Gnome 3 Discussions

[David Kramer]

On 04/22/2011 11:42 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Since Gnome 3 has been released, it was one of the topics in last
> Wednesday's BLU meeting,  and will be in the next releases of OpenSuSe
> 11.4, Fedora 15, Ubuntu 11.04**, I'd like to start a discussion on Gnome
> 3. I don't want a Gnome vs. KDE war, just a somewhat intelligent
> discussion from those of us who might have been using Gnome 3.
> Remember that people don't like changes or things that are different, if
> you have tried it out, opinions are valuable.
> ** Ubuntu 11.04 will be using the underlying infrastructure of Gnome 3,
> but will be using Unity instead of the Gnome Shell.

Well, I made my opinions clear at the meeting.  On the technical side,
it looks like they did some sharp reengineering to eliminate duplication
and increase interface efficiency.

>From a user perspective, I am gravely disappointed in what I saw last
Wednesday.  I can understand trying to make the interface easier for the
beginner/casual user, but not at the expense of removing functionality
for the power user.

I also took great offense at some of his statements.  For instance, I
talked about the problem of needing several apps that do similar jobs
because they each have their strengths.  In my case, I use several
different programs to manage my apple devices, because one can
edit/import/export playlists while the others can't, another one can
transfer videos over while the others can't, etc.  His answer was "We'll
just have to work to get one application that can do all of that".  That
is a ridiculous statement, since all of them are put out by different
people, Apple device integration has been around for a long time and has
not really improved much (other than the iPhone sorta kinda working).
What's going to change that now?  And given that I can't, how am I going
to be able to tell these programs apart if I can't see their names?

The other thing that really has me worried is when he was talking about
the plugin architecture, and how that might be used to get around some
of the problems we were all complaining about.  I can't remember his
exact words, but it was something very close to "We know how the the
interface should look and work, so we don't really like this feature,
because people are going to muck up the look and feel.  This just so
totally smacks of Microsoft's stance ("We know what you need").  Very
arrogant, and very much not the open source way and attitude.  In fact,
he bragged about several features they stole from Windows 7, all of
which cannot be disabled (If I want a window maximized, I'll maximize
it!!!).

He danced around some other long-standing issues that were not
addressed, like when you automatically autostart/restore applications
after a reboot, they should restart into the virtual desktop they were
on at shutdown.

Of course this leaves me in a quandary, because I gave up KDE when 4
came out and the whole UI was turned into an array of candy-like icons
all nearly identical.