Gnome 3.10 Release Notes

This might be heresy being that I'm a GNOME foundation member, but at first I did not much like GNOME 3 at all. After about 3.4 it started having the polish I expected. Now, I actually really enjoy using it. The extensions are super nice and having an interactive javascript console to extend / hack on your window manager is super nifty (if you know javascript of course).

All in all, I think it is quite solid. Currently I use Fedora 18 for most of my workstations, but just updated my home desktop to Fedora 19 and notice they have the "GNOME Classic" option, which is essentially a beefed up version of the fallback mode. If you prefer GNOME 2.x, take a shot at installing Fedora 19 or 20 if you like to live on the edge. Login to the GNOME Classic session (click the sessions button in the login screen) and try it out. I think you might actually like it.

As an eternal sceptic of new things tech who really didn't much care for GNOME 3.x at first, I've actually fallen in love with it. Can't say I have any issues at all other than it doesn't do amazing with 9 monitors, but how many OSS devs have setups like that ;D

I've loved GNOME 3 for as long as I've used it, but I've had (apparently) non-typical usage habits since before GNOME 1.x came out. For example, I know a lot of people hated the fact that GNOME 3 did away with the Win95-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen, but even under GNOME 2 I used to ditch it as quickly as possible.

For my purposes, GNOME 3 lets me easily dedicate workspaces to different tasks, it lets me easily open as many terminals and Vim windows as I like, and it lets me easily open two windows side-by-side (an editor with code and a terminal for running tests, or an editor with HTML and a browser for previewing, etc.) so I'm pretty pleased with it.

I'm a little worried about some of the changes GNOME 3 has gone through; as it migrates from traditional in-window menu-bars to a single button in the global bar at the top of the screen, that's probably going to put a crimp in my sloppy-mouse-focus habits. This new "header bars" concept probably isn't going to play very nicely with my custom title-bar-button-order setup (I prefer the traditional Mac close-at-top-left, zoom-at-top-right configuration). Still, I'll probably get used to it over time.

I'm on Debian with Gnome 3.8 and been quite happy overall.

I was recently working on a Gnome 2.x machine and couldn't believe how terrible and difficult to use it all seemed – even though I used 2.x for many years.

I'm not sure where all the Gnome 3 negativity came from. But I understand that a small detail can be enough to derail your experience with it. In my case, that would be the "Launch new instance" behaviour: clicking on the launcher focused on the existing instance, instead of creating a new one. But with a tiny gnome shell extension it was resolved. I have other extensions installed, but that's really the only one I want to keep.

I think the flak and hate they received was disproportionate… But then, pretty much the same happened with KDE3->KDE4, Win2k->WinXP, WinXP->Vista, Win7->Win8, and more recently with iOS6->iOS7. About the only time where a major UI change was introduced without too much trouble, was the MacOS9->MacOSX Public Beta transition; but I suspect there was just as much grumbling from the people on OS9, it just may have been that their voices got drowned out by the excitation of the new users attracted by the new "lickable" interface.

I just can't use Gnome 3 - it feels like you're straight-jacketed into only changing the approved settings by some dev who's 'decided for you'. I haven't used 3.8, but whenever I start a new system I try gnome 3 for a bit... and it quickly drives me away.

Things like deciding for me that I can't place items on the desktop. It's my desktop - if I want to put things there and 'clutter' it, then I should be able to.

Things like having a file manager that requires modifier keys to send things to the trash. Not delete them outright, just send them to the trash. If I fat-fingered something, then I still have the safety net of being able to pull it out of trash - it's the whole point of trash.

Then there's trying to get a Windows user to shift to linux with Gnome. "How do I..." You can't. "Oh, then how do I..." You're not permitted to. Yes, I know I said linux gives you much more control, but... ...and so we have one less linux user as she returns to an OS she can personalise beyond a background colour.

Gnome3 is too much about form and not enough about function, and makes the rather insulting assumption that the average user is pretty dumb. Is gnome 3.10 nicer than previous gnome 3's? Sure. Is it nicer than a traditional desktop? Not in my experience.

Great, I have Gnome 3 hidden behind i3 WM ;-)

Gnome GUI still creeps through of course, and generally does the trick, although lack of drag & drop system wide is the single biggest fail whale design decision of the Gnome 2 to 3 transition, IMO (if anyone has drag & drop in Gnome 3 without a WM wrapper, chime in, will happily retract the claim if this is i3 specific).

I'd like to go with a Gnome-less stack when I upgrade to Fedora 19, but you know, Gnome, despite its warts does come with a ton of built-in convenience out of the box, so unless I find myself unemployed in the near future (i.e. with time on my hands), Gnome + i3 it will be (i3, BTW, is pretty much a wonder joy of awesome, no pun on that other WM intended).

I'm on 3.8 in Fedora 19 and my overall impression is it's pretty fast & clean.

Haven't had much luck getting gnome-shell-extensions running well. I got the weather one going by taking the one from the gnome site rather than the rpmforge package but system monitor, pomodoro timer and a couple of others aren't playing ball for me currently.

I have had to google how to do a bunch of different things since switching to it. I still don't know any commands except restart for the snazzy alt+f2 command overlay.

I'd most like it to add a apple key+space style search from the mac world.

Most interesting new app there is "boxes", a virtual machine / remote machine viewer / manager mashup thing. Looks quite promising to me.

I switched to Gnome 3 (and Gnome Shell) the moment it was released. The biggest problems IMO were the broken/dropped features and the graphics driver glitches. The shell, which is what I suppose defines the experience, was great from day 1. I consider it a major leap forward and, for the most part, it just feels natural and does what you want it to.

A lot has improved since the first release, removed features came back, bugs were fixed, UI was tweaked. There are still some (stupidly) rough edges here and there that piss me off but you get used to them, wait for a fix, or use a shell extension.

