[lugm.org] Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a "total user experience design failure"

Tue Jun 5 17:17:32 UTC 2012

Have not used Cinnamon but I've heard good things about Mate.

> I've been sharing his feelings since GNOME 3.X. I really find 3.x to be
> very counter-productive and stuck to using Gnome 2. I'll wait a bit more
> to try out Cinnamon though, as I don't have much time to tinker with my
> system for now. Anyone tried Cinnamon (cinnamon.linuxmint.com) ?
>
> -Arv
>
> On 05/06/12 20:56, Yasir MX wrote:
>> Torvalds has long disliked the GNOME 3.x family
>> <http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-would-like-to-see-a-gnome-fork/9347>.
>> But, as Torvalds explained in his Google+ posting on GNOME 3.4:
>> <https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i>
>>
>>     I broke down, and upgraded my old aging Fedora
>>     <http://fedoraproject.org> install on my desktop. Simply because
>>     my old F14 comes with ancient X versions that don't contain all
>>     the fixes to make Intel 3D really work well. And yes, things
>>     really do work better on the graphical side.
>>     But with F17 comes gnome3 <http://www.gnome.org/>. And I knew I'd
>>     have trouble, but also knew that most of the worst crap could be
>>     fixed with extensions, and I'd used 3.4 on my laptop enough to
>>     know it should be all somewhat usable.
>>
>>
>>     Torvalds had had enough with the GNOME Shell Extensions way of
>>     "fixing" GNOME.
>>
>>         I have to say, I used to think that the "extensions.gnome.org"
>>         approach to fixing the deficiencies in gnome3 was really cool.
>>         It made me go "Ahh, now I can fix the problems I had".
>>         But it turns out to be a *major* pain, when it basically ends
>>         up as a really magical way to customize your desktop, which
>>         breaks randomly and has no sane way to do across machines. And
>>         the extensions seem to randomly break when you update the
>>         system, so they don't work as well as they would if they just
>>         came with the base system.
>>         End result: extensions.gnome.org may be a really cool idea,
>>         but it seems to have some serious usability problems in
>>         practice. And the whole gnome3 approach of "by default we
>>         don't give you even the most basic tools to fix things, but
>>         you can hack around things with unofficial extensions" seems
>>         to be a total UX (user experience design) failure.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     Later on in the resulting discussion, several people suggest that
>>     Torvalds just use the GNOME 3.4 keyboard shortcuts. Torvalds was
>>     not amused.
>>
>>         I'm really tired of the f*cking old "just use the keyboard
>>         shortcuts" crap. Sure, if you're a keyboarding person, then
>>         gnome3 is a big improvement. But dammit, if you're like me,
>>         and you *write* using the keyboard, and then use mousing for
>>         other operations, gnome3 is just not doing the right thing.
>>         And what irritates me is how the gnome3 fanboys (and more
>>         importantly, developers), seem to never acknowledge that
>>         different people have different tastes. The whole "we know
>>         best" thing is a disease.
>>         I'm really not that odd. I want a *few* things:
>>
>>             - smaller fonts (especially window decorations)
>>             - sane "start new terminal" without multiple steps from
>>             the panel
>>             - auto-hide the panel so that I don't have to feel "all
>>             emo all the time"
>>             - focus-follows-mouse
>>             - the ability to use a few default flags for certain
>> programs
>>
>>         and the fact is that none of the above are "odd" requests, but
>>         for some unknown reasons gnome makes these fundamental things
>>         really inconvenient and hard to find.
>>         And christ people - stop telling me about gnome-tweak-tool. I
>>         *know *. I mentioned the damn thing in the post, for chissake!
>>         Telling me about the tweak tool just shows that you didn't
>>         even bother to read what I wrote.
>>         I have found how to do all of the above things - except for
>>         the "flags for favorite applications" - but the fact is, the
>>         gnome extensions are not reliable and the UX *sucks*.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>         full article @
>>         http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-34-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/11127?tag=nl.e539
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
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>