
GNOME 3: The Future of the Desktop  - obsaysditto
http://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/326989:gnome-3-the-future-of-the-desktop
======
rfrey
"This desktop will change the way people view, work with, and think of the
desktop."

I don't want to be a hater, and especially I don't want to disrespect the
developers and designers who have put heart and soul in this and probably
created some awesome stuff. But hyperbole like this example, and sprinkled
elsewhere in the article, really gets my hackles up. I start looking at the
pictures skeptically and my inner troll starts growling.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
The writer of the article is definitely not doing the devs any favors with his
over-glowing purple prose. _No_ desktop can live up to that level of
hyperbole. Even worse than the bad writing is that there's no way to enlarge
those darn screenshots so you can actually _see_ something! Arghh!

~~~
imurray
_there's no way to enlarge those darn screenshots so you can actually see
something!_

Actually there is because they are full-resolution images displayed at less
than their true resolution (one of my pet peeves):

Firefox: right-click -> "View Image"

Chrome: right-click -> "Open Image in New Tab"

Edit: I now see this comment made multiple times below before the parent
comment.

------
ThomPete
I really don't hope that is the future of the desktop. I mean really? Is that
what we have to look forward to?

In my world there can be no talk about the future of the desktop unless:

The desktop metaphor and the current filesystem disappears.

My machine starts to monitor what I do and actually use this (The Ghost
Protocol)

The machine starts to connect everything I do and build contextual maps
automatically. For instance, I receive a picture in my mail and throw it into
photoshop. When I then want to retrieve it I can not only look for name.psd
but also for the context (Phil send it to me by mail)

Then we can talk about a the future of the desktop.

~~~
sliverstorm
Why is everyone interested in the filesystem going away? As long as users
posses more than 20 files, organizing them is helpful.

Notice one of the most requested features on the Kindle was folders for the
user interface. The result they gave us isn't folders, and the actual
filesystem is abstracted, but it's effectively the same.

~~~
megablast
The majority do not understand file systems, that is why. What do you NOT
understand about this? Why do people keep making this comment.

I like file systems, I understand them, but I used to program dos interrupts,
and actually reading sectors of the drive. But I can understand filesystems, a
lot of people don't.

What people want is an all their photos grouped together, all the vides
grouped together, all their documents together. They don't understand the
different between the desktop, user folder, trash can etc...

~~~
extension
So when I want to attach something to an email, I have to go to the app for
whatever kind of data it is and find the "share" button, which will be in a
different place for each app, if it's even there at all. Ditto if I want to
copy it to a USB stick, add it to my Dropbox, upload it to a website, etc.

The fundamental ideas behind a filesystem, packaging all data in a generic
container and allowing arbitrary grouping of the containers, are extremely
straightforward and intuitive, not to mention incredibly useful.

What throws people for a loop is having to share their filesystem with magic
invisible gremlins that leave inscrutable files all over the place. Most
filesystems come pre-loaded with mountains of this junk, which the user is
made keenly aware of when they are banished to some small niche directory. But
the gremlins won't even stay out of the niche; they are constantly creating
folders and dumping mysterious config files there, behind the user's back.

The solution to this problem is clear and simple. A filesystem, from the
user's perspective, should be _empty_ when it comes out of the box, or at most
contain a few items that the user knows exactly what they are. From then and
forever, _nothing_ should ever appear in the filesystem _except what the user
explicitly put there_. The user is free to create, move, copy, rename or
delete any file _without unexpected side-effects_.

It seems obvious to me that filesystems should work this way and there would
be no big usability issue if they did. The problem is, we have all this old
baggage attached to the filesystem, both conceptually and practically, and we
are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

~~~
ams6110
I think you've hit on why so many users keep everything on the desktop. They
can have files and folders there (which most people CAN understand, by the
way) but they don't have to deal with or see the rest of the file system
(which they will inevitably stumble into pretty quickly using Explorer (or
whatever file navigator app).

