Re: GNOME 3 from Fedora user's perpective - request for changes

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 8:21 AM, JB <jb 1234abcd gmail com> wrote:

Onyeibo Oku <twohotis@...> writes:

>...

> Why am I not surprised?  Surely all that whining will have its toll on
> spectators who have no idea about the history of the subject matter.
> And that is what bothers me the most.  It seems to me that the reactions
> and overreactions of the old-timers will end up being the deciding
> factor rather than the subject matter.

> ...

The reaction (not overreaction) by "old-timers" is based on their experience
with what works and what not, and with technical and non-technical user bases.
Most of these birds are (and should be) concerned with ease-of-use and sane
continuity of design of their daily tools.
If geeks want fireworks, they can do it for their own pleasure.
But if geeks want to stop whining and sell their products to a broad public
to make money and have a good life afterwards, they have to offer what that
prospective customer and user base wants.
Screwing up something so fundamental as a menu system is not acceptable from
the same devs who delivered a fully functional GNOME 2 menu system.
Come on, progress backwards ?
What were you smoking guys when that feature was developed and tested here ?

I think you're speaking as someone who has only superficially played around with GNOME 3 and had an immediately dislike for it.  Here is my challenge, use GNOME 3 as your default desktop and wrap your mind around on doing things the shell way for one week.  Then come back to us.  Feel free to look at the available extensions and add what you feel might be appropriate to help you manage the change.

Everything you've told us is just your personal opinion.  Some of us are also systems administrators and we can judge the value of the software by ourselves.  Nobody is going to be changing to shell or anything new for several spins (eg a year or two later) and as others have pointed out Shell needs to grow a little before deployment to said environments.

Finally, you mentioned points about technology.  We cannot move forward unless we challenge the status quo.  When we force requirements for modern hardware then we challenge the entire ecosystem to keep up and that's how we make progress.

BTW folks, do not ever suggest telling users to go to XFCE or any other desktop.  Encourage them to try it for a week.  We love our users and we want to keep them within the GNOME community.  If Shell isn't ready for them then they can try fallback mode.  If that doesn't then suggest a distro that supports the old GNOME 2 setup like Mint.  But going anywhere else is not an option.  This is the hotel california of desktops. ;-)

sri