Gnome 3 Review

At first I was leaning more towards Unity instead of Gnome 3... then I tried Unity some more.. LoL

Now its the opposite, I'm starting to see some things I like about G3, though like Kaddy I really want to see some things improve and especially see some sort of easy to manage extensions chooser/manager. I'm no dummy with code but its just a convenience thing and it will benefit everyone.

Quidsup has a video on how to get gnome 3 on natty, but it'll wipe out unity and upgrade the gnome 2 fallback to gnome 3. According to him it can't be undone, and it can't be done on virtualbox. Apparently it has to be on a normal install and you'll have to reinstall if you want to go back to unity.

Also if anyone didnt know this, if you hold ALT and Right Click on the panel in Gnome Fallback/Classic mode you get all the old "Add to panel" etc options!!! Only just discovered this lol so sorry if its old news.

So remember that Jonathan if you happen to delve in and do Gnome 3, its not quite as limited as I first thought, they just obscure it more

I might when school finishes and I don't need my machine for school work.

W00t look at this, gnome-tweak-tool just upgraded to 3.0.4-1 on my Arch system and looks like a new addition to the program -




Looks like once you install the extensions packages (from your package manager) you should in theory just be able to manage them with this tool easily for now.

Though beforehand I've found extensions to be pretty easy to manage anyway, I just made a Link folder to the '~/.local/Gnome-Shell/extensions/' directory in my downloads folder so all I have to do is extract a downloaded extension to the shortcut folder, restart Gnome-Shell (alt-F2, type 'r', then enter) and bam, done. Likewise you can also just delete the extension in the directory to uninstall it.

Oh Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetttt

I'm upgrading now.... this is great!

thanx for the heads up eldersnake........ i'll have a play with it today

No problem, as soon as I pacman -Syu 'ed my system and saw the tweak-tool update I was anxious to see what if any additions they might have made

I haven't really tested it but it ought to work okay if they have added it in there.

Only annoying thing (not related to the extensions part) is the "Allow file manager to handle desktop option" (to show icons on the desktop). It only works if you open up Nautilus.
It's only a small thing but if they could background nautilus to start with Gnome-Shell or some other method then the desktop handling thing would work okay/consistently I imagine.

yeah I know what you mean man... I want the right click functionality for my gnome 3 desktop, and the only way I know of is enabling nautilus to handle the desktop........... those fkn annoying icons though... arghhh..... you use to be able to get rid of those in gconf-editor but the option isn't there anymore for some fkn reason... I been trying to find out how to remove the icons from the Desktop...... havn't found a solution yet......... lemme know if you find one

Alrighty man, I've found it. Thankfully the functionality is still there they've just (typically) changed things around a bit and made it harder to find on the first go!

Hit Alt-F2 and type "dconf-editor" (yes, a 'd' instead of a 'g', why would they do that??? Lol).

Then go down the lists as you would in Gconf, start with 'org', then 'Gnome' then 'Nautlius' then the sub-field 'desktop'.

You'll come to this screen:



And there you have it, just uncheck those Computer, Trash and Home fields or whatever you like and it seems to work fine, I currently have right-click (so long as I open the file manager at least once manually) and none of those stinky icons

aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh That's the one!!!
I was freaking using the Gconf configuration editor that's in the menu thinking it was the same as dconf-editor.........

awweesommeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
cheers for that

You should make a video on this eldersnake... alot of people want the right click functionality in gnome 3 without the shitty icons

Yeah it's incredibly confusing to have both a gconf and dconf editor... no idea what's going on there, guess the gconf is kept for compatibility and dconf is the new Gnome 3 version or something.

Yeah I probably should whip up a quick vid, never done one before and it might not have audio but I might as well start somewhere. Cheers.

EDIT: Done and uploaded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5_q2J3XEJI

Yo, a temporary fix if you want your Nautilus "Files" application link to work after you enable desktop handling...

"sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/nautilus.desktop"

Scroll down to where is says "exec=nautilus %U" and add after the %U "/home/<username>"

So mine for example reads "exec=nautilus %U /home/archsnake"

Nothing major but until they fix it (or if they ever fix it) this makes nautilus open from it's application link in the Activities even when desktop handling is on.

Be cautious, it hasn't had any negative impact for me, the %U command is just "%U= A list of URLs. Each URL is passed as a separate argument to the executable program. Local files may either be passed as file: URLs or as file path.". It shouldn't be a problem because I believe with desktop handling the Nautilus %U command is already autostarted and hence why it wont open a new instance, but meh, I'm no expert lol. Hopefully it works out okay.

ahhhhh so that's why it happens.........

thanx for the tip mate!

