Setting Up GNOME Is Easier With Version 3.12

[Luke]

Cinnamon is fine as it sits right now, it's my main desktop

I doubt that. Cinnamon went nowhere. No one wants to continue development or even fork it. This was code that went nowhere. Let it rest in peace.

Went nowhere my spinning platters! Mint's popularity has exploded at the expense of Ubuntu's main distro, and both Cinnamon and MATE have a lot to do with that. Unless Linux Mint goes away, I don't see Cinnamon going away either. If it does, some new theming in MATE along with it's upcoming port to GTK3 and using Compiz w/o Unity could probably copy most or all of it's functionality. Already there is talk of adapting MATE to Wayland.

If Cinnamon did not exist, I would probably use its antecedant, which is gnome-shell with the frippery extensions as I did before I discovered MATE. This required pinning gnome-shell and all dependencies through each development cycle and for several weeks to a month therafter, until the Frippery mantainers could catch up. If that became non-viable I would switch to MATE, if that died too I would probably switch all my machines to IceWM like on my laptop.

I do not like and will not use a touch-style environment. I don't own any smartphones and have no reason to copy their interface styles, so unmodified gnome-shell or Unity are out.
At this point I simply intend to keep using Cinnamon and reject any update to anything that breaks it. I suspect that Mint will continue to offer it in mantainance mode even if all development stops. Some software is perfectly good as it sits and requires only bug-fixes and unbreaking any problems caused by changes in newer libraries. If it never supports Wayland, X isn't going away and there are a hell of a lot of smaller footprint traditional DE's and ultralight DE's that aren't going away either. Worst case, you simply stop updating anything but kernels and maybe video drivers on the basis that what works today works tomorrow with the same hardware.

Cinnamon had to be forked from GNOME because of GNOME's contempt for the community as expressed by their intentional breaking of extensions on every upgrade cycle. They forgot that a lot of people don't WANT anyone's standard interface and don't want anyone telling them how to structure their desktop. Without that contempt, Frippery would be much easier to mantain, and Mint et all would use either Frippery or the similar MGSE extensions they developed in-house. GNOME's willful breaking of extensions reminds me of Apple trying to un-jailbreak their hardware and forced Mint to fork their code entirely to create Cinnamon.

[liam]

No, I use Linux.

I like the technical advancements of GNOME.
But not the design changes, such as Nautilus, Gedit, etc. Seems like things getting retarded.

I think I've said this to you before but... I agree with this assessment if not the verbiage.
I'm so hoping fedora can make some downstream changes to gnome to make it an environment that makes tasks easier to accomplish.

[liam]

at least he did some good. and what he was doing was better than 3 gnome people pretending they know how to design efficient desktop and troll whole community with their insanity. gnome has nothing but total copy/paste usability nightmare where they copy certain features from some softwares without even thinking if that makes any sense. those features made sense where they were copied from, but don't make any sense how they were copied and where

gnome has become from best to absolutely worst interface in last 1.5 years.

You're very wrong about the gnome folks not thinking about these things. That's not the issue, IMHO. The problem is one of judgment and vision.
There's some hope we'll be able to do some proper testing in fedora on the de so maybe we can make things better.

[justmy2cents]

I do not like and will not use a touch-style environment. I don't own any smartphones and have no reason to copy their interface styles, so unmodified gnome-shell or Unity are out.

even MS figured this one out. by forcing touch environment on desktop you don't get more touch users, instead you start losing desktop users since you hampered their experience. i'm just wondering who in the right mind would run gnome as bloated as it is on tablet. way of using it as corporate desktop, interface simply breaks too often where using new one is not even resembling previous version

Cinnamon had to be forked from GNOME because of GNOME's contempt for the community as expressed by their intentional breaking of extensions on every upgrade cycle. They forgot that a lot of people don't WANT anyone's standard interface and don't want anyone telling them how to structure their desktop. Without that contempt, Frippery would be much easier to mantain, and Mint et all would use either Frippery or the similar MGSE extensions they developed in-house. GNOME's willful breaking of extensions reminds me of Apple trying to un-jailbreak their hardware and forced Mint to fork their code entirely to create Cinnamon.

but... but... they know what you want better than you do. yes, it was sarcasm against gnome usability team and their nonsense ideas. also, true about extensions being broken. using variable in each extension on which shell version it works breaks them whole time. if they used API versioning extensions would work without problem. and since most extensions are unmaintained no one is adding new versions.

