Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Shell

[drago01]

I would love it if they did some work on memory leaks.

We did, some of them got backported to 3.2.2.1 though ... which version are you using?
Also do you see any leaks without the extensions?

[cl333r]

Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Hell

[Wildfire]

Two things that bug me about the whole "hot corner" concept:

I usually have several applications open at once and I change between those quite frequently. Having no constantly visible task bar really slows me down. I know there are keyboard shortcuts but I'm mostly "either/or". I use either the mouse or the keyboard and I dislike constantly having to switch between both.

On top of that I use a graphics tablet instead of a mouse which makes it really difficult to hit the hot corners. With a mouse you can just keep pushing and you'll hit the corner eventually. With a pen you've got to hit the corner exactly or you'll either leave the tablet's sensitive area or you get your pointer stuck close to but not quite on the hot corner.

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

[wpoely86]

We did, some of them got backported to 3.2.2.1 though ... which version are you using?
Also do you see any leaks without the extensions?

I'm running 3.2.2.1. My system is fully up to date.

My extensions are: ['[email protected]', 'temperature@xtranophilist', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]', '[email protected]'].

I shall try it without extensions but I find gnome 3.x not really usable without some extensions.

[kraftman]

Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Hell

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

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.

The one who described them like interface nazis is a genius.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.