Looking good, Gnome: Digesting the Delhi in our belly

Did they fix the *REASONS* why Mate was forked from 2?

It's always good news when open source developers actually LISTEN to what the users want and DELIVER IT (and without the condescending attitudes pointed out in the article). I've been using Mate since it existed, and Gnome 2 on my FreeBSD desktop since forever. There has been *NO* compelling reason to "up"grade to Gnome 3's way of doing things, and a ZILLION compelling reasons *NOT* to (and to use Mate instead).

My biggest concern with Gnome is in line with my biggest concerns about what Microsoft did to windows, starting with "Ape": Gnome 3 made it NOT possible to cram 20 icons on the panel, along with 6 system monitor thingies, the date and time, the menu, and some extra white pace between groups of icons arranged *MY* way, not *THEIR* way. Fat-finger spacing *RUINED* the panel. And don't even get me started on the bizarre key combo needed to edit a Gnome 3 panel icon's settings.

When Gnome 3 "bothers" to fix THOSE kinds of problems, I'll re-consider it. My mouse+keyboard system does *NOT* need "fat-finger-friendly" spacing between things, enforced because some arrogant developer "feels". I want pure user-customization, even if "they feel" it's WRONG for me to have it "that way". It's why Mate exists, after all.

I'm guessing I can cherry-pick adding Gnome applications like 'maps' onto a Mate-based system, but fresh-installing a Linux system is STILL likely to get a Mate or even Cinnamon desktop instead.

In any case, it sounds like reason enough to take another look for myself. Here's hoping...

At least in the open source world, if the devs screw it up (like hamburger menus and fat-finger-friendliness), you can fork it from a previous release yourself (like Mate).

Gnome

Worst aspects of MS and Apple Kool Aid. Though not as bad as Unity.

Not a logical productive GUI or UX as it's designed for appearance over function.

I'll stick with Mate with stupid bits turned off & tweaked Redmond theme.

The criticism about Gnome isn't about missing features

The main criticism is that it's simply overcomplex. I mean if you look at it realistically the feature set you'd want from a GUI is roughly the one you got from Windows 3.1. I mean Windows 3.1 even had it's own OOP-style process communications named OLE.

Now you have an overcomplex system which doesn't do much more, but somehow managed to require _way_ more lines of code.

My guess is that there is now a whole generation of people having grown up without gaining any experience in making working designs. After all many universities now teach C++-style OOP as if that's the only way to make software. They see "Open Source" as a way to advance their career. As recruiters typically cannot tell good from bad code, they just stuff their code in where ever they can.

Batch Renames?

From the article:

"Even more exciting, there's a plan in the works to add a batch renaming feature to Nautilus in GNOME 3.22. That's right, not an improved existing feature but an actual new feature. Grab your coats."

Those of us old enough to remember Xtree Gold and who are now probably using the excellent clone of it for modern Windows OSes Ztree Bold" look at Nautilus (and Windows Explorer and Finder and a whole load of others) with disdain. Batch renaming a new feature? My arse - we could do that all the way back in 1985, in DOS with XTree.

Caja

It's what Nautilus used to be and it's good.

appearance over function

Gnome has a long standing problem with valuing appearance over functionality. They keep making big, fat titlebars on everything that eat up screen real-estate. Yet, their image app is just now obtaining some of the functionality that xv had in 1993.

They don't understand that a window manager should be a tool that helps you get things done, but otherwise gets out of your way.

They also have an arrogant belief that their graphic design and use cases are the only things users will ever need. They have been actively deleting customization options.

I would think that sensible people would not use Gnome until they completely remove that virus systemd.

So basically...

GNOME is doing what KDE tried to do about a decade ago with the KDE Software Compilation and is going about duplicating that effort, I wouldn't call KDE SC a resounding success either since they went and split everything again (Plasma 5, KDE Frameworks and KDE applications are all separate).

I don't get why GNOME thinks they can do this better somehow. Even if Red Hat's paying for it and failure doesn't matter, it seems like a huge waste of time and effort to me.

I can't see any reason to change from Xfce.

I've been using Mint Xfce for two years now and it's absolutely fine. Not tried it? Give it a spin...

And finally...

