back to article Look! GNOME 3.10 (with Fedora 20). Did we mention GNOME 3.10?

The biggest development in Fedora 20 (aka Heisenbug), which recently hit beta, isn’t something unique to Fedora at all. It’s the GNOME 3.10 desktop. Fedora's live desktop CD has long served up GNOME by default, but Ubuntu is moving to Unity, OpenSUSE has focused more on KDE and Mint is forging its own path with Cinnamon 2.0. …

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  1. Matt Piechota

    On hold

    I'll just wait until some of the bright sparks figure out how to add the minimize button and other sensible stuff back in before I try it.

    1. Jaffa Cakes

      Re: On hold

      You can add it back to regularly-titlebarred programs using gnome-tweak-tool, although it doesn't appear to affect the new look, titlebarless ones. Alternatively you can just use the keyboard shortcut (Win+H by default).

  2. Infidellic_
    Facepalm

    Eugh I always liked the fact that package kit *wasn't* a Software Centre clone. In fairness I rarely use the UI's but even when I do I'm going there for something specific and don't need the added bloatish advert style. I'm one of the few people on t'interwebs who actually quite liked GNOME 3 after using for a bit but there are some odd design decisions coming out every release, the lack of a maximise/restore button being one of them IMHO

    1. Tommy Pock

      Elementary OS Luna has done away with its minimize button as well, and it works. Kind of.

      But with that, you can put them back where they're supposed to be (close,minimize,maximize:) with gconf-editor. I don't know if that'll work with Gnome 3

    2. iniudan

      I also like GNOME 3, I also like KDE by principle, but been autistic, my brain is wired to be OCD and basically I go insane with all the customizations KDE got.

      I also extremely like GNOME 3 automated virtual desktop management (which is actually my favorite feature of any DE), one of the reason why I think minimize button is useless on GNOME 3, has I never minimize application, has I just use an other virtual desktop in that case, which along keyboard and mouse shortcut it it faster then managing the windows themselves.

      1. Infidellic_

        So I actually agree that getting rid of the minimize button isn't an issue. In GNOME 3 I never did that as I used the virtual desktops like yourself. But maximise is going to be something I'll miss I expect. Still time will tell.

        1. iniudan

          I just double click the title bar and I am pretty sure sure the import from Windows of meta+↑ also worked by default (not sure, forgot for some reason due to work requiring me to be on windows for the last 8 months, so only used Linux in VM lately where I don't use GNOME 3 due to performance issue from my last try)

        2. T. F. M. Reader

          Loss of minimize would not be a big issue for me as I practically never minimize anything - I just spread windows across multiple virtual desktops. People's habits vary though, so IMHO any decent desktop environment should allow the user to add minimize to windows, globally or per application.

          I do use maximize often, all the variants of it - vertical, horizontal, and to the whole screen.

          Luckily I am not a GNOME use - I hope KDE will not copycat.

    3. AdamWill

      You can still use yumex if you want something 'GUI-for-yum'-y. In fact, the old gnome-packagekit stuff still exists for now, but I don't know if Richard is going to maintain it any more.

  3. Tom Wood

    Nautilus less cluttered = less useful

    At least the version of Nautilus in Fedora 18 removed a bunch of useful features and is a right pain to use. Luckily you can install Nemo to get the old Nautilus back.

    1. Nextweek

      Re: Nautilus less cluttered = less useful

      This is why I switched to KDE, Dolphin has the Split button right there in the toolbar. It has the minimise and windowed toggle button.

      The big question a lot of these user interface designers are missing is "Where is the discover-ability?", a new user or a transitioning user wants to look at something and type in something else. How just looking at the interface can a user do that?

      The philosophy of "Perfection is reached when there is nothing left to take away" doesn't mean you remove features, it means you remove the barriers to using features. A smooth lump of marble is not better than Michelangelo's David.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nautilus less cluttered = less useful

      Luckily you can install Nemo to get the old Nautilus back.

      I have installed Cinnamon and Nemo on Fedora 19 - they're available in their version 2.0 incarnations from the standard Fedora repositories. It makes for a perfect desktop environment, particularly when you set the GTK theme to Simple, which gives you back scroll buttons and sensible behaviour for scrollbars.

  4. Slap

    Too confusing - really?

    "The GNOME developers think the typical trio of buttons is just too confusing."

    Er, really? On an operating system where most of its users are quite happy bashing away in the terminal the gnome developers think we're going to get confused by having 3 buttons on window, which we've had pretty much since WIMP environments first took off. You have got to be kidding me.

