GNOME 3 Released | Hacker News Reader

GNOME 3 Released

gnome3.org

178 pointssciurus98 comments

Gnome really needs help with their typography (and design in general).

Gradients, docks and shiny icons do not make a well designed product.

It's clear to see it suffers from the curse of open source software – design by committee, and the featuritis that results from that. There's often "flashy" chrome in OSS, but no solid interactions behind to back it up.

It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink.

Believe me - in the open source world Gnome is the one that leans towards minimalism.

I've found Sawfish+twm to be a sufficient window manager for my purposes.

Minimalism in what sense?

UI fading into the background. Working things around so that there are fewer User preferences. Default desktop themes which are sober and not overly jazzy.

How? Compared to LXDE (for example), GNOME seems cluttered and slow to me. Not at all minimalist.

It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink.

What does this mean? Gnome 3.0 is rather incomplete. You can't even change themes or fonts yet.

Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.

Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?

I used to change themes a lot back in the day ; now I just wish for a usable desktop that doesn't get in my way, and Gnome / KDE are awful from that point of view.

That's the reason why I'm developing software on Linux, but dual-boot in a Windows 7 partition for design-related work, as that requires mouse-based interactions, and in Gnome I can't even rely on copy/paste to work properly.

Changing themes and fonts is nice, but shouldn't be a priority. For me priorities would be having basic functionality, like copy/paste, working properly; or how about a task-switching applet (activated on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the window you want; or desktop notification windows that you can close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really obnoxious) ... this has always been the story of the Linux desktop for me, i.e. death by a thousand cuts.

   For me priorities would be having basic
   functionality, like copy/paste, working properly

It really should work. Since ages. Care to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't work in Gnome? Cause that's really a bug.

   or how about a task-switching applet (activated 
   on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the 
   window you want;

You can do that with Gnome 3. Press Alt-Tab, hold down Alt and click around to your app. Works like a charm here.

   or desktop notification windows that you can 
   close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really 
   obnoxious)

In Gnome 3 (and also Gnome 2 fwiw) you can close the notifications by clicking on them. But even better, in Gnome 3 you can set yourself as busy (click on your name in the top-right corner and select "Busy") so notifications will stay silent in the hidden notification area and won't disturb you.

    It really should work. Since ages. Care 
    to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't 
    work in Gnome?

Copy something in one app, close it, then try pasting in another app -- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the app or on its mood, and this behavior has been going on for ages, up until Ubuntu 10.10, which I'm using.

I'm happy to find that Gnome 3 has usability improvements. I'll definitely try it out.

You seem to confuse the primary selection with the clipboard: http://standards.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-...

I don't know what I'm confused about, and I don't really care about technical details -- the behavior of copy/paste has been inconsistent to me.

Reading that article, if it really is the reason for what is happening, it kind of makes sense, but that's no comfort to me when I'm losing my selection because I have closed the origin; behavior that isn't even consistent across apps.

I understand. I only use a Mac because I get a simple, consistent desktop that works right out of the box. Still, the user should have the ability to at least change the default fonts and UI color. Some people might prefer larger fonts, others might find too many colors in the UI distracting.

Winkey+w or winkey+e allows you to choose a window or desktop by mouse clicking. Copy/paste used to suck, but with newer ubuntu versions it works well for me. Notifications are not nice, I agree with you.

Unfortunately I have disabled Compiz because for some reason the NVidia drivers are hanging my computer when I'm shutting down -- and now after I switched to Nouveau, my screen doesn't light up when waking up from sleep.

And without those effects enabled, the show-all-windows shortcuts won't work.

And some would like to change the way the OS stacks windows, et cetera, et cetera. Picking great defaults is good enough for the vast majority of users, you don't have to waste your time implemnting ever more preferences and can focus on the important stuff.

OS X, iOS, and WP7 pick reasonable defaults that most people are happy with. The same is not so true for GNOME.

For example: http://static.arstechnica.com/gnome3/apps.png Fonts are only anti-aliased, not sub-pixel rendered. The app names are extremely small and have terrible kerning.

Hm, seems like they need quite some help with typography. The rest looks fine, also conceptually.

Many people do desire the feature to change themes. A big reason to choose open source in the first place is the flexibility in customization that it brings. It's the opposite of the "Apple mindset" that there's one good way and that's the Steve way.

I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' over thinking user interface design through, making a decision about the way something should work and sticking with it. It's a somewhat rational response to bikeshedding: if you can't please all the users, make it configurable and let the users indulge in bikeshedding to their hearts' content - just keep it outside of the source tree. Thankfully the ascendency of good user interface design on the web and in successful consumer products (notably, though not exclusively, from Apple) has started to place value on clean, well thought-out user interfaces.

