I really don't understand how any serious developer can use Gnome 3. I have tried for the past couple of months to use the out-of-the-box Gnome setup under Fedora (with the Adwaita theme) and the whole experience was maddening. I've finally switched back to KDE (which I haven't used for almost 5 years) and if this doesn't work out I'll go back to XFCE (which is what I used in-between).
Some problems include:
* Focused and unfocused windows look almost identical
* Expected features like tray icons, virtual desktops, alt+drag to move/resize windows, even alt+tab don't work out-of-the-box
* Window focus seems completely broken
* Eclipse looks terrible (and I spend much of my time there) - I'm told "no, that's an SWT issue", but it looks great under KDE
* IntelliJ's menus don't track the moue properly - again, probably a Java issue, but still works great under KDE
* Having to "drag" the screensaver thing away is annoying
* gkrellm seems to make all of my window focus issues even worse
I know most of the issues can be blamed on application/third-party framework bugs, but the fact is that I just want to get my work done and KDE/XFCE both work great.
Go look at some of the Gnome source code comments and Bugzillas and you will see the very opinionated "do it my way" thinking that the Gnome developers have. In some cases, it's almost hostile.
If I wanted a desktop that valued form over function, I'd use a Mac.
A lot of this reflects something I've noticed about development in the Gnome world: they decide exactly how interfaces should be used, and lock that in. As time progresses, they drop more and more customizability out of their products, and as a result, you're increasingly left with a choice between doing things their way, or mucking around in their re-envisioning of the Windows Registry or even program source code.
A big one for me is keyboard input: at one point, I could use the Super key for whatever I liked, and I could easily set the right Alt key to be a Compose key. Now, there is no reclaiming the Super key from hard-coded shortcuts (Unity is even worse about this!), and the Compose key is outright missing from the keyboard settings menu.
The obvious fix is simply not to use Gnome. I'm personally partial to Openbox; it's amenable to customization in a way I don't think Gnome will ever be again. The problem is that with the flurry of new system(d?) technologies -- dbus, policykit, consolekit, who knows what the hell else -- nothing works. I can't even mount removable drives from any file manager under an Openbox session now. At the moment, Gnome is the only system sufficiently tightly coupled into this stuff to work at all, and that's frustrating.
> A big one for me is keyboard input: at one point, I could use the Super key for whatever I liked, and I could easily set the right Alt key to be a Compose key. Now, there is no reclaiming the Super key from hard-coded shortcuts (Unity is even worse about this!), and the Compose key is outright missing from the keyboard settings menu.
Compose key is moved. To a non-obvious spot (if you're used to its historic location).
Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts, the ‘Typing’ section. There's ‘Compose key’, which lets you set the compose key.
It's also in a more traditional form in Gnome Tweak Tool.
> Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts, the ‘Typing’ section
Thank you!
> a non-obvious spot
No kidding; the Compose key being an actual key, it really belongs with the rest of the keyboard mapping settings. I guess since they removed that section altogether, they had to stick it somewhere.
> It's also in a more traditional form in Gnome Tweak Tool.
Not anywhere I can see, but that's not a big deal.
I'd consider myself a serious developer and I love GNOME 3.
> Focused and unfocused windows look almost identical
I have never had a problem distinguishing.
> Expected features like tray icons, virtual desktops, alt+drag to move/resize windows, even alt+tab don't work out-of-the-box
All of the above work perfectly fine. I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.
> Window focus seems completely broken
You'll have to be more specific here; works fine for me.
> IntelliJ's menus don't track the moue properly - again, probably a Java issue, but still works great under KDE
I had issues with IntelliJ until I switched from OpenJDK to the Oracle JDK. Now it works fine (though a bit ugly).
> Having to "drag" the screensaver thing away is annoying
You're doing it wrong. Just start typing your password and it goes away.
Some of the developers definitely do have a bad attitude, but many are actually quite awesome. Besides, more often than not, their way has turned out pretty good.
