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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

by 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.
viraptor 13y ago
"ignorant and painfully wrong in every single way" Could you provide some details and corrections? "It's wrong" is not saying much really... "The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking." The author raises a good point about backwards compatibility, what's your experience with it? How do you keep / plan to keep your customisation up to date after upgrades?
- tadfisher 13y ago
  It's pretty funny that Firefox was praised back in the day for removing most of the core functionality and configurability of SeaMonkey and leaving the rest to extensions, and now Gnome 3 is lambasted for doing the same thing. You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. I see that as a necessary tradeoff; I don't want core development bogged down by BC, and I want my extensions to be maintained and improved.
  - felipec 13y ago
    > You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. Not even close to what happens in GNOME 3. Firefox has an extension API, GNOME shell doesn't; that has consequences.
kunai 13y ago
Yes, because confusing, inconsistent, space-ineffective UIs that have serious usability issues like no default drag and drop, weird GTK3 two-menu system with tons of redundancy, loss of keyboard shortcuts, inefficient application launching systems, and a loss of customization are what everyone wants, and if people don't want it, they're Luddian curmudgeons who need to be exiled from the Linux community and put down in front of a BSD system. Right? The problem extends further than just GNOME's stupidity. When you have forks, you get a lot of fragmentation. Now, nobody can figure out whether to develop for GTK2, GTK3, Qt, or goddamned xaw because there is just so much fragmentation in the desktop environments. If GNOME had just been sane, there would be no MATE, there would be no Cinnamon, there would be no Unity, and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
- nuclear_eclipse 13y ago
  In all seriousness, Unity was a thing from Canonical long before anyone knew the direction Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell was heading. Canonical wanted their own desktop experience that they could drive in the direction they wanted to go, and they would have never gotten that from Gnome or KDE or any other existing project. The fact that they're switching Unity from a Gtk to a Qt backend in order to support their mobile efforts and their desire to have a single UX everywhere is just further proof of this strategy.
jfaucett 13y ago
Id agree with your overall point that gnome 3 is a great desktop environment. But I also agree with many of the authors points about the plain wierd default settings and non user-friendly way you have to go about getting gnome 3 to be the desktop env you want. For me I love gnome 3 now, but getting my setup how I wanted was not a task for the light hearted. I think thats the biggest problem gnome 3 has to be honest.
felipec 13y ago
> I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla I'm not, that happened two years ago, and the only one that lost something there is the GNOME project. There's no point in answering the rest of your comments, because apparently your mind is not capable of understanding that people are different, and why a project should not piss its current users.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  It really seems that you are still upset with the GNOME community disregarding you. Based on the fact that you keep writing pieces about how you hate GNOME 3, without any objective information on why GNOME 3 is bad. Attempting to continue some war on it is useless, there are many people who are quite pleased with GNOME 3, just because you aren't doesn't mean you need to keep deriding it, just move on and stop caring. As made obvious the past several times you've written incredibly similar pieces, the greater GNOME community doesn't care. There's no purpose to what you're doing.
homosaur 13y ago
This is exactly the kind of tone deaf developer suck-up attitude the article complains about. It doesn't really matter what you or I or person X thinks, the fact is that many many many user surveys have been taken and the majority despise Gnome 3. The Gnome developers have taken the exact same stance you do, that people are just not smart enough and have ulterior motives for hating Gnome 3. The only thing it's gotten them is being pulled from default on several distros and rapidly plummeting market share. But good for them, it's easier to be "brilliant" and "forward thinking" with zero users to support.
- darklajid 13y ago
  I stated my opinion elsewhere on this thread: Use what works for you. That said, I do wonder how you'd like to back up your claims here? I mean - if you'd just say "Bah! Gnome 3 is a step in the wrong direction and the Gnome developers are clueless. I'm moving on" that'd be fine and cool - I guess everyone could understand reasons to do that, without neccessarily agreeing. But you - state that a 'majority' hates Gnome 3. What? Really? A 'majority' of .. which representative group? - state that Gnome developers consider their users as dumb (I .. hope I didn't misrepresent you here) That's impossible to back, insulting and quite frankly it's hard to assign a single motive to the 'Gnome developers' - argue that they lost market share for some reason Ignoring whether you're right or not (I .. tend to disagree): Why would that be important? Why do you consider 'rule the DE market' / 'be a leader in the DE market' (what market??) a worthwhile goal of the Gnome project? In my opinion they should provide one of a number of consistent desktop environments..
- varjag 13y ago
  This reminds me when some version of Nautilus (around 2003?) adopted that ridiculous open each folder in new window thing without an option to disable it. Instead of listening to outcry of very much every single user out there, the person in charge insisted that his vision was the "correct" way of using desktop metaphor, and suggested everyone to get over it.
mverwijs 13y ago
> Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is unclear to me if those people also actually used the software (at lenght)?