I think one of the things that Gnome has achieved over the years is removing lots of configuration options, and battling the hostile responses of a vocal minority who would choose complexity for everyone so that they can tweak any minor detail. Remember the backlash when Gnome replaced Sawfish with Metacity as its default window manager, and users could no longer script the window manager in a dialect of Lisp?

I'm all for options to personalise the user interface where it make sense, but if I have to start configuring your software in order to make it usable for the job it's supposed to be designed for, you've failed.

I certainly agree with you there. Customization is important but the first priority of a program is that people should be able to do their work productively without changing any setting.

There's also fine-grained customization versus "themes". Themes do allow people to give their own feel to a device/program/site, without them having to worry about individual settings.

I've always been a proponent of the idea that fine-grained customization should be possible, but you can hide it (this is what GNOME does). Just don't make it illegal to customize for the people that really want to (this is where Apple seems to be going; I don't want to break laws to make a device do what I want).

Edit: I happy when they introduces Metacity in place of Sawfish. Sawfish was simply too complex for its own good, GNOME had taken over most of the window manager duties itself and thus the wm should simply manage windows and get out the way.

Many people do desire the feature to change themes.

Do they?

A big reason to choose open source in the first place is the flexibility in customization that it brings. It's the opposite of the "Apple mindset" that there's one good way and that's the Steve way.

I think you are mischaracterizing Apple’s mindset. It’s not about finding the one good way, it’s about finding a good way and the assumption that most people are not interested in tweaking that.

I do not think that all open source projects have to slavishly follow some sort of central ideology of maximum customization. There are enough alternatives to Gnome that it would be no problem at all for Gnome to be different. For those who really need it crazy customizability is certainly available.

Yes, the Apple mindset assumes that there is a good way and people are not interested in tweaking that. You can agree or disagree with that.

I do agree that a sane set of defaults is good. It should be usable without customization.

But for one, I am interested in tweaking things. From the operating system to how things look. That's why I use open source. Isn't that the original hacker spirit?

It is but various Open Source projects do want to cater to many more people than just hackers. There are several open source desktop environments, they don’t all have to have hackers as their target group, have they? Just looking at Gnome’s website I would argue that maybe Gnome just isn’t for you and that there is nothing wrong with that.

You can tell that by just looking at Gnome's website?

I've been using Gnome for >10 years now. I've never had any big complaints about it (well except for gedit not having a "replace in selection" feature, but there's a plugin for that). Gnome has excellent customization and theming facilities through GTK themes.

I also think the Gnome defaults are pretty good. I've also used KDE and like it but tend to choose Gnome as I'm used to it.

Apple, however, I wouldn't buy because it locks me in too much for my taste. I don't like cages, even cosy golden ones :)

That is only true if the default theme is generic and beautiful enough to not annoy the majority of the populous. We will see how Gnome fares on that.

That is one of the things that almost everyone does.

Do you have any specific examples?

I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leadership is extremely important when designing a good UI and I feel a lot of open source projects forget this.

Also this leader needs to be thick skinned and self confident enough to take criticism from others on the project but also assert their own subjective views.

Leadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this.

As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great programmer and also has good aesthetic sensibilities). I hope enlightenment comes back and the big two (KDE and Gnome) becomes the big four (kde, gnome, ubuntus take on gnome and enlightenment).

The problem with the Enlightenment guys (as I understood) is that they always had big plans and awesome ideas, but there's just not many enough of them to implement everything they want.

They might consider to simply take the good parts of KDE/Gnome and build a visual shell around it to their liking. Kind of like what Canonical is doing.

Lots of variations of "Dungeons and Dragons"-desktop environments are not a good show of aesthetics. IMHO.

The webfont used (Cantarell) does not look good in Windows. The texts are almost unreadable: http://op111.net/u/misc/20110407-win7-fx4-gnome.org.png — (It looks fine on Linux.)

Cantarell, by the way, is also the UI font of Gnome Shell. Not a bad UI font, I think, but it has a narrow glyph range (about 400) and only includes Latin.

Moving to the larger picture, my impression from the Gnome Shell desktop up to now is that it is an interesting experiment, trying to rethink as it does a lot of stuff that we have grown to take for granted in desktop environments. But it is not necessarily a good desktop experience. Up to now (I have used it for about 40 hours in total) I find it tiring and distracting, rather than distraction-free. Switching between app windows, e.g., is not a pleasant experience for me, with all the action I see on the screen and that I have to take myself each time I want to switch. (Alt-tabbing avoids all that, but I don’t always switch windows with Alt+Tab.) Another thing that does not help me, and that I find strange as an design decision, is the position of the clock right in the middle of the topbar. It causes me stress; I feel like time is hunting me.

