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.
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.
Have you tried the latest KDE? It's very customisable and hasn't crashed or required manual restart for me once in the last 3 years, even when I leave it running for days.
I did try it again (after many years) just last month, unfortunately I find it hideous and cluttered, even after an hour or two of tweaking. You're right it should be the answer, but I felt deeply unhappy using it. (My problem I know).
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.
This. I really love Gnome 3, and I really don't get all the bad vibe it's been getting. With a few extensions you can get back pretty much everything you might miss about it, and it's really slick and stable (especially compared to KDE).
You can re-enable the minimize button using the Gnome Tweak Tool without too much trouble. Admittedly, I think that button should be enabled by default, and it is annoying to have to install a different package, but the option is available.
gnome-shell doesn't have a minimize button because it doesn't have an application list for the window to minimize to; minimized windows just disappear. You can only find them in the activities overview or the alt-tab list.
Also note that you can still minimize a window by right-clicking on the title bar and choosing "minimize"; you just don't have a button for it.
> ...minimized windows just disappear. You can only find them in the activities overview or the alt-tab list.
... which is actually really cool. They're still very easily accessible (a single mouse-flip or keyboard sequence away), but completely out of sight when I'm not using them.
The windows-style task-bar with 75 bazillion unreadable entries always seemed pretty annoying (and often unusable when any number of apps are open); Gnome 3 does things much more elegantly.
That's one of the things I really like about gnome 3 / gnome-shell: it mostly stays in the background out of my way, but is quickly available when I want it.
You can easily add a minimize button to gnome 3 — somewhere in the various configuration settings, there's a "title bar layout" parameter which lets you set specify which buttons to use, and where to put them (roughly).
[...rummages around...]
Ah, try the following in a shell to get the classic Apple Mac button layout; other variations should be obvious:
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides button-layout close:minimize,maximize
If you install gnome tweak tool then you can set all buttons to the title bar of your windows, except for the menu button on the left side.
As extension developer I agree with your sentiment, all the missing parts are slowly returning, Gnome 3 shell is not bad, it was just put out to the world way too early.
I was very critical when I saw the first versions of gnome shell but things are really going well for it.
It has many development languages to choose from like Python, C, C++, Vala and even Javascript. It uses CSS as styling. Several backends to output to X, Wayland coming, HTML (which is impressive and good use when owncloud is integrated). Soon you can use your desktop everywhere not like VNC but realtime.
It's not that stable: I'm running 3.2 and it is full of memory leaks, to the point that I have to restart it every so often when it's using upward of 700MB of ram.
Other than that, I agree. It can be hid away nicely so that u can work in full screen bliss, and the extension ecosystem looks like it could rival Firefox interms of variety.
(Edit: maybe the leaks are caused by the extensions I'm running, and hopefully it gets better in later versions.)
Are you talking specifically about this version? If so, how hard/possible is it to install Gnome 3.8 on top of an existing X, say under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS? Thanks!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The desktop UI has reached something of a local maximum which users are content with.
In the absence of justification for refining the desktop UI, UI vendors have developed another excuse to change shit on people: the mistaken impression that more tablety UIs are more progressive and easier to use on the desktop. Which is false on its face, given the different ergonomic constraints between a desktop PC and a tablet.
I really, really want to go to a full Linux desktop.
What keeps holding me back are dumb things like video driver support, peripheral support for things I use, and general awkwardness with the whole plug/unplug state of affairs that is de rigueur in the laptop space.
I'd be happy with GNOME in the 3.x incarnation, but the whole "turn your 7-hour Macbook Air into a 4-hour Linux machine" is just not okay. I need parity in battery life.
EXACTLY. We're constantly a step or two behind in terms of platform support.
Why isn't there a top-tier platform company (or nimble upstart) out there taking the lead and making a machine that has 100% driver support under Linux?
I am holding out hope that the Piston might get us there, but I'm not holding my breath.
I haven't used it or other laptops enough to say how good it really is (but hibernate etc. works, the screen and keyboard are nice compared to other ultrabooks I tried; it's light and clean). The trackpad is annoying though but I think I'll always prefer a mouse.
> Why isn't there a top-tier platform company (or nimble upstart) out there taking the lead and making a machine that has 100% driver support under Linux?
Providing you stick to Intel (eg no Nvidia graphics) then the Thinkpad T series (and probably most others) work very well under Linux. Occasionally there are issues but Lenovo do fix them (eg BIOS updates). Of course Lenovo won't sell you one without Windows!
The only thing that hasn't been supported in my last two Thinkpads (T430s and T61) has been the fingerprint reader. More accurately it is supported in dumb mode, but not in smart mode as it is under Windows. That is largely the fault of the company that makes the reader, although they have been bought by Apple so who knows what happens next.
> Why isn't there a top-tier platform company (or nimble upstart) out there taking the lead and making a machine that has 100% driver support under Linux?
How about a Chromebook? They run Linux, and pointedly don't run Windows, so you know the hardware will work under Linux.
System76 does this, my last few laptops have all been bought from them. They don't design their own hardware, but they only sell hardware that is well supported.
Battery life is good, the price is great, and the support has always been amazing.
