Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Looks great. I've been extremely happy with Gnome UI after switching from OSX. It's fun being able to play with a desktop that is constantly improving on a rolling-release platforms like Arch Linux, where new updates stream in constantly. Instead of having to wait a year or more for big waterfall releases like OSX (Mavericks was also pretty disappointing).

My only complaint is how every gnome upgrade the majority of gnome shell extensions break and the dev community is really slow to update them.

View on HN

Just the fact that people need a ton of shell extensions to make it barely usable is a problem in itself. The fact that they break (and some are let to rotten) after every major release is just to beat a dead body.

Just a few weeks ago I tried Gnome 3 again (again!) and it still sucks as a productivity environment. I have better things to do. But as a geek, I'll be checking Gnome 3 again maybe in a year or more. No holding my breath for any surprises.

Why do you think people need a ton of shell extensions? What is missing from base?

I've got about ten extensions running, most of them I feel makes sense aren't in the base.

The one exception is one modifying alt-tab behavior so it doesn't group programs on different workspaces together. Honestly, that's the one behavior I cannot understand exists in the first place, makes navigating by keyboard nigh impossible.

> The one exception is one modifying alt-tab behavior so it doesn't group programs on different workspaces together. Honestly, that's the one behavior I cannot understand exists in the first place, makes navigating by keyboard nigh impossible.

To each its own but I really like the fact I can alt-tab between all applications as I tend to stick one application per screen because I mostly use a 1024x600 monitor. Thinking about it can see how that would be a problem with larger resolutions though. You would have to mentally discard icons that aren't relevant to the screen you are looking at.

I like gnome but I think Unity solved that problem in a more elegant way (icons on the dock can recall any applications whatever the screen it's living on).

As paulyg mentioned above, you can use Alt-` (tilde) to cycle through multiple instances of an application after using Alt-Tab to select the group. I think it actually make the experience less tedious.

Indeed, or Alt-| in my case (Norwegian layout), and it works for currently focused application, as well.

Try doing that with multiple instances (3+) of your browser though. I've got general browsing on WS1, Netflix on WS2, tutorials and the likes on WS3, and usually Gmail etc on WS4. Imagine cycling through those, and sometimes more for various reasons, without separating by workspace. Tedious, tedious, tedious.

Right. Yes - I missed the workspace specific part of your complaint before replying - sorry about that.

It's productive to me. I've tried Unity some times already and can't get used to it and at the moment I'm on Gnome Classic because of an issue when upgrading and I'm missing Gnome 3, so maybe each person has their preferences?

> Just the fact that people need a ton of shell extensions to make it barely usable is a problem in itself

Other than 'native window placement' I find that pretty much every extension I have installed is a customisation where I want something to work in a particular way. It's not that Gnome is unusable by default, it's just more the minimal set of features that everyone uses.

For example, including a time tracker on the top bar by default would be wasteful, as would a timer. I want both of these though, so I go to a website and click a button and they work.

However, the lack of proper sandboxing / permissions breakthrough for the extensions is a real problem I don't believe has been solved yet.

And that is being worked on: https://wiki.gnome.org/Events/Hackfests/WestCoastSummit2014

We have an entire stack showing up to fix things in the right places not just in GNOME itself.

Barely usable? I'd hardly call it that. I find it very usable. I don't quite like the alt+tab default functionality, but barely usable is really a stretch. I find it a very productive environment with no extensions whatsoever.

That said, I do use a few extensions, and I'm exploring writing ones as well. The fact that extensions are written in javascript is really nice (or awful, depending on how you feel about javascript). The built in debugger/console looking glass (type ALT+F2, then lg, the press enter) is very helpful, and window identification/selection is very simple. Being able to extend the environment in a relatively easy way with a scripting language is a big win in my book

ymmv, but I find it to be a nice environment. I'm not 100% satisfied, but I'm far more satisfied with it than, say, OSX or Windows, and slightly more satisfied with it than Unity or KDE.

For those complaining about the alt-tab thing maybe you don't know about alt-`. Alt-` cycles through windows/instances of the current app! I just learned about it two days ago and I've been using gnome 3 for a year (there is a lesson in there, why was this not publicized more?).

