Re: We want task bar back. Pretty please.

[Ryan Peters <sloshy45 sbcglobal net>]

Somebody needs to take this thread out back behind the shed and put a 
bullet through it's head for the good of humanity, so I volunteer to do so.

Denys, GNOME 3 is a radical change and you have a right to be upset, but 
your responses have been rather rude. Asserting that the designers made 
the change for no reason insults their intelligence; just because you 
didn't read the design documents/pages that outlined what problems GNOME 
3 would fix with it's design doesn't mean that they "changed for the 
sake of it". As Henry Ford allegedly said, "If I had asked my customers 
what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.". The automobile 
was awkward and totally different at first relative to horses, but it 
eventually caught on because it was a better choice than horses for most 
people.

Second, imitation isn't always the way to go. If GNOME simply stood the 
same for years without changing, there would be no innovation. In 
addition, your claim that GNOME "gives users no choice" is incredibly 
false: you can enable Forced Fallback mode in System Settings to a GNOME 
2-like UI which is meant for setups that cannot run the new GNOME 3. 
However, it's called "Fallback Mode" for a reason; it's deprecated, 
won't receive future updates unless they're extremely important, and 
GNOME 3's default desktop is much better for a variety of reasons. I, as 
well as the people working on developing and marketing GNOME 3, firmly 
believe that GNOME 3 is the future, which is a good thing and not bad 
like you suggest.

You can switch windows with Alt+Tab and Alt+[key above Tab, usually `], 
the former switching applications and the latter switching windows in an 
application. It works very well and you should try it! Also, switching 
windows is much more flexible than in GNOME 2: with the older GNOME, you 
only had Alt+Tab and a tiny window list. With GNOME 3, you get an 
"Exposé"-like view where you have nice, easily clickable thumbnails of 
every window on that workspace (especially useful on a laptop), "fling" 
gesture support to switch workspaces on touch devices, a dock-like 
window list on the left, a workspace switcher on the right with 
drag-drop support, and a search bar that works without clicking it; just 
start typing! If that doesn't satisfy you, I'm not sure what will. Of 
course, you can always write an extension that enables the behavior you 
like, but GNOME 3 should be given a fair chance first.

You can access the Activities overlay three ways: a hot corner (flinging 
your mouse to the top-left), clicking the Activities button, or a 
keyboard shortcut (Windows/Super/Meta key, Alt+F1, or whatever you set 
it to). I use the keyboard shortcut as it makes it much faster for me. I 
just tap it, click the window I want, and I've switched in less than a 
second, arguably about as fast as the task list on GNOME 2 (and in some 
cases faster because you don't have to scan a tiny list of windows like 
in GNOME 2). Your claim that GNOME doesn't let you add launchers is also 
false: right-click any running application (or any application in the 
Applications menu or Search function) and click "Add to Favorites". 
Then, just open the overlay and click it to launch. It's just as easy as 
the icons from GNOME 2, and they take up less screen space as well since 
they don't take up valuable panel real-estate. You can also manually 
organize them by dragging them up and down, which is much better than 
right-clicking the launcher, unlocking it, right-clicking it again, 
clicking "move", then moving the mouse along a gigantic panel to place 
it in a usable place (this was the GNOME 2 behavior).

Also, it's faster to start an application that you didn't add to 
favorites in GNOME 2; just search for it by opening the overlay and 
typing. It's keyboard-navigable so you can press up and down to move 
through the list. The Applications Menu isn't really intended to be used 
constantly and is only there for when you either don't know an 
application's name, don't have it on your favorites list, or are using a 
touch-device (like a tablet).

If you have any more problems with GNOME 3, please say so, but don't be 
rude about it. Also, check out gnome-tweak-tool and 
gnome-shell-extensions for some tweaks that let you customize GNOME 3 to 
how you want it to be. I hope I've helped make things more clear, and it 
would be very nice if you tried to wrap your head around the way things 
are now before going back to Fallback Mode. It might take a day, or even 
a week, but you might find that it improves your work flow a lot if you 
give it a chance.

    - Sincerely, Ryan (not a Shell developer; just a user)