The subject says it all. Since Gnome3 was released, or even in the works, all I’ve read about it is negative. I assume there must be posts that compliment it too, but forever reason, I’ve only run into what is now termed “Gnome bashing”. I’m not going analyse why people don’t like the new design; neither am I going to summarize why people should like it; I’m going to write down why it works for me.
The first thing I must list are my requirements. When I boot up my system, and login, without a thought, I run the following programs, in order:
- Gnome-terminal for a byobu/screen instance set up with irssi, rtorrent, htop, ncmpcpp, mc and additional bash screens
- Gnote
- Firefox
- Evolution
It takes me less than a minute to get them running: Firefox, Gnote and Evolution are on my dash as my favourites while a quick “alt f2 gnome-terminal -x byobo” pulls up the byobu instance. Sometimes, I even use “alt f2” to start Firefox and the rest. The point, irrespective of the method: it’s quick. Mind you, I can configure gnome to start all of these at each login too, but that would contribute to the time the system takes to login and give me a usable interface. I resist the temptation.
I use Evolution for multiple accounts: my Gmail account, my UTS account on Microsoft Exchange, my Windows live account and my Facebook: all of which were conveniently set up using “Online accounts”. I can use them for mail, calendar and chatting amongst the other cloud and storage services. I generally limit my usage to mail + calendar + chat.
Once my applications are up and running, I limit most of my work to the terminal instance, switching to Gnote for my TODO lists, or Firefox and Evolution to glance at the web or my mails respectively. My calendar is on the top panel, so I don’t need to use the Evolution calendar view unless I want to add a new appointment. A click suffices. Switching between applications is very very easy. It’s a simple “alt tab” to me. If you’re not a keyboard person, it’s fairly simple to use the activities overview to select another application. I’ve read that some people have issues while switching between windows of the same application: I haven’t experienced this since a combination of “alt tab” and “alt ~” works perfectly for me.
While I’m working, there are times I need to use other applications. For instance, when my mother wants me to check something in her mail, I really don’t want to logout of my Google account and into hers on the running Firefox instance. Instead, I use Ephiphany for such ad-hoc tasks. I read somewhere that opening an application is a problem in Gnome, apparently because the “app icon” isn’t intuitive enough and it takes 2 clicks to get to the application list. Being and android user, the “app icon” tells me what it is. If you aren’t an android user, exploring the dash will bring up a “Applications list” pop up when you hover over the icon. I don’t think the 2 clicks trouble me either. Here’s the thing: I hardly ever make the two clicks. Typing “web” into the search box in the activities menu brings up a bunch of web related things. I only need to check out the entire list when I need to use one of those applications that I use once a week or less. When this is the case, an extra click does not erk me.
What else do I use? “Settings” is easily available in the user menu on the top right. Bluetooth, network, volume, power management are all there too. I have nautilus on my favourites list in the dash, when I’m not using “mc”.
I remember reading that changing the background in Gnome3 is an issue too, since there isn’t a right click on the desktop. When I tried to change the desktop background the first time, I was already aware that a right click on the desktop would not work. I went to the “Settings” tool and found “Background” there. Since then, I type “Background” in the activities menu search box and access “Background” directly. I’ve noticed that the “Background” tool only lists images in the Pictures folder, but doesn’t look into folders there, i.e., it doesn’t search recursively. I’m not sure if this is a bug or intended behaviour, but it’s something that could annoy some people (Note to self: file a bug requesting recursive listing after some research on the subject). The “workaround” is to simply view your image in Shotwell, the default image viewer, which lets you set the image as background.
On customizing Gnome3, I didn’t need to. If you do, you should look at the many extensions available. If you want to move the core components around, the panel, the dash, the workspace switcher, you’d probably be better off using another DE. (I can’t think of a reason I’d want to move them around personally.)
When I’m done using my system, I generally set it to hibernate. When I want to power down, the “user menu” is right there. Since I have a “Guest” user on my system, I do indeed have a logout option. There’s an extension to make this option permanent if I’m not mistaken. You can also use “alt f2 gnome-session-quit”, like I mostly do.