Verdict: Buy (unless you want a tiling window manager)

In the past three years I've seriously used Gnome 2, awesome, xmonad, XFCE, Openbox, KDE, and Gnome 3. For window managers without Desktop Environments I generally rolled my own, but used GNOME DE under xmonad.

What got me started on all those was that early Gnome 3 had major problems with multi-monitor, and in general lack of finish/configurability.

I am using Gnome 3.8 on Fedora 19 now, and it is great. I'm very productive in it, and in my opinion it's the most polished UI. I run a three-monitor setup and program mostly.

That said, I would have chucked it without gnome-tweak-tool. GNOME 3 has brought back some of the configurability it lacked originally. Personally I use it to set Sloppy window focus, turn off dynamic workspaces and set 4 static, and make keyboard shortcuts for just about everything.

As for command-line configurability, I run 'gsettings list-recursively | sort > gs-before.txt' before running gnome-tweak-tool and then after to compare to see what the settings names are. I then use that to create a 'post-install' config file so my changes are documented and if I reinstall I don't have to manually flip buttons. For example, to set sloppy window focus mode:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy'

Anyway, so far so good with GNOME 3.8, and am looking forward to Fedora 20 and GNOME 3.10.

I use Gnome 3.8 with my archlinux, and I've tried it because it was giving me the least problems, now I can't touch anything else because it just seems slow and not as intuitive. It gets under your skin in a good way.

The best thing about it is also when it gets "a bit funky" it's as easy as "alt+f2 r" to fix it and have it running as good as new.

I too have switched from GNOME 2 to Xfce, since it suits _my_ needs better than GNOME 3 does.

I'm not sure if the hypothesis is correct, but it seems that GNOME 3 is targeting the desktop market that Apple has so well-cornered and optimized. There are things that do not logically make sense, to me, within Mac OS X and subsequently GNOME 3, but just the same they are included in the desktop GNU/Linux initiative.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is the path forward.

Depends of what you want, I use GNOME 3.8 on Fedora 19, is is smooth and fast.

I've been using it since the initial release and really like it. It's important however to keep an open mind and don't resist change at all costs.

Also keep an eye out on the extensions.

The killer feature is extensions.gnome.org

After you spent some time customizing it, I cant use any other WM that does not bring in this ease of customization.

After that, the WM gets out of your way.

My experience has been positive for Gnome 3.10 (I'm running Fedora 20 nightly). I don't feel to be more productive using other DEs though I can certainly switch between them easily (I do coding, graphic design, and 3d modeling). The majority of the changes listed on that page just made it look and function a lot better overall. I think they're headed in the right direction.

I tried hard until 3.4.2, then I stopped trying and started running the "fallback mode".

Now I'm happy. Now I understand that trying to use it when it forces you to change your workflow is a terrible idea. I needed months to get used to the new desktop and a week to completely forget it.

So I guess I'm a Gnome 3 user without really using Gnome 3, if that makes any sense.

Edit: formatting

Initially I was skeptical, but it soon turned into joy. Now I can't live without it. Try it for 1-2 months, there's no looking up.

My Ubuntu boxes run Unity, but my Fedora laptop runs Gnome and I'm quite happy with it. Unity is a better fit for small screens, but Gnome is just fine.

It's true some fine tuning is no longer easy to do and that the Gnome team makes some decisions I disagree with, but, all things considered, it works and stays out of the way.

There's a lot of things I like about it, but with regard to productivity, I was lost until I coded an extension to provide a bottom panel with a task list.

Well, I tried to use GNOME 3 and Unity, both had really annoying quirks, so I switched to GNOME Classic, which is essentially like GNOME 2.

I want to like Unity, and I use and love my Mac, but for some reason it just doesn't seem to stick for me either.

check this out http://fooishbar.org/tell-me-about/wayland-on-raspberry-pi/

There's a live image here you can give a shot: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/misc/promo-usb/gnome-3.10.iso

I think it's based on Fedora but I haven't tested it myself yet so I'm not sure.

I'm using Fedora 20 nightly now and it's working nicely. You can try it or the Alpha.

It will take some time for distributions to package the latest release. Arch Linux typically has the new release in a month or so.

Systemd is a critical part of the Linux userland, and is now the standard Linux init system.

If you opt to run Linux without systemd, expect various userland things to break.

It has a hard dependency on Logind. Logind was merged into systemd after the Gnome integration ( replacing ConsoleKit with logind ) happened. This means that Gnome became retroactively dependent on systemd-logind.

Part of the wayland integration as well. Wayland won't support middle-click to paste, nor will it provide the X copy buffers. This means that middle mouse paste + mark-to-copy has to be provided by toolkits, in some kind of way. That also means that the toolkits need to figure out a way to do "copy on mark" without breaking the buffer already in clipboard. I somehow doubt that middle click to paste will survive the transition to Wayland.

Ouch. Here I was hoping the flood of (multi)touch screens would make things like the ACME editor more attractive, by having some set of gestures that allowed for universal "three (or more) button" GUIs. Or even Smalltalk, for that matter. Now in applications one can of course do whatever one wants -- but select to copy always seemed like a much better idea than the alternative (and as someone else alluded to, it's a big burden to drop on toolkit/app developers -- it really should be service the "system" provides).

Did they release it with select to copy disabled? Can't find anything about it on the site.

Is there a gconf/dconf switch?

Yes, support has been added as of 3.10. It is similar to what Mac OS does. People who do not want that can tweak it in tweak tool.

You know, this is not a zero-sum game.

Gnome 2 + Xmonad was a pretty good combination for me, but I haven't used it in a while since I have a Mac at home and need to run Netbeans at work. (The Xinerama support in XMonad is highly unpleasant, too.)