Decided to join the early adopters crowd today and use the desktop of the future by switching to using GNOME Shell on my desktop. Luckily with Fedora its dead simple, you just yum install gnome-shell and then switch using the desktop effects widget under Preferences. Scarily simple.
So far GNOME shell has been very stable for me and the user experience has been mostly good. Still feels a little alien compared to what I was used to before, but nothing annoyingly alien. Only irritant so far is that the clock on the shell is using the luddite AM/PM time system instead of the proper 24H clock and I can’t figure out how/where to fix it. :)
Will report back next week if I decided GNOME shell is here to stay on my desktop or if its still needs some more love before I am ready to let it rule my life.
I really recommend using a current build of gnome-shell
(see http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/#Building) if you are using F12; they have changed a lot since then – it’s much more usable, e.g. being able to close windows in the activity view.
Regarding the 24/AM-PM issue: see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603488. There’s a patch I wrote for this issue that hopefully will be committed soon.
Hi, please use:
http://fedorapeople.org/~walters/gnome-shell-F12/ for Fedora 12.
did not like the time format too, wrote a patch and filed a bug at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=610995
with that you can set your time format in gconf
This is an ugly, temporary hack, but using the F12 package, I directly modified /usr/share/gnome-shell/js/ui/panel.js with this:
464c464
this._clock.set_text(displayDate.toLocaleFormat(_(“%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M”)));
So, right now, I get
Fr 2010-03-05 23:33
Er, my brackets weren’t escaped, so I’ll correct that now:
464c464
< this._clock.set_text(displayDate.toLocaleFormat(_(“%a %l:%M %p”)));
—
> this._clock.set_text(displayDate.toLocaleFormat(_(“%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M”)));