I'm 100% in agreement with you here. Gnome 3 was/is, to me, the only desktop I can stand to use anymore. I will agree with OP's complaint about alt-tab though... I had to install [Coverflow Alt-Tab|https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/97/coverflow-alt-tab/].
Some end up being minuscule (I'm looking at a ~1px-wide ownCloud icon right now) and the location is definitely non-obvious. I didn't even know Gnome 3 had a system tray for about a month, until I accidentally pulled it up.
> alt+drag to move/resize windows
This is not enabled by default, and there's no way to enable it in the default settings manager. I think gnome-tweak-tool has added support, but I had to dig around in dconf to enable it not too long ago.
> even alt+tab don't work out-of-the-box
Alt-Tabbing in Gnome 3 is fscked. You're expected to use Alt-~ to switch between windows of the same "application," while Alt-Tab only switches between application-group-things. You can fix it with a plugin, but you have to fix it with a plugin. That's ridiculous.
> Window focus seems completely broken
New windows are sometimes raised above other windows. Sometimes they're raised below. Sometimes they have focus. Sometimes they don't. I've experienced this issue with other window systems too, though, so I don't know if Gnome is to blame for it.
> more often than not, their way has turned out pretty good
It's something of an 80/20 scenario: yes, most of "their way" is perfectly fine, but a good chunk of it just sucks. Worse, which chunk of it sucks is different for different people and for different reasons. For example, I can't stand workspaces, but I know people who swear by them. Conversely, a lot of people prefer the old program menus, but I like the incremental search Gnome uses.
This is a universal problem, and it's easily solved: give the user options. No matter how well you design an interface, it's going to be wrong in some way for someone. By all means, yes, ship sane defaults, but give your users the ability to control their workflows on their computers.
> This is not enabled by default, and there's no way to enable it in the default settings manager. I think gnome-tweak-tool has added support, but I had to dig around in dconf to enable it not too long ago.
Try super+drag. If I remember correctly, they're trying to change window manager interactions to use super to free up alt for applications.
> It's something of an 80/20 scenario: yes, most of "their way" is perfectly fine, but a good chunk of it just sucks. Worse, which chunk of it sucks is different for different people and for different reasons. For example, I can't stand workspaces, but I know people who swear by them. Conversely, a lot of people prefer the old program menus, but I like the incremental search Gnome uses.
While it admittedly could be better, you can customize GNOME Shell significantly with extensions. The GNOME Classic session is implemented entirely with extensions in fact IIRC.
I use and love GNOME 3, and I think I'm a serious developer.
I love the simplicity. I love that jamming the mouse into the upper-right is the way to bring up all the application launching and window management UI, and the rest of the time it's out of the way. I love that it actually feels innovative, in that the design isn't just ripped off from some other OS. I love that non-essential features are relegated to extensions, keeping the core pure.
IIRC the problem with Eclipse is that it still uses gtk2, and thus gtk3 themes and config won't affect it. You have to manually edit the gtk2 settings to apply a reasonable theme. Ironically KDE can control gtk2 from its own control panel, but GNOME 3 cannot. Oh well.
Personally, I don't understand how any serious developer can use Mac OSX, yet almost every developer I meet these days in fact uses it, so... perhaps we are just projecting.
Interesting. I've used Ubuntu for years before Unity, switched between Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu with Unity, Linux Mint Cinnamon, Linux Mint MATE... and finally, as of last week, I've been using Ubuntu Gnome.
It was, of all the above mentioned, the first to give me a fluid desktop performance with decent aesthetics and all functionality I have grown accostumed to. I'm particularly fond of:
* Alt + drag work really well, specially dragging into borders with automatic resize. The lack of this feature in MATE was a daily pain for me.
* Login screen actually has useful information (even HipChat notifications!) and is really accessible - it opens up whether I scroll or simply start typing my password.
* The search box is, for a change (from Unity), actually smart. When I say "home", it knows precisely what I mean.
* All my tools work perfectly. IntelliJ WebStorm, HipChat, Chrome, the terminal... Even Spotify Linux Preview works like a charm.
