I’ve installed GNOME 3 ppa on my ubuntu natty last week, and have been using it exclusively since then. To be honest I’ve been ranting a lot against GNOME3 before using it for my day to day activities, so I feel I should share my observations now that I really know it. Here are all the good and bad things I’ve seen, with no particular order. I’ll try not being too polemic (that’s hard exercise for me), please keep in mind I’m not pretending being a normal user; I’m a developer so my needs probably are different.
Bugs
I’ve reported most of the bugs/regressions/unusabilities I’ve observed in bugzilla during the week
| 648190 | gnome-settin | UNCO | NumLock is not enabled by default | |
| 648153 | gnome-shell | UNCO | typing on the desktop could start searching in overview | |
| 648138 | gnome-shell | UNCO | Issue when swithing from/to dock station with external monitor | |
| 648137 | gnome-settin | UNCO | wallpaper suddenly became white | |
| 648114 | rhythmbox | RESO | NOTG | Window does not always close when running gnome-shell |
| 648106 | gnome-shell | UNCO | My account just below IM presence in me-menu is confusing | |
| 648097 | gnome-shell | UNCO | me-menu says I’m available, but I’m not until I start empathy | |
| 648096 | gnome-shell | UNCO | inconvenient workspace handling when app needs restart | |
| 648094 | gnome-shell | RESO | DUPL | Impossible to change wallpaper from desktop |
| 648093 | gnome-shell | RESO | DUPL | multimedia keys are not working from overview |
| 648091 | gnome-contro | UNCO | In shortcut tab, “+” and “-” buttons does nothing | |
| 648089 | gnome-shell | RESO | DUPL | can’t select “wikipedia” with keyboard |
| 648088 | nautilus | RESO | DUPL | Impossible to move a file to trash with DELETE key |
| 648087 | gnome-tweak- | UNCO | gnome-shell does not show icons on desktop after login | |
| 648084 | gnome-shell | UNCO | Network connected/disconnected notifications stay forever |
gnome-tweak-tool
I think I’ve changed the default value for pretty much everything in that tool. I find it sad to unify all gnome-settings in a new shiny and consistent UI, and then rely on a completely different and inconsistent tool for the rest. I know it is extremely hard to define what options to show the user, but IMO this feels like an easy solution to avoid the problem instead of facing it. Maybe we could simply make gnome-tweak-tool just another “tweak” icon in gnome-control-center, so at least it gets linked from there. That would feel more integrated.
GNOME thinks I’m disabled people
Considering all the effort to keep UI as minimum as possible, with no applets on the panel, no way to tweak it at all, and still I’m forced to have that menu for disabled people on my panel. I completely agree it is important for people needing those options to have a way to quickly access them, but this seems really really overkill to me. At least this could be yet-another option in gnome-tweak-tool?
Also please rename those “universal access”; do I really have access to the whole universe in one click? At least this sound silly in the French translation…
ctr-del
I’m probably the last geek to use nautilus to manage my files instead of gnome-terminal, but this change in nautilus to use ctr-del to delete a file surprised me. For the first days I’ve been thinking it was just a bug that nautilus can’t delete files and I used right-click context menu to move to trash. Then I discovered by asking on IRC this was actually intentional!! I won’t even start telling this is wrong, but simply ask one simple questions: How is CTR-DEL discoverable? Pressing DELETE does nothing, just silently ignoring me. My first intuition was of course the context menu to move to trash, and no shortcut is shown there. Since any computer user since in win95 (or even earlier?) are familiar with DELETE key to delete a file, I think it is important to have some notification telling the user what to do.
me-menu
The menu on the right of my screen that kindly reminds me my name, next to the disabled-people-menu (not only GNOME thinks I’m blind, but also that I have Alzheimer), looks like an IM menu to me. It starts with my fullname (which I use as alias on my IM accounts) and a chat bubble icon like the new Empathy icon. Then it have Available/Busy items which are totally IM vocabulary, followed by “My account” which surprisingly does not open Empathy account settings… and this ends here, the rest has nothing to do with IM… I do totally like having IM being first-class citizen in GNOME UI, but something looks wrong here. Especially since when I boot the computer, the menu says I’m available, but all my empathy accounts are actually offline. Changing to busy, back to available, etc does not change my status in Empathy; unless I first start empathy’s contact list view. I know this is partly because Empathy/Telepathy are not yet ready to fully integrate IM into the core desktop.
