Comment by inthewind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inthewind | Hacker News Reader

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I want to like Gnome 3. Every now and then I give it a spin, but ultimately end up back with Xfce. It just doesn't really give me anything extra, (apart from better font rendering in Firefox for some reason, and touch pad clicking! ) Their browser (web) doesn't work for me. It also kept freezing my keyboard for some reason or another, so it isn't much use.

The biggest irritant other than the above is that a couple of the taskbar widgets were missing. What I take away from that is that one little feature can influence us quite heavily. And it's pretty much the same story for Opera. I totally relied on the fit-to-width button and I love their spatial navigation - but have found myself using Firefox - just because I can make it more readable with a couple of easy modifications (though I still have issues with that.)

Give me a one line or paragraph summary of what Gnome 3 is, and why you'd want to use it over Gnome 2! Then try the same with Opera vs Chrome.

Gnome3 is a major update of Gnome2. They've replaced many aging libraries with their new counterparts. It includes 3d graphics (tasteful in my opinion), have dynamic workspaces and I really like the function when you're pushing the super key (windows key). The most important function is that it hardly gets in my way and I had to install less things to get the functions I really like (super - start typing to start an application, transparency...). I had to install GnomeDo and configure Compiz Fusion to get this in Gnome2 (and I still couldn't use super alone for this function). With GNOME3 I hardly every click with the mouse to start an application. I can't say anything about web (their browser) - cause I'm still using Firefox.

I think it is always hard, but sometimes open source projects have to make a cut to take a step in the right direction (and yes - some of the configuration stuff is hidden in Gnome3 and this really sucks). There are rough edges - but I think it's bold and good that they've made this step.

As I said, I've used it. But it doesn't really give me much back (apart from the headache of rendering my computer useless.) Modern libraries (!?!), and 3D graphics and window transparancies isn't really a game changer. They uttered something about having a semantic desktop at first, but those ideas fell from the wayside. Synapse and Xfce give me easy application launch, I find it less jarring also. I hate that transition in Windows 8. I can get by with Gnome 3 though (when it works,) it's usable.

You can't even configure the appearance of your apps (colour scheme etc) that easily in Gnome 3, it was pretty sucky in Gnome 2. This was pretty much customisable in Windows 98!

Anyway you didn't rise my challenge of trying to summarise what Gnome 3 is! But thanks nonetheless.

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