In general, Gnome Shell seems to me to offer an experience more tuned to small rather than large screens. In a 2560*1600 screen, say, and if you prefer using the mouse rather than the keyboard, the distances you have to travel are ridiculous.

I expect the whole thing to improve in the next couple of years or so, but I am curious to see how much it can improve given its basic design principles.

UIs like this are not for power users. They use xmonad or awesome or dwm or ratpoison or ...

This is for someone who turns on their computer, does some work, and then stops using their computer. They do not want to bother themselves with a lot of learning. Simple actions that can be easily learned and improve speed (like keyboard shortcuts) are in reach. But more "confusing" concepts like virtual desktops without visual cues are not what they go for, even though pressing M-1 is much faster than moving your mouse to some picture of window.

The idea is "how can we make computing accessible to the average person", not "how can we make demetris not feel stress on his 2560x1600 screen". Once you reach a certain level of interest in optimizing everything, you have to use tools to build your own desktop environment, because you are a unique flower, and only you can decide what you want. You've reached this point, so GNOME is not for you.

I consider myself a power user and I've been happily using Gnome for several years now. It's got just enough room for customization that I can configure it to be a very efficient workspace, but it doesn't require me to spend days or weeks configuring it and learning a new way to use my computer.

But it looks like this release might be enough to drive me away. The app-based window management paradigm just doesn't work if you regularly have 8 console windows and 4 browser windows open on a single virtual desktop. My working style used to be well supported by Gnome, but now it's been completely dropped.

>This is for someone who turns on their computer, does some work, and then stops using their computer. They do not want to bother themselves with a lot of learning.

>Once you reach a certain level of interest in optimizing everything, you have to use tools to build your own desktop environment, because you are a unique flower

Or the power user can switch to OS X, which requires less 'optimizing' to get it into a comfortable state than any of the Linux environments (e.g., Gnome 2, dwm and ratpoison) I have tried do.

I do not want a set of tools with which I can build my own desktop. I want a desktop that is usable without major customization or tinkering although I do realize that any desktop warrants some customization and administration if it will be heavily used.

ADDED. I ran Linux for 13 years, and command-line Gnu tools and Emacs on proprietary Unix for 5 years before that, and I would like to continue supporting free software if I can do so without undue sacrifice.

Maybe I am just more sensitive to matters of design and aesthetics than most Linux users are, but I started using OS X last year. It's not perfect, but I like it better than I like the Gnome 2 on Linux I used before that even though I have put less effort (but still much effort, maybe more that is rational) into tweaking and customizing OS X than I have Gnome 2.

As someone who has used both systems at length and who has commented on the subject before, I'll simply tell you that your opinion is obviously very subjective. I find the out-of-box Ubuntu experience to be far surperior to the OS X one, and to get OS X to even approach the level of efficiency I get from Ubuntu/Gnome/Compiz I end up investing well over $100 in utilities. Not that I mind supporting the developers, but it is what it is. I don't want to get into a features pissing match, but I can point specifics when I have more time to write. OS X is fine if it fits your view of the world or if you're willing to adapt your world view to fit it, but Ubuntu gives you a very solid experience out of the gate which you can mold to your heart's desire.

I think you've got some fair points here; but let's not forget that (at least as of a while back, I can't speak for newer releases) Ubuntu would not have support for even basic mp3 playback without downloading support for it. I understand the "free software" reasons for such restrictions--but I think it's difficult to justify the statement of Ubuntu having an "far superior out-of-box experience" when difficulties such as this are considered.

...and let's not even get into video drivers. :P

Actually, mp3 support is a checkbox during the install process now, so this is a non-issue.

Video drivers have been just fine for me for the past six years or so, but perhaps that's because I always buy nvidia cards that are well supported.

The only place OS X has a leg up on Linux IMHO is video codec support, and you can't really blame the open source developers for this one.

I keep waiting for a hardware manufacturer to issue 3 or 4 different machines and make Linux work very well on them, akin to what Apple does with OS X. Most of the issues I see people have with Linux is due to the immense variability in hardware combinations. Eliminating this variability would make it pretty easy for a company to provide a seamless desktop experience to users.

Didn't know that about mp3 support; that's really good to hear. What about installing proprietary video drivers? Can that be done at install time too? Has maintaining up-to-date versions of these drivers become easier?

I admit ignorance--the last time I used Ubuntu regularly on the desktop was just before my first mac arrived in late 2006. I've toyed with it since then; but never gone through installation and configuration.

