Fedora 15: More than just a pretty interface The Red Hat–backed Fedora Project has released the latest version of its Linux-based operating system, Fedora 15, into the wild. Despite the similarities of the two leading Linux-based PC operating systems, Fedora has long played second fiddle to Ubuntu in the minds of many Linux fans. Now – for the first time – there are …
RANT START - warning, profanity within.
... I must be getting old and Jaded, but I simply *don't* get all this fucking around with the desktop Paradigm - this is a *DESKTOP* not a *MOBILE INTERFACE*
Heck, why don't they just force users to adopt the Dvorak keyboard layout while they are at it - it's the same frikkin' difference.
I use a desktop to *get work done*, I'm *not* interested in having to re-learn a good 16 years experience on what I consider to be the accepted UI methodologies.
I can use Windows / Gnome (2x) / XFCE / MacOSx and switch between without *any* issues.
I fire up Unity or Gnome 3 and I just get angry - WHY WHY WHY.
It's like a huge desktop developers wank-fest - it's like they not only threw the desktop UI design guideline book away, but stamped on it and set fire to it before they did.
"We know better. We know what *you* want."
Fuck off, no you don't - your just obsessed with the way mobile devices work and want to emulate them on the Desktop. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
There's a *very* valid reason why both Microsoft and Apple don't stray too far off the path when it comes to Desktop UI design - they don't want to alienate their users.
There's a very valid reason why they have *seperate* OS's for mobile devices - because they are *different* disciplines.
They *understand* the concept of interface familiarity - you don't fuck with something that's been around for two decades.
RANT OVER. I'll get my fucking coat.
(If this passes moderation, I'll eat my coat)
This whole thing about GNOME 3 being an interface for mobile devices is just entirely made up. It's not. It was not designed for phones or tablets; it was designed for computers. If you read the design documents, this is very clear; the interface is designed for computers, with a small amount of sanity checking to make sure it won't be completely horrible to use on a small screened device.
Just because it's different, and it happens to have some features which look similar to a few phone features, doesn't mean it's a phone interface; it just isn't. Sometimes a good design happens to be the same for both.
"They *understand* the concept of interface familiarity - you don't fuck with something that's been around for two decades."
So, where does this argument stop being valid? Because if it always is, why do we have GUIs at all? Why do we have monitors and not punch cards? Why do we have computers and rocks? There has to be some kind of trade off between conservatism and development; you can't just require everything in the world to stay the same way forever because you're used to it.
It's done slowly, over releases. Gradual change, not massive overhauls. You'll notice these gradual changes in both MacOS and Windows if you look back through the releases over the decades.
It hardly matters much anyway, as the market share of Gnome is miniscule - and about to get smaller.
"It hardly matters much anyway, as the market share of Gnome is miniscule"
Indeed; this is actually a point in favour of the GNOME 3 change. All the bellyaching about how it changes ways of doing things that are established in GNOME 2 kind of relies on the assumption that GNOME 2 is a *success*.
"and about to get smaller."
good lord, do you have next week's winning lottery numbers there too? Seriously, though: if you've been doing something for ten years (GNOME 2) and your 'market' share is still 'minuscule', doesn't it sort of make sense to think 'I know, let's do something different instead of continuing to polish our turd in our irrelevant little corner'?
"'I know, let's do something different instead of continuing to polish our turd in our irrelevant little corner'?"
Absolutely. What you need to ensure, however, is that you *appeal* to a set of users who are familiar with Desktops and how they work.
If your aiming at trying to capture some windows users, you need to make pretty damn sure they can adopt your desktop easily. Your average user is *not* a computer geek. They expect things to work they way they've been shown, the way they learnt.
I may be giving Gnome3 a bit of a hard time, but the reality is, like Unity, it's gone a step too far from what people are used to.
Innovation is important, but innovation for innovations sake - because of some drive to 'do things different', is tricky route to take. By all means, do it differently, but make damn sure it works as well or better.
There's another side to this too. Gnome 3 may indeed be a *better* desktop design in terms of productivity, but if the learning curve is too steep, people aren't going to bother - not because they are lazy, but because, they have work to do!
I've had 16 years of expecting a close window button to be in the top right corner of a window.
When I use desktop configurations with that button on the left, I *still* aim for the right and have to do a quick double-check before moving to the left - muscle memory.
