It's Been Three Years Since "GNOME 4.0" Was Proposed

[justmy2cents]

Gnome 4 should simply be to bring back gnome 2. The only thing good about gnome 3, is when you hit meta and can launch and can find something quickly. But we already had that with gnomeDo, which was/is superior.

I still haven't found a window manager that had the workflow that gnome 2 had. Unity takes too much real estate. And it's default behavior to have the open software icon be the same as the icon to launch it, means half the time I have to do one more click to open a second instance of the software.

The Gnome 3 team are a bunch of idiots that have no clue what they are doing.

hmmmm... NO?

GnomeDo while good (served as my best friend in Gnome 2 times), it is not even comparable to shell.

and if you want Gnome 2, use MATE. whole mission of MATE is preserving and improving on Gnome 2 workflow/design

[justmy2cents]

I think the main problem of Gnome 3 at its beginning wasn't the tablet paradigma's change :

The mistake was to release the pre-3.10 branches as oficial, they were allmost at beta state, and forcing the users to quit using a fully functional desktop (Gnome 2) for an incomplete desktop.

Incomplete in the way it didn't cover all the functionality Gnome 2 has.

Things could been better if they had continue supporting Gnome 2 (and GTK 2) while developing Gnome 3 on background until it'll be really ready.

mistake? maybe if you make flawed assumption and forget finite resources.

- focusing on Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 at the same time would seriously impact progress. unless everyone would work twice as much
- if they released nothing until 3.10, many of the later changes wouldn't be here yet. gnome changed a lot based on feedback from 3.0-3.10
- the very fact they didn't work on Gnome 2 brought MATE, where other people are dedicated to preserve and update it. this is better for both.

at least for me...
- i liked 3.0-3.6 (direction was nice)
- hated 3.8 (which started bringing changes based on feedback redesign and incomplete)
- was on verge of switching desktop at 3.10 (brought even more changes where everything felt even less complete than 3.8)
- at 3.12 when changes started coming together i was like "ohhh, well... at least something"
- 3.14 was awesome (most of the changes were finally put together)
- 3.16 is best desktop i ever had
- changes coming in 3.18 make me drool

[finalzone]

My sense is that GNOME 3 had a terrible launch for the GNOME community and alienated a lot of people. But they've been both listening to user feedback (and watching the amazing success and popularity of the Cinnamon and MATE forks) and also doing an incredible job improving the product. I think they've won back most of the fans they lost.

Gnome Shell was different compared to the preview version last seen on Gnome 2.32.


Final version of Gnome 3.0 was



The final version of Gnome Shell 3.0 is definitely much better than a preview. The initial reaction was the change from some users preferring Gnome 2. Cinnamon was initial a Gnome Shell extension that diverged due to to the API changes.

- More high resolution support in applications.
- Make the Wayland support as solid as the X11 support (for all I know it already is, I have not checked)
- Work on the GNOME IDE Builder for other applications.
- Work on the application sandboxing for enhanced security.

- Working in progress
- Gnome 3.18 reached that level. Also look at Fedora Workstation tasklist
- In progress
- Already in place, with xdg-app based on ostree. See https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/SandboxedApps

[r_a_trip]

I believe windows desktop is 90% what a user want
Microsoft got this from the first try

Ah, you young'uns. Windows 1.0 in 1985 was an abysmal failure. Windows 2.0 in 1987 was a failure. It wasn't until Windows 3.0 in 1989 that Windows started to catch on. It really broke through with Windows 3.11 in 1993. Windows before windows 95 didn't have a taskbar. The "classic" Windows design with the taskbar and menu on the bottom (Windows 95 and higher) has had many itterative design improvements over nearly two decades. So no, they didn't get it right from the first try.

Gnome 3 didn't either, but now that the concept has been fully realised, it is quite palatable. Only alterations I need (I'm an old fart) is the dash-to-dock and window list extensions.

[moilami]

I liked Gnome 3 right away.

[sarmad]

Gnome 3.0 was brilliant from the beginning despite the bugs it carried initially. It did many things better than Gnome 2. When it comes to audience, It suited those with touch devices, and it also suited those with mouse AND keyboard. The audience that was ignored by Gnome 3 was those with mouse only, i.e. those who wanted to navigate their systme using mouse only. I personally can't find many reasons why you wouldn't want to use the keyboard while navigating the system with your mouse, but apparently there was enough of those users. For those users I would say you can buy one of those mice that has the Super key on them (Windows key), those are really handy with Gnome Shell.

[Adriatic]

I am one of those who stayed with MATE (Mint).