My father uses Gnome3. He’s not a tech person. He’s almost 60 and a doctor by profession. He hasn’t had much trouble using it (if he had, he’d call me and go “how do you do $this?”, and it hasn’t happened over the past six months at least).
In conclusion, it works for me (and my father). What’s even better, it works really well. I like to keep my fingers on the “home row” of my keyboard all the time. Moving my fingers to access the mouse/touchpad feels like a waste of time to me. In this environment, I can do almost everything without using the mouse. (Yes, I can browse the internet without using the mouse too: checkout Pentadactly for Firefox!). It’s incredibly efficient for the work flow that I follow personally.
I’d really like you to give it a go. However, when you do, don’t do it looking for a Windows style desktop. It’s not what Gnome3 is trying to be. Give it a go with the expectation of something new! If you’re open to learning a little, I’d think you’d be comfortable with the desktop within a week.
A note: If you “Gnome bash” in a comment, I will not approve the comment. It isn’t because I can’t take criticism, it’s because I’ve had enough of it. If it isn’t working for you, you’re free to criticize it on your blog or chime in with the many already doing it.
Speaking of gnome 3 , i am running Fedora 18 and it is OK. But it still lacks feature set of GNOME 2. I am frequently getting into this bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=878736 where i have to do a ‘DISPLAY=:0 gnome-shell –replace’ all the time from a terminal. It is annoying. The new nautilus sucks big time. i switched to thunar!
I’d want to know what features you’re missing and why nautilus sucks but I don’t want a discussion to ensue.
I haven’t experienced that bug.
Nautilus works just fine for me. It has everything I expect a file manager to have.
The current feature set of Gnome3 is more than enough for me as the blog post shows.
Ah, yes. There’s about zillions of things I don’t like about gnome 3’s nautilus, but no, people are complaining about missing menu bar. Why? Firefox does not have it, google chrome does not have it, even Thunderbird does not have it, my midori and Terminal do not have it, I don’t use it in Thunar, but cannot hide it, unfortunately. Why for web *browser* people are OK with missing menu bar but for file *browser* it makes their world break? The removed menu bar is actually one of the few positives on gnome3 development that I see.
Nautilus is lacking for developers e.g. no source-control integration (subversion, git, etc) diff/merge tools integration etc. Also NTH is shell integration i.e. ability to open shell at current location and keep it synchronized with Nautilus location.
Take a look at KDE’s file browser (Dolphin).
I’m not sure of what you mean by “ability to open shell at current location”.
For version control in nautilus, take a look at rabbitvcs which adds this support. http://rabbitvcs.org/
A simple yum install rabbitvcs-nautilus added git and svn support to nautilus. I just checked it out.
You might be interested in: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682126
Thanks Debarshi. Added myself to CC list.
I enjoy Gnome3 for much the same reasons listed here. Infact it has spoiled me. I really like being able to hit the “windows” key and it bring up the gnome menu and (this is the clincher) it shows all my currently open applications in that one window. The visibility in to quickly seeing all my apps with a screenshot (which normally updates in real time) has made it difficult to even try another UI. I tried Ubuntu’s Unity interface but I personally felt constrained; it lasted an hour before I made the move back to gnome3 (and Fedora. Yes I know you can run gnome3 in Ubuntu but there were a few other reasons I moved back to Fedora). The other major thing is the search feature, like you, I prefer not to move back and forth between keyboard and mouse. Thanks for this positive review on gnome3, I find it works very well for me.
Hi Ankur,
I don’t see why you should call it gnome bash. It’s precisely the same what you do, but from another perspective (i.e. why *I* don’t use gnome 3). Thanks for your post. It’s good to read why people think differently from me.
One of the most important things I find different between the us two, is our hands — you like to keep them on home row, I like to keep one of them on mouse. (You know, I browse and draw a lot). Just like putting your hand off the home row to grab mouse, the other way round is slow as well. IMHO DE can and should be designed well for both kinds of usage, not only one of them.