It irritates me instantly.
Sure, I can probably customise the interface and move it - but why should I have to? Why change a default so many people are used to?
In closing, I *will* admit that, by and large, we haven't reached a computer UI yet which is instantly accessible with hardly any training. I'll go further in saying that the touch interface is the right direction in achieving this for many applications. But for now, most people are on Desktop interfaces when it comes to productivity and will be for quite some time.
I'll drink to that!
Back in the day when I was a *real* programmer, one of the things I learnt very quickly is "don't change anything just because you can". It has also been paraphrased as "just because you can change something doesn't mean that you should."
Nothing used to piss the clients off more than having to re-learn an application with which they'd been intimately familiar.
In my experienced opinion, the changes in GNOME 3 are too many, too soon, with no decent or usable transition mode. Don't mention the "fallback" mode - I tried it and it was as useless as tits on a bull - it did NOT fall back to a GNOME 2 environment, it just fell back to a half-arsed attempt to look like GNOME 2, but with all the hassles of GNOME 3 still in place.
Maybe it's because I *am* an experienced IT type that I find GNOME 3 so useless and constricting, but I don't understand why a PDA/touchscreen UI metaphor needs to foisted onto a desktop environment which has a keyboard and mouse. It may be suitable for "kiosk" style installations, but that's it as far as I can see.
Now, I've always preferred the Red Hat based distros, and I will be continuing using Fedora with F15, but I have switched to XFCE. I don't think much of KDE4 either, but to be honest I haven't given KDE much of a look since the days of Red Hat 6 (and no, I don't mean RHEL6).
However, the real winner here is that I have the CHOICE of window manager/desktop managers, and that the UNIX style systems such as BSD & Linux support multiple windows & desktop managers "out of the box".
(*real* programmer: profiled, hand-optimised, top-down (or bottom-up) procedural programs with text screens, none of this GUI building-block lego style malloc()+malloc()+malloc()... "programming" [let the garbage collector clean it up] of today!)
Okay, yes I'm trolling a bit with the above statement, but there's an element of truth to it. ;)
Quoting Matt 89's fine rant:
"..this is a *DESKTOP* not a *MOBILE INTERFACE*"
Exactly.
Dear desktop designers, my PC has a 20 inch screen, not a 3 inch screen. It runs 10 applications at once, not a single "app". I use 2 hands, not a single finger, and so on, and so on. Please take your shiny Androidesque daftness and place it in the bin with the KDE plasmoids. I'll give you plasmoids.
As a long term Fedora user (and RedHat Linux before that) I have to say that this is not the finest release.
Gnome 3 is still a work in progress. As someone who was a confirmed Gnome 2 user I find V3 almost unusable.
Naturally the network interface are configured to be off at boot. IT took me an age to find the network manager to get them going. I was on the point of giving up and editing the ifcfg_* files.
I will give G3 a bit more of a chance but I have a number of 3rd party apps that I use all the time. Pinning their icon on the top bar in G2 really increased the usability. I really don't want to wade through screens of icons for apps I hardly ever use. Sorry that is not my style.
Terminal in KDE is totally broken. Thankfully konsole works fine.
I don't line the light black text on a white background in the installer. Why oh why di you change it?
As for the default wallpapers etc, F15 is a big letdown. Some of the previous releases the artwork was great. Now it looks like blue Victorian Wallpaper. Sorry, a fail.
Why do they default the network interfaces to Off! Pah. For the average user this is a big fail.
With all that, I have to say that I'm going to keep trying with G3 for the tme being. I can always revert to KDE.
If F-15 fails I will go back to RHEL 6/SL 6 or CentOS. At least they stil have G2.
"Naturally the network interface are configured to be off at boot. IT took me an age to find the network manager to get them going. I was on the point of giving up and editing the ifcfg_* files."
This hasn't changed in F15, it was the same in previous releases. (For the record, it depends on how you install; if you enable the network during installation, it'll be enabled post-install too.)
"I will give G3 a bit more of a chance but I have a number of 3rd party apps that I use all the time. Pinning their icon on the top bar in G2 really increased the usability. I really don't want to wade through screens of icons for apps I hardly ever use. Sorry that is not my style."
