GNOME 3 released

[Adrian0E]

For the love of God, I hope they are not planning to make the next version of Ubuntu look like this. That is horrible.

Didn't Ubuntu decided they will stop using Gnome and use Unity instead?

[1for-matik]

Didn't Ubuntu decided they will stop using Gnome and use Unity instead?

Well... no.

For now, Unity is a shell for Gnome 2.3x available in 2D and 3D.

There's no plan to drop Gnome (for now...)

[.Neo]

Eh they all "borrow" ideas from other operating systems, nothing new there.

There's a difference between "borrowing" ideas and give your own spin to it and just ripping things off. As far as I know the Dashboard close button from Mac OS X is still in GNOME 3 as well.

Screenshots from the Fedora-based live CD (from gnome3.org):

Is it just me or does GNOME 3 look extremely bulky? All interface elements seem to waste lot of screen estate. :/ I mean, by default Safari's window chrome occupies almost half the space with tab bar enabled... :blink:

Terminal

Has GNOME 3 been designed with the visually impaired in mind or something? Seeing this I get that Ubuntu went its own route.

[OuchOfDeath]

First impressions:

Ugly default theme. No way to change it or the UI font via the GUI.

The new UI paradigm is... confusing. I get what they are going for, but will Joe User? Unlikely

Incomplete. This feels like KDE 4.0, only worse.

Unstable - I had Epiphany crash on me twice while trying to edit this post.

On the positive side I get the full Shell experience on Intel graphics; the Intel wi-fi adapter worked ootb.

Overall not very impressed.

I love the theme. I don't know why others don't like it, it's gorgeous.

GNOME is FOR the Joe User. That's their target audience. Of course they'll get it. It's been simplified a ton, and it really is way easier to use. Every part of the interface has been made simplier and easier. It's really intuitive. I think you, like most others, are confusing different with hard. I've used it for about a week now, and it's simply super-easy to use. Window management is fantastic. You simply move the mouse to the top left and you get OS X's expose, and this is -the- best way to do window management. Period. You also get that dash/dock, which again is mostly like the OS X dock, and it's really simple to use. You simply click on an icon and you get your program. This works for launching and for focusing already opened applications. In previous GNOME versions launching an application from the menu would often re-launch the same application twice, and this was entirely redundant. Now it's done properly.

It has the feel of OS X-style polish and simplicity, and it's definitely the correct way of going about the Desktop Environment. I honestly have no idea how you can call the new UI paradigm confusing when it's so similar to what OS X is doing. Does everyone go around call OS X's UI paradigm confusing too? Last I checked OS X is touted as having a superior DE due to its simplicity and excellent window management with the dock and Expose.

Not being able to change the themes by default may be a slight issue to some, but then if you look at Windows and OS X you can't change the themes there either. There's a simple tool you can install that's part of GNOME 3(but not installed by default I believe) that lets you change the theme and mess around with a bunch of other options. Here's the link: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/introducing-gnome-tweak-tool-gui-to.html

Incomplete? What's incomplete about it? It has more or less everything GNOME 2 had, except for some of the options and features that have been purposefully removed from the GUI. Again, look at OS X. It's not known for being super-customizable from the GUI either. Many of the options are however still in place, just that officially there's no GUI for it any more. It's up to you to go around the gconf-editor and all that.

And KDE4.0? You have no idea what KDE4.0 launch was like. That or you simply forgot entirely. KDE4.0 was so feature incomplete at launch, and the entire DE crashed EVERY SINGLE TIME I did the most basic navigation around it. I could not run KDE4.0 for more than literally 2-3 minutes without having it crash on me. It could not be done. GNOME3.0 on the other hand I've been running with few hitches for several days now. I can use it for... well for everything. I have mutter crash on me every about 30 minutes to an hour(of course it restarts in a few seconds and everything resumes perfectly like nothing happened), but do keep in mind that this could be a bug in the driver as well, and it could also be the fact that I'm running an incomplete GNOME3 from an unstable PPA. Not even all the packages from it have been updated to the final 3.0. It runs like a charm though. You should find KDE 4.0 yourself in some past distro release and run that for a bit. You literally have no idea how bad 4.0 was, because comparing GNOME3 to KDE4.0 is night and day, and of course a ton of features were missing at launch. GNOME 3 is, I'll emphasize again, feature-complete. It's like Windows 7 or OS X Snow Leopard right now. Yes there are newer version incoming with more features, however they are feature-complete and ideal for every-day computing of any sort. Same with GNOME 3.