[Luke]

You can hack g-s extensions to beat version checking

but... but... they know what you want better than you do. yes, it was sarcasm against gnome usability team and their nonsense ideas. also, true about extensions being broken. using variable in each extension on which shell version it works breaks them whole time. if they used API versioning extensions would work without problem. and since most extensions are unmaintained no one is adding new versions.

When I was relying on Frippery I routinely hacked extension files and/or gnome-shell javascript to bypass version checking, reverting anything that crashed the shell. When something I needed would not run due to true incompatability I rolled back and then pinned gnome-shell. What a nuisance, but better than a touch-style DE. Other option would have been to abandon alphas entirely, pull all important apps +xorg, video drivers, and kernel from PPA's.

[justmy2cents]

You're very wrong about the gnome folks not thinking about these things. That's not the issue, IMHO. The problem is one of judgment and vision.
There's some hope we'll be able to do some proper testing in fedora on the de so maybe we can make things better.

gave up on fedora after 20 releases and 21 is definite nono for me. main reason being fedora.next which basically treats most of community as 2nd citizen by default. even in 20, my crossplatform apps written in gtk look and work way more native in windows than with new gnome in f20. lately, i'm wondering if it isn't better simply throwing exception Not supported if i detect gnome newer than 3.6 since i definitely don't plan on going trough that nonsense

and there is no vision whatsoever. any slight shred of vision would take into account that people can't work with pure gnome. and as soon as you need for example: Libreoffice, one QT app, one wine app, one old and one (god forbid, new) gnome app you're already created so inconsistent environment it is not true.

just most basic example. Where is dialog confirmation? in QT and Win, left bottom. in old gtk right bottom and in new right top. yea, one helluva vision. and sorry to burst your bubble, but beside maybe web browser and evolution there is not one app suitable for doing actual work in gnome. not to mention i could ever imagine anyone even thinking of writing commercial app following gnome HIG, since he would basically forfeit all portability on interface choices

i suggest next gnome release to simply randomizes confirmation corner. it will make just as much sense as now, but at least it will be fun exploration

[finalzone]

gave up on fedora after 20 releases and 21 is definite nono for me. main reason being fedora.next which basically treats most of community as 2nd citizen by default.

Could you show where on the Fedora.next wiki?

[justmy2cents]

Could you show where on the Fedora.next wiki?

read mailing lists. the point where i decided against fedora was when i realized it will make everything but default package set 2nd class citizen which puts community distro into really strange definition. it basically puts all projects with less contributors into unwanted position like "you can be here, but no one cares". you can also look fosdem presentation which could be summarized into "we want to hear your feedback as long as you simply agree with how we decided"

being avid fedora user from 1 to 20, you can believe i put lot of thought and checking out before deciding on change. even now with last machine i switched to korora since i really like fedora. but, fact that i started checking was when i started realizing that fedora.next basically defines it as "gnome or 2nd citizen". and gnome with all post 3.6 stupidities is a complete no go since i develop cross platform applications and support commercial linux desktops where gnome is complete bust

[drag]

read mailing lists. the point where i decided against fedora was when i realized it will make everything but default package set 2nd class citizen which puts community distro into really strange definition. it basically puts all projects with less contributors into unwanted position like "you can be here, but no one cares". you can also look fosdem presentation which could be summarized into "we want to hear your feedback as long as you simply agree with how we decided"

You are talking some crazy jive there, buddy.

If I was you I would relax and just observe what happens because you really suck at speculating.

[Kostas]

@justmy2cents
Apart from a stronger focus on the development of (the indifferent to me) gnome apps and the fairly recent huge changes in HID (which I can certainly agree resulted in huge inconsistencies but don't consider bad design) I can't see how the shell itself had anything but improved tremendously since gnome 3.6.