Hello! Hello Again! I’m out here attending Northwest Linuxfest! Doing a presentation on GNOME 3.. probably one of the first ones post release. I’ll blog about the experience. If any of you are attending Northwest Linuxfest, look me up! We’ll chat about whatever!
Misc stuff:
Congratulations to Ubuntu on the release of Natty Narwhal with the new Unity shell!
It feels wierd not to be running Ubuntu on my main machine, my laptop. With Ubuntu moving to Unity as their main UI, I was forced to move to Fedora 15 in order to get my GNOME 3 experience. Fedora is a great distro, with great support, and even more awesome people But I really mess debian packaging. Yum gets on my nerves. This is my first rpm based distro since RH 7.3!
My desktop machine at home is in a wierd state with Unity broken, gnome 3 not quite working.. logging in gives me the GNOME 2 experience which is also hard since I keep wanting to filck my pointer to the left top hotspot to get to the menu and wondering why it is not working. *face palm*
In any case.. maybe when Ubuntu has full support for GNOME 3 I might move back.. but for now, I’m a Fedora guy!
I’m surprised there isn’t a thread yet…what does everyone think of the new Ubuntu? Do you love Unity, or did you switch back to regular GNOME in the first few minutes? Did the upgrade wreck anything? Personally, I like Unity because it frees up so much screen space and basically looks like GNOME. There’s a bug that makes drop box not show up, but the workaround is opening a terminal and typing “drop box stop”, then “drop box start”. Otherwise a great release.
I didn’t use Unity long enough to work my way around it. I’m deep in GNOME 3 land, and spent a lot of effort into using it and helping with it’s release. So I wasn’t going to switch DE at that point. But I do wish everyone well since a lot of my friends are involved in Canonical and Ubuntu.
The upgrade using the PPA wrecked Unity. I’m using GNOME 2 for some reason it’s not moving to gnome3 for some reason and I don’t know why. I am thinking of wiping everything and starting all over, although I’m somewhat nervous to do that.
I’m neutral on Unity. It didn’t drive me away straight off, but didn’t really pull me in. Gnome3 pushed me away hard though, until someone gets a proper spatial file manager with desktop into it.
GNOME 3 has a lot of hard edges. A lot of people have a hard time understanding some of the design choices. It’s one of those things that make sense when you a) think about it b) use it for awhile. I don’t know what to tell you about hating it or not other than to try it for a week or so. Better yet, wait fora while.. all kinds of extensions are being written. Maybe some of those will change your mind.
I first tested gnome-shell on F14. It was slow, it was ugly, and I didn’t get it at all. I hated it within 5 minutes, and removed it.
I then tried it again on F15 alpha. It was a lot faster, it was less ugly, and I still didn’t understand how it was supposed to work.
Then F15 golden came around. Tried again. Hey! It’s snappy. It looks good. But I still didn’t get the hang of how to use it. Searched the net for how to get the old panel instead. Once I found a how-to I also read some recommendations to spend a week with gnome-shell. Well, now that I knew how to get rid of it… why not? Then with an update I got the new wallpaper with the birds. Nice! really beautiful! And I’m starting to get used to gnome-shell. Perhaps it’s a keeper after all! Now I am starting to miss the flick to the upper left corner when I boot in vmware and don’t get gnome-shell.
Perhaps there should be a 5-minute tutorial on first startup covering the rather dramatic shift from gnome-panel to gnome-shell? Just to give users a more positive first impression? And how about releasing your talk somewhere so I could get more hints on how to use this new beast?
Your experience pretty much mirrors a lot of other people who initially didn’t like it. It is important that you try it for a week as is. That flick to the left corner is pretty addicting. 🙂 I do it in games now!
birger, you can get the video of my presentation and also one on fedora here:
http://www.archive.org/details/LinuxfestNorthwest2011
Both Adam and mine will give you a decent view of GNOME 3, I think. As for a tutorial.. mail Shaun McCance on your idea, he might like that.
Secondly, do you know about the videoes that we did for GNOME 3?
http://www.gnome3.org/