    With the amount of dumbing down going on across the board by all parties involved in the major OSs my bloody goldfish will soon be able to sign up for a Facebook account, but I won't be able to do a damned thing that's in any way useful and productive.

    1. Eddy Ito

      Re: Too confusing - really?

      I would have never guessed that the 3 buttons was so confusing but it must have be true. Computers were so much easier back in the day. Now it finally makes sense why people I knew liked Apple computers with Mac OS System 6, it only had one button square button in the corner of the window where Windows 2.0 had a confusing array with a "-" button in the top left corner and two arrow buttons on the right.

      I can now see the future of computing. Apps will look like the current annoying error box pop-ups containing a pointless message and a single lonely button [OK].

    2. Ian 55

      Re: Too confusing - really?

      It's "Would you let your wives and servants have a minimise button?" time.

      Is this point do we finally enter the GNOME 3.x source code into the 'longest suicide note in history' contest?

      Virtual desktops are lovely - I have six in this set up - but if you use 'always on top' for a window, you need some easy way to get rid of it from time to time. You know, like a minimise button.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Too confusing - really?

      That's why I use OpenSuse and all it's KDE goodness.

      1. P. Lee

        Re: Too confusing - really?

        +1 for KDE desktop looks but why would you hold drive mappings in the desktop rather than push it down to the underlying OS/file system?

        I can see the samba share, I just can't get firefox to use it!

        Gah!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I quite liked Gnome3. I could live with the wonky and inefficient task management and the developer's weird obsession with removing useful features.

    Then GDM started requiring systemd. My distribution uses OpenRC for it's init manager which meant in order to install Gnome's login manager I would have to fundamentally change how my system is booted.

    It was at this point I realised quite how far the Gnome developers had crawled up their own arses and bailed; I am enjoying XFCE's company whilst I wait for the Gnome-less Cinnamon 2.0.

  6. iniudan

    In the case of the GNOME music application, did you install proprietary codec, fedora only come with free codec, due to Fedora founding principles reason, so it cannot read thing like MP3 out of the box.

    1. FrankAlphaXII

      He may have been using something free like FLAC or Vorbis, which are supported by default since they're free, but really enabling MP3 support is trivial. (Just as a note, I'm going to use dnf as the package manager in the example since its what I use usually, but you can use yum just as easily. For those of you that don't know, dnf is the new-ish yum upgrade project, its still being tested but it works better for me. Oh, and you need to enable the non-free rpmfusion repos first, as the Fedora repos don't have non-free software, also you can use sudo instead but I use su).

      Open a terminal window and type (without the hashmarks of course):

      #su -

      #dnf install gstreamer-plugins-ugly

      or

      #su -

      #dnf install audacious-plugins-freeworld-mp3

      depending on what audio player you want to use.

      There are also libraries for KDE, but since this is about GNOME mostly, you don't really need them unless you're a KDE user.

      Or you can skip all the manual installation and just install and use fedorautils, which will do it for you.

      Also, I'm pretty sure VLC has MP3 codecs out of the package, Im not 100% sure because installing codecs and drivers is always the second configuration task for me after installing Firefox Beta on a new Fedora install if I didn't just use fedup but I'm fairly certain VLC has it by default.

      Its pretty simple. And anyone using Fedora for multimedia probably knows how to do it already, unless they're brand new to the distro. However, IMHO GNOME sort of sucks unless you like reduced functionality. I don't use it because I don't like it, and I've been using Fedora with KDE pretty exclusively for awhile now.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I really don't get quite why these designers do all this bizarre stuff, and as posted above who using Linux would find it too 'confusing' to use a minimise button. Fortunately in the Linux world, such strange UI decisions such as this can be safely ignored, as there are plenty of decent alternatives, Cinnamon, Mate or KDE being the obvious alternatives. That said I wish more effort was put into improving Linux applications than re-designing the desktop every two minutes (Cinnamon / Mate / Xfce excepted as they are trying to restore some sanity).

    1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
      Trollface

      > I really don't get quite why these designers do all this bizarre stuff

      It's the same reason government needs more and more people and more and more money while promising to get leaner and meaner and more streamlined and provide better service really soon now all the time.

      Then people install the same guys as ever.

  8. gv

    Hiding the notification area

    The main drawback of Gnome 3 for me is the fact that the notification area (system tray) is hidden by default. I like to be informed in real time if an IM or email is received.

    1. wbaw

      Re: Hiding the notification area

      It pops up a notification if you get one, you need to click to hide it.

  9. John Crisp

    The reason I dumped unity. Sorry but I'm too old to do full screen. I run multiple windows on multiple monitors. I want a CHOICE.

