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GNOME 3 Released

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Re: GNOME 3 Released

#61

Post by ugh »

naner wrote: post #53
iamcalledrob wrote: post #26

Gnome really needs help with their typography (and design in general). Gradients, docks and shiny icons do not make a well designed product. It's clear to see it suffers from the curse of open source software – design by committee, and the featuritis that results from that. There's often "flashy" chrome in OSS, but no solid interactions behind to back it up. It's equally important what you choose to leave out from yo…

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.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#62

Post by Derbasti »

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.

That is only true if the default theme is generic and beautiful enough to not annoy the majority of the populous. We will see how Gnome fares on that.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#63

Post by GeneralMaximus »

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.

Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#64

Post by ugh »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #63
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.

Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?

And some would like to change the way the OS stacks windows, et cetera, et cetera. Picking great defaults is good enough for the vast majority of users, you don't have to waste your time implemnting ever more preferences and can focus on the important stuff.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#65

Post by bad_user »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #63
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.

Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?

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 nice, but shouldn't be a priority. For me priorities would be having basic functionality, like copy/paste, working properly; or how about a task-switching applet (activated on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the window you want; or desktop notification windows that you can close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really obnoxious) ... this has always been the story of the Linux desktop for me, i.e. death by a thousand cuts.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#66

Post by bkor »

rwmj wrote: post #23

It seems no one here has actually tried using GNOME 3 for any period of time. I gave it a couple of days and switched over to XFCE. I found it incredibly annoying as a developer desktop (perhaps a minority user these days?). It's very hard to switch between applications, virtual desktops are basically broken, you can't have shortcuts for launching apps/programs, no focus-follows-mouse, and the GNOME developers don't…

You can change all that. Install GNOME tweak tool. If the setting is not there yet (not sure about shortcuts), either file a bug or look at dconf-editor until that time.

Regarding "don't give a damn" and per http://planet.gnome.org/: I am GNOME :-)

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#67

Post by wladimir »

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.

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.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#68

Post by jan_g »

bad_user wrote: post #65
GeneralMaximus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?

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.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#69

Post by wladimir »

dman wrote: post #38
_frog wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leadership is extremely important when designing a good UI and I feel a lot of open source projects forget this. Also this leader needs to be thick skinned and self confident enough to take criticism from others on the project but also assert their own subjective vie…

Leadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this. As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great pr…

The problem with the Enlightenment guys (as I understood) is that they always had big plans and awesome ideas, but there's just not many enough of them to implement everything they want.

They might consider to simply take the good parts of KDE/Gnome and build a visual shell around it to their liking. Kind of like what Canonical is doing.

Re: GNOME 3 Released

#70

Post by ugh »

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.

Many people do desire the feature to change themes.

Do they?

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 you are mischaracterizing Apple’s mindset. It’s not about finding the one good way, it’s about finding a good way and the assumption that most people are not interested in tweaking that.

I do not think that all open source projects have to slavishly follow some sort of central ideology of maximum customization. There are enough alternatives to Gnome that it would be no problem at all for Gnome to be different. For those who really need it crazy customizability is certainly available.

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