This article is so ignorant and painfully wrong in every single way. I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla (which he very much deserved in my opinion).
GNOME 3 is by far the best desktop environment I have ever used. The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking. Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is incredibly polished and stable, especially in the latest version 3.8.
I'm tired of all the bullshit being spread about GNOME 3. If you're going to cling to the past, you're free to use a shitty--I'm sorry--traditional desktop environment.
No drag & drop, across the entire interface, huge usability ouch.
Here's an example: I use Evolution as my email client. An important email comes in that I'd like to store in a project folder. In Gnome 2 you just drag and drop directly to the target folder; in Gnome 3 you have to right-click; choose "Move To"; then browse to the target folder (that is right before your f-ing eyes), and hope that it works.
It's the same for every application. Open 2 Nautilus windows, try to shift-select a bunch of files and drag to the other window -- does.not.work
For me lack of drag and drop is the single biggest strike against Gnome 3.
I use a tiling WM (i3) with Fedora 18; when I switch to Fedora 19 it will very likely be a Gnome-less stack.
Sounds to me like your window manager doesn't support the necessary drag & drop hints [1]. Yes, X11 does not specify a D&D protocol. All three of those use cases work fine for me, using the Gnome Shell itself.
"ignorant and painfully wrong in every single way"
Could you provide some details and corrections? "It's wrong" is not saying much really...
"The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking."
The author raises a good point about backwards compatibility, what's your experience with it? How do you keep / plan to keep your customisation up to date after upgrades?
It's pretty funny that Firefox was praised back in the day for removing most of the core functionality and configurability of SeaMonkey and leaving the rest to extensions, and now Gnome 3 is lambasted for doing the same thing.
You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. I see that as a necessary tradeoff; I don't want core development bogged down by BC, and I want my extensions to be maintained and improved.
Yes, because confusing, inconsistent, space-ineffective UIs that have serious usability issues like no default drag and drop, weird GTK3 two-menu system with tons of redundancy, loss of keyboard shortcuts, inefficient application launching systems, and a loss of customization are what everyone wants, and if people don't want it, they're Luddian curmudgeons who need to be exiled from the Linux community and put down in front of a BSD system.
Right?
The problem extends further than just GNOME's stupidity. When you have forks, you get a lot of fragmentation. Now, nobody can figure out whether to develop for GTK2, GTK3, Qt, or goddamned xaw because there is just so much fragmentation in the desktop environments. If GNOME had just been sane, there would be no MATE, there would be no Cinnamon, there would be no Unity, and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
In all seriousness, Unity was a thing from Canonical long before anyone knew the direction Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell was heading. Canonical wanted their own desktop experience that they could drive in the direction they wanted to go, and they would have never gotten that from Gnome or KDE or any other existing project. The fact that they're switching Unity from a Gtk to a Qt backend in order to support their mobile efforts and their desire to have a single UX everywhere is just further proof of this strategy.
Id agree with your overall point that gnome 3 is a great desktop environment. But I also agree with many of the authors points about the plain wierd default settings and non user-friendly way you have to go about getting gnome 3 to be the desktop env you want. For me I love gnome 3 now, but getting my setup how I wanted was not a task for the light hearted. I think thats the biggest problem gnome 3 has to be honest.
> I think the author is just butthurt about being banned from GNOME's bugzilla
I'm not, that happened two years ago, and the only one that lost something there is the GNOME project.
There's no point in answering the rest of your comments, because apparently your mind is not capable of understanding that people are different, and why a project should not piss its current users.
It really seems that you are still upset with the GNOME community disregarding you. Based on the fact that you keep writing pieces about how you hate GNOME 3, without any objective information on why GNOME 3 is bad.
Attempting to continue some war on it is useless, there are many people who are quite pleased with GNOME 3, just because you aren't doesn't mean you need to keep deriding it, just move on and stop caring. As made obvious the past several times you've written incredibly similar pieces, the greater GNOME community doesn't care. There's no purpose to what you're doing.
This is exactly the kind of tone deaf developer suck-up attitude the article complains about. It doesn't really matter what you or I or person X thinks, the fact is that many many many user surveys have been taken and the majority despise Gnome 3. The Gnome developers have taken the exact same stance you do, that people are just not smart enough and have ulterior motives for hating Gnome 3. The only thing it's gotten them is being pulled from default on several distros and rapidly plummeting market share.
But good for them, it's easier to be "brilliant" and "forward thinking" with zero users to support.
I stated my opinion elsewhere on this thread: Use what works for you.
That said, I do wonder how you'd like to back up your claims here? I mean - if you'd just say "Bah! Gnome 3 is a step in the wrong direction and the Gnome developers are clueless. I'm moving on" that'd be fine and cool - I guess everyone could understand reasons to do that, without neccessarily agreeing.
