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Comment by username42 | Hacker News Reader

I am very happy that Ubuntu GNOME is present. This means no unity for the next 3 years ;-)

At the risk of starting a flamewar, is Gnome 3/Shell really any better? I've never felt quite so unproductive as when I use Gnome nowadays.

I have never quite understood all these desktop emotions. I run Kubuntu, but almost never interact with any desktop features. What is it in your workflow that requires you to interact with Gnome/Unity? (just curious)

alt+tab. Used to work perfectly. Now broken. I've returned to debian stable, which comes with a gnome-2 legacy option that works out of the box just as well as it did a decade ago.

Have you tried the "Simple App Switcher"? It's the good old alt+tab from yester years. You can enable it through Compiz Settings Manager.

Go to [0], install, configure to either "all windows" or "all windows in current workspace", and alt+tab probably works like you want again. It's not terribly difficult.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/

Or, you know... just keep using an old, stable, dependable version. But you can't do that with GNOME since they are such rabid fans of the CADT model.

Alt-Tab, Super+[1,2,3...0], App launching from the Dash and window spread.

I can't live without the Super+[1,2,3,4...] shortcuts.

The main thing that springs to mind is that the only way to get a half decent desktop is through extensions. I installed a whole load of useful ones about a year ago, but currently only about 1/5th of them are still working due to gnome version incompatibility.

One of the most noticably broken parts of Gnome Shell for me is that my Pidgin notifications/alerts seem to be broken. They neither flash the item in the taskbar, nor give me a popup to let me know that a new message has arrived. I had an extension to fix this, but that has since broken upon Gnome version change. There is a messenger integration into the user account menu in the top right, but there is no way of changing the client from the default to Pidgin.

I only use Gnome on my travel laptop, so I get little snapshot peeks at how it's going. I've had these problems I've mentioned for quite a while now (and many more besides), it only seems to be getting worse. The Gnome devs seem to be completely ignoring the community and charging off down their own path of weird unusability.

For my main desktop I just run AwesomeWM, which is almost completely pain-free and gets the hell out of my way.

For me Gnome (2 especially) always felt more natural and productive to use than Unity. Besides, you could easily customize your Gnome to look and behave exactly like Unity but you can't replicate the same with Unity.

Gnome 2 always annoyed me because on every fresh install I had to spend time moving the two separate task bars to be just one. Vertical real estate is at a premium on all monitors, why would I ever want two bars taking up precious space?

Never made sense to me.

I love that feature. One bar for the various menus and the other for the list of open windows. I often have several versions of the same application open while working and it is easier for me to find the right window on the open window bar than the alt+tab interface. When I upgrade Ubuntu again, the first thing I will do is install Gnome 2.

Gnome 3 is actually pretty good (once you install a few extensions from extensions.gnome.org.)

Much less cluttered than unity (most of the time you just have a single black bar at the top of the screen) and handles workspaces nicely.

I never liked gnome 2, though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I'll second that extensions bit.

The difference between Gnome and Unity is that if there's something you don't like about the former, you can install an extension to fix it. If there isn't an extension, you can write one - at least theoretically.

Anecdotally, that sort of shifts the blame for missing functionality around. It's no longer "my wm is missing x" it's "I haven't written x for my wm yet."

Yeah, the extensions have really helped. The main problem there is that the extensions keep on falling out of compatibility. I have half a dozen extensions that used to work well and provided critical functionality, now they don't.

No signs of anyone fixing them either, it's been 6 months since my Pidgin extension broke :(

Anecdote: After running some net-install 12.04, 12.10 and 13.10 for a long time with a tiling window manager and recently trying out Unity and Gnome for a few weeks I decided to get back to Debian and Gnome 3.4 + awesome because it runs way smoother on the latest live-CD. And I am in the mood for some long term stability.

My main point of contention is that Unity's dash isn't fast enough for me and I am tired to dig the registry to get rid of the on-line suggestions. But overall I think Unity has a better App/Window management than GNOME (the dock is much more functional for instance). So no 14.04 for me. Except if performances are okay and if the team pulling Ubuntu GNOME show good support.

Gnome-Shell convinced me to switch away from wmii.

The trick is to use extensions. In particular, the "shellshape" extension for GNOME Shell is a pretty good approximation to sane tiling window managers.

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