Gnome 3.4 - a review (or a recount of experiences?)

[cleary]

I'm not particularly good at this sort of writing, so while I'd like it to be an in-depth review, it won't. It'll be a recount of a series of experiences I've had using Gnome 3.x for the past couple of months.

Introduction:
About the reviewer: I like to think of myself as a bit of a Desktop Environment agnostic. I use Linux heavily at work, and use a variety of Desktop Environments in anger during the course of a normal day. My work desktop is running Unity, I maintain an in-house distro with Gnome 2.x, my main desktop (which is just a big laptop) at home runs KDE 4.7 and Win7, and my portable laptop (which comes to work with me) has been running Gnome 3.x for the last 3 months, with Vista as a secondary boot option. All of these machines/DEs are used heavily throughout the course of a day. As a result, I tend to focus on usability out of the box, not usability after tweaking the shit out of it - this review will be a slight exception to this rule though.
The machine I've been running for the review is a Dell Latitude D430 with a ULV Core2Duo@1.2GHz, 2GB Ram, Intel 945GM/GMS Video Card, 12" 1280x800 screen, and a 64GB Runcore Pro IV SSD.

About Gnome: The Gnome Desktop Environment has always prided itself on making usability a priority when developing software. The version of Gnome I'm reviewing today is 3.4.0.1 on an up-to-date Debian Unstable (sid) install running an aptosid Linux kernel based on Linux 3.4-0.


First Impressions:
Gnome 3.x is not like any desktop environment I've used before. Compositing effects are part of the core interface design, which keeps the desktop uncluttered allowing better efficiency with the screen real estate.
The traditional app menu has been rejigged with an "Activities" button in the top left corner, which can also be activated by pushing the mouse cursor into the top left corner without clicking. From the Activites view you can run your favourite apps from a side panel, view running apps, search desktop resources such as apps/files/contacts, switch virtual desktops, or view the full list of installed applications.







The thin panel running the length of the top edge of the screen contains the title of the current running app and some indicators such as network, volume and battery. Pushing the mouse cursor into the bottom right corner reveals the notification panel.




Many common mobile interface paradigms have made their way into the Gnome interface. Dialogs have been simplified, and settings changes do not need to be "saved" or applied with a separate mouse click - once a setting is changed, it's immediately applied.



Another Android "feature" (and I assume this exists on other mobile interfaces too, I just don't know) is the "Online Accounts" dialog. When setting up your desktop, you traditionally have to reconfigure one or more email accounts separately, one or more chat accounts separately, and integration of these activities "sub-features" (calendering, contacts) into the containing Desktop Environment is non-existent. Gnome changes this by letting you configure multiple "Online Accounts" that are either Windows Live, Facebook or Google, and then lets you sync the components provided by those services with the core Gnome apps - eg mail is auto configured in Evolution, Empathy is configured for chat, contacts are pulled in for both, and indexed and searchable in the Activities dialog, Calendering syncs to the Date/Time widget on the top panel, and in Evolution.


Gnome 3.4 is colour managed. I do a bit of photography, and this matters to me - at this stage, I have no Linux compatible screen `calibrator so I did not delve into this.

The compositing speed/responsiveness was excellent on my very modest equipment, consistent and fast. It felt faster than KDE, and more reliable than Unity. The Online Accounts feature made setup an absolute breeze and the starting apps by searching in the Activities view was quite intuitive since that is my primary method for starting apps on both Unity and KDE.



It's inbuilt ssh-agent also *just worked*, I didn't do anything and it just popped up the password dialog the first time I ran ssh. So far so good!


