GNOME 3.0 , Do you like it ?

GNOME 3.0 , Do you like it ?

Have you tried GNOME 3.0 ? it on new OpenSUSE 11.3, What you people want to say about "GNOME SHELL"

For the very short period of time I had it on Gentoo it was amazing.
I can no longer use it as it will cause problems with my main Gnome installation.
Until it has become stable, I can't use it.
I suppose it will be ready next year sometime, and I am looking forward to making the switch.

WindowMaker FTW! The best since 1998.

edit: 98 not 99

I think ubuntu unity is better than gnome shell

Gnome 3 is out there in wild. and it's awesome

Gnome shell is awful. I want to have control of my desktop and to choose how to get things done. Is it easy to set the new favorites panel to non-autohide mode or to even uninstall it? Or to hide/remove/disable the 'applications' label? The same goes to workspaces area -is at least able to remove those workspaces in any other side of the screen?
Anyway, i am pretty happy with Xfce and i have tailored it to my needs -and when i am seeking for a change, i used to log in to Openbox session.

ps: unity seems as problematic as gnome shell. I prefer a desktop, not a touch screen

lol yeah both gnome shell & unity are more touch screen ui than a desktop ui. but I think when gnome 3.2 or 3.4 will out everything will be fine.

If GNOME 3 is available in openSUSE 11.4 I'll try it. I wonder if there is a separate repo for it.

Yeah its there for OpenSuse 11.4.
1 click install.
http://news.opensuse.org/2011/04/23/gnome-3-0-arrives-for-opensuse-11-4/

I'm trying Ubuntu Unity for the first time today. At first I was feeling highly unimpressed that the dock (or whatever that side thing is called) doesn't stay on top when I launch the web browser (Firefox, haven't gotten Opera yet since I had to download drivers and whatnot) But I saw all you have to do it click that little icon in the top corner to get it back. It might be a little more flexible than people are giving it credit for, since you seem to be able to just about everything you could do with old Gnome Panel.

What I don't like about it is that the dock is vertical. On my widescreen monitor, that certainly does not save any space. It also is more a pain the ass to use. When I try launch another application with browser, the panel has this tendency to try to hide off-screen. I just noticed, it doesn't seem like you can change the position of the icons on the panel. I'll give it a few days, but at this point (maybe an hour since the install) I'm thinking I'll just get XFCE.

You will find that unity is a lot easier and can do a hell of a lot more in a couple of clicks.
For example, click on the top left icon, dash pops up, type first 2 letters of any app or file, bang, the icons to launch the app or access the file are staring at you.
The launcher and panels can all be customised.
It takes time and patience to learn a new way of doing things but a hell of a lot of time, effort and thought has gone into compiz and unity.

It is still in it's first stages, It will incorporate grub-3 soon.

Unity is a delight to use and the more you use it the more you realise how elegant it is.

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

For example, click on the top left icon, dash pops up, type first 2 letters of any app or file, bang, the icons to launch the app or access the file are staring at you.

I've been doing that with Gnome Do, Launchy, Katapult and the like for a long, long time. But even Alt+F2 has always been quite nice.

slight variations and did you get the full icons and files, etc?

alt and f2




windows key (or click top left icon)


Also, Unity is finely tuned and designed for inhouse searches. the subtle differences are what set it apart as far as system search goes.
more ai sort of thing.

Is there a way to keep the dock on top. The behavior that was annoying to no end was that I would have a web browser open and try to open another application but the dock tries to hide on me. That's the main reason I meant to give it a few days, but could only stand to give it a few hours.

I've heard of this being called Linux's Vista, but I disagree. It's more like KDE 4 when it first came out in terms of completeness. They called it a full version release, but really it should have be 3.9xx beta.

I've also read for the that Ubuntu is dropping classic Gnome (2.3) for the next release. This might not be a good thing for the simple fact that the OS might not recognize the user's video card right away. When I first installed, it didn't think I had the hardware to support Unity until I installed the Nvidia drivers. By eliminating the fallback of dropping users in Gnome 2.3, I can see this creating a lot of headaches, especially for inexperienced users.

theres a lot of work going on with video drivers, updates, new versions, kernel updates for both proprietory and open source drivers.
gnome 3 is pegged for the next release:
http://www.webupd8.org/2011/05/expected-changes-in-ubuntu-1110-oneiric.html

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

slight variations and did you get the full icons and files, etc?

