GNOME 3.14 Beta 2 Released

[MichaelSerious]

I tried again from a newly booted desktop and hammered the wallpaper change. The first few did nothing more than a few mbs but eventually, after eight or ten changes I got it to increase by 250mb and it stayed there. Not a big deal when I have 8Gb of ram, but it does happen. I use Gnome Shell all day every day and I have never had an issue with memory usage. A few hundred megs is nothing when you have 8Gbs.

In my experience, it is the nvidia proprietary driver where the memoy consumption is the absolute worst. My desktop has 16gb of ram, so it's no a huge deal for me but still, seeing gnome-shell at 2gb memory usage does cause performance issues at that point. I will install gnome3 on my laptop which using Intel HD graphics (and only has 3gb of ram, this is an old laptop) this weekend if I get time..

[curaga]

Not a big deal when I have 8Gb of ram, but it does happen. I use Gnome Shell all day every day and I have never had an issue with memory usage. A few hundred megs is nothing when you have 8Gbs.

This attitude is exactly what is wrong with much modern software.

[wargames]

This attitude is exactly what is wrong with much modern software.

This is partly because nowadays almost all programmers are sub-standard programmers. They don't even know what assembly is. They know a lot of high level crap though. No wonder we have bloated programs.

[ninez]

To all you Gnome 2 dinosaurs Shell 3.12 has a Gnome Classic mode. A modern take on the old interface (and way better than the old fallback mode). Add the Top Icons extension and you are back in 2008. Yes it is still Gnome 3 and yes it uses more resources, but if you pine for the past and have a reasonably specced machine the go for it.

Classic-mode is very gnome2-ish... but I would debate it being better than flashback/fallback-mode and would also say that flashback/fallback is more similar to gnome2 than the GS/classic-mode, in certain ways. With Flashback, you can use different WMs and compositors [which is similar to gnome2, classic-mode doesn't work this way]. So in that sense, flashback is a little more customizable than classic-mode.

Myself, I am not after the 'gnome2 experience' so much, but I do use [gnome-3.12] flashback-mode + compiz + cairo-dock + patched nautilus [and i ditch gnome-panel]. I'm not a fan of mutter or GS, and prefer using a dock without having any conventional panel, for a simplified interface. [cairo-dock provides the classic app-menu, logout/shutdown, etc.... or anything else that I would get out of using a normal panel, like in GS/classic-mode]....

So while classic-mode is decent, i think flashback is actually quite a bit more flexible. [although it does require jumping through a few extra hoops, to workaround minor issues].

[grege]

I do not dispute your analysis or usage. I defined it as better because Classic Mode is 100% Gnome 3/GTK3, just using a Gnome 2 like layout. No configuration required. Then by adding TopIcons and using Tweak Tool to turn on the desktop you have a Gnome 3 version of Gnome 2 - that is most definitely not Gnome 2. Classic mode cannot be used on machines that do not have a working OpenGL. I would not even consider using Gnome on old hardware with minimal graphics capabilities, that is now the realm of Xfce4, LXDE, LXQT etc.

Also Fallback mode is stuck at 3.8 in Debian Sid. I guess it comes down to clinging to the past or moving forward. That is the strength of GNU/Linux - you can still use FVWM if that is what you want.

[ninez]

I do not dispute your analysis or usage. I defined it as better because Classic Mode is 100% Gnome 3/GTK3, just using a Gnome 2 like layout. No configuration required. Then by adding TopIcons and using Tweak Tool to turn on the desktop you have a Gnome 3 version of Gnome 2 - that is most definitely not Gnome 2. Classic mode cannot be used on machines that do not have a working OpenGL. I would not even consider using Gnome on old hardware with minimal graphics capabilities, that is now the realm of Xfce4, LXDE, LXQT etc.

Also Fallback mode is stuck at 3.8 in Debian Sid. I guess it comes down to clinging to the past or moving forward. That is the strength of GNU/Linux - you can still use FVWM if that is what you want.

Ah, i wasn't so much trying to argue what you said - just pointing out that G3/classic-mode is more similar to GS than gnome2... Yeah, i have never tried to run g3 on old machines, but I have run a similar setup to what i described as my current desktop - so likely, if i was using old hardware, i would do the same - unless i found a reason not to.

I don't use debian sid, so i can't comment there, but flashback has a repo [at git.gnome.org], and has very recent commits [like today, for example. and over the last week or so, and so on.]; https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-flashback/log/ ... I use my distro's package management tools to build/package from git. But i wouldn't say that i am 'clinging to the past', it comes down to functionality for me - compiz gives me the best options for a fluid desktop, using my wacom tablet - while i still like to stick to a gnome-stack/gtk3.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

This is partly because nowadays almost all programmers are sub-standard programmers. They don't even know what assembly is. They know a lot of high level crap though. No wonder we have bloated programs.

Bingo. I don't know of any reputable CS Program that doesn't require Assembly Programming. All Pac-10/now Pac-12 used to require CS that really includes a Minor in EE and you most certainly did either Assembly on the Moto 68000 or Intel x86. I'm specifically referencing programs before the late 90s.

Also, in Mechanical Engineering [other degree] we went into intensive study on Kinematics. Even WSU (Washington State University) no longer has the professors, on staff, who have the background in Kinematics to properly teach it. They've rolled it into Robotics, which is an absolute mistake. Learning applied Robotics should always have a pre-requisite background, just like programming should with Assembly.