Re: Gnome-Shell - questions and opinions

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

Il giorno mer, 29/12/2010 alle 14.17 -0800, Nex6 ha scritto:
> hi all,
> 
> First I would like to say great work on Gnome/Gnome-shell. I loaded 
> Gnome-Shell on Fedora 14 and messed arround with it for awhile. I also, 
> poked around the NET, and the archives of this list (just joined today).

Current (2.91.4 / git master) gnome-shell experience is very different
from the Fedora 14 packaged one (2.31.5). You should use jhbuild to get
the latest version, follow instructions at
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell#building

> 
> But I sadly, I agree with those that think the use patterns/work-flows 
> of Gnome-Shell is not right. I really like the "control center" and the 
> lay-out under your user name. but the whole, activities, pop/zoom thing 
> click click click. just does not work. it would force you to create 
> shortcuts on the desktop. just to avoid that mess, the idea of a desktop 
> environment is to help the users with their work-flow. I am not saying 
> Gnome should copy OSX or windows. but, don't go off the deep end 
> different just to be different from them. when flipping around the 
> shell, the constant changing and zooming started to give me a headache.

While being different is a marketing point, as it marks the reason for
switching to GNOME, gnome-shell is not different for the sake of beign
different, every design decision (including the most discussed ones, and
including those still under discussion) have been made for its merits.
Moving in particular to the zooming effect exposed by the Activities
button, this has been reported many times by various users, but it is
explicitly part of the design, as the purpose of that mode is to give an
overview (hence the technical name, "Activities Overview") of active
windows, applications, and tasks (in the future, > 3.1, it will have
contacts, desktop search, zeitgeist logging, etc.).
Still under discussion is the behaviour wrt window management inside the
workspace. Some proposals concentrated on gesture-based window
management + shading of minimized windows (possibly shading to icon
only), other instead wanted a gesture or button to emulate Alt-tab, or
showing the favourite application list on the left of the workspace.


> ok, why not:
> 
> make the activities a drop down menu/sidebar with no zooming, or better 
> yet make it optional/move the zoom some where else.

The main point of the Activities Overview is to show all the windows at
the same time, so this does not make sense in the current design.

> 
> next:
> 
> make it possible to add icons/shortcuts to the top menu bar. infact make 
> it easy to do so like add a right click menu item under add to 
> favorites, as add to top menu. (make it movable)

Why clobbering the top menu bar, when adding a favourite is just as
clean and fast?
(I'm referring to the new overview layout here, 2.31.5 still has the old
layout, please update to see what I mean)

> 
> also in the same vain, add a, "add to desktop item"

The desktop (as the icon view behind the windows) is going to die,
either in 3.0 or 3.2. We should not add more features to it.

> 
> ok, that's good for now as I explore Gnome Shell I will add more.

Thanks for your time reporting, it is always useful getting feedback
before gnome-shell is released.

Giovanni