Re: A few comments regarding Gnome-shell

[Robert Park <rbpark exolucere ca>]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> On 2011-03-07 at 10:29, Robert Park wrote:
>> On a side note, I was recently annoyed when I tried out v0.0.6 of the
>> GNOME ISO (from gnome3.org) and I was not able to activate the clock
>> menu by clicking on the topmost row of pixels above the clock applet,
>> I had to move the mouse down in order to click. That's a failure to
>> implement Fitts Law.
>
> this was a bug that has been fixed by Clutter 1.6.8, which has been
> released today.
>
> the bug was due to a rounding error of floating point values on large
> stage sizes - such has high resolution displays or multi-monitor setups.

I'm glad to hear that's fixed. Clutter is so cool ;-)

I've played a bit more with GNOME Shell today, and I really like it. I
feel as though 95% of the people who are complaining about it fall
into the category of "I don't like things that I'm not used to and I
don't enjoy learning." Gnome Shell is amazing and I can't wait for it
to be more widely available (yeah, I can play with a liveCD or
whatever, but I just want a default Fedora install to have Gnome Shell
for me...)

Anyways, I really liked:

* Dragging titlebars to maximize/tile. I've never seen a sexier
implementation of a tiling windowmanager. I think perhaps if you drag
a window to the left or right edge while there is already a maximized
window on that workspace, the maximized window could shrink down to
tile both windows together. that seems like it would make more sense
than to have one window 50% covering a maximized window. But still,
the idea is really solid and the UI apart from that is great.

* the automatic add/remove of workspaces. That's so brilliant, I can't
even believe I haven't seen it done before. I remember way back when I
was new to the concept of workspaces, being a bit put off by the
awkwardness of having to decide ahead of time how many I'd need and
how to organize them. This new way is just so _effortless_... if you
need more workspaces, they just appear as you use them. I love it!

* alt+tab switching between windows on all workspaces, that makes it
harder to forget about things hidden on other workspaces, definitely a
nice touch.

* how rigid the top panel is. I'm sick of customizing panels when they
should Just Work in the first place, and Gnome Shell Just Works. It
just gets out of my way as fast as possible and lets me focus on doing
work, not on screwing around with panel settings. I remember way, way
back in the early days of GNOME2, before they'd implemented the 'lock
to panel' checkbox, things in the panel tended to forget where they
were placed, and I remember constantly being frustrated by things
sliding around, particularly when logging in (sometimes when you log
in and gnome-panel launches, things would be in the wrong place). I've
even seen that problem crop up from time to time on more recent
versions of GNOME, and it's terrible. I'm so glad to see gnome-panel
being killed off. I'm confident that the items on the top panel in
gnome shell will stay put across reboots, and that's great.

One complaint that I often see about GNOME Shell is how you have to
mouse all the way to the top left corner and then all the way back to
the right edge to get at the workspace switcher. I think people should
just learn to press the 'windows' key with their left hand (without
letting go of the mouse in their right hand) to access the Activities
screen. That eliminiates almost all of the mouse movement necessary,
and is way faster. I can tell I will definitely be leaning on that key
whenever I want to rapidly change from one window to another, and I'm
very happy with how that works.

I for one am excited for the release of GNOME3. I'm getting sick of
the overwhelmingly large amount of options provided by compiz, and how
utterly difficult and time consuming it is to get compiz into a state
where it's subtle, usable, and not garish.

Thanks for reading ;-)

-- 
http://exolucere.ca