[gnome-love] Gnome3 Feedback

[Jonas Wagner <j b w gmx ch>]

Hello,

I'm not sure whether this is the right place for some gnome3 feedback. 
However, I hope that the feedback will be valuable for developers of Gnome.

A few days ago, gnome3 entered debian testing and thus my machine. Here 
are a few first impressions.

* Overall, I like it... I'm not going to switch back, even though I have 
to change many of my workflows, and it's gonna need some time to adapt.

* My graphic card was not configured properly before the update, so the 
first thing I saw was gnome3's fallback mode. There was a popup 
informing me of this. It provided a link to a help page. However, the 
link led to the gnome3.org homepage, and as such was absolutely useless.

* Once 3d was configured properly, I was quite positively surprised by 
how beautiful everything looked. The font (Cantarell) is really nice.

* Why does the logout window look different from any other window?

* To ease transition, I removed my ~/.gnome2 folder... apparently, this 
was not a good idea. In particular, now network-manager asks me every 
time about wifi passwords. Could it be that the default keyring is not 
re-created automatically? Any idea how I could fix this?

* One of the first things I wanted to do was to change the desktop 
background. When using System Settings > Background, I can't select any 
.png file (the Open button is grayed out if I try)! It works when I open 
the png in eog, then select "Set as Desktop Background" from the context 
menu.

* Adding applications to my favorites was painful. I go to Activities, 
then Applications, then select my app, then drag it to the favorites 
pane. When I do this, the screen changes and displays me the "Windows" 
part of the activities screen again! Why? So to add another app, I have 
to again click on Applications again, select the right category again, etc.

* Files from my ~/Desktop folder are no more displayed on the desktop :-/

* What is the best way to switch between windows? The standard mapping 
of alt-tab no longer switches between two windows of the same 
application. It also changes virtual desktops sometimes. I've discovered 
alt-esc which works more intuitively, but the whole thing is confusing 
to me, and having two similar shortcuts needs a lot of thought.

* Having an unlimited, dynamic number of virtual desktops is cool!

* Closing the last window of a desktop opens the Activities screen. I 
dislike this. My workflow used to be (1) close the program I was using, 
(2) type ctrl-alt-left to go to the other desktop where other work was 
running. Now I need one more action, to explicitely exit from the 
activities screen.

* Opening a terminal on another desktop is very counter-intuitive. I use 
terminals a lot, hence I added it to the favorites pane. When I switch 
to a new Desktop, and click on the terminal icon in my favorites, it 
changes back to the old desktop and selects some already open terminal 
instead of starting a new one. I have to explicitely drag the terminal 
icon to some empty space to start it :(

* I like the fact that I can start applications on another desktop, by 
dragging the app icon to that desktop. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to 
work with some applications (Firefox and Thunderbird, for example).

* Clicking on Activities > Applications shows an alphabetical list of 
all applications. Is this really useful? The list of categories is far 
away, on the other end of the screen.

* The direct search is cool! Is there a way I can extend it so it finds 
every file, not just recently-used ones? Recently-used is also a tad 
misleading, because files opened in non-gnome programs (or even vim 
compiled with gnome support) do not get added to this list.

To summarize: many things I like, congratulations! It would be great to 
see some pitfalls ironed out. Feel free to discuss this or ask me if 
anything is unclear.

Hope this helps,
Jonas