Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Shell

[AdamW]

Sigh. Seriously.

This announcement is about *a test day*. Where we test stuff. It is not a 'send your unsolicited opinion about GNOME 3's design into the ether' thread. No-one from the GNOME design team is reading this. There is not a whelk's chance in a supernova that any kind of 'I want you to completely change GNOME's design in way X, Y or Z' post here is going to achieve _anything at all_. You are completely and utterly wasting your time.

I really don't know how else to say it except bluntly, because every other way failed. It's just absurd to hardwire every mention of the word GNOME to 'I don't like the new design and I'm going to repeat my demands for how it be changed'. Even when what's being talked about is nothing to do with the design of GNOME at all.

So again, for the cheap seats: this is a TEST DAY. A TEST DAY. WE TEST THINGS. WE DO NOT FUNDAMENTALLY RE-DESIGN THEM.

If you really, really can't be restrained from complaining about GNOME's design, wouldn't it at least make sense to do it somewhere vaguely appropriate? Like the GNOME design mailing list. Or your blog. Or anywhere at all except messing up the comment thread for an event which has _nothing at all to do with the design of GNOME_.

Really, it's just inappropriate.

allquixotic: I really think you're a long way off base there. I've said this before, and maybe people find it hard to believe, but: Red Hat, as a big evil corporate entity, really doesn't care a whole lot about GNOME. It's the hard truth. You don't need to take my word for it; just follow the money. We famously don't make any money off the desktop, right? Strictly that's not true, but it's true that it forms a very minor part of Red Hat's revenue stream.

Red Hat pays quite a few people to work on GNOME and it has for a long time; this is not really because GNOME forms some sort of crucial strategic interest for Red Hat, but because of RH's general strategy of sponsoring developers on key parts of the F/OSS ecosystem in order to try and keep the whole thing healthy and, yes, get some PR benefits.

There's lots of different categories of 'people who work for Red Hat', really. Some people come into a category you could obviously see as a straightforward 'Red Hat needs this coding work done to make money so Red Hat is going to hire people to write this code, and tell them what to code'. There are definitely those people. But, perhaps oddly enough, those who seem to be courting all the controversy these days - the GNOME developers, insofar as some of them are paid by Red Hat, and people like Lennart - _aren't_ in that category. They're much more in the 'sponsored developers' category, where RH just goes out and finds people who are already doing significant work in F/OSS and gives them a paycheck to keep doing it. The GNOME 3 design isn't some kind of Red Hat corporate mandate that's part of our sekrit long term plan. It really isn't. It's just what the GNOME developers and designers - who are principally GNOME developers and designers, whoever signs their paycheck - genuinely believe their desktop ought to look like. Red Hat as a big evil corporate entity, quite honestly, doesn't give much of a toss. Ditto all Lennart's Big Ideas. Frankly, half of them give people who spend all their time working on RHEL, dressed in suits, conniptions. They're not part of our Big Secret Masterplan, they're just Lennart's firework factory brain going off again.

If you fall into the trap of assuming everyone who's @redhat.com is being directed by a single company-wide grand agenda, you're going to badly misanalyze what happens in RH and Fedora, because that's really not how it works.

[kraftman]

I have noted that the people who hate Shell are usually the people who shout the loudest, so I feel I should pipe up and say I absolutely love Shell. Been using Linux since Slackware 8, so it's not like I'm particularly new to Linux either. OTOH there's been a resistance in the community ever since the shift towards 'unbreaking' instead of adding options..

That argument you mention in the first sentence appeared just after gnome shell was released and it's nothing more than marketing crap. One of the problems with shell is it broke things and removed options same time!

[kraftman]

I don't think that the case is that no one listens, the problem is rather that the group of people leaving this kind of feedback is completely forgetting (or unable to grasp the existence of) the group of people who actually mostly likes gnome-shell in its current form.

There were many constructive comments on Phoronix, LWN and mailing lists. What's the fact gnome shell isn't aiming at Gnome 2 users, but at some not specified target. Now there's Unity, Shell, Cinnamon and the fragmentation was never so high in Linux. Make Gnome Shell to look and behave like Gnome 2 and it will bring many users back.

[Nevertime]

Gnome 3 is by far my favorite gui. I've learnt to dislike more traditional desktops like kde and xfce as a result.
I'm sure it doesn't meet everyone's requirements as people have all kinds of workflows but there's huge scope to adapt it to your needs.

[Veerappan]

Despite what the echo chamber may tell you Gnome 3 actually is very cool and I would be happy to contribute to making it better.

Agreed. I've been using it on Ubuntu 11.10 at work/home. It's been plenty usable, even on my dual-monitor setup at work after a few tweaks/extensions.

[drag]

The two distributions that actually do Gnome 3 properly are Debian unstable and Fedora. This is the major reason why I use Fedora on my main system and have gone back to Debian on other systems.

Despite what the echo chamber may tell you Gnome 3 actually is very cool and I would be happy to contribute to making it better.

[alazar]

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

Yes, it does now, but I saw in some mockups they're trying to remove this.

[Wildfire]

In all likelihood, you aren't going to see this option shipped natively in any distro except Linux Mint for a while at least. It's certainly not on the table for Fedora 17, because every significant change to the core desktop on Fedora requires a "Feature" write-up and FESCO approval (see FeatureList. If "Go back to a traditional taskbar" isn't on the list of features, it isn't happening.