On a more general note put me in the camp that feels gnome is getting better and better every release. I like what they have done with the header bars. Very clean interface. Initially i did nit like Gnome 3. I gave Unity and Cinnamon fair shots, 3 months each. Neither wowed me. Then I gave Gnome 3 another chance (it was 3.4 by then) and have not looked back.

It's also worth mentioning that this behavior exists on OS X as well.

And also on Unity (if you're into that).

And also on KDE.

Wait, is Windows the only one not to have that implemented?

My XFCE4 doesn't have it. It might be in some configuration option though.

Arguably Windows doesn't need to implement this because alt-tab is already a window switcher and not an app switcher.

I am into that - and you can change the behaviour to only alt-tab windows in a single workspace if you're more used to that.

Yeah, I do know that. What I don't like about alt+tab is that it doesn't respect virtual workspaces. I use workspaces to group windows I'm working on at a particular moment, but alt+tab shows applications across all workspaces, and switches between those. Might as well not even have workspaces with this behavior.

It seems that everyone has their own opinion of how alt+tab should work. Personally, I have the AlternateTab extension[0] installed, which has a configuration option to allow switching between windows within a single workspace, rather than across all workspaces. There's also several other similar extensions, each implementing their own behaviour depending on what you want.

I believe I did try that and couldn't get it to work the way I hoped. However, maybe I'm wrong...will try it again.

Thanks, John

There's a switch to turn that off in gnome-tweak-tool.

Which tab? I can't seem to find this.

If we all posted a few minutes worth of screencam video showing the pain points in typical tasks, without compromising confidentiality, it might help developers understand the issues.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=531271#p531271

Does anyone have any better references to usability research on Gnome Shell?

Gnome is very usable for many of us. I'm tired of seeing the same 'it sucks as a productivity environment' comments.

If it's not your preference, you can say that, but Gnome Shell is perfectly fine when it comes to productivity. Quick app switching, searching, app launching, etc... How do these things hurt productivity?

I personally dislike KDE, but that's just my taste. Some people love XMonad or XFCE, and some people even like Unity.

Dunno, I'm a developer and my workflow involves several different tools, Gnome Shell certainly doesn't hurt 'productivity'.

> I'm a developer and my workflow involves several different tools, Gnome Shell certainly doesn't hurt 'productivity'.

I'm also a developer whose workflow involves several different tools. One of those tools is Firefox, and I currently have several hundred tabs open in more than a dozen Firefox windows. I want to be able to instantaneously switch from Emacs to a specific Firefox window. I don't want to switch from Emacs to Firefox and then switch to a specific Firefox window (e.g., using Alt+`) like some desktop environments force their users to do.

The best solution I've found is to use a desktop environment or window manager that will display the Alt-Tab window list vertically with full titles displayed for all windows (which is similar to how I display tabs in Firefox using the Tree Style Tab extension). KDE and Openbox support this setup, and the last time I checked, Gnome didn't. So using Gnome would hurt my productivity.

I see your (valid) point but I am also positive that you could, if you wanted to, create an simple js plugin for gnome shell that would have the desired effect, as others have created alternative alt+tab switchers: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/

While this may be an issue for you, I doubt having so many Firefox tabs open is all that common. I wouldn't consider this a failure of Gnome.

Personally, having that many tabs open would make my head hurt. I'll generally have Vim open with a few open buffers, one browser window, one terminal, and the running program I'm working on...

Actually, you are countering his personal experience with your own. Just because you would find that many open tabs to be problematic doesn't mean he will. He could be like a lot of developers, lots and lots of documentation pages pointing to API info whilst they code :-)

> Actually, you are countering his personal experience with your own.

Kind of the point. Just because one developer finds KDE or Gnome or x better doesn't make it a universal fact.

Many of us find Gnome suits us just fine.

> He could be like a lot of developers, lots and lots of documentation pages pointing to API info whilst they code :-)

Most documentation pages are searchable and well organized. No need to keep hundreds of open pages.

+1 I have the same issue with alt+tab and have stopped using Gnome shell.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/294/shellshape/

finally fixed this for me. Awesome-style window switching without Awesome-style window glitching.

Use workspaces, that is the best way to switch between maximized windows in gnome. Even easier with 'workspaces to dock' extension - just scroll at the right edge of the screen.

I currently have several hundred tabs open in more than a dozen Firefox windows.

This is not a typical use case. I do periodically see people leaving comments which claim that they usually have the entire World Wide Web open simultaneously, but not often enough for it to be a use case worth optimizing for.