Sounds like you've never tried Gnome Do? Anyway, since Unity seems to have replicated most of its functionality I suppose it'd be a bit redundant to try. Still, in Windows Vista & 7 I used Launchy 'cause it was just so much faster and otherwise better than the built-in start menu atrocity.

Launchy's also available for Linux these days, btw.

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

I've heard of this being called Linux's Vista, but I disagree. It's more like KDE 4 when it first came out in terms of completeness. They called it a full version release, but really it should have be 3.9xx beta.

That's kind of strange to say regardless because you can't do sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop (or classic gnome-desktop or whatever) in Vista.

Btw, Ubuntu 11.04 booted into Unity by default and because I had disabled desktop effects in the past it gave me nothing at all. I had to go to a TTY to restart. I haven't yet tried Unity because I can't be bothered getting it to work (and besides I really don't have the time to for the coming two months).

I'll sniff at Gnome 3 and Unity in the future, but if I don't like it it'll simply be hello XFCE (or WindowMaker, Fluxbox, KDE or whatever strikes my fancy).

Originally posted by Frenzie:

That's kind of strange to say regardless because you can't do sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop (or classic gnome-desktop or whatever) in Vista.

I mean that in the context of it being an incomplete and buggy desktop. Of course, you have the capability to choose your own desktop in Linux and not in Windows. (Well in Windows, you have the ability to heavily customize your desktop through various third party programs and supposedly KDE 4 works in Windows.)

I ended up ditching unity and going with `peppermint ice'
I am fully customising my system and desktop with `ice' as the foundation.
so am now using LXDE instead of gnome.
It is a lot faster amongst other things.

no
"I mean that in the context of it being an incomplete and buggy desktop. Of course, you have the capability to choose your own desktop in Linux and not in Windows. (Well in Windows, you have the ability to heavily customize your desktop through various third party programs and supposedly KDE 4 works in Windows.)"

No vista here, it's solid as a rock.

LXDE looks interesting, but I think I'll stick with Gnome for right now because I just want to be use my computer. Let me explain. The original HDD was about to fail, so I purchase a new one and installed Ubuntu. About a day and a half later the new one stopped working. I was browsing the web and it came a dead halt. So I took it back to the store, where the store personnel confirmed the damned thing doesn't even spin (After I explained that it WAS the drive and I swapped out the SATA cable and the power cables to the drive, etc) Finally, they had to admit that I was right. So they gave me a new drive that seemed a little dodgy a first, missing the plastic sleeve over the drive, the Seagate disk utility, etc; so hopefully it really is a new drive and not a return that will fail on me. So anyway I reinstalled Linux and the damned thing wouldn't boot. Turns out that for some reason, Grub was trying boot off a non-bootable external drive. So I fixed that. So, I'll probably give LXDE a go in the future; but for now I'm tired of configuring things.

When I saw that LXDE was based on GTK+, I went ahead and installed it in a process that took less than 5 minutes

It's pretty nice so far, lightweight and doesn't get in the user's way.

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

I mean that in the context of it being an incomplete and buggy desktop. Of course, you have the capability to choose your own desktop in Linux and not in Windows. (Well in Windows, you have the ability to heavily customize your desktop through various third party programs and supposedly KDE 4 works in Windows.)

Alright, but I think the problem with Vista wasn't really the DE, though I could be wrong.

I've been using KDE4 programs quite happily for a few years in Windows btw. Okular's been my default Windows PDF viewer for over a year. Kate, KWrite, KWord and all the other KDE applications at your fingertips is nice indeed. Dolphin makes a surprisingly nice file manager even though its integration leaves much to be desired. It doesn't mean you can use the actual desktop environment though.

Perhaps ironically, I'm only using GTK+ and Qt4 applications at the moment, and no KDE ones at all.

I setup another hard drive yesterday.
The quickest and easiest restore from scratch I have ever done.
(I still have my setup on my main drive - just seeing what would happen if I had to start from scratch)

I will outline the steps I took to end up with my operating system and all my data back on a clean formatted hard drive)

> boot from cd > with peppermint ice.
> install peppermint ice > 30 minutes.
> choose mobile phone as 3g-modem in network setup.
> update-manager > bring system upto latest build/versions, etc (50 mb downloads-auto install)
> copy mp3's, mp4's, photos, software packages, etc from backup (dvd/usb/cd/spare-hard-drive)

Finished.
> All my other data is in the cloud (on websites/servers/google-docs, etc.)
> Installing about 5 browser extensions gives me back - all passwords/login details, etc. (lastpass)
all my bookmarks (xmarks) - all my rssfeeds - automatic gmail manager, etc.

