Gnome 3.0

cb474 · 2009-09-03 05:19:37

ngoonee wrote:

Obviously the benefits are dependent on you actually using a mouse in the first place, which would indicate a rather GUI-driven workflow. For me, for example, I tend to have some files which I need to send to X buried deep in my folder structure. Even with tab completion, it takes a while to get to the correct folder to access the file. With a GUI, I could have a shortcut (for example 'bookmarks' in nautilus) which brings me to a folder within maybe 1 or 2 clicks from the actual file, which I can then drag and drop to my email client. Keyboard shortcuts for this would be possible, but sometimes, if you're already using a GUI, clicking is simpler and faster.

But how does GnomeShell improve this? That's what I'm not getting.

I should be clear that I'm not against GUIs. I like them. I use Gnome. I use the mouse. I think it has it's place. I just think that 90% of the time it's over used, because it has the appearance of being simpler, when it actually adds steps to doing something and requires more movement of the hand. Mousing and clicking for every single thing is not efficient. Try typing that way.

That said, if GnomeShell somehow improves drag and drop in a way that I don't get, that's fine with me. I'm just alarmed by the whole shrinking and expanding desktop thing, every time you open an application or document. And the replacement of the System Menu system with the Activities menu, that seems to me like an oversimplification and huge loss of functionality over the current system menus.

ngoonee wrote:

Backward-compatibility is well and good, but at some point it just produces extra dev work for little/no gain. I actually see no real difference between using Gnome sans Compiz and using XFCE, and I'm sure if Gnome 3.0 doesn't have the 'off' switch for most of this stuff people will just use XFCE. Works out good for everyone.

Yeah, I may in fact end up going to XFCE if I have to. But I won't be happy about this. Every time I try it I find there are a lot of little things from Gnome that I miss. Gnome to me is a more complete desktop environment. XFCE is trying to be light weight so it leaves things out. But I feel like Gnome is doing the best job currently of offering all the functionality you might want in a full desktop environment, while also keeping it as streamlined as possible. If I wanted animations, eye-candy, every option under the sun, I go to KDE. So I just fear with GnomeShell, Gnome is headng in the KDE direction, because they feel the pressure to look more cool. But then we may end up with two competing overdone (in my opinion) desktops, rather than Gnome as the simpler option and KDE as the more gee-whiz option.

Last edited by cb474 (2009-12-28 09:43:11)

moljac024 · 2009-09-03 08:47:44

Why are you worried about the shrinking desktops ?
As long as the animation isn't slow, it actually just adds screen real estate because you don't need a panel.
Since you're clicking in the menu anyway, you don't need your programs until you're done clicking and then the desktop zooms back in..

Diospyros · 2009-09-03 09:03:28

moljac024 wrote:

Why are you worried about the shrinking desktops ?
As long as the animation isn't slow, it actually just adds screen real estate because you don't need a panel.
Since you're clicking in the menu anyway, you don't need your programs until you're done clicking and then the desktop zooms back in..

It's kind of like if you were really drunk at a party and wanted to reach for a glass on a table, and the walls and floor were moving around you. No functional difference but it's weird.

I guess users could be habituated, but I favor simplicity over extraneous eyecandy. Leave that to the KDE guys.

Last edited by Diospyros (2009-09-03 09:06:34)

b9anders · 2009-09-03 09:04:00

cb474 wrote:

But then we may end up with two competing overdone (in my opinion) desktops, rather than Gnome as the simpler option and KDE as the more gee-whiz option.

I'm afraid the times have left you behind if you think that is gonna be acceptable for a major DE. Setting aside the configurability debate of kde vs gnome, It's not simple vs. gee-whiz, it's outdated vs modern.

tbf, vanilla gnome looks about as pretty as windows 98. It's needs a makeover and animations are part of that now. The trick is to use them to add functionality and enhance the user experience.

cb474 · 2009-09-03 20:47:42

moljac024 wrote:

Why are you worried about the shrinking desktops ?

Because it's incredibly annoying and serves no purpose. I've played around with compiz plenty and end up just turning it all off in the end. 99% of animations add no functionality.

b9anders wrote:

I'm afraid the times have left you behind if you think that is gonna be acceptable for a major DE. Setting aside the configurability debate of kde vs gnome, It's not simple vs. gee-whiz, it's outdated vs modern.

I could not disagree with this more. There is nothing "modern" about animations. For one, Windows was trying to animate menus and things as early as Windows 98. It's always been there as an idea. The hardware just allows for more possibilities now. But animations have to me always been annoying and pointless, with maybe one or two exceptions. I've always been turning them off if I can. This is what is nice about Gnome. Of the major desktops, it's focused more on simplicity and usability. If people didn't think this was a useful way to go there wouldn't be things like XFCE. But now there will be no choice amongst the major full desktops. I see that not as a stop forward toward "modernity," but as a limitation of choices and a movement toward the lowest common denomiator.