So, put them in the Dash? I mean, that's what it's there for. If you use them all the time, why not just set them to run on boot?
"Terminal in KDE is totally broken. Thankfully konsole works fine."
GNOME Terminal? Yeah, it is - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=670173 . But, I mean, that's not really a huge deal, is it? Seems natural to use Konsole in KDE.
"As for the default wallpapers etc, F15 is a big letdown. Some of the previous releases the artwork was great. Now it looks like blue Victorian Wallpaper. Sorry, a fail."
If that's all the problems you can come up with, I'm pretty happy. I mean, a wallpaper's a wallpaper. Don't like it, change it...
"Why do they default the network interfaces to Off! Pah. For the average user this is a big fail."
I've never met this Average User of whom you speak, could you let me have his/her phone number? People use computers for all sorts of different reasons; Fedora targets some of those people and some of those reasons. The default network configuration is part of that. In concrete terms, it's been defaulted to off simply because the anaconda team figured you can't really assume someone who did the entire installation without using the network actually wanted it turned on post-install. Sometimes they don't, honestly. It may be changed in future, but it's not a new thing and it's really not a huge deal, I mean, the network applet is right there on the panel.
As an aptosid user (Debian sid rolling release) i got use to the idea of a machine in perpetual development, as a daily driver.
I use KDE 4.4.5 today. Tomorrow it might be 4.4.6, if you get my drift.
A user interface is not written in stone. At first encounter everything may seem strange if one has never used anything except the same old same old.
But I bet you have not had your latest podly or android phone more than 6 months... that's new too. tomorrow it will be different, get use to it.
Fact is... the desktop is evolving into a hybrid of mobile and workstation.
Most of Linux is geared towards the supercomputer and the desktop struggles for a piece of the action with the developers. The PC itself is dying. These new developments with GNOME and KDE are really the only shot at bringing the desktop PC in to a future that is integrated with the new world of the mobile.
My best advice to users of computers is stop thinking of these things as white goods were all the controls are always were they were and doing the same things as your dads machine did. Embrace the future and feel the acceleration of greater power in computing. Put that old Pentium in the dumpster of the past along with MS Win whatever it was.
Linux Rocks in its many forms from android, to some invisible embedded thing running your automobile, to the latest global powerhouse figuring out Quanto-gravitectic hyper-drive in the 4th dimension. Oh by the way, Linux does desktops on a PC... Aren't we lucky it does.
Icons go down hard and thinking of Linux as a reflection of Windows and the dying Microsoft is like not realizing that in computing terms 1995 was in the last millennium. Computers had better look like and act like today's technology today.
A rolling release such as aptosid is more like tomorrows technology today... I'm quite sure that the fine people at Fedora and Red Hat feel the same way. Even if the mechanism of the distribution is a little old school :)
On one hand technology is today an acceleration of doing things with greater capabilities at lower cost than yesterday.
It also means that people need to take a greater amount of time to think about what they are allowing into their lives today. Your choice to stay in the past or not has ramifications.
You do have a choice about that. you do not have one if you choose not to move into the future though, as the rest of the world will pass you by. And it will if you can't integrate your mindset with the new.
Sorry, but just as Luddite became a word... aren't we all just a little bit like that from time to time. Look at your computer as more than an Office sledge hammer and one will see into it the future itself.
I too look at my Western Electric 202 telephone from 1932 and dreamily consider a past that is no more. But I don't stay there long.
I wish the people at GNOME and its users all the best in getting people to let go of the past and move into a new more sophisticated UI.
I look at my (once) beloved KDE 3.5 and now wonder, just what was I thinking so long ago... two years past. change happens.
I tend to launch frequently used apps (Firefox & email) from the start menu or a quicklaunch buttons on the taskbar OR a desktop icon - depending upon what's most visible and easiest to hit at the time.
I have media players and such like arranged around the edge of the screen where I can drag-n-drop documents onto them, and frequently used files and folders tend to get shortcut icons on the desktop too.
It works perfectly and I simply cannot imagine anything better. I'd be absolutely fascinated to see A Better Way, because what I have at present closely represents - as close as it can - having a nice big Real Life desk with all sorts of goodies (phone, calculator, notepad, reference books, files etc) always in the same place readily to hand.