I can from this install access any file/directory on any other drives/partitions with windows or linux partitions or data.
All up> less than an hour. (no other drivers/software required)

last time I did that with windows XP > 5 hours to get it all up to date with all other software I used to use/updates/patches/new version/ drivers, etc, etc etc. ( and maybe 500 mb downloads). A lot of stress and things missing/not-working after)

I prefer desktops like Ratpoison or Openbox, JWM etc. But XFCE is great compared to Gnome or KDE.

I popped in a Fedora 15 LiveCD the other day to check out Gnome 3. I liked it better than Unity and Compiz, but mostly it just didn't feel quite done. But that might also have been Fedora...

Originally posted by Frenzie:

But that might also have been Fedora

Nope...lol... I have yet to find a distro that makes it even appear complete, nevermind actually being so.

That said, Fedora certainly has become more sketchy, 13 was the last decent one (for me), Mint is my current "I don't wanna bother f**king with it" type distro. (as apposed to Slackware)

Also I was all excited that they'd updated Nautilus (it's about as bad as Explorer in Win 95 imo) but I couldn't spot any difference. Same annoying list view, same lack of being able to use single-click in a semi-decent manner like Windows 98+ and KDE...

Of course other file managers than Nautilus are easy to find, but I've always found it a rather unsatisfying experience on LiveCDs (which would be most people's first impression).

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Mint is my current "I don't wanna bother f**king with it" type distro. (as apposed to Slackware)

I noticed that the the new version of Mint is taking a pass at both Unity and Gnome 3.

KDE 4.6 is actually pretty decent once you turn off all the unnecassary effects. Until then, I was like.."Why the fcsk do I need this stupid baby blue drop shadow, etc..." Also, about KDE, I noticed that Rekonq seems to use about twice the RAM as Konqueror. Maybe they have the situation of Firefox and Mozilla...make a "light' version that winds up being heavier than orginal.

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

Rekonq seems to use about twice the RAM as Konqueror

Off-topic... I'm not familiar whatsoever with Rekonq, but giving them both equal opportunity (within Fedora 15)

Opening kde.org Virtual + Res/Wrt/Shr of 1.5GB RAM

Within KDE 4.6				Within Gnome 3
Rekonq:	290.6  86.7  54.8  32.0		370.4  90.9  57.1  33.9
Konq:	202.5  48.0  21.2  27.1		235.6  57.6  24.1  33.8

So yeah... and they both behave strangely in Gnome compared to KDE like you have to get it's attention all the time, or it'll wander off and do it's own thing...lol

Anyways, seems Rekonq lost their "light weight" title (if that was ever the case).

Fedora Love-luck is the worst gnome 3 desktop distribution. I am using it for the last 6 days, now I feel the OpenSuse Gnome 3 is far far better than Fedora. But Opera 11.50 beta runs fine on it, with three tab open it uses only 140 MB of RAM.

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

When I saw that LXDE was based on GTK+, I went ahead and installed it in a process that took less than 5 minutes

very nice desktop.

Originally posted by s4swadhin:

very nice desktop

Thank you

I'm actually finding KDE 4.6 using Openbox as the window manager quite nice, too. About Unity, I discovered that you need to have Zeistgeist in order to have Unity, so I removed Unity. If I wanted spyware, I wouldn't have removed Windows (You can re-add the Unity extensions and use that epic fail of a desktop, but I couldn't be arsed .)

Any particular reason you're using Openbox instead of KWin? I presume that (like me) you're not very fond of all the fancy schmancy effects, but KWin can be made to behave quite nicely (unlike, say, Compiz/Unity).

I did tone down KWin quite a bit, but I decided to try Openbox as experiment and found that it can be made to look just as nice and is a little snappier than KWin.

I am dual booting Xfce plus Openbox - each one of them in a separate action.

Openbox, as a standalone environment allows any kind of customization, mainly by editing 2 or three text files. It's amusing to transform it in anything you want, choose the file manager, a panel perhaps, etc..
My vote is always for desktops that are staying out of my way and let me do my work. Unfortunately, even compiz seems a bit "distracting" -when i give it a run, once on a month.