As for some of your comments — I can fire-up these apps in less then a minute in xfce too, because I have quick launchers in bottom panel (yes, I like having two panels) for my favourite apps. I didn’t find setting up my multiple e-mail accounts (including local mail) in claws hard either (it was rather straight forward wizard that did most of the thing for me). I can alt-f2 Terminal -x mc too. It even fills most of the “Terminal” word for me too.
Mathias Clasen reported that Gnome 3.8 will have right-click on desktop, so this difference will have become moot since Fedora 19. I can switch using alt-tab too, or super-tab to cycle windows of the same app. I won’t go through the rest, but they’re analogous and working too. Only, IMHO it does not matter much whether “Settings” are in user menu (top-right) or app menu (top-left) 😉
My point is, from my point of view, gnome 3 does not add anything that I cannot do in xfce 4.10, only does it differently in a way you like and I don’t. It works for non-tech people, IMHO because it’s simple and very window-centric.
I refer to it as “gnome bashing” because that’s what it is. The posts that I’ve read are hardly civil. If you use Quora, you’ll see that there’s a question that goes “What were the Gnome 3 team thinking when they redesigned Gnome to suck donkey balls?”. Need I say more?
Most DEs share functionality, like most Linux distributions. They are mostly different in the way they go about doing it that people like (and in turn the DE/distribution) and dislike (and in turn move to a different DE/distribution).
The interface is simple, but I fail to see how simplicity would restrict it’s usage to non-tech people. I’m fairly techy myself: if you see my posts, I spend most of my time on the terminal.
Gnome was not designed only for people that use the keyboard more. It might suits us a little more. The same keyboard short-cuts are available in all desktop environments as far as I know.
I doubt my father knows what the home row is. He still types using only his index fingers. I’m certain that he isn’t aware of all the keyboard-fu that I use. 🙂
“What were the Gnome 3 team thinking when they redesigned Gnome to suck donkey balls?” Yeah… That’s people behaving idiotic 😦 I always try to stay polite when trying to say what I think gnome’s (and other DEs FWIW) doing wrong. As for tech people — I wasn’t talking about them. I said gnome works good for non-tech people, but that does not say anything about tech people. I think in their case it depends more on their working behaviour. I tend to open lots of windows, have all my six workspaces filled with them. As many of them are similar (sometimes it’s a couple of terminals with another couple of tabs), gnome’s overview would be next to useless to me, and the alt-tab animations would slow things down unnecessarily.
PS: people who type with only two fingers tend to get less annoyed by slower switching between apps and tend to like animations more, IMHO. *I* really dislike animated UIs. For *me* they’re distracting and unnecessary slow. That’s part of the reason that while I use compositing manager on XFCE, I don’t use compiz, and part of the reason why I really dislike gnome shell (but there are more reasons than gnome shell for why I don’t use gnome 3). 😉
> “I doubt my father knows what the home row is. He still types using only his index fingers.”
Here’s even more contradictions:
– I also type (mostly) with my two index but I almost never use the mouse
– I’m fairly techy, but I hate being forced to choose when the defaults should be good enough
I don’t know where I fit in the usual “Power users vs newbies” debates, because I identify to both camps in different ways.
But then again, I love GNOME 3, so what do I know? 🙂
I’m enjoying Gnome Shell.
I may quibble with some of the design defaults (app “tray” icons in the bottom and built-in “tray” icons on top, why?), but there are extensions to address most of my complaints.
But what’s best is that it enables me to use my desktop the same way I have been web browsing for years. Hotkey, type a few letters, and select one of the matching items. Fast!
And with no advertisements!
Gnome 3 is pretty userfriendly. I think that it really needs an AppStore to relegate the old yum packages to the command line. It could also do with a few replacement window manager and task bars, so that people can swap in/out the bits of GUIs that they like/hate.
