

Fedora 17 Final declared Gold - mindcrime
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel-announce/2012-May/000933.html

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bjustin
How is Gnome Shell coming along with this release? I used Fedora as my Linux
development VM for some time, but Gnome Shell just bothered me too much. KDE
and FVWM didn't do it for me either. I went as far as trying Ubuntu 12.04 on
its release, and found a reasonable default setup to settle in to. I like Red
Hat more than Canonical, but I like using Ubuntu more than Fedora. I will have
to stick with Ubuntu unless Fedora really improves going forward.

~~~
Aethaeryn
If you have to wait for a Linux desktop environment to improve over time into
something that's fully usable, wait for a desktop other than GNOME 3's shell
to improve.

I have used Fedora and GNOME since Fedora Core 4, which was almost 6 years
ago. I even tested out GNOME shell in early alphas and _liked_ the new
interface.[1] Of course, there were plenty of annoyances, but I was giving the
GNOME 3 team the benefit of the doubt because it was very early software.

A few months ago, I switched to LXDE. I am much happier in an environment that
is closer to the traditional GNOME 2 experience than GNOME 3 is.[2] LXDE is
not user friendly like GNOME and so it requires some basic customization (with
text files) to get it working comfortably. On the other hand, GNOME 3 is user
hostile when you want to do _any_ customization at all!

GNOME 3 is nice when you use it _exactly_ as the developers intend, but they
purposefully make it hard to customize:

Do you want to set custom GTK themes on a per-application basis like you could
in GNOME 2? Too bad -- that feature doesn't exist in GTK3 and the GTK2 command
line magic that used to work no longer works in GNOME 3. I mean, it's not like
some applications simply look horrible in the default theme while others
pretty much require the default, right?[3]

Do you hate wasted space on your screen? Well, the padding is there to stay so
you have to set the title bar font to a tiny size with a third-party semi-
official customization application if you want to make the title bar a sane
small size without touching source code. Big GUI elements are touch friendly,
yes, but I am not using touchscreens and I don't want wasted space when I
could devote more pixels to the actual content I want to focus on.[4]

Do you have two large desktop monitors? Too bad, the GNOME 3 experience isn't
optimized for multi-monitor setups. They put more thought into touchscreen
devices (where currently no one uses GNOME 3) rather than fairly common multi-
monitor setups.[5]

There's a complete lack of meaningful customization in GNOME 3 and the tiny
bit of customization that exists is via the GNOME Tweak Tool rather than
integrated officially into the desktop environment's settings. This 'do not
customize' attitude is a design preference and it's _really_ annoying,
especially when no software works flawlessly for all use cases. It seems like
they really want to move all customization to random third party add-ons
downloaded from the Internet via their website.

Don't get your hopes up for GNOME 3. A lot of the missing features are
conscious design decisions that might never be fixed. For me, there's no one
reason why I can't use GNOME 3, but there's just lots of constant minor
annoyances I simply don't experience in other desktop environments. Most of
these annoyances will take years to fix and many will never be fixed.[6]
Again, none of these are irredeemable flaws, there are just _many_ little
faults and the anti-customization attitude of GNOME 3 makes those flaws
considerably harder to deal with than they should be.

I wouldn't give up on Fedora, but I have definitely given up on GNOME 3.[7]
Again, most of GNOME 3's barriers to customization (i.e. fixing their many
annoyances) are _deliberate_ decisions that will probably never change. GNOME
demands you follow their One True Way of doing things. If I wanted to conform
my workflow to some organization's opinions, I probably wouldn't be using
Linux in the first place.

\-----

[1] I was pleasantly surprised that the fancy version works even on my laptop,
which has terrible Intel integrated graphics from years ago. My laptop barely
handles anything that requires a graphics card, but it runs GNOME 3's new
shell.

[2] LXDE doesn't have some features that GNOME 2 had, but LXDE also has some
cool things that GNOME 2 didn't have. One cool feature I particularly like is
being able to remove window border decorators. It's the little things that
count. LXDE+Openbox have as many little details that I like as GNOME 3 has
little details that annoy me.

[3] This was actually the last straw that sent me to LXDE. I spent days trying
to either set an appropriate theme or figure out how to set themes for each
application. The GTK3 theme for GNOME 3 simply doesn't work for all types of
applications even though you can only use one for all of your currently
running applications. Of course, the default themes for just about every other
desktop environment seem to work fine for all popular applications first-party
and third-party, so I really don't know why GNOME 3 has a complete lack of
aesthetic taste. Maybe it's some subtle issue like the title bar background
color in the window decorator matching the toolbar and menu bar background
color.

[4] They also want you to constantly switch to a separate mode (the Activities
view) to do many common tasks, like quick launching of applications that could
easily be located as an icon on the top panel instead.

[5] I could get into more detail about all the minor annoyances here, but it
would make this rant far too lengthy.

[6] It seems like they love the large icons and the massively huge window
decorator title bar padding. Expect a user interface that works universally,
even on device form factors you will never use GNOME on, to be a higher
priority than one that works well on large desktop screens.

[7] I don't hate GNOME 3. I wouldn't have put this much effort into
criticizing it (based on over a year of trying to like it) if I immediately
hated GNOME 3. It's just that the GNOME team has a different target audience
than me (or, really, hackers in general[8]) and it is more work customizing
GNOME 3 to work the way I want it to than it is to customize LXDE. LXDE isn't
perfect and it isn't polished, but I do expect desktops like LXDE and XFCE to
get improvements and attention now that GNOME 3 has alienated most of GNOME
2's audience.

[8] The funny thing is that GNOME shell's target audience appears to be people
who don't use desktop Linux and who probably will never use desktop Linux.
They clearly aren't targeting Linux 'power users' with their design decisions.
The issues that prevent desktop Linux from being used are market barriers
(i.e. almost every laptop coming with Windows pre-installed (supply) and
people being used to Windows after almost two decades of use (demand)) rather
than technological or UI barriers. (Yes, I put a footnote in a footnote. I
don't care.)

