Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Gnome users are revolting

There are claims that Gnome 3 is too dumbed down for Linux users. I have to admit I'm a little frustrated at not being able to test Gnome 3 properly, because my CD drive is failing, causing my Fedora 15 beta live Gnome 3 session to crash regularly.
One of the main objections to Gnome 3 seems to be the lack of minimise and maximise buttons on windows. However, I have been able to try out the way Gnome 3 handles windows, and it seems intuitive and more efficient in a minimalist way than the previous method. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,"* said Einstein, and to my mind the Gnome team have done this: "Made of easy" indeed.
Of course there is no bottom panel to minimise windows to. Grabbing a window and bumping it up to the top panel will automatically maximise the window; grabbing it again and pulling it down will minimise it to the desktop.
Simple. And elegant.

* Apparently actually a paraphrase (for understandable reasons) of: "It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience."

2 comments:

  1. I've got Fedora 15 alpha/beta installed on one laptop, and Debian Squeeze (Gnome 2.30) on another - I think the hoo-hah about Gnome 3 is now getting silly: it works great, and is the most elegant GUI imaginable. Thinking of ditching Squeeze just so I can be running Gnome 3 on my main machine. Minimise/Maximise buttons and a taskbar for minimised windows is the Windows 95 paradigm, time we got rid of it.

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  2. The notification area too.

    http://dontsurfinthenude.blogspot.com/2010/05/destop-design-1995-2010.html

    My live session isn't stable enough to see how Gnome 3 handles notification, though.

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