gnome-shell feedback

[Jimmy Forrester-Fellowes <jimmy sparkleinteractive co uk>]

Hey all,

I gave gnome shell a bit of time today, I've been tuned in to this mailing list for some time and previously built the project a few times out of curiosity. Today I spent a couple of hours using it and wanted to share my feedback:

The main issue I found was that I couldn't easily keep track of what windows I had open on my current desktop. I tend to use workspaces for specific tasks; for example I use pgadmin3 and I tend to have numerous query windows open at any time. Without my panel and my 'windows list' I couldn't easily find what I was looking for. I'd either have to alt+tab to the find the correct window (which was rather time-consuming and quite fiddly) or I'd have to open the activities window and look for it there. Is there something I'm missing? I've seen a few youtube screencasts where people have coupled gnome-shell with Avant Window Navigator to get keep on track of windows but I wondered what's the gnome-shell way of managing a current desktops windows?

I really like the way when you view the workspaces from gnome-shell it explodes the windows in to an easy to read grid, a potential solution to my issue would be to have that functionality available while focused on a workspace? A key combination could organise all windows on the workspace allowing the user to pick the one they're looking for - I think I've seen a similar effect in compiz-fusion.

My second issue was after using gnome-shell for a couple of hours, although it seemed very stable i experienced serious slow down the more i used it. It looked like mutter might have been leaking as it was consuming 200mb+ of memory?

All in all I was pleasantly surprised with gnome-shell and I'm really looking forward to seeing it develop. I'd love to see it look prettier (osx, kde4 & win7 all look very good these days) but I trust that will come later.

Keep up all the good work all those involved.

- Jimmy


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