Last edited by cb474 (2009-09-03 20:49:49)

madalu · 2009-09-03 21:29:30

ngoonee wrote:

Obviously the benefits are dependent on you actually using a mouse in the first place, which would indicate a rather GUI-driven workflow. For me, for example, I tend to have some files which I need to send to X buried deep in my folder structure. Even with tab completion, it takes a while to get to the correct folder to access the file. With a GUI, I could have a shortcut (for example 'bookmarks' in nautilus) which brings me to a folder within maybe 1 or 2 clicks from the actual file, which I can then drag and drop to my email client. Keyboard shortcuts for this would be possible, but sometimes, if you're already using a GUI, clicking is simpler and faster.

I have to disagree. There are many ways to bookmark directory locations and files from the command line (aliases, history, cdargs, etc.) or within a text editor like emacs. I can't see how a GUI interface is inherently simpler and faster.

But your larger point is well-taken. *If* you rely heavily on the mouse, good drag and drop provides some of the efficiency that command line addicts already enjoy.

That said, every time I see all those moving desktops in Gnome 3.0 screencasts, I get sick to my stomach. I personally would be annoyed by so many animations. But some people really go in for the eye-candy (or so I've been told)...

Last edited by madalu (2009-09-03 21:30:20)

b9anders · 2009-09-03 21:33:52

cb474 wrote:

If people didn't think this was a useful way to go there wouldn't be things like XFCE. But now there will be no choice amongst the major full desktops. I see that not as a stop forward toward "modernity," but as a limitation of choices and a movement toward the lowest common denomiator.

Well, that's the thing. Xfce is not looking to play with the major DEs. Gnome and kde have ambitions of competing with windows and OS X. That's not about the 'lowest' common denominator but it is in large part about the broadest common denominators. That is to say, how to make the best possible desktop in a way that will be usable and appealing to the largest possible group of people.

It's not that I don't relate to what you want from it (I personally use xfce because it's simple and does what I want it to do and no more), it's just that I think it's wrong to expect a desktop like GNOME (who, tbf, has limiation of choices strongly implemented in its design philosophy anyway) to fulfil this role.

cb474 · 2009-09-04 01:07:58

I hear what you're saying. But I'm not sure if I think the appropriate goal of Gnome ought to be to compete with Windows and OS X, nor am I certain that's really how the developers see it. And I do think it's pretty hard to avoid a lowest common denominator phenomenon if one's goal is really to appeal to the broadest possible audicience. There is a benefit for Linux desktops in not being the most popular thing. It frees them to pursue other design directions, stay more focused, avoid pointless things.

I'm also not convinced that competiting with Windows and OS X, if one must, has to mean following their lead. To me that seems like a defensive and losing stance. Look at Mozilla/Firefox, by far the biggest open source sucess story on the desktop. Firefox succeeded precisely by following it's own design ideas, after which Windows and OS X had to play catch up. To me that seems like a long term much more likely to be effective strategy. If people perceive that there's an alternative that offers things they don't get with Windows/OS X, they might consider making the move. If they merely perceive someone has created a comparable system, I think the incentive to switch is much lower.

Anikom15 · 2009-09-08 22:12:34

Video Editors need drag and drop just to be practical!

cb474 · 2009-09-23 05:19:58

Just read a review with Vincent Untz about Gnome 3.0. Pretty interesting.

http://www.h-online.com/open/The-path-t … s/114277/0

Of interest to people like myself who aren't that excited about Gnome Shell, he says: "We also have plans to make the GNOME 2.x look and feel available for some time in GNOME 3, as a fall-back."

I wonder if this is a sign that the Gnome developers aren't that sure that Gnome Shell's new interface is going to be accepted.

AngryKoala · 2009-09-23 05:57:38

With touch screens becoming more popular, it may not be of great benefit to make an intensely integrative desktop environment when what we have with mice is quite satisfactory and accepted now.

b9anders · 2009-09-23 10:40:28

cb474 wrote:

Just read a review with Vincent Untz about Gnome 3.0. Pretty interesting.
http://www.h-online.com/open/The-path-t … s/114277/0
Of interest to people like myself who aren't that excited about Gnome Shell, he says: "We also have plans to make the GNOME 2.x look and feel available for some time in GNOME 3, as a fall-back."
I wonder if this is a sign that the Gnome developers aren't that sure that Gnome Shell's new interface is going to be accepted.