I’m not sure about the window manager and task bars part, but I think Richard Hughes is working on a new software manager application that you’d be interested in. Details here: https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Software Upstream, i.e., Richard uses Fedora. The discussions on the fedora desktop mailing list look encouraging http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2013-March/007788.html 🙂
You know that Alt+F2 and stuff you speak of comes by default in KDE with KRunner? And that you can set up powerful keyboard shortcuts? And Activities (which sound like just the right thing for a user like you!)?
You are hardly even using GNOME, you are in the terminal most of the time. That’s why you don’t understand the full extent of its crappiness. KDE, on the other hand, is brilliant and I’m sure it will improve your life as it has improved mine! I would highly recommend you try it.
Is it difficult to be civil? Instead of using derogatory terms like “crappiness”, you can simply say that it doesn’t work for you. Do you see me mentioning other DEs that I don’t use and going “this doesn’t work for me, it’s so crappy”? Another example of “gnome bashing”: your comment doesn’t even mention why Gnome3 is “crappy”. Not one example.
Yes. I have used KDE and the rest. Gnome3 works much better with my work-flow. If you’re going to spread the word about things you like by pulling down other options, you Sir, are doing it wrong. Your comment pulls down Gnome3 and says nothing about why KDE suits you, other than “is brilliant”. You haven’t mentioned why Gnome3 doesn’t work for you, or why KDE does! What’s the point of your comment? Noise?
Gnome3 is brilliant in my book.
I know that alt f2 etc comes by default in most DEs. I hope you know that it’s been around since Gnome2. If you read the other comments, I’ve mentioned that the basic functionality provided by all DEs is mostly similar. Question: if features from the other DEs are present in Gnome3, why should I shift in the first place?
I hope you post more constructive comments in the future. This one was noise, like I said earlier, quite like most of the other “gnome bashing” posts.
You recommendation that “Gnome3 is crappy, try KDE” is based on zero information, and I hope you’ll understand why I ignore it.
Only reason I didn’t like gnome3 was because it was full of bugs and had a high resource usage, *some* of the bugs appear to have been corrected and resource usage seems to have been improved so I guess I’ll I give it another try someday.
I use GNOME 3 for my main workstation because I’ve used Fedora in a lot of client deployments, and am, I suppose, rather invested in Fedora as a platform. In general, I do my daily work on the current release (though I’ve learned the hard way to wait 30-60 days before doing so). There are a few things I really like about GNOME 3 (I use multiple desktops to run servers in VMs, but I _don’t_ run them headless, and having a live preview when I hit Super is _very_ handy), but I have some very serious concerns as well.
The most serious real-work, day-to-day concern is about Extensions. The Extension API is INCREDIBLY brittle, and breaks constantly for pretty lousy reasons. Also, it’s been quite some time now, and trying to say that Extensions, as a technology, are still “BETA” is getting a little stale. The extension developers are sick of hearing it, and sick of constantly fixing things.
Worse, there are a number of discussions that increasingly seem to indicate the GNOME team is not happy about “just anybody” writing extensions. I can’t honestly tell how much of that is about non-gnome extension sites and how much of it is people complaining that extensions shouldn’t even be allowed unless they are written by the GNOME team, but there is DEFINITELY a large amount of both.
Even if Extensions are allowed, there is a very clear, strong push to make the “Top Panel” (can we still call it that?) OFF-LIMITS to extensions:
“One particular issue is the ability for users to modify the top bar via extensions. This part of the UI is vital for giving GNOME 3 a distinctive visual appearance. If we do have extensions, I would very much like to see the top bar made out of bounds for extension writers, therefore. We have to have at least *something* that remains consistent.”
–Alan Day, as quoted in “Rotting in Threes”
The problem is… well, take a look at the top bar. What does it DO?
On the left, we have the Activities menu. Except that it’s not a menu, and you’ll probably switch to the whatever-they-call-it view as soon as you get the mouse near it. Okay, whatever; that’s GNOME 3. One to the right, it says “Firefox” at the moment for me, because I have Firefox open, as I can verify by… the… fact that I’m staring at Firefox. Which has its own menu, at the top of its window. I… still don’t understand why that’s in the top bar, actually. Can we do anything with it? The only entry I ever see is “Quit”. Anyway, it changes to whatever app is open. OK… so far, questionable use of real estate, but whatever.