But you
- state that a 'majority' hates Gnome 3.
What? Really? A 'majority' of .. which representative group?
- state that Gnome developers consider their users as dumb (I .. hope I didn't misrepresent you here)
That's impossible to back, insulting and quite frankly it's hard to assign a
single motive to the 'Gnome developers'
- argue that they lost market share for some reason
Ignoring whether you're right or not (I .. tend to disagree): Why would that be
important? Why do you consider 'rule the DE market' / 'be a leader in the DE
market' (what market??) a worthwhile goal of the Gnome project? In my
opinion they should provide one of a number of consistent desktop
environments..
This reminds me when some version of Nautilus (around 2003?) adopted that ridiculous open each folder in new window thing without an option to disable it.
Instead of listening to outcry of very much every single user out there, the person in charge insisted that his vision was the "correct" way of using desktop metaphor, and suggested everyone to get over it.
There is a much bigger problem with GNOME 3, it is fighting a battle that nobody cares about anymore. People using GNOME and KDE used to have this notion where they are trying to build a Windows replacement or a Mac replacement to get people to use FOSS.
Ubuntu showed that what needs to happen is to make a better UX overall and that has nothing to do with Mac or Windows.
What I mean by UX is stuff like drivers working, being able to install on a laptop or just buy it on a laptop and stuff "just works". People will pay money to support things that work. They will buy things that work.
Millions of people are using Android, which is Linux based, because it just works on their device. The experience is pretty great and it makes it easy to do what you need to do when you need to do it.
GNOME 3 didn't solve any user experience problem. It is new and shiny just because. It didn't make it better than Ubuntu, or Windows, or Mac, or Android.
This isn't particularly useful or accurate. The larger Gnome diaspora has been pretty instrumental in draining the swamp of hardware problems and dumb broken things.
Gnome's 'flagship distro', unfortunately, is Fedora, which is... structurally not super-suited to creating a user-facing distribution.
Canonical has done lots of interesting work over the past decade or so, but ultimately most of the 'just work' they have didn't really come from their employees or investments.
KDE works in broken graphics drivers. GNOME only give you missing characters, deformed windows, etc... And isn't GTK getting something wrong. I try for example OpenBOX and all works fine.
I agree with some of the author's points, but I've been using Gnome 3 from back when I had to use a damned crowbar and Debian Experimental repos to install Gnome 3. I certainly did have some not-totally-happy moments to begin with, but Gnome 3 has turned into a straightforward and very clean GUI. I'm pretty much using the default functionality and theme, so haven't needed too much configuration.
And I was all about configuration in Gnome 2... Gnome 3 is definitely not like Gnome 2's tweaker's paradise. It was an effort to strip down to a minimalistic GUI and, after a rough start, they've done quite well. I've not missed the "Start" menu at all. I've not missed all the configuration/tweaking. I appreciate the functionality exposed by the Windows button. I've gotten used to Alt-` for switching windows-within-applications.
But I definitely agree with the author's points about the Gnome devs' response to feedback. Without regard to the trajectory of Gnome 3, the developers seems not to have managed or responded to criticism well. And Gnome 3 development and direction has been fairly quiet from a PR perspective, and a bit more PR/blog-posts could have been effective and mollifying the haters.
Note: I don't really use multiple workspaces, so can't comment on the author's comments there.
The author here. I understand that some people have no problems with GNOME 3, that's fine. Based on the evidence I've gathered through the years, my estimate is that half the people that used GNOME 2 liked GNOME 3, and half didn't. In my opinion that's way too many people to piss off in one version bump.
Judging from the responses after two years from the debacle, I think it's fair to say that GNOME will never be as successful as it once was.
The biggest problem with relying on a survey of users to determine what direction a software project should go is that users don't know what they want.
Or rather, they know it, but only deep down in their subconscious, their lizard brain. Their conscious mind doesn't know, because you're asking them to pull specific things out of the nebulous cloud of the possible, and there's too many of the damn things in that cloud for them to know which ones map to what they want.
That's why they need developers. Developers know how to translate requirements into features. Users don't. And they shouldn't have to!
So if you ask them, what you get back tends to be:
- too vague ("it should be easier");
- pie-in-the-sky stuff ("it should whiten my teeth while I use it");
- or falling back on what they know, which is what they've had in the past ("bring back feature X").
If you want to learn what users want, you have to watch them use the product, pick up on their frustrations, and creatively solve them. Asking them what they want leads you nowhere.
As mentioned in the article, you are correct in saying that users don't know what they want. However, they darn sure know what they _don't_ want, which is why many of the complaints are completely valid.
