gnome-shell a week later…

A few people commented on my blog after my last post, and asked me if I actually liked GNOME Shell. My last post wasn’t meant to be stinging criticism, more pointing out things that need to be addressed before we can call this the shell of GNOME 3.0. I’ve filed lots of bugzillas (some already fixed!) and I’m pleased to say that most of the issues I’ve brought up the developers seem keen on addressing. Owen has been working hard on the theming code, so hopefully I can get a less white-on-black theme for my little old eyes. Dan has been working on multi-monitor support, and it’s much better already. I do heartily recommend installing mutter and gnome-shell from gnome git, rather than using the distro built packages, as it’s all being implemented / fixed so quickly.

I do think I’ll be sticking with GNOME Shell, as it really is some cool stuff.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

10 thoughts on “gnome-shell a week later…”

  1. So what else was addressed?

    Slow taskswitch? Space waste top bar? Ugly zoomed icons? No config/option/hot edges? No panel gadgets? Bad layout on small screens? Empathy/Evolution/xxx integration?

    That said I think these things are polish, but they need to be implemented BEFORE release day or you will get major KDE4-esque blowback. Don’t just ask around in your small little happy Gnome world or you will be hit by the uglyness of the intertubes ones this shell ships in distros.

    1. Why is a top bar space waste? Current GNOME has even two panels. And every other environment I know of has at least one bar by default.

  2. Tim sums it up above me, all the stuff he mentioned needs to be fixed before you release it into the wild.

    1. Signing up and explaining myself just to be ignored with a “patches welcome” at best for these obvious shortcomings. I don’t think so.

      1. @Tim,
        It may be obvious in your hardware, but are you sure that it’s obvious on the hardware of the developers? If this is the case, how are they able to fix problems they don’t know about?

        Given Richard’s comments about the fast bug fixes, I don’t think that the “no, patches welcome” will be the reply. Keep in mind, GNOME is not a monolith. Different modules are managed by different people. Whatever your past experience with a specific GNOME team, it does not appear to be the case with this GNOME team.

    2. I hope you are aware that the “post the bug numbers” line is just an ad hominem argument. Which is probably OK since it’s basically the only response the Gnome Shell people have come up so far regarding criticism.

  5. In the places part in the activity menu, my bookmarks do not show. I have some ssh/network bookmarks and in the usual gnome places they get displayed but not in gnome-shell.

    In the side bar, the time gets displayed properly (24hr the way i have configured it), but in the top bar it uses the AM/PM (not how i configured it)

    I works much better than i expected.

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