I have had TWO minor hiccups:
* Bluetooth needed some extra modules installed. After that, everything worked fine.
* Workspaces would not behave appropriately with external monitor. One command solved that.
So, for now, Ubuntu Gnome is definitely my distro of choice.
I consider myself a serious developer and I'm perfectly happy with Gnome 3. It's clean, simple and allows me to focus on what's really important -- my editor and terminal.
Having your own opinions is fine but please do not generalize.
I really wanted to be happy with Gnome 3, but the focus issues (strange stacking order issues, sometimes closing dialogs would leave no window with focus, launching certain apps with global hotkeys wouldn't bring them to the front) made it impossible for me to keep track of what I was trying to do. I'm curious if maybe there's something about my setup that's different than everyone else (because I know there are plenty of people who are happy with it) or if maybe I'm more keyboard oriented or something.
The default GNOME 3 that comes with Fedora 20. My needs from a DE is minimal. I spend 90% of my time alt-tabbing between my browser and editor with my terminal a F12 away (Guake is awesome).
GNOME 3 simply gets out of my way and lets me focus on what is important.
I feel the same way towards Macs. Macs "just work" out of the box until you try to customize anything or install up to date dev tools. Gnome 3 works out of the box (for me at least). Plus you have source code if you need to debug or customize anything. I use Arch Linux which is not exactly easy to install. As soon as I install Gnome, however, the user experience becomes as easy as a Mac, but with a powerful Linux engine underneath. I am free to install the latest kernels and packages plus I have a desktop that a non-Linux user can use. Personally, I don't care too much about the Desktop Environment, as long as it doesn't get in my way. Gnome 3 allows me to use as much or as little as I want. I normally use command line tools, but in a pinch I can use the Display Manager or Network Manager to get set up in a different environment.
I feel the same way. Gnome 3's ideas are interesting, but execution leaves a bit to be desired; When I use it, it feels like I'm fighting it to get it work nicely, and as a developer I don't want to spend my time doing that.
Funnily enough, Unity and Elementary OS's DE have the same "sane defaults and 'intuitive' interface" idea, but both of them have executed it better in my opinion.
You'd have to acknowledge that it is subjective, though. After using OS X for a few years, I switched back to Kubuntu. The driver was that form was eclipsing function. It was becoming increasingly difficult to make OS X function `my way'. I had to resort to third-party applications for almost everything. That reduced the value of the OS itself to near zero.
I too moved to KDE recently, and couldn't be (much) happier. Guh-nome has it's "you're an idiot" philosophy, which I find really painful. XFCE still has some rough corners. KDE is a traditional heavyweight desktop that is well-supported. Heaps of old-school customisability, allowing me to tweak it to my workflow, rather than corral me into its workflow.
Sad to see Debian not continuing with the shift to XFCE (I'd prefer KDE, but I think the lightweight DE is the better way to go for a 'universal' distro). Maybe with the next release?
I had a similar experience with Gnome 3, it looked nice but was always difficult to use despite trying for many months. I suggest taking a look at Mate. I moved to it after finally giving up on Gnome 3 and have been very happy.
That's interesting. I have been planning switch to Debian/XFCE on next computer / upgrade, from Xubuntu, so I do hope that XFCE will at least keep in good shape on Debian.
But as default, I can not tell what would be best, other than that Gnome 3 indeed seems to have improved lots lately. Tried the Gnome "classic desktop" version of it recently, and found that I could definitely stand it, although XFCE feels a little better to me.
One upside over XFCE is that Gnome 3 looks a lot better by default than XFCE. XFCE is easier to configure, and so can be made to look even better, but default looks has some significance too, as it means less modifications needed for those who just want to install and get stuff done.
XFCE's next release is 18 months overdue, and afaict it won't be ready anytime soon. In contrast, GNOME has a regular 6-month release cadence and their next one should be out tomorrow.
"While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium."