No worries, only downside is if you ever go to fallback mode it means Nautilus will open twice when you access the file manager icon, but you can understand that.

I wouldn't have known about that if Gnome-Shell wasn't adverse to video editing >_> anyone else had that? Maybe just openshot but GS pretty much always crashes eventually when video editing.

Looks like the Distro I'm currently running, PCLinuxOS Gnome, which is a rolling release, is about to send out the Gnome 3 update:

Gnome3 is near final

Pclinuxos is updating to gnome 3.0? waatttttt? seriously? Those guys usually don't jump aboard
buggy software........ they held onto kde 3.5xx for aaggesssssss before moving to kde 4xx

Yeah that's kind of surprising. While Gnome-Shell itself has been reasonable for good casual use I've had some real problems doing any, I guess, more intensive work on like with video editing/encoding. You know, the flicker and then the "Oh noes! Error occured, you must log out" screen

I mean it's pretty useable for day to day stuff but I'm surprised the PCLOS guys would be updating already. Though, I've found the fallback interface to be quite stable but still. I wonder what they are going for.

upon further research... I think you jumped the gun a little early man.......

There is no announcement by Texstar to roll gnome 3 in the repos and it has been discussed and dismissed here

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=89478.30


didn't think they would roll out Gnome 3 just yet

I'm getting my info from this thread here.

http://linuxgator.org/gnome/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3460&hilit=gnome3

Slax is the guy who heads up the Gnome edition. On April 22nd, he posted

Of course, all news regarding gnome3 will be posted here on the forums.
It is not ready yet for pclos.

Please be patient because we want to make it right as anything else in our pclinuxos
we don't want to rush it

on May 12,

Gnome change cannot be ignored :/

So who wants to continue using g2 should make a local repo while there's still time.

Unless some dev group continue supporting g2 in the future as some other project/branch

may 17

f

irst, we still don't have an exact plan about the update that we can tell you.
secondly, your personal files will not be lost/affected

what siamer said is that the release will be available as iso, and also the packages will be updated in synaptic for the users who already has gnome installed (rolling release)... we can't separate gnome 2 and 3 packages because the libs are the same.

on May 22, I get the article I linked to above, which says:


L

ots of polish has been landing prior to the gnome3 hard code freeze. We’re racing to the finish line: exciting times! (From tweeter post)



So it’s near final. Also another news, MBantz has offered his help in packaging Gnome3 with me and Siamer.



So i’m off to test new Gnome3 build to see if there is some trouble

I'd say it's coming soon. That's the info I'm getting. Both the Gnome and the Zen Gnome will be getting the upgrade.


http://zen.pclinuxos.org.pl/


Hello everyone!



J

ust want let you know that just packed GNOME 3 for ZEN-mini and PCLinuxOS ! It’s working almost fine… Sended already to Texstar and hope that he will help with few problems that I have… (not big problems so don’t worry!)… Soon will be available for download !

Regards,

siamer

early screenshot is in the link.

Personally, I hope you guys are right. I kind of like things the way they are. Also I have PCLOS on my wife's computer, she went bat crazy on me when Firefox 4.0 came out, she hates even the slightest change, I don't even want to think about the heat I'm going to get with this. The Gnome-shell interface is certainly not going to fly with her, hopefully the fallback mode won't be that much different.

bahhahahahahahahahahahha.... that's funny

nar I doubt gnome 3 will come along for atleast a close to a couple years on pclinuxos... she is safe til then

kaddy wrote:bahhahahahahahahahahahha.... that's funny

nar I doubt gnome 3 will come along for atleast a close to a couple years on pclinuxos... she is safe til then

I reckon we'll find out. I'll keep you posted on the updates that come through to my machine.

If it does happen, the fallback interface IMO isn't too terrible so long as the user is aware that to get most options on the panel you need to "Alt+right click" instead of just regular right click. In any case it looks and functions fair similar out of the box but it depends how much she plays with Gnome typically I suppose.

eldersnake wrote:If it does happen, the fallback interface IMO isn't too terrible so long as the user is aware that to get most options on the panel you need to "Alt+right click" instead of just regular right click. In any case it looks and functions fair similar out of the box but it depends how much she plays with Gnome typically I suppose.

I pretty much have hers set up to mimic a classic Windows desktop, she doesn't get very far into modifying things. One panel at the bottom, the single menu down at the bottom left, resembling a Windows "Start menu," and the clock and whatnot over on the bottom right. I put launchers to her favorite programs just to the right of the menu, resembling Windows' "quick launch." If it doesn't work out, I suppose I can install LXDE, which is what my 9 year old daughter uses, I put Peppermint on hers and gave it a pink girly theme.