~~~
extension
They either stumble out of the Desktop or get lost in the pollution. They
download a photo and edit it in Power Goo. When they want to find it again, do
they look in Desktop, Desktop\Downloads, Desktop\My Pictures, Desktop\My
Documents, Desktop\My Documents\Power Goo, etc?

~~~
ThomPete
I think you are missing the fundamental point here.

The current file systems whether MS or OSX isn't made for the amount of files
that the average person deals with today.

A better system would be to allow you to search on multiple axis. But more
importantly a better system would follow what you are attempting to do and
limit the option space quite significantly.

------
bitwize
The OLPC's Activity metaphor is basically taking over and, having always
loathed desktops and never understood why my computer must simulate a desktop
(with all the clutter that implies), I like it.

It's not just GNOME: iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are at their heart the
same as activities (the Android API even uses com.android.Activity as the base
class for Android apps).

~~~
SwellJoe
Yes, it struck me that this looks like a desktop version of
Android...obviously tweaked to take advantage of the extremely larger screen
and available resources.

------
Yaa101
I am a Gnome user and I am not at all impressed, I liked Gnome because there
was 1 way to do a certain task, now they gone the windows way of being able to
do the task at many places, that is confusing and complicated. Gnome was
simple but complete, but I guess fashion is more important than satisfied
users, just like windows and OSX. I am not looking forward to the next fad.

Anybody knows a simple and consistant and complete desktop that I can use when
Gnome got screwed?

B.T.W. I expect negative mod points for being viewed as nagger, but it is how
I feel about this Gnome route.

~~~
petercooper
Try xfce. It's based on GNOME technologies but is leaner and more minimal.
It's often used for low spec machines but is great if you just want a super
fast desktop environment that's not too alien/weird.

~~~
dkarl
It's built on GTK+ but doesn't depend on GNOME.

Xfce is where I am now thanks to KDE4. If KDE4 and GNOME3 are big boosts to
Xfce, I hope Linux desktop developers take the right lesson from that. If they
want to keep "revolutionizing" things, they had better give us a good reason
to put up with the learning curve and the sudden nosedive in usability and
polish.

~~~
pyre

      > It's built on GTK+ but doesn't depend on GNOME.
    

IIRC, it still uses gnome-screensaver, gnome-power-manager, etc. Lots of the
GNOME background processes are in use, unless they've recently weaned
themselves...

------
SwellJoe
Workspaces are such an obviously great idea that it astounds me that Windows
and Mac OS X _still_ don't have them (I guess Mac OS X has a functional
equivalent as of Leopard or Snow Leopard, if you squint right, but I find it
less intuitive and I use it less even after months of having it available on
my hackintosh). Given that they've been a part of X Windows window managers
for a couple of decades, it's just astonishing that they've never made an
appearance as a standard feature of other windowing systems.

This, of course, isn't a new feature in GNOME 3, and so I guess it's not
really relevant, but I just felt like ranting about the one thing that I think
the Linux desktop has always had such a clear lead on, and that until you've
used it you don't even know how much it sucks to not have it.

~~~
ssp
It's not obvious that they are a good idea in general. One pretty bad issue is
that if you don't know about work spaces, then hitting Ctrl-Arrow will have
the effect that everything vanishes with no obvious way to get it back.

It's also not clear to me that they actually make people more productive even
if they are aware of them and understand them. Of course many nerds _feel_
they are being more productive, but that only indicates that if you wish to
sell to nerds, you should include them at least as an option.

~~~
cookiecaper
I know it's anecdotal, but workspaces make me _much_ more productive. I use
awesomewm and it's very fast to be able to keep everything up and active and
just switch over to a screen dedicated to web, email, IM, or the rest of my
screens which usually have different clients' projects up for easy and quick
access, and makes switching tasks much easier. It doesn't clutter anything to
have all this up at once; no task bar clutter, no window clutter.

If someone knows how to use workspaces and has cause for more than one or two
windows over the course of their computer usage, I don't see how they could
_not_ make someone more productive.

------
SandB0x
To see an image in full size, right click and choose "View Image" in Firefox
or "Open Image in New Tab" in Chrome.

~~~
thought_alarm
Kind of like how you add an application to the Gnome Start Menu.

------
Goosey
Anyone else find this article really useless without being able to see the
screen shots in higher resolution? I am interested in the UI improvements, but
I won't be told about them. SHOW me.

~~~
buro9
What's ludicrous is that those thumbnails ARE the full images. Just open the
images in a new window: <http://www.linux.com/images/stories/desktop.png>
<http://www.linux.com/images/stories/activities.png>
<http://www.linux.com/images/stories/applications.png>
<http://www.linux.com/images/stories/workspaces2.png>

~~~
zavulon
In a way, this exemplifies what's wrong with the approach Linux
desktop/application developers have been taking for years: create something
amazing, but forget one small detail, rendering the whole thing completely
useless, and causing 99% of the population to dismiss them and go back to
Windows/Mac.

