GNOME 3.0 Laptop Change Frustrates Some Users

[Nevertime]

I've always avoided using sleep due to issues in the past. But i tried activating sleep a number of times on opensuse 11.4 with catalyst drivers and broadcom wl drivers and there was no issues and it was fast. Now made it the default when I push the power button on my laptop.

[Djhg2000]

Suspend and hibernate are still a bit problematic in general. Sometimes they work perfectly, and sometimes they don't, especially if binary drivers are being used. In my own experience I'm using the OSS Radeon drivers in openSUSE 11.4 and both suspend and hibernate work flawlessly. My cousin is using the nvidia binary drivers on Ubuntu 10.10 and hibernation works 1 out of 5 times or less. I believe this isn't something that can be easily fixed by distros, but maybe you're right and it's for the best that suspend is the default behaviour. Let's see how that turns out.

I didn't really mean distros would fix all the suspend/hibernate stuff, that comes along with the devs who will now start to use them. Most likely they will hack in a config option somewhere to enable/disable suspend when you close the lid.

I know it's a different scenario, but Chrome OS has done this all along and I haven't heard too many complaints from users, unofficial builds included. It seems to "just work" with 100% success rate on every laptop I've tested so far. This makes me think it's just a matter of updating any configs and/or blacklists to include a wider range of hardware.

[devius]

I don't think anyone but devs and advanced geeks will try to install 3.0 before their distro picks it up in the repos where this will most likely be fixed in one way or another.

Suspend and hibernate are still a bit problematic in general. Sometimes they work perfectly, and sometimes they don't, especially if binary drivers are being used. In my own experience I'm using the OSS Radeon drivers in openSUSE 11.4 and both suspend and hibernate work flawlessly. My cousin is using the nvidia binary drivers on Ubuntu 10.10 and hibernation works 1 out of 5 times or less. I believe this isn't something that can be easily fixed by distros, but maybe you're right and it's for the best that suspend is the default behaviour. Let's see how that turns out.

[Djhg2000]

after two lockups and no way to turn suspend off the new user will happily go back to windows and tell everybody how much linux sucks.

Thanks to gnome-devs and their brain dead ideas.

I don't think anyone but devs and advanced geeks will try to install 3.0 before their distro picks it up in the repos where this will most likely be fixed in one way or another.

[energyman]

The more I read of this thread the more I realize... they're right.
We need to force users to suspend. It's the only way to make driver developers care.

after two lockups and no way to turn suspend off the new user will happily go back to windows and tell everybody how much linux sucks.

Thanks to gnome-devs and their brain dead ideas.

[liam]

FYI, tried posting this earlier, but for anyone who is interested and likes the Gnome 2 experience, there is at least one fork of Gnome 2 now, it is called EXDE, I am not sure how active it is. It seems to have only been started this past January.

The website has a FAQ, a roadmap, et al:

http://exde.org/

I'm not involved with EXDE, I just would like to see some semblance of my current UI maintained, whatever the most fruitful path for that outcome may be.

Use gnome-fallback.session
It's the "old" panel system and menu written in gtk3, as I understand it. Haven't tried it personally. My asus Aspire One netbook runs gnome-shell wonderfully (running Fed15 from alpha with updates).
The Clutter team has made massive improvements with regards to performance and more should be on the way.

[Alejandro Nova]

Radio?

I have my KDE desktop configured to a) when on batteries, hibernate on lid close; b) when on AC power, DO NOTHING. I love to tune some radio station with Bangarang, close the notebook and leave it on. You are leaving me without my radio, and you are leaving me without my hibernation (I need HIBERNATION, not suspension).

I was thinking about testing GNOME 3.0. With this, guys, you close the door on my face.

[Djhg2000]

Come on, you can't be serious? Power users and people with many years of Linux under their belt, maybe. New users? New users are going to blame "Linux", rather than "Gnome" or "The driver", period.

True. I don't really think it's the best way to do it either, but I think I understand why they do it which is what must of us have been asking in this thread.

You're assuming that Gnome alone will drive driver development, regardless of the facts:

• It is not the responsibility or goal of Gnome to do so!
• Driver developers that have these kinds of problematic suspend code are either hobbyists who don't really care about that functionality, or part of a company which develops their own drivers and did not prioritize the feature. In either case, there is more motivtion for them to come back and say "Don't use Gnome" than actually fix the problem.
• Gnome is more or less the only ones doing this.

