Posted on by Olav Vitters

Feedback and more

I’ve been reading the feedback regarding GNOME3. Pretty nice overall.

  • A lot of feedback thanks to the Live versions available on gnome3.org
    GNOME is made of various people spending time on what they think is good for the project overall. The live images happened because people spend the effort. Live versions also resulted in a lot of extra feedback, and thus a better GNOME 3.0.0.
  • Do not see too much stability issues
    Most of the feedback focuses on behaviour changes
  • I unfortunately see too much assumption that feedback is not welcome
    I guess this is because of a combination of getting used to GNOME3, design decisions that are not changed without a lot of feedback, the relative imperfection of GNOME3 vs 2.32 (3.0 is less refined than 2.32) with the assumption is that 3.0 set in stone and not having interacted with the real GNOME community yet. Regarding changing decisions: I forgot what it was about, but in gnome-terminal some things were changed every other release because of feedback. Each time another bigger group complained what the default of some option should be.
    I am strict on ensuring all communication follows the Code of Conduct (which also includes “avoid being repetitive”). Other than that, be as critical or positive as you want.
  • Various criticisms concerns valid points
    Things that will be addressed during GNOME 3.2 and 3.4.
  • Some criticism is regarding design decisions
    Decisions taken with some goal in mind. Requiring a different way of working and always results in transition pain. As a result, it is still early to draw conclusions on those IMO, we first have to wait for a few distributions to have GNOME3 as default in their stable version.

more:

  • Once again uncle 🙂
    Tech wise: My sister really enjoys having a smartphone (3g+wifi)
  • Twice in the last 2 weeks had to cycle differently as sections of roads where closed off due to possible gas explosions. Once a gas pipe underneath the street was faulty, second time a person drove off from a gas station while the gas line was still connected to the car.
  • Celebrating Queen’s day in Utrecht is a lot of fun!
  • Switched my ISP contract to 60 / 6 Mbit/s (fastest they provide is 120/10)
    Got a new modem. Modem has DOCSIS 3, wifi (+ separate wifi dongle which works in Mandriva Cooker) and router functionality built in. I hate the router functionality though. I don’t like NAT, much rather have my pc directly on the internet. The router did have some bridge options, haven’t played with that yet. Only disabled the firewall + enabled the option which directs all traffic directly to my pc.
    Since the new modem the IPV6_DEFAULTDEV=tun6to4 /etc/sysconfig/network option doesn’t result in a IPv6 address anymore. Fortunately my ISP intents to provide IPv6 somewhere this year (and yeah, that’s documented on their website). Now if they’d only stop trying to sell me ‘digital tv’.
  • Updated packages on my laptop
    Switched to Fedora from Ubuntu during FOSFEM. This as I need something which tracks GNOME and does so by default. Though prefer using a distributions which is different from what other release-team members prefer.

10 Replies to “Feedback and more”

  1. “Things that will be addressed during GNOME 3.2 and 3.4.”

    I would really like to know what these are since some of the “design choices” and “lack of polish” has made me for once decide to skip a fedora release just to see if gnome 3.2 fixes stuff that’s absolutely detrimental to my productivity like the alt-tab, shutdown button, amongst others.

    1. I only know of a few things, we need someone to gather this, keep track of it and publish it somewhere… so looking for someone to spend the effort like with the live images 🙂

      It is also a bit difficult, because things are still being defined, so no promises can be in there, just that some things will be addressed.

      Quick and brief list of what I know / noticed:

      • They’re looking into solving the difficulty tracking files and the lack of a places menu. Either Zeitgeist or something similar.
      • Interaction of the available/busy and changing the status on empathy
      • How to show buddy’s / starting empathy
      • Seems new networkmanager needs some work
      • Shutdown thing is undecided actually, might change (IMO close lid = standby, no need to repeat in menu, should only have poweroff). You have the alt thing + gnome-tweak-tool as well (though: everyone understands it should be sane by default; defining the line between sane and special takes some time).
      • Alt-tab: you also have alt+key above tab / left to 1
      • Notification messages will get some additional work to ensure you more easily notice the messages you want (e.g. currently sometimes too easy to miss certain messages)
      • Noticed a few applets being ported to the new API. So you’ll have more applets in the fallback mode of GNOME 3.2.
      • Might get a good enough software renderer. So it’ll use your CPU for the things which isn’t supported by your hardware.

      To be clear: I am not a developer 🙂

      1. Thanks, 3.2 might just be a decent release then. As long as they let people change keyboard shortcuts as they did in gnome 3.2 so I can “fix” the alt+tab thing I might bite. Zeitgeist would be awesome, it’s been so long in the making but it really needs to be pushed to people before it shows it’s usefulness.

        Also the fact that my fav theme (shiki + gnome-colors) doesn’t work in gnome3 is putting me off. The new look is too white for my taste.

        1. You can still change the keybindings. They moved and now are a bit hidden. IIRC in international settings or something similar. What I hope is that they’ll also add more sane default keybindings (windows+something). I actually thought it was already in, unfortunately it wasn’t.

          Though I’d prefer if my distribution (Mandriva) already had GNOME3, I think the slow switch is a good thing. Gives developers time to ensure more ‘low hanging fruit’ is fixed before people have their first GNOME3 experience.

        2. Regarding Alt+tab, I opened a bug in Bugzilla over a year ago which was recently closed with the message that this needs to be brought up with the designer which isn’t reading Bugzilla:

          https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=606867

          It was suggested that I try IRC; will have to find the time to install a client and see if I can find somebody willing to talk to me.

          Hopefully that person will be kind enough to reevaluate the decision; if nothing else, I hope that we could at least get some rationale for the break, haven’t been able to find anything online (sadly, the design document doesn’t really discuss it).

    2. The lack of a shutdown button is “absolutely detrimental” to productivity? An annoyance, I agree, but is surely citing it as harming productivity is exaggerating a little?

      1. Yes, the alt+tab is more detrimental than the shutdown one but consider this: my old laptop does have working suspend but it maxes out at 1h of use time. What do you suggest I do if I move to suspend instead of shutdown? Plug it in every 3 hours or so every time I move from one place or the other?

        Also my desktop is in my bedroom (I’m a college student) and while in suspension it has this bright blue blinking light. Am I supposed to throw a blanket over it?

        Also while I can understand why “suspend” might be interesting I would rather see them push hibernation instead. Of course I think shutdown/bootup should be fast enough and work as hibernation instead but that would take too much reworking of current applications probably.

        1. For shutdown, open a terminal and run “poweroff”, or possibly “sudo poweroff”. Harsh lesson: try not to be dependent on Gnome devs (or any other devs for that matter) for your daily life. Ubuntuforums and such sites have lots of helpful people who have the same problems and will share workarounds.

  2. If you care not running what seemsto be the leading distro for GNOME 3 developers and you come from Ubuntu, why not going the Debian way? Currently GNOME 3 is in the experimental branch but it’s already quite usable for everyday work…

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