[Discuss] Gnome Shell

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 06/28/2012 10:15 AM, Bill Cattey wrote:
> I too have found Gnome 3 to be primarily a design based on some simplification dogma uninformed
> by usability experience or testing.
>
> The most glaring example of this is how the panel was "simplified" away, and replaced by the horrendous behavior of, "have your thinking disrupted as all windows move on the screen when you overshoot your intended mouse move into the title bar."  That behavior cannot be turned off, but with a third party extension, can be shifted from the upper left corner to the upper right corner, and thereby make it only an occasional, rather than a constant annoyance.
>
> I tried to keep an open mind.  I've used different desktop interfaces for more than 20 years, and have discovered several that seemed problematic initially, but showed value over time.  The more I used Gnome 3, the more I've come to believe, "They've got it completely wrong and I need to get it off my computer."
>
> -Bill Cattey
> Veteran of Unix Wars since Version 7.
> Veteran of Toolkit Wars since Xlib.
>
> On Jun 28, 2012, at 7:40 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>
>> When Gnome 3 came out, I was a bit disappointed, but I was able to
>> obtain some really cool extensions from Finnbarr Murphy.  There
>> extensions allowed me to customize Gnome 3 to add things like a shutdown
>> command on the menu, and a few other nice things. Unfortunately the
>> Gnome developers have made the API a moving target. Every release of
>> Gnome 3 has required significant changes to the Javascript extensions.
>> And even FinnBarr is giving up. He has a very nice page on the
>> architecture. If you look at his latest blog: http://blog.fpmurphy.com/,
>> --
>> "Fairly major changes were required to make it work with GNOME 3.4. I do
>> wish that the GNOME developers, most of whom appear to be young with
>> little real practical world experience and who do not seem to understand
>> the business need to preserve backwards compatability, would stop
>> randomly changing APIs and functionality for no good reason. For
>> example, Jasper St. Pierre removed support for tooltips in GNOME 3.4 in
>> February 2012. See GNOME Bug 670034. His excuse:
>>
>> StTooltip has been plagued by lots of issues, and we recently ditched it
>> in the dash. Remove it for good.
>>
>> As a result, many of my GNOME Shell extensions require major rework to
>> work with GNOME Shell 3.4. No consultation with end users, no attempt to
>> fix the problems, no marking interfaces as deprecated for a release or
>> two. Just remove the facility and let consumers of the facility rework
>> their code. No wonder the GNOME Shell designers and developers are
>> getting such a bad rap. By the way, look at the Cinnamon codebase, they
>> fixed tooltips so that they work correctly.
>>
>> This is the last release of the GNOME Shell that I will be releasing my
>> extensions on. I simply do not have the time or inclination to rework my
>> codebase everytime a young and usually inexperienced (in terms of years
>> of software development) developer that is a member of the GNOME Shell
>> cabel decides to reinvent facilities for no particularly good reason."
>> --
>>
>> Basically in my 40 years as a software developer, I have always
>> respected backward compatibility. In the Digital Unix group they would
>> stand us up before a firing squad if we even suggested to break
>> backwards compatibility. (I got away with it once because of standards
>> compliance). I can certainly empathize with Finnbarr (who BTW has spoken
>> at the BLU a few times).
>>
>> In my own case, that means If I want to keep using these extensions, I
>> will either have to maintain them myself or maybe switch to KDE.
>>
>
>
There are some features of Gnome 3 I liked and with a few Gnome
extensions I was able to customize it to where it worked for me, but the
issue is that the customizations I stole from Finnbarr had to be
re-engineered every release. I was a long time KDE user and at one point
I didn't like the way it was going. I was never a big icon on the
desktop person. I like pinning things to the task bar or panel. My
desktop is always cluttered with windows and such that I don't see the
icons.

The 3 major issues I see with the Gnome team is:
1. The failed to migrate features from Gnome 2 making Gnome 3 look
radically different.
2. They made their API a moving target, alienating developers.
3. They are introspective and are not connected to the user base.

I found that Ubuntu's Unity sucked even worse.

So, where is the future for Gnome. Is the Gnome team going to get it and
clean up their act. Are the major distros going to push back and either
go back to Gnome 2, or is more support going to go to KDE. I don't know.
At least all I have to do is tell Fedora that I want to use KDE.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id:3BC1EB90 
PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90