I think it is simply a wise move for a smoother transition. KDE 4 was very much a harsh dump for 3.5 and it was an either or choice. I think a lot of the criticism of KDE 4 and the hyperbole of how much better gnome 3 will be handled has been rather unfair on KDE (especially considering gnome 3 isn't done yet), but allowing for a smooth transition to the next level sounds like an excellent plan to dance over the rocky parts that might come from such a radical new implementation.

cb474 · 2009-09-23 23:12:10

Maybe. Or they could be getting into one of those situations like with Windows where they forever have to provide a "classic" mode, because a huge portion of their users don't see the point of the interface "improvements." Anyway, I'm glad it will be there as an option and hope that "available for some time" means it will really be there for a long while. I'm afaird this may well turn out to be an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" situation. I know Gnome feels the pressure to keep up with the Jones on eye candy. But perhaps it's the conservative nature of Gnome's development that has kept it the most popular Linux desktop.

I would like to emphasize, in case I'm creating the opposite impression, that I'm not against interface innovation and eye-candy. I like playing around with compiz and other desktops. But I just keep coming back to Gnome as it is for my day to day environment. It's not so frilly and it works for my purposes. And what I've seen with Gnome Shell (underlying system improvements notwithstanding) is just not impressive as a new desktop interface. It looks cool. It seems like in practice an actual loss of functionality.

Last edited by cb474 (2009-09-23 23:14:05)

techprophet · 2009-09-24 15:30:56

One word: Blech.

I like my KDE4 & fluxbox.

cb474 · 2009-09-29 22:02:01

This is an interesting article about about the current state of Gnome-Shell, from someone who seems to like it:

http://www.deansas.org/blog/2009/09/24/ … ment-38846

One of Gnome-Shell's current "features" is that it doesn't have a window list in the panel. That sounds great. I've also read that Compiz won't work with Gnome-Shell and the Gnome developers aren't going to work with Compiz to make it work. So for those who like Compiz it sounds like there are going to be problems. I'm not into all Compiz's eye candy. But there are a couple functions like Snap that I really like. And obviously Compiz offers a lot of highly configureable options. To me this is another example of how Gnome-Shell will be limiting and removing options from users, according to the personal preferences of what the Gnome developers think is best.

Last edited by cb474 (2009-09-29 22:02:28)

Anikom15 · 2009-09-29 22:17:56

What about us poor people with crappy integrated graphics cards?

AngryKoala · 2009-09-30 00:32:32

Anikom15 wrote:

What about us poor people with crappy integrated graphics cards?

You don't have to use Gnome 3.0. Neither do you have to play games like Crysis and CoD6.

ngoonee · 2009-09-30 03:58:36

Anikom15 wrote:

What about us poor people with crappy integrated graphics cards?

Even my integrated intel card handles compiz fine, so why should gnome-shell be a problem? Granted my MB is only a year old.

cb474 · 2009-09-30 06:45:57

AngryKoala wrote:

You don't have to use Gnome 3.0.

I've been thinking about this. If I decide I don't like 3.0 and what to stick with Gnome 2.0, won't this increasingly create dependencies problems as other packages require this and that, which are part of Gnome 3.0 somehow? How easy will it be to maintain a system and keep it upgraded, while holding Gnome at 2.28?

ngoonee · 2009-09-30 08:39:38

cb474 wrote:

I've been thinking about this. If I decide I don't like 3.0 and what to stick with Gnome 2.0, won't this increasingly create dependencies problems as other packages require this and that, which are part of Gnome 3.0 somehow? How easy will it be to maintain a system and keep it upgraded, while holding Gnome at 2.28?

More and more work as time goes by. Unless someone decides to offer legacy gnome2 packages, either in a separate repo or within our repos as with kde3. Even then, major rebuilds of core would screw your install up, and it would get unworkable within a year I'd guess.

Perhaps the statement should have been "you don't have to use gnome". I seriously doubt gnome 3.0 will suddenly become much 'heavier' on resources than gnome 2.28.

VirtualRider · 2009-09-30 08:43:42

And if you absolutely don't like it, i'd suggest to switch the DE - I prefer XFCE over Gnome since a few months

cb474 · 2009-09-30 09:00:11

Thanks for the explanations and suggesitons. I've tried XFCE and I respect it for what it's doing. But there's always a lot of little things with it that don't work the way I want it to. That's why I've really appreciated Gnome for what it is. It's a full featured desktop, which is what I want (I don't need light weight and faster so much), but of the full featured desktops, it has the most minimalistic, basic, elegant user interface.

But now with Gnome-Shell it looks like Gnome is going to get all glitzy. There will be no more full featured desktop option that isn't overly tricked out with eye-candy and "features" that are just annoying animations. Why do they all have to go this way?