Not much has changed: there are still a bunch of hurdles holding back the average user. Those issues are still around today, and especially for newer hardware.
The biggest problem IMO is the graphics. On my laptop (a Dell XPS I purchased in 2011) the OSs I installed (Fedora and Ubuntu) couldn't render anything serious. If I wanted to watch a TV-HD release, the screen would flicker; if I wanted to make a 3D plot in Mathematica, it wouldn't show; if I wanted to play a simple, lightweight game like Teeworlds, it wouldn't run. I had to use Bumblebee to get around it, but graphics still lagged.
Some of these problems are common enough that you can just google up a solution, but you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. I really like the idea of a Linux desktop, but it's just not going to happen anytime in the near future.
( after installing bumblebee and primus, please remember to add your user to 'bumblebee' and 'video' groups, before reboot)
KDE is still a messy shit but doesn't crash much any more ;). It can display a wicked Mandelbrot as background but can't auto add wallpapers in ~/Pictures. Reports about v4.10 desktop indexing being 'sane' and 'reasonable' are wholly untrue.
sound works over HDMI cable but occasionally goes quiet (relogin). flicker is an xorg feature which is not going away :( Sound is still subpar compared to maxx drivers under windows. So much for 'Open-source Desktop'
Somewhat improved, but especially in the notebook space it's still far from optimal. This is not necessarily fault of the commnunity - laptops often have custom hardware (e.g. NVIDIA Optimus) that simply doesn't have driver support because vendor doesn't care.
You may or may not consider it a "major next-gen UI", but I'd throw Ubuntu's Unity in that list as well.
While I'm on the topic, I love the way Unity consolidates system bar, app title bar, and app menu bar. This single screen real estate saving technique is what keeps me using Unity. Every time I switch into Gnome, *box, etc., open Firefox, and see 3 bars all taking up screen real estate, I go back to Unity.
Are there any other shells/window managers/whatever that do this same bar consolidation???
When apps are maximized in Gnome 3, the window title bar is supposed to hide/blend into the panel/menubar like in Unity. Lots of apps don't do it yet, though.
I wasn't a Unity fan but I have to agree with you, the screen space saving is amazing. Another thing that's cool about Unity is that the launcher is on the side which on the _modern_ screens which are vertically challenged for some odd reason, works really well.
Yes, that is actually the only feature I like about Unity. The rest bugs me too much though. That's why I love programs where I can hide the menu bar and toggle it via a shortcut (a lot of KDE programs can do this). This is especially useful in programs like image viewers and PDF readers (say Okular).
I'm in the same boat. While I've been using GNOME for the past few releases and really enjoying it, I switched to a Thinkpad X230 recently.
Unity really shines on the relatively low 1366x768 resolution and increases usability tremendously. Every vertical pixel counts, and it's surprisingly good at optimizing screen real estate. Now if they could only make it crash less... it's been abysmal in the stability department. GNOME has been pretty stable since about two releases 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.
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.
It’s not clear what a polished phone interface looks like. For example, I could see such an interface lacking files entirely or giving priority access to communications technologies, wherein this might be wholly inappropriate for the desktop. Also the desktop has a keyboard on its side.
> I could see such an interface lacking files entirely
Now that's a great idea. If you think about it, current file systems are OLD. No transactions (I'm aware of the exceptions, but even those filesystems capable of transactions don't always expose that to the user), we rely on the file name to determine its type, no-or-severely-restricted access to metadata, possible infinite link loops.... I'm sure that the filesystems are implemented excellently, but I really hope we rethink the way we store data. I would much prefer a "flat" filesystem jailed by app and organizable by labels. Or whatever.
This is slightly hilarious because Gnome 3 (and Unity) has excellent keyboard support. You had to install a Quicksilver clone in Gnome 2 to get what Gnome 3 has baked in. And Gnome 3's keyboard search is better all around; faster, uses my whole screen, and it's simpler to switch between various types of entity that I'm searching for.
I use Gnome3 but with Cinnamon simply because its one of the few ways to be both using a newer desktop environment and have an experience (after a little bit of moving things around) that looks like what I am used to, like and want. I love tablet UIs... on my tablet. I realize designers/developers of UIs want the elegance of one UI paradigm to rule them all, but content production on a desktop and content consumption on a mobile devices are not at all alike.
I tried Cinnamon for a while and I was very happy with it... except for its performance; it is quite slow; I recently went back to Gnome Classic, and although it is not as nice as Cinnamon, it is much faster.
When I was using it I used to notice a slight delay on some actions (maximizing a window, doing alt-tab, opening the task bar, etc.), that I never had on Gnome Classic.
It must be said, however, Cinnamon is really nice.
At second thought, I noticed this until I disabled desktop effects, you might want to make sure that wasn't the delay you noticed as that delay is configurable and artificial.
I'm not convinced Lion (or Mountain Lion) is getting a 'huge' pushback from users. I heard isolated groanings on launch from people who didn't like adapting to natural scrolling or the new saving paradigm, but that all disappeared within a few weeks. My friends with Windows 8 on non-touch laptops have, after several weeks, continued to have the opinion that the touch-UI (née Metro) is 'stupid,' and they're not huge nerds either.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.