The GNOME 3.0 Shell Is Advancing Too

[Delgarde]

lets make a new and different wheel. we'll make it hexagonal.

As i said, they don't always succeed (although even the failures can be educational). But if they didn't try at all, where would we be?

[fermo111]

Who needs Gnome 3?

Gnome 2 is horribly bugged and slow. So, what do the Gnome developers do about it? Instead of fixing the bugs, they write new code which will result in an even more bugged and slower Gnome.

Do they think that Gnome 2 is a solid and reliable product? Is there anybody that can explain them what a solid and reliable product is? Or at least a product that does not upset you constantly with its defect?

Don't you, Gnome developers, think that maybe there are people which are happy using a stable system that is good enough to make some work done? Which in most cases consists simply in surfing the web or editing a file?
People who, for instance, are perfectly satisfied with Explorer-as-in-Windows-XP and do not know what to do with Explorer-as-in-Vista/7 or Plasma or some other eye candy desktop?

What good can came for a change just for the sake of it, or, as they put it, because it looks 'old'?

[V!NCENT]

lets make a new and different wheel. we'll make it hexagonal.

You mean make them rubber -> rubber with air -> bearings -> anti slip texture?

[Delgarde]

You mean make them rubber -> rubber with air -> bearings -> anti slip texture?

Quite true - a modern tyre isn't actually round at all, but an approximation, balancing smoothness of ride (triangular = bad) with the need to grip the road surface (perfectly round = frictionless). Thus, a structure that deforms under weight to increase contact surface, grooves to channel water away, etc. Hey, looks like this "reinventing the wheel" stuff is more complex than it sounds...

[Delgarde]

Gnome 2 is horribly bugged and slow.

Largely a matter of opinion. I won't deny that it has bugs - no software can claim otherwise - but it's been stable enough and responsive enough for me to happily use for many years now. And I'm sure for every person like you complaining about it, there's many people like me with no major complaints.

[liam]

Phoronix: The GNOME 3.0 Shell Is Advancing Too

Last night an update was published as to the state of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, which is the Unity desktop interface that Canonical will be using in their next Ubuntu release rather than the GNOME Shell. Most all other GNOME distributions, however, will be using the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.0 when released in March. As it so happens, another development snapshot of the GNOME Shell arrived last night too...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODg0MQ

Naturally, what you see here is the final product. They've said nothing about adding categories to the menu http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2010-November/msg00044.html.
As always, judge a product in its alpha/beta NOT the final b/c no changes occur during the intermediate stages.

[fermo111]

Largely a matter of opinion.

Althought I did not give any figures, speed and number of bugs, are not matters of opinion. They are quantitative indicators that can be easly measured. And I am pretty sure that Gnome is a looser on these matters.

And I forgot to mention the quantity of RAM that it needs for running, that makes it impossible to use on any old machine. Machines where Explorer runs happily.

Now if you are saying that it is not Gnome's fault, but the problem is elsewhere (X for exemple), I can point out that there are Window Managers based on X that require little memory and perform even better that Explorer (no I am not talking of KDE or XFCE). They are too simple to be called Desktop Managers? Yes, but again. How comes that Explorer can be fast and small and give at least the same features, to say the least, of Gnome?

The only task of fixing Gnome would keep their developers busy for years. Maybe, instead of having only half thair users happy, they would make most of them happy. Wouldn't that be a better cause?

[Dragoran]

Naturally, what you see here is the final product. They've said nothing about adding categories to the menu http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2010-November/msg00044.html.
As always, judge a product in its alpha/beta NOT the final b/c no changes occur during the intermediate stages.

You are wrong ...

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-design/plain/mockups/static/overview-application-picker.png

[misiu_mp]

Althought I did not give any figures, speed and number of bugs, are not matters of opinion. They are quantitative indicators that can be easly measured. And I am pretty sure that Gnome is a looser on these matters.

And I forgot to mention the quantity of RAM that it needs for running, that makes it impossible to use on any old machine. Machines where Explorer runs happily.

Now if you are saying that it is not Gnome's fault, but the problem is elsewhere (X for exemple), I can point out that there are Window Managers based on X that require little memory and perform even better that Explorer (no I am not talking of KDE or XFCE). They are too simple to be called Desktop Managers? Yes, but again. How comes that Explorer can be fast and small and give at least the same features, to say the least, of Gnome?

The only task of fixing Gnome would keep their developers busy for years. Maybe, instead of having only half thair users happy, they would make most of them happy. Wouldn't that be a better cause?

I think gnome 2 has become very usable and fast. Some of its applications are one of the best ever in what they do (e.g. eog, evince) from the usability and performance point of view.
There are some faults, that I would rather call 'paper cuts' than real problems.
Some examples: nautilus caches thumbnails everywhere it sees them. You can make it not do it, but not on a per-folder basis. The cache is in-memory and can sometimes consume huge amounts of it. The only way to clear it is to restart nautilus.
In 'open file/folder' dialogs, there is no option for moving, copying files. Also it is difficult to convince such a dialog that you want to choose a folder instead of going into it when clicking open.
It is sad that gnome developers now concentrate on something completely different rather than ironing out the remaining issues in gnome 2.

[BlackStar]

Althought I did not give any figures, speed and number of bugs, are not matters of opinion. They are quantitative indicators that can be easly measured. And I am pretty sure that Gnome is a looser on these matters.

Hence, a matter of opinion.

My opinion, as a user of all major DEs is that KDE 4.5 is buggier and slower than Gnome 2.30 (haven't moved to 2.32 yet). This is not a shabby system either, 8GB RAM, Nvidia graphics (with the blob), 3.2GHz Core 2, Intel SSD, running Ubuntu 10.10 (Gnome), Arch (KDE), Win7 and Mac OS X 10.6.5 (yes, I'm crazy).

The performance difference between Gnome and KDE is visible to the naked eye: scroll Chrome, Opera or Firefox and KDE (kwin) renders at half framerate, while Gnome (Compiz) renders perfectly smooth. I've covered my pet bugs in the KDE 4.5.2 thread, so I won't go there again, but Gnome is more stable on the whole (I've never had invisible background applications crash randomly on Gnome, as I do on KDE).

Gnome does have a couple of usability issues in folder navigation (misiu_mp nailed them!) but on the whole it feels faster and more stable than KDE.