Friday, April 27, 2012

Fixing Gnome 3 design mistakes


While there are some cool things in Gnome 3, I think mostly everyone will agree that there are many design mistakes. To me, it looks like a bad copy of the Mac desktop, and it's specially annoying that they also brought the "let Steve Jobs decide it for you" philosophy to GNU. I don't really know who is leading the project, but looks like they should send a resume to Apple.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that I realized that I'm not alone. And I realized in a strange way... Basically, it looks to be a consensus on which are the parts of Gnome 3 which suck more, and I arrived to this conclusion after seeing that there is a Fedora package to remove almost every non-sense feature Gnome brings.

These include (among others):

  • Accessibility icon always on the bar
  • Alt-tab bothering system of grouping windows
  • Power off option not hidden by secret methods


I'm not a genius, so I don't usually share my opinions in Linus Torvalds style, but I think it's totally worth in this case.

So, if you're using Gnome 3, you should probably check this link out:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/GnomeShellConfigurability

1 comment:

  1. Well I like Fedora and Ubuntu, but I don't like Gnome 3 or Unity. So I thought perhaps it wasd me just being a luddite, as some Gnome 3 developers have called us who just don't 'get' Gnome 3. So I let a Windows user loose on gnome 3 and Unity. They were not impressed one bit. They preferred Unity for some reason, but were annoyed by the lack of being able to shift the side dock, they would have preferred it on the bottom of the screen. I then let them loose on a system with XFCE installed and they were happy as larry. Now they were using Linux, they could find their way around, and they said that if all of Linux was as easy to use as this then they'd be hapopy to ditch Windows when their XP system is not supported in a couple years. So, what did they do? They dual boot at the mo' with Xubuntu and Windows XP, and they've let on they only boot into Windows for stuff not available on Linux, although that is quickly becoming less and less each day. If they'd had to choose between Gnome 3, Unity or Windows, then for sure they would not even touch Linux, and they would have been stuck in a couple years with something not supported and no idea what to do.

    Myself I used Fedora with XFCE and Xubuntu. My fav' is Xubuntu because it has a great community and I just feel there is more I can contribute to the project. Also we are looking at turning it into a Server distro as well because t is so easy to configure through the XFCE DE.

    ReplyDelete