------
pyre
The real question is: Does it have a feature to exclude certain files from the
'recently accessed files' list? There are many examples where you wouldn't
want someone to see some of the files that you recently opened/worked with
(i.e. top secret work, porn, whistleblower, etc).

------
jamesgeck0
There are two features I'm excited about for Gnome 3 which were not mentioned.
Both exist as ideas. Ideas are fragile, delicate things. Attack people, not
ideas.

The first is the "task pooper." [http://arstechnica.com/open-
source/news/2010/02/task-pooper-...](http://arstechnica.com/open-
source/news/2010/02/task-pooper-could-revolutionize-gnome-desktop.ars)

The general idea is that things that pop up in your face are distracting, but
notifications are good. Hence, the task pooper. It's a bar of wibbly-wobbly
timey-wimey stuff. You drop files and such into time slots on it, and they pop
up again at the end (to either disappear into a filing system after a few
seconds or be bumped back a few hours). I vaguely remember hearing something
about being able to shove application notifications in it. Additionally, it
can boil an egg at thirty paces.

The second is Quicksilver/Launchy/Gnome-Do type functionality integrated at
the GTK 3 level. <http://www.cimitan.com/blog/2009/01/31/do-ifying-gtk-30/>

This will never happen, but it would be amazing. No more hunting for arcane
menu items in The GIMP; just type "enable indexed color" or whatever. Alas, a
strong argument against is would be that it would just encourages sloppy ui
design, so I doubt we'll see it any time soon.

------
snitko
I don't see anything revolutionary or extremely interesting and useful here.
(a + b) is the same as (b + a). Anyone remembers this link when someone made a
prototype of a desktop interface that you could manipulate by all of your 10
fingers? That was truly awesome.

~~~
dkersten
You mean Clayton Millers 10gui concept[1]? Sadly, it seems that this won't
become reality for another while yet. Lack of funding and expertise mainly, it
seems. A real pity.

[1] <http://10gui.com/> and HN discussion here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=877535>

------
code_duck
Well, looks a bit more slick than Gnome 2, but not revolutionary. Kind of a
step towards KDE 4, which was really a step towards MacOS. If they can make it
less buggy and more performant than KDE 4 (and... one would hope) then I'm
sure I'll enjoy using it.

ps. Seriously, whomever put together this article for Linux.com is
inepxerienced enough to embed 1920x1080 images directly into the page, rather
than thumbnails?

~~~
cookiecaper
How is KDE 4 a step toward Mac OS? I don't see that at all. KDE 4 also wanted
to revolutionize the desktop, but I think we have accepted at this point that
it isn't going to happen. KDE 4 is much more like Windows and KDE 3 than OS X.

~~~
code_duck
Of course KDE4 is like KDE4, but I don't see it as more similar to Windows
than the Mac desktop. Mac OS doesn't revolutionize the desktop, either.

For KDE4, Lime Snow Leopard

1> You have a 'widget dashboard'

2> The preferences panel is very similar

3> KDE4 has a features identical to Expose

Probably more, too. All of the other features and ideas have been kicking
around KDE/Gnome for years. Having a separate menu bar at the top, for
instance - Gnome is set like that by default, which is more similar to Mac OS
than the KDE style. Desktop 'Spaces' has been available on Linux for ages,
too, while some people see that as feature unique to MacOS (though it's been
added to Windows in various ways recently)

There is not really such a huge difference between Mac OS and Windows, even.
It adds up to a lot, but as someone who has used scores of DEs and Window
managers, they all share features, concepts and traits. They all use the same
basic ideas - launcher icons, a desktop, a window tasklist, windows with menu
bars, buttons and titles, etc.

I'd been using KDE4 for 6-9 months when I got my first Mac and all I'm saying
is, well, I see where inspiration for certain features and design came from.

KDE and Gnome do have great ideas of their own, no doubt. They don't have $300
million worth of support to make KDE as polished as MacOS, though. I wish they
did - the design of these DEs is just as good or better than the mainstream
systems.

~~~
cookiecaper
I'll assume you meant of course KDE4 is like KDE3, but that's not what they
were going for way back when they first announced the project and wanted
everyone's ideas for how to innovate the desktop. They didn't really come up
with anything.

