowMaker in an instant. I was wrong. Gnome Shell has turned out to be quite the bit of kit. It's polished, fast, smooth, and now really stable. The workflow is also incredibly productive and fast. The only thing I miss is a minimize button, but because the workspace system is so great in Gnome Shell, I don't find myself wanting it all too often, and when I do, I just add another workspace or switch focus. It's amazing how much thought seems to have been put into this interface. It's equally amazing how many are so quick to shun it.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  For me the problem isn't so much the new stuff, but what is continually lost. For example, I was a heavy user of emblems and a frequent user of spatial mode, but they are now gone without replacement. I now stumble through hundreds of folders that all look the same. Want to change the colors they've chosen? No can do... but you know what could do that? Windows 3.1 (and basically every other OS since ~1990) could. :/ That gigantic new clocks app is less useful than the elegant Calendar/Locations dropdown from Gnome2. It's still around in classic-mode but it no longer stays open by default (dunno why). Five+ years ago I remember there were also helpful apps, like a "service control manager" gui, similar to the Windows MMC that actually worked. Oh, and Ubuntu removed sessions too. My experience is that the Linux desktop loses as much as it gains every year. Almost twenty years of work and it still feels like a 0.5 alpha. The SGI I worked on 20 years ago could save my session automatically for x-sake, and the GUI was about as good.
  - krakensden 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure those were the RedHat system-* apps, and I think RedHat and Fedora still ship those.
    - mixmastamyk 14y ago
      Sounds right, but I've used Ubuntu on the desktop for the last several years (after switching from Gentoo in the mid 2000's)... have not used RH/f much outside of VMs. Maybe I'll give fedora/rhel7 another hard look and/or a rev or two of gnome.
chousuke 14y ago
Gnome is showing steady improvement with every new release. Really impressive. The first versions of Gnome 3 were sort of lackluster, but nowadays I much prefer it over its predecessor.
olympus 14y ago
I wonder what will happen when Gnome 4 rolls out in the future. Will users jump to it like what happened from Windows Vista -> Windows 7? Will they still yearn for the days of Gnome 2, like some people still wish for Windows XP even though Windows 8 has been released? And why does every situation happening with Gnome seem to have a Windows analogy?
- kimagure 14y ago
  people are often rosy-eyed about things they used first/most so they often think things are nicer than they really are. i remember for the longest time i thought my time with dwm were some of the nicest and yearned for tiling wm's in windows, but after trying it again i'm really glad i switched to win vista/7.
- allerratio 14y ago
  They will yearn for Gnome 3, just like they yearned for Gnome 1 when Gnome 2 was released.
WayneDB 14y ago
I went to the release notes to see how they implemented the Classic Mode. I was happy to read "Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies..." - https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/ https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/
Spittie 14y ago
As a KDE user, I'm constantly impressed by the amount of polish the Gnome team put into Gnome Shell. While I don't like some of their design choice, They are coherent and try to focus on their ideals. 3.8 looks like a nice release, I might try it those days. Anyway, great work and good luck about the future Gnome team!
10098 14y ago
I never really understood WHY they felt the need for this radical change in UI. It may have gotten better with new releases, but why did they have to break everything in the first place? What, the usual desktop was not working well? Anyway, I'll give this a try and I'll do my best to not be biased...
- grakic 14y ago
  Making a new UI is fun :) People like to hack on fun things. It keeps the momentum.
- ctbeiser 14y ago
  I never really understood why people feel the need to keep the UI mostly the same. It may not be as good at the first release, but why do people object to them breaking everything at first? What, was everything perfect already?
  - 10098 14y ago
    Because users are accustomed to the Previous Version. They have various specific ways of doing things. Your new UI breaks it, so now the user has to spend time readjusting their habits. It gets even worse if there is no simple, obvious way to re-establish the old workflow.
  - mixmastamyk 14y ago
    Because they didn't leave any option to "break everything". If the new stuff was mature when released it might be a different story. Some people actually have work to do however and don't appreciate being forced from a 2.0 to a 0.5alpha without option. Unless you wanted to stay on an unsupported dist for years as I did with Natty (until recently). Despite my complaints, experimentation is fine in my book... The best way of handling this would be to ship Gnome2 and 3/Unity side-by-side and let the user choose, but 2 was dumped immediately for something broken, unknown, and undocumented. There's no way to stay current without "busting" your desktop.
frozenport 14y ago
Looks like SkyOS
antoncohen 14y ago
I knew Red Hat was going to do something to make Gnome 3 more 2-like. It looks like this is it, Classic will be the default in RHEL 7 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917679 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917679
donniezazen 14y ago
The only thing that I still can't get my head around is Gnome 3's message and notification tray. Gnome 3.0 was released in Oct 2011 and software developers have showed no interest in Gnome's message tray. Most software still don't support or even care about it. In spite of this reality Gnome developers have refused to make any changes to their ideology of system icons and notification. TopIcon extension that puts system tray back to where it belonged has made Gnome useful for me.
- fmoralesc 14y ago
  Weird, but GNOME 3's notification system is what sold it to me. I hated to have tray icons visible all the time, specially because I don't neeed them all the time at all. But that's just me, I guess.
Yaggo 14y ago
Wow. OS X influence is pervasive, but despite (or because of) that, it looks great.