In the middle we have a clock, and it is good, for it tells me I should’ve been in bed hours ago. However, it is also centered, and I think this causes quite a number of layout issues for Extensions. So my guess is that there are some headaches there, that might be part of the (unvoiced) resistance to allowing Extensions in the top bar. However, speaking as a professional software developer, that’s a cop-out and can be disregarded.
Finally, that brings us to the right, the status area. I think. I don’t know, because I can never seem to find design docs for GNOME that are current. But it seems to be the status area. Distinct, mind you, from the notification area. That is indeed a GNOME-has-a-different-way-of-doing-that thing vs. Windows, and that’s fine. That’s UX design, and fine. Except that it’s already inconsistent, because a flash drive yank gives me a notification at the bottom, while a network connectivity loss changes the icon at the top, but whatever.
So the two useful chunks of the top bar are the clock and the status area, both of which allow you to view changing information relative to the operation of your system.
Now, the amount of crap that jammed in there has been kept to a minimum for a damned good reason: everybody’s seen how much crap winds up in a typical Windows XP “system tray”, especially if you had the misfortune to actually install your motherboard vendor’s “Driver CD” (*COUGH*). The compromise set– “What time is it? Do I have a network connection? Is this going to be really loud? Who’s logged into this thing, anyway?”– seems pretty reasonable.
The problem is that users often have other information that is MUCH more important than any of that which they need to see at ALL TIMES. The best example I can come up with, and it happens to be one I have, is network traffic rates monitoring for users with metered connections such as cellular tethering.
Cellular plans are almost always capped, and usually capped pretty tightly. A rudely-coded web page using your system to rotate hidden DIV advertisements in the background (WAY more common than you’d think) can easily nuke a hundred megabytes while you’re having coffee. Having an extension to keep an eye on this sort of thing is REALLY important, because cellular overages can quickly run into the hundreds of dollars.
I used to have an extension to this. But it’s broken. Again. And this time, the other has apparently gotten sick of maintaining it.
Now, I could probably fix the damn thing, but the evidence indicates the GNOME team will shortly be breaking my ability to even PUT an extension in the top bar, which leaves an interesting question:
…where the hell else would it go?
Meanwhile, the allusions to eventually just scrapping support for Extensions altogether, no matter how background the discussion, throws some serious cold water on all the people who might otherwise want to write them.
So, what gives? I don’t get it. Extensions were written in JavaScript so they’d be easy for just about anybody to write… except, now they don’t want “just anybody” (actual quote) writing them? And if they do, they don’t want them to display status… in the status area…?
Maybe the argument is that GNOME is fighting user distraction. Let’s see how that plays out.
Well, the general argument against the “desktop metaphor” is that people don’t really use it (and, I’d argue, rarely EVER used it) the way it was kind of intended to be used.
Now, I used real COE/HPUX X-Windows workstations back when they were very minimalist, and let me tell you, arbitrary layout was damned handy. You’d rarely maximize a window; usually you had a bunch of terminals up and whatever you were testing. Multiple workspaces got used a lot. Window decorations got used constantly. The Window Manager had almost nothing on the screen; usually just a workspace switcher and maybe some kind of crude task bar, usually a way to log out. If you wanted a clock, you ran xclock, stretched it to fit whatever space was handy, and that was that.
DEVELOPERS use machines that way. ADMINS use machines that way. But USERS tended, ever then, to just maximize whatever they were dealing with, and go hunting for other windows as they– very occasionally– needed them. In a day and age of maximized web browsers, this has only been reinforced: browsers evolved _TABBED_ browsing, not _MDI_ browsing. (Remember MDI? Sort of a hierarchical desktop-within-your-window thing?)
So, okay. Maximized, or at least half-docked. (I *love* half-dock-to-edge. Anything that doesn’t support it started earning my wrath the day after I first used it.) Minimal distractions. No crap you don’t need.
