Hands-on: GNOME 3.4 arrives, introducing significant design changes

Hands-on: GNOME 3.4 arrives, introducing significant design changes
arstechnica.com

That's putting it mildly. A split menu may be correct from some design point of view (e.g DRY principle) but from a usability point of view, it's recipe for frustration.

On a more general note, does no one else consider Mac-style "alt-tab switches apps" and "global menu" usability mistakes? (on grounds of being modal)

With both Unity and Gnome adopting these, I no longer have a compelling reason to switch from Mac back to Linux.

Which is a pity really, because Gnome 3 is one of the prettiest and most usable desktops I've seen: I love how the windows key gives you access to the dock, all windows, workspaces and search at the same time.

This might not be optimal for large displays and desktop computers, but if with Windows 8 the future of computers looks like [1], then GNOME might have made a very smart move with the shell.

1: http://liliputing.com/2011/12/samsung-series-7-slate-pc-revi...

For example, I find myself liking the activities overview more and more since it combines together functionalities that you'd have to access separately on other desktop environments, namely a keyboard based application launcher, windows scale (or exposé for the Mac crowd) and virtual desktop manager. It's problematic that each environment maxes out at 8-9 windows before it becomes unmanageable, but the philosophy seems to be new desktops on demand, which are quick to create (just drag a window to the blank desktop or middle click an application to launch it in a clean desktop)

And the new Alt+Tab behavior does have a silver lining in that it scales much better for large number of windows since it allows you to drill down much quicker to the window you're looking for: Alt+Tab until you reach the application, Alt+ to reach the specific window you want. Or Alt+Tab, then use the mouse to highlight the application and then the specific window.

Another little know functionality is that the shell comes with a screen recorder: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R to start recording, again to stop, the video is saved as WebM on the root of your home dir.

It's far from perfect, some functions take way too many motions to execute, and I wish they allowed you to bind mouse shortcuts (it would be perfect to enter the overview), but the basis for what could become a pretty decent desktop environment are there.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/

I used to be involved with Gnome a long time ago (pre 2.14), and have lost touch since— so maybe the accessibility mailing list is now outdated and I'm looking in the wrong place — but I feel like there's a huge disconnect between the various teams, and that design decisions are taken by isolated groups of developers, with little regard for system coherency or good, consistent usability.

Linux-world developers are good at many, many things— but in my humble opinion, good usability and design are not amongst them.