GNOME 3: The Future of the Desktop | Hacker News Reader

GNOME 3: The Future of the Desktop

linux.com

63 pointsobsaysditto96 comments

"This desktop will change the way people view, work with, and think of the desktop."

I don't want to be a hater, and especially I don't want to disrespect the developers and designers who have put heart and soul in this and probably created some awesome stuff. But hyperbole like this example, and sprinkled elsewhere in the article, really gets my hackles up. I start looking at the pictures skeptically and my inner troll starts growling.

I read that article three times to be sure, and there isn't a damn thing in it I haven't seen at least twice (and for most things, more) in the open source world since about 2005. Including "activity-centric" interface. (Not counting shrinking the desktop so you can put the menu up without covering anything, but "meh".)

Personally my opinion is that until something fundamental changes in the IO devices or the intelligence level of the thing reading the IO devices, we've long since grabbed the low-hanging fruit and quite a bit of the not-so-low-hanging fruit. And most of the changes I see proposed for IO changes are steps back, not forward. (Like a "true 3D desktop", which is a recipe for getting the user lost in new and exciting ways, not wonderful new interface empowerment.) We've grunted what we can grunt in our point & grunt interfaces, we need either real words or more real language.

(Since people may not know this: When I say "point & grunt", it is not intended as a derogatory term per se. What it is intended to illustrate is that the rate at which we can communicate information with a computer is very limited. Point at your computer screen and pretend your finger is the mouse cursor. You can point at anything you want on the screen. Now, you have 1, 2, 3, or at any rate a small number of mouse buttons. That is, you have a grunt, and a different grunt, and on those sophisticated verbose UNIX systems, a third type of grunt, the point being that your mouse click doesn't carry all that much information. Information in the information-theoretic sense; at full blast, I'm lucky to get 10 bits a second into my computer. Try communicating with your coworkers that way all day, and you'll grow to appreciate the limitations. Computers get a lot of out it since we've had decades to learn how to cleverly prompt the user's grunts in such a way to get the most information out of it, but there's just so much we can pull, no matter how clever we are with our menus and UIs, from pointing & grunting.)

Speaking of point & grunt, bear in mind that in the early '70s Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg were building by testing it in the Palo Alto schools. Now we grown-ups have adopted a paradigm which designed to be understood by young children.

(Though when I go back and reread Kay on this, I'm actually struck by the incredible sophistication he expected of the 12-year-olds, far from "point-and-grunt".)

The writer of the article is definitely not doing the devs any favors with his over-glowing purple prose. No desktop can live up to that level of hyperbole. Even worse than the bad writing is that there's no way to enlarge those darn screenshots so you can actually see something! Arghh!

there's no way to enlarge those darn screenshots so you can actually see something!

Actually there is because they are full-resolution images displayed at less than their true resolution (one of my pet peeves):

Firefox: right-click -> "View Image"

Chrome: right-click -> "Open Image in New Tab"

Edit: I now see this comment made multiple times below before the parent comment.

The old desktop metaphor? Gone. Except for the 50 times I refer to it here.

It's kind of engrained at this point. How are you going to refer to a piece of information other than a 'file' or 'document'? If you don't call it a 'desktop' when trying to explain it to people, will they really understand what you're talking about? You have to draw parallels to what people already know.

Seems like they're just keeping up with the level of hyperbole that comes out their competitors. (see: Apple)

I really don't hope that is the future of the desktop. I mean really? Is that what we have to look forward to?

In my world there can be no talk about the future of the desktop unless:

The desktop metaphor and the current filesystem disappears.

My machine starts to monitor what I do and actually use this (The Ghost Protocol)

The machine starts to connect everything I do and build contextual maps automatically. For instance, I receive a picture in my mail and throw it into photoshop. When I then want to retrieve it I can not only look for name.psd but also for the context (Phil send it to me by mail)

Then we can talk about a the future of the desktop.

Why is everyone interested in the filesystem going away? As long as users posses more than 20 files, organizing them is helpful.

Notice one of the most requested features on the Kindle was folders for the user interface. The result they gave us isn't folders, and the actual filesystem is abstracted, but it's effectively the same.

A few other commenters have explained it pretty well, but I think the main problem is that things get lost way too easily. Most filesystems are just way too vast and even the strictest user will eventually end up misplacing a few files. And when that happens, it sucks.