Well, sort of. Users of an existing application tend to cling to the old version in the event of a major UI overhaul, even if the new version is easier to use.
For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange.
When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it.
My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him.
He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked.
Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
Yes, of course, everyone who doesn't like a major UI overhaul is just an irrational luddite. New UI is always better UI.
However you got one thing right: familiarity always trumps ease of learning, ie. the easiest thing to learn is what you know already. So if you define "good UI" as "user friendly UI" (as we have done, for some reason, for 30 years) you will find that the best UI is always the old one, because virgin users do not exist anymore.
You just skimmed the article before rushing to have the first comment here, right? It explicitly addresses the "users don't know what they want" excuse, for several paragraphs. Also, developers are only barely better at translating requirements into features than users are, and that's even one of the ways GNOME has screwed up. Where are the UX designers? Where are the product managers? In any project large enough to have some of those - like GNOME is - it's primarily their job to do that translation. They should be the ones watching and engaging with users, while the developers mostly - wait for it - develop. Leaving both kinds of user interaction to developers is exactly how you get to where GNOME is today.
Thanks everyone. I know there are other choices, but they always involve drawbacks as well as benefits. I'm looking for something slightly more powerful than nautilus in gnome 2 and will try the alternatives you've mentioned.
Another pretty big problem with the Gnome Project recently is that they've made Gnome less modular. Gnome used to be a collection of associated software- you had a window manager, a panel, a compositor, panel applications and widgets, a settings-daemon, a keyring manager, a screensaver, etc. If you wanted something other than what Gnome wanted to provide, you swapped out metacity and compiz for xmonad. Or you bolted the settings-daemon onto another window manager. It's been subtle, but with every 3.x version of gnome, a little more of the functionality just gets rolled into gnome-shell and is unable to run without it. Most recently, with 3.8, media keys are no longer handled by gnome-settings-daemon- you can now only have gnome's media keys if you're running gnome-shell.
I know a lot of people are going to say "well, you're not using the software for its intended purpose. it's not their fault for breaking it." And that's true, but modularity a big part of the Unix philosophy and this is Gnome showing the Unix way the door.
If you're looking for a useful critique of the Gnome 3 desktop, look elsewhere. Here's ts;dr: Gnome developers are dumb. Every decision they ever made was stupid. I'm the smartest. They should listen to me but they don't because they're stupid.
Maybe the author should write meaningful pieces that actually contain even a modicum of objectivity. It's basically exactly the same as a handful of other pieces he's written about how he doesn't like GNOME because they were 'mean' to him (even though based on everything he really seems to have deserved the punishments dealt to him).
Sorry, but it peeves me that his articles still get near the top. They're worthless diatribes against a project that doesn't care about his input. And, more importantly, doesn't need or want to care about his input.
I don't understand these posts. More, I dislike them a lot.
Gnome 3 rants are boring. Yes, people don't like the way the project moves. Some of those are very vocal and outspoken. Some rant on a blog.
The thing is: Either the author cares about the Gnome project, in which case this is _no_ constructive way to put it (Hey, why don't you work on a better legacy mode? Propose a Gnome Shell extension API?). No, the 'But I tried it before, over and over, and they don't listen' argument is no excuse.
Or the author just does't like the project and wants to bash it. In that case posts like this one might make some weird kind of sense, but I yawn skimming them, hit flag on news aggregators like this and wish the author good luck with a Gnome 2 fork or a different DE of his choosing.
Hi, my name is Ben and I'm a happy Gnome 3 user. I'm sure there are others out there like me. Maybe we need to shout more? That would certainly remove stupid 'Google suggestions' arguments or 'of all the people that took this weird poll, x % hate Gnome 3' pseudo-statistics from future rants.
As a fellow happy Gnome 3 user I think the problem is no one complains about what works for them. It took a bit to get used to, but now I find all other environments lacking.
Similar thing here. I wanted a taskbar for a while, until I installed an extension that put it back and realized how clunky it felt. I love the combined launcher/virtual-desktop/expose screen. The vanilla experience is pretty great.
I love how much the environment gets out of your way and doesn't bother you. The instant message notification that can be ignored, or answered briefly and ignored. The lack of noise. It feels like an alternate history version of the Mac OS X Finder; my workflow transitioned with very few changes when I started using OS X at work.
Interesting. One question: does it feel "fast"/responsive? That's one of the things I value the most in a DE. Unity doesn't live up to my standards regarding this.
I am surprised by the polarization, really - I have been using Gnome 3 on two machines for the last few months, and it works fine, though that doesn't mean I don't have a few complaints. But I don't expect it to be magically perfect - no other OS / wm I use regularly is either. I don't find Unity unusable, or Cinnamon or Mate, I just haven't liked any of them so much I'd switch (partly there's inertia at work here, I am sure I if I had to use any of them exclusively I'd have a better grasp of their strengths and weaknesses).
