8 ms·

The problem with GNOME 3

76 points by felipec 13y ago

CoffeeDregs 13y ago
I agree with some of the author's points, but I've been using Gnome 3 from back when I had to use a damned crowbar and Debian Experimental repos to install Gnome 3. I certainly did have some not-totally-happy moments to begin with, but Gnome 3 has turned into a straightforward and very clean GUI. I'm pretty much using the default functionality and theme, so haven't needed too much configuration. And I was all about configuration in Gnome 2... Gnome 3 is definitely not like Gnome 2's tweaker's paradise. It was an effort to strip down to a minimalistic GUI and, after a rough start, they've done quite well. I've not missed the "Start" menu at all. I've not missed all the configuration/tweaking. I appreciate the functionality exposed by the Windows button. I've gotten used to Alt-` for switching windows-within-applications. But I definitely agree with the author's points about the Gnome devs' response to feedback. Without regard to the trajectory of Gnome 3, the developers seems not to have managed or responded to criticism well. And Gnome 3 development and direction has been fairly quiet from a PR perspective, and a bit more PR/blog-posts could have been effective and mollifying the haters. Note: I don't really use multiple workspaces, so can't comment on the author's comments there.
- felipec 13y ago
  The author here. I understand that some people have no problems with GNOME 3, that's fine. Based on the evidence I've gathered through the years, my estimate is that half the people that used GNOME 2 liked GNOME 3, and half didn't. In my opinion that's way too many people to piss off in one version bump. Judging from the responses after two years from the debacle, I think it's fair to say that GNOME will never be as successful as it once was.
smacktoward 13y ago
The biggest problem with relying on a survey of users to determine what direction a software project should go is that users don't know what they want. Or rather, they know it, but only deep down in their subconscious, their lizard brain. Their conscious mind doesn't know, because you're asking them to pull specific things out of the nebulous cloud of the possible, and there's too many of the damn things in that cloud for them to know which ones map to what they want. That's why they need developers. Developers know how to translate requirements into features. Users don't. And they shouldn't have to! So if you ask them, what you get back tends to be: - too vague ("it should be easier"); - pie-in-the-sky stuff ("it should whiten my teeth while I use it"); - or falling back on what they know, which is what they've had in the past ("bring back feature X"). If you want to learn what users want, you have to watch them use the product, pick up on their frustrations, and creatively solve them. Asking them what they want leads you nowhere.
- vegasje 13y ago
  As mentioned in the article, you are correct in saying that users don't know what they want. However, they darn sure know what they _don't_ want, which is why many of the complaints are completely valid.
  - jamesgeck0 13y ago
    Well, sort of. Users of an existing application tend to cling to the old version in the event of a major UI overhaul, even if the new version is easier to use. For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange. When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it. My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him. He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked. Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
    - felipec 13y ago
      > He _hated_ it. We still do.
    - EdiX 13y ago
      Yes, of course, everyone who doesn't like a major UI overhaul is just an irrational luddite. New UI is always better UI. However you got one thing right: familiarity always trumps ease of learning, ie. the easiest thing to learn is what you know already. So if you define "good UI" as "user friendly UI" (as we have done, for some reason, for 30 years) you will find that the best UI is always the old one, because virgin users do not exist anymore.
mixmastamyk 13y ago
The evisceration of nautilus is now a daily handicap... I don't know what to do about it. There are some things the terminal isn't good at.
- jaibot 13y ago
  Caja.
- felipec 13y ago
  Thunar.
- riquito 13y ago
  Nemo.
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  Midnight Commander
- LaSombra 13y ago
  PCManFM
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  Thanks everyone. I know there are other choices, but they always involve drawbacks as well as benefits. I'm looking for something slightly more powerful than nautilus in gnome 2 and will try the alternatives you've mentioned.
dhruvmittal 13y ago
Another pretty big problem with the Gnome Project recently is that they've made Gnome less modular. Gnome used to be a collection of associated software- you had a window manager, a panel, a compositor, panel applications and widgets, a settings-daemon, a keyring manager, a screensaver, etc. If you wanted something other than what Gnome wanted to provide, you swapped out metacity and compiz for xmonad. Or you bolted the settings-daemon onto another window manager. It's been subtle, but with every 3.x version of gnome, a little more of the functionality just gets rolled into gnome-shell and is unable to run without it. Most recently, with 3.8, media keys are no longer handled by gnome-settings-daemon- you can now only have gnome's media keys if you're running gnome-shell. I know a lot of people are going to say "well, you're not using the software for its intended purpose. it's not their fault for breaking it." And that's true, but modularity a big part of the Unix philosophy and this is Gnome showing the Unix way the door.
QEDturtles 13y ago
If you're looking for a useful critique of the Gnome 3 desktop, look elsewhere. Here's ts;dr: Gnome developers are dumb. Every decision they ever made was stupid. I'm the smartest. They should listen to me but they don't because they're stupid.