I understand what you're saying and I agree to a certain degree. However, if I read a topic like "Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Shell" I primarily interpret that as: "Give us your opinion so we can decide which way is best for most (not all) users". This means: Someone experienced collects those opinions and then does the write-up. Expecting your end-users to follow a technical process like a Feature write-up simply won't work (it's too much work and they lack the expertise and an individual end-user lacks the broad perspective).

I agree that responses like "Gnome 3 is sh*t" aren't exactly useful. Which is why I not only expressed my opinion, I also gave reasons why I prefer the traditional taskbar.

[allquixotic]

With all that said, I'd really like the option to go back to a "traditional" taskbar.

In all likelihood, you aren't going to see this option shipped natively in any distro except Linux Mint for a while at least. It's certainly not on the table for Fedora 17, because every significant change to the core desktop on Fedora requires a "Feature" write-up and FESCO approval (see FeatureList. If "Go back to a traditional taskbar" isn't on the list of features, it isn't happening.

There are going to be exceptions, of course, but most of those exceptions are ideas which originate from existing (long term / core) contributors to Fedora, for example Red Hat employees. Based on my experience, the likelihood of an "outsider" starting into the project and getting their feature accepted straight away -- especially for the default desktop, and doubly-especially at this stage of the release cycle or later -- is basically nil.

So I would say that the BEST possible scenario would be that Fedora 18 would ship the Cinnamon and Muffin packages from Linux Mint as an optional alternative desktop, like they currently ship KDE and others. If you're extremely lucky, they might even have an officially supported "spin" for Cinnamon, though I wouldn't count on it until/unless Cinnamon gains MUCH more popularity.

As an end-user, basically all you can do is live with the defaults, or else, install Cinnamon from a repository or from source. It isn't that hard to install it either way. I'm running it now on F16 and it's everything I could want in a desktop: it's based on the latest upstream technologies (GTK3/Gnome3 libraries); it's non-intrusive; the user interface patterns are extremely similar to Gnome 2 / KDE 4 / Windows; and the performance on my 4 year-old integrated Intel chip is perfectly fluid.

As much as I would like to see Cinnamon on the premiere/default Fedora Live CD as either THE default or one of the built-in options, I think it's exceedingly unlikely.

I have very much respect for Fedora because it has matured so well as a distro, from being consistently broken even in "stable" releases in years past, to being a mature product that's at least as stable as Ubuntu, though I like to think it's even more stable (while also being more cutting-edge -- how do they do that? )

But Red Hat still has a trace of xenophobia, and accepting major changes from the outside leads to the instinctive gut-wrench rejection reaction, sometimes known as "Not Invented Here". This behavior hasn't really affected me at all until Gnome-Shell, because I used to LOVE everything Red Hat put out, and it always agreed with my sensibilities and preferences. But G-S is finally the first Red Hat / Fedora Community effort which I can definitively say is just not for me, while a third-party non-intrusive package from the maintainers of Linux Mint definitely is for me (i.e., Cinnamon). On the other hand, I'm no fan of the Linux Mint distro itself, because I much prefer rpm over dpkg, and I prefer the way that RHEL-based distros manage the 32/64-bit library split compared to Debian-based distros. Although I might enjoy the front-end desktop UI of Mint, I can't stand messing with its internals. I have to be able to enjoy the command line as much as I enjoy the UI. Hence, Cinnamon running on Fedora is my "dream desktop" for 2012 and probably for years to come.

Sorry, AdamW, but I'm pretty sure this thread is going to just be about who likes Gnome-Shell and why, and who dislikes Gnome-Shell and why. That's just the reality of it. It's a polarizing-enough issue that, regardless of whether I said anything in this thread, it was going to turn into this. The main venue for responses which are on-topic for the test day is probably going to be your IRC channels and Fedora wiki. But that's what you guys are monitoring anyway, right? So I don't really see the problem.

On the other hand, I do have a constructive suggestion: I hope that Cinnamon makes it into the official repositories of Fedora 18 as a first step towards making Fedora more accepting of outside contributions. If Fedora can just package and ship it on their mirrors, I'd be more than happy to type "yum install cinnamon" to get the desktop of my choice. The main reason I want it in the distro rather than getting it from third-party is that it makes it much easier for me to provide instructions to others on how to install it (especially novices, and people I know in-person who are curious about GNU/Linux), because I can almost guarantee you that if I let a Windows user watch me use Gnome-Shell for 15 minutes, then let them watch me use Cinnamon for 15 minutes, they're going to want to use Cinnamon themselves, not Gnome-Shell.

[nishou]

They don't even want to listen those who don't like it in the current form.

There is a bunch of people who likes gnome-shell, and there is a bunch of people that really dislikes it. I'm not sure exactly what your demands for making it better are, but in general a lot of the "critique" is simply of the form "this sucks so hard make it work just like it did in gnome2 again!!1" as I have seen from other posters in this thread and elsewhere.

I don't think that the case is that no one listens, the problem is rather that the group of people leaving this kind of feedback is completely forgetting (or unable to grasp the existence of) the group of people who actually mostly likes gnome-shell in its current form.