You're a voice of reason. In another part of this discussion I compare the choice of your DE preference with the holy wars of VI vs. emacs.
Obviously, of course, no DE is perfect. Gnome 3 is no exception. The polarization is, in parts at least, caused by the vocal group of complainers. I certainly reflect and understand enough to know that I might widen the gap here, but I have had enough of these 'Gnome 3 is stupid' (or for that matter: 'Windows 8 is a joke') posts with little (constructive, usable, meaningful) content.
Again: Look at the article: If you don't argue against it, the 'Everyone hates Gnome 3' and 'Even Google suggests that everyone considers Gnome 3 a failure' arguments will strive. That's insane, stupid and needs to end. So - polarization is necessary. The loud 'Gnome 3 sucks' (minority?) group wins by default, otherwise.
That's cool. Move on. Use what is best for you. I could ask you if you use vi or emacs or which Linux distribution you fancy, but really? I don't care. It's important for you to find things that work for you. People online will disagree, argue, try to convince you that you're mistaken and wrong. It's your setup alone.
Open source projects hopefully fullfil most of your needs, one way or another. But you have to pick from these free offerings according to your own preferences and taste. You did the right thing: Gnome 3 was unbearable for you and you moved on, found a better solution.
Please, just don't sling mud at a project for failing to align with your goals. It was a relationship that didn't work out. Move on, remember the good times and .. never write blog posts like the OP?
You didn't understand the point of the article. Breaking user-experience is the absolute worst thing any software project could do. It goes against the "Linux way".
The people that "broke" (hey, see the quotes?) the user experience you expected and liked are the people that steer the project. They are free to do that, just like any company is free to (drastically? I don't quite think that's the case here, but let's go with it) change their product.
You have some benefits, though:
- You didn't pay a dime. Sure, you might've invested time learning to use Gnome 2 to your utmost satisfaction. You might've spent a good amount of hours to configure it to your liking. The product though? You got it for free and without any contract stating that your personal workflow would work in every future version, that your preferences are important to the project goals.
- You got the source. People complain just the same about WIndows 8 and they are stuck. Unless they find a way to jump to a totally different OS or stay in the past forever, they'll have to swallow the (imo not thaaat bad) changes. Maybe they can install some workarounds. You? You can enjoy a multitude of alternatives. You don't need to move away from your favorite applications. You can even, in fact, install one of the Gnome 2 forks (think Mint etc.) and imagine that Gnome 3 never happened.
You're not without options. Posting stuff like this rant on your blog? That's not helpful. You cannot seriously believe that this will change a thing. People that don't agree with you are going to sadly shake their heads. Gnome (3) developers are not even going to _read_ your blog, based on your way to communicate.
You reach only the people that already agreed with you in the first place. I'm sure you guys could have a good time in a bar, sharing complaints about ways Gnome 3 broke the user experience for you. But .. don't even start to believe that you represent all of the Gnome user base, much less the majority.
Putting everything that obviously divides us beside: Can you explain in 2-3 sentences what you'd hope to archive with that post of yours, the way you present your arguments? Is there any serious agenda, or is that just a way to blow off steam?
> The people that "broke" (hey, see the quotes?) the user experience you expected and liked are the people that steer the project. They are free to do that,
Yes, they have all the freedom to destroy their project.
They don't. They work on something they believe in. Now - that's not a reason to agree by default: Lots of people do things they believe in and fail their social circles or even society.
But there's no further point to argue about: Your article was a (poor) rant, your comments here are further proof that you deeply disagree with everything Gnome 3 and still are unable to provide any meaningful comment.
I'm trying to put it simple: If Gnome 3 doesn't solve your goals, it's not 'destroying the project'. If a couple of 'Yeah, that's really crap, mate' people agree with you that doesn't magically make you the majority of the userbase, nor does it mean that the developers are wrong and you are right.
In all seriousness: After your rant was posted you had only one way to react without digging an even deeper hole: Acknowledge that you were overly aggressive and wrong in quite some points. Instead you continue witih statements like this.
English is a foreign language for me, but I think 'to pout' is the verb I'd grab for if I'd need to talk about this comment of yours. Stop complaining, start improving things you care for.
That's subjective. I'm a big fan of the user-experience GNOME 3 provides, and I strongly prefer over KDE, OS X, Windows 8, etc... There are many others that agree with that sentiment. You may not like it, and that's fine. There are plenty of options. But, please, stop whining about it incessantly.