~~~
bishop_mandible
> GNOME 3 is user hostile when you want to do any customization at all

It's not: <https://extensions.gnome.org/>

~~~
Aethaeryn
> It's not: <https://extensions.gnome.org/>

That's not user friendly customization:

(1) When there's something that's called "Remove Accessibility" on the front
page that's indicative of a broader problem. A tiny little script to remove
the accessibility menu (which most people probably don't use) from the top
panel? Couldn't this be a simple checkbox integrated natively into GNOME 3
instead of a third party download? Why is the accessibility menu there by
default in the first place if very few people are going to use it? Honestly,
this is something I'd expect in a Microsoft product, not in a community-based
open source project.

(2) I already mentioned in my previous post how customization depends on
"random third party add-ons downloaded from the Internet via their website" so
I am aware of this. It's not a counterpoint to my post.

(3) Compared to "App Stores" or even distributions' repositories, that website
is a terribly designed way to download content.[1] It is _not_ user friendly
or modern. The only modern aspect is updating a desktop environment via a
browser.

(3b) Is there even a way to automatically update these extensions? Can I see
the source code? Where is the average rating display and the sort by ratings
even though ratings and reviews exist? Why can't I sort by rating even though
there are apparently ratings in the comment system? Is it curated or can
anyone upload malware there? Is it a secure site or could someone circumvent
the security measures easily? There are many more questions, mostly of design,
quality, and trust. If you have a Linux (or BSD) distribution, you (hopefully)
trust the software in its repositories.

(4) Speaking of a distro's repositories, shouldn't this kind of thing be
managed in your distro's repositories? Well, it should except that GNOME 3 has
so many problems, bad defaults, and (of course) missing options that could
easily be placed in its configuration menus. There are simply too many
necessary extensions, which forces this to happen. Many of these only do very
tiny things that certainly wouldn't justify their own independent package,
like "Alternative Status Menu" that merely separates Suspend, Hibernate, and
Shutdown.[2] Yet again, just a line in a configuration GUI would be
preferable.[3] (I mean the official configuration GUI, not the Tweak Tool.)

(5) Why do users have to trust random downloads from a browser? I mean, I
suppose we could all code extensions ourselves and get rid of this trust
issue, but this isn't emacs. This is meant to be a default desktop
environment, the first thing a newbie Linux user will see. Not every single
user of the OS is supposed to be computer professionals (especially given
GNOME's new target audience). Programming shouldn't have to be a prerequisite
to having a usable desktop enviornment. Wizards or configuration menus _will_
be something the typical user is used to. Code integrated into the desktop
will be faster, more reliable, trusted, installed and updated via
yum/apt/etc., and so on. Many of these things are already toggled in hidden
ways and could easily be configured explicitly through the official GUI in a
way that's tested and trusted.

I could go on. I won't. It's too easy.[4]

\-----

[1] There are probably hundreds or maybe thousands of people who read Hacker
News (I'm not sure how many active users there are) who could code up a better
website as a weekend project. Why does the largest desktop environment in the
FOSS world have such a terrible way to download extensions?

