Why Do People Hate Gnome 3?

I've been using Linux for about 4 or 5 years now and I've used all types of UIs for Linux. I've heard a lot of people complain about their dislike of Gnome 3. Personally I have no issues with it. I find it great for productivity and it's one the the few UIs I've seen take use of the Windows/Power/Command Key. If you've used Gnome 3 let me know what your opinions are about it as I'm really curious.

It's a developer thing.

Gnome and GTK developers are... well...  lets say "not the easiest people to work with"  :D

This is the general consensus among non Gnome and GTK linux developers and has caused a bit of a flow on effect into the regular everyday general linux populous.

QT FTW lol.

For me, Gnome 3 feels very claustrophobic, it feels like it's trying to herd me into doing things they way Gnome wants them done, not the way I want it. The fact that you have so little direct customization options sure hurts it a lot.

As for the windows key, you could try awesome. In its default configuration, it uses the key for everything. And once you go tiling, you never go back (kidding, but it's a very different experience).

GNOME does have a tiling plugin shell shape. 

I run it with Cairo dock and it works well for me.

awesome doesn't use as many resources compared to gnome, and I really like using Lua to modify the configuration files or to create my own widgets.

I have complete control over my environment in awesome. Although xmonad might be even better, with the support for creating window rules. Too bad I don't know Haskell.

For whatever reason GNOME 3 is the only GUI that likes my sound card Asus essence STX.

I don't like Gnome because it runs pretty slow. I don't really care for the design either. My favorite DE is Mate.

Its okay, but its largely touch screen based, and I havent herd of any Linux user using touch, or if it even works well, unsure there anyways.

Gnome 2 was a beast, I remember it back in the days of Ubuntu 8, it just worked, and I personally found it to be the best DE for me, but alas that all changed, Gnome3 was released and Unity took over, so I moved to LXDE/XFCE.

I dont really like its counter DE, it just doesn't feel the same, although these days I rather like qt over gtk, more so with LXQT, maybe GnoQT2 or something haha, would be fun!

Gnome Shell isn't half as bad with extensions, it's the productivity-orientated DE in linux, styled with the same principles in mind as for instance OSX. It is very efficient on productivity machines, and gtk has a huge application support.

Users that don't primarily use their systems for productivity tend to use XFCE or KDE more than Gnome, if they even use a DE at all. It's a matter of what works best for a particular user.

That being said, KDE has tons more commits per annum than Gnome, and the changes implemented in Frameworks 5 and KDE Plasma 5 are pretty revolutionary, since they offer more functionality (i.e. the first ever convergence environment, and it's immediately a thousand times better than any experimental projects by others that don't seem to really get anywhere), for less than half of the RAM usage of KDE 4, which is pretty spectacular, and which brings the memory usage of KDE 5 under that of Gnome Shell.

The biggest beef with Gnome Shell is that it is a RedHat project. There is no real community involvement anymore in Gnome Shell itself, only in the extensions. However, there are ever more Gnome Shell forks, like Cinnamon... granted, that is a bloated nightmare, but it's a fork of Gnome, or Unity... granted, that is an even worse bloated spyware nightmare, but it's also still a fork of Gnome...  One of the most sexy Gnome Shell forks is the new OzonOS specific DE by Numix, the guys that are known from the special gtk3 icons and the black-and-red gtk theme that is so hugely popular. OzonOS is now in alpha, so it's not finished yet, but it's based on Fedora, so it's made to work with Gnome Shell, and it uses a fork of Gnome Shell that does a few things more efficient and nicer.

It's definitely worth a look for those that love a productivity-orientated interface like Gnome Shell.

Another alternative to Gnome Shell for people that prefer gtk-centric applications, is XFCE of course, which is entirely gtk2 and gtk3 compatible. XFCE is very customizable, and even though it's not as lightweight anymore as it used to be, it's very stable. Downside is that it doesn't do Wayland, it's X11 all the way.

Yet another alternative to Gnome Shell for Gnome 2 lovers, is MATE, which is a Gnome 2 fork. I personally like MATE very much, it's snappy, it's logical, it's efficient, it's thorough, it works. MATE is pretty lightweight, it will run on anything, and look good on anything.

