Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

And also on KDE.

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

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

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

> 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.

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?

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 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.

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.

> 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?

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. ;-)

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 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com