Based on the screenshots, font rendering -- the most important thing -- still seems to suck big time.
Introduction to Gnome 3
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#62>A lot of effort has gone into this; it's a shame to see so many disparaging posts here. I think the developers should be applauded for their work.
bad work is bad. GNOME developers are again ditching code that works (and it sucks).
http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html >This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version.
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter: Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around while everybody else can just cross-license with their own silly little patents. It may be possible they simply cannot afford the risk of doing the obvious thing.
Could you clarify this? Do you actually know that Gnome is actively "code around" some alleged patent violation? Programming around any imaginable patent violation actually seems really bad, especially given that software patents aren't looking as strong as they once were. I vaguely Linus or someone saying it's better not to research existing patents, it limits your liability. But just on the principle of letting cor…
Start here:
http://david.freetype.org/cleartype-patents.html
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#64A lot of effort has gone into this; it's a shame to see so many disparaging posts here. I think the developers should be applauded for their work. Between this and Ubuntu's plans to adopt Wayland in place of X, there are some interesting times ahead for Linux on the desktop. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how it all plays out.
The developers absolutely deserve to be applauded for their work, but declaring it as "simply beautiful" is almost laughable. I think that it's actually quite ugly. And even if you disagree, I don't think it's fair to call your own work beautiful unless you've proven that the overwhelming majority consistently enjoys your aesthetic.
I read that as more of a goal statement than a description. Whether or not you think they've succeeded, they certainly seem to have put a lot of effort towards that goal: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not criticizing truncation. You need to do it on long names. I'm saying it looks like the designers of the GNOME UI are using truncation as a quick fix for a flawed design. Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter: http://i.imgur.com/MN3Q2.png Notice how the tracking (spacing between letters) in the first item gets tightened to make it fit? It looks a little squished, but it's much preferable to reading d…
> Besides, truncation in OS X is much much smarter: Don't forget Apple (among others) has tons of silly patents regarding text rendering that Gnome developers have to program around while everybody else can just cross-license with their own silly little patents. It may be possible they simply cannot afford the risk of doing the obvious thing.
Truncation != Rendering. Truncating long strings by replacing middle by ... is pretty common.
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#66Gnome 3 Alpha, codenamed "Jumping the Shark". So many things shown are ridiculous - the spacing, the truncated titles in the ribbon-thingy, the seeming changes in the concept of workspaces. Why are dropbox and the wireless-thingy broken off from other system tray icons? What is the rationale for the changes in basic concepts? At the moment, I'm still using Gnome on all computers. This version might be just what I need to finally start using a minimal tiling manager.
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#67> "Simply beautiful", "Distraction-free computing", "Everything at your fingertips", "completely redesigned for GNOME 3", "And much, much more", ...
This page reads much like a corporate ad.
> "GNOME 3 is crammed full of new features."
Is that a good thing?
For Gnome, I want: more streamlining, compartmentalization, removal of deprecated features, and optimization. Make it smaller and tighter -- only add parts conservatively and if they offer great value.
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
People like to beat up on MS a lot, but the differences between the Windows 7 GUI (or iOS GUI) and Gnome 3 really highlight the disadvantage that a bunch of spare-time developers who say to themselves, "well, I think our users will like text truncation, let's throw it in tomorrow!" are at versus a big company with millions to spend on thoughtful UI design, graphics, research, and focus groups. Windows 7 has its probl…
I think what's most unfortunate is that Linux desktop people follow MS' approach of integrating the windows managers and the graphic shell ever more closely. This approach seems to requires a monolithic application. I would imagine it could be more open-source-appropriate to separate out the Windows manager (in charge of the details of font and icons) and the shell (the taskbar, start-menu, explorer-type-application…
Is that a valid criticism though? I don't run a desktop, just a window manager (scrotwm), and I can still run KDE apps without having to load the entire KDE desktop environment. (Gnome I don't know about, as Slackware doesn't provide Gnome.)
Also, does 'shell' mean something specific to desktop people? What you detail as being the shell, I would call 'desktop'. But I could very well be out of touch with the current lingo.
Re: Introduction to Gnome 3
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If they didn't want to invite criticism, they shouldn't have release screenshots of a product they don't want criticism of. I am sure this will be a learning experience. It's alpha software, after all, and it is released in order to allow people to learn what works and what doesn't in the real world. As usual, with open-source, if you decide to use Gnome Shell right now, or in April, you'll be running the bleeding…
http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/News/Red-Hat-the-Top-... "The vast majority (70 percent) of contributors work on the project on their spare time, while an additional 20 percent of contributors do so on both a paid and voluntary basis." Adding the percentages of the top 5 corporate contributors adds up to just over a third of contributions from ostensibly full-time developers. So it appears to be just a fact th…
Canonical has and pays UI design experts. I don't know if they're the best, but I remember going to a conference given by one of them a few years ago at the FOSDEM.