The Honeymoon is Over:
Up to this point, I was really enjoying the change. It felt fresh and fast, and really worked well on my D430. But as is always the case, I started to hit some niggles:
* sudo authentication is required - I haven't traditionally run sudo on my aptosid installs as part of keeping with the aptosid philosophy, but I was hitting enough hurdles that I decided to break this self imposed rule. Core system settings changes were suddenly a lot easier -
* network manager is required - once again, the aptosid philosophy is to avoid network-manager like the plague. On a bleeding edge, rolling release distro it can be really difficult to keep under control, plus with cli only access it can be difficult to manage. I decided that I wanted the Gnome experience to be as they intended and installed it. Suddenly I had full network management control from the gnome taskbar, it integrated with my online status in the user menu, and the integration experience improved even more.
* gnome-screenshot is just a bit too basic. Shutter and Ksnapshot are both much better and provide flexible snapshotting options in terms of time, area etc, as well as a host of different upload services. I prefer Ksnapshot, and it became my default.
* it's missing a pastebin widget - there's one in kde, and I find it extremely handy for all sorts of stuff.

Then I hit the major one - the notifications system is a complete misnoma.
The Gnome 3 brochure describes the new system as:

GNOME 3.0 includes a new notifications system which has been designed to let you focus on your current task. Notifications are unobtrusive and will wait for you in the Messaging Tray

In real life though, if you look/walk away from your computer for a moment, then receive a chat message, or new email or some other notification - when you next look at your screen, there is absolutely no visual indicator that something exists that you should attend to. There is an incredibly long bug report on this issue. I am almost speechless at how bad this is. I missed so many important chat messages, put all sorts of un-needed strain on my relationship, and this almost became the "feature" that destroyed the experience for me. At this point, I headed back to KDE. I'd grown comfortable with having easy Mail/Calendar/Chat access on via installed client apps, so I tried to do this with a one-shot configuration in KDE. You can't - you have to configure everything separately - mail in kmail, chat in kopete, etc. That hurt, and the convenience of the Online Service feature became clear - so I headed out to do something I rarely do, and delved into the world of Gnome DE tweaking. I was ready to try and patch gnome myself, but it turned out they've got a very nice service in beta atm, called Gnome Shell Extensions for you to install/distribute plugins for the Gnome Shell. I found a couple of extensions that put visual notification indicators on the top taskbar, and eventually settled on the "Notifications Alert" plugin by hackedbellini, and with the simple act of turning the speech bubble next to my name red when I receive a notification, suddenly the urge to punch gnomes in the face receded completely. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it moved from complete DE interface failure to usable.



Moving Forward:
At the end of the day, no interface will ever make all the people happy all the time. I applaud the Gnome developers for moving the DE interface paradigm forward. There are some really magic and unique touches to Gnome 3 that have pushed the envelope in so far as DEs on Linux are concerned, as well as other Operating Systems, and in general (asides from the notifications issue), I find it a pleasant and unobtrusive experience. I get good screen real estate efficiency, good consistent compositing performance, and simple but complete service integration. There are niggles like all software, but we are fortunate enough to be able to actually contribute to the software directly, or just help influence the direction of these projects, and I'm looking forward to seeing the notifications system improved in the core release.

As far as the Desktop Environments running on my other Linux installs go, I'll be leaving them in place (I'm a sucker for seeing what they're all doing ) but it's got a permanent home on my D430 for now.

[Smakked]

NIce write up cleary, i haven't had chance to have a look at 3.4 but might do soon and see how it goes.

[Hamal]

How platform agnostic is Unity? I like Unity and all it has to offer, but the prospect of tying myself down to Ubuntu indefinitely isn't appealing. I imagine Gnome 3 would provide a more transportable experience, should I decide that Ubuntu has diverged too far for me?

[cleary]

Originally Posted by Hamal

How platform agnostic is Unity? I like Unity and all it has to offer, but the prospect of tying myself down to Ubuntu indefinitely isn't appealing. I imagine Gnome 3 would provide a more transportable experience, should I decide that Ubuntu has diverged too far for me?

In theory, I would assume it's completely agnostic. In reality though, it's a canonical project and is something they'd probably consider a competitive advantage so I would strongly suspect any bug reports/patches/discussion regarding running it on other distros would be treated with the lowest possible priority.
The only way I would expect to see it running and maintainable on other distros in the real world would be a complete fork as a non-distro affiliated project.

[Menthu_Rae]

Nice writeup. Personally I don't like this dumbed-down UI trend with Gnome 3.x and Unity, and KDE is just a tad too far in the opposite direction for me (too much crap everywhere!).

