I was encouraged to read that I and other critics of Gnome 3 are not alone, and so by way of a ‘screw you’ to all those supposed ‘developers’ and Gnome 3 fanboys (or arsewipes as they ought to be called) who told me I’m wrong, ignorant, or whatever… I quote this from a recent review on ZD-net, which quotes Linus Torvalds as saying:
it’s not that I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it’s that the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable.
Why can’t I have shortcuts on my desktop? Why can’t I have the expose functionality? Wobbly windows? Why does anybody sane think that it’s a good idea to have that “go to the crazy ‘activities’” menu mode?
I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was “too complicated” for the user to remap some mouse buttons. In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it’s “too complicated” to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do.
Here’s an example of “the crazy”: you want a new terminal window. So you go to “activities” and press the “terminal” thing that you’ve made part of your normal desktop thing (but why can’t I just have it on the desktop, instead of in that insane “activities” mode?). What happens? Nothing. It brings your existing terminal to the forefront.
That’s just crazy crap. Now I need to use Shift-Control-N in an old terminal to bring up a new one. Yeah, that’s a real user experience improvement. Sure.
I’m sure there are other ways, but that’s just an example of the kind of “head up the arse” behavior of gnome3. Seriously. I have been asking other developers about gnome3, they all think it’s crazy.
I’m using Xfce [a lightweight Unix/Linux desktop). I think it’s a step down from gnome2, but it’s a huge step up from gnome3. Really.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-would-like-to-see-a-gnome-fork/9347
As I said before – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But now that you have, please put it back together again.
People (well, Windoze people anyway) have said that this is a disaster for Linux, but actually, it demonstrates the strength of Linux. If Microsoft bought out a crap user interface that nobody liked (apart from the developers and a few fanboys – who probably are the developers and their younger brothers…), they would be in serious trouble. Oh yes, they did, it was called Vista – and boy did they rush to take a step back and get Windows 7 out before all those people still grinding along on XP started looking around for something else. They must have lost as big a fortune on Vista as a film studio does on a box-office flop. But, I have not heard a single Linux user say they are going back to Windows, or switching to Apple (as tempting as that may seem at times). Nope. Because of the flexibility of linux, there were so many options available that people didn’t need to. What do people about Gnome3?
Stick with the last stable distribution release before Gnome3 (& Unity), and keep using it and updating it as long as it is supported.
Switch to a conservative distribution that has not yet incorporated Gnome3, like Debian.
Stay with the distribution of choice regardless, and use XFCE.
Stay with the distribution of choice regardless, and use KDE.
Or switch to some other interface, like LXDE.
Stay with or move to Ubuntu, and opt for Gnome Classic instead of Unity.
Switch to Mint and opt for either the Mate or Cinnamon interface – either by upgrading Ubuntu to Mint, or a fresh installation.
That’s the thing with Linux, you have so many options you can pick, if somebody does bugger something up, you have choices, you can find a way round it. With Windows, What you see is what you get.
Change for change sake is not good, I don’t know about others, but I get quite cosy in my desktop environment on Linux, and I get used to everything being where I put it over the previous couple of years. It’s like a cross between a shed and a library. I don’t want to suddenly find my shed/library/workspace has suddenly been converted into a Klingon space vessel cunningly disguised as an Android phone. That won’t work for me. I won’t know how I get to use the power drill if you have made the plug sockets look like jelly-babies. I could try and learn to open the shed door by knocking on the door frame three times, but at the end of the day, I’ve always felt using the handle was quite adequate for my needs…
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