I think the solution is not to destroy the concepts of files and folders, but to become increasingly dependent on tagging and context-sensitive searches. Most DEs have shifted to this approach; there's Spotlight in OS X, whatever that search on the start menu is called in Win7, and various daemons/systems in Linux (Beagle, Nepomuk, etc.). There are third-party utilities too, like Google Desktop Search. As those things improve, and as we see more work to narrow the filesystem concept to only things that are usable to the user and allow automatic tagging of content, usability issues will go away.

The majority do not understand file systems, that is why. What do you NOT understand about this? Why do people keep making this comment.

I like file systems, I understand them, but I used to program dos interrupts, and actually reading sectors of the drive. But I can understand filesystems, a lot of people don't.

What people want is an all their photos grouped together, all the vides grouped together, all their documents together. They don't understand the different between the desktop, user folder, trash can etc...

So when I want to attach something to an email, I have to go to the app for whatever kind of data it is and find the "share" button, which will be in a different place for each app, if it's even there at all. Ditto if I want to copy it to a USB stick, add it to my Dropbox, upload it to a website, etc.

The fundamental ideas behind a filesystem, packaging all data in a generic container and allowing arbitrary grouping of the containers, are extremely straightforward and intuitive, not to mention incredibly useful.

What throws people for a loop is having to share their filesystem with magic invisible gremlins that leave inscrutable files all over the place. Most filesystems come pre-loaded with mountains of this junk, which the user is made keenly aware of when they are banished to some small niche directory. But the gremlins won't even stay out of the niche; they are constantly creating folders and dumping mysterious config files there, behind the user's back.

The solution to this problem is clear and simple. A filesystem, from the user's perspective, should be empty when it comes out of the box, or at most contain a few items that the user knows exactly what they are. From then and forever, nothing should ever appear in the filesystem except what the user explicitly put there. The user is free to create, move, copy, rename or delete any file without unexpected side-effects.

It seems obvious to me that filesystems should work this way and there would be no big usability issue if they did. The problem is, we have all this old baggage attached to the filesystem, both conceptually and practically, and we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I think you've hit on why so many users keep everything on the desktop. They can have files and folders there (which most people CAN understand, by the way) but they don't have to deal with or see the rest of the file system (which they will inevitably stumble into pretty quickly using Explorer (or whatever file navigator app).

They either stumble out of the Desktop or get lost in the pollution. They download a photo and edit it in Power Goo. When they want to find it again, do they look in Desktop, Desktop\Downloads, Desktop\My Pictures, Desktop\My Documents, Desktop\My Documents\Power Goo, etc?

I think you are missing the fundamental point here.

The current file systems whether MS or OSX isn't made for the amount of files that the average person deals with today.

A better system would be to allow you to search on multiple axis. But more importantly a better system would follow what you are attempting to do and limit the option space quite significantly.

WHen you want to share something, it will ask you what type of file you want to share, you pick photo, then select from the list, which you can filter in a number of different ways.

You could filter by name, date, who is in it.

So you need special case code to handle each and every data type, even when you're just going to flatten it into an opaque blob in every case? And there would be a PDF store, and a Powerpoint store, and a Ruby script store, and an NES emulator saved game store, each with it's own completely independent API?

No, this is ludicrous and backwards, for so many reasons. Obviously you want some sort of generic data interchange layer, and voila: filesystem.

I can imagine a filesystem far more sophisticated than what we have today, with metadata, indexing, content handlers, searching, filtering, and so on. But the essential foundation for all of this is a generic package for user data.

The web is fundamentally a bunch of files.

Would you rather browse around the net in hierarchies or use google to find the files.

File systems like those we have today are fine when you don't have a lot of content. But it simply fails as a design system as soon as we move into terabytes of data.

Why do you think that Spotlight and QuickSilver are so popular on the mac?

We're not talking about the web, we're talking about the user's stuff. Entirely distinct, for the purposes of usability. Anyway, a good filesystem supports fast search and filter, in addition to folders.

Without files, you have no web and no general search. Instead you have photo-net, music-net, video-net, text-net, all orthogonal. Lame.

Slightly OT, but what I really want in userspace is something that is good at searching/setting extended attributes for media files. I like my Artist/Album/Song dir structure and all, but it falls flat for some types of music, and I want to be able to search and group my movies by director or actor.