- homosaur 13y ago
  Maybe you should try reading more than 2 paragraphs before commenting, it makes you sound a lot more informed.
  - QEDturtles 13y ago
    I'll admit I didnt' finish it... how could I? it was too painful...
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    Maybe the author should write meaningful pieces that actually contain even a modicum of objectivity. It's basically exactly the same as a handful of other pieces he's written about how he doesn't like GNOME because they were 'mean' to him (even though based on everything he really seems to have deserved the punishments dealt to him). Sorry, but it peeves me that his articles still get near the top. They're worthless diatribes against a project that doesn't care about his input. And, more importantly, doesn't need or want to care about his input.
jmhain 13y ago
This article is so ignorant and painfully wrong in every single way. I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla (which he very much deserved in my opinion). GNOME 3 is by far the best desktop environment I have ever used. The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking. Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is incredibly polished and stable, especially in the latest version 3.8. I'm tired of all the bullshit being spread about GNOME 3. If you're going to cling to the past, you're free to use a shitty--I'm sorry--traditional desktop environment.
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  No drag & drop, across the entire interface, huge usability ouch. Here's an example: I use Evolution as my email client. An important email comes in that I'd like to store in a project folder. In Gnome 2 you just drag and drop directly to the target folder; in Gnome 3 you have to right-click; choose "Move To"; then browse to the target folder (that is right before your f-ing eyes), and hope that it works. It's the same for every application. Open 2 Nautilus windows, try to shift-select a bunch of files and drag to the other window -- does.not.work For me lack of drag and drop is the single biggest strike against Gnome 3. I use a tiling WM (i3) with Fedora 18; when I switch to Fedora 19 it will very likely be a Gnome-less stack.
  - tadfisher 13y ago
    Sounds to me like your window manager doesn't support the necessary drag & drop hints [1]. Yes, X11 does not specify a D&D protocol. All three of those use cases work fine for me, using the Gnome Shell itself. [1] http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/ http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/
- Mindless2112 13y ago
  > I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. I, on the other end of the spectrum, have yet to find someone who loves it. I switched to XFCE because I found GNOME 3 to be a terrible experience, despite having loved GNOME 2.
- 13y ago
programminggeek 13y ago
There is a much bigger problem with GNOME 3, it is fighting a battle that nobody cares about anymore. People using GNOME and KDE used to have this notion where they are trying to build a Windows replacement or a Mac replacement to get people to use FOSS. Ubuntu showed that what needs to happen is to make a better UX overall and that has nothing to do with Mac or Windows. What I mean by UX is stuff like drivers working, being able to install on a laptop or just buy it on a laptop and stuff "just works". People will pay money to support things that work. They will buy things that work. Millions of people are using Android, which is Linux based, because it just works on their device. The experience is pretty great and it makes it easy to do what you need to do when you need to do it. GNOME 3 didn't solve any user experience problem. It is new and shiny just because. It didn't make it better than Ubuntu, or Windows, or Mac, or Android.
- krakensden 13y ago
  This isn't particularly useful or accurate. The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things. Gnome's 'flagship distro', unfortunately, is Fedora, which is... structurally not super-suited to creating a user-facing distribution. Canonical has done lots of interesting work over the past decade or so, but ultimately most of the 'just work' they have didn't really come from their employees or investments.
  - felipec 13y ago
    > The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things. True, but not particularly more than KDE, or any other environment.
    - Zardoz84 13y ago
      KDE works in broken graphics drivers. GNOME only give you missing characters, deformed windows, etc... And isn't GTK getting something wrong. I try for example OpenBOX and all works fine.
  - 13y ago
darklajid 13y ago
I don't understand these posts. More, I dislike them a lot. Gnome 3 rants are boring. Yes, people don't like the way the project moves. Some of those are very vocal and outspoken. Some rant on a blog. The thing is: Either the author cares about the Gnome project, in which case this is _no_ constructive way to put it (Hey, why don't you work on a better legacy mode? Propose a Gnome Shell extension API?). No, the 'But I tried it before, over and over, and they don't listen' argument is no excuse. Or the author just does't like the project and wants to bash it. In that case posts like this one might make some weird kind of sense, but I yawn skimming them, hit flag on news aggregators like this and wish the author good luck with a Gnome 2 fork or a different DE of his choosing. Hi, my name is Ben and I'm a happy Gnome 3 user. I'm sure there are others out there like me. Maybe we need to shout more? That would certainly remove stupid 'Google suggestions' arguments or 'of all the people that took this weird poll, x % hate Gnome 3' pseudo-statistics from future rants.
- dkhenry 13y ago