[2] Yet another minor annoyance: shutdown is hidden by default behind the
modifier key Alt. There is no easy built-in way to change this. When I used
GNOME I had to Google command line magic to trick GNOME into thinking my
computer was incapable of suspending to get the shutdown to display by default
on the menu. Apparently the One True Way to deal with "turning off" your
computer is to suspend it and pretend it's off.[5] And since Shutdown is
capable of being displayed on the menu without a modifier key instead of
Suspend when you do some command line magic, that means yet again it would be
trivial to make it able to be toggled in a menu since the functionality
already exists!

[3] I hope you're noticing a pattern here.

[4] There was a thread on Hacker News calling PHP a "fractal of bad design".
GNOME 3's shell is _certainly_ a fractal of bad design. My post was a broad
overview of what is annoying about it for the sake of being concise. That
might be surprising due to its length, but I was holding back the entire time
I wrote it. I can go more in depth on various parts if challenged.

[5] There's one really annoying thing you'll notice about GNOME 3 shell's
philosophy of there being one way to do things and no trivial way (downloading
third-party scripts where a checkbox would do is _not_ trivial) to change it.
Remember the example of the accessibility menu being enabled by default: GNOME
shell's way of doing things is rarely in line with the most common ways GNOME
2 was used. Thus, old GNOME users upgrading will have to actively fight
against the defaults. That's about as close to being user _hostile_ as you can
get, almost _literally_ being hostile.

~~~
bishop_mandible
> That's not user friendly customization

1) You were arguing in your original post that the default is good for a
target audience of non-power users, but not for power users. However, power
users should be able to go through the dead-simple extension two-click
installation process. So you're contradicting yourself.

> Couldn't this be a simple checkbox integrated natively into GNOME 3 instead
> of a third party download?

<http://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html> "The question of preferences"

> Why is the accessibility menu there by default in the first place if very
> few people are going to use it?

It's just an icon, no one has to click it. But it's there for those who need
it. Why make it harder for them while others have no loss with the icon being
there? And everybody will need it at some point in his life.

3) e.g.o is not meant as app store. Extensions are not intended to be apps.

3b) Automatic updating: it's coming with Gnome 3.6. Source code: You can see
the source code of every extension under .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/.
It's plain JavaScript.

> Is it curated or can anyone upload malware there?

Extensions go through a review process. You could have figured that out by
looking at <https://extensions.gnome.org/about/> "Are GNOME Shell Extensions
safe?"

4) Power users and extension developers do not want to wait for the next
distro release in order to have fun. Same rationale for browser extensions.

5) <https://extensions.gnome.org/about/> "Are GNOME Shell Extensions safe?"

6) It's not a random download. It's from the official Gnome project site and
subject to a review process.

------
pthread
Loved the footer, Debian FTW :)

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------
idleloops
What does declared Gold actually mean? Is this a feature freeze?

~~~
rwmj
It means it is released [edit: oops, released tomorrow]. The final freeze was
earlier this month.

<https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/17/Schedule>