Look up OneTab, it improved my quality of browsing the web x100+

Onetab basically refuses to load all previous tabs when you open the browser. By default, Firefox doesn't open old tabs until you move to them. Firefox also offers tab groups by default as well. Most importantly, Firefox uses only around half as much memory as chrome and (in my use) seems to be more responsive with lots of tabs open.

After having switched to KDE from Gnome, I can say Gnome Shell does hurt productivity. One example would be, Nautilus can't be split into two panes. When I have to move a bunch of files from one folder to another, on Gnome it would require right-click copy and then open the folder and then right-click-paste. Whereas on KDE, it merely means drag and drop. It will even ask you, if you want to move or copy, that could come handy at times. Usually, I have a working folder open in split and a new tab if I want a full folder.

Secondly, KDE comes with a full suite of applications [1] that all follow same philosophy of user choice than minimalism. Gnome severely lacks that kind of application database. For example, there are not many applications, including big names like Banshee, that use Gnome's message tray. Some applications use split menu and some don't. Overall, it's not a great user experience. Not to mention there is no way in Gnome to entertain Dropbox icon which is specifically designed for system tray.

[1] http://www.kde.org/applications/

And you could say that file managers hurt productivity because they need you to focus on the file, after finding the specific one you were going to move. And then you have to wait for it to ask and focus your view on the option you were to choose, when you had the option to go with mv or cp in the first place and you don't have to navigate to the folder you need to copy the files either.

For moving and copying files from one directory to another, it's arguable that Gnome's select files, right-click and select "Move To", or "Copy To" from the context menu and select the destination from the resulting dialog is as efficient as the split-pane way.

You get split Nautilus windows in GNOME the same way you get split anything windows: tile the window to the left (Super+Left or drag window until mouse touches the left screen edge), open new Nautilus window, tile it to the right (Super+Right or draw window until mouse touches the right screen edge). Presto.

Instructions to split a window in KDE.

   click split

"Quick app switching"

For me, it's candy app switching but definitely not quick. Having to look at animated transitions is extremely distracting and definitely hurts productivity.

These days what do you need other than a web browser, terminal emulator and text editor? Gnome is similar in usability to TWM and so it works. ;-)

> Just the fact that people need a ton of shell extensions to make it barely usable is a problem in itself.

You might give xfce a try, as that's more like "real Linux" if you're a hacker used to something like fvwm2 where you have pretty much total control over the desktop.

I too am kind of disappointed in the "chasing Mac taillights" direction that Gnome has taken, dumbing things down. I guess it'd be ok if they were making significant inroads into the "mom" market where Macs are strong, but I don't think they are, and in the process seem to be losing some of the hacker market.

> Just the fact that people need a ton of shell extensions to make it barely usable is a problem in itself.

Idunno, FireFox pretty nicely demonstrates that a simple, straightforward platform with an emphasis on extensions can be great. Your use-case doesn't necessarily match my use-case, and letting the users get lost in a sea of config files to customize them has kind of proven to just cause havoc... so why not focus on extensions?

Extensions per se are good and fine. The big problem with Gnome extensions is that the Gnome people aren't really treating them as first class citizens and happily break some of them every update. So each time a new version of Gnome comes out you either have to wait a few month while all your extensions get updated or go a few month without all your favorite extensions.

I think firefox lost its way because it focused on extensions for things that should have been browser core functionality. What does firefox stand for these days? Why would I use it over Opera or Konqueror?

One of the reasons I switched away from OSX a few years ago (not to Gnome Shell, to Mint and then later to i3wm) was because every new version of OSX required me to tweak more things and install more third party things to make it usable, and I figured if I was going to have to keep going down that road I might as well go whole hog to something designed for me to do that instead of something that fought me at every step [1].

[1] Did you know that in order to rebind cmd-tab on a mac, you have to kill the Dock of all things, run the program that binds cmd-tab, and then re-run the Dock? Every other key combo is explicitly configurable, afaik.

> Just a few weeks ago I tried Gnome 3 again (again!) and it still sucks as a productivity environment.

I am sorry it sucks for you. For me, it works great.

