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Gnome Shell updates for 3.2

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Ubuntu switched their default UI from GNOME 2.x to Unity in 11.04, and after trying it out for a while I decided it felt clunky and awkward, so I decided to try out GNOME 3 from the official unofficial PPA - and man, I'm glad I did. The overall feel is just... more polished than Unity, and even more polished than GNOME 2.x. I like being able to bring up the overlay with a keystroke, then start typing the name of the app I want to launch, or browse the virtual desktop list, or pick an app from the dock. The Alt-Tab switcher has a big icon for every app I have open (like OS X), but if the app has multiple windows, they appear in a kind of submenu and I can navigate with the arrow keys to the one I want. I even love the notification system - when an app on another desktop wants the focus, an unobtrusive pop-up appears at the bottom of the screen; if I miss it, I can clink my mouse-cursor to the bottom right to see all the notifications awaiting me.

It took me a while to make it recognise my preferred keybindings, and I've had to resort to poking through gconf-editor and dconf-editor to make it respect my personal preferences, but overall I really like it, and I'm looking forward to seeing where GNOME 3 goes from here.

Is Gnome 3's system tray still off-limits to 3rd party applications? I like having Dropbox's sync indicator and Tomboy's note list running in the tray, and I'm not sure how that functionality would be replicated in Gnome 3.

Dropbox's sync indicator is still in the corner for me, just as it always has been, so it seems to work fine.

How is everyone's alt-tab performance? I've been trying to like it, but alt-tab is so slow that it's barely usable. I don't have another GNOME3 computer to compare it to, so I don't know if it's something wrong with my configuration or hardware.

alt+tab is the same speed as it always was. are you running on a really old pc by any chance?

Things I dislike about Gnome 3.0:

* Alt-tab is between apps, with alt+(thing above tab) for between windows in an app

* Super+L doesn't work from the zoomed out view

* Screen lock is partially broken: gnome-screensaver doesn't guarantee to lock the screen when switching users or suspending. It continues on whatever happens.

> with alt+(thing above tab) for between windows in an app

Wow, I really wish I would have known about that a long time ago. Alt-tab only working between applications was so annoying that I found an extension that reverted to an old-school alt-tab behavior, except now it operates between all windows regardless of what workspace they are on...

Alt-` is fantastic.

I dislike the Alt+Tab behavior so much that I just filed a bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=654645

I've been running Gnome 3 on Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 (via the PPA) on my Thinkpad W500 since April or so.

This laptop has a discrete (FireGL 5700) and integrated graphics (GMA 4500) chip I can toggle between for power management reasons. No performance issues, alt-tab or otherwise, under either.

It's been such a solid desktop that it's been my main development environment for these past few months.

On my rather average 3-yo laptop without dedicated graphics, Alt-Tab works great if the system load is low, but if I have a lot of things going on, it can take a second to pop up.

Oddly, Super seems to work with less lag (though it stutters) than Alt-Tab for me while I'm running something resource-intensive.

Good. No problem.

On the other hand, typing anything in the activities overlay is very painful. I do it only by a mistake, because it's sooo slow, not only for the first time, but always. So is switching from Windows to Applications.

No, systray icons are displayed (and can be accessed and interactively used) in the bottom right corner, which is, however, shown only when you push your mouse cursor there, or when some notification shows up. The area left of the username (right top corner, no idea how it's called) is available only to the gnome-shell extensions that you have to install and turn on/off.

I like it, though there are some problems, like quite often missing Empathy IM notifications (given that we use jabber quite a lot in the work...).

The one thing I really like about Unity is the ability to switch between the windows with Super + [1-9]. Is there a similar functionality in Gnome 3/Shell?

I use Unity every day at work and Gnome 3 every day at home. There are two things about Unity that make me like it a lot more than Gnome 3:

1) The window placement. Since in both Unity and Gnome 3 you can't replace the window manager, having some measure of tiling built in is a necessity. In Unity you can manually tile windows using the Ctrl-Alt-Numpad keys. Gnome 3 just has the much more limited "aero snap" feature. From what I've seen on the mailing list, there's interest by outside developers in adding tiling to Gnome 3 but it won't be easy.

2) The fixed workspaces. I like to have a fixed number of workspaces on a grid so I can place certain windows on specific workspaces and easily switch to them. Unity allows this. Gnome 3 dynamically creates and destroys workspaces, and it lays them out on a line. This eliminates a lot of the value in workspaces for me.

In Unity you can manually tile windows using the Ctrl-Alt-Numpad keys. Gnome 3 just has the much more limited "aero snap" feature.

If you mean 'make windows neatly line up against each other', try holding Shift while you're dragging a window around in GNOME 3. This is an old feature of Metacity from GNOME 2, which Compiz (Unity's WM) only approximates.

I hate that. I had a ton of Emacs shortcuts mapped to Super combos... Now I need a keyboard with a Hyper key...

I have seen a plugin on WebUpd8 for this functionality in Gnome Shell but don't have the link ATM.

There is a plugin which can switch windows with the alt key in the activities view.

I've been using GNOME 3 on Fedora 15 for a while now and I'm pretty pleased with it, that being said, it's far from perfect. There are several interface choices they've made that remove what I would consider obviously desirable functionality and hide it away or remove it outright.

Removing shutdown and restart from the user menu. Sure, if I hold down option or control or whatever the key is those menus appear, and of course I can also open up the shell and 'shutdown -r now' my way to freedom but the point of the menu is convenience, and that's not.

Removing the minimize button from the windows /is/ a gutsy choice, and I do respect them for it as they appear to have a good plan in place, however they do have to understand that if you are using a system with multiple monitors, which in my experience is not uncommon on Linux computers, having multiple workspaces seems redundant. Though, for me only one screen has the workspace change, and I might be more fond of them after that bug has been worked out. ((note: It is possible to bring the minimize and maximize button back, and you always can minimize and maximize by right clicking on the titlebar, but again that's not the point :p))

Regarding only one monitor switching when changing workspaces: that's intended behaviour, see [1]

You can change that using gconf-editor and setting /desktop/gnome/shell/windows/workspaces_only_on_primary to false.

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2011/03/22/multimonitor-support...

I've been using F15 since it was released and these are both things that had user add-on patches within a week. Finnbarr Murphy is responsible for a great deal of extensions that I use: http://www.fpmurphy.com/gnome-shell-extensions/

> Easier window resizing

Thank goodness! This alone about GNOME Shell has infuriated me more than anything else. I can deal with changes in how to do things (even though I added a window panel back). But this alone was terrible!

Every window manager I've used since WindowMaker back in 1998, including Metacity (GNOME 2), Compiz (Unity) and Mutter (GNOME 3) has supported resizing windows by holding down Alt and dragging anywhere on the window with the right mouse button.

Metacity and Mutter default to resizing with Alt+middle-drag rather than Alt+right-drag, but you can fix that in gconf-editor: "/apps/metacity/general/resize_with_right_button"

edit /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

Then modify:

    <frame_geometry name="frame_geometry_normal" ...>
        <distance name="left_width" value="3"/>
        <distance name="right_width" value="3"/>
        <distance name="bottom_height" value="3"/>

Thanks!

Quite cool, lots of small improvements, and a major shift towards service-orientedness and touch friendliness.

It would be an appealing idea to try GNOME Shell on my ExoPC tablet when 3.2 gets released.

I can guarantee that it works pretty well on the ExoPC.

Somebody should package GNOME Shell for MeeGo. Another cool UX :-)

Thank <insertnamehere> for XFCE.

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