[NCLUG] GNOME 3.x

[Mike Loseke]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 12:39 PM, Andrew Gilmore <agilmore2 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Mike said:
>
> > The real underlying problem is that Gnome 3, and in particular,
> > gnome-shell, has only really made to the alpha stage.  I wouldn't even
> > call Gnome 3.4 a "beta" in the sense that it's anywhere near on par
> > feature-wise with Gnome 2.x.  I mean, seriously, you can't even change
> > your font preferences from System Settings.  The upcoming Gnome 3.6
> > suffers from the same problem.  It's just not feature complete yet so I
>
> don't even consider it a beta yet.
>
>
I've been using gnome 3 since it came out with no negatives.  It has never
once crashed or seg-faulted on me and has worked consistently the entire
time.  Does it have every feature of it's predecessor versions?  Probably
not, but that's fine with me.  Every single "desktop" since CDE has
provided me with too many options that *need* to be toggled, and every one
that I've used in the past 15+ years or so has been a step in the wrong
direction from just a "window manager" running right on top of X.  I used
fvwm and similar window managers for a long time and gnome 3 is the closest
mix of the two things I've seen that I like.

gnome-tweak-tool is definitely a must-have and is very easy to use to do
things like tweaking focus and changing fonts.  Much easier than
Windows-wanabe tools like *conf-editor.

gnome 3 also looks great, mostly because there isn't that much to see
except the applications that I'm running (xterm, chrome and...).  With the
help of a few extensions from https://extensions.gnome.org/ I can make what
is visible look and act just as I would like it to.  I don't miss any
Windows-like features (alt-tab, minimizing windows, task-bar, start menu,
etc) because I have no use for them and they aren't there to get in the way
of me getting work done in a comfortable environment.  I can dynamically
add and move virtual workspaces around with very little effort as well as
move between them easily.

I'm actually dreading moving my family's main computer to Fedora 17. I've
> been holding on to 14 for far too long, but the culture shock and changes
> to GNOME 3 are going to be difficult for my wife and kids to adapt to.
>

Try out KDE, XFCE or any of the other readily available desktop
environments available on pretty much whatever distro that you want to use.
 Ask your family to try them out and see if they like it, don't force
something you're unhappy with on them just because it's the default.  Heck,
install all of them and let them choose which desktop to use upon login.
 Each desktop will do things different from each other and maybe several of
those will cover your bases, or one of the distros like Mint that have a
fork of gnome 2.  There are lots of options, banging your head on the
default isn't worth the headache.


> Mike