I couldn't handle the distractions with Gnome 3 (running Fedora 15). It's not a developer's desktop in my humble opinion. Dumped it for KDE 4 today. Already a happier programmer. Took a few minutes to figure out that double-clicking was the easiest way to get widgets on the Plasma panels, but today was a lot less frustrating than yesterday. Gnome 3 shifts the entire desktop far too often to stay focused.

Cheers,
Brian

I'm not a programmer, but I dig what you're saying. When I'm writing, I get distracted too easily; hence LXDE with muted colors. I rolled my eyes at the silly Compiz and Beryl cubes, too.

Originally posted by s4swadhin:

Yeah its there for OpenSuse 11.4.
1 click install.
http://news.opensuse.org/2011/04/23/gnome-3-0-arrives-for-opensuse-11-4/

alright, thank you.

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

I'm not a programmer, but I dig what you're saying. When I'm writing, I get distracted too easily; hence LXDE with muted colors. I rolled my eyes at the silly Compiz and Beryl cubes, too.

Me too. All these animations are slow and distracting.

I installed Fedora 15 today and played with Gnome3. I used to use Ubuntu. I was very impressed with Fedora but not with the implementation of Gnome3. I love gnome, but I don't know if its Fedora, but it does not have a nice "feel" about it. I am impressed though how readily everything worked in Fedora. BTW, Windows could get a gnome type desktop, where everything is nicely organised. The windows desktop is a magnet for clutter.

I installed the Gnome 3 desktop a little while ago. It's not hard to use, but just a little bizarre having having to click and Activities link to do anything.

Hrmmm...I checked the keyboard shortcuts and there doesn't seem to be a way to minimize all the windows and just return to the desktop

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

Hrmmm...I checked the keyboard shortcuts and there doesn't seem to be a way to minimize all the windows and just return to the desktop

You can set this by going in to your System Settings and choose the Keyboard settings. Under shortcuts, you can set the "Minimize all windows" function to your preferred key combo.

Oh, and by the way, I do like Gnome 3. I'm running it under Fedora 15 and on my acer Aspire One. It's nice and snappy and doesn't seem to slow me down at all.

Of course, I'm quite custom to using keyboard commands, so I've been moving from window to window on my desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) pretty much the same way for many, many years: ALT-TAB.

Originally posted by Sanguinemoon:

I installed the Gnome 3 desktop a little while ago. It's not hard to use, but just a little bizarre having having to click and Activities link to do anything.

With special emphasis on click. As far as I can tell there is no keyboard accessibility there (in contrast to Unity).

Originally posted by virtualsky:

Of course, I'm quite custom to using keyboard commands, so I've been moving from window to window on my desktops (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, etc) pretty much the same way for many, many years: ALT-TAB.

You need to add Alt+` to the mix in Gnome Shell for it groups all windows by a single application together. I think it's a poor effort compared to implementing something like SmartTag.org. It takes much too long to select anything.

There is another way to get to the "Activities" view, other than having to move to the top-left corner of the screen. Pressing the "Windows" key on your keyboard (that key next to the left ALT key) will also take you to the Activities view. Just thought I'd mention it.

Yes, super and Alt+F1 make it show. It's still essentially unusable without the mouse then, plus you have to click a million times to do anything.

Yeah and it doesn't seem to be the way to win over users from Windows. I hate to make the "average user" argument, but what new user wants to learn alt + ctrl H and ALT F6, etc just to be halfway productive?

It's also like that this. Let's say I'm writing a story, but I need to check a dictionary or thesaurus. In Gnome 3 simply click on the panel to bring the web browser back up. No, I have to flip through ALT + TAB or go back to Activities, which is less efficient. I guess I could use Google Docs or Zoho for rough drafts, but when polishing my work up, when I'd need the dictionary or thesaurus, I need to use Libre Office or MS Office (none of the online word processors have formatting capability that I need. I least Google Docs and Zoho now have page numbering)

I think Alt+Tab is primarily inefficient because it isn't like SmartTab.org. What you do there is you press Alt+Tab, hold Alt and then you press a letter or number. It's quite fast and you immediately see what you're dealing with because it's got a name. In Gnome you've only got icons and thumbnails and you've got no idea what's going on. superswitcher is somewhat like it for Linux, though it probably won't play nice with either Unity or Gnome Shell.

Anyway, you could try holding Alt and then clicking on what you want. If you like the classic task bar that might just be the thing for you, or at the very least be better than the horrors of Gnome Shell.