  As a fellow happy Gnome 3 user I think the problem is no one complains about what works for them. It took a bit to get used to, but now I find all other environments lacking.
  - jamesgeck0 13y ago
    Similar thing here. I wanted a taskbar for a while, until I installed an extension that put it back and realized how clunky it felt. I love the combined launcher/virtual-desktop/expose screen. The vanilla experience is pretty great. I love how much the environment gets out of your way and doesn't bother you. The instant message notification that can be ignored, or answered briefly and ignored. The lack of noise. It feels like an alternate history version of the Mac OS X Finder; my workflow transitioned with very few changes when I started using OS X at work.
    - runeks 13y ago
      Interesting. One question: does it feel "fast"/responsive? That's one of the things I value the most in a DE. Unity doesn't live up to my standards regarding this.
donrememberpass 13y ago
I'm a happy Gnome 3 user.
zalew 13y ago
Hated it at first, but recently switched do Gnome (3.6) and loving it. > There’s no other way to put it; GNOME 3 was a mistake. There’s no other way to put it: your blog post is a mistake.
riquito 13y ago
> I complained about GNOME 3 since day one Maybe you need an attitude change
neumino 13y ago
I'm pretty sure if Apple would have release a desktop environment like Gnome 3, people would have love it. I personally like how they do things, they provide what people need, not what people want. And I do believe that they provide an awesome and by far the best desktop environment.
js4all 13y ago
I am happy with Gnome 3. I can't understand the rants. If you don't like it, use something else.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bfrog 13y ago
Honestly gnome 3 convinced me to switch from using a few assorted others (xmonad, kde, xfce, etc) and just use gnome 3. Its the only one that just works 90% of the time with crap that should work. Network, bluetooth, notifications, window management. I like the way all these things work. I have my minor qualms with it (alt+tab, multimonitor support, poor virtual machine performance) Those few things aren't deal breakers for me though
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  Multimonitor support, shit, that's an absolute must here. Window management pales compared to tiling WMs like Awesome and i3, so being able to drag title bar to windows edges to get a split screen is like, is that all? How about a key binding for that, and while we're at it, how about splitting the screen arbitrarily using keyboard shortcuts? I get that Gnome 3 is good in the sense that things mostly work, but it seems tailored to touch screen devices or use of a mouse to interact with the interface. This frankly blows if your go to tool of choice is the keyboard. Saying that, I wouldn't consider going back to Gnome 2, am moving toward a Gnome-less stack.
u2328 13y ago
I'm a big fan of GNOME 3, and strongly prefer it over other desktops. The GNOME guys/gals have been doing a great job, and all the hate it gets is old and tired. If you don't like it, that's fine. There are many other great options available to you. Look, we're on GNOME 3.8 now. The ship of GNOME's desktop design philosophy has sailed. Either GNOME broke up with you, or you broke up with it, but the relationship is over. Get over it.
pjmlp 13y ago
Well, we could also use twm instead.
bad_user 13y ago
1. configuration options are usually a symptom of a bad UI. But sometimes they are necessary. Personally I get why Gnome 3 or Unity developers have cut down on configuration options, but on the other hand, for example it's really frustrating in Unity not being able to move the left bar to the right. On OS X or on Windows (7 at least) this is extremely easy to do, as you can place that bar wherever you want it, to the left, to the right, at the bottom, wherever it feels more comfortable to you. So it's good that Gnome developers strive for interfaces that work well out of the box, but some choices have been rather dumb. 2. developers do listen to users, but unfortunately every user is different and have different preferences and needs, so whom do you listen to? Also, users aren't really aware of what they really need, so you have to read between the lines. This is a sixth sense that many of us lack. You need to have a strong dictator with good taste to drive good design. It's pretty sad that we don't have a dictator like Linus Torvalds for Gnome. Now that's a guy that would have driven things forward. 3. it happens with us technical people that every time interfaces change, we bitch about it. Well I decided to embrace change. I like Gmail's new Compose. I like most UI decisions from Ubuntu/Unity. There I said it. Good design doesn't necessarily feel right from the start, because the lack of familiarity gets in the way. But the ultimate pursuit is that of simplicity, composability and usefulness. So from time to time, we should sacrifice familiarity for the mentioned purposes. On the other hand, there's no excuse for releasing broken interfaces. Gnome fell in the same trap that KDE did when version 4 was released - as in barely functional software getting released to unsuspecting users.
bluedino 13y ago
Tweak tools, customization - people need to learn that this doesn't matter. Look at the Mac. You can't change anything. You can't even change the colors. You're stuck with what you've got. But people just learned to live with it. After you stop complaining and start working, you actually get things done. Whenever I turn my Linux machine on, I'm always tweaking something. I can't do that on my Mac. I've sat at Starbucks for over an hour installing themes and such. Talk about wasting time, but I guess I find it fun. (I'm still using the old GNOME)
adrianlmm 13y ago
I'm a GNOME 3 user and I love it, I feel I'm more productive with it than with any other desktop. GNOME 3 developers, you rock!
uvtc 13y ago
If you prefer a more traditional-style desktop, Xfce is very nice.

