GNOME 3.3.3 Heats Things Up For GNOME 3.4

[drag]

In the meantime I'll use kde 4 where I can kill and restart plasma and kwin however I like.

I'm able to restart gnome-shell whenever I feel like it. I don't know what your doing wrong, though.

[drag]

I also like the direction of GNOME 3 Switched from KDE 4.6 to Fedora 15 with GNOME 3 when it came out, didn't regret it. I felt a certain serenity with G3 that I never had with KDE. KDE just never (not even in 3.x days) felt polished with all its' little design inconsistencies. There was a blog post a while back on Planet KDE about learning from the GNOME competition, which pointed them out. Should be required reading for everyone involved with KDE UIs.

Yes gnome-shell kicks ass.

It is helpful to be willing to learn new things. Gnome-shell is infinitely more flexible and hackable then Gnome 2.x was.

[ChrisXY]

I'm able to restart gnome-shell whenever I feel like it. I don't know what your doing wrong, though.

Last time I tried "pkill gnome-shell" would require me to logout and close all applications.
Nope, not the behaviour I want.

[BlackStar]

Last time I tried "pkill gnome-shell" would require me to logout and close all applications.
Nope, not the behaviour I want.

Alt-F2, r, enter will restart gnome-shell as long as it's not locked up completely. It works when an extension crashes (which I tend to encounter a lot during development). There's certainly room for improvement here, for instance gnome-shell should restart automatically when an extension crashes and a notification should be shown ("extension xyz crashed, disable?")

I'd also love better debugging tools for extensions. Javascript is infinitely extendable via monkey patching, but the debugging story just isn't there right now. This is ok for trivial modifications (e.g. "hide top panel" or "hide bluetooth icon") but will cause issues down the road, as extensions get more complex. A proper IDE with autocompletion for the gnome-shell API would also be nice.

I do like the direction gnome 3 is heading, though. 3.2 is an improvement on 3.0 on all regards, with pretty much no regression in functionality or stability. The 3.4 feature-set is shaping up nicely, improving on 3.2 in small but significant ways.

I mainly wish for three things now:
a) An updated gnome-terminal with support for split screen and quake-style behavior (drop down from top of screen on keypress).
b) A way to hide the top panel whenever a maximized application receives focus (as a gnome-shell extension maybe?)
c) Updated fglrx drivers that work with gnome-shell, or radeon drivers with improved power management. Even with minimum clocks, radeon consumes significantly more power than fglrx on my laptop.

[Kivada]

The alternatives are quite lacking? So why should Gnome get all the hate? No, the majority of hate I see is when people that are conditioned into the traditional way of using a desktop just can't adjust to Gnome 3. But a lot of them used KDE to begin with... I love Gnome 3. New != better, but "better" is not the right word here. As always it's a matter of taste, and a lot of people can't see past their own. I and most other Gnome 3 users will be the first to admit that it's missing certain key features. But I think most of us have faith they'll be sorted out eventually. And development since 3.0 indicates they will be.

Well no, I don't think you can call that childish... this half-baked desktop environment is working for me just fine. Maybe I'm just lucky that I'm a somewhat technical user and can find workarounds to most of the common "problems" (read: just not implemented yet). They could of course have kept postponing release over and over until it was perfect, but I don't think that would be in the project's best interests. I've seen many projects just fade away and die by doing that. I don't think it's "childish", I think it's just the right strategy.

I can appreciate that you'd be frustrated if you can't get along with any of the other DEs. But just have some patience. Mint's Gnome 3 strategy has really only just started. Likewise MATE. Give them a while to get up to speed and I'm sure you'll have nothing to complain about. Comparing it to Vista is unfair. Vista doesn't give you options, and wasn't even a rethink anyway. This is the direction Gnome has taken. It has it's supporters, and it's haters, but it's certainly not going back to what it was after coming this far. Intelligent criticism is fine, but bitching and whining for the sake of it solves nothing and reflects badly upon a community that should know better!

Support and kind words can go a long way.

You're missing the point, you should have to look for workarounds and hacks to get it into a usable state if it's going to be the DEFAULT DE on all of the major distros. You keep the old version as the preferred version for mass distribution till you are at least at feature parity before you kill the old version.

As I've said many times before, I've given many refurbed machines running distros like Mandrake, Ubuntu and Fedora over the years, pretty much all of them given to people that know fuckall about technology, changing the desktop on them without warning just isn't cool, nor is the loss of many old GPU drivers. They don't know how to switch desktops, they don't even know what a DE is.

Linux is spreading out from the geek and nerd crowd, expecting X lever of technical skill is no longer an option, especially if we want see Linux taken more seriously by device makers. To get that there has to be more consistency in the user experience so that anyone of any tech level can jump on any desktop distro with any general purpose DE and use it.

[liam]

You're missing the point, you should have to look for workarounds and hacks to get it into a usable state if it's going to be the DEFAULT DE on all of the major distros. You keep the old version as the preferred version for mass distribution till you are at least at feature parity before you kill the old version.

As I've said many times before, I've given many refurbed machines running distros like Mandrake, Ubuntu and Fedora over the years, pretty much all of them given to people that know fuckall about technology, changing the desktop on them without warning just isn't cool, nor is the loss of many old GPU drivers. They don't know how to switch desktops, they don't even know what a DE is.

Linux is spreading out from the geek and nerd crowd, expecting X lever of technical skill is no longer an option, especially if we want see Linux taken more seriously by device makers. To get that there has to be more consistency in the user experience so that anyone of any tech level can jump on any desktop distro with any general purpose DE and use it.

I don't want to put words in your mouth but what I think you mean is that it isn't usable for you, and many others, in its default configuration. That is, potentially, fixable, but I don't think the developers will go that route (that is, offer an easy way to change the desktop). IMHO, that is wrong of them, but I'm not the one writing the code, and undoubtably the road they are taking requires less code, though it also requires MUCH more thought towards UX.