    When will the smartarses stop foisting their ideas on me ? Are they just trying to justify their payscale ?

    Fine, give me an option. And let me make up my OWN mind. If I don't want choice I'll buy W$n.

    Long live XFCE.....

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Microsoft mentality of hiding or removing features they would rather the users not to have has been high in the minds of gnome developers for quite a few years. I have long wondered why this would be and the only thing that comes to mind is their over arching desire for control.

    They're just a bunch of control freaks. Which seems to be a growing trend in industrialised parts of the world all over. Control is more important than giving the customer what they desire. Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Google and now Gnome, all would rather have complete control over what is done with their products than let the user mould it to their own needs.

    I mean seriously, what the f*** is wrong with a minimise button? Seriously? It would have taken more effort to remove it than leave it in..

    1. iniudan

      What is wrong with the minimize button is that it is actually useless if you use virtual desktop efficiently, which automated management of them is one of the main feature of gnome 3, thus it just add clutter to a window to have it, same thing with the maximize/restore button where you can simply double click the title bar.

      1. keithpeter Silver badge
        Windows

        DWM then?

        "What is wrong with the minimize button is that it is actually useless if you use virtual desktop efficiently, which automated management of them is one of the main feature of gnome 3, thus it just add clutter to a window to have it, same thing with the maximize/restore button where you can simply double click the title bar."

        By that logic Gnome 5.1 will look a lot like DWM?

        Jef Raskin developed the idea of the 'monotonous UI', not in the sense of boring but in the sense of one way of doing each task. Add in the need to use a single UI for touch on tablets through to twin 30 inch monitors and we have a recipe for very few very large controls. Fun times.

        1. iniudan

          Re: DWM then?

          What control ? The feature that people are mostly complaining about GNOME 3 are there or likely were just not implemented or not easy to configure in the last version they tested.

          For example the minimize and maximize button functionality are still there, know how to restore them in the GUI? Go in GnomeTweakTool, windows and turn the two missing buttons option on.

          If that control, then the world must be one giant conspiracy theory.

          What I am saying is just the reason why I think they are not activated by default.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Of the new lot, the one that works is Music

    But in their infinite wisdom GNOME developers made Music find the files through the *tracker database* of all places. You have to wait until tracker deems itself holy enough to stoop to read your files, or go to the control panel, open the Search thingamagick and turn it off and on again and may be, just may be, while being off click on the gear icon and add other directories where you may have interesting files to index.

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: Of the new lot, the one that works is Music

      Surely I'm not the only person in the whole wide world who has his music filed by artist/album and often just wants to listen to an album, in its entirety, in the order that the artist originally intended?

      Without having to set up a damn playlist?

      No?

      Oh well. Back to Exaile. Or even, $deity$ help us, mpg123.

  12. Herby

    Only one answer

    KDE.

    No further comments needed.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    "Maps loaded … fine, but never correctly found anything…"

    That might have more to do with the mapping service than the application itself.

    I've found using OwnCloud, it gives you the option to click an icon to display an address on a map. It uses MapQuest Open for this. Many addresses, it did not know exactly where the house was, but if I deleted the house number, it could find the correct street.

    If the appropriate correct metadata is missing, it's hardly the application's fault for not finding something that isn't there.

  14. DCFusor

    Gnome 3 stank, stinks, and well, I agree - but I never did like KDE that much. So I went with mate over ubuntu 12.04LTS.

    Most people might not realize that you can have your choice of desktops in any linux distro, simply by installing them, and choosing which you want at login time. The list on this quad 24" HD monitor machine is about 10-12, from lightweight, to the default ubuntu stuff (ugh) to LFCE to mate (which is what I really use - it's gnome 2 in customizabiliy, but it works right and does not crash).

    And I have a minimize button, with the other two, in the proper upper right (yes, you can tweak that) of each window - and if I'm that crazy, drag one window to take up all 4 monitors, or full screen on just one, or anything I like, which is in this case, menu bar on the bottom, task bar floating, and main screen in the lower left of the quad.

    Mint's nice, but anything below 15 was so flakey, I couldn't use it for my work.

    1. itzman

      Re: Mint's nice, but anything below 15 was so flakey, I couldn't use it for my work.

      ??? the only flaky one I found was MINT 15!!!

      13 and 14 rock solid really.

      (written on 14, will upgrade to 15 when 16 comes out :-))

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fedora devs, please wake up!

    Your obsession with those large buttons and windows you can't minimize might work well on 10in screens but your Gnome 3 looks absolutely horrible on larger screens.

