Gnome 3.0

russ0r · 14 Apr 2011 at 14:23

LizardKing said:
Been playing with this and Fedora 15
Slowly getting my head around the changes, has to be one of the biggest leaps forward with Linux since Compiz/Beryl hit the scene.

Missing my desktop icons though, not quite sure how the favourites bar will cope with scalability.

I found out you can turn them on. Install gnome-tweak-tool, load it, go to 'File Manager' and check 'Have File Manager handle the desktop'.
Plenty of other bits to tweak in there too

I've been using it since I last posted and still liking it. There's a few bugs (applications disappearing, background not being rendered, VLC crashes quite a bit) but other than that it's rather stable.

EDIT: Also, if you haven't got it installed, install gnome-shell-extensions. It gives you a little dock sidebar that shows your favourites. For some reason it isn't included in gnome3 by default, at least not in the Arch repos.

craptakular · 14 Apr 2011 at 15:07

might attempt ths, but is it worth it on an ari 5870?

yashiro · 14 Apr 2011 at 15:43

I'll fire this up when it gets a .1 update.

LizardKing · 14 Apr 2011 at 16:25

russ0r said:
I found out you can turn them on. Install gnome-tweak-tool, load it, go to 'File Manager' and check 'Have File Manager handle the desktop'.
Plenty of other bits to tweak in there too

I've been using it since I last posted and still liking it. There's a few bugs (applications disappearing, background not being rendered, VLC crashes quite a bit) but other than that it's rather stable.

EDIT: Also, if you haven't got it installed, install gnome-shell-extensions. It gives you a little dock sidebar that shows your favourites. For some reason it isn't included in gnome3 by default, at least not in the Arch repos.

Cheers, it doesn't look like the tweak tool is in the FC15 beta repo's yet so will hang on for that, having no desktop icon's is not a bad thing, removes the temptation to dump everything on there.
The dock bar was included with FC, strange arch never had it :confused:

i'd consider it quite a major part of the desktop.
For an early release i'm finding this very promising

It feels very polished there are a few niggles but i'm sure they will be ironed out in a few releases.

russ0r · 14 Apr 2011 at 18:49

Oxy said:
might attempt ths, but is it worth it on an ari 5870?

From a quick google the open source drivers are meant to be okay with gnome 3. Don't bother with catalyst though.

craptakular · 14 Apr 2011 at 19:40

yeh i, ok i'll fire up my arch install

PhilGQ · 14 Apr 2011 at 20:04

I am one of the few people who prefers Windows Vista (home basic) over Windows 7.

I think Windows 7 is dumbed down too far. It's designed to help disorganised people with its daft upside down menu and its dockbar thing that puts minimised programs in icons instead of text boxes.

I have been fearing Unity and Gnome3 are going the same way. I am reserving judgment until the I have a go at some stable distros, but I am preparing to jump back to KDE full time.

PaulyD · 15 Apr 2011 at 17:38

PhilGQ said:
I think Windows 7 is dumbed down too far. It's designed to help disorganised people with its daft upside down menu and its dockbar thing that puts minimised programs in icons instead of text boxes.

Change taskbar icons to never combine and it wont do that. Will put them on taskbar as in traditional way

Can you not also change it back to the old style menu as well (at work on XP at moment)

Back on topic, i quite like the look of Gnome 3 and is making me think of doing a dual boot again on my little netbook

SMN · 16 Apr 2011 at 10:25

Havent really had time to read up on Gnome3 with work being busy - what benefits does it provide over the current release build?

torchxit · 16 Apr 2011 at 12:38

dislike it and also dislike natty now i have to start all over again and search for DE that i like =( i hate what they did to gnome and i hate how they dropped compiz in gnome 3 what a waste for great piece of software

tntcoder · 16 Apr 2011 at 12:55

torchxit said:
dislike it and also dislike natty now i have to start all over again and search for DE that i like =( i hate what they did to gnome and i hate how they dropped compiz in gnome 3 what a waste for great piece of software

Have you tried the fallback mode? That's supposed to be closer to gnome 2 I think.

Mr. Brightside · 16 Apr 2011 at 19:31

I wiped my Fedora 14 (with KDE 4.6) and Windows 7 partitions a couple of days ago, replacing them with my first Arch install. I've got GNOME3 set up and running quite nicely (GTX 470 graphics - using the NVIDIA drivers; nouveou works nicely for KMS and native res TTYs but GNOME3 doesn't like them).