107 points by krakensden 14y ago

screencast http://youtu.be/ete5Us0-IpY http://youtu.be/ete5Us0-IpY

I see there's mixed responses here, but more praise than I expected. That said, too little, too late for me. I've now moved to a tiling window manager (i3) and I'm not planning on going back.

ebtalley 14y ago

I finally got fed-up with unity on my laptop and followed some blog instructions to pull the latest apt version of gnome (3.6) and I have to say that so far I have been pleasantly impressed. Its a paradigm shift from classic window managers that I have cut my teeth on but all in all the polish is so much greater than unity. congrats to the gnome team, not everyone has bought into it but you've converted me.

aroman 14y ago

I think the "Classic mode" is really the biggest, most game-changing thing here. There are a whole lot of people who hate GNOME Shell (I am not one of them. I'm not a fan either, but I don't think the shell is a step backwards) and are either staying on the outdated GNOME2 platform or hacking on top of GNOME3 to bring back GNOME2. This, I think, is a great solution which acknowledges the desire/need, but addresses it in a way that embraces newer technologies ("classic mode" is built on GNOME3, in fact), rather than simply rolling back to older dated ones. Kudos to the GNOME team for this and the entire release!

ovis 14y ago
So what do you think this means for MATE and Cinnamon?
- andyking 14y ago
  With any luck, a speedy demise. It doesn't make any sense to have in one corner, an out-of-date desktop environment in MATE, and in the other corner, Cinnamon fragmenting things yet further. I want a "traditional" DE in the GNOME 2 style, I don't feel the need to have a tablet UI on my desktop PC with keyboard and mouse. But I'd rather not have to go back to ye olde software to do this. I'd like GNOME to take into account those of us who want to use the new technologies without pretending our 17-inch monitor is a 7-inch tablet.
  - Grue3 14y ago
    After what GNOME developers did with GNOME 3, I wouldn't trust their classic mode one bit. Cinnamon devs clearly understand the UI needs of users, and Cinnamon is already superior to pretty much every DM out there in usability.
- aroman 14y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as wishing them a speedy demise -- if building something like that makes you happy, who am I to hope that it comes to an end. I do think that those projects will naturally and healthily die out, or perhaps evolve into other forms and directions. They're good projects, I just don't think they are as needed now as they were pre-3.8. And I think for most people, the basic desire/need to have a GTK2/GNOME2-based experience will largely be satisfied by GNOME 3.8.
rogerbinns 14y ago
I liked Gnome Shell but I have large dual monitor systems and run multiple copies of the same apps. The least worst way of dealing with those has been a taskbar. I tried to use extensions but they broke on every new release as well as having random quirks, so I gave up and use the the legacy mode. I'm hoping the new classic mode actually works well. Example issues I've found before are being unable to reorder taskbar buttons, not bringing apps to the foreground when hovering over their buttons during a drag and drop, not having a usable system monitor (I have no need to sort through 3 pages of candidates on a website) and hiding the message area.

rayiner 14y ago

It's interesting to me how all the major next-gen UIs (GNOME Shell, OS X Lion, Windows 8) are all getting huge pushback from users.

VMG 14y ago
I believe that to be status quo bias. I remember discussions with people who preferred Win3.1 to Win95.
- ajross 14y ago
  Well, of course it's status quo bias. I think the deeper question is whether the bias is justified or not. In 1995 the desktop UI paradigm was still in flux. The paradigm that the world settled on in the mid-90's hasn't changed much in the last 18 years. Except now it is, driven largely by innovation in device UIs that are not desktop PCs. I think there's a real and valid question as to whether trying to unify a desktop and "tablet" UI makes sense. That said, I will say that of the recent attempts to come up with a new UI paradigm, I like Gnome 3 the best and it's what I use daily.
  - VMG 14y ago
    (I meant status quo bias in the way it is defined on Wikipedia: an irrational preference for the current state of affairs)
  - duaneb 14y ago
    The desktop paradigm only has age and video games (via mouse and power) on its side. Once the touch-oriented interfaces become polished, so I don't have to continually swear at my phone when trying to select something or move a file from app to app, I don't really see myself ever using a desktop again (unless required by my job). I suspect I couldn't use iOS in its current iteration, but a Google Chrome Pixel Book thing with android is pretty close to perfect for me.
    - frozenport 14y ago

CoffeeDregs 14y ago

I've really enjoyed Gnome3 and have appreciated the quick cycle of updates. I just looked at upgrading to 3.8 on Debian Sid/Experimental. Looks difficult, but not too bad... BUT gnome-settings-daemon 3.7.92 depends on systemd. Interesting. This may force the conversion from init... And it's systemd v44 (so pretty crusty).