76 points by felipec 13y ago

I agree with some of the author's points, but I've been using Gnome 3 from back when I had to use a damned crowbar and Debian Experimental repos to install Gnome 3. I certainly did have some not-totally-happy moments to begin with, but Gnome 3 has turned into a straightforward and very clean GUI. I'm pretty much using the default functionality and theme, so haven't needed too much configuration. And I was all about configuration in Gnome 2... Gnome 3 is definitely not like Gnome 2's tweaker's paradise. It was an effort to strip down to a minimalistic GUI and, after a rough start, they've done quite well. I've not missed the "Start" menu at all. I've not missed all the configuration/tweaking. I appreciate the functionality exposed by the Windows button. I've gotten used to Alt-` for switching windows-within-applications. But I definitely agree with the author's points about the Gnome devs' response to feedback. Without regard to the trajectory of Gnome 3, the developers seems not to have managed or responded to criticism well. And Gnome 3 development and direction has been fairly quiet from a PR perspective, and a bit more PR/blog-posts could have been effective and mollifying the haters. Note: I don't really use multiple workspaces, so can't comment on the author's comments there.

felipec 13y ago
The author here. I understand that some people have no problems with GNOME 3, that's fine. Based on the evidence I've gathered through the years, my estimate is that half the people that used GNOME 2 liked GNOME 3, and half didn't. In my opinion that's way too many people to piss off in one version bump. Judging from the responses after two years from the debacle, I think it's fair to say that GNOME will never be as successful as it once was.

smacktoward 13y ago

The biggest problem with relying on a survey of users to determine what direction a software project should go is that users don't know what they want. Or rather, they know it, but only deep down in their subconscious, their lizard brain. Their conscious mind doesn't know, because you're asking them to pull specific things out of the nebulous cloud of the possible, and there's too many of the damn things in that cloud for them to know which ones map to what they want. That's why they need developers. Developers know how to translate requirements into features. Users don't. And they shouldn't have to! So if you ask them, what you get back tends to be: - too vague ("it should be easier"); - pie-in-the-sky stuff ("it should whiten my teeth while I use it"); - or falling back on what they know, which is what they've had in the past ("bring back feature X"). If you want to learn what users want, you have to watch them use the product, pick up on their frustrations, and creatively solve them. Asking them what they want leads you nowhere.