It's hard to add to the above. Gnome has become a byword for arrogance, ignoring users and the worst in Open Source. But for Redhat's support the project would have surely ended long ago. Regrettably, even outside of Gnome there are still some examples of this arrogance.

When I moved to Mint 13 MATE it was great, not just the Gnome 2 Desktop Environment but the MDM was GDM as it used to be with support for multiple seats, remote logins and so on. Then came Mint 17 and some Bozo got to work on MDM and removed the remote login code. OK, there are security weaknesses without firewalls but this also broke Xvnc which depends on the XDMCP protocol. At least the venerable XDM is still around to support remote login and can run in parallel with MDM.

The moral of the story: don't remove features you don't like or deprecate - just make them configurable options.

bah get off my lawn

>if you want lightweight, Xfce, LXDE, Fluxbox and Openbox all fit the bill)

Look at all that bloat (will admit I do like the *box WMs though). JWM at less than 3 megs memory fully loaded gives enough functionality even lightweight wm noobs aren't lost (until they want to start customizing it but always trade offs). That said my favorite minimal wm of choice is still that ancient FVWM version that ships with OpenBSD base. I love that Motif look and don't mind using the CLI to launch apps (could never get into ratpoison and its ilk though).

Change for change sake...

When KDE went off into the weeds I needed a saner GUI (you couldn't even put a shortcut on the desktop in the first release of KDE 4), and Gnome 2.x saved the day. With a clean configurable interface and a more logical arrangement of it's menu (Applications, Places, System) I found Gnome 2.x to be a pleasant work environment. I missed Konqueror and it's ability to split it's panes vertically and/or horizontally, however Nautilus was good and I could install and run Konqueror if the need arose.

Then paradise was lost. When Gnome 3 came out I figured they improved things, how wrong I was. There was no clue to the depth to which the lot of them had gone insane, and if Gnome 3 had been adequately described I would never have installed it. "Task-centric", and "unclutterd" was the constant chant being heard from the clearly megalomaniacal devs, who rebuked every critique with vitriol instead of considered thought. While Task-centric and uncluttered are both desireable traits, "usable" and "productive" are far better and Gnome 3 was neither of those. Their attitude and unwillingness to change/compromise has meant that Gnome has not since darkened my desktop, and likely never will, as I now use the more RDP/VNC friendly Mate.

MATE and Cinnamon have my support, in use and in the case of MATE, financially. Cinnamon is very well done and a quantum leap improvement on usability & customization vs GNOME 3, but does not get deployed due to it being less than usable via an RDP/VNC session.

Systemd is pernicious.

Funny that Gnome Maps is being lauded so much

When it stopped working two days ago because MapQuest stopped allowing direct tile access.

Different story here! I actually don't mind the new gnome, and I don't understand the massive dislike. I suspect that the people who do dislike gnome have very specialized skills and tasks that are incompatible with the gnome paradigm.

As for me, I hardly use more than 10 applications, and my standard open windows are a terminal, vim (with sessions), browser with tabs and a couple of pdfs. Oh, and a windows VM for work.

So basically gnome never gets in the way since I can switch windows with alt tab, and that's about it. Lighter programming/scripting is done in vim/bash, office documents in a vm, reading in evince, and browsing in ff.

I do not like systemd however. Still do not understand why the previous way of doing things, that nicely adered to the unix philosophy of keeping stuff in text files, was discarded.

Yeah...

I actually prefer Gnome 3 to any other Linux desktop environment. Yes, a few years ago it was buggy as hell and weirdly slow for no reason, but they've corrected that now.

My primary reason for liking Gnome 3 is that the interface gets out of your way. All you have to constantly visible widgets is the bar at the top of the screen. I don't want a huge grab-bag of UI elements plastered across the screen all the time (XCFE is good for this as well). Everything looks good and it's easy to customize. Support for High-DPI screens is pretty good too as is touchscreen support, both of which matter to me because I primarily use it on a 15" 4K laptop with a touchscreen.

I'm currently using Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 and it's working for me. I don't like the unmovable shortcut menu, unified menus (yes I know this is optional now) and overall feeling of self-righteous smugness about the design. It's about at Apple level of telling me what I want. Integration with 3rd party apps can be poor as well, with menus in the wrong place and small graphical annoyances.

I'm not saying you should use Gnome 3, just that I like it. If you don't I recommend XFCE or Cinnamon.