Add another entry to the "start learning what you need to to implement this" list, I guess.

I have never actually seen any computer user, however incompetent, who has not organized his files in some sort of directory hierarchy.

Sounds like iPhoto and iTunes. Doesn't really pass the porn test, though.

Your point about the system watching what you do and doing something useful with that information reminded me of some work a few years back by Nat Friedman on "Dashboard" that had me pretty excited at the time: http://nat.org/dashboard/

It was a shame to not actually see that go anywhere other than the prototype stage.

That sure is a shame as it seems like it would be pretty useful.

There need to be more thinking going into non-interaction. Actually having to interact with the computer as much as we do about the things we do, surely can't be the goal in itself.

I want my machine to make plenty of choices for me and present me with information not have me do it manually. I think that is what pisses me off the most right now.

There is something wrong and primitive about normal human beings still having to interact with their machines to get proper information.

This idea is something I've talked about many times with various people. Even posted about it on stackoverflow and blogged about it once. Computers are better at boring and mundane maintenance tasks than we are - so they should do them. Users shouldn't have to think about such low level concepts as filesystems, directory structures, saving files and so on. It should be managed behind the scenes.

I think anything beyond the simplest of automatic organization schemes will end up being confusing. I like to organize my files the way I want them organized. I can probably deal with all my pictures showing up under "My Pictures" but if it starts to try to do something like classify my documents by content it's going to depart from what I think "makes sense" pretty quickly.

"My machine starts to monitor what I do and actually use this (The Ghost Protocol)"

Yeah, the last time they tried this it was called Clippy.

Take a look at Zeitgeist and GNOME Activity Journal, which haven't been accepted as modules into GNOME 3.0, but are already usable and will almost certainly be part of the 3.x series in the next few releases.

http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist http://live.gnome.org/GnomeActivityJournal

It does seem like there will be some tentative steps in this direction. But I agree we need to see more - I like your idea of a content-neutral tagging agent that draws inferences based on my use patterns rather than a committee's agreed use cases.

The OLPC's Activity metaphor is basically taking over and, having always loathed desktops and never understood why my computer must simulate a desktop (with all the clutter that implies), I like it.

It's not just GNOME: iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are at their heart the same as activities (the Android API even uses com.android.Activity as the base class for Android apps).

Yes, it struck me that this looks like a desktop version of Android...obviously tweaked to take advantage of the extremely larger screen and available resources.

I am a Gnome user and I am not at all impressed, I liked Gnome because there was 1 way to do a certain task, now they gone the windows way of being able to do the task at many places, that is confusing and complicated. Gnome was simple but complete, but I guess fashion is more important than satisfied users, just like windows and OSX. I am not looking forward to the next fad.

Anybody knows a simple and consistant and complete desktop that I can use when Gnome got screwed?

B.T.W. I expect negative mod points for being viewed as nagger, but it is how I feel about this Gnome route.

Try xfce. It's based on GNOME technologies but is leaner and more minimal. It's often used for low spec machines but is great if you just want a super fast desktop environment that's not too alien/weird.

It's built on GTK+ but doesn't depend on GNOME.

Xfce is where I am now thanks to KDE4. If KDE4 and GNOME3 are big boosts to Xfce, I hope Linux desktop developers take the right lesson from that. If they want to keep "revolutionizing" things, they had better give us a good reason to put up with the learning curve and the sudden nosedive in usability and polish.

  > It's built on GTK+ but doesn't depend on GNOME.

IIRC, it still uses gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager, etc. Lots of the GNOME background processes are in use, unless they've recently weaned themselves...

Even though the simplicity was gnome's mantra, I think xfce did a better job of it ironically.

gnome-shell is just a window manager which replaces metacity. You can continue using GNOME with another window manager. I personally use xmonad with GNOME and won't trade it for anything else.

Workspaces are such an obviously great idea that it astounds me that Windows and Mac OS X still don't have them (I guess Mac OS X has a functional equivalent as of Leopard or Snow Leopard, if you squint right, but I find it less intuitive and I use it less even after months of having it available on my hackintosh). Given that they've been a part of X Windows window managers for a couple of decades, it's just astonishing that they've never made an appearance as a standard feature of other windowing systems.

