Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME 3 For Xfce 835
kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable, adding that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 — but a huge step up from GNOME 3."
Re:Change for the sake of change? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Change for the sake of change? (Score:4, Informative)
http://wicd.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:Change for the sake of change? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Change for the sake of change? (Score:4, Informative)
Quite honestly, if you want a faster desktop, use Debian* with XFCE instead. I can't believe how sluggish the 'buntus are, and i didn't notice any difference between Xubuntu and Ubuntu-proper, which astounded me. Also, on Debian it is easier for you to use all the wonderful manual methods of editing system behavior. Adjusting network settings via Ubuntu's wizards or gui controls has been (in my experience) kludgy and tedious at best, and downright broken at worst, at least since about 7. Meanwhile, on a Debian system it's ifconfig, ifup/ifdown and it's all set.
Also, the root account is enabled by default. I know you can do this in ubuntu also, but it's one of a long list of annoyances I have with that distribution.
Just giving my 2 cents.
*or any other older-school no-nonsense distribution will work. Slackware is a great choice too, but if you're used to Ubuntu, Debian might be a better fit.
Re:Change for the sake of change? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tiling window manager (Score:5, Informative)
Tiling? I'd be very surprised if Linus didn't use overlapping windows. There's no need to limit the number of visible windows to those who can be fully visible - most of them are waiting for your input, or compiling something (in which case you usually only want to see when it stops).
Of course, overlapping windows work better with focus-follows-mouse and no-raise-on-click; that allows you to copy/paste between windows without any of them popping up to the front.
Back on topic, I have ditched Gnome 3 myself, for multiple reasons: .gvfs goes against everything that is holy.
- The amount of mouse movement you have to do is ridiculous. Sometimes all the way to the left, then all the way to the right again, to do something really simple.
- As Linus said, the assumption that you only want to run one of each app is truly braindead.
- Multi-monitor support is even more broken than in Gnome 2. Which makes the first point even more of an issue, when you can't even open a menu on your second monitor, but have to drag the mouse over to the first one.
- You can't run it in a VM - you have to use the fallback mode, which means you have to relate to two different interfaces. (And the fallback mode is way less functional than Gnome 2)
- I don't have Windows keys on my keyboard. The shortcuts assume that you do. Well, Gnome 3 devs, if you really like Windows that much, run it!
- No way to set fonts? Or DPI? I don't want "larger", I want a 10 pt font to be exactly 10 pt (~3.5 mm), so it's the same size on all my monitors and printers.
- The superuser is not allowed access to a user directory?
- Lack of man pages. In a terminal, I don't want to deal with graphics-laden help files. Lack of documentation in general, for that matter.
- For having been so simplified since Gnome 2, it's strange that the memory usage skyrockets. Or perhaps not, given it requires three different interpreted languages (not counting bash, sed and awk), and lists of libraries longer than my arm. (just do ldd on a gnome executable).
- I take back that the Gnome 3 users have Windows envy. It's Mac envy too - disable all but one mouse buttons.
- How can I unmount a USB drive? Or eject a CD? Or... pretty much anything where either a desktop icon or the "places" menu would have come in handy.
But most of all, the excessive mouse waving required makes it completely unusable, especially with more than one monitor (in which case virtual desktops become completely unusable).
It's a steaming pile of technology, and must be aimed at iPad users incapable of doing more than one thing at a time, and who get confused by more than one mouse button or difficult things like "font size" or "minimize".
This is why I stick with Fedora 14 and gentoo, and not F15, nor will I go to F16 unless Red Hat forks and brings back Gnome 2.
Re:Tiling window manager (Score:4, Informative)
Not having used Gnome 3, I don't know what it does. Does it just default the shortcuts to use Windows, or does it not let you (or make it difficult) to change them?
The latter. In particular, hitting the windows key opens the "overview", which is the replacement for the Gnome menus combined with a type-to-search bar and tonnes of transparent eye candy. The alternative is to move your mouse to the top left corner of your leftmost monitor, and wait. I'm sure changing it is possible, but they sure hasn't made it easy. Nor provided sane defaults that doesn't require a 104/105-key keyboard.
Trinity Desktop Environment (Score:5, Informative)
Is anyone here aware of the fact that KDE 3.5 still exists under the name Trinity Desktop Environment?
Re:They're all apeing OSX (Score:4, Informative)
The Ars Technica article on Lion has a lot of details, but basically the little lightbulb is being deprecated. The idea is that OSX applications using the new Lion interfaces should always have their state written out to disk. They can then be killed on demand to free up memory, and transparently restarted without the user seeing any difference. The idea is that applications become completely persistent and so the whole notion of running or not running becomes invisible to the user.