Re: We want task bar back. Pretty please.

[Ryan Peters <sloshy45 sbcglobal net>]

On 05/18/2011 02:54 PM, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
> On Tue, 17 May 2011 09:40:09 -0500, you wrote:
>
> > Because your blog won't let me directly comment for some reason (maybe
> > it's an add-on), I'm responding here:
> >
> > I'm very glad that you gave GNOME 3 a chance! It's a well-known fact
> > around here that comments like "there's no taskbar", or "you need to
> > click a lot", or "there's no minimize/maximize buttons", or even the
> > ever-popular "If I wanted to use a smartphone interface, I'd use a
> > smartphone" show that the writer of those comments has given
> > little-to-no effort whatsoever to enjoy GNOME 3.
> A yes, the semi-official standard Gnome 3 response that if you don't
> like Gnome 3 its because you haven't given it a chance.  Rather
> arrogant really.
You're leaving out a *gigantic* part of what I said: there are many 
valid complaints. For example, there's a bug report I read where some 
settings dialogs were constructed in a way that, when used with the 
default GNOME 3 theme (which has a lot of padding), they are completely 
unusable on smaller screens because they extend beyond the limits of the 
screen. Another valid complaint is lack of proper VPN support (if I 
remember correctly). These are all valid complaints. Complaining about 
the lack of a feature that isn't even necessary (minimization) or 
complaining about having to move the mouse to the left instead up 
upwards (as in "why are there no icons on the panel"; it's just as fast 
to tap the windows key and click an app on the dash), though, are 
invalid complaints that have been discussed to death and back again 
after many, many discussions. Not every complaint is valid; sometimes 
"bugs", "regressions", or "feature requests" are not valid at all, or 
could at least be looked at a different way.

Say, for example, you developed an IDE. You just added a feature to the 
latest stable release of it to automatically insert closing parentheses, 
quotes and brackets when it would be convenient to do so. For some 
users, this is great, but for others, it interferes with their habits. 
The latter group asks for this new feature to be a preference. You could 
do that, but that preference would make the IDE harder to debug in the 
long run and make it more complex than necessary to use. An alternative 
that would please both groups of users would be to cancel out the 
closing parentheses/quotes/brackets when a user manually types them in. 
GNOME 3, instead of simply caving in and adding preferences left and 
right, tries to think outside of the box like this. I'm not saying it's 
perfect, but you can see how it's better.
> > Also, the critics saying that GNOME Shell is "one size fits all" must
> > have never looked at the extensions or third-party programs yet. There
> > are already places menus, drive menus, alternative status menus, docks,
> > launchers on the panel, an applications menu, removing the accessibility
> > icon, launching applications on specific workspaces... the
> > possibilities, like with Firefox's Add-on system, are nearly infinite.
> How very damning, Gnome 3 hasn't even been released to the masses (no
> major distro has released with it yet) and already we have multiple
> attempts to fix the UI.  Guess that kind of throws out the Gnome
> philosophy of taking the time to do it right instead of quick, messy
> hacks.
Arch Linux does, what I'm currently using, and it works great. I'm not 
sure if you could consider it a "major distro", but I think it's 
reasonably popular to be considered major. The extensions aren't 
"attempts to fix the UI", but rather "exercises in extending the 
interface". There are legit reasons to want launchers on the panel, for 
example (launching several applications in sequence), or implementing a 
devices/places menu (something that the Shell team didn't have a chance 
to work on, as they were busy with making Shell stable). GNOME does try 
to do things right; they don't advocate "quick, messy hacks" at all. In 
fact, extensions and theming the Shell aren't officially supported at 
all; they're bound to break with each major release as they haven't 
settled on a standard, reasonably frozen structure yet.