Is it really only integer scaling? Bit of a bummer if so. I'd have hoped they'd design arbitrary scales into this or it'll be stuck behind Windows and OS X for potentially a long time (until someone fixes it and all of the 3rd party software is updated to work right at other scales).
I run my Windows computer at 1.5 scale, which gives me sharp but readable text and a whole ton of screen real estate.
Who wants to buy an expensive 28" 4K screen and either choose between huge interface with 1080p effective resolution or an unusably tiny interface at native 4K?
Is "arbitrary widgets" everything that isn't text, including the overall layout of a window? That sounds a lot like Windows' "Change only the text size" option, which has been around for a long time and isn't a good substitute for UI scale.
Size of all of the mouse targets is as big a deal as the text; they need a middle ground between "impossible to hit" and "gigantic waste of space".
I'd just been getting in to Linux (via the LF course on edX) and have it dual booting on my old laptop, but all of my newer computers have higher res screens that fit best at fractional upscaling from the "standard" size of old UIs. Guess I'll keep working on it because I'm enjoying the CLI and playing around with a web server, but I'm now a lot less excited about the prospects of Linux as a Windows / OS X replacement.
The GNOME 3 stack does better than Windows at scaling UI elements based on text size; I'm successfully using a 1.4 or 1.5x scale on a 2560x1440 14" screen, and none of the UI elements look too small to me. Off the top of my head, I think the main elements that DPI-based font-size scaling doesn't scale are raster images (for which HiDPI allows supplying alternate high-res images similar to CSS) and cairo-based drawing elements (see cairo's "device-scale" support).
Not really. It sort of side-steps the issue by having extremely configurable icon, font, window, etc. sizes, but it has no real, OSX-style high-DPI support like GNOME does.
More configurable, but certainly not better. It's a major pain to set up, since everything (fonts, titlebars, desktop panels, icons in various contexts, scrollbars, cursors, GTK equivalents to the above) has to be set independently, and many things still aren't capable of automatically scaling at all, like checkboxes, anything using KWebView (like konqueror or khelpcenter) or Aurora themes. Some parts of (say) Amarok's interfaces completely glitch out when scaled past a certain point.
For this particular subject, my money's definitely on the "just works" solution.
That sounds plainly better. Being pixel agnostic by allowing everything to scale as the user pleases will allow a broader range of users to configure their system as they prefer it. (Last I checked, OSX on retina devices couldn't even use the actual resolution of the screen without third party extensions... A problem I don't have in Linux with a high-dpi screen).
hidpi support doesn't matter so much if you don't have any window chrome or widgets to speak of. minimalism has always served me well in window manager choice.
I hope with systemd it doesn't / didn't become harder to use a "brand X" window manager.
What does systemd have to do with wms? (desktop managers, yes, but wms, no) There will be more issues with the move towards wayland. Just yesterday I read openbox development had stalled, so it is doubtful it will survive unless someone takes over. OTOH, there are not many tiling window managers with wayland support yet.
I recall having to run gnome-settings-daemon even if I wasnt running the rest of gnome to fix some absurd issue or other. I can see systemd easily "leaking" dependencies up the stack, making my life as a "fringe"/non-gnome user harder.
The people working on it don't seem to have any aversion at all to scope creep. In fact, the politics of it all make it seem like a "land grab" and they'd in fact be happy if systemd takes over more and more responsibilities.
> hidpi support doesn't matter so much if you don't have any window chrome or widgets to speak of.
But if you do, it stinks. Gnome isn't my favorite DE, but it's probably a safer default for a very general-purpose distro. You can always switch to XFCE if you care.
Luckily enough, I just installed Debian with Xfce on my laptop next night... I suppose you might call this a close call. However, their Xfce support is, good, but lacking polish. The panel tools are comprehensive but the selector is hard to use; you just wish the automatic setup made sense. The default programs include such gems as quodlibet and xterm. Apparently Xfce isn't portable enough for Debian? Nonetheless, it's fast, tearing is minimal, wallpaper changing mostly just works (IceWeasel can't xdg-wallpaper or whatever), and it's nice to have a working Firefo-err, IceWeasel. The blue-grey default theme is still one of the most depressing default desktop looks I've ever seen and it hasn't changed in five years. So, like, 7/10.