I'm not sure if it can be done at install time, but it's very easy after you're booted up. Almost all cards I've tried are supported by the basic drivers, and enabling third-party driver support (to get nvidia drivers, etc straight from the commercial source) is as simple as System->Administration->Additional Drivers. Click activate and you're good to go.

no problem at all for a few releases now ;)

This. My last setup of Ubuntu took like two hours (a few ubuntu releases back) and has been a great experience in terms of efficiency/usability. The really nice point about linux is to ask yourself what could you do to work more efficiently and usually there will be several tools available. I often ask myself that question and i don't know what could be better :)

Well, I will definitely give Ubuntu (and Gnome) another try.

That is kind of strange how they want to make it easy to use for the average user, when I think 'discoverability' (how easy is it to find/discover features) of these kinds of desktop environment isn't all that good.

To me it looks more like they tried to make a desktop which also works for tablet-users (read: touch)

I really like gnome3, but I'ts kind of sad to realize the main video on the frontpage (for a wonderful new desktop experience) shows only two desktop applications: gedit editing an html file, and firefox with firebug to fix that same code. And a fake IM session with a loremipsum in it.

I understand the gnome desktop may not have many shiny artisty apps as OSX, but this feels a tad too nerdy.

You do realise where you are posting right?

We're not representative of the linux userbase anymore - increasingly it is used by students, home users and office workers that aren't necessarily technical. That's the demographic they should be appealing to and they're more interested in social and media related apps.

>We're not representative of the linux userbase anymore.

> increasingly it is used by students, home users and office workers that aren't necessarily technical.

citations, please. it's one thing where the developers of gnome/linux WANT it to be used by this demographic, it's another to claim that it's happening (and to claim that HN users don't use it anymore).

I just know, statcounter claims Linux has 1% worldwide desktop website-visitors and Wikipedia has statistics that say: 2% of the Wikipedia visitors is a Linux-desktop user. Half of that is an Ubuntu user.

All mobile (non-desktop) users combined statcounter claims is also around 1%

Ryan Paul's review on Ars might be more useful:

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2011/04/ars-revie...

Love it! Can't wait to use it. I wonder what the impact is going to be now that Ubuntu is doing it's own UI thing. That's the vast majority of Linux users; so who becomes the premiere Gnome 3 distribution? I was hoping to get a System76 as my next desktop but now I'm not sure; depends if Gnome3 is included in Ubuntu's repos going forward.

Fedora 15 is most likely to be the Gnome 3 showcase. Its release on May 24 is nicely timed to allow them enough time to integrate Gnome Shell. As a desktop distro it's second in popularity only to Ubuntu, which makes it the most popular distro to choose Gnome Shell as its default UI.

But all this shouldn't affect your hardware purchases. A System76 machine should run Fedora just as well as it does Ubuntu.

Gnome Slackbuild 3.0 has been available for slack 64 for a while, and the stable release hit the mirrors recently. See http://gnomeslackbuild.org/

Did anyone else find putting these two features next to each other unfortunate:

* Messaging built-in

Communication is an important part of the modern desktop, but it's a hassle when you have to switch windows to reply to a message.

* GNOME 3 is designed to reduce distraction and interruption and to put you in control.

Our new notifications system subtly presents messages and will save them until you are ready for them,...

They really should concatenate some of those videos together. Each one individually is a little underwhelming.

at the very least, get rid of the personal intros and "one of the hundreds" bit.

Why?

gets old after the 3rd time.

"Window bars don't offer any minimise/maximise window controls; however, this functionality is still available by right-clicking on a window's top bar. GNOME and GTK+ development veteran Owen Taylor explained the reasons for removing the controls in a comprehensive email. In this email, the developer indicates that workspaces may make it unnecessary to minimise windows."

I don't think I like that one. I minimize all the time even with workspaces. To relegate to a right click is just going to confuse the novice end user.

Why are the videos on the site so small, make it big and show off what you have made!

You can see them here on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRHAio98n-g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRHAio98n-g&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9Bgjaspjs&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lepXx1kDelo&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSuRy7TRHPc&feature=relmf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxOQj5eBRCY&feature=relat... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4fhsgZbgKk&feature=relat...

It seems no one here has actually tried using GNOME 3 for any period of time. I gave it a couple of days and switched over to XFCE. I found it incredibly annoying as a developer desktop (perhaps a minority user these days?). It's very hard to switch between applications, virtual desktops are basically broken, you can't have shortcuts for launching apps/programs, no focus-follows-mouse, and the GNOME developers don't give a damn.

