How I ended my trial of Gnome 3
tl;dr version: I like XFCE better than Gnome 3.
I wrote previously about trying out Gnome 3. I’ve been using it for about a month now, and it’s time for me to make a decision about whether to keep using it or revert to Gnome 2. I’m actually on vacation, which ends soon. I need to do this before vacation ends, so I can be fully productive at work.
My ultimate impression of Gnome 3 is that it’s very slick, and makes significant improvements in some ways, but it’s not very usable for my purposes, and has too many self-contradictions. I still have the complaints I listed in my earlier blog post, such as the identity crisis between keyboard and mouse use. It is geared to keyboard control in some ways, but not enough to really work, and at the same time it’s hard to use it with the mouse. For example, it wastes space on items such as huge thick titlebars (what is that for, if not for the mouse to grab?). Yet window borders are only 1 pixel thick, which is very hard to grab with the mouse when I want to resize, and there are no minimize buttons by default. And there is a big black bar across the top of my screen, which contains a lot of useless items I normally hide. At the same time, this bar isn’t configurable and I can’t put the things I actually want onto it, so it simply sits there making part of my screen unusable.
After using Gnome 3 for a while, and trying to customize it to my liking, I gave up a couple of days ago. There are simply too many things that were either designed in a way I don’t like, or don’t work as designed (bugs). At this point, I revisited my reasons for using Gnome. I used to use XFCE, and Fluxbox before that, but I ultimately decided to use Gnome because it was the default, and I want to avoid customizing my environment as much as possible. Gnome had gotten to the point where it was about as good as anything else, for my purposes.
So instead of reverting to Gnome 2, since I’m going to customize my environment anyway, I decided to go back to XFCE instead. And now I’m happy again. It’s simple, usable, functional, attractive, and fast. It’s easy to customize slightly to my taste (e.g. moving the taskbar to the bottom of the screen, Windows style). And Alt-TAB works sanely. And, I get back some of the things I always missed, such as one-click ways to maximize windows vertically or horizontally.
When Fedora 16 comes out I’ll revisit Gnome 3 and see if it has improved, but for now I’m done with my evaluation. I also just set up a new computer for my dad, who’s a Windows user, and installed Fedora 14 with Gnome 2, instead of Fedora 15. I hope the Gnome developers are able to collect and integrate enough feedback to make a groundbreaking Gnome 3 interface that still does what people expect and works the way they work, because that is the key to getting more adoption.
Don’t get your hopes up! I joined the Gnome.org mailing list for a short time. They didn’t want to hear anything negative about Gnome 3, no matter how well founded or that they were coming from long time Gnome users.
With an attitude like that, I can see other WMs and desktops making great headway. As you mentioned XFCE works well and is fast and light weight. Even KDE, at this point, would be a better choice. Bodhi has come a long way with Enlightenment as well.
Time will tell, but I can see Gnome 3 being another Win ME or Win 2000!
Bill Dwyer
5 Jul 11 at 2:20 am
That’s saddening to hear. Well, from what I’ve read, Gnome Shell seems to be a great framework for developing, so if nothing else, perhaps someone else will use it as the engine for creating a really great desktop environment. I imagine it must be a lot easier than writing one in C++, although I don’t really know for sure.
Xaprb
5 Jul 11 at 8:44 am
I think probably the things that irk me the most about Gnome 3 is 1. The fact that it has such a poor work-flow pattern, and 2. The lack of being able to customize your desktop.
I’m right handed, so are the majority of the people in the world. To have a dock on the left side of the screen, especially with the wide screen formats, is asking a lot to mouse across the screen. I use AWN with Gnome 2 and have a bottom center dock. I don’t know if the dock thing is part of Gnome 3 or what, but even the test distro on the Gnome.org site has one and it isn’t Debian based. Than you have all the hidden commands, like shut down and restart, which are only present with a hotkey combination. Honestly, how many people really use hotkeys? I was around in the days of DOS. Everyone had a list of DOS commands stuck to their monitors, have we regressed to that?
On the mailing list, when anyone pointed things like this out, they’d say well have you tried this hotkey combo or modified this or that file. Point is, these are basic commands that should be there from the start and things you shouldn’t have to do.
Gnome 3 seems to be designed strictly for notebooks and netbooks. For those applications, it’s probably great. However, for desktop computing, especially in a work environment, where you have to be productive, Gnome 3 is really lacking.