vegasje 13y ago
As mentioned in the article, you are correct in saying that users don't know what they want. However, they darn sure know what they _don't_ want, which is why many of the complaints are completely valid.
- jamesgeck0 13y ago
  Well, sort of. Users of an existing application tend to cling to the old version in the event of a major UI overhaul, even if the new version is easier to use. For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange. When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it. My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him. He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked. Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
  - felipec 13y ago
    > He _hated_ it. We still do.
  - EdiX 13y ago
    Yes, of course, everyone who doesn't like a major UI overhaul is just an irrational luddite. New UI is always better UI. However you got one thing right: familiarity always trumps ease of learning, ie. the easiest thing to learn is what you know already. So if you define "good UI" as "user friendly UI" (as we have done, for some reason, for 30 years) you will find that the best UI is always the old one, because virgin users do not exist anymore.

mixmastamyk 13y ago

The evisceration of nautilus is now a daily handicap... I don't know what to do about it. There are some things the terminal isn't good at.

jaibot 13y ago
Caja.
felipec 13y ago
Thunar.
riquito 13y ago
Nemo.
virtualwhys 13y ago
Midnight Commander
LaSombra 13y ago
PCManFM
mixmastamyk 13y ago
Thanks everyone. I know there are other choices, but they always involve drawbacks as well as benefits. I'm looking for something slightly more powerful than nautilus in gnome 2 and will try the alternatives you've mentioned.

dhruvmittal 13y ago

Another pretty big problem with the Gnome Project recently is that they've made Gnome less modular. Gnome used to be a collection of associated software- you had a window manager, a panel, a compositor, panel applications and widgets, a settings-daemon, a keyring manager, a screensaver, etc. If you wanted something other than what Gnome wanted to provide, you swapped out metacity and compiz for xmonad. Or you bolted the settings-daemon onto another window manager. It's been subtle, but with every 3.x version of gnome, a little more of the functionality just gets rolled into gnome-shell and is unable to run without it. Most recently, with 3.8, media keys are no longer handled by gnome-settings-daemon- you can now only have gnome's media keys if you're running gnome-shell. I know a lot of people are going to say "well, you're not using the software for its intended purpose. it's not their fault for breaking it." And that's true, but modularity a big part of the Unix philosophy and this is Gnome showing the Unix way the door.

QEDturtles 13y ago

If you're looking for a useful critique of the Gnome 3 desktop, look elsewhere. Here's ts;dr: Gnome developers are dumb. Every decision they ever made was stupid. I'm the smartest. They should listen to me but they don't because they're stupid.

homosaur 13y ago
Maybe you should try reading more than 2 paragraphs before commenting, it makes you sound a lot more informed.
- QEDturtles 13y ago
  I'll admit I didnt' finish it... how could I? it was too painful...
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  Maybe the author should write meaningful pieces that actually contain even a modicum of objectivity. It's basically exactly the same as a handful of other pieces he's written about how he doesn't like GNOME because they were 'mean' to him (even though based on everything he really seems to have deserved the punishments dealt to him). Sorry, but it peeves me that his articles still get near the top. They're worthless diatribes against a project that doesn't care about his input. And, more importantly, doesn't need or want to care about his input.

jmhain 13y ago

This article is so ignorant and painfully wrong in every single way. I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla (which he very much deserved in my opinion). GNOME 3 is by far the best desktop environment I have ever used. The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking. Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is incredibly polished and stable, especially in the latest version 3.8. I'm tired of all the bullshit being spread about GNOME 3. If you're going to cling to the past, you're free to use a shitty--I'm sorry--traditional desktop environment.