I totally agree with you. Gnome 3 is a brave departure from xp-style desktops and that's inevitably going to irk die-hard fans of the previous versions or people who love to tweak ad infinitum, but I find it a far more pleasurable experience than Unity and much more fluid than other menu-oriented desktops. Non-linux users I have shown Gnome 3 too are not only generally impressed, but also pick it up very very quickly.In my opinion, that's a real achievement.
I'm pretty sure if Apple would have release a desktop environment like Gnome 3, people would have love it.
I personally like how they do things, they provide what people need, not what people want. And I do believe that they provide an awesome and by far the best desktop environment.
Honestly gnome 3 convinced me to switch from using a few assorted others (xmonad, kde, xfce, etc) and just use gnome 3.
Its the only one that just works 90% of the time with crap that should work. Network, bluetooth, notifications, window management. I like the way all these things work. I have my minor qualms with it (alt+tab, multimonitor support, poor virtual machine performance)
Those few things aren't deal breakers for me though
Multimonitor support, shit, that's an absolute must here.
Window management pales compared to tiling WMs like Awesome and i3, so being able to drag title bar to windows edges to get a split screen is like, is that all? How about a key binding for that, and while we're at it, how about splitting the screen arbitrarily using keyboard shortcuts?
I get that Gnome 3 is good in the sense that things mostly work, but it seems tailored to touch screen devices or use of a mouse to interact with the interface. This frankly blows if your go to tool of choice is the keyboard.
Saying that, I wouldn't consider going back to Gnome 2, am moving toward a Gnome-less stack.
I'm a big fan of GNOME 3, and strongly prefer it over other desktops. The GNOME guys/gals have been doing a great job, and all the hate it gets is old and tired. If you don't like it, that's fine. There are many other great options available to you.
Look, we're on GNOME 3.8 now. The ship of GNOME's desktop design philosophy has sailed. Either GNOME broke up with you, or you broke up with it, but the relationship is over.
1. configuration options are usually a symptom of a bad UI. But sometimes they are necessary.
Personally I get why Gnome 3 or Unity developers have cut down on configuration options, but on the other hand, for example it's really frustrating in Unity not being able to move the left bar to the right. On OS X or on Windows (7 at least) this is extremely easy to do, as you can place that bar wherever you want it, to the left, to the right, at the bottom, wherever it feels more comfortable to you.
So it's good that Gnome developers strive for interfaces that work well out of the box, but some choices have been rather dumb.
2. developers do listen to users, but unfortunately every user is different and have different preferences and needs, so whom do you listen to? Also, users aren't really aware of what they really need, so you have to read between the lines. This is a sixth sense that many of us lack.
You need to have a strong dictator with good taste to drive good design. It's pretty sad that we don't have a dictator like Linus Torvalds for Gnome. Now that's a guy that would have driven things forward.
3. it happens with us technical people that every time interfaces change, we bitch about it. Well I decided to embrace change. I like Gmail's new Compose. I like most UI decisions from Ubuntu/Unity. There I said it.
Good design doesn't necessarily feel right from the start, because the lack of familiarity gets in the way. But the ultimate pursuit is that of simplicity, composability and usefulness. So from time to time, we should sacrifice familiarity for the mentioned purposes.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for releasing broken interfaces. Gnome fell in the same trap that KDE did when version 4 was released - as in barely functional software getting released to unsuspecting users.
Tweak tools, customization - people need to learn that this doesn't matter.
Look at the Mac. You can't change anything. You can't even change the colors. You're stuck with what you've got. But people just learned to live with it. After you stop complaining and start working, you actually get things done.
Whenever I turn my Linux machine on, I'm always tweaking something. I can't do that on my Mac. I've sat at Starbucks for over an hour installing themes and such. Talk about wasting time, but I guess I find it fun.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadGNOME 3 is by far the best desktop environment I have ever used. The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking. Every person I've shown it to, developer and otherwise, has loved it. It is incredibly polished and stable, especially in the latest version 3.8.
I'm tired of all the bullshit being spread about GNOME 3. If you're going to cling to the past, you're free to use a shitty--I'm sorry--traditional desktop environment.
Here's an example: I use Evolution as my email client. An important email comes in that I'd like to store in a project folder. In Gnome 2 you just drag and drop directly to the target folder; in Gnome 3 you have to right-click; choose "Move To"; then browse to the target folder (that is right before your f-ing eyes), and hope that it works.
It's the same for every application. Open 2 Nautilus windows, try to shift-select a bunch of files and drag to the other window -- does.not.work
For me lack of drag and drop is the single biggest strike against Gnome 3.
I use a tiling WM (i3) with Fedora 18; when I switch to Fedora 19 it will very likely be a Gnome-less stack.
[1] http://www.newplanetsoftware.com/xdnd/
I, on the other end of the spectrum, have yet to find someone who loves it.