I hope you’re right, I hope they do develop some good apps for it, but as it stands right now, I don’t see veteran users or IT Professionals embracing it. I may be wrong, who knows? Linux has come so very far since I first tried it in 1999 when I bought a book and it had a Red Hat disc in the back! No Synaptic back than, even installing a new program was a really big challenge to get all the files in the right places! I remember, I installed Gimp, and really thought I’d accomplished something!
Bill Dwyer
5 Jul 11 at 10:32 am
I think we might have gotten started with Linux at about the same time! I bought a book with Red Hat CD in the back… what was it, maybe Red Hat 5.2 or something? For some reason I decided Slackware was better, and then Gentoo for a few years, then Ubuntu for a couple and now Fedora for 2 or 3 years. (I really regard Ubuntu and Fedora as pretty much equals, and I don’t mind which I’m using.) Along the way I’ve used KDE, probably around 1999/2000 or so; Fluxbox from about 2001-2006; XFCE for a while in there somewhere; Rat Poison for a while too. It’s funny what a hodge-podge of software I’ve used over time, and how little it usually matters to me — but Gnome 3 was just not functional enough, somehow.
Xaprb
5 Jul 11 at 11:10 am
Ha! You sound like me! I bought an awesome(at the time) 1G HDD as a second drive and had Win 98 SE, 2 Red Hat versions and the old IBM OS2/Warp(looked like Win NT) all bootable on the same machine! As I say about 1999. My mistake was I bought a second 1T HD for this machine, now I have 5 or 6 distro running on here and Win 7. Mostly Gnome 2 but also XFCE and Enlightenment(2 versions). I just downloaded the ISO for Zenix 2.0 which comes with XFCE and also Awesome. the tiled WM, so that’s next on the list! I love eyecandy and something that is different, so I try about anything! I’m using Ultimate Edition now. It’s about the “king” of eyecandy and visual appeal! 61 years old and I have “burn on close” windows and a rotating cylander for my desktops! That’s what happens when you retire early!
Bill Dwyer
5 Jul 11 at 11:46 am
Why not Fluxbox? :-) The first window manager I used for a significant amount of time was Window Maker. I was really happy with it and a few nice dock apps made keeping an eye on what happen with my machine very easy. After that I switched to Fluxbox because it was faster and made keeping the windows full-screen easier. Plus it had support for the dock apps from Window Maker. :P In the last 5 years or so I switched to wmii which takes the minimalism even further. It doesn’t have support for dock apps but it’s easy to populate the status line from the bottom with the output from arbitrary programs.
Razvan Musaloiu-E.
16 Jul 11 at 4:59 am
I used Fluxbox for many years. I like it. XFCE’s default setup is a little more of a “desktop,” with window lists and notification areas and so on, and I like that.
Xaprb
16 Jul 11 at 6:55 am
Similar experience here.
Fedora 14′s fonts render better than 13 or 15, for that reason alone I’m stuck on 14. But whatever, you are too kind, Gnome 3 is a nightmare.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t go the XFCE route. It wouldn’t recognize my external display properly. If my laptop screen was shut it wouldn’t move the desktop (correctly) to my external monitor.
My solution was to format everything and work from a backup back to 14, which is beautiful and functional.
PS: I bought a Red Hat CD at a bookstore back around 1995 but it wouldn’t recognize my Wacom. (No drivers!) Didn’t try Linux again on my home machine for another 10 years after that.
I just bought a new machine and I’m wondering if this is it for me with Fedora, I might try another distro to see what I’m missing. Now that I’m spoiled with Fedora 14, I can’t go back to fonts that don’t scale gracefully. Got any suggestions?
PJ Brunet
28 Jul 11 at 7:15 am
“not very usable for my purposes”
Amen. Period.
Shaunak
5 Aug 11 at 2:55 pm
Update: Because of Gnome 3 (Fedora) I switched to Crunchbang Openbox–I love it!
I found a Crunchbang thread on .fonts.conf and after some more research and tweaking found the best sub-pixel config for my LCD. Now my text looks awesome, better than ever!
PJ Brunet
6 Aug 11 at 4:37 pm
Well, it’s official, Linus said Gnome 3 is a “unholy mess” and he called on RHEL to fork off Gnome 2! Linus also switched to Xfce! He said that Xfce was a step down from Gnome 2, but 2 steps up from Gnome 3! You know, as simple as it is, I saw some screenshots of IceWM that someone had customized. It really looked nice! Black background and slightly lighter icons and black window decorations. He said if you want something fast try IceWM with no DE! Openbox does make a nice desktop, all though I think I’m going with Crunch Bang Xfce. I tried a Distro last week called VESTA from Russia, had a Java desktop with animated icons and animated menu BUT, I kept showing 50% CPU usage! Probably because of the Java! Really wish it had worked better!
Bill Dwyer
6 Aug 11 at 7:20 pm
@Bill “unholy mess” I love it.
Also I saw in the news the CEO of Acer says you need PCs to create tablet apps. Therefore tablets and smartphones can’t replace PCs. And he thinks tablets are a fad. Sounds bold but maybe he’s right, I just bought an Acer desktop PC, has something like 9 USB ports, 1TB of storage, smooth 1080p–I have 12 workspaces open (each is time tracked) only using 1 gig of memory and the CPU is chilling at 11%.
PJ Brunet
6 Aug 11 at 7:45 pm
I can see surfing the web with a tablet, it would be handy, but what if a college student need to write a paper, or if you were a graphic designer? Even a laptop keyboard gets tiring reaching over the “mouse” pad. Desktop sales probably are sagging, only because a desktop isn’t something you have to buy every other year, they don’t change that much. I added a 1T second drive to this HP and it’s fine. In 2004 or 2005 I bought a OQO mini-computer. It had a 5 or 7 inch touch screen that slid up to reveal a full mini-keyboard. Came with full version of Win XP and MS Office. Also came with Linus’s Caruso processor and only 256M of RAM! Very slow! About a year later they went to the Atom CPU and full G of RAM, but, really with the small screen and keyboard it was still really a hassle to do any real work! A big waste of money, but it was the “bleeding edge” of technology!
Bill Dwyer
6 Aug 11 at 7:57 pm
“what if a college student need to write a paper, or if you were a graphic designer”
Exactly, most accountants won’t edit spreadsheet on tablets, architects won’t design buildings on tablets, mechanical engineers won’t design parts on tablets, manufacturers won’t run CNC machines from tablets, professional video editors won’t edit video on tablets, that list is a mile long.
PJ Brunet
6 Aug 11 at 8:56 pm
Very true and every one forgets the economy isn’t exactly in great shape, either. Sure, I’d like an i7 based, 32 G RAM, 2 2T HD system, but hey, I’m retired, I can’t afford that, at least not now! You know, I’m a retired electronics tech, I can do most hardware upgrades myself, like adding that extra HDD, so unless my mother board dies I probably won’t be in the market for another desktop for a couple of years. I guess with the new tablets, you’d have to subscribe to 4G service as well. Tablets may be here to stay or may not, but as an enhancement or accessory to a desktop, not a replacement. That was one thing that OQO I mention tried to push, use it to replace your laptop. Ha, not as slow as that was! I tried it once with mine, oh yeah, USB 2.0 was out for about a year previous and it had USB 1.0! Toshiba sold a LifeBook that used the same setup and was about the size of a netbook several years back. So, netbooks and tablets are nothing new at all!
Bill Dwyer
6 Aug 11 at 9:12 pm
When Apple released the Macbook Air and claimed it was the thinnest and lightest laptop ever, I checked the specs against a Toshiba I used to own in 2003, and they were wrong. Nothing’s really new.
I have a Nook Color tablet now. The best way to explain the difference between the usefulness of tablets and “real” computers is that tablets are for consuming, and real computers are for producing. The list of things you mentioned earlier — video editing, etc — is all producing.
Xaprb
7 Aug 11 at 9:04 am
BTW, the other desktop environment I used to use for a long time was ratpoison. Now that’s minimalism. If you’re rebelling against window managers and desktops and stuff, that’s about as far as you can go unless you just stop running X at all. Of course, everything I did was in a terminal, and I even used lynx for browsing.
Xaprb
7 Aug 11 at 9:06 am
Yes, I’ve heard of Ratpoison, It’s really not a rebellion against WMs, more like Gnome killed a good standard for something unproven. I think everyone would have been happy if they had kept G2 and called G3 the lite version or web version. I did try Elinks text based browser the other day, it was on my Ultimate Edition 2.9 OS, it was different for sure! One thing, ever since Intel and ADM ended the “speed race”, outside of multi-cores, there really haven’t been any significant changes in desktops, no reason to upgrade. Don’t get me wrong, I could find a use for a tablet to carry with me, but I’d still have to come home to my desktop in the end. As I say, I think of a tablet as and enhancement to or accessory to a desktop, but not a replacement for one. Guess I’ll always be a producer! My roommate spends most of her time on Facebook, she has 6 bros and sisters, and checks Craigslist, but every now and than, she does print receipts and cards, etc. Also as you get older small things don’t seem to work as well as larger things, she even has problems with her cell phone at times, so I don’t see desktops dieing out any time soon.
Bill Dwyer
7 Aug 11 at 11:20 am