Plasma might have been inspired by Dashboard, but it may not have been, and it
definitely allows things that Dashboard doesn't.

Expose is part of almost all compositing window manager plugin sets of which I
am aware. I don't know if OS X was the first to do this, but I don't think
it's all too much of a stretch to suppose that it might be useful to see all
the windows all at once occasionally.

Spaces is a non-starter; Linux DEs have had them for dozens of years, OS X
10.5 was the first appearance in OS X.

I agree that the preference panel is similar.

KDE 4 also has a huge taskbar and what is essentially a start menu. It uses a
very conventional, Windows-like approach, and although it may have cribbed a
few features from OS X too, Windows 95 is the dominant paradigm for a default
KDE 4 installation.

------
imsky
So they implement Spotlight search/Windows key search, show tiled desktops
like countless other apps for Windows/OSX, and call it the "future of
desktop?"

The GNOME people should pay more attention to design, like using better fonts
and not drenching the entire screen with dark gray. The next version is just
as ugly as the previous ones.

~~~
knarf_navillus
I think that most of it just boils down to terrible typesetting. Even Windows
does a better job. I've always felt that this is the #1 contributor to that
Linux 'cheap' feel. Everything else looks wonderful, but the fonts look ugly,
even the necessary font packages are installed.

------
jksmith
If the "Future of the Desktop" still means having to do installs and updates,
then I look forward to living in the past. I've even gotten sick of being
harangued by Android updates.

After having written code for 20 years, I want zero responsibility for
somebody else's code, and that includes doing updates.

~~~
goof
I agree that constantly being nagged about updating sucks. What's worse
though: update nagging or occasionally having an app or service you depend on
breaking temporarily due to a bad update?

If regressions are somewhat rare then I think I prefer automatic updates, even
with the risks.

~~~
macrael
This is the norm with all web applications. The frequency of regressions will
depend on a lot of factors. One of the reasons I think this works well for web
apps is that the deployment environment is exceptionally consistent and stable
when compared to the world of desktop os's. It would be awful if your text
editor broke while you were in the middle of using it, but that is the
situation I am in right now with my email. How much trust do you give the
developers?

~~~
jksmith
yes. Whether it's desktop apps, local os, iphone apps, android apps, any
interest in this stuff in the future will be just some kind of steampunk
sentimentality. The only desktop app that should be developed and upgraded is
the browser. Web dev is a superior expression of division of labor, and
regression management. Software dev is so increasingly worthless, the only
viable platform for it is web, embedded specialties withstanding.

------
commandar
Interesting that, after years of being accused of ripping off the Mac, the new
Activities interface looks a lot more like Windows 7 than anything OS X.

I've always said that the Gnome team is more interested in adopting good UI
paradigms; this seems to pan that out.

~~~
cookiecaper
Pretty much anytime someone changes something about a DE interface someone
else claims that they're "ripping off OS X", and most of the time it makes no
sense whatsoever. I would ignore these people.

------
atiw
So, I kinda got a little too excited when I heard a new desktop. But then, I
have already seen all these concepts pretty much, haven't I? From what I got
form the article, it seems like we will only get a couple of new "shortcuts".
I REALLY am hoping his headline is true, and we do get a new desktop
experience at least, when this releases...and I would LOVE it if GNOME
surprises me when it comes out and is more than what I think it is.

------
d0m
I sure will give it a try. The author is right when he said people stopped to
find gnome innovating.. and this is a genius move from the gnome team.

I hope there will be an easy shell command to use the activity "find". For
instance, activity firefox would start it and activity test.py could show me
the activity view with all my files named test.py, etc.

------
logic
As an FYI: Gnome 3 is on the feature list[1] for Fedora 14, scheduled for
release near the end of October[2].

[1]: <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/FeatureList>

[2]: <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14>

