Gnome 3 Discussions

[Tom Metro]

David Kramer wrote:
> 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.  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...

I took that as a statement of an ideal. I'm sure you too would rather
have one tool that did the complete job rather than combining 3.

He didn't clarify the point, but I didn't interpret what he was saying
as "you can't do that." It was more like, "we want to avoid this kind of
a situation for typical users."

If what you are trying to do is a common need, and it logically makes
sense to meet all those needs with one tool, then that's what the
community should be striving for.

This doesn't always make sense. Sometimes features are better
implemented as a chain of separate tools (classic Unix philosophy), or
your use case may be odd-ball enough not to warrant integrating, or some
features may not fit the philosophy of a program.

Does any one of the programs stand out as coming the closest to meeting
your needs? Have you filed feature requests?


> ...how am I going to be able to tell these programs apart if I can't
> see their names?

There seemed to be some misunderstanding over the UI elements.

If you're familiar with GNOME 2, then the bar on the left side is a
combination of the Window List and Application Launcher applets (or in
(pre-7) Window terms, task bar and quick launch icons). I don't know
what GNOME 3 calls this, but dock bar seems to be the common term for
this combined functionality. (I use one called DockbarX on GNOME 2.)
Dock bars let you see what applications are currently running, and allow
you to "pin" a small subset of applications that you use most frequently
so they can be launched from the bar.

While the application list that appeared in the main part of the screen
is the equivalent to the Applications menu.

Your complaint was that you couldn't distinguish multiple applications
with similar looking icons when they appeared on the dock bar. Is this a
situation you see happening when you go to launch the application, or do
you anticipate having all 3 running simultaneously?

If the latter, then you have a valid concern, and it would seem that
hovering your mouse over the icon to get the program title is the only
option. If the former, then the next question is how do you currently
launch these 3 applications in GNOME 2? Do you launch them from the
Applications menu, or do you have 3 Application Launcher icons for them
on a GNOME panel? (I make very limited use of Application Launcher icons
or pinned applications.)

If you use the Applications menu, then there doesn't seem to be much
difference between 2 and 3. The application listing they showed in the
demo showed both icons and program names. The biggest down side I heard
was that they didn't yet provide a tool for manually reorganizing the list.


> 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. 

The ability to reprogram the UI in a main stream language (JavaScript),
without having to recompile the whole desktop, sounds rather promising.

Anyone know if this is how Ubuntu's Unity UI is implemented on top of
GNOME 3, or did they get more invasive?


> "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.

I think desktop UI designers face some of the toughest challenges of any
UI designers, because users inevitably resist change and want a new
desktop that works the way the old one did. That makes it pretty hard to
innovate.

Ideally you want a "soft" introduction to the new features where you can
try them out after an upgrade, and if you find you just can't live with
them, you can revert the problematic ones, while keeping others.

I'm pretty sure if the capability is there in the plugin architecture,
we'll see plugins to revert most behaviors to be GNOME 2-like.

I wouldn't fault the GNOME 3 developers for not putting in hundreds of
configuration options to support GNOME 2 behaviors. But I do think it
would be wise to have GNOME 2 compatibility plugins available in time
for the first non-beta Linux distribution that ships with GNOME 3.


> 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.

Agreed. Session persistence has been a long standing problem in GNOME.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/