Another happy Arch user here. I hope people stop harping on the GNOME team, at this point it should be clear to some end users that the gnome-shell interface has come together. 3.8 and 3.10 are beautiful once you install extensions the act of which could not be easier and browsing new extensions is kind of fun. The dev team has had terrible communication problems and I get pissed off when they remove stuff like transparency in gnome-terminal, but extensions often replace missing features (compiz wobble for example). Over time my Arch linux installs have become something I can show my friends and be proud of, this is in no small part thanks to Gnome developers. I wish more distros were able to experience bleeding edge gnome-shell and hopefully as time goes on they will. Also, when Debian stable users get moved to 3.8 and their transparent shell goes away hopefully someone like me or the above poster will be there to say, "grab the xcfe4-terminal and trust the developers decision to deprecate what they claim was unmaintainable code."

GNOME has a continuous build system now, you can get images in cow2 format every day!

If you need a churning time-consuming stream of updates, the software wasn't written well.

I'm looking for an alternative to OS X, but I want a stable OS that I can use to get work done. If anything, Apple has been shipping too much broken software, too often. The last thing I want to do is switch to a platform that actually embraces pushing out a constant stream of poorly thought out features and a slew of regressions.

If you want a stable distro, then obviously Arch Linux isn't for you. I use Debian for production machines (ie. work laptops).

This is pretty much what everyone recommends re Arch.

I've had a lot of people use Manjaro and not run into issue. Packages are staggered enough that any bugs are usually found and sorted in the ~3 months between releases, but you never get into the Ubuntu 12.04 problem of "oh shit my system is so outdated everything will break if I dist-upgrade".

Debian testing is also similar.

The problem with Manjaro package staggering is that it's based on fortune. The Manjaro team as far as I know does not maintain any packages not specific to Manjaro. After using Manjaro on my laptop for the better part of a year and running into lots of stability issues over the last few months, I think that the criticism about "aging packages like wine" is valid. I could deal with significant breakage in Xfce for a while, but when my wireless card (supported in the kernel) was unable to reliably connect to a wireless network, I had to toss Manjaro for good. If there's breakage in Arch, it will make it to Manjaro, and Arch packages seem to break more often these days.

I think that the state of Linux desktop right now is bad. GNOME3 is a pretty toy and KDE4 is ugly and (in my experience) unstable. Xfce is getting heavy, so it seems like people are all going to *box DEs. There used to be much greater diversity of well-supported desktop distros, like MEPIS, that weren't just another layer over Ubuntu.

Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now: Fast mirrors, systemd for reasonable boot times, up-to-date packages, no distractions or consumer focus (Ubuntu), well-supported and relatively stable. I strongly recommend the MATE+Compiz spin: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/

As a user and contributor to KDE, it is as ugly or as beautiful as you want to make it. I find the default skins in Suse / Manjaro KDE to be pretty good, of course there is still huge room for improvement and hopefully the design group makes kde5 look less 1990s beige office box.

It isn't any heavier than Windows. Hell, anything is lighter than Windows, and Vista has been running on almost every PC since 2005. So I'm not that worried about the "weight".

> Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now

The only two breakages I've had in the last 6 months on Arch as my main development machine have been a kernel 3.13 bug that affects everyone (AMD cards are put in suspend mode even if they don't support it, which crashes the driver, and is fixed in 3.13.7) and an xorg configuration bug fixed in Xorg 1.16. Neither of which were game breaking, just inconveniences, but I did cherry pick my hardware to work with Linux (all open source drivers on everything, atheros nic, hd4600 + 7870 on Mesa, Intel ethernet and usb / etc).

Problem with Fedora is a severe lack of software availability. On Ubuntu you have PPAs, on Arch the AUR and pkgbuild.com, and on Suse you have the OBS, but on Fedora (and Mageia and friends) you have the rare independently hosted repo you have to add via config file. I've also had experiences with Fedora being just as unstable as Manjaro with their bleeding edgeness and lack of verbose testing on all devices before pushing near-vanilla kernels.

Even when Ubuntu switches to systemd, it is hard to recommend because rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case except the unmaintained server or automation box, in which case I'd favor Debian anyway. I'm actually hopeful for Chakra, which is kind of floundering since they lost their web hosting and all kinds of nonsense, but the direction - consistent biannual update pushes to a rolling release, with thorough testing and a KDE base system that goes out of its way to avoid pulling it other frameworks for speed and footprint. It is a pretty pure fire and forget solution, albeit of course its just a community project.