This, of course, isn't a new feature in GNOME 3, and so I guess it's not really relevant, but I just felt like ranting about the one thing that I think the Linux desktop has always had such a clear lead on, and that until you've used it you don't even know how much it sucks to not have it.

I haven't used GNOME 3 but it sounds like OSX's Spaces are a bit more usable at this point. This article talks about dragging icons around to move applications between spaces -- in OSX you can just drag the window itself independent of the application so you could have a Numbers spreadsheet in Space 1 and another in Space 2. It's based on the window not the application though you can statically bind certain applications to their own space if that works better. Multiple monitor support is nice too. I think I remember using that in GNOME 2 though so I'm sure 3 will support it too.

I don't find Spaces to be more usable, I find them clunky and confusing...but I have a dozen years worth of habits on Linux desktops which may be working against me. Honestly, though, I find a lot of Mac OS X and Apple interfaces clunky and confusing (and I generally have horrible things happen when I try to use them, like deleting my whole music collection when trying to use iTunes to put stuff on an iPod; iPhones also confuse the heck out of me). I've often referred to myself as "Appletarded" because I don't think I think like a normal person at this point, when it comes to interacting with technology. Apparently, many people find Mac OS X intuitive and easy to use...I find it really difficult to do anything beyond just using applications at a very basic level, and even that is often filled with frustration due to all the magic incantations you have to just know to do things (no right mouse button, so to get a context menu, you gotta know the key combo or how to use the magic mouse pad to create a right click event).

I'm basically the definitive "doesn't like Macs" user. Mac OS X is moderately better than Windows, but only by a smidgen, in my estimation, and it's certainly not a great UNIX. So, take my rants with a grain of salt.

It's not obvious that they are a good idea in general. One pretty bad issue is that if you don't know about work spaces, then hitting Ctrl-Arrow will have the effect that everything vanishes with no obvious way to get it back.

It's also not clear to me that they actually make people more productive even if they are aware of them and understand them. Of course many nerds feel they are being more productive, but that only indicates that if you wish to sell to nerds, you should include them at least as an option.

I know it's anecdotal, but workspaces make me _much_ more productive. I use awesomewm and it's very fast to be able to keep everything up and active and just switch over to a screen dedicated to web, email, IM, or the rest of my screens which usually have different clients' projects up for easy and quick access, and makes switching tasks much easier. It doesn't clutter anything to have all this up at once; no task bar clutter, no window clutter.

If someone knows how to use workspaces and has cause for more than one or two windows over the course of their computer usage, I don't see how they could _not_ make someone more productive.

I'm certain I'm more productive when I'm running Linux, after having spent enough time in Mac OS X and Windows to have confidence in that result (my 3G modem doesn't work in Linux, and until I got a router for it, I had to boot into Windows or Mac OS X to work online, so I spent a couple of months on the other side). But, workspaces are definitely not the only factor. The biggest is actually having a really good shell (bash with the bash_completion package) that is comfortably integrated into the OS and has tabs. I'm horribly unproductive in the Windows shell, and the Mac OS X shell is just weird, though better than Windows. I'm not even sure why the Mac OS X terminal is so uncomfortable to me...it's bash, but it feels really clunky compared to the Gnome Terminal.

Anyway, workspaces are definitely something I really, really, miss when I use Windows. I regularly have a couple dozen windows open, often several of the same app but in use for different tasks, and it's kind of a nightmare to keep up with what's where.

I find windows almost unusable without virtuawin. It very successfully adds virtual desktops to windows.

To see an image in full size, right click and choose "View Image" in Firefox or "Open Image in New Tab" in Chrome.

Kind of like how you add an application to the Gnome Start Menu.

Anyone else find this article really useless without being able to see the screen shots in higher resolution? I am interested in the UI improvements, but I won't be told about them. SHOW me.

What's ludicrous is that those thumbnails ARE the full images. Just open the images in a new window: http://www.linux.com/images/stories/desktop.png http://www.linux.com/images/stories/activities.png http://www.linux.com/images/stories/applications.png http://www.linux.com/images/stories/workspaces2.png

In a way, this exemplifies what's wrong with the approach Linux desktop/application developers have been taking for years: create something amazing, but forget one small detail, rendering the whole thing completely useless, and causing 99% of the population to dismiss them and go back to Windows/Mac.