Well, if that’s the case… why all the resistance to an option that autohides the top bar? I’m on a monitor at the moment that’s one of these intermediate-size jobs, super-wide but only 900 rows. If I can’t run my extensions anyway, I’d really rather have the vertical height back.
The answer, as the team has confirmed, is branding. They want people to know what they’re looking at, when they look at it.
Branding is not all bad. As someone who maintains a LOT of different Linux versions, I appreciate being able to tell what in the hell I’m walking up to. But the problem is, five seconds later I’m actually _working on the thing_, and then I need a functional desktop.
GNOME 3 wants a strong and consistent “brand” that emphasizes a “clean” user experience. Note that I did not say “intuitive” (some of it is, some of it isn’t) or “powerful”. I might accept “efficient”, but only for the things it actually does.
The basic conflict, as I see it, comes down to two things:
1. Solutions that current get real, heavy-duty work done usually look like shit, and there’s no point in branding them because everybody will just reconfigure them to hell anyway.
2. GNOME 3 looks great, and it is clearly and obviously GNOME 3 at all times, anywhere, but manages this by being actively antagonistic to the needs of “power users”, to the point where it’s so one-size-fits-all that it’s hard to consider it business grade software, let alone enterprise grade.
Very few things a GNOME 3 “power user” would do are actually officially supported, and many are unlikely to work after a version upgrade.
I actually do have a solution to the mess to suggest. Apparently “Fallback Mode” is being replaced with a sort of “Classic Mode” (which is and isn’t classic, but whatever). I would suggest that GNOME 3 support *three* modes:
1. Classic Mode
2. Standard Mode – Limited extensions allowed, no extensions in top bar
3. Power/Enhanced/Bespoke Mode – Extensions allowed, including in the top bar; limited “theme” support.
I actually tentatively agree with dropping themeing. I wince when I write that, but I don’t remember very many window managers where themeing really worked right, and I don’t remember _any_ where ALL of the stock themes worked. (FVWM, Enlightenment, etc.) But I think letting people tweak colors, font sizes, and enable/disable window decorations is pretty reasonable.
Branding, usability, and power: pick any two, it seems.
Actually, regarding that last line in my prior post, here are my takes on some combinations that have been tried, where the products seem to have hit their apparent selections:
Desktop:
Branding and Usability: MacOS; OSX: Mountain Lion
Branding and Power: Fedora GNOME 2; arguably Windows XP
Usability and Power: Windows 7; OSX: Snow Leopard
Branding and Even More Branding: Windows 8
Usability and Even More Usability: GNOME 3
Power and Even More Power: Scientific Linux running LXDE
Tablets / Mobile:
Branding and Usability: iOS 6.x (maps fiasco)
Branding and Power: Blackberry (for its day)
Usability and Power: Android
Branding and Even More Branding: Windows CE (to make up for 500 platform name / device class target changes)
Usability and Even More Usability: iOS at introduction (native Google maps)
Power and Even More Power: probably *NOBODY* yet; maybe various high-end RTOS
What does everybody else think? I’d be curious to see your nominees.
Cheers,
Matt
In f18 the bluetooth setup is broken. Ubuntu 12.10, 13.04 it works. It is related some gnome. I am able to see sucessful initiation in dmesg.
Could be. Please file a bug at http://bugzilla.redhat.com Also try F19 if it’s better?
I installed fedora to use a tested gnome shell version.. ubuntu gnome edition is less stable.. ubuntu 13.04 was fast but stopped booting after using sometime.
I’m a big fan of Gnome 3 as well. I left Windows for a really petty reason- I have a nice Creative MP3 player with a big hard drive and really great battery life that I was still using, and when I switched to Windows 7, it no longer worked. I found that Linux had Gnomad2 that would let me keep using the thing, so I put it in a virtual machine, and went on with life. Eventually, I got sick and tired of Windows because of (believe it or not) the Windows 7 GUI, which keeps randomly hiding windows on the taskbar and/or refusing to reopen them without using alt-tab or windows-tab when I am using my CAD system at work.