I switched to XFCE because I found GNOME 3 to be a terrible experience, despite having loved GNOME 2.
Could you provide some details and corrections? "It's wrong" is not saying much really...
"The extension system is brilliant; I have used it to tweak every aspect to my liking."
The author raises a good point about backwards compatibility, what's your experience with it? How do you keep / plan to keep your customisation up to date after upgrades?
You get upgrade hell with Firefox extensions too, btw. I see that as a necessary tradeoff; I don't want core development bogged down by BC, and I want my extensions to be maintained and improved.
Not even close to what happens in GNOME 3. Firefox has an extension API, GNOME shell doesn't; that has consequences.
Right?
The problem extends further than just GNOME's stupidity. When you have forks, you get a lot of fragmentation. Now, nobody can figure out whether to develop for GTK2, GTK3, Qt, or goddamned xaw because there is just so much fragmentation in the desktop environments. If GNOME had just been sane, there would be no MATE, there would be no Cinnamon, there would be no Unity, and we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
I'm not, that happened two years ago, and the only one that lost something there is the GNOME project.
There's no point in answering the rest of your comments, because apparently your mind is not capable of understanding that people are different, and why a project should not piss its current users.
Attempting to continue some war on it is useless, there are many people who are quite pleased with GNOME 3, just because you aren't doesn't mean you need to keep deriding it, just move on and stop caring. As made obvious the past several times you've written incredibly similar pieces, the greater GNOME community doesn't care. There's no purpose to what you're doing.
But good for them, it's easier to be "brilliant" and "forward thinking" with zero users to support.
That said, I do wonder how you'd like to back up your claims here? I mean - if you'd just say "Bah! Gnome 3 is a step in the wrong direction and the Gnome developers are clueless. I'm moving on" that'd be fine and cool - I guess everyone could understand reasons to do that, without neccessarily agreeing.
But you
- state that a 'majority' hates Gnome 3.
- state that Gnome developers consider their users as dumb (I .. hope I didn't misrepresent you here) - argue that they lost market share for some reasonInstead of listening to outcry of very much every single user out there, the person in charge insisted that his vision was the "correct" way of using desktop metaphor, and suggested everyone to get over it.
It is unclear to me if those people also actually used the software (at lenght)?
Ubuntu showed that what needs to happen is to make a better UX overall and that has nothing to do with Mac or Windows.
What I mean by UX is stuff like drivers working, being able to install on a laptop or just buy it on a laptop and stuff "just works". People will pay money to support things that work. They will buy things that work.
Millions of people are using Android, which is Linux based, because it just works on their device. The experience is pretty great and it makes it easy to do what you need to do when you need to do it.
GNOME 3 didn't solve any user experience problem. It is new and shiny just because. It didn't make it better than Ubuntu, or Windows, or Mac, or Android.
Gnome's 'flagship distro', unfortunately, is Fedora, which is... structurally not super-suited to creating a user-facing distribution.
Canonical has done lots of interesting work over the past decade or so, but ultimately most of the 'just work' they have didn't really come from their employees or investments.
True, but not particularly more than KDE, or any other environment.
And I was all about configuration in Gnome 2... Gnome 3 is definitely not like Gnome 2's tweaker's paradise. It was an effort to strip down to a minimalistic GUI and, after a rough start, they've done quite well. I've not missed the "Start" menu at all. I've not missed all the configuration/tweaking. I appreciate the functionality exposed by the Windows button. I've gotten used to Alt-` for switching windows-within-applications.
But I definitely agree with the author's points about the Gnome devs' response to feedback. Without regard to the trajectory of Gnome 3, the developers seems not to have managed or responded to criticism well. And Gnome 3 development and direction has been fairly quiet from a PR perspective, and a bit more PR/blog-posts could have been effective and mollifying the haters.
Note: I don't really use multiple workspaces, so can't comment on the author's comments there.
Judging from the responses after two years from the debacle, I think it's fair to say that GNOME will never be as successful as it once was.
Or rather, they know it, but only deep down in their subconscious, their lizard brain. Their conscious mind doesn't know, because you're asking them to pull specific things out of the nebulous cloud of the possible, and there's too many of the damn things in that cloud for them to know which ones map to what they want.
That's why they need developers. Developers know how to translate requirements into features. Users don't. And they shouldn't have to!
So if you ask them, what you get back tends to be:
- too vague ("it should be easier");
- pie-in-the-sky stuff ("it should whiten my teeth while I use it");
- or falling back on what they know, which is what they've had in the past ("bring back feature X").
If you want to learn what users want, you have to watch them use the product, pick up on their frustrations, and creatively solve them. Asking them what they want leads you nowhere.
