The best feature for me is automatic text reflow in terminal. It's finally here!
Gnome 3.12 Released
61–70 of 130 posts
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you need a churning time-consuming stream of updates, the software wasn't written well. I'm looking for an alternative to OS X, but I want a stable OS that I can use to get work done . If anything, Apple has been shipping too much broken software, too often. The last thing I want to do is switch to a platform that actually embraces pushing out a constant stream of poorly thought out features and a slew of regressi…
Hasn't OS X become "linux on the desktop". Homebrew is there for a lot of the main packages and its easy to bring up virtual machines with whatever flavor of Linux distribution one wants for more particular needs. If you already have Apple hardware, I feel OS X is a great compromise. A great mainstream OS with a lot of support for good GUI apps plus great support for a lot of linux software. What's your reason's for…
Who does use vanilla OSX though? I mean people here are complaining about having to install extensions on Gnome, but isn't it what we do when we install a launcher (Alfred), web/documentation searching tool (Dash), clipboard manager (Alfred again), a new terminal (iTerm2), better touch tool, etc. etc. We are just extending the system to make it suit our workflow.
We just have to accept that developers expect a lot of their environment, more than traditional users want, and more than what should be available by default in an OS. I am okay with installing plugins/tools/etc. to make me more productive.
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gnome is very usable for many of us. I'm tired of seeing the same 'it sucks as a productivity environment' comments. If it's not your preference, you can say that, but Gnome Shell is perfectly fine when it comes to productivity. Quick app switching, searching, app launching, etc... How do these things hurt productivity? I personally dislike KDE, but that's just my taste. Some people love XMonad or XFCE, and some peop…
> I'm a developer and my workflow involves several different tools, Gnome Shell certainly doesn't hurt 'productivity'. I'm also a developer whose workflow involves several different tools. One of those tools is Firefox, and I currently have several hundred tabs open in more than a dozen Firefox windows. I want to be able to instantaneously switch from Emacs to a specific Firefox window. I don't want to switch from Em…
I see your (valid) point but I am also positive that you could, if you wanted to, create an simple js plugin for gnome shell that would have the desired effect, as others have created alternative alt+tab switchers: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/15/alternatetab/
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#64Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#65There are many annoyances in these new unfinished desktops, but one I miss the most was the Gnome2 clock applet. A must if you have people in other timezones: http://i.stack.imgur.com/1Ftcd.png Note the map with day/night marked. Allows one at a glance to figure out if it is a reasonable time to make contact. I've managed to get a version almost as good on a Saucy laptop, but now Locations doesn't stay open by defaul…
That's why I don't use any of those fancy desktops, I don't tolerate it when stuff I use breaks. I have a dockapp from 1999 I don't want to live without. It's one of the reasons why I just use openbox without a DE. My desktop hasn't lost anything in more than a decade, since I switched from Win2k.
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#66I think GNOME3 is breaking *nix philosophy: do one thing and do it well; to be highly configurable. You have freedom to use compiz in GNOME2, but not in 3. There are a lot of good GTK2 themes but gitg and d-feet have hard-coded styles so only default GNOME3 theme will look sane. Super+p is somewhat hard-coded and you cannot customize it ... and there are more annoying issues. I am happy that mate-desktop is still alive.
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had a lot of people use Manjaro and not run into issue. Packages are staggered enough that any bugs are usually found and sorted in the ~3 months between releases, but you never get into the Ubuntu 12.04 problem of "oh shit my system is so outdated everything will break if I dist-upgrade". Debian testing is also similar.
The problem with Manjaro package staggering is that it's based on fortune. The Manjaro team as far as I know does not maintain any packages not specific to Manjaro. After using Manjaro on my laptop for the better part of a year and running into lots of stability issues over the last few months, I think that the criticism about "aging packages like wine" is valid. I could deal with significant breakage in Xfce for a w…
As a user and contributor to KDE, it is as ugly or as beautiful as you want to make it. I find the default skins in Suse / Manjaro KDE to be pretty good, of course there is still huge room for improvement and hopefully the design group makes kde5 look less 1990s beige office box.
It isn't any heavier than Windows. Hell, anything is lighter than Windows, and Vista has been running on almost every PC since 2005. So I'm not that worried about the "weight".
> Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now
The only two breakages I've had in the last 6 months on Arch as my main development machine have been a kernel 3.13 bug that affects everyone (AMD cards are put in suspend mode even if they don't support it, which crashes the driver, and is fixed in 3.13.7) and an xorg configuration bug fixed in Xorg 1.16. Neither of which were game breaking, just inconveniences, but I did cherry pick my hardware to work with Linux (all open source drivers on everything, atheros nic, hd4600 + 7870 on Mesa, Intel ethernet and usb / etc).
