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Hello, everyone! I just wanted to share my excitement about Fedora 19 and Gnome-Shell 3.8. This post is a bit contrary to what I reported some time ago in another thread concerning "Gnome-Shell degrading every release", and that is part of the reason I wanted to share my experience on the list. So, I switched from Ubuntu 13.04 with Gnome-Shell 3.6 to Fedora 19 with Gnome-Shell 3.8 and have great experience so far. Given that I am on the same computer that I had GS 3.6 installed on, my comparison is quite "fair". I do not know however whether it is due to switching to pure Gnome experience with Fedora or Gnome 3.8 would work the same way under Ubuntu. 1) First, the overall experience with GS is somehow "smoother" than it used to be. There are still lags time to time for unknown reason, such that GS would get stuck for several seconds without responding to anything, but I guess it is, probably, due to JS doing its job or some other background processes. The biggest problem here is that whenever the screen is locked, all extensions are disabled, and reenabled after that. This causes a significant delay in showing the system after screen lock (I believe this is the reason, because I did not see that when I had less extensions installed). I do not see any real reason for disabling extensions on screen lock. Moreover, I can easily think of extensions that I would personally want to have enabled when screen is locked. It should be up to extension how it hides itself when it is not needed. Disabling/enabling of extensions has dramatic effect on performance. Why do not you just "freeze" them if you really want to? 2) Overview: a) I do not experience any lags with opening Overview the first time anymore. b) Overview and other animations perform much better: it used to be when I press Win-key that it would lag for a bit and show the final window placement in a second or so without actually animating windows going there, but now I see quite smooth animation. c) I like the new Overview layout. Also, the window placement in Overview has improved a lot. d) There is still auto-showing of Overview when the last window is closed (which is annoying when you, for example, just restart the only application) but there is an extension to prevent that, and I saw that this is not the case in GS 3.9 anymore (correct me if I am mistaken). One thing to mention here: please move the Apps button in Overview to the top. I will explain why. For me one of the reasons I did not like Unity was that when you needed to find an app with the mouse you would have to make quite a distance with your mouse cursor to find what are you looking for, just imagine this: top-left corner to open it, then a tiny icon on bottom-center of the screen to select category (why would not you put all those icons on top?), then right part of the screen to select category, then top-left to click the app etc. That was not the case with GS. 3) Message tray with "pressure" is amazing compared to what it used to be. I do not need any extension preventing showing Message Tray anymore. The two problems were solved in one move: I would not accidentally open Message Tray when I do not want to, but I can instantly without waiting open it when I need to. Now there is only one problem left: sometimes I need to interact with icons in Message Tray several times in a row, such as opening their menus and choosing several commands. That would be awesome if it would stay open until I actually click outside of it (not when, for example, I right-click icon and open its menu). So, I still need Top Icons extension. 4) Files (Nautilus). I reported in that other thread big problems with Nautilus being somehow laggy. The problems were so big that I had to switch to another file manager (I used Dolphin with all its Gnome-incompatibility). This is not the case for me anymore. It performs quite well: there are no lags when I focus Nautilus window etc. It is more than usable now. nautilus-terminal is also back for me! Just a tip: Nautilus has this weird behaviour that when you press slash "/" it would focus the path line and enter the slash there. This "feature" prevents from entering the slash in nautilus-terminal! But you can easily fix this. There are some other little annoyances that I had to overcome, but everything has been solved somehow. Examples: - When you choose background, there is no option to browse for a file. Change it directly in dconf-editor (set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri) or put your background in ~/Pictures. - There is no easy way to change Metacity theme anymore. Change it in dconf-editor (set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences theme) and make sure your Metacity theme is in /usr/share/themes not in ~/.themes (the latter does not work for some reason for many themes: I saw a bug report about that some time ago, so I knew what to do when my theme in ~/.themes would not be applied -- just move it /usr/share/themes and check permissions). - New weather app as well as the Weather extension on extensions.gnome.org offers big airport weather only (Norwegian forecast or something) and moreover it is often way off: so, I just git pull https://github.com/canek-pelaez/gnome-shell-extension-weather.git, which is old nice version of the extension that now has searching support (so, you do not need to go to Yahoo whether to find your city's ID). Overall, many of the problems I reported for GS 3.6 were solved for me in GS 3.8. So, to sum up, all I wanted to say now is: "No! Gnome-Shell does not degrade with every release." Old problems are being solved, some new are introduced. But overall for me Gnome 3.8 has matured a lot compared to previous versions. Vadim Developer of YAWL extension. |