The problem with GNOME 3
felipec.wordpress.com
felipec.wordpress.com
Gnome 3 rants are boring. Yes, people don't like the way the project moves. Some of those are very vocal and outspoken. Some rant on a blog. The thing is: Either the author cares about the Gnome project, in which case this is _no_ constructive way to put it (Hey, why don't you work on a better legacy mode? Propose a Gnome Shell extension API?). No, the 'But I tried it before, over and over, and they don't listen' argument is no excuse.
Or the author just does't like the project and wants to bash it. In that case posts like this one might make some weird kind of sense, but I yawn skimming them, hit flag on news aggregators like this and wish the author good luck with a Gnome 2 fork or a different DE of his choosing.
Hi, my name is Ben and I'm a happy Gnome 3 user. I'm sure there are others out there like me. Maybe we need to shout more? That would certainly remove stupid 'Google suggestions' arguments or 'of all the people that took this weird poll, x % hate Gnome 3' pseudo-statistics from future rants.
I love how much the environment gets out of your way and doesn't bother you. The instant message notification that can be ignored, or answered briefly and ignored. The lack of noise. It feels like an alternate history version of the Mac OS X Finder; my workflow transitioned with very few changes when I started using OS X at work.
Obviously, of course, no DE is perfect. Gnome 3 is no exception. The polarization is, in parts at least, caused by the vocal group of complainers. I certainly reflect and understand enough to know that I might widen the gap here, but I have had enough of these 'Gnome 3 is stupid' (or for that matter: 'Windows 8 is a joke') posts with little (constructive, usable, meaningful) content.
Again: Look at the article: If you don't argue against it, the 'Everyone hates Gnome 3' and 'Even Google suggests that everyone considers Gnome 3 a failure' arguments will strive. That's insane, stupid and needs to end. So - polarization is necessary. The loud 'Gnome 3 sucks' (minority?) group wins by default, otherwise.
A few weeks ago I've switched to KDE (Kubuntu). Gnome was just unbearable. The reasons are described in the article.
Open source projects hopefully fullfil most of your needs, one way or another. But you have to pick from these free offerings according to your own preferences and taste. You did the right thing: Gnome 3 was unbearable for you and you moved on, found a better solution.
Please, just don't sling mud at a project for failing to align with your goals. It was a relationship that didn't work out. Move on, remember the good times and .. never write blog posts like the OP?
You didn't understand the point of the article. Breaking user-experience is the absolute worst thing any software project could do. It goes against the "Linux way".
The people that "broke" (hey, see the quotes?) the user experience you expected and liked are the people that steer the project. They are free to do that, just like any company is free to (drastically? I don't quite think that's the case here, but let's go with it) change their product.
You have some benefits, though:
- You didn't pay a dime. Sure, you might've invested time learning to use Gnome 2 to your utmost satisfaction. You might've spent a good amount of hours to configure it to your liking. The product though? You got it for free and without any contract stating that your personal workflow would work in every future version, that your preferences are important to the project goals.
- You got the source. People complain just the same about WIndows 8 and they are stuck. Unless they find a way to jump to a totally different OS or stay in the past forever, they'll have to swallow the (imo not thaaat bad) changes. Maybe they can install some workarounds. You? You can enjoy a multitude of alternatives. You don't need to move away from your favorite applications. You can even, in fact, install one of the Gnome 2 forks (think Mint etc.) and imagine that Gnome 3 never happened.
You're not without options. Posting stuff like this rant on your blog? That's not helpful. You cannot seriously believe that this will change a thing. People that don't agree with you are going to sadly shake their heads. Gnome (3) developers are not even going to _read_ your blog, based on your way to communicate.
You reach only the people that already agreed with you in the first place. I'm sure you guys could have a good time in a bar, sharing complaints about ways Gnome 3 broke the user experience for you. But .. don't even start to believe that you represent all of the Gnome user base, much less the majority.
Putting everything that obviously divides us beside: Can you explain in 2-3 sentences what you'd hope to archive with that post of yours, the way you present your arguments? Is there any serious agenda, or is that just a way to blow off steam?
Yes, they have all the freedom to destroy their project.
They don't. They work on something they believe in. Now - that's not a reason to agree by default: Lots of people do things they believe in and fail their social circles or even society.
But there's no further point to argue about: Your article was a (poor) rant, your comments here are further proof that you deeply disagree with everything Gnome 3 and still are unable to provide any meaningful comment.
I'm trying to put it simple: If Gnome 3 doesn't solve your goals, it's not 'destroying the project'. If a couple of 'Yeah, that's really crap, mate' people agree with you that doesn't magically make you the majority of the userbase, nor does it mean that the developers are wrong and you are right.
In all seriousness: After your rant was posted you had only one way to react without digging an even deeper hole: Acknowledge that you were overly aggressive and wrong in quite some points. Instead you continue witih statements like this.