ROSA is another one I'm hopeful for, since its business backed with support contracts and does some novel features on top of Mageia.

"rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case"

Oh my goodness, no. Rolling release requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything from the repos (because, as Arch says, "partial upgrades are not supported", as a practical matter I have to update everything before installing anything.) Breakage is also a routine possibility any time I install security updates.

I also have machines that connect to the Internet solely through a cellular data plan. I have no desire to such bandwidth for all these updates.

Rolling release gets me nothing I'm interested in. I use Debian stable on all my machines.

> requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything

This is a failing of an improperly tested update, not of the model. You do need to beat all the possible glitches out of updates as they come in some testing repo, but if you do and you can deliver rock solid iterative updates it is the natural way to keep a system up to date.

I disagree strictly about the state of the Linux desktop. Of course, whether KDE is ugly depends on the user's view, but it is highly customizable, too: for instance, I prefer having borderless windows, and I like using KWin's tabs, which means I probably get something different from the stock experience: <http://i.imgur.com/TfWFmZl.png>.

GNOME, too, is going a long way forward. Windows still doesn't really have pixel scrolling for trackpads, which MacOS X has had for a very long time, but GNOME does.

I'd argue that the biggest Linux desktop issue is that package management systems are a bit of a mess, especially the dpkg / rpm kind. A system like this one should not have locks, nor require root access systematically. Thankfully, Nix fixes both, and ensures atomic upgrades and rollbacks. That project makes me hopeful for the future. Anyone can install and use it, no matter what distribution or package manager is used on their system. Their default repositories are rather large, although obviously not as large as others, but that's improving rather fast.

Beyond that, the fact that both KDE (Apper) and GNOME (Software) agree on using PackageKit by default, which grants them an app store that isn't tied to a specific package management system, is rather good news for the future.

You can definitely make KDE4 look good, but KDE3 looked a lot better out of the box, and distros like openSUSE, Sabayon, PCLinuxOS, and MEPIS all provided very unique KDE setups, but it seems like the well-supported KDE4 distros all look very close to stock KDE4.

The main problem with fedora is that yum sucks so badly. It's absurdly slow and the interface is goofy. What's up with needing a separate tool like repoquery?

Also, why is it necessary to update the kernel twice a week? And why isn't VirtualBox a core package?

Yum seems a little faster than apt-get/aptitude to me. Do you have the yum cache enabled? Yum normally downloads its package lists for every command, but you can make it cache the package list like apt-get does.

Even using the cache it's annoyingly slow compared to Arch's pacman. Various repoquery commands take near a minute to run whereas pacman is instantaneous. I'd guess the Python and SQLite approach are to blame.

Hasn't OS X become "linux on the desktop". Homebrew is there for a lot of the main packages and its easy to bring up virtual machines with whatever flavor of Linux distribution one wants for more particular needs. If you already have Apple hardware, I feel OS X is a great compromise. A great mainstream OS with a lot of support for good GUI apps plus great support for a lot of linux software. What's your reason's for wanting to move away from OS X?

MacPorts has been there for something like 12 years now, so "linux on the desktop" software availability is not really the problem.

However, it's growing clear through Apple's actions that they aren't interested in supporting the traditional desktop computing market, and that they see iOS-style black box computing as the road forward.

For someone whose contributions to the platform have run the gamut from kernel drivers to VM runtimes to desktop apps, living in an iOS-like desktop is simply not tenable; I can't wait years for a platform vendor to decide that my particular use-case is worthy of their support.

It's like owning a wood shop and only being able to produce Ikea-style furniture. Endless streams of vendor-approved Ikea furniture, and nary a 30' hand-built sloop in sight.

However, most of the industry-changing software has been exactly the kind of thing you or I could never build on iOS -- even HyperCard would technically run afoul of Apple's iOS rules regarding downloaded code.

Apple lost their way, so I need to find a new platform.

Who does use vanilla OSX though? I mean people here are complaining about having to install extensions on Gnome, but isn't it what we do when we install a launcher (Alfred), web/documentation searching tool (Dash), clipboard manager (Alfred again), a new terminal (iTerm2), better touch tool, etc. etc. We are just extending the system to make it suit our workflow.

We just have to accept that developers expect a lot of their environment, more than traditional users want, and more than what should be available by default in an OS. I am okay with installing plugins/tools/etc. to make me more productive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com