A few days ago, I added experimental to my Debian apt list and apt-getted for about an hour until gnome-shell was working. Very unstable, partially configured, not really revolutionary, etc. Headed back to Gnome 2 only to find out that GTK 2 and GTK 3 have a hard time co-existing. Twas very difficult to get my system back to normal. I'm an idiot; don't be like me.

If developers are a minority of Linux users, surely it's still a large minority. Sadly, KDE3 was the last desktop I actually enjoyed using. KDE4 is still (still!) broken and useless and ugly.

What KDE are you using? The current version is miles away from the initial 4 release. I don't think it is hardly broken, useless and ugly.

Its just released, so give us sometime to get our pitchforks out.

You can change all that. Install GNOME tweak tool. If the setting is not there yet (not sure about shortcuts), either file a bug or look at dconf-editor until that time.

Regarding "don't give a damn" and per http://planet.gnome.org/: I am GNOME :-)

I don't use GNOME because I find it way to heavy and bloated (I run X and the stumpwm manually). It would however be very interesting to know how early adapters find GNOME 3 compared to previous GNOME versions in terms of bloat and speed.

I also understand that GNOME 3 can be used very keyboard driven. AAAnybodywo swears to the keyboard like me have any opinions?

Their new site is gorgeous

Does anyone else find the tagline "Made of Easy" to be a bit silly and poorly thought out?

It's playful, it clearly and strongly communicates a single underlying concept. I think it's good.

It's just such a grammatically poor phrase and it gives the impression that the entire project lacks polish and thoughtful design.

So it matches what some people in this thread think of the project so far?

Maybe you just need to think different

gnome3.org is down for me, but http://www.gnome.org/gnome-3/ works.

edit: and the torrent to the openSUSE with "optional" GNOME3 is: http://software.opensuse.org/114/en

Wow. Gnome 3 looks worse than Gnome 2 did. I say that with love and kindness in my heart though, as I'm a hardcore openbox user. openbox+tint2+nitrogen.

(edit: Okay, Gnome3 and E17 are "Almost" looking alike: They're shiney and don't do much more than that.)

I couldn't find an obvious link on the gnome(3).org sites, but there are detailed release notes:

http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.0/

The press release is at http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2011-04-gnome-3.0-releas...

The link is broken. This is the working link: http://www.gnome.org/press/2011/04/gnome-3-0-released-better...

Thanks for catching that! It looks like they launched a new design for http://www.gnome.org/ in conjunction with the release. That must have altered the URL for the press release they had published earlier in the day.

We'll be setting up redirects for the old press releases to the new website soon. We just had so many things to sort out today for the release that these small things end up slipping out. Cheers!

Will Gnome 3 still be in Ubuntu?

I'm unclear on how the changes relating to the desktop will actually change the experience.

Congratulations to the Gnome team though! It does look great.

Have a look at jdub's comment on the item about Ars Technical review of GNOME 3. He summarizes pretty well what will happen (or not happen) in Ubuntu with regards to GNOME 3:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2419435

Seems like gettimg started is easy too, at least on Arch Linux.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME_3

Looks quite heavily OS X inspired, with Windows 7’s window arrangement feature.

In theory, that should make for a great desktop environment.

gnome3.org seems to be unaccessible right now. Any news on a official (as in official from the GNOME people, not Canonical) repo / .deb for Ubuntu 10.10?

I'm using Awesome WM since a about a year and I'm really happy with it, but it looks kinda good and I want to give it a shot.

The URL is fine for me. Maybe it's just an issue from your location.

Does anyone have instructions on how to build this beast?

We have a tool called "jhbuild" that keeps track of all the dependencies and stuff. In short, just get jhbuild from git.gnome.org, build it and do a "jhbuild bootstreap && jhbuild build".

More complete instruction can be found in the wiki: https://live.gnome.org/Smoketesting

If you want to just check out gnome-shell without the other Gnome 3 stuff, you can find instructions on http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell

If you want to get started with Jhbuild, you probably want to have a look at the official manual:

  http://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/stable/

If you really want to build the whole thing for hacking purposes, yes, Jhbuild is probably what you want.

But if you just want to give GNOME 3 a try, I suggest you to simply run one of our live images here:

  http://www.gnome.org/getting-gnome/

Not to be a smart ass but... ./configure, make, make install.

Who cares about gnome? I mean really. To first, second, and third order approximations, nobody will ever use it. The ipad2 sold over 2 million units the first month out. The next billion users of the internet will interact with it over their cell phone. Might as well publish an article about somebody who is making a nice set of switches for the front panel of a pdp-11 using mahogany wood or something.

At least a third of the people on Hacker News. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303726.

My guess is you are looking for a discussion of ChromeOS ? This isn't that discussion. :-)

And you wouldn't love a new set of PDP-11 switches?

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