Well I just had a while messing with the Fedora one, my experience lasted about 3 minutes before I rebooted into 10.10 in disgust

What a heap of ***

Application icons wouldn't even display properly - most of them were all white with unreadable text until they reached the bottom of the screen where they became normal icons again.

Wi-Fi worked - thats about the only good thing I have to say about it in its present state.

If they said this was Alpha, then ok, I would be like, "Yea its coming along"... but final ? WTF

It's obvious the Fedora team have not packaged it properly yet. It takes time. It was just release, and it's possible their GNOME3 iso hasn't been merged with the latest packages. This happens very often to any new DE version, and it has nothing to do with GNOME3 itself. It runs almost flawlessly here for example. It's up to the distro teams to compile and set it up properly. This will, I'll stress again, take a bit of time. The missing icons as an example are so obviously due to improper packaging. You're judging the wrong set of people for the mistakes here.

There's a difference between "borrowing" ideas and give your own spin to it and just ripping things off. As far as I know the Dashboard close button from Mac OS X is still in GNOME 3 as well.

Is it just me or does GNOME 3 look extremely bulky? All interface elements seem to waste lot of screen estate. :/ I mean, by default Safari's window chrome occupies almost half the space with tab bar enabled... :blink:

Terminal

Has GNOME 3 been designed with the visually impaired in mind or something?

Ubuntu and most other distros are like this as well. Have you not run Linux before? It's simply the fonts that are too big. I find when I shrink the font size to 9 everything ends up being more or less like on Windows or OS X. EDIT: Yes though it is a valid point. It definitely needs changing.

[.Neo]

Ubuntu and most other distros are like this as well. Have you not run Linux before? It's simply the fonts that are too big. I find when I shrink the font size to 9 everything ends up being more or less like on Windows or OS X.

The font size has little to do with the toolbar and title bar size in GNOME 3. Not to mention it now needs four bars to accomplish the same thing as Mac OS X does with two. That's insane.

I have used Linux before, but for some reason GNOME 3 feels extremely bulky. Even by Linux standards.

[OuchOfDeath]

Try changing the font. I've done it and everything shrinks. The font absolutely does have a lot (everything) to do with the toolbar. Most parts of the UI except for the titlebar will shrink when lowering the font. I do agree that it's too bulky by default though.

[Growled Member]

Overall not very impressed.

I'm just basing this on what I've seen and read, but I'm not impressed either, surely not enough to spend the time to download it.

[.Neo]

Try changing the font. I've done it and everything shrinks. The font absolutely does have a lot (everything) to do with the toolbar. Most parts of the UI except for the titlebar will shrink when lowering the font. I do agree that it's too bulky by default though.

There is a lot of empty space around the fonts and toolbar icons. That has nothing to do with the font size, it's a design decision.

[OuchOfDeath]

There is a lot of empty space around the fonts and toolbar icons. That has nothing to do with the font size, it's a design decision.

Ah you're talking about the toolbar toolbar. Not the menu toolbar. Right. Yes, there's a lot of empty space there.

[Adrian0E]

Well... no.

For now, Unity is a shell for Gnome 2.3x available in 2D and 3D.

There's no plan to drop Gnome (for now...)

Oh, I see now. I thought that Unity has nothing to do with Gnome.

[Quillz]

I've always liked GNOME. I think this looks quite nice, and I like having Aero Snap-like features being built in.

[Unix2]

Oh, I see now. I thought that Unity has nothing to do with Gnome.

Never mind, is a shell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(desktop_environment)

[OuchOfDeath]

Unity is not Gnome, is based in mandriva: http://unity-linux.org/

No... not that Unity. This Unity: http://unity.ubuntu.com/

It's a "shell" for GNOME. It's the panels and window switching. The rest is standard GNOME.