Problem with Fedora is a severe lack of software availability. On Ubuntu you have PPAs, on Arch the AUR and pkgbuild.com, and on Suse you have the OBS, but on Fedora (and Mageia and friends) you have the rare independently hosted repo you have to add via config file. I've also had experiences with Fedora being just as unstable as Manjaro with their bleeding edgeness and lack of verbose testing on all devices before pushing near-vanilla kernels.
Even when Ubuntu switches to systemd, it is hard to recommend because rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case except the unmaintained server or automation box, in which case I'd favor Debian anyway. I'm actually hopeful for Chakra, which is kind of floundering since they lost their web hosting and all kinds of nonsense, but the direction - consistent biannual update pushes to a rolling release, with thorough testing and a KDE base system that goes out of its way to avoid pulling it other frameworks for speed and footprint. It is a pretty pure fire and forget solution, albeit of course its just a community project.
ROSA is another one I'm hopeful for, since its business backed with support contracts and does some novel features on top of Mageia.
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had a lot of people use Manjaro and not run into issue. Packages are staggered enough that any bugs are usually found and sorted in the ~3 months between releases, but you never get into the Ubuntu 12.04 problem of "oh shit my system is so outdated everything will break if I dist-upgrade". Debian testing is also similar.
The problem with Manjaro package staggering is that it's based on fortune. The Manjaro team as far as I know does not maintain any packages not specific to Manjaro. After using Manjaro on my laptop for the better part of a year and running into lots of stability issues over the last few months, I think that the criticism about "aging packages like wine" is valid. I could deal with significant breakage in Xfce for a w…
I disagree strictly about the state of the Linux desktop. Of course, whether KDE is ugly depends on the user's view, but it is highly customizable, too: for instance, I prefer having borderless windows, and I like using KWin's tabs, which means I probably get something different from the stock experience: " rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/TfWFmZl.png>.
GNOME, too, is going a long way forward. Windows still doesn't really have pixel scrolling for trackpads, which MacOS X has had for a very long time, but GNOME does.
I'd argue that the biggest Linux desktop issue is that package management systems are a bit of a mess, especially the dpkg / rpm kind. A system like this one should not have locks, nor require root access systematically. Thankfully, Nix fixes both, and ensures atomic upgrades and rollbacks. That project makes me hopeful for the future. Anyone can install and use it, no matter what distribution or package manager is used on their system. Their default repositories are rather large, although obviously not as large as others, but that's improving rather fast.
Beyond that, the fact that both KDE (Apper) and GNOME (Software) agree on using PackageKit by default, which grants them an app store that isn't tied to a specific package management system, is rather good news for the future.
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#69Looks great. I've been extremely happy with Gnome UI after switching from OSX. It's fun being able to play with a desktop that is constantly improving on a rolling-release platforms like Arch Linux, where new updates stream in constantly. Instead of having to wait a year or more for big waterfall releases like OSX (Mavericks was also pretty disappointing). My only complaint is how every gnome upgrade the majority of…
Just the fact that people need a ton of shell extensions to make it barely usable is a problem in itself. The fact that they break (and some are let to rotten) after every major release is just to beat a dead body. Just a few weeks ago I tried Gnome 3 again (again!) and it still sucks as a productivity environment. I have better things to do. But as a geek, I'll be checking Gnome 3 again maybe in a year or more. No h…
One of the reasons I switched away from OSX a few years ago (not to Gnome Shell, to Mint and then later to i3wm) was because every new version of OSX required me to tweak more things and install more third party things to make it usable, and I figured if I was going to have to keep going down that road I might as well go whole hog to something designed for me to do that instead of something that fought me at every step [1].
[1] Did you know that in order to rebind cmd-tab on a mac, you have to kill the Dock of all things, run the program that binds cmd-tab, and then re-run the Dock? Every other key combo is explicitly configurable, afaik.
Re: Gnome 3.12 Released
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Barely usable? I'd hardly call it that. I find it very usable. I don't quite like the alt+tab default functionality, but barely usable is really a stretch. I find it a very productive environment with no extensions whatsoever. That said, I do use a few extensions, and I'm exploring writing ones as well. The fact that extensions are written in javascript is really nice (or awful, depending on how you feel about javasc…
For those complaining about the alt-tab thing maybe you don't know about alt-`. Alt-` cycles through windows/instances of the current app! I just learned about it two days ago and I've been using gnome 3 for a year (there is a lesson in there, why was this not publicized more?). On a more general note put me in the camp that feels gnome is getting better and better every release. I like what they have done with the h…
Yeah, I do know that. What I don't like about alt+tab is that it doesn't respect virtual workspaces. I use workspaces to group windows I'm working on at a particular moment, but alt+tab shows applications across all workspaces, and switches between those. Might as well not even have workspaces with this behavior.