virtualwhys 13y ago
No drag & drop, across the entire interface, huge usability ouch. Here's an example: I use Evolution as my email client. An important email comes in that I'd like to store in a project folder. In Gnome 2 you just drag and drop directly to the target folder; in Gnome 3 you have to right-click; choose "Move To"; then browse to the target folder (that is right before your f-ing eyes), and hope that it works. It's the same for every application. Open 2 Nautilus windows, try to shift-select a bunch of files and drag to the other window -- does.not.work For me lack of drag and drop is the single biggest strike against Gnome 3. I use a tiling WM (i3) with Fedora 18; when I switch to Fedora 19 it will very likely be a Gnome-less stack.
- tadfisher 13y ago
  Sounds to me like your window manager doesn't support the necessary drag & drop hints [1]. Yes, X11 does not specify a D&D protocol. All three of those use cases work fine for me, using the Gnome Shell itself. [1] http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/ http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/
Mindless2112 13y ago
> I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. I, on the other end of the spectrum, have yet to find someone who loves it. I switched to XFCE because I found GNOME 3 to be a terrible experience, despite having loved GNOME 2.
13y ago

programminggeek 13y ago

There is a much bigger problem with GNOME 3, it is fighting a battle that nobody cares about anymore. People using GNOME and KDE used to have this notion where they are trying to build a Windows replacement or a Mac replacement to get people to use FOSS. Ubuntu showed that what needs to happen is to make a better UX overall and that has nothing to do with Mac or Windows. What I mean by UX is stuff like drivers working, being able to install on a laptop or just buy it on a laptop and stuff "just works". People will pay money to support things that work. They will buy things that work. Millions of people are using Android, which is Linux based, because it just works on their device. The experience is pretty great and it makes it easy to do what you need to do when you need to do it. GNOME 3 didn't solve any user experience problem. It is new and shiny just because. It didn't make it better than Ubuntu, or Windows, or Mac, or Android.

krakensden 13y ago
This isn't particularly useful or accurate. The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things. Gnome's 'flagship distro', unfortunately, is Fedora, which is... structurally not super-suited to creating a user-facing distribution. Canonical has done lots of interesting work over the past decade or so, but ultimately most of the 'just work' they have didn't really come from their employees or investments.
- felipec 13y ago
  > The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things. True, but not particularly more than KDE, or any other environment.
  - Zardoz84 13y ago
    KDE works in broken graphics drivers. GNOME only give you missing characters, deformed windows, etc... And isn't GTK getting something wrong. I try for example OpenBOX and all works fine.
- 13y ago

darklajid 13y ago

I don't understand these posts. More, I dislike them a lot. Gnome 3 rants are boring. Yes, people don't like the way the project moves. Some of those are very vocal and outspoken. Some rant on a blog. The thing is: Either the author cares about the Gnome project, in which case this is _no_ constructive way to put it (Hey, why don't you work on a better legacy mode? Propose a Gnome Shell extension API?). No, the 'But I tried it before, over and over, and they don't listen' argument is no excuse. Or the author just does't like the project and wants to bash it. In that case posts like this one might make some weird kind of sense, but I yawn skimming them, hit flag on news aggregators like this and wish the author good luck with a Gnome 2 fork or a different DE of his choosing. Hi, my name is Ben and I'm a happy Gnome 3 user. I'm sure there are others out there like me. Maybe we need to shout more? That would certainly remove stupid 'Google suggestions' arguments or 'of all the people that took this weird poll, x % hate Gnome 3' pseudo-statistics from future rants.

dkhenry 13y ago
As a fellow happy Gnome 3 user I think the problem is no one complains about what works for them. It took a bit to get used to, but now I find all other environments lacking.
- jamesgeck0 13y ago
  Similar thing here. I wanted a taskbar for a while, until I installed an extension that put it back and realized how clunky it felt. I love the combined launcher/virtual-desktop/expose screen. The vanilla experience is pretty great. I love how much the environment gets out of your way and doesn't bother you. The instant message notification that can be ignored, or answered briefly and ignored. The lack of noise. It feels like an alternate history version of the Mac OS X Finder; my workflow transitioned with very few changes when I started using OS X at work.
  - runeks 13y ago
    Interesting. One question: does it feel "fast"/responsive? That's one of the things I value the most in a DE. Unity doesn't live up to my standards regarding this.

donrememberpass 13y ago

I'm a happy Gnome 3 user.

zalew 13y ago

Hated it at first, but recently switched do Gnome (3.6) and loving it. > There’s no other way to put it; GNOME 3 was a mistake. There’s no other way to put it: your blog post is a mistake.