I'm not a KDE user, but from reading on the internetz I have this feeling that KDE in general is evaded by users, users don't see it as much of a option or as the last option, this commit also doesn't mention KDE.
Some say the problem with KDE is that you have to drink the whole koolaid, but not sure if that is really the reason.
OpenSUSE still exists. It is a pretty beast KDE desktop. There is a lot of effort around Netrunner / Manjaro / Chakra to make some good KDE desktop based on Arch, but that has never come to fruition mostly in my mind due to NIH and no pooled effort.
And Kubuntu is still solid and stable. If I were pushing Linux in an office environment, 14.04 LTS Kubuntu would almost certainly be my pick for its stability.
KDE doesn't do a ton of stuff that many (most?) people care about like handle add/removing displays frequently. Accessibility is pretty good in GNOME (but not in KDE) which makes it a better default option too. Also most of the desktop plumbing (freedesktop.org stuff) seems to start in GNOME and works better there.
Definitely not true. It handles add/removing displays, applying different color profiles to each monitor, etc.
Freedesktop is DE agnostic and many technologies there come or are inspired from KDE.
Last I checked, colord had been broken for at least six months, and the only mostly functional alternative [0] was some project called Oyranos that's signed with expired GPG keys and distributed from some OpenSuse server.
[0] It applies color profiles just fine, but fails to also color-correct full screen programs.
I use oyranos and kolor-manager (depends on oyranos). For color profile auto-loading you will also need xcalib. These work automatically. I only have to generate and install profiles with dispcalGUI.
Color correction works fine for full screen programs with two exceptions:
[1] If you have set hardware accelerated (opengl) color correction then it doesn't work on full screen opengl apps. Normal color correction works there too.
[2] Color correction never works on VDPAU. Today's CPUs though can decode anything with minimal effort (so no fans spinning uncontrollably), so no need for VDPAU.
"(I will not be answering media enquiries related to this commit.)" - take note, Sam Varghese
It's a shame that such a commit is so obviously political (in terms of how it will be taken, not why it was done). I think this is technically the right call, but I doubt much of the argument will be on technicals.
Am I the only one who is frustrated by the plethora of desktop environments available for Linux? Why not just have just a single, highly extensible desktop environment instead? Is there any sane reason for having so many[1] mainstream DEs?
[1]: Gnome, KDE, XFDE, LXDE, are the ones I know off the top of my head
> Why not just have just a single, highly extensible desktop environment instead?
I'll likely get flak for this but that's what KDE is (or could be). KParts¹ is great. Just press F4 in Dolphin. Drag And Drop works quite well. It's the only DE where i managed to get a unified look between GTK2/3 and QT.
It's sane² and build on Qt/C++. No crazy gobject or GTK3 problems.
The only problem is that Plasma/Oxygen is just terrible and scares users away². Once you configure it away KDE is great². Also they did not a favour to themselves by including Akonadi and that semantic desktop stuff in a way that will hog memory and kill latency when using a disk³. You can scare away the friendliest Linux user when you start an MySQL instance in userspace on logon and feed that with a invasive disk-indexer.
Maybe I'm just a disgruntled KDE user.. it could really be a fine default desktop system.
3: Hi there! I'm nepomuk/bamboo! I'm doing millions of seeks on your disk and crash randomly on the documents I've found. Don't worry. I'm not slow! Must be your fault! It's still slow? Really? (...)
If you tried to unify them you would have one bloated piece of crap or a desktop 90% of people hate.
I like having the choice between a few good DEs. What I don't understand is why Apple or Microsoft have yet to create a DE that is really better than something from the open source community. Sure each desktop is better at somethings than others, but it's hard to say that the ones that are being developed for proprietary OS's are objectively better than their open source counter-parts. You would think putting all your eggs in one basket would allow you to create a "super OS". Guess not.
