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

[Thpn]

Phoronix recently compared desktops. Of the ones modeled after GNOME 2, LXDE is being replaced with LXQt, and Xfce isn't receiving a lot of developer love these days.

However, MATE is being converted to the modern GTK+3, while retaining the GNOME 2 UI. Before Ubuntu was created, I wished for exactly what the distro was when first released, until Canonical went off the rails following MS into the converged UI abyss.

Naturally, I'm a big fan of Ubuntu MATE and look forward to the LTS release in April. I'm not the only one. The popularity of Ubuntu MATE continues to increase on DistroWatch.

[pracedru]

Happy birthday gnome 3

I use GNOME 3 at home on both my desktop and laptop. At work I use xfce.

I am very pleased with both.

[Luke]

Software developers never learned the 1st thing you have to learn to be a software developer: You can never, ever, under any circumstance, change the UI. Changing the API, which affect professionals (software developers) is a PITA, but sometimes necessary. In an application, for every 100 times you change the API, you should be granted the right to change the UI zero times. Users hate it. Never, *EVER* do it. ALL users are extremely pissed off when they change the UI of an application they use regularly. When will developers learn this very basic fact?

The car has kept the same basic UI for over 100 years. Imagine what would happen is car manufacturers were changing the UI of cars at will, with every new car, each manufacturer on its own. One because he made a study that putting the break under the right foot will increase safety, other because placing the gear stick on your left hand will improve usability, other because instead of a wheel some joystick will make it easier, etc, etc, etc... Car accidents and deaths will rise 10x-100x. Is the car UI the very best possible? No. Could it be improved? Yes. Is it viable, worth or likely to happen? No. No way. People don't want to learn how to drive a car again and again. Each time they drive a different car. Just because someone of the design team thinks it's "cool" or that it "improves usability". There really is no excuse for it. Just *NEVER* change the UI. The USER Interface belongs to the USERS. Change the bloody API every single new release if you want. Force all your colleagues to relearn it again and again. It's their job. But just leave users alone. Once and for all.

What was the question, again? If I like Gnome 3?

The last US change for the car was Ford's delayed change to the current automotive UI when they transitioned from the Model T to the Model A. The last Model T's were made in 1927, the first in 1908-and Ford knew Model T customers did not want UI changes. The first decade of the 1900's for auto makers were like the 1980's and Windows 3.x era for computer makers. Ford got a UI that worked but all other automakers had changed to the now standard pedal setup, as opposed to Ford's hand brake/3 transmission pedal setup. It was a considerable amount of relearning to switch from a T to any other car once all other makers had standardized and for new drivers the old setup no longer made sense.

GNOME would have been in Ford's situation if the GNOME 3 interface had come out in 1988 and been adopted by millions, only to have the rest of the computer industry to the other way with the Win95 layout in 1995. Both GNOME and Microsoft though this was happening to the Win95 layout with the rise of the smartphone and the tablet but they were wrong. Tablets and phones are to desktops as motorcycles and bicycles are to cars: different devices that need different UI's.

Wayland is probably GNOME's best chance to lose enough weight to become practical on low powered mobile devices. Getting rid of all that JS a few versions ago helped a lot with this too.

[Davidovitch]

see previous post

[Davidovitch]

I started out on Ubuntu with the Gnome 2 series, but jumped ship when Unity came in. I moved onwards to Arch Linux and tried the fresh Gnome 3, but didn't like it and swapped it for Cinnamon. Cinnamon was ok, but not rock solid (as Gnome 2 was in my experience). I kept following the Gnome 3 development and finally went back to it when the classic mode was introduced with Gnome 3.8. I was forced into the classic mode due to failing graphics drivers that kept crashing the shell. Can't remember when I stopped using the classic mode, but haven't missed it for a second since. Gnome 3 has only been growing stronger if you ask me.

Although I had to get used to the Gnome 3 way of doing things, it does work better for me compared to Gnome 2. But I absolutely can not live without the dash-to-dock and alternatetab extensions, and use Gnome Tweak Tool often too.

I really do not miss the old status bar, and love the additional vertical pixels. My preferred task switching goes like: alt-tab (showing thumbnail of the app window + app icon overlay, courtesy Alternatetab extension) + mouse select the application, and works faster for me compared to the old task bar. Compared to a small task bar, It also allows my to find my application faster when I have a lot of stuff open. This means I always have my left hand on the keyboard, and right at the mouse for super fast application switching. This is a lot faster compared to moving cursor down the screen, find the application, click on the application, and continue.

Also the shell overview mode triggered by the super key is pretty convenient for me. For example, launching an application is as fast as super + start typing app name + enter. For me this works faster compared to click start and then finding the application buried deep down in some of the sub-menus.

Also, I like some of the themes out there. Now I am using Vertex-light for GTK+ theme in combination with the Elegance-colors Gnome shell theme, and the Ubuntu Light as font.

Thanks Gnome devs and designers, keep up the good work!

[sarfarazahmad]

i really really like xfce4.12 . wish it felt somewhat more polished and "complete" like gnome3 still being easy on resources. xfwm4 is really veryvery efficient. Its about time linux had a proper UI i dont know what happened after gnome2 and kde 3. kde 3 felt ahead of its time to me

[Daktyl198]

I'm not a huge fan of gnome shell*, but I like things like Gtk+3.0 and vala that wouldn't exist if Gnome didn't exist.

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.

[wargames]

In my opinion, Gnome 3 is a bloated piece of sh*t designed for dumbed down people. Also, Gnome 3 is the reason I switched to Windows 7 as my main desktop. Windows 10 is also a bloated piece of sh*t, but this one with bult-in spyware.

EDIT: I really hate Gnome 3 because it forced me to switch to Windows 7, and now Micro$hit is trying to force me to upgrade to Win$hit 10. Oh, and don't mention other DE because they are all a joke.

[sjukfan]

Might be well written code, but I really don't like the UI. It annoys me that I have to mouse over icons to figure out what they do. Some seems to like it but I hear a lot of people saying it need some extension or plugin to be useable.

[etam]

GNOME 3 was the reason I switched to KDE.

I was using GNOME 2 for a long time. It was simple and easy and felt familiar for someone using windows before. KDE 3 at that time was not appealing to me.

But then GNOME 3 came and at the beginning I was like "wow! it's so cool and fresh!", but after some time of using it I realized that for me it's unusable without many extensions. Authors just made many assumptions about how people should use desktop, that aren't true for me. And they made it very difficult to change anything.

After some time I just felt that's enough and switched to KDE 4 (I also tried other lightweight DEs like xfce or awesome, but it didn't work - I like having my WebDAV calendar easily integrated with desktop). It took some time to get used to it and to learn all the options to make KDE fit to me. But, unlike GNOME 3, it was possible.

Now I'm still using KDE 4 (on openSUSE 13.2). I'll switch to KDE 5, when it'll be rock solid stable. Maybe with next release of openSUSE, we'll see.