GNOME 3 Is Soon Turning Five Years Old: How Are You Liking It?

[nazar-pc]

GNOME 3 is ugly. It has some nice features, but it is barely usable without bunch of extensions and even with them there are some thing inherently broken.
Just to mention a few: useless Nautilus (thankfully we have awesome fork Nemo), entirely broken shortcuts on non-Latin keyboards (this bug also affects Ubuntu Unity users, since under the hood it uses GNOME parts, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/1226962), yesterday installed one distro into VM with GNOME 3.14 and was not able to change default terminal app in other way than replacing /user/bin/gnome-terminal binary with terminator (GNOME devs hardcoded it and decided this is what ALL GNOME users will want). All these small parts create negative impression.
Having such tendency GNOME 3 is ugly and terrible, Unity with Compize is much more flexible (with own weaknesses, but it is anyway better choice for me).

[Apopas]

Jumping from desktop to desktop for many years. Gnome 1, then KDE2, then KDE 3, then Gnome 2, then XFCE, then KDE4, then Openbox where I stayed for about 2 years till I decided to give Gnome 3 with Fedora 22 a chance. I'm still there and I think I'll stay. The speed of my work have been improved dramatically.

[Fenrin]

I liked the first few versions of Gnome 3, but I dislike what happened to Nautilus, Gnote, Totem and some other Gnome applications.
The last two years or so I have used XFCE and Mate the most time under Linux; Linux spins of these usually ship without ugly Gnome 3 applications.

[Pajn]

I like and use Gnome 3, but I do have some issues however so when Unity 8 comes out I will try that to see if it's time to move on.

[Delgarde]

Just want to point out here that GTK originally stood for "GIMP Tool Kit" and was created by the developers of GIMP, for GIMP. It would still exist if Gnome didn't.

Probably not, actually. Yes, Gtk would have been created back in the distant past. But if it had remained the Gimp Toolkit and not been adopted by Gnome as the toolkit for an entire desktop, it's unlikely that it would still be around today.

[emblemparade]

I admire the GNOME project in general. It's a combination of lots of very good and even world-class apps, with a terrific platform underneath: GTK+3 is very solid and modern, supporting HiDPI and Wayland (and I much prefer C over Qt's C++, thank you), while the Vala language shows real innovation that has proved immensely productive. It's also shown tremendous restraint in terms of its design/interface language, keeping things simple, while constantly refining the message.

But the GNOME 3 shell has been a thorn in my side! I really liked it at first, and was excited by all the plugins and themes that could let me modify almost any aspect of it, but then every single point release broke my plugins and broke my themes and forced me to relearn things. I even though to write plugins on my own, but realized how frustrating it would be to keep having to fix them every few months when a new point release came out.

I'm likewise frustrated by how hard it is to get the latest GNOME 3 releases on Ubuntu. If you stick to an Ubuntu LTS release, you will not be able to get the latest and greatest GNOME 3, even with PPAs.

So, GNOME 3 has a lot of promise, but I'm waiting for the platform to stabilize. (We had the same issue early on with Firefox, with new releases breaking add-ons, until that problem has mostly disappeared.)

Until then, like others here, I find Xfce to be the perfect desktop. I do have to tweak it a bit to suit my needs, but at least I can. My only issue with it right now is that it doesn't have proper HiDPI support. I hope Xfce finishes migrating to GTK+3 and gets in line with the rest of the goodies.

[boxie]

I have not used Gnome 3 enough to form a solid opinion. It did get in the way of me doing things a little - but it has been a while since I have tried it.

I have been using Cinnamon for the last couple of years and have been relatively happy - with time the rough edges have become more and more smooth.

[anderpants]

WHY would they add an additional step to access the most used feature on a desktop : switching to another window.

I kinda like GNOME 3 except for this. I use Ubuntu Unity because at least I can switch to the window I want in a single click. I do it so many times a day that two successive actions is too much. Every single commercial OS I ever known since Windows 95 has a directly accessible task bar or dock, for a good reason.

Just a visible dock/taskbar with open windows, and a good search feature. Beyond that, it honesty just has to be classy.

I never understood this either. GNOME3 is unusable in my opinion. I have tried over and over to get used to it and make it a usable full time desktop but every time I try, the settings you have to tweak are different, don't work, or are in different places.

[zuxun]

I was a gnome 2 user, when gnome 3 was released it was the reason i went to kde.

Because it didn't have buttons to switch between programs i was unable to like it.

It had a menu to switch between programs. This doesn't allow fast switching like i am used to.

I too hate gnome 3.

[halo9en]

I didn't like Gnome 2 and really hated the focus on tablets in Gnome 3 (e.g. notifications in 3.14+), but of all the desktop environments and window managers I've tried (and I've tried them ALL) it's still the only working, "real" DE. Yes, there's KDE but I never liked the fact that GTK applications don't really blend with the QT framework.