On Sat, 2011-11-12 at 21:21 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote: > Hi all, > > I just upgraded my debian testing laptop and found myself running > Gnome3. I was quite happy with Gnome2 (with a few minor tweaks) > but Gnome3 is completely abysmal. >
What I find annoying about these conversations is that if you had gone and bought an Apple with Mac OS X you would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different. ++ I've been using GNOME 3 full time for over 9 months, and I find it quite usable. Sure, it's different than GNOME 2. It's vastly different. But it *is* a new UI paradigm. The GNOME 2 experience was 9 years old, and the gnome hackers have been working hard (since about 2007) to do something about interaction that the old Windows 95 paradigm simply couldn't address. Sure, I had to learn some new usage patterns, but I don't see that as a negative. It's a new piece of software, so I'm doing my best to use it the way it's designed to be used. Incidentally, I'm not sure how up to date it is, but you might have a read of http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design to see some of the things they had in mind. And of course there's lots of things linked off of http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ . Distros like Ubuntu have been shipping GNOME 2.32 for ages; but it has been well over 2 years since anyone actually worked on that code. It's wonderful that nothing has changed for you in all that time, [a true Debian Stable experience!] but I think it's a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is ... different. ++ I went to some trouble to run GNOME 3 during the Natty cycle; that was a bit of work but I needed to be current; now with Oneiric things are mostly up to date. GNOME 3.0 was indeed a bit of a mess, but then so was GNOME 2.0. The recently released 3.2 is a big improvement. And it looks like the list of things that seem targeted to 3.4 will further improve things. I'm now running GNOME 3 on a freshly built Ubuntu Oneiric system; I just did a "command line" install of Ubuntu and then installed `gdm`, `gnome-shell`, `xserver-xorg` and friends. Working great, and not having installed `gnome-desktop` saved me a huge amount of baggage. Of course a normal Oneiric desktop install and then similarly installing and switching to gnome-shell would work fine too. You probably want to enable the ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 PPA. ++ One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional Hyper and then CapsLock + F1 .. CapsLock + F12 as launchers. I have epiphany browser on F1, evolution on F2, IRC on F3 and so on. Setting up CapsLock + A as to do `gnome-terminal --window` means you can pop a term easily from anywhere. You do all that as "custom shortcuts" in the "Keyboard" section of system settings. That means I only use the whole "Win key + T R A C ..." thing (in this case looking for the Project Hamster time tracker) for outlying applications. Of course you can also set up the things you use the most on the "Dash" (I think that's what they call it) as favourites. I've actually stopped doing that [the original design didn't have favourites at all]; I prefer to have it as an alternative view of things that are actually running. AfC Sydney
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