The real question is: Does it have a feature to exclude certain files from the 'recently accessed files' list? There are many examples where you wouldn't want someone to see some of the files that you recently opened/worked with (i.e. top secret work, porn, whistleblower, etc).

There are two features I'm excited about for Gnome 3 which were not mentioned. Both exist as ideas. Ideas are fragile, delicate things. Attack people, not ideas.

The first is the "task pooper." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/task-pooper-...

The general idea is that things that pop up in your face are distracting, but notifications are good. Hence, the task pooper. It's a bar of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. You drop files and such into time slots on it, and they pop up again at the end (to either disappear into a filing system after a few seconds or be bumped back a few hours). I vaguely remember hearing something about being able to shove application notifications in it. Additionally, it can boil an egg at thirty paces.

The second is Quicksilver/Launchy/Gnome-Do type functionality integrated at the GTK 3 level. http://www.cimitan.com/blog/2009/01/31/do-ifying-gtk-30/

This will never happen, but it would be amazing. No more hunting for arcane menu items in The GIMP; just type "enable indexed color" or whatever. Alas, a strong argument against is would be that it would just encourages sloppy ui design, so I doubt we'll see it any time soon.

I don't see anything revolutionary or extremely interesting and useful here. (a + b) is the same as (b + a). Anyone remembers this link when someone made a prototype of a desktop interface that you could manipulate by all of your 10 fingers? That was truly awesome.

You mean Clayton Millers 10gui concept[1]? Sadly, it seems that this won't become reality for another while yet. Lack of funding and expertise mainly, it seems. A real pity.

[1] http://10gui.com/ and HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535

Well, looks a bit more slick than Gnome 2, but not revolutionary. Kind of a step towards KDE 4, which was really a step towards MacOS. If they can make it less buggy and more performant than KDE 4 (and... one would hope) then I'm sure I'll enjoy using it.

ps. Seriously, whomever put together this article for Linux.com is inepxerienced enough to embed 1920x1080 images directly into the page, rather than thumbnails?

How is KDE 4 a step toward Mac OS? I don't see that at all. KDE 4 also wanted to revolutionize the desktop, but I think we have accepted at this point that it isn't going to happen. KDE 4 is much more like Windows and KDE 3 than OS X.

Of course KDE4 is like KDE4, but I don't see it as more similar to Windows than the Mac desktop. Mac OS doesn't revolutionize the desktop, either.

For KDE4, Lime Snow Leopard

1> You have a 'widget dashboard'

2> The preferences panel is very similar

3> KDE4 has a features identical to Expose

Probably more, too. All of the other features and ideas have been kicking around KDE/Gnome for years. Having a separate menu bar at the top, for instance - Gnome is set like that by default, which is more similar to Mac OS than the KDE style. Desktop 'Spaces' has been available on Linux for ages, too, while some people see that as feature unique to MacOS (though it's been added to Windows in various ways recently)

There is not really such a huge difference between Mac OS and Windows, even. It adds up to a lot, but as someone who has used scores of DEs and Window managers, they all share features, concepts and traits. They all use the same basic ideas - launcher icons, a desktop, a window tasklist, windows with menu bars, buttons and titles, etc.

I'd been using KDE4 for 6-9 months when I got my first Mac and all I'm saying is, well, I see where inspiration for certain features and design came from.

KDE and Gnome do have great ideas of their own, no doubt. They don't have $300 million worth of support to make KDE as polished as MacOS, though. I wish they did - the design of these DEs is just as good or better than the mainstream systems.

I'll assume you meant of course KDE4 is like KDE3, but that's not what they were going for way back when they first announced the project and wanted everyone's ideas for how to innovate the desktop. They didn't really come up with anything.

Plasma might have been inspired by Dashboard, but it may not have been, and it definitely allows things that Dashboard doesn't.

Expose is part of almost all compositing window manager plugin sets of which I am aware. I don't know if OS X was the first to do this, but I don't think it's all too much of a stretch to suppose that it might be useful to see all the windows all at once occasionally.

Spaces is a non-starter; Linux DEs have had them for dozens of years, OS X 10.5 was the first appearance in OS X.

I agree that the preference panel is similar.