kunai 14y ago

After losing faith in Unity (the workflow sucks) I reluctantly switched to Gnome Shell. Originally I thought I would have been back to Xfce or Openbox or WindowMaker in an instant. I was wrong. Gnome Shell has turned out to be quite the bit of kit. It's polished, fast, smooth, and now really stable. The workflow is also incredibly productive and fast. The only thing I miss is a minimize button, but because the workspace system is so great in Gnome Shell, I don't find myself wanting it all too often, and when I do, I just add another workspace or switch focus. It's amazing how much thought seems to have been put into this interface. It's equally amazing how many are so quick to shun it.

mixmastamyk 14y ago
For me the problem isn't so much the new stuff, but what is continually lost. For example, I was a heavy user of emblems and a frequent user of spatial mode, but they are now gone without replacement. I now stumble through hundreds of folders that all look the same. Want to change the colors they've chosen? No can do... but you know what could do that? Windows 3.1 (and basically every other OS since ~1990) could. :/ That gigantic new clocks app is less useful than the elegant Calendar/Locations dropdown from Gnome2. It's still around in classic-mode but it no longer stays open by default (dunno why). Five+ years ago I remember there were also helpful apps, like a "service control manager" gui, similar to the Windows MMC that actually worked. Oh, and Ubuntu removed sessions too. My experience is that the Linux desktop loses as much as it gains every year. Almost twenty years of work and it still feels like a 0.5 alpha. The SGI I worked on 20 years ago could save my session automatically for x-sake, and the GUI was about as good.
- krakensden 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure those were the RedHat system-* apps, and I think RedHat and Fedora still ship those.
  - mixmastamyk 14y ago
    Sounds right, but I've used Ubuntu on the desktop for the last several years (after switching from Gentoo in the mid 2000's)... have not used RH/f much outside of VMs. Maybe I'll give fedora/rhel7 another hard look and/or a rev or two of gnome.

chousuke 14y ago

Gnome is showing steady improvement with every new release. Really impressive. The first versions of Gnome 3 were sort of lackluster, but nowadays I much prefer it over its predecessor.

olympus 14y ago

I wonder what will happen when Gnome 4 rolls out in the future. Will users jump to it like what happened from Windows Vista -> Windows 7? Will they still yearn for the days of Gnome 2, like some people still wish for Windows XP even though Windows 8 has been released? And why does every situation happening with Gnome seem to have a Windows analogy?

kimagure 14y ago
people are often rosy-eyed about things they used first/most so they often think things are nicer than they really are. i remember for the longest time i thought my time with dwm were some of the nicest and yearned for tiling wm's in windows, but after trying it again i'm really glad i switched to win vista/7.
allerratio 14y ago
They will yearn for Gnome 3, just like they yearned for Gnome 1 when Gnome 2 was released.

WayneDB 14y ago

I went to the release notes to see how they implemented the Classic Mode. I was happy to read "Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies..." - https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/ https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/

Spittie 14y ago

As a KDE user, I'm constantly impressed by the amount of polish the Gnome team put into Gnome Shell. While I don't like some of their design choice, They are coherent and try to focus on their ideals. 3.8 looks like a nice release, I might try it those days. Anyway, great work and good luck about the future Gnome team!

10098 14y ago

I never really understood WHY they felt the need for this radical change in UI. It may have gotten better with new releases, but why did they have to break everything in the first place? What, the usual desktop was not working well? Anyway, I'll give this a try and I'll do my best to not be biased...

grakic 14y ago
Making a new UI is fun :) People like to hack on fun things. It keeps the momentum.
ctbeiser 14y ago
I never really understood why people feel the need to keep the UI mostly the same. It may not be as good at the first release, but why do people object to them breaking everything at first? What, was everything perfect already?
- 10098 14y ago
  Because users are accustomed to the Previous Version. They have various specific ways of doing things. Your new UI breaks it, so now the user has to spend time readjusting their habits. It gets even worse if there is no simple, obvious way to re-establish the old workflow.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  Because they didn't leave any option to "break everything". If the new stuff was mature when released it might be a different story. Some people actually have work to do however and don't appreciate being forced from a 2.0 to a 0.5alpha without option. Unless you wanted to stay on an unsupported dist for years as I did with Natty (until recently). Despite my complaints, experimentation is fine in my book... The best way of handling this would be to ship Gnome2 and 3/Unity side-by-side and let the user choose, but 2 was dumped immediately for something broken, unknown, and undocumented. There's no way to stay current without "busting" your desktop.

frozenport 14y ago

Looks like SkyOS

antoncohen 14y ago

I knew Red Hat was going to do something to make Gnome 3 more 2-like. It looks like this is it, Classic will be the default in RHEL 7 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917679 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917679

donniezazen 14y ago

The only thing that I still can't get my head around is Gnome 3's message and notification tray. Gnome 3.0 was released in Oct 2011 and software developers have showed no interest in Gnome's message tray. Most software still don't support or even care about it. In spite of this reality Gnome developers have refused to make any changes to their ideology of system icons and notification. TopIcon extension that puts system tray back to where it belonged has made Gnome useful for me.

fmoralesc 14y ago
Weird, but GNOME 3's notification system is what sold it to me. I hated to have tray icons visible all the time, specially because I don't neeed them all the time at all. But that's just me, I guess.

Yaggo 14y ago

Wow. OS X influence is pervasive, but despite (or because of) that, it looks great.