So the recent GNOME 3.12 release has gotten a very positive reception. Since I know that many members of my team has worked very hard on GNOME 3.12 I am delighted to see all the positive feedback the release is getting. And of course it doesn’t hurt having it give us a flying start to the Fedora Workstation effort. Anyway, for the fun of it I tried putting together a set of press quotes, kinda like how they tend to do for computer game advertisements.
- “GNOME 3.12: Pixel perfect” “GNOME 3 has finally arrived” – The Register
- “It is the GNOME release I have been waiting for” – Linux Action Show
- “The Very Exciting GNOME 3.12 Has Been Released” – Phoronix.com
- “…. a milestone feature update for users …” – eweek.com
- “The design team has refined everything …” – omgubuntu.co.uk
- “One of the big Linux desktops is updated” – TheInquirer
- “High Resolution screens are best managed under Gnome 3.12” – laptopspirit.fr
- “One of the most striking innovations..” – Heise.de
- “has resurrected what was once the darling of the Linux desktop” – TechRepublic.com
Some of the quotes might feel a little out of context, but as I said I did it for fun and if you end up spending time reading GNOME 3.12 articles to verify the quotes, then all the better ;)
Also you should really check out the nice GNOME 3.12 release video that can be found on the GNOME 3.12 release page.
Anyway, I plan on doing a blog post about the Fedora Workstation effort this week and will talk a bit about how GNOME 3.12 and later fits into that.
I am still amazed how slow the whole desktop experience is .. compared to other desktops, e.g. KDE which has a lot of effects). Don’t get me wrong, I used GNOME for about 4 years now but graphics is still lagging despite having a decent Intel GPU.
There are annoying lags everywhere in gnome-shell, especially in the overview mode: dragging windows between workspaces seem sluggish.
The GNOME team has a lot of optimization work … Otherwise, the desktop gets better with every release and I like the ‘less is more’ logic.
Well there was a lot of optimization work going into this release, to try to improve the experience on especially old and server hardware. So hopefully GNOME 3.12 will solve your performance issues.
Sadly I have the same slow (lag) experience in GNOME 3 (currently, GNOME 3.12 + Fedora 20) compared to use KDE in the same machine/distro.
Ok, definitely something we need to keep looking at then :) I am personally not able to reproduce any of the behaviour described by Luka, and I too are running on a laptop with integrated Intel graphics. But we do have some older hardware laying around so we will use that to do some further testing.
I used to have an issue with the overview being a bit sluggish to appear, but that went away a few releases ago for me.
Hai…
i have the same issues with the animation of the gnome-shell. Sometimes the windows are jerking in the overview and the desktop change.
Regards
Volker
Excuse me bad english experience, i’m not a native speaker.
That’s the problem, it’s still the same in 3.12. I think the compositing manager (mutter?) is to blame. Animations still lag while in other desktops they’re smooth so I doubt it’s the drivers/Xorg fault.
that is very hard, considering that mutter is running at 60 fps basically all the time.
there have been a bunch of power management issues on Intel that hit us pretty hard because we synchronise to the refresh rate of the display. see for instance this bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=719368#c13
so, as you see, it’s actually drivers/Xorg fault. :-)
Gnome 3.12 is unusably slow atm. My Radeon HD 6970 is running at high clocks all the time and the fan is screaming in pain. Older versions were slow but they didn’t usually make the GPU max out on clock frequencies. Gnome Shell on Gnome 3.12 is as slow on one display as if it was a triple-head setup on an older Shell.
The main target audience of the Fedora Workstation is software developers and computer science students. In your future blog post, it would be nice to know if it will change something for GNOME. Since a lot of GNOME developers work also on Fedora and Red Hat, can the Fedora Workstation initiative change something for GNOME? Like adding more configuration. A software developer is able to customize its desktop environment.
For example what happens when the laptop lid is closed (a lot of people don’t want to suspend the computer is this case, since they are connected to IRC or downloading stuff).
Yes, it will. In fact we have already started changing stuff in upstream GNOME to accommodate these segments based on the requirements we have outlined for the Fedora Workstation. For instance some of the GNOME terminal improvements came about this way. In some cases we do the changes in GNOME itself in other cases they might be adding new options to the gnome-tweak-tools package. And of course through the GNOME Shell extensions people can customize their desktop in quite extreme ways. In fact Linus Torvalds as an example mentioned on Google Plus that the extensions was what brought him back to GNOME 3, as they allowed him to get the exact experience he needed from his desktop.
https://git.gnome.org/browse/office-runner/
What happened to tabbed terminals in gnome terminal? I know its fun to remove features but that was one thing I actually used!
They are still there I actually use them myself all the time, if you go into preferences menu you can choose if you want to open new terminals as tabs or windows.
Ah, thanks. To be honest I wouldn’t have thought to look there. I actually use both new window and tab and before this change I had both accessible to me (“open terminal” and “open tab”), now with this setting there’s just “open terminal” which will make a new tab and I have to remember control+alt+n for a new window, which has no menu option or any other hint.
I’m happy that it’s still usable for me but this seems like an absolutely pointless and unasked for change that breaks something that was there for no apparent reason.
The only other “gnome” app I really use is evince for viewing PDFs, this one now has the weird new menu bar / buttons thing so now I can’t click the “x” to close its window, I have to use alt+f4 or find the “close” menu item in the gear button thing. This seems, again, arbitrary and a bit obnoxious.
This is a brilliant release, if a little buggy in places. The time/date menu in the top bar used to lag for ~200-400ms before opening, but now it is instant! Everything is so much smoother as well!
The only time I waste is time I spend doing something that, in my gut, I know I shouldn’t. If I choose to spend time playing video games or sleeping in, then it’s time well spent, because I chose to do it
Gnome is a really good linux distribution.
It is hard to learn how to use it, but when you have learned that, it is a pleasure to use it.
I will try this new version.