Well, KDE4 did, and Gnome has a possibly even larger user base.
I think this is meant to put pressure on the distro devs as it will probably take a while after release until it's actually implemented in Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and so on, not to mention being the default option.
New users most likely won't try Gnome 3 until it becomes just that; the default desktop environment.

Observation: When KDE4 comes along and starts putting OpenGL 3 desktop effects into KWin, people scream bloody murder. When Gnome3 mandates suspend on lid close regardless of the fact that suspend is known not to work on several mobile platforms, the same people say its cool? Really? When closing the lid is something almost every laptop user is going to /have/ to do at one point in the lifetime of their laptop?

I don't think it's cool, I think it's just a way to push development so that it doesn't take half of a laptop lifetime to get suspend support.

The pushing factor behind driver development of drivers for workstation and consumer PCs is based on one thing: Market presence. If noone used Linux, no or person would develop drivers for it. Companies and hobbyists don't have a clear count, but they do know that millions of people use Linux on the desktop. Every user makes a part of that invisible count, be it new users, experienced users, or developers. Forcing buggy behavior on users will scare some away from the platform, and is definitely the wrong approach. The right thing to do is to have bug tracking in place for upstream issues like this.

Very true, but would Windows ever get this far if people wouldn't tolerate a little buggy behavior?
In fact, I think that's about the only reason Windows is still used for things like browsing the web and writing papers instead of being reduced to a gaming platform.

[kazetsukai]

The more I read of this thread the more I realize... they're right.
We need to force users to suspend. It's the only way to make driver developers care.

While you have a point, the ones that end up losing here are the users, especially new users. See below.

By forcing everyone to use it (technically you can avoid it, but you know you will try it just once to see if it actually ended up working that way) a lot more people will complain about either the behavior of Gnome or how suspend is broken.

Come on, you can't be serious? Power users and people with many years of Linux under their belt, maybe. New users? New users are going to blame "Linux", rather than "Gnome" or "The driver", period.

So, it's about raising the awareness of the suspend issues, not whether it's a sensible default. While this does indeed seem selfish from the point of view of the users who never suspend their laptop automatically, it will bring better drivers and probably a higher quality feel since one less thing is broken.

You're assuming that Gnome alone will drive driver development, regardless of the facts:

• It is not the responsibility or goal of Gnome to do so!
• Driver developers that have these kinds of problematic suspend code are either hobbyists who don't really care about that functionality, or part of a company which develops their own drivers and did not prioritize the feature. In either case, there is more motivtion for them to come back and say "Don't use Gnome" than actually fix the problem.
• Gnome is more or less the only ones doing this.

Observation: When KDE4 comes along and starts putting OpenGL 3 desktop effects into KWin, people scream bloody murder. When Gnome3 mandates suspend on lid close regardless of the fact that suspend is known not to work on several mobile platforms, the same people say its cool? Really? When closing the lid is something almost every laptop user is going to /have/ to do at one point in the lifetime of their laptop?

The pushing factor behind driver development of drivers for workstation and consumer PCs is based on one thing: Market presence. If noone used Linux, no or person would develop drivers for it. Companies and hobbyists don't have a clear count, but they do know that millions of people use Linux on the desktop. Every user makes a part of that invisible count, be it new users, experienced users, or developers. Forcing buggy behavior on users will scare some away from the platform, and is definitely the wrong approach. The right thing to do is to have bug tracking in place for upstream issues like this.

[Djhg2000]

The more I read of this thread the more I realize... they're right.
We need to force users to suspend. It's the only way to make driver developers care.

It took years for my old Inspiron 6000 to get proper suspend support and I don't want to go through all of those times of accidentally loosing data again with my DV7.

So what do I do?
Well one option would be to shut down the machine every time I'm going somewhere, like I used to. Or I could work on fixing it.
Either way would make little difference since while I do know a lot more about the internal workings of Linux now than 5 years ago, I'm still just a lonely power user/small scale hobby developer with a single recent laptop.

By forcing everyone to use it (technically you can avoid it, but you know you will try it just once to see if it actually ended up working that way) a lot more people will complain about either the behavior of Gnome or how suspend is broken.

So, it's about raising the awareness of the suspend issues, not whether it's a sensible default. While this does indeed seem selfish from the point of view of the users who never suspend their laptop automatically, it will bring better drivers and probably a higher quality feel since one less thing is broken.

Oh and on a side note; nobody is stupid because of their preferences.