Re: My first impression of GNOME 3

[Adam Williamson <awilliam redhat com>]

On Tue, 2011-04-19 at 21:50 +0200, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> Hi there, I just wanted to share my first impressions of using gnome
> shell with you. Please try to ignore the ranty tone of the mail, it was
> a rather frustrating day :-). But I guess there are some valid (probably
> mostly known) issues that can improve the GNOME experience....
> 
> Otherwise feel free to ignore this, I just had to write it off my chest.
> Sebastian
> 
> GNOME3 has been released, Ubuntu has a repository for it, so I dutifully
> upgraded to the latest version. To be honest, I was curious at getting
> to see the big changes that have led to massive amounts of both praise
> and rants. I have to say, that I am kind of like it, but am still pretty
> disappointed.
> 
> I installed gnome3-session, which led to a desktop that looked
> approximately like Windows 3.1 in its appeal. Only after I found out
> that gnome-standard-themes are also required, but apparently not pulled
> in by default, did things start to actually make sense and look pretty :)
> One Ubuntu peculiarity is that gnome3-session apparently pulls in gnome
> 2.32, but gnome-session pull 3.0, don't ask me why. At least they block
> each other.
> 
> Speaking of themes, after I was presented with the most ugly window
> border I had ever seen (due to the mentioned lack of
> gnome-standard-themes), I tried to find settings related to
> themes. There are NONE, as far as I could find out. The only one is to
> change the desktop background, but there is no "theme switcher" (I have
> now learned that theme switching is not yet implemented and you have to
> manually copy and overwrite the theme file). There is no "window border"
> setting, letting me choose how window borders can look and there is not
> even a color scheme setting that lets me choose to use a pinkish desktop
> if I wanted to. I know, all this is probably possible by fudging with
> javascript and css files, but I was a bit puzzled by that. I am sure
> tools will come over time that make this easier in the future, but for
> now you better like the standard theme and colors (the default theme is
> nice, even if the titlebar is using a bit too much vertical space for my
> taste).

Most of this is Ubuntu stuff; obviously they still have kinks getting
the proper configuration set up. If you used a Fedora or SUSE-based
image it'd all Just Work.

On theming: I believe the GNOME team felt that supporting theming comes
with more drawbacks than benefits. The drawbacks are that it introduces
far more complexity - i.e. things that can possibly go wrong, that then
get blamed on GNOME - and it detracts from the ability to present a
carefully considered appearance. Neither Windows nor OS X (nor any
smartphone OS I'm aware of) provides an official UI and support for
theming, and there's no great outcry that it should be available on
those; it's the norm for the appearance of the desktop to be defined by
the provider. It's likely that third-party extensions for theming will
be developed, but this will make it properly clear that this is an
unsupported thing and the 'official' appearance of GNOME is defined.
(correct me if I'm wrong, anyone).

> Second, I want my weather indicator back. More google... Besides
> some hand-drawn scetches on live.gnome.org there I find nothing. Is it
> already there and I am too stupid to find it? Is it in the works? has it
> been deemed uneeeded? Neither google nor yahoo helped me find out.

No-one's implemented it yet, I believe.

> Previously I had my 5 most needed apps in the panel which I could
> start immediately. Now I have to go to the hot-corner to make the
> panel appear, find the app and go there to start it. It's more moving
> and more waiting. I can live with that but it's not much of an
> improvement for me. 

I'd suggest just auto-starting them; if you're going to run them anyway,
why do it manually? gnome-session-properties lets you do this, though
it's somewhat deprecated; I believe the intended design is that you
simply leave the apps you want running, and suspend the system when
you're done, so you never have to re-launch them because you're not
restarting. (I'm not sure I entirely agree with this, as it overlaps
with the 'restart vs. suspend' argument and *also* doesn't really
consider the case of updates which require a log out / log in cycle, but
that's where we are).

> I have not found out yet if keyboard shortcuts are configurable, the
> current ones need a lot of F-keys (to get the window overview, etc).
> Unfortunatley, I use Apple-Keyboards, and to reach F-keys you have to
> press 'fn' in addition to the Fx key. This makes it a bit inconvenient
> to use them often, so I would prefer some other keyboard shortcut.

The 'keyboard' settings applet has a 'Shortcuts' tab which looks like
you can set all these up however you like.

> One thing that is absolutely horrible, is that I am an avid emacs user.

That's okay, self-loathing will get you nowhere ;)

>  Emacs most important area is the "minibuffer", the lowest line in the
> window. However, that happens to be exactly the space where
> "notifications" are now shown. Notifications are not translucent
> enough to actually see what happens beneath them (say, if I want to
> type the path of a filename I want to open). They also don't go away
> by themselves without me clicking on them,

well, they don't go away, but the notification area doesn't (shouldn't)
be visible all the time - only when you move your mouse to the very
lower-right corner. Is that still inconvenient?

> "You are now offline" followed by "Battery discharging" followed by
> the hilarious 'Application problem: "Application problem" is
> ready' (which made me laugh loudly).

That sounds like an Ubuntu thing, haven't seen it on F15.

> Next, some empathy messages popped up there: my contact 'lwn.net'
> announced (displayed with a picture of my coworker who I am sure has
> never heard of LWN) that Fedora 15beta has been released. That picture
> of my coworker talking about Fedora had me nearly freak out.

Not sure what you're reporting here; the wrong buddy icon is an obvious
bug (file it) but other than that, empathy messages showing up in the
notification area is a feature.

> One widget that I am not very fond of, is the ON/OFF slider. It has
> been copied from Apple's UI, I believe and it makes sense on
> capacitive touch screens, but on a desktop that I operate with a
> mouse, I find it awkward to have a widget that I have to click-grab
> move around and release again. Also when it is in one position and is
> only labeled "Off", does it mean that is it Off right now, or that I
> have to drag it to the off direction to actually turn it off? This was
> not always clear to me. I would have preferred a checkbox, which is
> essentially what this is. On a non-touchscreen, it just doesn't make
> sense to me.

There's already been some discussion of this on the Planet, IIRC.

> Last but not least, whenever the "Authentication needed" dialog pops
> up, the password entry dialog is not focused initially, it requires a
> mouse click to do so. I believe this was different previously, and I
> actually preferred it that way.

Sounds like an Ubuntu bug, that's not the case on F15 (indeed, the
window steals focus exclusively, you can't do anything else until you
provide it something to eat).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net