I eventually settled on Unity with Gnome-Do and Avant Window Navigator (the 2 things I actually need on a desktop/make it work the way I want it to work). I will keep an eye on Gnome 3.x though, or might head towards KDE one day (when I can invest the time to re-learn where everything is)... I figure with Gnome/Unity, at some point the user environment has to at least become "good", otherwise people will abandon it

Also, just a heads up - I have a ColorHug, if you'd like, I could mail it to you so you could borrow it... though I will say that the calibration results I have achieved are not quite what I expected, I believe this will change in time though as the software is tweaked.

[cleary]

@Menthu - yeah I saw your colorhug post in f=48, thanks for the offer - I'm currently pretty comfy with my processing workflow on windows. If I dive into recreating that on the linux side, I anticipate I'll end up buying one myself - but I'll keep your offer in mind just in case

What sort of results are you getting from it?

[Psychotria]

Good review; thanks clearly

Is your Windows photography workflow calibrated? If so why can't you just copy the (calibrated) ICC profile from Windows to Linux?

[cleary]

Originally Posted by Psychotria

Good review; thanks clearly

Is your Windows photography workflow calibrated? If so why can't you just copy the (calibrated) ICC profile from Windows to Linux?

Glad you liked it (ps, it's cleary with one 'L' )

Re windows calibration, Yes it is, but between OS', drivers, display servers and DEs, I don't trust that the ICC profile from one with give me output any closer to correct than uncalibrated.

[SchRAMBO]

Good on Gnome devs for trying something new. However I have jumped ship and gone to KDE 4.7.

I was using Deb stable on my laptop, was happy with gnome2. But I needed new features found in the 3.2 kernel so did an upgrade to testing (wheezy). Firstly I got an error saying that it couldn't load gnome3 properly due to not having full hardware graphic support and so it presented me with this "fail-safe" gnome3 mode. MY GOD it was terrible and I was raging so much over it. It would not let me do even the most basic of things like change and manage my wifi 802.11 connections. I felt insulted, like as if it was treating me like a child and not letting me play with things. I raged hard. reinstalled Debian wheezy netinst. then proceeded to install KDE-standard plasma-desktop xorg etc and BOOM! it works perfectly. Even with using the free ATI drivers that Debian defaulty uses. it works a bloody charm. And its friggin fast and snappy and runs oh so smooth.

Such a huge sigh of relief now with having many options and features I can tweak to get things right how I like it.

Still running on the default radeon drivers as it seems fglrx-drivers etc are not currently in testing which is bloody annoying but thats another story and winge.

[Smakked]

Hows it going cleary?
Still using Gnome? I tried but lasted only a week, but lobe kde 4.8.4, seems they have fixed alot of bug with this release, Smooth as silk , have since dropped the nvidia driver for nouveau which seems better then nvidia on my setup.

[cleary]

Originally Posted by Smakked

Hows it going cleary?
Still using Gnome? I tried but lasted only a week, but lobe kde 4.8.4, seems they have fixed alot of bug with this release, Smooth as silk , have since dropped the nvidia driver for nouveau which seems better then nvidia on my setup.

Yep, still using it (on my d430 at least) - I don't think kde 4.8 has dropped into debian unstable just yet, so I haven't tried it yet. I haven't really had any issues with bugs in KDE though, it's just features like the single account sign on business that I really find convenient in gnome

[Smakked]

Im back on G# testing it now , Extensions are a must if you want it to be usable at all. AN get rid of the horrible black theme, so far so good. Latest KDE was a huge resource hog , hence the swap. and i use more GTK apps then Qt, i hate mixing the two together.

[metamorphosis]

Some very basic HUI fuckups like not including text with icons in some areas, but nothing the other OS's aren't equally fucking up at the moment.
Looks pretty at least.

[dalek]

I too upgraded from Debian squeeze to wheezy. I lasted about 15mins on gnome3 before I gave up and installed xfce. Best move ever - it just works!

[Smakked]

Im pretty happy with cinnamon now which is basically Gnome 3 but dont better :P