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On 04/22/2011 11:42 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: > Since Gnome 3 has been released, it was one of the topics in last > Wednesday's BLU meeting, and will be in the next releases of OpenSuSe > 11.4, Fedora 15, Ubuntu 11.04**, I'd like to start a discussion on Gnome > 3. I don't want a Gnome vs. KDE war, just a somewhat intelligent > discussion from those of us who might have been using Gnome 3. > Remember that people don't like changes or things that are different, if > you have tried it out, opinions are valuable. > ** Ubuntu 11.04 will be using the underlying infrastructure of Gnome 3, > but will be using Unity instead of the Gnome Shell. Well, I made my opinions clear at the meeting. On the technical side, it looks like they did some sharp reengineering to eliminate duplication and increase interface efficiency. >From a user perspective, I am gravely disappointed in what I saw last Wednesday. I can understand trying to make the interface easier for the beginner/casual user, but not at the expense of removing functionality for the power user. I also took great offense at some of his statements. For instance, I talked about the problem of needing several apps that do similar jobs because they each have their strengths. In my case, I use several different programs to manage my apple devices, because one can edit/import/export playlists while the others can't, another one can transfer videos over while the others can't, etc. His answer was "We'll just have to work to get one application that can do all of that". That is a ridiculous statement, since all of them are put out by different people, Apple device integration has been around for a long time and has not really improved much (other than the iPhone sorta kinda working). What's going to change that now? And given that I can't, how am I going to be able to tell these programs apart if I can't see their names? The other thing that really has me worried is when he was talking about the plugin architecture, and how that might be used to get around some of the problems we were all complaining about. I can't remember his exact words, but it was something very close to "We know how the the interface should look and work, so we don't really like this feature, because people are going to muck up the look and feel. This just so totally smacks of Microsoft's stance ("We know what you need"). Very arrogant, and very much not the open source way and attitude. In fact, he bragged about several features they stole from Windows 7, all of which cannot be disabled (If I want a window maximized, I'll maximize it!!!). He danced around some other long-standing issues that were not addressed, like when you automatically autostart/restore applications after a reboot, they should restart into the virtual desktop they were on at shutdown. Of course this leaves me in a quandary, because I gave up KDE when 4 came out and the whole UI was turned into an array of candy-like icons all nearly identical.
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