Fedora Wants Your Help To Improve GNOME's Shell

[bwat47]

What site do you think you're on? You should just be glad that Qaridarium hasn't (yet) posted some huge, annoying, 4chan-style retarded image in this thread.

[DanL]

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.

What site do you think you're on? You should just be glad that Qaridarium hasn't (yet) posted some huge, annoying, 4chan-style retarded image in this thread.

[movieman]

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.

The kind of people who do real work on Redhat-based desktops (e.g. Redhat, CentOS or Scientific Linux) tend to be the people who hate Gnome 3 because it gets in the way of that work, and also tend to be the people who get to decide what OS will run on their servers (i.e. Redhat or... something else).

Ultimately I don't care a whole lot about Gnome 3 either because I'll be switching to a different GUI or a different OS when Redhat pushes it out. But I honestly don't understand why Redhat is paying developers to push a tablet GUI on us. I am really, truly, mind-bogglingly puzzled by this decision.

[bwat47]

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).

Nautilus does have a sidebar in gnome 3 still, hell its still the default...

[ninez]

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).

That isn't true at all. MacOSX has had hot-corners for years and years, and it's a feature that i have been using in OSX for longer than i can remember.... compiz also has had hot-corners (and hot-edges) for a very long time, as well. Both compiz and MacOSX allow you to customize hot-corners, with whatever function/use that are available.

[AdamW]

Don't disagree with any of your points but last I checked, I am your colleague still ;-)

What, we still haven't fired you? Jeez, this is some kind of amateur operation.

[RahulSundaram]

Cinnamon has been submitted for review by Leigh Scott, who does not work for RH, and is being reviewed by Rahul Sundaram, who also doesn't work for RH.

Don't disagree with any of your points but last I checked, I am your colleague still ;-)

[AdamW]

allquixotic: as far as cinnamon goes: procedurally, for Fedora, it's just a set of new packages like any other. All the procedure that's required to get new packages into Fedora is to file a review request for each package and have it reviewed. Any packager can review a new package; there are hundreds of packagers, and the majority do not work for Red Hat. It would actually be somewhat difficult for Red Hat to prevent Cinnamon getting into Fedora, assuming for some reason RH wanted to do such a thing.

Cinnamon has been submitted for review by Leigh Scott, who does not work for RH, and is being reviewed by Rahul Sundaram, who also doesn't work for RH. Once the packages pass review they'd land into Fedora. RH would have to do something pretty heavy-handed to prevent that, and it's shown no indication at all of doing anything like that.

The question of whether forks of existing desktops, like Cinnamon, should be considered problematic in some sense was raised as a FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) agenda item by Christoph Wickert, who (starting to sense a pattern here...) *also* doesn't work for RH (at least, I don't think we borged him yet). FESCo is currently composed of seven people who work for RH and two who don't (RH would dearly like the numbers to be more balanced, but hilariously enough, the FESCo seats that are *voted for by the community* keep going to people who work for Red Hat, and the seats which are *appointed by Red Hat* keep going to community members...). By a unanimous vote, this shadowy Red Hat cabal...declared that there was no problem at all with desktop forks and they should be treated just like any other package. Clearly, a conspiracy to prevent Cinnamon extends to the very highest levels!

[ciplogic]

User facing features may be missing

* Removed all, seems that the article is a bit badly targeted. *

[Hamish Wilson]

I would be using Gnome right now, probably, instead of Xfce if Gnome could still work with Zaphod Mode.

I found Gnome Shell itself to be the most pleasant dual head experience I have had in many ways. That is, if you use the standard xrandr setup. This is one area where the whole unified Activities overview works wonders, when you have several windows dragged on multiple screens.

However, I am a gamer who often runs full screen games, and I like treating my second head as a separate X session. Thus I prefer to use Zaphod Mode, which worked fine with Gnome 2 but does not work with Gnome 3, not even in Fallback mode.

So now I am on Xfce, which has improved considerably over the past few years. It is in many ways superior to Gnome 2 already, and with a little more work I am confident it could be completely.

Kind of off topic, but so is the rest of the thread.