For example, Microsoft Office 2007 came out just after I started university. I'd never used Office before, and I spent a lot of time digging around in Office 2003's menus looking for things. I'd googled for help using programming languages before, but googling for help about an office suite seemed strange.
When I tried Office 2007, I thought that the tabbed interface was fantastic; I had a far easier time finding the options and features I was looking for. The more I used it, the more impressed I was at how intuitive Microsoft had made it.
My father had been using Office for decades. I excitedly showed him the new version and installed it alongside his older version so that he could open the docx files that people were starting to send him.
He _hated_ it. For over a year afterward, I heard about how terrible it was and how he had to unlearn everything and how he couldn't find anything. I even heard that all his keyboard shortcuts were broken, even though that wasn't one of the things that changed and even though he couldn't demonstrate any that no longer worked.
Users know what they don't want, and they really don't want change.
We still do.
However you got one thing right: familiarity always trumps ease of learning, ie. the easiest thing to learn is what you know already. So if you define "good UI" as "user friendly UI" (as we have done, for some reason, for 30 years) you will find that the best UI is always the old one, because virgin users do not exist anymore.
I know a lot of people are going to say "well, you're not using the software for its intended purpose. it's not their fault for breaking it." And that's true, but modularity a big part of the Unix philosophy and this is Gnome showing the Unix way the door.
Sorry, but it peeves me that his articles still get near the top. They're worthless diatribes against a project that doesn't care about his input. And, more importantly, doesn't need or want to care about his input.
Gnome 3 rants are boring. Yes, people don't like the way the project moves. Some of those are very vocal and outspoken. Some rant on a blog. The thing is: Either the author cares about the Gnome project, in which case this is _no_ constructive way to put it (Hey, why don't you work on a better legacy mode? Propose a Gnome Shell extension API?). No, the 'But I tried it before, over and over, and they don't listen' argument is no excuse.
Or the author just does't like the project and wants to bash it. In that case posts like this one might make some weird kind of sense, but I yawn skimming them, hit flag on news aggregators like this and wish the author good luck with a Gnome 2 fork or a different DE of his choosing.
Hi, my name is Ben and I'm a happy Gnome 3 user. I'm sure there are others out there like me. Maybe we need to shout more? That would certainly remove stupid 'Google suggestions' arguments or 'of all the people that took this weird poll, x % hate Gnome 3' pseudo-statistics from future rants.
I love how much the environment gets out of your way and doesn't bother you. The instant message notification that can be ignored, or answered briefly and ignored. The lack of noise. It feels like an alternate history version of the Mac OS X Finder; my workflow transitioned with very few changes when I started using OS X at work.
Obviously, of course, no DE is perfect. Gnome 3 is no exception. The polarization is, in parts at least, caused by the vocal group of complainers. I certainly reflect and understand enough to know that I might widen the gap here, but I have had enough of these 'Gnome 3 is stupid' (or for that matter: 'Windows 8 is a joke') posts with little (constructive, usable, meaningful) content.
Again: Look at the article: If you don't argue against it, the 'Everyone hates Gnome 3' and 'Even Google suggests that everyone considers Gnome 3 a failure' arguments will strive. That's insane, stupid and needs to end. So - polarization is necessary. The loud 'Gnome 3 sucks' (minority?) group wins by default, otherwise.
A few weeks ago I've switched to KDE (Kubuntu). Gnome was just unbearable. The reasons are described in the article.
Open source projects hopefully fullfil most of your needs, one way or another. But you have to pick from these free offerings according to your own preferences and taste. You did the right thing: Gnome 3 was unbearable for you and you moved on, found a better solution.
Please, just don't sling mud at a project for failing to align with your goals. It was a relationship that didn't work out. Move on, remember the good times and .. never write blog posts like the OP?
You didn't understand the point of the article. Breaking user-experience is the absolute worst thing any software project could do. It goes against the "Linux way".
The people that "broke" (hey, see the quotes?) the user experience you expected and liked are the people that steer the project. They are free to do that, just like any company is free to (drastically? I don't quite think that's the case here, but let's go with it) change their product.
You have some benefits, though:
- You didn't pay a dime. Sure, you might've invested time learning to use Gnome 2 to your utmost satisfaction. You might've spent a good amount of hours to configure it to your liking. The product though? You got it for free and without any contract stating that your personal workflow would work in every future version, that your preferences are important to the project goals.
- You got the source. People complain just the same about WIndows 8 and they are stuck. Unless they find a way to jump to a totally different OS or stay in the past forever, they'll have to swallow the (imo not thaaat bad) changes. Maybe they can install some workarounds. You? You can enjoy a multitude of alternatives. You don't need to move away from your favorite applications. You can even, in fact, install one of the Gnome 2 forks (think Mint etc.) and imagine that Gnome 3 never happened.