All these DEs are giving the users options. The DEs themselves try to organize between each other to make sure devs don't have to write apps twenty times to support the different DEs, which sometimes isn't done fast enough. But the fact that users have a choice between many different DEs, with very different philosophies, is excellent.
KDE is for people who like configuration options. GNOME is for people who prefer simplicity. LXDE is for those looking for a lightweight DE that doesn't get in the way. Cinnamon is for those who like OSX but want to stay on Linux. XFCE is for the truly minimalists out there. Etc.
What would "one single highly extensible DE" bring? It'd just be a name. A desktop environment is a few things:
- A core session manager. This stuff is common to all DEs and works pretty much the same for all.
- A set of core apps for desktop management (eg desktop, panel, system settings)
- Desktop apps. They're just apps. Some DEs don't ship any, some ship a hundred. They generally don't require you to run the DE alongside them, they're just built by the same people in the same spirit.
So tell me, what would your ideal desktop environment bring to the table, exactly?
Am I the only one who is frustrated by the plethora of operating systems available for x86? Why not just have just a single, highly customizable and secure desktop operating system instead? Is there any sane reason for having so many[1] mainstream OSs?
[1]: FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Minix, OSX, Solaris, are the ones I know off the top of my head
Problem is that not everyone agrees on what that means, or if that is a good thing. Gnome is getting less and less extensible, while KDE is almost too extensible. LXDE is focused on low resource usage, and I'm not sure what XFCE's goal is. There is also the toolkit schism (GTK vs Qt) to take into account.
Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon, Unity. I find this list beyond frustrating, and verging on absurd.
I tend to think of this as the lack of pipes problem. Every unix tool can be piped into or out of every other tool, and so combined with absolute freedom -- perhaps too much freedom. The choice of shell used to do it barely matters, and can be swapped out easily, so we don't have to ask at install time if the user wants bash or zsh or fish. The desktop developers have not come up with a flexible unifying abstraction (and some even seem to be throwing out the few abstractions available, like separate window manager programs) and so are stuck either imitating the past, or fragmenting in a ceaseless, aimless desire for the new and shiny.
Gnome is practically only usable through extensions. If you want an example of Gnome 3 done right, look at Zorin - which is a Gnome reskin designed to emulate modern Windows.
Likewise, KDE is highly modular and configurable - you can develop whatever widgets you want and drop them in wherever you want. That is how they now have a mobile and desktop variant of Plasma. And the configuration means you can do everything from featureless software rendered uncomposited desktop to exploding windows and spinning cubes in OpenGL.
The thing is highly extensible means more space use, and LXDE / XFCE in part originate in a desire for smaller footprint installs. They also use less memory on average, albeit the usage of Gnome / KDE and them is minute relative to modern memory footprints (XFCE might use 100MB, KDE sans semantic desktop search might use 200).
Depending on what forums you follow, yeah, this is the sentiment. GNOME has a reputation (deserved or not is up for debate) for the same kind of "we'll do it our way and go fork it if you don't like it" attitude that people (including Linus) take systemd to task for.
Some problems include:
* Focused and unfocused windows look almost identical
* Expected features like tray icons, virtual desktops, alt+drag to move/resize windows, even alt+tab don't work out-of-the-box
* Window focus seems completely broken
* Eclipse looks terrible (and I spend much of my time there) - I'm told "no, that's an SWT issue", but it looks great under KDE
* IntelliJ's menus don't track the moue properly - again, probably a Java issue, but still works great under KDE
* Having to "drag" the screensaver thing away is annoying
* gkrellm seems to make all of my window focus issues even worse
I know most of the issues can be blamed on application/third-party framework bugs, but the fact is that I just want to get my work done and KDE/XFCE both work great.
Go look at some of the Gnome source code comments and Bugzillas and you will see the very opinionated "do it my way" thinking that the Gnome developers have. In some cases, it's almost hostile.
If I wanted a desktop that valued form over function, I'd use a Mac.