[Klug-general] Gnome3

[James Morris]

On 7 April 2011 09:42, David Halliday <david.halliday at gmail.com> wrote:
> I still think that people should give the new Gnome shell a go, try and use
> it for something productive to see how they get on with it. I tried it out
> briefly and I did like some of the changes and thought there were some good
> ideas in it.
> I do like the new ideas (Innovation is good even if the new ideas
> aren't immediately beneficial). It's worth trying it out just to see what
> parts of it ARE good/interesting as with anything technical, understanding
> something that you ultimately decide to be a bad way of working is still
> getting a good understanding of what (in your opinion) is a bad way of
> working and why it isn't appropriate to your future projects.
> I gave it a try, it is very different especially in comparison to those
> people who are evilwm users. Some things of it I liked, the only feature
> that put me off was a privacy issue of tiling the windows to select which
> one to switch to. While this is very useful, not always good when working on
> something and your significant other comes over and asks you to look
> something up and you have just minimised the window containing
> their birthday present.

Here's a slapdash report on my experiences of Gnome3. Note that it's
tainted by the fact I'm using a distro like (like? it is!) Arch Linux
rather than a more user^d^d^d^d newbie friendly distro like Ubuntu.

I began following the instructions on the ArchWiki for Gnome3. It
involved using the testing repository for Arch Linux - just a matter
of uncommenting a couple of lines in the /etc/pacman.conf file. I went
on to install gnome3 and gnome3-extras via pacman (Arch's package
manager) while simultaneously updating system components due to the
switch to Testing.

To use GDM instead of Slim, /etc/inittab required a minor edit
(uncomment one line, comment out another).

The information to take these steps easily found on the Arch Wiki via
a certain monopolistic search engine.

Due to slackly configured NVIDIA GFX card (op at fault), my first
experience of gnome3 was in 'fallback' mode. Ie something akin to
gnome2. It didn't seem too bad, however I wanted to see the full
gnome3 shell.

I'd read on one of the reviews that Gnome Shell needs GFX hardware
acceleration so I downloaded the NVIDIA driver for my card direct from
the upstream NVIDIA website. Installed it, but due to problems I can't
remember, Xorg wasn't having it. After various dead ends I decided to
follow the instructions on the Arch Wiki and use the recommended
packages to handle the NVIDIA drivers.

Unfortunately my existing installation of NVIDIA drivers caused the
install to abort. It took a while to locate the information telling me
how to uninstall the NVIDIA driver ( sudo
./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.44.run --uninstall ). The Arch NVIDIA
packages then successfully installed.

Gnome3 Shell now runs successfully.

I'm used to window managers/desktop environments where I can
right-click on the desktop and get an applications menu. Starting a
new application in Gnome 3 is rather cumbersome involving mouse
movements that span the entire width and half the height of the
display (1650x1080). You start by moving the mouse to the activities
doodad on the top-panel. All the windows shrink and the background
darkens. At first this happens very smoothly, but after ten minutes or
so (perhaps) it is very jerky.

The display of application icons is severely let down by applications
using pixel based icons (as opposed to vector graphics based icons -
ie SVG) due to the icons being so large.

Something that has long bugged me about Gnome is their insistence I
should only be able to maximise a window both horizontally and
vertically at the same time. Guess who frequently wants to choose
between maximizing only horizontally or only vertically.

They have made some kind of acknowledgement that this kind of
maximization is useful. A window can be moved to the far right or far
left of the screen and a tinted box appears on the desktop showing an
outline of how the window would appear maximized vertically only. The
window could also be moved to the top to be maximized horizontally.
The feature might be useful except when the window is moved it loses
the maximized quality.

The Arch Wiki also mentions Gnome Shell Extensions most of which are
experimental and not available in the official Arch Testing packages
but only via the Arch User Repository (AUR) (which downloads the
source code from a git repository). I installed these and using them
required a logout/login.

Pressing ALT+F2 brings up a run command dialog. Typing lg brings up
'looking glass' - GNOME Shell's integrated debugger and inspector
tool. I used it to check the extensions were installed.

One of the extensions brings up the same dock-panel that appears when
you move the mouse over to Activities, but this time its smaller and
on the right. I think favourites or frequently used applications
appear there. Maybe, iconized windows, I'm not quite sure.

Another extension provides nice thumbnails of the application windows
when ALT-tabbing.

There are other extensions providing additional items in the status
menu such as... power off. Another extension allows keyboard binding
to window movements or something. And another does something else.

My initial response to the visual properties of Gnome3 (back up in
this thread) of 'it looks hideous' was an over-knee jerk-reaction. I
do think the theme works really well (despite the whiteness) on the
file manager for instance. The window decorations are too over sized
though. One of the extensions was supposed to deal with user themes in
some manner but I've not figured out how to access it. There isn't yet
a decent selection of user themes (that I found on gnome-look.org at
least) anyway.

As some sort of conclusion I can note that my time spent using Gnome3
has been considerably greater than that spent using KDE4.6, and that I
spent more time in Gnome3 using software to do things than just
playing around wasting time.