And yet another alternative, one that I think might have a great future, is the Hawaii DE from the Maui Project, and Italian open source development that looks really stylish and efficient, and is made from the ground up to use Wayland as display server and Weston as compositor. It's far from finished though, and Wayland has been, delayed because of the degradation by RedHat of the open source projects that depend on RedHat employees, like Fedora, Wayland, Gnome Shell, etc.... Because of the delays in Wayland, the Maui Project hasn't been able to develop much further.

I was going to post about Mate but Zoltan beat me to it. I thought it was funny that Gnome 2 (Mate) competes with Gnome 3.

I kinda like Gnome 3 but I have a fast machine with gobs of ram. The extensions are where it's at there. 

Something with designed Wayland in mind will quickly take over the universe. Gnome 3.14 was just released -- I need to go check that out.

I should do a video on decrapifying Gnome 3. Not that I'm any expert but I really like it. I have had troubles with Gnome on many monitors but I think it's mostly okay now.

 

 

I'm a touchscreen user. Linux is still lacking in the multitouch area - it has support for it, but either X or DEs don't really have as good support, virtualizing touch with a single cursor. Gnome 3 is much better in that regard, but apps still lack the touch support (see links below). For example, I still can't slide scroll with my finger in Firefox - I have to use the scrollbar (I can in native apps, though). Outside of that, Gnome 3 is the best environment I've used for a convertible experience (even over Windows 8, but only because I can still use a keyboard and touchpad if I want). I just hope it gets more community support in the future.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Gestures

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Touchscreen

Can either you or Zoltan point in the right place to set up a VM with Wayland so I can help test it.

i am mediocre at coding bit damn am I good at breaking thing.

Arch install guide:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland

 

Oh yeah Arch does have wayland.

Thank you sir.

Followup: I just installed GNome 3.14 to a liveUSB and have been trying it out - it is definitely an improvement. I have a few minor quarrells over some of the interface, for example when a sort of options menu pops up while using the onscreen keyboard, it will override the keyboard input so that you actually have to type each key twice, or type fast, which I'm not comfortable with on a screen. It would also be nice to have support from the applications that I actually use, as opposed to GNome's own browser and whatnot. That said, I'm sure those will be fixed easily in updates and I also appreciate the steps they're taking to push Wayland. Being that it's my main DE on my Yoga 13, I can't wait until it hits Arch and some of the other major distros.

Also, I like the fact that GNome, KDE, and Unity (and [insert DE here]) seem to be having a prettiness race. While the major interface of GNome 3 won't have changed much, the apps like Weather and Clock look great, surprisingly enough.

Fedora 21 has Gnome 3.14 with Wayland by default, and is out in beta since yesterday.

That's the easiest and most complete Wayland implementation (more complete than activating Wayland on Gentoo or Arch). The inbuilt bug reporting tool (ABRT) will also report the bugs directly with the Gnome devs (as Gnome is de facto a RedHat project as is Fedora).

Wayland is just the display server though. A lot of subsystems and applications aren't running on Wayland, but on X11, so they run in compatibility mode. A lot of things also use transparencies, so they depend on the compositor, which is completely different for Wayland than for X11. So as long as not everything is ported over (and for the moment, very few things are ported over, basically it's just the Gnome Shell GUI and very few gtk3-apps), it's going to be a kind of crappy experience. The transition to Wayland is a matter of Wayland, Weston and Mutter for Gnome, it's kinda complicated.

I agree, do a video, need more Linux exposure to the system, maybe do one with installing BSPWM and configuring it, I rather like that and I would use it daily :)

Adding to that, maybe some more about virtualisation, explain the differences between containers and VMs, maybe KVM vs Xen vs LXC or something :)

Maybe if you can also do a Linux PC build for a specific purpose, such as something business like, leave linus to the gaming things lol, we need more expertise stuff here :)

I honestly would like to see more Linux videos from Wendell and Qain. 

Upon research I found that to be true, thanks!

Care to explain why G2 was better to G3? I'm curious that's all.