English is a foreign language for me, but I think 'to pout' is the verb I'd grab for if I'd need to talk about this comment of yours. Stop complaining, start improving things you care for.
And I was all about configuration in Gnome 2... Gnome 3 is definitely not like Gnome 2's tweaker's paradise. It was an effort to strip down to a minimalistic GUI and, after a rough start, they've done quite well. I've not missed the "Start" menu at all. I've not missed all the configuration/tweaking. I appreciate the functionality exposed by the Windows button. I've gotten used to Alt-` for switching windows-within-applications.
But I definitely agree with the author's points about the Gnome devs' response to feedback. Without regard to the trajectory of Gnome 3, the developers seems not to have managed or responded to criticism well. And Gnome 3 development and direction has been fairly quiet from a PR perspective, and a bit more PR/blog-posts could have been effective and mollifying the haters.
Note: I don't really use multiple workspaces, so can't comment on the author's comments there.
Judging from the responses after two years from the debacle, I think it's fair to say that GNOME will never be as successful as it once was.
Ubuntu showed that what needs to happen is to make a better UX overall and that has nothing to do with Mac or Windows.
What I mean by UX is stuff like drivers working, being able to install on a laptop or just buy it on a laptop and stuff "just works". People will pay money to support things that work. They will buy things that work.
Millions of people are using Android, which is Linux based, because it just works on their device. The experience is pretty great and it makes it easy to do what you need to do when you need to do it.
GNOME 3 didn't solve any user experience problem. It is new and shiny just because. It didn't make it better than Ubuntu, or Windows, or Mac, or Android.
Gnome's 'flagship distro', unfortunately, is Fedora, which is... structurally not super-suited to creating a user-facing distribution.
Canonical has done lots of interesting work over the past decade or so, but ultimately most of the 'just work' they have didn't really come from their employees or investments.
True, but not particularly more than KDE, or any other environment.
I know a lot of people are going to say "well, you're not using the software for its intended purpose. it's not their fault for breaking it." And that's true, but modularity a big part of the Unix philosophy and this is Gnome showing the Unix way the door.
Look, we're on GNOME 3.8 now. The ship of GNOME's desktop design philosophy has sailed. Either GNOME broke up with you, or you broke up with it, but the relationship is over.
Get over it.
GNOME 3 is by far the best desktop environment I have ever used. The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking. Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is incredibly polished and stable, especially in the latest version 3.8.
I'm tired of all the bullshit being spread about GNOME 3. If you're going to cling to the past, you're free to use a shitty--I'm sorry--traditional desktop environment.
Here's an example: I use Evolution as my email client. An important email comes in that I'd like to store in a project folder. In Gnome 2 you just drag and drop directly to the target folder; in Gnome 3 you have to right-click; choose "Move To"; then browse to the target folder (that is right before your f-ing eyes), and hope that it works.
It's the same for every application. Open 2 Nautilus windows, try to shift-select a bunch of files and drag to the other window -- does.not.work
For me lack of drag and drop is the single biggest strike against Gnome 3.
I use a tiling WM (i3) with Fedora 18; when I switch to Fedora 19 it will very likely be a Gnome-less stack.
I, on the other end of the spectrum, have yet to find someone who loves it.
I switched to XFCE because I found GNOME 3 to be a terrible experience, despite having loved GNOME 2.
Could you provide some details and corrections? "It's wrong" is not saying much really...
"The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking."
The author raises a good point about backwards compatibility, what's your experience with it? How do you keep / plan to keep your customisation up to date after upgrades?
You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. I see that as a necessary tradeoff; I don't want core development bogged down by BC, and I want my extensions to be maintained and improved.
Not even close to what happens in GNOME 3. Firefox has an extension API, GNOME shell doesn't; that has consequences.
Right?
The problem extends further than just GNOME's stupidity. When you have forks, you get a lot of fragmentation. Now, nobody can figure out whether to develop for GTK2, GTK3, Qt, or goddamned xaw because there is just so much fragmentation in the desktop environments. If GNOME had just been sane, there would be no MATE, there would be no Cinnamon, there would be no Unity, and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
I'm not, that happened two years ago, and the only one that lost something there is the GNOME project.
There's no point in answering the rest of your comments, because apparently your mind is not capable of understanding that people are different, and why a project should not piss its current users.
Attempting to continue some war on it is useless, there are many people who are quite pleased with GNOME 3, just because you aren't doesn't mean you need to keep deriding it, just move on and stop caring. As made obvious the past several times you've written incredibly similar pieces, the greater GNOME community doesn't care. There's no purpose to what you're doing.
But good for them, it's easier to be "brilliant" and "forward thinking" with zero users to support.