riquito 13y ago

> I complained about GNOME 3 since day one Maybe you need an attitude change

neumino 13y ago

I'm pretty sure if Apple would have release a desktop environment like Gnome 3, people would have love it. I personally like how they do things, they provide what people need, not what people want. And I do believe that they provide an awesome and by far the best desktop environment.

js4all 13y ago

I am happy with Gnome 3. I can't understand the rants. If you don't like it, use something else.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bfrog 13y ago

Honestly gnome 3 convinced me to switch from using a few assorted others (xmonad, kde, xfce, etc) and just use gnome 3. Its the only one that just works 90% of the time with crap that should work. Network, bluetooth, notifications, window management. I like the way all these things work. I have my minor qualms with it (alt+tab, multimonitor support, poor virtual machine performance) Those few things aren't deal breakers for me though

virtualwhys 13y ago
Multimonitor support, shit, that's an absolute must here. Window management pales compared to tiling WMs like Awesome and i3, so being able to drag title bar to windows edges to get a split screen is like, is that all? How about a key binding for that, and while we're at it, how about splitting the screen arbitrarily using keyboard shortcuts? I get that Gnome 3 is good in the sense that things mostly work, but it seems tailored to touch screen devices or use of a mouse to interact with the interface. This frankly blows if your go to tool of choice is the keyboard. Saying that, I wouldn't consider going back to Gnome 2, am moving toward a Gnome-less stack.

u2328 13y ago

I'm a big fan of GNOME 3, and strongly prefer it over other desktops. The GNOME guys/gals have been doing a great job, and all the hate it gets is old and tired. If you don't like it, that's fine. There are many other great options available to you. Look, we're on GNOME 3.8 now. The ship of GNOME's desktop design philosophy has sailed. Either GNOME broke up with you, or you broke up with it, but the relationship is over. Get over it.

pjmlp 13y ago

Well, we could also use twm instead.

bad_user 13y ago

1. configuration options are usually a symptom of a bad UI. But sometimes they are necessary. Personally I get why Gnome 3 or Unity developers have cut down on configuration options, but on the other hand, for example it's really frustrating in Unity not being able to move the left bar to the right. On OS X or on Windows (7 at least) this is extremely easy to do, as you can place that bar wherever you want it, to the left, to the right, at the bottom, wherever it feels more comfortable to you. So it's good that Gnome developers strive for interfaces that work well out of the box, but some choices have been rather dumb. 2. developers do listen to users, but unfortunately every user is different and have different preferences and needs, so whom do you listen to? Also, users aren't really aware of what they really need, so you have to read between the lines. This is a sixth sense that many of us lack. You need to have a strong dictator with good taste to drive good design. It's pretty sad that we don't have a dictator like Linus Torvalds for Gnome. Now that's a guy that would have driven things forward. 3. it happens with us technical people that every time interfaces change, we bitch about it. Well I decided to embrace change. I like Gmail's new Compose. I like most UI decisions from Ubuntu/Unity. There I said it. Good design doesn't necessarily feel right from the start, because the lack of familiarity gets in the way. But the ultimate pursuit is that of simplicity, composability and usefulness. So from time to time, we should sacrifice familiarity for the mentioned purposes. On the other hand, there's no excuse for releasing broken interfaces. Gnome fell in the same trap that KDE did when version 4 was released - as in barely functional software getting released to unsuspecting users.

bluedino 13y ago

Tweak tools, customization - people need to learn that this doesn't matter. Look at the Mac. You can't change anything. You can't even change the colors. You're stuck with what you've got. But people just learned to live with it. After you stop complaining and start working, you actually get things done. Whenever I turn my Linux machine on, I'm always tweaking something. I can't do that on my Mac. I've sat at Starbucks for over an hour installing themes and such. Talk about wasting time, but I guess I find it fun. (I'm still using the old GNOME)

adrianlmm 13y ago

I'm a GNOME 3 user and I love it, I feel I'm more productive with it than with any other desktop. GNOME 3 developers, you rock!

uvtc 13y ago

If you prefer a more traditional-style desktop, Xfce is very nice.