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GNOME 3 Released

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Re: GNOME 3 Released

#81

Post by mhw »

wladimir wrote: post #67
ugh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.

Many people do desire the feature to change themes. A big reason to choose open source in the first place is the flexibility in customization that it brings. It's the opposite of the "Apple mindset" that there's one good way and that's the Steve way.

I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' over thinking user interface design through, making a decision about the way something should work and sticking with it. It's a somewhat rational response to bikeshedding: if you can't please all the users, make it configurable and let the users indulge in bikeshedding to their hearts' content - just keep it outside of the source tree. Thankfully the ascendency of good user interface design on the web and in successful consumer products (notably, though not exclusively, from Apple) has started to place value on clean, well thought-out user interfaces.

I think one of the things that Gnome has achieved over the years is removing lots of configuration options, and battling the hostile responses of a vocal minority who would choose complexity for everyone so that they can tweak any minor detail. Remember the backlash when Gnome replaced Sawfish with Metacity as its default window manager, and users could no longer script the window manager in a dialect of Lisp?

I'm all for options to personalise the user interface where it make sense, but if I have to start configuring your software in order to make it usable for the job it's supposed to be designed for, you've failed.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#82

Post by wladimir »

mhw wrote: post #81
wladimir wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people do desire the feature to change themes. A big reason to choose open source in the first place is the flexibility in customization that it brings. It's the opposite of the "Apple mindset" that there's one good way and that's the Steve way.

I think the problem in the past has been that developers in general (commercial as well as open source) have chosen to build 'flexibility' and 'customisation' over thinking user interface design through, making a decision about the way something should work and sticking with it. It's a somewhat rational response to bikeshedding: if you can't please all the users, make it configurable and let the users indulge in bike…

I certainly agree with you there. Customization is important but the first priority of a program is that people should be able to do their work productively without changing any setting.

There's also fine-grained customization versus "themes". Themes do allow people to give their own feel to a device/program/site, without them having to worry about individual settings.

I've always been a proponent of the idea that fine-grained customization should be possible, but you can hide it (this is what GNOME does). Just don't make it illegal to customize for the people that really want to (this is where Apple seems to be going; I don't want to break laws to make a device do what I want).

Edit: I happy when they introduces Metacity in place of Sawfish. Sawfish was simply too complex for its own good, GNOME had taken over most of the window manager duties itself and thus the wm should simply manage windows and get out the way.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#83

Post by snotrockets »

bad_user wrote: post #75
hendi_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me priorities would be having basic functionality, like copy/paste, working properly It really should work. Since ages. Care to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't work in Gnome? Cause that's really a bug. or how about a task-switching applet (activated on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the window you want; You can do that with Gnome 3. Press Alt-Tab, hold down Alt and click around to your app. Work…

It really should work. Since ages. Care to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't work in Gnome? Copy something in one app, close it, then try pasting in another app -- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the app or on its mood, and this behavior has been going on for ages, up until Ubuntu 10.10, which I'm using. I'm happy to find that Gnome 3 has usability improvements. I'll definitely try it out.

You seem to confuse the primary selection with the clipboard: http://standards.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-...

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#84

Post by lepht »

_frog wrote: post #28
DrJokepu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's playful, it clearly and strongly communicates a single underlying concept. I think it's good.

It's just such a grammatically poor phrase and it gives the impression that the entire project lacks polish and thoughtful design.

Maybe you just need to think different

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#85

Post by chroma »

ugh wrote: post #61
naner wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink. What does this mean? Gnome 3.0 is rather incomplete. You can't even change themes or fonts yet.

Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.

OS X, iOS, and WP7 pick reasonable defaults that most people are happy with. The same is not so true for GNOME.

For example: http://static.arstechnica.com/gnome3/apps.png Fonts are only anti-aliased, not sub-pixel rendered. The app names are extremely small and have terrible kerning.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#86

Post by bad_user »

snotrockets wrote: post #83
bad_user wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really should work. Since ages. Care to elaborate where copy and paste doesn't work in Gnome? Copy something in one app, close it, then try pasting in another app -- sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the app or on its mood, and this behavior has been going on for ages, up until Ubuntu 10.10, which I'm using. I'm happy to find that Gnome 3 has usability improvements. I'll definitely try it out.

You seem to confuse the primary selection with the clipboard: http://standards.freedesktop.org/clipboards-spec/clipboards-...

I don't know what I'm confused about, and I don't really care about technical details -- the behavior of copy/paste has been inconsistent to me.

Reading that article, if it really is the reason for what is happening, it kind of makes sense, but that's no comfort to me when I'm losing my selection because I have closed the origin; behavior that isn't even consistent across apps.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#87

Post by bad_user »

jan_g wrote: post #68
bad_user wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to change themes a lot back in the day ; now I just wish for a usable desktop that doesn't get in my way, and Gnome / KDE are awful from that point of view. That's the reason why I'm developing software on Linux, but dual-boot in a Windows 7 partition for design-related work, as that requires mouse-based interactions, and in Gnome I can't even rely on copy/paste to work properly. Changing themes and fonts is n…

Winkey+w or winkey+e allows you to choose a window or desktop by mouse clicking. Copy/paste used to suck, but with newer ubuntu versions it works well for me. Notifications are not nice, I agree with you.

Unfortunately I have disabled Compiz because for some reason the NVidia drivers are hanging my computer when I'm shutting down -- and now after I switched to Nouveau, my screen doesn't light up when waking up from sleep.

And without those effects enabled, the show-all-windows shortcuts won't work.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#88

Post by ugh »

chroma wrote: post #85
ugh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.

OS X, iOS, and WP7 pick reasonable defaults that most people are happy with. The same is not so true for GNOME. For example: http://static.arstechnica.com/gnome3/apps.png Fonts are only anti-aliased, not sub-pixel rendered. The app names are extremely small and have terrible kerning.

Hm, seems like they need quite some help with typography. The rest looks fine, also conceptually.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#90

Post by rufugee »

bcrescimanno wrote: post #58
rufugee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has used both systems at length and who has commented on the subject before, I'll simply tell you that your opinion is obviously very subjective. I find the out-of-box Ubuntu experience to be far surperior to the OS X one, and to get OS X to even approach the level of efficiency I get from Ubuntu/Gnome/Compiz I end up investing well over $100 in utilities. Not that I mind supporting the developers, but…

I think you've got some fair points here; but let's not forget that (at least as of a while back, I can't speak for newer releases) Ubuntu would not have support for even basic mp3 playback without downloading support for it. I understand the "free software" reasons for such restrictions--but I think it's difficult to justify the statement of Ubuntu having an "far superior out-of-box experience" when difficulties suc…

Actually, mp3 support is a checkbox during the install process now, so this is a non-issue.

Video drivers have been just fine for me for the past six years or so, but perhaps that's because I always buy nvidia cards that are well supported.

The only place OS X has a leg up on Linux IMHO is video codec support, and you can't really blame the open source developers for this one.

I keep waiting for a hardware manufacturer to issue 3 or 4 different machines and make Linux work very well on them, akin to what Apple does with OS X. Most of the issues I see people have with Linux is due to the immense variability in hardware combinations. Eliminating this variability would make it pretty easy for a company to provide a seamless desktop experience to users.

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