I've been using the machine pretty much non-stop since I setup GNOME3 to write my dissertation. There's been the occasional freeze but most of them resolved within a minute or two of waiting. Also I've seen the background fail to render a few times but aside from this I'm really impressed with it; I moved over to Fedora and KDE a few months ago from Ubuntu because although I've not tried it I can't say I'm keen on the direction Ubuntu is going with Unity.

I recommend trying it.

tntcoder · 17 Apr 2011 at 00:24

Useful 'cheat sheet' for gnome-shell: https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

And some early shell mods: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/gnome-shell-extensions-additional.html

The gnome-tweak-tool is great for enabling desktop icons and other little bits

I switched to it tonight, it seems ok but getting rid of desktop icons seems to me like going backwards rather than going forwards. Also little things like not being able to enable browser mode in nautilus so you can browse to a path manually, you can do it with ctrl+l but I can't work out how to make it persistent anymore

Also no option to shutdown? you're forced to press the Alt key on the menu to get a shutdown option. Honestly I don't know why the Gnome devs are so against offering these things as configurable options!

The activity thing in the top left of the screen is nice, but im not sure it works too well on dual screens. Certainly takes some getting used to, naturally we no longer have an option for a task list on the main bar

Otherwise I like it

tntcoder · 17 Apr 2011 at 15:27

If anyone is using 2 screens and has had issues with the dock extension i've made some simple changes to it play better with twinview'ed screens.

- The dock is now positioned on the right of the second screen (-20 pixels), before at least with me it was stuck between the two screens (nvidia twinview).
- Clicking on a dock icon multiple times will open one process per click on the current workspace rather than locking you to one instance.

Extensions to the shell are really easy as it's all JavaScript, so I think within a few months things will improve a lot

Now looks like:

Once the occasional rendering bugs are fixed I think it will be ok

I still don't like the huge graphical list of apps under the activities menu though

My next job is to mod it so you can have a dual screen wallpaper, of course they didn't think that is a relevant feature in 2011...

EDIT: turns out multi-monitor wallpapers are already supported, and just need to to be done as a 'spanned' image

LizardKing · 18 Apr 2011 at 17:47

Heres a pretty good video that gives a good overview of the use of gnome 3

I'm starting to get use to no desktop icon and no taskbar, the no taskbar is pretty hard as its so ingrained but i'm starting to find that you really don't need it other than knowing what's currently open.

Mr. Brightside · 18 Apr 2011 at 18:05

LizardKing said:
... i'm starting to find that you really don't need it other than knowing what's currently open.

I think that's part of what makes it so refreshing; not constantly being reminded of what's open. To me, that's just a distraction. I feel like I'm more productive when I don't have a Firefox window sitting in a task bar, asking for my attention. Virtual desktops of the past helped to some extent but they felt too static.

LizardKing · 18 Apr 2011 at 20:19

tntcoder said:
Also little things like not being able to enable browser mode in nautilus so you can browse to a path manually, you can do it with ctrl+l but I can't work out how to make it persistent anymore

I find that strange as well, they seem to be trying to move away from clunky interfaces, and in its current form I'm finding file browsing very clunky.

Mr. Brightside said:
I think that's part of what makes it so refreshing; not constantly being reminded of what's open. To me, that's just a distraction. I feel like I'm more productive when I don't have a Firefox window sitting in a task bar, asking for my attention. Virtual desktops of the past helped to some extent but they felt too static.

Agreed! the dynamic virtual desktops are a work of art as well

tntcoder · 18 Apr 2011 at 21:21

I worked out how to enable browser mode / location bar in nautilus if anyone is interested

gsettings set org.gnome.nautilus.preferences always-use-location-entry true

cb_linus · 18 Apr 2011 at 21:24

LizardKing said:
Heres a pretty good video that gives a good overview of the use of gnome 3

I'm starting to get use to no desktop icon and no taskbar, the no taskbar is pretty hard as its so ingrained but i'm starting to find that you really don't need it other than knowing what's currently open.

enjoyed watching that, thanks for linking

Essexraptor · 19 Apr 2011 at 20:56

Is Fedora 15 going to be using Gnome 3 as it's default shell?