You're not without options. Posting stuff like this rant on your blog? That's not helpful. You cannot seriously believe that this will change a thing. People that don't agree with you are going to sadly shake their heads. Gnome (3) developers are not even going to _read_ your blog, based on your way to communicate.
You reach only the people that already agreed with you in the first place. I'm sure you guys could have a good time in a bar, sharing complaints about ways Gnome 3 broke the user experience for you. But .. don't even start to believe that you represent all of the Gnome user base, much less the majority.
Putting everything that obviously divides us beside: Can you explain in 2-3 sentences what you'd hope to archive with that post of yours, the way you present your arguments? Is there any serious agenda, or is that just a way to blow off steam?
Yes, they have all the freedom to destroy their project.
They don't. They work on something they believe in. Now - that's not a reason to agree by default: Lots of people do things they believe in and fail their social circles or even society.
But there's no further point to argue about: Your article was a (poor) rant, your comments here are further proof that you deeply disagree with everything Gnome 3 and still are unable to provide any meaningful comment.
I'm trying to put it simple: If Gnome 3 doesn't solve your goals, it's not 'destroying the project'. If a couple of 'Yeah, that's really crap, mate' people agree with you that doesn't magically make you the majority of the userbase, nor does it mean that the developers are wrong and you are right.
In all seriousness: After your rant was posted you had only one way to react without digging an even deeper hole: Acknowledge that you were overly aggressive and wrong in quite some points. Instead you continue witih statements like this.
English is a foreign language for me, but I think 'to pout' is the verb I'd grab for if I'd need to talk about this comment of yours. Stop complaining, start improving things you care for.
> There’s no other way to put it; GNOME 3 was a mistake.
There’s no other way to put it: your blog post is a mistake.
Maybe you need an attitude change
I personally like how they do things, they provide what people need, not what people want. And I do believe that they provide an awesome and by far the best desktop environment.
Its the only one that just works 90% of the time with crap that should work. Network, bluetooth, notifications, window management. I like the way all these things work. I have my minor qualms with it (alt+tab, multimonitor support, poor virtual machine performance)
Those few things aren't deal breakers for me though
Window management pales compared to tiling WMs like Awesome and i3, so being able to drag title bar to windows edges to get a split screen is like, is that all? How about a key binding for that, and while we're at it, how about splitting the screen arbitrarily using keyboard shortcuts?
I get that Gnome 3 is good in the sense that things mostly work, but it seems tailored to touch screen devices or use of a mouse to interact with the interface. This frankly blows if your go to tool of choice is the keyboard.
Saying that, I wouldn't consider going back to Gnome 2, am moving toward a Gnome-less stack.
Look, we're on GNOME 3.8 now. The ship of GNOME's desktop design philosophy has sailed. Either GNOME broke up with you, or you broke up with it, but the relationship is over.
Get over it.
Personally I get why Gnome 3 or Unity developers have cut down on configuration options, but on the other hand, for example it's really frustrating in Unity not being able to move the left bar to the right. On OS X or on Windows (7 at least) this is extremely easy to do, as you can place that bar wherever you want it, to the left, to the right, at the bottom, wherever it feels more comfortable to you.
So it's good that Gnome developers strive for interfaces that work well out of the box, but some choices have been rather dumb.
2. developers do listen to users, but unfortunately every user is different and have different preferences and needs, so whom do you listen to? Also, users aren't really aware of what they really need, so you have to read between the lines. This is a sixth sense that many of us lack.
You need to have a strong dictator with good taste to drive good design. It's pretty sad that we don't have a dictator like Linus Torvalds for Gnome. Now that's a guy that would have driven things forward.
3. it happens with us technical people that every time interfaces change, we bitch about it. Well I decided to embrace change. I like Gmail's new Compose. I like most UI decisions from Ubuntu/Unity. There I said it.
Good design doesn't necessarily feel right from the start, because the lack of familiarity gets in the way. But the ultimate pursuit is that of simplicity, composability and usefulness. So from time to time, we should sacrifice familiarity for the mentioned purposes.
On the other hand, there's no excuse for releasing broken interfaces. Gnome fell in the same trap that KDE did when version 4 was released - as in barely functional software getting released to unsuspecting users.
Look at the Mac. You can't change anything. You can't even change the colors. You're stuck with what you've got. But people just learned to live with it. After you stop complaining and start working, you actually get things done.
Whenever I turn my Linux machine on, I'm always tweaking something. I can't do that on my Mac. I've sat at Starbucks for over an hour installing themes and such. Talk about wasting time, but I guess I find it fun.
(I'm still using the old GNOME)
GNOME 3 developers, you rock!