skweez.net

Shane Fagan tries to debunk some Gnome 3 myths. However, I don’t see the whole issue as bright and easy as he does. I’m a bit skeptic about this upcoming Gnome release.

He writes

Gnome will drop all support for Gnome-Panel
Actually it will be fairly easy to go back to Panel if you dont like Gnome-Shell its just “gnome-panel –replace” in command line.

This is NOT easy! It may be easy to do for you and for me, but it’s a bit ignorant, to think that makes it easy for everyone! Many people aren’t comfortable with a terminal and I don’t think this would solve the problem for them for good. It probably only replaces Shell with Panel in the current session. There needs to be a user visible option to get back to the old style. Terminal and gconf hacks aren’t the right thing to do here.

I think Gnome Shell has some more major usability bugs at the moment. Some might be easily solvable, some might be design inherent. I don’t know, make your own decission.

• The bar on the left with the filenames only works for very short filenames. Most of my files (not everybody in the world speaks English!) are longer than this and get truncated with “…” so that some of them aren’t even distinguishable, which makes the whole thing useless.
• The “Activities” item in the upper left corner is not really recognizable as clickable.
• It seems to be not as easy to find applications as with the categorized main menu in the current panel. It seems the categories are still there somewhere.

Also, where do I put things like Tomboy or GNote, the Hamster applet, the dictionary applet, and the like in the Gnome Shell? I don’t need all of them, but they are convenient programs for fast access to useful functions. Any new release of a software will have major acceptance problems, if it has less functions than the one before.

I’m also a bit skeptic about the performance that can be achieved with software written in JavaScript, but that could be a prejudice. The last time I tried Shell, it’s animations were far from being acceptable. But hey, it’s also far from being finished and I’d like to be proven wrong here.

I think, Gnome Shell is not bad per se, but the whole concept might not be entirely thought through. All of it’s features could have been done evolutionary, so one could see, if it really fits users needs. A big part of the UI changes seem to me like solutions for problems that don’t even exist.

I also don’t really see the use case for the whole timeline thing, but that might just be because I wasn’t able to use it yet.