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Tag: gnome-shell

The Gnome 3 Experience

Posted in linux by Adam
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As with Firefox 4, I have decided to move to the new as it’s released. So today I’ve installed Gnome 3 on my desktop to be used as my primary computing environment for the foreseeable future.

As with Firefox 4, I have decided to move to the new as it’s released. So today I’ve installed Gnome 3 on my desktop to be used as my primary computing environment for the foreseeable future.

I wasn’t really nervous, and I’m impressed so far. It wasn’t as straight of a shot as Firefox 4 was, and I was less familiar with what changed than I had been with Firefox, but on the whole it’s now a pretty usable environment.

From my notes:

The version of Gnome3 isn’t in Debian unstable yet, so I had to install from experimental.  The dependencies are still a little bit clunky, so I didn’t get everything I needed on the first shot.

The first thing that was missing was the new gnome-control-center.  Without that little doohicky… well, there were a couple of menus that I’d click and nothing would happen.  Chiefly the System Settings menu item.

So that was installed, it was time to set a background.  But the background manager in the aforementioned dialog didn’t do anything.  So I started it from terminal and observed the message that the settings doesn’t care what backend it has, and if it doesn’t have one it just uses memory.

So I installed the dconf backend and was on my way.

Next, I couldn’t tell exactly how backgrounds were added to the dialog, which I’m currently assuming (but haven’t verified) is by their presence in some directory in ~/.config? Anyway, the remedy was to just use gsettings to directly specify my background:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri 'file:///home...'

While I was there I poked around a bit more and made some other changes:

To let me type in paths in nautilus
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry false

To show advanced permissions (duh) in the same:
gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences show-advanced-permissions false

And a couple of theme tweaks:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme DMZ-White
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme elementary

Noting that before changing the cursor-theme I had a delightful mistake where the mouse cursor in the web browser differed from the rest of the system. I actually think that would be a cool feature, as bugs sometimes turn out to be inspirational.

But back to the cleanup…

I noticed that while the rest of the shell looked nice, the actual window chrome looked like Gnome 2.0. A quick search revealed another user had felt my pain before and had been nice enough to follow-up. So I installed gnome-themes-standard and got the Adwaita theme.

That’s about all I’ve done so far.

I’m very pleased with the overall behavior of Gnome 3. A few minor things were lamentable:

  1. Loss of backgrounds and emblems in nautilus
  2. The default (and currently only theme) has some accessibility issus (eg, unfocused window titles are not readable)

But the first is acceptable (the blamed states quite factually that the code for those features was unmaintained), and the second will change soon enough as themers create alternatives.

Other minor issues like the applications needing to be updated to use GTK+ 3 scrollbars will solve themselves in time and the fallback (continue to use GTK+ 2 scrollbars) is fine.

I’m enjoying the new desktop, and while I do agree with the users that say Gnome should give users more control, there aren’t actually many cases where I feel left in the cold.

Congratulations the the Gnome hackers for building a better desktop experience.

Canonical and GNOME

Posted in linux by Adam
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Canonical Limited (the main driver for Ubuntu Linux) and the GNOME project couldn’t work together so they are each moving forward with their own, reinvented desktop interfaces. GNOME is going for gnome-shell and Canonical/Ubuntu will get Unity.

Removing the minimize button?  Not giving a preference to turn off the display and not suspend when you close your laptop?  Moving the window controls to the other side of the window? Making the tabs square instead of round? Not allowing the editbox to be manually resized? Hiding the RSS icon? Moving the link preview to the URL bar? Removing the status bar?

And those are just the ones I can recall at the moment.

The computer is so central to peoples’ activities, that there is a certain fear that someone will break it for them.  That’s one of the major motivations behind Free Software in the first place: if I can build it myself, then you can’t force me to use the broken one.  If I can’t, then MicrosoftAppleSonyPaypalMastercard can up and decide to force their will upon me, and my recourse is simply to stop using them.  No stabbing big corporations with a fork.

Canonical Limited (the main driver for Ubuntu Linux) and the GNOME project couldn’t work together so they are each moving forward with their own, reinvented desktop interfaces. GNOME is going for gnome-shell and Canonical/Ubuntu will get Unity.

I don’t think this is a bad thing, excepting the bickering.  The larger community of desktop Linux users will get to see two different approaches in the wild for at least a year, which will inform the next iteration of the Linux desktop landscape.  There’s also an open-ended possibility for reunion later.

The dispute is territorial, which is not uncommon in open source.  The uncommon part of this is simply that it’s between two big players rather than between one big player and the users.  Though, the latter has occurred for both reinventions as well (see a few of the questions posed in the first paragraph).

Project governance is hard.  Cooperation is hard.  Finding the best way is hard.

If it weren’t for the bickering, nothing would be wrong.  There’s too much distrust and fear, because that’s what we’ve been taught by the proprietary realm.  When we used proprietary software, we could be stuck with a bug indefinitely.  Or things could change with no warning.

So we’re edgy.  But when the source is open, we shouldn’t be.  And if we weren’t, it would make project governance easier, it would make progress easier.  We should be willing to give the code an honest run.

At the end of the day any shift in any system will require a new equilibrium to be reached.  In open source that means some users will switch, forks might be created, etc.  But it also means that most users will find a slightly better workflow, will be a little (or a lot) happier and more productive.

I just wish that the developers weren’t so quick to assign blame, because they’re both building the foundation for the future, and they should be proud of their efforts even if they fail.