    You will end up like Ubuntu!

    1. AdamWill

      Re: Fedora devs, please wake up!

      What do you mean 'your GNOME 3'? Fedora doesn't write GNOME. GNOME writes GNOME. We just ship it. If you don't like it, use any one of the other dozen+ desktops we also ship.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fallback mode

    I remember hearing that GNOME 3.8 was going to remove fallback mode, but then heard there was some other way to get some of the 2.x feature set in it.

    What is the status of all this for GNOME 3.10 in Fedora 20? I need to upgrade my Fedora 17 install, but will not use GNOME 3. Never. I'm using fallback mode in Fedora 17, if they take that away I'll probably just abandon Fedora entirely for being too stupid to avoid following the morons at GNOME off the cliff.

    If they expect me to use a WM without a minimize button, they can go fuck themselves.

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: Fallback mode

      Don't sit on the fence, Doug - tell us what you really mean!

    2. iniudan

      Re: Fallback mode

      GnomeTweakTool ---> windows ----> turn on minimize and maximize button

      There you go the missing button are back. They are just not there by default for they are extra clutter, has you can double click title bar for maximize equivalent by default, while minimize is kind of useless if you use virtual desktop efficiently.

      And since your in fall back I guess you prefer a gnome 2 style application menu, for which you go in GnomeTweaktool ---> extensions, there should be the official gnome extensions already listed, at least if I estimation are correct, which should have an application menu that is a drop down list instead of the GNOME 3 style menu, from what I can see in the official extension tar package. There is also always user created extensions available, should be a link in the extensions menu. Sorry for the lack of certainty in what I am saying, for this last part, but like I said in other post, didn't touch GNOME 3 In like 9 month, so last time I touched it was also on a Fedora 17 installation.

    3. keithpeter Silver badge
      Linux

      Re: Fallback mode

      " I'm using fallback mode in Fedora 17, if they take that away I'll probably just abandon Fedora entirely for being too stupid to avoid following the morons at GNOME off the cliff."

      No need to change distribution because of the desktop environment. Just install another desktop flavour.

      Or if you really must have a Gnome 2.28 desktop, jump into the CentOS lifeboat. CentOS uses a similar package management logic to Fedora. Sit on that until 2017 and get some work done. By then it will all be sorted out.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Fallback mode

        I switched from CentOS to Fedora because I got tired of anything I tried to install not working because of something that was only available with more recent kernels or libraries than what CentOS/Redhat provided.

        I agree I don't need to change distribution because of it, it would just be on principle for the people in charge of Fedora not realizing how dumb they are for sticking with Gnome when everyone else has already abandoned ship.

        But I'll try the tweak tool suggestion first. I should download the beta to install in a VM and see if I can beat the desktop into acceptable shape using that.

  17. AdamWill

    Clarifications, corrections

    "The other, more controversial change in GNOME 3.10 is the disappearance of the minimise button. The only button you'll see in the top right corner of a GNOME 3.10 window is the close button. The GNOME developers think the typical trio of buttons is just too confusing. At this point there seems little point in arguing, the button is gone, GNOME 3 marches on"

    Um. This isn't anything new in 3.10. Minimize buttons haven't been present by default since 3.0. Perhaps you turned them back on in gnome-tweak-tool and then forgot you'd done it?

    What is 'new' in 3.10 (though really I think 3.8 or even 3.6) is that some apps use the 'combined' titlebars you mention, and those don't have 'minimize' buttons even if you enable them in gnome-tweak-tool.

    "It's not hard to see the inspiration for Software – it looks and behaves pretty much like Ubuntu's Software Center."

    Kinda, but FWIW, we've had a plan to build something like this for several years and never quite got around to it until now. It's 'inspired' as much by the Android and iTunes app stores as Ubuntu's - it's basically just the whole concept of 'app stores' that it's an implementation of.

    "The Fedora project wiki is in a transition stage at the moment, migrating to a new feature-tracking process, which at the time of writing does not offer much in the way of progress reports."

    Well, it's not the wiki per se that's "in a transition stage". It's the feature process, which just happens to post some of its content on the wiki. It used to be the 'feature' process, it's now the 'Change' process, it's mostly inside baseball you don't really need to worry about. "Progress reporting" hasn't actually changed much, and isn't an incredibly strong point of the process in either form - it relies on the feature/change owner providing progress reports voluntarily. But if you just want to see what stuff is definitely scheduled to be in Final, you need to be looking not at the _proposed_ list but the _accepted_ list: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/ChangeSet

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