by jmhain 13y ago

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.

viraptor 13y ago

"ignorant and painfully wrong in every single way" Could you provide some details and corrections? "It's wrong" is not saying much really... "The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking." The author raises a good point about backwards compatibility, what's your experience with it? How do you keep / plan to keep your customisation up to date after upgrades?

tadfisher 13y ago
It's pretty funny that Firefox was praised back in the day for removing most of the core functionality and configurability of SeaMonkey and leaving the rest to extensions, and now Gnome 3 is lambasted for doing the same thing. You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. I see that as a necessary tradeoff; I don't want core development bogged down by BC, and I want my extensions to be maintained and improved.
- felipec 13y ago
  > You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. Not even close to what happens in GNOME 3. Firefox has an extension API, GNOME shell doesn't; that has consequences.

kunai 13y ago

Yes, because confusing, inconsistent, space-ineffective UIs that have serious usability issues like no default drag and drop, weird GTK3 two-menu system with tons of redundancy, loss of keyboard shortcuts, inefficient application launching systems, and a loss of customization are what everyone wants, and if people don't want it, they're Luddian curmudgeons who need to be exiled from the Linux community and put down in front of a BSD system. Right? The problem extends further than just GNOME's stupidity. When you have forks, you get a lot of fragmentation. Now, nobody can figure out whether to develop for GTK2, GTK3, Qt, or goddamned xaw because there is just so much fragmentation in the desktop environments. If GNOME had just been sane, there would be no MATE, there would be no Cinnamon, there would be no Unity, and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.

nuclear_eclipse 13y ago
In all seriousness, Unity was a thing from Canonical long before anyone knew the direction Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell was heading. Canonical wanted their own desktop experience that they could drive in the direction they wanted to go, and they would have never gotten that from Gnome or KDE or any other existing project. The fact that they're switching Unity from a Gtk to a Qt backend in order to support their mobile efforts and their desire to have a single UX everywhere is just further proof of this strategy.

jfaucett 13y ago

Id agree with your overall point that gnome 3 is a great desktop environment. But I also agree with many of the authors points about the plain wierd default settings and non user-friendly way you have to go about getting gnome 3 to be the desktop env you want. For me I love gnome 3 now, but getting my setup how I wanted was not a task for the light hearted. I think thats the biggest problem gnome 3 has to be honest.

felipec 13y ago

> I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla I'm not, that happened two years ago, and the only one that lost something there is the GNOME project. There's no point in answering the rest of your comments, because apparently your mind is not capable of understanding that people are different, and why a project should not piss its current users.

dkuntz2 13y ago
It really seems that you are still upset with the GNOME community disregarding you. Based on the fact that you keep writing pieces about how you hate GNOME 3, without any objective information on why GNOME 3 is bad. Attempting to continue some war on it is useless, there are many people who are quite pleased with GNOME 3, just because you aren't doesn't mean you need to keep deriding it, just move on and stop caring. As made obvious the past several times you've written incredibly similar pieces, the greater GNOME community doesn't care. There's no purpose to what you're doing.

homosaur 13y ago

This is exactly the kind of tone deaf developer suck-up attitude the article complains about. It doesn't really matter what you or I or person X thinks, the fact is that many many many user surveys have been taken and the majority despise Gnome 3. The Gnome developers have taken the exact same stance you do, that people are just not smart enough and have ulterior motives for hating Gnome 3. The only thing it's gotten them is being pulled from default on several distros and rapidly plummeting market share. But good for them, it's easier to be "brilliant" and "forward thinking" with zero users to support.

darklajid 13y ago
I stated my opinion elsewhere on this thread: Use what works for you. That said, I do wonder how you'd like to back up your claims here? I mean - if you'd just say "Bah! Gnome 3 is a step in the wrong direction and the Gnome developers are clueless. I'm moving on" that'd be fine and cool - I guess everyone could understand reasons to do that, without neccessarily agreeing. But you - state that a 'majority' hates Gnome 3. What? Really? A 'majority' of .. which representative group? - state that Gnome developers consider their users as dumb (I .. hope I didn't misrepresent you here) That's impossible to back, insulting and quite frankly it's hard to assign a single motive to the 'Gnome developers' - argue that they lost market share for some reason Ignoring whether you're right or not (I .. tend to disagree): Why would that be important? Why do you consider 'rule the DE market' / 'be a leader in the DE market' (what market??) a worthwhile goal of the Gnome project? In my opinion they should provide one of a number of consistent desktop environments..
varjag 13y ago
This reminds me when some version of Nautilus (around 2003?) adopted that ridiculous open each folder in new window thing without an option to disable it. Instead of listening to outcry of very much every single user out there, the person in charge insisted that his vision was the "correct" way of using desktop metaphor, and suggested everyone to get over it.

mverwijs 13y ago

> Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is unclear to me if those people also actually used the software (at lenght)?