GNOME Shell + Mutter See Big Last Minute Improvements With The GNOME 3.36 Beta

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Shell + Mutter See Big Last Minute Improvements With The GNOME 3.36 Beta

GNOME Shell and Mutter are out with their v3.35.90 releases today for the planned GNOME 3.36 beta...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-3.35.90-Mutter-Shell

[Mez']

- Updating the default favorite apps list with changing Rhythmbox to GNOME Music, Shotwell to GNOME Photos, removing Evolution, adding GNOME Calendar, and adding Geary

Looks like there's going to be a bit of extra work to revert almost each and every one of these changes.
I hope Ubuntu will be wise and do it for me.

[Britoid]

Mez' no one forces what you have in your favourites.

[treba]

An incredible release. Lots of new developers joined and developer productivity increased too. Blame Gitlab.

That. And I'd expect quite a few more things to land during the beta phase - we are just entering UI freeze, but API freeze is a bit later and even after that there's a lot of stuff that doesn't require either of them (especially backend / performance stuff). Also the news do not really reflect what I'd have in mind to be exited about...but lets wait for the release, it's gonna be quite big. Probably bigger than 3.34, which was already huge.

My personal favourite lately is Olivier Fourdans work on XWayland compatibility. In 3.36 XWayland apps will have way less glitches (like black areas during startup and resizes).

[muncrief]

Windows 8 and Windows 10 introduced what I call "The Age of Convolution."

This is the time when simple and direct point and click interfaces, where GUI efficiency was easily measured by the average number of scrolls and clicks it took to access any program, was replaced by who-knows-what, and the subsequent requirement that users type in hoped for commands in a search box like good old DOS, or look it up on the Internet, to find out where it is.

And sadly Gnome was one of the the first in Linux to follow this confused paradigm, though Unity was the first, in, what I consider, to be Linux abominations to GUIs.

But I don't know. Maybe I'm just old, and getting to programs simply and quickly doesn't matter anymore. And I'm not being facetious. From what I've seen many people just place shortcuts somewhere, and if they don't have a plethora of them it works okay.

But, again, I don't know. Between Windows 10 and most Linux desktops today, it seems that while the Age of Convolution predominates, it is worse, not better.

[ssokolow]

Windows 8 and Windows 10 introduced what I call "The Age of Convolution."

This is the time when simple and direct point and click interfaces, where GUI efficiency was easily measured by the average number of scrolls and clicks it took to access any program, was replaced by who-knows-what, and the subsequent requirement that users type in hoped for commands in a search box like good old DOS, or look it up on the Internet, to find out where it is.

And sadly Gnome was one of the the first in Linux to follow this confused paradigm, though Unity was the first, in, what I consider, to be Linux abominations to GUIs.

But I don't know. Maybe I'm just old, and getting to programs simply and quickly doesn't matter anymore. And I'm not being facetious. From what I've seen many people just place shortcuts somewhere, and if they don't have a plethora of them it works okay.

But, again, I don't know. Between Windows 10 and most Linux desktops today, it seems that while the Age of Convolution predominates, it is worse, not better.

Agreed... though type-in search isn't all bad. It's just a shame it arrived at the same time they broke the traditional stuff.

A good type-in search for a launcher menu, for example, is great for not having to search every submenu for something you know is in there somewhere... you just need to make sure that it shows where the result you want was found so that, in the future, you can navigate the menu to it rather than taking your hand off the mouse.

[lumks]

Updating the default favorite apps list with changing

Rhythmbox to GNOME Music,

Yes!

Shotwell to GNOME Photos,

We'll see. Photos needs some improvements. More attention will help hopefully.

removing Evolution, adding GNOME Calendar, and adding Geary.

HELL YEAH!!! Maybe rename geary to GNOME Mail at this point 😌

[horizonbrave]

[OT/Rant] I just realised that as a desktop user I need my desktop environment to provide me both that desktop (and its folder). It really helps.. there's no other way/place (as one of many examples) to pin a file shortcut (and why that?!?) to the dash (I honestly hope to be wrong
I'm a gnome fan, but fuck.. how much thought did they put in that move?

[Britoid]

horizonbrave the desktop folder is still there, but the wallpaper is more of a canvas to put windows/apps on in the gnome UX, rather than a place to store files. Desktop icons imho are a terrible thing.

[Mez']

Mez' no one forces what you have in your favourites.

By favourite, we are talking about default (for vanilla Gnome), or am I wrong?
In that case, I'm not complaining about being forced. I'm just saying I'll have to revert these changes as I would personally do (almost) the exact opposite. But that's not too important, it'll be done by Ubuntu or I will do it in a few minutes.

It was also ironic.
Gnome has such a long way to go before being fully usable at this point I just hope they're going to focus on more important things (workflow, design, extensions, multi-monitors, Hidpi) than their always-in-alpha-stage apps that not many people actually use before downloading real apps. It might have a good appeal to have sorts of working integrated apps for very basic features, but when there is basically always another app that does it better, it's a bit of a waste of resource. Especially when Gnome needs a tremendous amount of work.