Where I see Gnome going is down the path of OS X (from looking at and reading about Gnome-Shell). To me OS X is a case study in how to make a desktop environment that seems user friendly, but is actually very idiosyncratic and a pain. XP may have been clunky, but once you get the hang of it I found it much more useable. Of course Windows has gone the way of pointless glitz too. You can imagine I'm not a big KDE fan. But it was all fine because there was still Gnome. To me Gnome took the best elements of the other major DEs and got rid of the pointless glitz.

I find it very disheartening to see what they have planned for Gnome.

VirtualRider · 2009-09-30 09:43:49

Well i don't see it that bad. My guess is that many people agree with your point (including me) and the Gnome developers won't integrate the shell as a "must use"-feature. Btw. what are you missing in XFCE? For me everything is fine, except accessing samba shares.

b9anders · 2009-09-30 11:48:51

cb474 wrote:

To me this is another example of how Gnome-Shell will be limiting and removing options from users, according to the personal preferences of what the Gnome developers think is best.

'twas ever thus for Gnome.

cb474 · 2009-10-01 04:01:55

VirtualRider wrote:

Well i don't see it that bad. My guess is that many people agree with your point (including me) and the Gnome developers won't integrate the shell as a "must use"-feature. Btw. what are you missing in XFCE? For me everything is fine, except accessing samba shares.

My understanding is that it's full steam ahead on Gnome-Shell as the default in Gnome 3.0. After all, as I noted above, Vincent Untz said, ""We also have plans to make the GNOME 2.x look and feel available for some time in GNOME 3, as a fall-back." That doesn't sound like Gnome-Shell won't ultimately be the only choice. Also, what I've seen developers say in response to concerns about this change is that it's just growing pains like with the shift from KDE 3 to 4. So that don't seem to be taking seriously that maybe Gnome users aren't going to like the change when it happens (most Gnome users probably have no idea this is coming).

As far as XFCE goes, it's been a while since I used it, so I don't remember all the things that didn't work for me. It was just little things like how the panels work, Thunar vs. Nautilus. Nothing that was a big deal, but just twenty little things that I missed from Gnome, which served me well in my day to day computing. I'm sure I should give XFCE a try again and no doubt will once Gnome-Shell hits. Actually I've been wanting to try Sidux, so maybe I'll install the XFCE version of Sidux on my extra partition and play around.

[Edit:]A couple things about XFCE, after thinking about it more, that aren't so great for me are that Thunar I believe doesn't have tabs and you can't use ssh with it. Those are two things I do all the time and find incredibly convenient about Nautilus. It actually has a lot to do with how I switched from Debian to Arch. It may seem silly, but I really wanted tabs in Nautilus and got totally impatient with Debian unstable(!) being completely out of date. It was still on Gnome 2.22, when 2.26 came out. So I jumped ship to Arch. For tabs in Nautilus. Yep. A little goofy, I admit. Okay and I do like the whole idea of Arch and felt I was prepared to use a system that required a little more knowledge about how it all works.

Last edited by cb474 (2009-10-01 04:18:46)

Arch Linux

#76 2009-09-03 05:19:37

Re: Gnome 3.0

#77 2009-09-03 08:47:44

Re: Gnome 3.0

#78 2009-09-03 09:03:28

Re: Gnome 3.0

#79 2009-09-03 09:04:00

Re: Gnome 3.0

#80 2009-09-03 20:47:42

Re: Gnome 3.0

#81 2009-09-03 21:29:30

Re: Gnome 3.0

#82 2009-09-03 21:33:52

Re: Gnome 3.0

#83 2009-09-04 01:07:58

Re: Gnome 3.0

#84 2009-09-08 22:12:34

Re: Gnome 3.0

#85 2009-09-23 05:19:58

Re: Gnome 3.0

#86 2009-09-23 05:57:38

Re: Gnome 3.0

#87 2009-09-23 10:40:28

Re: Gnome 3.0

#88 2009-09-23 23:12:10

Re: Gnome 3.0

#89 2009-09-24 15:30:56

Re: Gnome 3.0

#90 2009-09-29 22:02:01

Re: Gnome 3.0

#91 2009-09-29 22:17:56

Re: Gnome 3.0

#92 2009-09-30 00:32:32

Re: Gnome 3.0

#93 2009-09-30 03:58:36

Re: Gnome 3.0

#94 2009-09-30 06:45:57

Re: Gnome 3.0

#95 2009-09-30 08:39:38

Re: Gnome 3.0

#96 2009-09-30 08:43:42

Re: Gnome 3.0

#97 2009-09-30 09:00:11

Re: Gnome 3.0

#98 2009-09-30 09:43:49

Re: Gnome 3.0

#99 2009-09-30 11:48:51

Re: Gnome 3.0

#100 2009-10-01 04:01:55

Re: Gnome 3.0

Board footer