I tried really hard to keep using Gnome Shell, and even managed to do so for many months. But then there was the 6 monthly version bump and all the extensions broke.
I have two problems. The first (shared with Unity) is that I have a dual monitor setup with large screens. I usually have at least two of each top level window (eg emacs, browser) and many terminals. A panel has turned out to be the most productive way of managing them, providing the panel lets you do drag and drop to change ordering. Every Gnome release cycle the old panels break, new ones appear, and they keep missing functionality. The only way to get a decent stable usable one is to use fallback mode which Gnome is killing in the next release.
The second problem is "random stuff". When I tried Gnome Shell the most recent time, the System Monitor applet showed up at the bottom and only if you moved your mouse to the bottom of the screen. That is beyond spectacularly useless - it needs to be always visible. You get many many niggles like that, that add up to a whole lot of annoyance.
It seems to me that the whole experience is being optimised for a single 11 inch screen where one program at a time is run. Quite frankly Android is a better bet in that kind of scenario.
I agree with the last bit. Neither Gnome nor Canonical have any competing devices in the mobile market. They don't have developer base or user mass to support their ambitious mobile projects. Why leave desktop users behind in hope that mobile users will pick up Gnome or Unity. Even if they are able to bring their shells to market, the deciding factor in mobile market is availability of quality application. A hugely successful project like Android has not made its mark in tablet market due to lack of tablet optimized apps. All this mobile-driven development is work in futility.
I too am mystified by Gnome and Canonical. If they want to compete in the tablet/mobile space then they need to be good at something. Anything will do such as price, freedom, apps, developer productivity, distribution, popularity, localization, tools, privacy, security etc but I can't name a single thing. And the competition is constantly improving - being better than Android/iOS today is useless if you ship in 3 years. Not to mention Mozilla/Firefox are also messing in this space diluting effort and attention even more.
The only thing Gnome and Canonical have to show so far is a homescreen/launcher which is by far the least useful/interesting part of the tablet/mobile experience.
On the being constructive side, what they should be doing is what happened to the GNU project. Do not try to take over the whole world with your stuff all at once. Instead run parts on existing platforms, and provide alternatives or replacements for the other components until it is possible to run completely "native". This way the development effort can be used most effectively, feedback is quick, and you have a working system from day one. What Gnome and Canonical seem to be doing is following the model of Hurd!
> The only thing Gnome and Canonical have to show so far is a homescreen/launcher which is by far the least useful/interesting part of the tablet/mobile experience.
I wish the general public agreed, but the number of awful websites for new desktop wallpapers or icons or mouse pointers or other trivial customisations tells me that a lot of people think the 'home screen interface' is super important, and they don't care (or even know) about other more important things.
Canonical and Gnome have destroyed my previous arguments about the benefits of benign dictators or of directed committees. There's some gentle backlash against Ubuntu (a little bit is from people who know what they're talking about, a lot of it is from people who just don't like the popular Ubuntu) and there's similar backlash against some of the Gnome stuff.
I really wish that tablet / phone / touch interface things were spun off into separate projects, to allow people to continue polishing existing projects rather than focusing on monumental change. That'd allow people to continue using one interface on desktops and the other on tablets. Because they are different, and have different needs, and you can't really kludge one metaphor onto both devices.
That's what KDE has done: the big rewrite of KDE4 let them use the same libraries to power two different shells, for distinct purposes. That's a good way of doing it. Though it does not solve the problem for the rest of the applications.
Once users are happy with everything else, then they turn to customising home screens. If the entire system was only a home screen no one would touch it! (And arguably many are doing personalization rather than customization.)
> The first (shared with Unity) is that I have a dual monitor setup with large screens.
Unity supports large multiple-monitor set-ups without any issues! Each monitor is provided with a copy of the launcher. IMO this makes it far easier to interact with applications when using a mouse.
Personally, I have Unity running across 3 x 24" screens without any issues at all.
Luckily it's very easy to disable having the launcher on every screen because that's just about the most annoying possible default.
It really gets in the way of dragging windows across monitors. Let alone having windows placed "over the fold". Something I often do when things start getting crowded.
>When I tried Gnome Shell the most recent time, the System Monitor applet showed up at the bottom and only if you moved your mouse to the bottom of the screen. That is beyond spectacularly useless - it needs to be always visible.
But the System Monitor is an external extension to the shell; the problem you have with it is not gnome-shell's fault at all.
That makes things worse! Am I supposed to not use the System Monitor at all and count that as an improvement? I believe the System Monitor applet is somewhat part of the official extensions - ie it is in the gnome-shell-extensions package.
This is one of many little niggles that add up to an unpleasant experience. Another example is whether additional workspaces go horizontally or vertically.
AFAIK, there are no official extensions. The gnome-shell-extensions package is just a collection of extensions which grew together in a development repo before the extensions website (http://extensions.gnome.org) existed.
From the website:
> Since extensions are created outside of the normal GNOME design and development process, they are supported by their authors, rather than by the GNOME community. Some features first implemented as extensions might find their way into future versions of GNOME.
I don't actually want a choice! When I use Gnome 2 or Gnome 3 fallback mode, there is exactly one system monitor and it works. The extensions site lists 3 named system monitor and 3 pages of search results with similar descriptions. And my prior experience has been every extension breaks on Gnome version change. And usually they don't end updated so I have to go find another set of extensions.
I am one of those (apparently few) people who actually agree with the Gnome approach of less configurability and options. (Right up until one I use is removed of course!) As standard I do not need a large choice of system monitors, workspace managers, window switchers, volume menus etc. I need one good official one, that works out of the box and is still present as Gnome does its biannual update.
This shifting blame in a lazy fashion, I see this a lot with open source projects.
If you want to provide a good desktop experience, go the distance. Make sure I have a usable system, be accountable for everything that is installed by default and/or I need to actually use the system you are offering.
I don't care if Apple uses a subcontractor to make their Activity Monitor app. If it doesn't work, it's Apple's fault.
> Make sure I have a usable system, be accountable for everything that is installed by default and/or I need to actually use the system you are offering.
Agreed. But how does that apply here, really? The system monitor is not installed by default and is not needed to use the system GNOME is offering. The case here is more alike if Ubuntu bundled some vim plugin into their default installation and people throwed shit at vim because the plugin doesn't work.
And I'm sure that's exactly what people would do. It isn't fair, but we're ever going to have the year of the linux desktop, somebody needs to start owning these little mistakes and quirks.
Raymond Chen from Microsoft on maintaining backward compatibility from Windows 95 to Windows XP:
Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn't work at all. You're going to tell your friends, "Don't upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it's not compatible with program Z." Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn't work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You're going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)
...
This is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to application compatibility. I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95. (Games were the worst. Often the game vendor didn't even care that their program didn't run on Windows 95!)
I have two problems. The first (shared with Unity) is that I have a dual monitor setup with large screens. I usually have at least two of each top level window (eg emacs, browser) and many terminals. A panel has turned out to be the most productive way of managing them, providing the panel lets you do drag and drop to change ordering. Every Gnome release cycle the old panels break, new ones appear, and they keep missing functionality. The only way to get a decent stable usable one is to use fallback mode which Gnome is killing in the next release.
The second problem is "random stuff". When I tried Gnome Shell the most recent time, the System Monitor applet showed up at the bottom and only if you moved your mouse to the bottom of the screen. That is beyond spectacularly useless - it needs to be always visible. You get many many niggles like that, that add up to a whole lot of annoyance.
It seems to me that the whole experience is being optimised for a single 11 inch screen where one program at a time is run. Quite frankly Android is a better bet in that kind of scenario.