Granted, there's an issue of apparent tidyness or lack of, and in real life the things I really don't use that often get put away in drawers or on a shelf - on the PC document shortcuts either end up as icons towards the center of the screen usually covered by some window, or not shortcut-ed at all. What's the problem?
Seems like this new interface is geared towards very light use of a PC, only launching the same few apps each time - not for real work.
Again with the 'real work' meme, as if there's only one way to do that...again, what do you think the people who program GNOME 3 do with their desktops? Play Solitaire all day?
Your use of icons on the desktop is a fairly sane one, but in my experience it's unusual; mostly when I see random people's desktops, they have the last five hundred things they downloaded from the Internet on there. In no order whatsoever. When they download something else from the internet, they then minimize all their windows and spend the next five minutes rolling their cursor over the desktop looking for it. This is the kind of thing that GNOME 3 is trying to avoid.
I can't really explain the alternative any better than the design documents. Take a look at the links from https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointOne/Features/FindingAndReminding .
I've read all the posts and so far I generally agree with your points.
However, a point you keep making to everyone who dislikes GNOME 3 is that the way they prefer to work is not necessarily the way everyone else works. Well, I'd like to point out that the way the GNOME 3 team likes to work is not the way we like to work either. Clearly the majority of people currently using GNOME 2.x like the way it works or they would have jumped to KDE, XFCE, etc.
If the GNOME 3 team don't like cluttered desktops, then they shouldn't put clutter on their desktop. They shouldn't be enforcing their opinion on everyone else either, for the exact same reasons you keep pointing out to all the other posters. If I like clutter on my desktop (which I don't), I should be allowed to put it on there. I have links to my current projects on the desktop, when a project is complete or not as active, any files or links are moved to the home directories, archived if you like.
We can't give our opinions on how we work without being told we're wrong or have the wrong idea, but the GNOME 3 team can just make changes based on their opinions? Isn't GNU/Linux all about choice and customisation? Clearly not in the GNOME 3 teams opinion. By all means change the default, but surely we are allowed to change it back and decide how WE work, not how the GNOME 3 team work?
And no, I can't get involved in the community so my opinion could be heard. You wouldn't be Adam Williamson of Red Hat? We're not even trying to change any code here and you're already telling us that our opinion is wrong. What would be the point of joining the developing team when our opinions are even wrong in a discussion forum, none of our ideas or code would be accepted, we're just plainly wrong.
If you disagree or show any signs of frustration, you will be labeled the Label of All Labels - a "Troll".
I just don't see how the "friendly Linux community" just can't stand to have differing thoughts or opinions as you have clearly expressed.
I totally agree - change the default, but still allow the customer (the end user) to make whatever changes from that default they wish.
Or is this 1984?
there seems to be a perception here that all the coding involved in writing a desktop is to create a dialog box with a lot of radio buttons in it.
there does have to be code *behind* those radio buttons, y'know.
The GNOME team considered what a good desktop environment design would look like, then wrote it. They figured that putting a bunch of icons on the desktop was probably never the best way to achieve what you actually want to achieve, and thought hard about other ways to achieve that, which they have now designed and are starting to code.
But because you like to throw icons on the desktop, you think the GNOME team should be required to write all the code necessary to support having icons all over the desktop? It's not just a question of providing a preference; it's a question of writing to code to make that preference actually work and then supporting it forever. If that's not how they want their desktop paradigm to work, why would you expect them to spend all the time and pain writing the code to do it?
So maybe the key point here is to look at GNOME 3 as a new desktop and decide if you like its approach. If you do, great - if you don't, use something else. I don't mind at all if you think icons on the desktop are a great idea and so important you must have them, so you use some desktop which lets you do that instead of GNOME 3. It's your choice. What seems odd to me is this expectation that GNOME must implement, and allow you to choose, anything which you believe is a good way to use your desktop. Would you write to Fluxbox and demand they provide an option for the Expose feature, because you think it's a neat thing? Probably not. So why everyone assumes the GNOME team should be required to implement their $favourite_feature, I'm not quite sure.
You're reversing the blame back to us again.
"But because you like to throw icons on the desktop, you think the GNOME team should be required to write all the code necessary to support having icons all over the desktop?"
I'm not asking them to write any code, the code was already there in GNOME 2.x. But because they don't use it, they've thrown the code away. The problem I have, along with many others, is that it's not some slightly different way of doing something, it's a completely different way of doing anything. It's pretty much impossible to work the way we did before and it's not even possible to have a slightly similar look and feel any more, because nothing is the same.
Don't get me wrong, I will try to use GNOME 3, but it means changing everything about the way I work. It's going to take longer to do things until I get used to the new way. But what's going to happen with GNOME 3.x? Is everything going to be thrown out again and we all have to learn yet a new way of doing things, just because the developers decided they didn't like something? It's very difficult to use GNU/Linux of any flavour for anything serious when things change so drastically with the next upgrade. It's a damn sight better than Unity, but it's still too much of a change.
I now need to remove Fedora 14 from a few machines in order for them to be upgradable, I can't let them upgrade to F15, it took them long enough to get used to not using Windows without moaning. I can't try and convince them that it won't change again. It'll be easier to move them to XFCE or maybe even KDE if it has finally settled down.
GNOME 3 is a completely different codebase to GNOME 2. You can't just throw the GNOME 2 code in and expect it to work.
Well...you can try. In fact, you can do exactly that, as I hinted above: install gnome-tweak-tool and check the box to make Nautilus render the desktop. And you'll find that...hey! It sorta-kinda-not-quite-perfectly works.
That's what you get by just more or less leaving the code from GNOME 2 alone, because that's exactly the code that's there. But it doesn't really work properly, because of other changes in the GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 transition. And since having desktop icons on the desktop isn't where the GNOME team wants GNOME 3 to go anyway, it doesn't make much sense to spend the effort on fixing it.
Desktop Icons are quite simply icons that represent applications or links to said applications.
You make it sound like it takes a team of coders to write code for every single possible icon for every possible application, for every single x-y coordinate on the screen.
It's really just a matter of including code that's already been written - you know, "re-usable code".
So what they did was choose not to include something that was already there and is pre-existing. Not a helluva lot of work to put it back.
Why do you make it seem so difficult and time-consuming? It can be done during a bathroom break.
yes, that's who I am. Note I don't work on GNOME or represent the GNOME project, or, for that matter, any official opinion on the part of Red Hat; I'm just trying to help explain why some things in GNOME 3 are the way they are.
you may not realize it, but yes, you are trying to change code. Install gnome-tweak-tool and enable the option that says 'Have file manager handle the desktop'. Then notice that it's broken in various ways; there's been a few threads in the Fedora forums on this already. By asking the GNOME team to implement a preference for this in the main GNOME, you are implicitly asking them to fix up all those bugs and then maintain the code against such bugs forever after, just to support a feature that doesn't fit the design of the desktop they're trying to write. You're free to ask that, but they're also free to refuse. :)
What tends to get annoying on the mailing lists is when the arguments get depressingly circular: someone pops up on the list and argues for Pet Feature A, someone else replies explaining why Pet Feature A isn't in GNOME 3, then the person writes back and says all the things they said in their first post all over again, only angrier. That's the point at which the signal to noise ratio starts to decline. It's perfectly fine to show up on a GNOME list or whatever and say "I think this thing should be done this way", but if the people who are actually involved in writing "this thing" don't agree and explain why they don't, it does no-one any good for you to keep repeating your demand at an ever-increasing level of obnoxiousness. In any project, people make feature requests, and sometimes those requests get denied.
On my HP I7-950 rig, with 9 gigs of Ram, four large 7200 rpm hard drives, and an ATI Radeon high end card with dual monitor, the first install of Fedora 15 went perfectly! It's true that it wouldn't install Grub to enable the Win7 bootloader on the MBR, but, everything went well when Fedora wiped out Win7 and did an auto-install :)
My HP Pavilion Elite 9280t absolutely FLIES with Fedora, as well as making my jaw hit my floor when messing around with the Gnome Shell! It even found and installed my HP printer which is connected wirelessly to my router, using CUPS.
I've already done a system update (first time it choked second time it worked).
My wife just came into my computer lab and asked me to print out an UNO restaurant coupon on the net. Worked perfectly, printed beautifully. All in all I'd say that I'm going to KEEP Ubunto off of my HD and instead, use Fedora instead of both Win7/64 and Ubuntu 11x /64!!!!
I heartily recommend F15, it's a fast fighter jet :)http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/thumb_up_32.png
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