~~~
dkarl
Isn't it rather like Microsoft used to be, when they can assume that their
sweeping changes will be unquestioningly accepted by everybody, no matter what
the final result is like? I thought open source freed us from that. Of course,
I'm grumpy that Kubuntu moved to KDE4 by default. I know KDE3 is still
available, but c'mon, how could the Kubuntu guys look at KDE3 and KDE4 and
decide to ship KDE4 as the default? When I installed Lucid (to give KDE4 yet
another try) notifications were sized and stacked illegibly, and I kept losing
notifications I didn't want to dismiss. Do a fresh install with default
settings, and basically the first movement you see on the screen reveals a
major usability problem! Well, it's obvious how that happens -- months before
the final product is even scheduled to be finished, distros have already
decided when to unleash it on their users.

~~~
DrJokepu
Fedora is typically very liberal distribution when it comes to package
versions and they usually try to ship the latest reasonably stable version of
every package with each release. People who choose Fedora (like me) accept
that or even like that. The reason Red Hat sponsors Fedora is because it acts
as a test bed for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.

If you need a more conservative distribution, you can try RHEL or Debian, or
Ubuntu which is a bit more conservative than Fedora but a lot less
conservative than, say, Debian. Linux distributions are about choice, really.

~~~
dkarl
It's not a matter of distro priorities being conservative vs. cutting edge.
It's about distros ignoring their priorities and marching ahead with whatever
the GNOME and KDE projects say should be next. Ubuntu is supposed to be about
usability, which isn't served by taking a big jump down in polish and
completeness. Fedora is supposed to be up-to-date, but it isn't supposed to
install incomplete or buggy software by default. Who knows what GNOME3 will be
like in October? Not Fedora. They have no way of knowing whether GNOME3 will
be in an acceptable state.

Let's face it; distros jumped to KDE4 because they want it to be great someday
and they're delivering users to support that dream. GNOME3 looks like more of
the same. They're supposed to be delivering software to users, not the other
way around.

------
jimbokun
Kudos for moving past the "let's just try to look like XP" design stage to
thinking about how to improve usability.

~~~
pavs
Gnome never looked anything like XP or MS Windows for that matter. I think you
are confusing it with KDE. If anything, Gnome has some similarities with OSX.

~~~
masklinn
> If anything, Gnome has some similarities with OSX.

beyond both having rounded corners? Apart from both having completely crummy
file explorers?

------
Groxx
That looks... like everything I've seen before.

Useful? An improvement? Oh heck yes, I _like_ it like that. But this is no
future, this is the _present_ , and they're just slightly re-organizing.

Hyperbolic prose, indeed.

------
tung
> There are actually three ways to open the Activities Window:

> 3\. Click the Super key (often referred to as the "Windows" key).

Well, there goes my free unused keyboard shortcut modifier.

~~~
pyre
Since when does one 'click' a keyboard button?

------
sad
I am a big fan of gnome-shell. I'll be an even bigger fan when it plays nicely
with VirtualBox. Or is it VirtualBox that has to play nicely with gnome-shell?

------
BonoboBoner
Why does an article about a supossedly revolutionary Desktop UI include such
tiny pictures only?

------
ahk
What a sad mix of windows and OSX. That Activities button is pure ugliness.

------
smallblacksun
The activities window sounds a lot like the Start menu in windows Vista/7.

------
billmcneale
TLDR: 2010 will most definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop.

~~~
pyre
More like, "See? See? Linux desktops can be innovative and not just copy what
MacOS and Windows do!"

------
st3fan
Sounds good. But it really is 'The future of the Linux Desktop'.

------
niels_olson
key question: does it work with compiz, or somehow support 3D?

~~~
shekmalhen
It uses mutter as its window manager, which is based on metacity and uses the
clutter toolkit (hardware accelerated UI). It replaces compiz but seems to
have much less eye candy. Remember, metacity is the WM for the grown up!

So gnome-shell will require a GPU (should work on the Intel GMA), but have the
side effect of not working in virtual machines.

------
joubert
is it touch-device optimized/aware?

------
jlcgull
But can it tile windows yet? :-)

I know, I should use a "real" window manager if I need my windows to be tiled,
but I feel that tiling is a real feature with a legitimate need that should be
built into Gnome.

~~~
andybak
Ah! My pet rant too. Overlapping windows. What a pain they are...

~~~
mkelly
I also thought the same thing. I don't mind fully overlapping windows (a la
tabs), but leaving a bunch of useless space, occupied by nothing more than a
pretty picture, on my power-huntry monitor is what's inconceivable to me.

I think I've irrevocably put myself on the fringe by switching to a tiling
window manager, though. Oh well. There's a little more elbow room out here.

------
c00p3r
They life in a day-dreams. ^_^ Browser is the desktop. Even mobile browser.