Gnome 3.x was bad to me for a number of reasons:
- concept of desktop icons being disabled by default, I would have to search for my programs by typing their name or lock them to the sidebar which realistically can hold much less entries than desktop space
- the general design idea to see one program at a time is quite limiting too
- speed: have you ever run Gnome 3.x distro in a VM (1GB RAM per VM) on a normal hardware? Compared to MATE, such distros run like snails. It appears that being resource friendly does not have huge priority these days.

I do appreciate work on improving the infrastructure though, such as moving forward with Wayland, implementing HiDPI support etc. That is something that we all can benefit from (backporting the code).

But my main issue is the current state of GTK+ toolkit.
In the past it used to be a multi-platform toolkit, with Windows binary builds done regularly (by Tor).
Nowadays, there are no official binaries for Windows, many different projects doing their own builds without shared build framework.
Also, GTK+ itself is in bad state IMO, many bug reports have been rotting in bugzilla for years now.
Rich text support is somewhat primitive (GtkTextView and GtkSourceView projects do not support tables for example), many APIs present in Qt are missing here (as basic as playing sound file for example).

And the change from GTK2.x to GTK3.x is a separate story, I had to spend months to make my app compile to the new version of the same toolkit (huge amounts of deprecated APIs or new APIs).

My gut feeling is that GTK+ was left to slowly rot, that there is no enough people being paid to devote their efforts to this toolkit.

[pal666]

I believe windows desktop is 90% what a user want
Microsoft got this from the first try

Linux desktop environment developers should just create an interface exactly like Windows

like windows 1.0, imbecile?

[psychoticmeow]

I am one of those who stayed with MATE (Mint).

Gnome 3.x was bad to me for a number of reasons:
- concept of desktop icons being disabled by default, I would have to search for my programs by typing their name or lock them to the sidebar which realistically can hold much less entries than desktop space

You might not like it very much, but it is a much faster way of launching applications, especially once it's learned what your favourites are. For example, to launch Firefox all I do is press Super, F, and then Enter. It's done in the blink of an eye, and always reliable.

- the general design idea to see one program at a time is quite limiting too

This is actually how I've always used my computer, even when I was using Windows 95 I used Alt+Tab to switch windows instead of the task bar. I don't need a list of what is running at the bottom of the screen at all times because I can bring one up by hitting either Alt+Tab or using the overview.

- speed: have you ever run Gnome 3.x distro in a VM (1GB RAM per VM) on a normal hardware? Compared to MATE, such distros run like snails. It appears that being resource friendly does not have huge priority these days.

That won't work very well because Gnome 3 makes use of hardware acceleration which probably isn't enabled in your VM. It's not sluggish in the real world even on some of the low end hardware I used to own.

I do appreciate work on improving the infrastructure though, such as moving forward with Wayland, implementing HiDPI support etc. That is something that we all can benefit from (backporting the code).

But my main issue is the current state of GTK+ toolkit.
In the past it used to be a multi-platform toolkit, with Windows binary builds done regularly (by Tor).
Nowadays, there are no official binaries for Windows, many different projects doing their own builds without shared build framework.
Also, GTK+ itself is in bad state IMO, many bug reports have been rotting in bugzilla for years now.
Rich text support is somewhat primitive (GtkTextView and GtkSourceView projects do not support tables for example), many APIs present in Qt are missing here (as basic as playing sound file for example).

And the change from GTK2.x to GTK3.x is a separate story, I had to spend months to make my app compile to the new version of the same toolkit (huge amounts of deprecated APIs or new APIs).

My gut feeling is that GTK+ was left to slowly rot, that there is no enough people being paid to devote their efforts to this toolkit.

You're right, the reason why there are no Windows ports is because as far as I know it's really just Gnome maintaining it on platforms they don't have any interests on. That's not to say they have not improved it, they've replaced the theme engine mess with one system for theming and spent a lot of time working on what they need. Also, the APIs your looking for are probably part of GStreamer and not GTK.

[GraysonPeddie]

I have made GNOME 3.16 much more usable. The blur is faked by modifying the wallpaper. Conky's (below as dock with clock and date/time) transparency matched with the top bar, although I can only specify from 0.00 to 1.00 (0% to 100%) for the top bar and 0 to 255 for conky. Now the only thing missing is the global menu and that's about it.

Oh, and because the blur is faked, if I want to change to another wallpaper, I will have to fake the blur as well.

Oh, and I don't want a me-too Windows-ish desktop environment. I prefer something that is Mac-like.

Take a look: