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.

Further Reading:

• Impressions of Fedora 15 with Gnome 3
• How to install beautiful X11 cursors
• How to set up dual monitors in Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501
• Switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, and Thunderbird to Claws Mail
• How to auto-mount removable devices in GNU/Linux

I loved this book. (Disclosure: Bill is a colleague of mine.) This is the first book I’ve read from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, and if the rest are like this one, I want to read them. The quality of the writing is way above the average technical book. Techniques that feel gimmicky and forced in other books, such as fake stories to introduce each chapter, actually work here (because they’re real stories, not fake ones). Each topic is named in a memorable way and introduced very cleverly. Little quotes and excerpts are tastefully used to illustrate and reinforce the topics. The end result is that it’s a lot of fun to read. If you do nothing more than read the first and last page of each chapter, you’ll enjoy it and learn a lot at the same time.

The target audience here is developers who must work with databases, not database administrators per se. But if you’re a DBA and you’re having a hard time explaining something to a developer, you could do a lot worse than referring to this book. The content is database-agnostic, with specific mention of a broad variety of databases such as MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and more when appropriate.

There are four major categories of mistakes: logical database design, physical database design, queries, and development practices. These cover 25 “anti-patterns” showing how not to do things, and explaining why they’re wrong, when it might be a good idea to do it that way anyhow, and what your alternatives are.

For example, the first pattern is titled Jaywalking. The name is a reference to avoiding intersections, i.e. storing comma-delimited lists in a single column. The chapter explains what’s hard to do in a database that’s designed in this manner, and how to sniff out the use of this antipattern. Then it explains how to create an intersection table, and ends with a pithy recommendation to “store each value in its own column and row.” Pretty straightforward, and much more effective than a lecture on all the different varieties of normal forms.

Sometimes I thought of some other alternatives. For example, in avoiding FLOAT data types to prevent rounding errors for currency values, the book suggests using DECIMAL. But another option is storing an integer number of the smallest currency unit (pennies, in the US dollar currency). And I thought of lots more antipatterns, such as using a table as a queue, which often happens sneakily, without anyone realizing it. I am sure we could all suggest more antipatterns and alternatives. Anything can be taken to extremes; I think this book wisely stops before the point of burn-out.

Like Bill Karwin, I see developers make these mistakes constantly, so I recommend this book to every developer who interacts with a database. It might be a good book to buy for new team members, if you’re the team leader.

Further Reading:

• A review of Web Operations by John Allspaw and Jesse Robbins
• A Review of Beginning Database Design by Clare Churcher
• A review of SQL and Relational Theory by C. J. Date
• A review of Optimizing Oracle Performance by Cary Millsap
• A review of The Art of Capacity Planning by John Allspaw

This is a pocket-sized guide to setting up and managing MySQL replication. It is self-published and made via print-on-demand technology. Topics include how replication works, setting up replication, making backups, and administering replication after it’s working. There are several appendixes for replication-related functionality in the MySQL server and command-line tools.

This book doesn’t go into great depth, so don’t expect it to be a reference manual to replication internals or anything like that. It’s more of a how-to manual for beginners, walking through the basics of binary and relay logs, SQL and I/O threads, and so on.

I wish it were more comprehensive in some areas, and talked about tools such as Percona XtraBackup and Maatkit. I don’t think any book on replication today is complete without these tools. I also wish the text font had serifs and was colored black instead of a foggy gray color. This might be an artifact of the print-on-demand technology, I’m not sure.

Some readers will likely prefer the official MySQL manual to this book, while others might find the book to be a convenient and helpful reference. If I had to summarize the book in a sentence, I’d say that it tells readers the basics of setting up and administering replication, but excludes advanced topics, some of which I’d consider essential (e.g. Maatkit, Percona XtraBackup).

Further Reading:

• A review of Get it Done with MySQL 5&6 by Peter Brawley and Arthur Fuller
• A review of MySQL Administrator’s Bible
• Free webinar Wednesday: verifying replication integrity
• Why MySQL replication is better than mysqlbinlog for recovery
• What are your favorite MySQL replication filtering rules?

PostgreSQL 9 Administration Cookbook. By Simon Riggs and Hannu Krosing, Packt, 2010. Approximately 330 pages. (Link to publisher’s site.)

This is a good book for PostgreSQL database administrators to pick up, especially if you’re new to PostgreSQL but familiar with another system such as Oracle, SQL Server, or MySQL. It has more than 80 “recipes” that range from quick tips to moderately detailed discussion of how to accomplish specific tasks. The chapters and recipes are well organized, and you can either read the book from start to finish or jump to a specific recipe for quick help.

The major topics are introductory/overview, configuration, managing tables and data, security, managing the server itself, monitoring, maintenance, performance, backup and recovery, replication, and upgrades. The chapter list mimics that list pretty well, though I lumped some chapters together in my topic list.

Some of the same topics are covered in much greater detail in Greg Smith’s excellent PostgreSQL 9 High Performance, which I reviewed previously.

On the negative side, I can only remark that the cookbook format in general isn’t my favorite; each “recipe” is quite formulaic, with little sub-headings titled “getting ready, how to do it, how it works, there’s more, see also.” But it works pretty well nonetheless as a quick-reference guide.

Overall worth picking up, unless you’re quite knowledgeable about PostgreSQL already, in which case I wouldn’t expect you to learn much from this book.

Further Reading:

• A review of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance by Gregory Smith
• An invitation to PostgreSQL community members
• Going to PostgreSQL Conference East
• What are your favorite PostgreSQL performance resources?
• PostgreSQL Conference East 2009, Day Two

Fedora 15 and Gnome 3 have awesome support for my laptop’s hardware. It’s simply flawless. You could not expect better software/hardware integration if you paid thousands of dollars for something from Steve Jobs. Fedora has been great about this for a long time, actually, although there was a video driver problem in Fedora 13 that would sometimes kernel-panic if I did a lot of suspending and resuming combined with plugging and unplugging external monitors. That’s not a problem I’ve seen in this release.

This is my work laptop, so it’s not important whether it’s cool or exciting. I am generally dealing with a lot of open windows, rapidly switching between them, opening new programs, finding files and directories, and so on. I need the interface to help me with that. So far, results are very positive, with a few things that are either giving me withdrawal pains or simply aren’t working as well as I need.

If you’re considering using Gnome 3, don’t just try it out on a live CD for ten minutes and decide it’s lame. It’s completely new and different, and you need to spend a little time actually learning it. You had to learn Mac or Windows or whatever you currently use; if you struggle with Gnome 3 at first, stop struggling and read the documentation for 15 minutes or so. The best and fastest place to get started is with the cheat sheet. You do things differently in Gnome 3. You don’t have your familiar start menu, taskbar, system tray, desktop icons, and so on. You don’t use your mouse, in general, although you can if you want to.

The Gnome 3 desktop environment is definitely beautiful and well-done. I’d say it’s the best-designed, fastest, best-integrated desktop I’ve used on Linux, and perhaps all-around the best interface I’ve used on any platform. (Mac OS X, for example, is very pretty but not very usable IMO, although it’s getting better these days with the ability to control it more completely without using the mouse. I’m not a Mac fan, for what it’s worth.) You can call it eye candy if you wish, and I won’t argue, but I’ll point out that it’s extremely tasteful eye candy. I never felt that KDE’s eye candy was anything but garish, by contrast.

It’s extremely easy and efficient to find and open programs in Gnome 3; much better than using a “start menu.” Press the “Windows key” and type the first few letters of the program’s name, then press Enter. Done. You can do the same thing to switch between your open windows.

The most important thing for me is managing a lot of open windows while switching between things a lot. This is the nature of my work, not something I’m doing wrong. I haven’t gotten used to this yet. I still want to be able to choose a window from the taskbar with my mouse, when I’m working with a mouse. It’s nice to be able to switch to a window with the keyboard quickly, but I need both abilities. Some activities, such as web browsing and graphics editing, are more mouse-driven. It’s most important to me that I don’t have to switch between the mouse and the keyboard, rather than solely that the keyboard can be used very easily. When I’m text editing in Vim (100% keyboard driven), the abilities to find and switch to other windows with just the keyboard are awesome. But I need both kinds of usability.

I haven’t gotten used to the distinction between alt-tab and alt-backtick, for switching between groups of applications and switching between windows within an application group. I might ultimately decide to configure the behavior back to alt-tab’s old familiar behavior. I don’t really think of groups of windows as applications/activities in a unit, which I think the Gnome 3 interface really assumes is the case. I group windows by using tabbed interfaces (browser, for example) in most cases; and when I have multiple windows of a single application open, they’re usually not related. For example, I’ll have several terminals open, but they’re not all for one task. I’m more likely to have Firefox with three tabs open, and three terminals, and an email or two, and a chat window — and the three terminals all correspond to different activities.

Gnome 3′s partial answer to this task grouping is completely redesigned workspace support. It’s awesome — it’s the way it always should have worked. But I’m not quite used to using it yet. I expect to use it a lot more as I relearn/unlearn old habits. In the meantime, when I have several Skype chats open and I want to find one of them, it’s a bit painful for me because Gnome wants to switch me to Skype, as a whole, rather than switching me to any given chat window. And if one of them is buried and visually not accessible, it’s hard for me to use the keyboard to get to it.

I use IRC a lot at work. I usually use XChat, but I decided to give the Gnome messaging platform a try. It’s basically Empathy, tightly integrated into the desktop environment, to make chatting easy and unintrusive. These videos show how this works. Unfortunately, Empathy isn’t a very richly featured IRC client, and this is one of those tools that I use so much and so specifically that I have special needs. I was able to tweak Empathy to make it alert me when people mentioned me by name, but I ran out of some other configuration options that I need. XChat lets me create custom key bindings to change my nickname easily, custom highlight words, and so on. From what I can see so far, Empathy doesn’t have that ability. And I’ve gotten confused or lost a bit of chat history/context a couple of times when odd things happened, such as the person at the other end of a private message chat changing his nickname. I might just need to learn how to use Empathy better, so I’m reserving my judgment a bit before I switch back to XChat. But at this point I think that Empathy is better designed for the “AOL instant messenger” type of chatting than it is for IRC, with its concept of multiple people in a single channel with changing nicknames.

I had to change one of the default window manager behaviors. My email client (Claws Mail) opens a new window to compose a message, and I have customized Claws to do almost everything with the keyboard. So when I press ‘c’, it opens a new message window. Gnome 3 decided to place this window behind my Claws Mail window, with the focus remaining on the main window, and a notification that my new window is ready to use. But then I have to switch focus to the new window to actually use it. This doesn’t work for me, so I started gconf-editor and changed the value of /apps/metacity/general/new_windows_always_on_top. That solved the problem.

I absolutely rely on Revelation for password management, and it has a nice panel applet / widget that I used heavily in Gnome 2. Unfortunately, Gnome 3 has no panels. So I have to use the Revelation program directly, instead of the applet. This is painful. The Revelation interface is not very good. I searched around for another password manager, but couldn’t find anything better (they all look worse, frankly). I don’t think that the native Gnome keyring manager is the solution I’m looking for. I have nearly 200 passwords, and I use dozens of them actively every day — and the number of paswords probably grows by two or three a week. I would be willing to pay some money for a really good password manager with tight Gnome integration. I’d love something keyboard-driven, that I can switch my focus to, type a few characters to search for the account I need to use, hit TAB to highlight the password, copy with CTRL-C, dismiss with ESC, and be on my way.

The default Gnome 3 interface is too gray and colorless. Active and inactive windows look the same. It’s too uniform. I wish the color theme were slightly more imaginative. And the window titlebars are too thick — it uses too much space. I think all of these things are fixable, but I don’t see an easy way to change the visual theme from the preferences dialog. I think I need to install some add-on to do this.

That brings up another minor wish: the system and user preferences don’t seem complete. There isn’t enough control in the control panel, so to speak. If you search the Web for tweaks, you see a lot of gconf-editor command-line one-liners. This isn’t good for most users; most people need a graphical utility that groups configuration settings together nicely for them. I assume that this is just because it’s new, and a lot of the most popular tweaks and add-ons will find their way into the next Gnome 3 release as native, built-in preferences dialogs.

In summary, I really like Gnome 3 and thank the Gnome team very much for creating it. I hope that many of the hiccups I’ve seen so far are just early-adopter syndrome, and it’ll get more complete and well-rounded in future releases. I probably need better and more configurable IRC functionality if I’m going to switch to using the built-in messaging/chat functionality, and I definitely need a better password manager in general. I might also need a taskbar or something similar to help me switch between running applications and windows when I’m using my mouse to control my computer. But all of this is early impressions, and I’m trying to learn to be a more skilful Gnome user, so I’ll see how that goes.

Further Reading:

• How I ended my trial of Gnome 3
• Switching from Ubuntu to Fedora, and Thunderbird to Claws Mail
• Running Fedora 12 on the ASUS UL30A-X5
• Vim, the ultimate command-line password manager
• How to install innotop on Microsoft Windows