That said, I do wonder how you'd like to back up your claims here? I mean - if you'd just say "Bah! Gnome 3 is a step in the wrong direction and the Gnome developers are clueless. I'm moving on" that'd be fine and cool - I guess everyone could understand reasons to do that, without neccessarily agreeing.
But you
- state that a 'majority' hates Gnome 3.
What? Really? A 'majority' of .. which representative group?
That's impossible to back, insulting and quite frankly it's hard to assign a
single motive to the 'Gnome developers'
Ignoring whether you're right or not (I .. tend to disagree): Why would that be
important? Why do you consider 'rule the DE market' / 'be a leader in the DE
market' (what market??) a worthwhile goal of the Gnome project? In my
opinion they should provide one of a number of consistent desktop
environments..Instead of listening to outcry of very much every single user out there, the person in charge insisted that his vision was the "correct" way of using desktop metaphor, and suggested everyone to get over it.
It is unclear to me if those people also actually used the software (at lenght)?
Or rather, they know it, but only deep down in their subconscious, their lizard brain. Their conscious mind doesn't know, because you're asking them to pull specific things out of the nebulous cloud of the possible, and there's too many of the damn things in that cloud for them to know which ones map to what they want.
That's why they need developers. Developers know how to translate requirements into features. Users don't. And they shouldn't have to!
So if you ask them, what you get back tends to be:
- too vague ("it should be easier");
- pie-in-the-sky stuff ("it should whiten my teeth while I use it");
- or falling back on what they know, which is what they've had in the past ("bring back feature X").
If you want to learn what users want, you have to watch them use the product, pick up on their frustrations, and creatively solve them. Asking them what they want leads you nowhere.
For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange.
When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it.
My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him.
He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked.
Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
We still do.
However you got one thing right: familiarity always trumps ease of learning, ie. the easiest thing to learn is what you know already. So if you define "good UI" as "user friendly UI" (as we have done, for some reason, for 30 years) you will find that the best UI is always the old one, because virgin users do not exist anymore.
Sorry, but it peeves me that his articles still get near the top. They're worthless diatribes against a project that doesn't care about his input. And, more importantly, doesn't need or want to care about his input.
> There’s no other way to put it; GNOME 3 was a mistake.
There’s no other way to put it: your blog post is a mistake.
I personally like how they do things, they provide what people need, not what people want. And I do believe that they provide an awesome and by far the best desktop environment.
Its the only one that just works 90% of the time with crap that should work. Network, bluetooth, notifications, window management. I like the way all these things work. I have my minor qualms with it (alt+tab, multimonitor support, poor virtual machine performance)
Those few things aren't deal breakers for me though
Window management pales compared to tiling WMs like Awesome and i3, so being able to drag title bar to windows edges to get a split screen is like, is that all? How about a key binding for that, and while we're at it, how about splitting the screen arbitrarily using keyboard shortcuts?
I get that Gnome 3 is good in the sense that things mostly work, but it seems tailored to touch screen devices or use of a mouse to interact with the interface. This frankly blows if your go to tool of choice is the keyboard.
Saying that, I wouldn't consider going back to Gnome 2, am moving toward a Gnome-less stack.
Personally I get why Gnome 3 or Unity developers have cut down on configuration options, but on the other hand, for example it's really frustrating in Unity not being able to move the left bar to the right. On OS X or on Windows (7 at least) this is extremely easy to do, as you can place that bar wherever you want it, to the left, to the right, at the bottom, wherever it feels more comfortable to you.
So it's good that Gnome developers strive for interfaces that work well out of the box, but some choices have been rather dumb.
2. developers do listen to users, but unfortunately every user is different and have different preferences and needs, so whom do you listen to? Also, users aren't really aware of what they really need, so you have to read between the lines. This is a sixth sense that many of us lack.
You need to have a strong dictator with good taste to drive good design. It's pretty sad that we don't have a dictator like Linus Torvalds for Gnome. Now that's a guy that would have driven things forward.
3. it happens with us technical people that every time interfaces change, we bitch about it. Well I decided to embrace change. I like Gmail's new Compose. I like most UI decisions from Ubuntu/Unity. There I said it.
Good design doesn't necessarily feel right from the start, because the lack of familiarity gets in the way. But the ultimate pursuit is that of simplicity, composability and usefulness. So from time to time, we should sacrifice familiarity for the mentioned purposes.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for releasing broken interfaces. Gnome fell in the same trap that KDE did when version 4 was released - as in barely functional software getting released to unsuspecting users.
GNOME 3 developers, you rock!
Look at the Mac. You can't change anything. You can't even change the colors. You're stuck with what you've got. But people just learned to live with it. After you stop complaining and start working, you actually get things done.
Whenever I turn my Linux machine on, I'm always tweaking something. I can't do that on my Mac. I've sat at Starbucks for over an hour installing themes and such. Talk about wasting time, but I guess I find it fun.
(I'm still using the old GNOME)
Maybe you need an attitude change