KDE 4 also has a huge taskbar and what is essentially a start menu. It uses a very conventional, Windows-like approach, and although it may have cribbed a few features from OS X too, Windows 95 is the dominant paradigm for a default KDE 4 installation.

So they implement Spotlight search/Windows key search, show tiled desktops like countless other apps for Windows/OSX, and call it the "future of desktop?"

The GNOME people should pay more attention to design, like using better fonts and not drenching the entire screen with dark gray. The next version is just as ugly as the previous ones.

I think that most of it just boils down to terrible typesetting. Even Windows does a better job. I've always felt that this is the #1 contributor to that Linux 'cheap' feel. Everything else looks wonderful, but the fonts look ugly, even the necessary font packages are installed.

If the "Future of the Desktop" still means having to do installs and updates, then I look forward to living in the past. I've even gotten sick of being harangued by Android updates.

After having written code for 20 years, I want zero responsibility for somebody else's code, and that includes doing updates.

I agree that constantly being nagged about updating sucks. What's worse though: update nagging or occasionally having an app or service you depend on breaking temporarily due to a bad update?

If regressions are somewhat rare then I think I prefer automatic updates, even with the risks.

This is the norm with all web applications. The frequency of regressions will depend on a lot of factors. One of the reasons I think this works well for web apps is that the deployment environment is exceptionally consistent and stable when compared to the world of desktop os's. It would be awful if your text editor broke while you were in the middle of using it, but that is the situation I am in right now with my email. How much trust do you give the developers?

yes. Whether it's desktop apps, local os, iphone apps, android apps, any interest in this stuff in the future will be just some kind of steampunk sentimentality. The only desktop app that should be developed and upgraded is the browser. Web dev is a superior expression of division of labor, and regression management. Software dev is so increasingly worthless, the only viable platform for it is web, embedded specialties withstanding.

Interesting that, after years of being accused of ripping off the Mac, the new Activities interface looks a lot more like Windows 7 than anything OS X.

I've always said that the Gnome team is more interested in adopting good UI paradigms; this seems to pan that out.

Pretty much anytime someone changes something about a DE interface someone else claims that they're "ripping off OS X", and most of the time it makes no sense whatsoever. I would ignore these people.

So, I kinda got a little too excited when I heard a new desktop. But then, I have already seen all these concepts pretty much, haven't I? From what I got form the article, it seems like we will only get a couple of new "shortcuts". I REALLY am hoping his headline is true, and we do get a new desktop experience at least, when this releases...and I would LOVE it if GNOME surprises me when it comes out and is more than what I think it is.

I sure will give it a try. The author is right when he said people stopped to find gnome innovating.. and this is a genius move from the gnome team.

I hope there will be an easy shell command to use the activity "find". For instance, activity firefox would start it and activity test.py could show me the activity view with all my files named test.py, etc.

As an FYI: Gnome 3 is on the feature list[1] for Fedora 14, scheduled for release near the end of October[2].

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/FeatureList

[2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14

Isn't it rather like Microsoft used to be, when they can assume that their sweeping changes will be unquestioningly accepted by everybody, no matter what the final result is like? I thought open source freed us from that. Of course, I'm grumpy that Kubuntu moved to KDE4 by default. I know KDE3 is still available, but c'mon, how could the Kubuntu guys look at KDE3 and KDE4 and decide to ship KDE4 as the default? When I installed Lucid (to give KDE4 yet another try) notifications were sized and stacked illegibly, and I kept losing notifications I didn't want to dismiss. Do a fresh install with default settings, and basically the first movement you see on the screen reveals a major usability problem! Well, it's obvious how that happens -- months before the final product is even scheduled to be finished, distros have already decided when to unleash it on their users.

Fedora is typically very liberal distribution when it comes to package versions and they usually try to ship the latest reasonably stable version of every package with each release. People who choose Fedora (like me) accept that or even like that. The reason Red Hat sponsors Fedora is because it acts as a test bed for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.

If you need a more conservative distribution, you can try RHEL or Debian, or Ubuntu which is a bit more conservative than Fedora but a lot less conservative than, say, Debian. Linux distributions are about choice, really.

It's not a matter of distro priorities being conservative vs. cutting edge. It's about distros ignoring their priorities and marching ahead with whatever the GNOME and KDE projects say should be next. Ubuntu is supposed to be about usability, which isn't served by taking a big jump down in polish and completeness. Fedora is supposed to be up-to-date, but it isn't supposed to install incomplete or buggy software by default. Who knows what GNOME3 will be like in October? Not Fedora. They have no way of knowing whether GNOME3 will be in an acceptable state.

