On Wed, 07 Sep 2011 11:23:26 -0700, Frederick N. Brier wrote: > On 09/02/2011 07:31 AM, Stefan Held wrote: >> Am Freitag, den 02.09.2011, 09:44 -0400 schrieb Darryl L. Pierce: >> >>> Great points. If we didn't have change and innovation we'd all still >>> be using 80x25 monochrome text mode terminals. > What was wrong with 80x25 monochrome? I liked the Hercules display :). > No, but seriously, Gnome3 is irritating. To have to click on Activities > to change and repaint the whole screen, and then select the category of > an item you want (if you have not added it to your favorites), then > click on it, then repaint the screen again. And the screen real estate > for the Activities text does nothing else. Nothing. You can't even > right click on it. > > You also can't right click on the "desktop menu items" and bring up > their properties. Can't copy and edit them (I like that for rdesktop > and other commands that have parameters). No, you have to find the old > MainMenu utility and create an item in the non-existent menu so it will > show up. Maybe there is another way, but it ain't intuitive. > > What's with no right clicks? Only one mouse button? Instead of Unix's > 3 buttons? Is this a lowest common denominator solution for someone who > installs Linux on a Mac? > > I have been using Gnome3 for over 3 weeks now. I tried adding AWN. > Tweaking different parameters. It is STILL annoying. And SLOOOOWWWWW. > There is a reason why menus have been around so long. So yeah, I guess > I think the Gnome guys fumbled the ball. > > I liked Gnome2. Mostly I liked all the nice GUI utilities built on top > of it. And now I am not sure what I am going to do. > >> It was only a change, no innovation ..... >> >> http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/76280/ >> >> This is going to be long, and I'm commenting late. First of all, a few general comments and caveats. Comment: Notice how the person responsible for starting this flame-fest wrote one message and hasn't reappeared? Caveat: I am a KDE user (mostly) or a WindowMaker user. However, I've been using Gnome 3 on and off since Fedora 15 was released. Take my comments with the above caveat in mind. Like many people, I find a lot of the UI changes in Gnome 3 to be a bit irritating. However, I have found several reasonable work-arounds. 1. Switching virtual desktops The left-screen / right-screen tango with a large monitor is cumbersome. Many have commented on this. I find it unpleasant as well. The work-around I use is Ctrl-Alt up-arrow and down-arrow. This allows me to easily page through my virtual desktops. The virtual desktops don't wrap around, and they're not labeled, but it's certainly better than the mouse equivalents. 2. Applets Quite frankly, I don't miss these at all. I have a weather plugin for Chrome, and I use gkrellm for system monitoring. If you alt-right-mouse click on gkrellm, you can choose "Always on visible Workspace" which lets you see your machine's suffering on every desktop :-p. 3. Items on desktop I've never been a fan of items on the desktop. I usually have too many things running so double-clicking on a desktop item is counter-productive. That said, you can probably manage a lot with having Nautilus show up on every workspace. Again, just right-mouse click on the title bar and select "Always on visible Workspace". 4. Right-mouse click on the desktop I've not missed this nearly as much as I thought I would. I find that Alt- F2 and entering a command works for most of my needs. I actually use this a lot (see Applications menu below). Things I don't like 1. Performance On this old machine (2.6 GHz P4, 1.5 GB memory, overclocked Nvidia 7600GS AGPx4 card), Gnome 3 consumes the most memory and renders the slowest of KDE 4 / WindowMaker / Gnome 3. Hopefully the Gnome developers will improve performance in the upcoming releases. Early versions of KDE 4 had performance problems as well, so one can hope. 2. Uncontrollable workspaces This one is irritating. I tend to lay out my workspaces in a particular order. I group running tasks on particular workspace based on what I'm doing. Think of it as an alternative to the KDE activities concept. I find now that if I don't open programs in a certain order, then they get placed on an unfamiliar workspace. While this isn't a huge problem, it makes setting up workspaces based on tasks more cumbersome than it should be. I can get around some of this with alt-tab (through all programs), but this is less than optimal. 3. Workspace behavior when ending last program This one is a bit convoluted to explain. I have gkrellm visible on all of the workspaces. If I go to the last workspace and start a new program, everything works as expected. However, if I close that program, I get the same view as if I put my mouse cursor in the upper left-hand corner of the screen - the activities view. I have to hit the escape key to bring me back to a workspace view. This also happens if I launch a KDE program - let's say amarok - and send it to the system tray. 4. The applications menu This one is a real mess. I am a software packrat. I have lots of programs. I have a couple of versions of some programs. The default behavior of the application menu on a smaller system is pretty much unworkable. 4A. Speed The first time I bring up the Applications menu, it will take several seconds to appear. During that time I can obviously do nothing else on the computer. Scrolling through this mess is also an issue, as well as a CPU hog. 4B. Organization Alphabetic? Really? Yes, there are menus on the right hand side, but this does not come up by default. Also, there are no tool tip style comments when you hover over an icon. If you have several lightly used applications, you get to guess what the names are and what they do. 4C. Icons Mostly icons are not a problem. However, some icons are still .PNG or other bit-mapped graphics. These scale poorly with the default icon size. Because of this mess, I end up using Alt-F2 / command a lot. While this works for my most commonly used programs, it certainly doesn't work (being forgetful) for programs I don't use as often. In short, it places a barrier to finding the right application for the task at hand. 5. Playing nicely with KDE GTK 3 applications no longer play nicely with KDE. Newsreaders like pan are ugly (garish background on menus, blocky fonts). Google Chrome doesn't automatically start up the key manager, so none of the saved passwords are available. You can enter them in and save them, but as soon as you start Chrome under Gnome 3 again, you will lose the passwords stored while in KDE. 6. Playing nicely with Java I do a lot of Java work in NetBeans. The GTK look and feel is quite broken with GTK 3. Horizontal positioning is off when using an application in full screen. There are no menu shadows. There are no menu borders. Font rendering is different than the default GTK applications (and spindly). 7. Multiple open copies or windows If you have multiple copies of an application open, or multiple windows of a single application open, Alt-tab only gets to the most recently active window. You have to use the arrow key to maneuver to other windows of the same program or other instances of the same program. This isn't quite so bad. Alt-tab once, and then use the arrow keys for everything (this works). It's a bit clumsy, but I'm not sure how else to approach this issue. Nits Theming is painful. Hopefully I can poke around with the gnome-tweak-tool to fix the look of running GTK applications under KDE. Resource usage is higher than other windowing systems. I realize this is the first release. I hope that the Gnome developers will focus on performance / efficiency in the upcoming releases. What is the point of having the active program display on the title bar? If I click on the entry (for example gedit), all I get is an option to quit. Why is this any more beneficial than using Ctrl-Q from within the program? I just trying to figure out why this is a good UI design. All in all, Gnome 3 has some potential, but there are certain warts that really need to be addressed in order to make it useful (IMHO). . . . . just my two cents. /mde/ -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
