Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Shell

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Shell

The Fedora Project is seeking your help to improve the GNOME Shell and its extensions...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA3MDk

[allquixotic]

My suggestion for improving Gnome Shell: use Cinnamon (or alternatively, merge Cinnamon's UI into the upstream Gnome Shell project).

Since Gnome 2, my impression of the changes:

GLib changes: Right on, great job, keep it up.
GTK3 changes: Right on, great job, keep it up.
GIO/GVFS/GSettings/GStreamer changes: Right on, great job, keep it up.
Clutter / Mutter / WM changes: Right on, great job, keep it up.
Using JavaScript as extension language: Right on, great job, keep it up.
Default UI arrangement and usage patterns for Gnome Shell: FAIL. Unusable.
Cinnamon: Right on, great job, keep it up.

Something in that list isn't like the others...............

[Ex-Cyber]

I actually have no major complaints with Gnome Shell itself. I really was skeptical at first, but adjusted. The "hot corner" concept, in retrospect, seems like it's at least a decade overdue (insert rant here about how some Workbench hack actually did it first in 1988 in 22 bytes of 68K assembly language or whatever, but AFAIK Gnome 3 was the first major desktop to actually make it central). I just wish more GPU drivers sucked less at rendering it. The radeon driver has no egregious artifacts on my setup, but seems to eat CPU like candy if another app actually tries to render a big window at 60 fps. The fglrx driver is, as ever, brutally optimized for Maya and Unreal Engine 3 or whatever else is the hot shit these days.

[AdamW]

"Unlike other distributions, the Fedora / Red Hat developers actively work towards pushing their changes back upstream, etc. "

Wow, that's a bit harsh, Michael! I don't think we'd put it like that. Lots of other distros have very solid upstreaming policies too. I like to emphasize that contributing to Fedora test days helps upstream and other distros too, but I wouldn't put it in over-'competitive' terms like that, the same would be true of events for many other distros too I'm sure.

I know it's hard, but it'd be great if people could avoid turning this into yet another 'GNOME 3 is great / GNOME 3 sucks' thread. This is a test day. Test days aren't about huge philosophical changes, they're about taking something and looking for specific bugs and fixing those. This is a test day to test out the Shell and particularly extensions currently in Fedora 17. If you really hate Shell, then by all means...don't come along. But it's not helping anyone to turn a discussion of this test day into an overall GNOME debate.

[alazar]

They should not forget there are desktop users of gnome 3 too, as they're trying to hide every menu or option out there for touch devices. But I'm a desktop/laptop user, I use a mouse and I want my bookmarks in a side panel in nautilus (for example).

[Dukenukemx]

#1 Forget about tablets and other such touch devices. Create a whole new interface for those devices, instead of trying to butcher Gnome to fit that purpose.
#2 Look at what Mint has done. A taskbar is a must.
#3 Don't be afraid to make it work like Gnome 2.

[Ex-Cyber]

I was about to write a scathing flame about how this

The radeon driver has no egregious artifacts on my setup, but seems to eat CPU like candy if another app actually tries to render a big window at 60 fps.

still hasn't been fixed (considering the underlying bug's apparently been around since F15), but then I decided to actually check. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Beefy Miracle, I guess.

[russofris]

Does FC17 support the VMware gallium driver? I guess there's two ways for me to find out, either read the release documentation or Leroy Jenkins!!!!!

[AdamW]

alazar: um, nautilus *does* have a sidebar in GNOME 3. I see it in both F16 and F17. With favourites.

[wpoely86]

Memory leaks

I would love it if they did some work on memory leaks. My pc usually doesn't reboot more then once a week (or less) and gnome-shell is eating memory. If I simple restart the gnome-shell, memory usage drops. I have to restart gnome-shell once every 4-5 days or it eats all my memory ( > 2 GB is not an exception ). I run F16 with some extensions.