GNOME 3 Shell is terrible, I am switching to XFCE
I’m a long-time user of Fedora and GNOME. GNOME 2 has served me well over the years, so I was interested in what the GNOME people were cooking for GNOME 3. Fedora 15 comes with the new GNOME 3 shell; since change can sometimes be good, I’ve tried to give the new GNOME 3 shell a fair trial.
But after giving GNOME 3 (especially GNOME shell) some time, I’ve decided that I hate the GNOME 3 shell as it’s currently implemented. It’s not just me; the list of people who have complaints about the GNOME 3 shell include Linus Torvalds, Dedoimedo (see also here), k3rnel.net (Juan “Nushio” Rodriguez), Martin Sourada, junger95, and others. LWN noted the problems of GNOME 3 shell way back. So many people are leaving GNOME 3, often moving to XFCE, that one person posted a poem titled “GNOME 3, Unity, and XFCE: The Mass Exodus”.
The GNOME 3 shell is beautiful. No doubt. But as far as I can tell, the developers concentrated on making it beautiful, cool and different, but as a consequence made it far less useful and efficient for people. Dedoimedo summarizes GNOME 3.0 shell as, “While it’s a very pretty and comely interface, it struck me as counterproductive, designed with a change for the sake of change.” In a different post Dedoimedo says, “Gnome 3 is a toy. A beautiful, aesthetic toy. But it is not a productivity item… I am not a child. My computer is not a toy. It’s a serious tool… Don’t mistake conservative for inefficient. I just want my efficiency.”.
Some developers have tried to fix its worst problems of GNOME 3 shell with extensions, and if GNOME developers work at it, I think they could change it into something useful. But most of these problems aren’t just maturity issues; GNOME 3 shell is broken by design. So I’m going to switch to XFCE so I can get work done, and perhaps try it again later if they’ve started to fix it. Thankfully, Fedora 15 makes it easy to switch to another desktop like XFCE, so I can keep on happily using Fedora.
So what’s wrong?
I’ve been trying to figure out why I hate GNOME 3 so much, and it comes down to two issues: (1) GNOME 3’s shell makes it much harder to do simple, common tasks, and (2) GNOME 3 shell often hides how to do tasks (it’s not “discoverable”). These are not just my opinions, lots of people say these kinds of things. k3rnel.net says, “Gnome’s ‘Simplicity’ is down right insulting to a computer enthusiast. It makes it impossible to do simple tasks that used to flow naturally, and it’s made dozens of bizarre ‘design decisions’, like hiding Power Off behind the ‘Alt’ key.” Let me give you examples of each of these issues.
First of all, GNOME 3 (particularly its default GNOME shell) creates a lot of extra steps and work to do simple tasks that used to be simpler. To run a program whose name you don’t know, you have go to the far top left to the hot spot (or press “LOGO”), move your mouse to the hideously hard-to-place (and not obvious) “Applications” word slightly down the right, then mouse to the far right to choose a category, then mouse back to choose it. That’s absurd; the corners of the screen are especially easy to get to, and they fail to use that fact when choosing non-favorite applications. Remarkably, there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to simply show the list of (organized) applications you can start; there’s not even a keyboard shortcut for “LOGO Applications”. Eek. This is a basic item; even Windows 95 was easier. Would it really have killed anyone to make moving to some other area (say, the bottom left corner) show the applications? And why are the categories on the far right, where they are least easy to get to and not where any other system puts them? (Yes, the favorites area lets you start some programs, but you have to find it the first time, and some of us use many programs.) Also, you can’t quickly alt-tab between arbitrary windows (Alt-tab only moves between apps, and the undiscoverable alt-` only moves between windows of the same app). GNOME shell makes it easy to do instant messaging, but it makes it harder to do everything else. Fail.