So, I started with Ubuntu on my laptop, and had a lot of trouble with the x-server- not sure why, it was just always a problem that required fiddling around, and I’m really tired of always tweaking stuff- it was fun for a while, but I’ve been using computers my whole life, and the thrill of some new hard-won eye candy is gone. So I tried Mint with Cinnamon- and I didn’t like Cinnamon *because* it looked like the same Windows interface that annoys me all day at work. It was also a constant project to keep it working, so I decided to try Fedora- that was a petty rejection as well- truth be told, it worked fine, but I didn’t like the old-school serif fonts and didn’t care to spend a lot of time messing around to figure out where they thought the option to change it should be.
After about a year of testing all the options, I found openSUSE with the Gnome 3 desktop. I didn’t like the desktop much at first- everything slid around and the buttons look kind of cartoonish- but I love the openSUSE YaST tool, zypper and one-click install (perhaps the best thing ever), so I stuck it out. After about three weeks, I wouldn’t trade Gnome 3 for anything.
Part of my job is IT support- I am mainly a CAD designer, but it evolved over time to include maintaining the workstations and servers at my company, and I have to deal with complaints about Windows all day long. Then I’d come home, and have to deal with the same complaints from my wife and kids- so I switched the eight computers in my home over to openSUSE with Gnome 3, and after a couple of days, I have not had a single computer complaint at home in more than six months- it’s unspeakably wonderful. It was easy to teach them, fast to set up (just placing favorites on the sidebar) and it works great- especially with Lenovo thinkpad keyboards, where you can set the page up/down keys that straddle the directional pad to switch desktops. One of the huge features was that it’s hard to make desktop shortcuts- if you’ve ever done support work, you know that way too many people will assume that the shortcut is the program, and if it’s not there, they freak out- so you have to be some kind of Rainman to keep track of where everyone in the company expects to see “that one thing I always click to do that.” With the sidebar and the friendly icons in Gnome 3, that’s largely eliminated, because the thing they always click is easy to see. and not hidden in some special spot nestled somewhere on their desktop image.
I’ve heard it said that Gnome 3 is awful because it’s not as easy to customize. That’s probably true, but I just don’t care. Ubuntu was ok when it worked- after I installed a bunch of stuff like Compiz and other add-ons to make it look like something I wanted to see- but those same add-ons made it unstable while making it look spiffy. I love Gnome 3 because I don’t feel any need to customize it- it feels custom out of the box, and works great for how I use it (usually four desktops- Chrome, Thunderbird, Amarok and Skype) with the first used with multiple windows for viewing .pdfs and other documents. Sometimes I add Vidalia if I am working remotely and need Solidworks) It’s fast, smooth, and looks clean- I don’t actually want anything more than that. Truth be told, I don’t even change my wallpaper anymore, because the GUI allows me to work without going back to the desktop, so I never see it anyway.
It seems like most of the other contenders are Windows clones to me, and if you like that, that’s great- that’s why there is more than one choice. But I was looking for something new and different that fit the way I use it, and that happened to be Gnome 3 for me. It’s been about two years since I started switching over, and there are no longer any copies of Windows in my home, and everyone is happier for it (though I sometimes consider setting up a virtual machine on my desktop for gaming- sometimes a guy just needs to blow up a virtual super-mutant or steal a cop car and go on a rampage after work, and Linux is not so great for that.)
So, I don’t care to waste a lot of time hating the other desktops- if you like them, they’re there to use, and easy to change. I just thought I’d take a little time to defend the one that I really like- not despite the changes that the developers made since Gnome 2, but because of them. Personally, I’d like to see it thrive, and have the opportunity to see where they take it from here- there are plenty of Windows variants already, and it seems fair enough to let Gnome do it’s own thing for those of us who want something a little different than the same old start menu->folder->sub-folder coupled with dozens of icons on the desktop paradigm.
Just my two cents.