My vision of Telepathy integration into the desktop, is that “Empathy” as an app does not really exist. We have views for different kind of IM informations (contact list, chats, file transfer, presence, account settings, etc). Those views are provided partly by empathy widgets, but also by gnome-shell itself (presence in me-menu, embedded chat). The views are apps started on-demand but are not THE im application. So empathy’s main window is (should) just a view of the contact list, it does not need to be running to be available on XMPP and receive IM messages.
I have great hopes for 3.2 😀
Embedded IM chats
This is totally awesome! I love it so much! My only concern is the empathy status icon still blinking even after I replied messages in the embedded chat. During the week I’ve almost never actually opened the empathy’s chat window, I’ve been always chatting in gnome-shell directly. If gnome-shell’s activities search could match my contacts names too and let start chat/call, I think I could even not need to see empathy’s UI at all.
non disturbing notifications
Thanks god for smartly hiding notifications, I’m spending much less time in liferea since I don’t see anymore when my RSS are refreshed. I also totally like the rhythmbox’s notification when changing song, that let you pause/skip easily without needing to open the rb window (I’m using multimedia keys most of the time though).
It could be improved a bit though, for example when a new IM message arrive when I was away, I don’t see any notification until I open that bottom panel.
The wow-effect
I think gnome-shell is a perfect balancing between modern OpenGL desktop, but still looking professional. When compiz started showing tones of technically impressive 3D effects, I’ve always though its nice, but not professional. Now gnome-shell succeed in take advantage of technology, but not over-using it.
Launchers
I though it would be worse, but still I’m missing my launchers for some apps. I’m used to open a lots of gnome-terminal everywhere, for example. I had launchers in my gnome-panel before. I’m getting used to keyboard shortcuts now, but still I miss them a bit. I wish the launcher bar in the activities view could be visible on my desktop, and smartly hide when a window is on the border, like the ubuntu unity.
multi desktop
This is also something I though it would be worse. But still I can’t get totally used to it. It should have a way to spin some desktops to they don’t get removed when empty. Since they are dynamically open/close, I sometimes get lost in my desktops, having the preview image when using ctr-alt-up/down could help I think.
Also I miss a direct way to switch desktop using the mouse. May I suggest having the desktop bar we see in activities visible on desktop too. Just like suggested for the launchers above, it would hide like it does for unity’s launcher bar.
The shutdown story
You’ll be surprised, but I personally don’t miss the shutdown option. I almost always suspend anyway. After important upgrades, ubuntu should add a reboot option there; is such distro extension possible? A tooltip or something could suggest ALT magic key to reboot/shutdown, though.
Google/Wikipedia
Wikipedia makes perfect sense for an Open project, but is GNOME paid (like Mozilla AFAIK) for that Google advertisement at least? Even Internet Explorer lets the choice.
Developer feeling
This is probably partly because I have less time to contribute to GNOME this year, but I feel its getting more difficult for developers not having full-time job working on GNOME to contribute. I see 2 main reasons for this:
- Gtk3 breakage: In previous cycles it was almost trivial to build Empathy master on latest stable Ubuntu release. Only a few telepathy packages were needed from a ppa. With this GNOME3 cycle, it was mostly impossible to even see what was being worked on. We had the choice between installing totally unstable distro (not even Ubuntu sadly) with a full GNOME3 desktop, or build the world with jhbuild, which I always considered (wrongly?) a pain to get stuff working.
- Decisions are more and more made by UX “experts” who knows better, and make their plan partly behind closed doors. I have to admit they did mostly an amazing work, but as user and occasional contributor, I feel I’ve lost my voice. I don’t think anymore I can change stuff that I don’t like in GNOME, not because of technical reasons, but because GNOME is now part of a bigger plan. This is probably a good thing for marketing, but makes the hacker in me sad.
Hopefully point 1 won’t be the case anymore for GNOME 3.1 cycle, and point 2 is maybe more a feeling than a reality and could surely be improved.
Importance of fallback mode
No, not everyone has OpenGL running just fine on linux yet, and no not only proprietary drivers are broken. Just 2 examples on my laptop with intel GPU:
- gnome-shell won’t startup in a VM using virt-manager
- Playing an OpenGL game with wine works just fine when I launch it from gnome2 desktop with metacity and not effect, but is terribly broken rendering when launch from gnome-shell.
My conclusion
GNOME3 is a good base for upcoming releases. Better than I’ve though before using it everyday, but still lots of place for improvement and not yet the perfect release I hoped. I only hope designers and main hackers will be flexible enough to let it involve to something that can make everyone happy, but still rigorous to keep a consistency. Hard task, really.