GNOME 3’s capabilities are not discoverable, either. To log off or change system settings you click on your name — and that’s already non-obvious. But it gets worse. To power off, you click on your name, then press the ALT key to display the power off option, then select it. How the heck would a normal user find out about this? The only obvious way to power down the system is to log out, then power off from the front. If you know an application name, pressing LOGO (aka WINDOWS) and typing its name is actually a nice feature, but that is not discoverable either. If you want a new process or window (like a new terminal window or file manager window), you have to know press control when you select its icon to start a new process (for Terminal, you can also start it and press shift+control+N, but that is not true for all programs). The need to press control isn’t discoverable (it’s also a terrible default; if I press a program icon, I want a new one; if I wanted an existing one I’d select its window instead). Fail.
There are some nice things about GNOME 3 shell. As I mentioned earlier, I like the ability to press LOGO start typing a program name (which you can then select) - that is nice. But even then, this is not discoverable; how would a user new to the interface know that they should press the LOGO button? This functionality is trivial to get in other desktop environments; I configured XFCE to provide the same functionality in less than a minute (in a way that is less pretty, but much easier for a human to use).
The implementors seem to think that new is automatically better. Rediculous. I don’t use computers to have the newest fad interface, I use them to get things done (and for the pleasure of using them). I will accept changes, but they should be obvious improvements. Every change just for its own sake imposes relearning costs, especially for people like me who use many different computers and interfaces, and especially if they make common operations harder. Non-discoverability is especially nasty; people don’t want to read manuals for basic GUI interfaces, they want to get things done.
I don’t think GNOME 3 is mature, either. For example, as of 2011-07-28, GNOME 3 does not support screensavers — it just shows a blank screen after a timeout. But the previous GNOME 2 had screensavers. Heck, Windows 3.0 (of 1993) did better than that; it had screensavers, and I’m sure there were screensavers before then.
I’ve tried to get used to it, because I wanted to give new ideas a chance. Different can be better! But so far, I’m not impressed. The code may be cleaner, and it may be pretty, but the user experience is currently lousy.
If you’re stuck using the GNOME 3 Shell, you basically must read the GNOME shell cheat sheet, because so much of what it does is un-intuitive, incompatible with everything else, and non-discoverable. Needing to read a manual to use a modern user interface is not a good sign.
You could try switching to the GNOME 3 fallback mode, as discussed by Dedoimedo and others. This turns on a more tradtional interface. Several people have declared that GNOME 3 fallback is better than GNOME shell itself. But I was not pleased; it’s not really well-supported, and it’s really not clear that this will be supported long term.
You can also try various tweaks, configurations, and additional packages to make GNOME 3 shell more tolerable. If you’re stuck with GNOME 3 shell, install and use gnome-tweak-tool; that helps. You should also install the Fedora gnome-shell-extensions-alternative-status-menu package, which lets you see “Power off” as an option.
But after trying all that, I decided that it’d be better to switch to another more productive and mature desktop environment. Obvious options are XFCE and KDE.
XFCE is a lightweight desktop environment, and is what I’ve chosen to use instead of the default GNOME 3 shell. I found out later that other people have switched to XFCE after trying and hating GNOME 3’s shell. XFCE doesn’t look as nice as GNOME 3, indeed, the GNOME 3 shell is really quite flashy by comparison. But the GNOME shell makes it hard for me to get anything done, and that’s more important.
I expect that it wouldn’t be hard for the developers to make it better; hopefully the GNOME folks will work to improve it. If many of GNOME 3’s problems are fixed, then I’ll be happy to try it again. But I’m in no hurry; XFCE works just fine.
I’m creating a new page on my website called Notes on Fedora so that I can record “how to” stuff, in case that others find it useful. For example, I’ve recorded how to turn on some stuff in XFCE to make it prettier. Enjoy!
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Upcoming FLOSS in Government Conferences for 2011
If you’re interested in free/libre/open source software in government (particularly the U.S. federal government), there are two upcoming conferences you should consider.
One is Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) 2011 on August 23, 2011. It will be held at the Washington Convention Center, Washington, DC.
The other is the Military Open Source Software (MIL-OSS) WG3 conference on August 30 - September 1, 2011. It will be held in Atlanta, Georgia.
I’ll be speaking at both. But don’t let that dissuade you :-).
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