Let's face it; distros jumped to KDE4 because they want it to be great someday and they're delivering users to support that dream. GNOME3 looks like more of the same. They're supposed to be delivering software to users, not the other way around.

"Isn't it rather like Microsoft used to be, when they can assume that their sweeping changes will be unquestioningly accepted by everybody, no matter what the final result is like? I thought open source freed us from that."

The other reply to your post says this, but doesn't frame it this way: open source does free you from that. You can move to any number of functionally-equivalent distros that made different decisions (from superficial things like GNOME vs KDE, or more fundamental things like how aggressive or conservative they are). Or install your own window manager. These are totally supported use cases.

But in Windows and OS X you're totally stuck.

Kudos for moving past the "let's just try to look like XP" design stage to thinking about how to improve usability.

Gnome never looked anything like XP or MS Windows for that matter. I think you are confusing it with KDE. If anything, Gnome has some similarities with OSX.

> If anything, Gnome has some similarities with OSX.

beyond both having rounded corners? Apart from both having completely crummy file explorers?

I like what I see and have a real soft spot for Gnome, but it seems fairly conservative, yet. More at http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.30/#rnlookingf...

That looks... like everything I've seen before.

Useful? An improvement? Oh heck yes, I like it like that. But this is no future, this is the present, and they're just slightly re-organizing.

Hyperbolic prose, indeed.

> There are actually three ways to open the Activities Window:

> 3. Click the Super key (often referred to as the "Windows" key).

Well, there goes my free unused keyboard shortcut modifier.

Since when does one 'click' a keyboard button?

I am a big fan of gnome-shell. I'll be an even bigger fan when it plays nicely with VirtualBox. Or is it VirtualBox that has to play nicely with gnome-shell?

Why does an article about a supossedly revolutionary Desktop UI include such tiny pictures only?

What a sad mix of windows and OSX. That Activities button is pure ugliness.

The activities window sounds a lot like the Start menu in windows Vista/7.

TLDR: 2010 will most definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop.

More like, "See? See? Linux desktops can be innovative and not just copy what MacOS and Windows do!"

Sounds good. But it really is 'The future of the Linux Desktop'.

key question: does it work with compiz, or somehow support 3D?

It uses mutter as its window manager, which is based on metacity and uses the clutter toolkit (hardware accelerated UI). It replaces compiz but seems to have much less eye candy. Remember, metacity is the WM for the grown up!

So gnome-shell will require a GPU (should work on the Intel GMA), but have the side effect of not working in virtual machines.

Excuse the jargon, but... gnome-shell is a plugin for mutter, which is a fork of metacity, built on top of Clutter (thus "mutter") for awesome 3D scene/animation support.

In fewer words: Yes, it has some 3Ds in it. ;-)

is it touch-device optimized/aware?

But can it tile windows yet? :-)

I know, I should use a "real" window manager if I need my windows to be tiled, but I feel that tiling is a real feature with a legitimate need that should be built into Gnome.

I've dabbled with Awesome and Xmonad, but am not an expert. However I've found that Compiz Grid + Guake on Gnome gives me mouse-less window management too:

http://guake.org/ (in most repo's)

Grid:

    sudo apt-get install compiz-fusion-plugins-extra

CompizConfig -> Window Management -> Enable Grid

Desktop controls:

* Position and tile a window: Ctrl-Alt-[Numpad]

* Show/Hide console: F12

* Open multiple console tabs: Shift-Ctrl-T

* Change workspace: Super-[leftarrow], Super-[righarrow]

* Start any program, open any file: Alt-F2 or Super-Space (for Gnome-Do)

Ah! My pet rant too. Overlapping windows. What a pain they are...

I also thought the same thing. I don't mind fully overlapping windows (a la tabs), but leaving a bunch of useless space, occupied by nothing more than a pretty picture, on my power-huntry monitor is what's inconceivable to me.

I think I've irrevocably put myself on the fringe by switching to a tiling window manager, though. Oh well. There's a little more elbow room out here.

They life in a day-dreams. ^_^ Browser is the desktop. Even mobile browser.

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