[Syanide]

GNOME Shell Extensions is a collections of extensions providing additional functionality for GNOME Shell. The first public release was made two days ago but the extensions didn't really work because of a bug in GNOME Shell - which was fixed today.

Alternative tab: use the classic ALT + Tab

Alternative Status Menu: adds a "Power off" menu item visible at all time (and not just when pressing the ALT key) in the status menu.

Dock: shows a dock-style task switcher to the right side of the screen and is visible all the time (unlike the Dash "dock" displayed on the left that's only displayed in the "Activities" view). Right now, the dock looks almost the same as the Dash dock except it's smaller.

Auto Move Windows: you can assign a specific workspace to each application.

Gajim: Integration with Gajim, a Jabber/XMPP instant messaging client.

User Theme: Loads a shell theme from ~/.themes/THEME_NAME/gnome-shell.

Windows Navigator: Allow keyboard selection of windows and workspaces in overlay mode: when you hold the ALT key, a number is assigned to each window (displayed in the top left corner) and you can then press the number to switch to that window:

Xrandr Indicator: Replace the GTK+ based indicator from gnome-settings-daemon with a native one. Lets the user rotate the laptop monitor and open display preferences quickly.

Source

Download

Why most of these aren't included by default is beyond me.

[Flawed]

I gave the gnome 3 shell a test using the ppa for 10.10, but unfortunately it was out of date. I also tried doing a git install, but that was taking forever to compile. It will be nice to try out the latest version with 11.04. Thanks for the info Syanide.

[Anooxy]

Not my kind of thing.

The "snapping" goes straight against what I want and expect a window to do when I drag it to the boder of the screen, ie. go through the edge and out of the way to the extent I want it to. If I want windows to fully maximize (or maximize vertically side by side) I can do that already without resorting to triggers fired by completely unrelated actions *shrugs*

I guess I'll eventually give it a good try, but I don't see any advantages that justify crippling my workflow. It'll certainly get nowhere near my work laptop.

Why would you drag a window way to the border? I can't think of a possible real-life situation forcing you to do so.

[JoeyF]

I tried running the LiveCD in VirtualBox, and it failed and defaulted back to "fallback mode", which looks very similar to GNOME 2 (menu bar at the top, taskbar at the bottom, max and min buttons, etc). Not too impressed so far...

[ichi]

Why would you drag a window way to the border? I can't think of a possible real-life situation forcing you to do so.

Maybe because I'm not interested in the whole window but just part of it. You might say "ok, then resize it", but then it's the window content what's scaled while the decoration, toolbar, etc... remains the same size, so what's the point. Even while I alt+middleclick drag to resize instead of reaching for the boders It'd still be slower than dragging the window around.

Also I only maximize two apps (the browser and the mail client) and never ever had the need to maximize two apps side by side, so I certainly don't want those two things to happen automatically when I'm actually trying to do something else. If I wanted to maximize vertically I could just middle click the maximize button, which is an action whose effect is only that one and there's no way I can accidentally trigger it.

[MidnightDevil]

Smells good.. looks good... :D

[Descartes]

EDIT: Wow, way to take the idea of Aero Snap completely from Windows and not even mention it as inspiration or anything. That's kind of a douche move. I'm not on the "OMG THEY COPIED THIS" train, but it kind of bugs me what a blatant rip that is of a Windows feature without even recognizing Windows for it :/

Yeah, it made me smirk in disgust. Not the fact they copied it (was bound to happen, everyone copies stuff like someone has mentioned) but the fact they went all "omg look what an awesome thing we invented" on this.

[Subject Delta]

When I didn't think Gnome could possibly get more ugly, I have been proven wrong. People are never going to mass adopt Linux if the GUI looks like something that should have been abandoned 10 years ago

[alisalem]

I always wonder why window corners are aliased? I believe this is the same in MS Windows.

[Xilo]

I always wonder why window corners are aliased? I believe this is the same in MS Windows.

They too lazy to AA I guess.

[.Neo]

I always wonder why window corners are aliased? I believe this is the same in MS Windows.

Window corners look like crap on both Linux and Windows. Mac OS X is the only one of the three that actually has smooth corners that are properly anti-aliased.

[neufuse Veteran]

did they also implement Shake to hide all windows except for the one selected? :laugh: