Fri, 20 May 2011
GNOME 3
After installing Fedora 15 in a virtual machine, I have decided to give GNOME 3 a try. Firstly, it is really slow over VNC. While GNOME 2 has been pretty usable for testing various new applications in a virtual machine, under GNOME 3 it is almost impossible. Here is a screenshot on which I will demonstrate my problems with GNOME 3:
Firstly about the file manager. I use mostly command line for managing
my files, but using a file manager is sometimes handy nevertheless. One
of the features I often use is the "Places" list. In GNOME 3, it is presented
differently in the Places menu and in the file manager itself, which
is a clear usability bug. When I wanted to add another directory there
(I often use ~/tmp as my sandbox),
it took me at least 10 minutes to discover
that "Bookmarks" is what I probably want. And even then, the newly added
bookmark is added to a submenu instead of the main Places menu.
Also, I did not found any way how to remove those useless predefined
directories like Videos, Music, etc.
from the left sidebar. Even when I have deleted them from my home directory,
they still remain in the sidebar.
Another ugliness is that the new window manager does not decorate the windows properly, and instead relies on the applications themselves to provide things like resizing handle in the lower right corner (see the gnome-terminal window). Not only it looks ugly as hell, it also obscures the space the application expects to be visible. I will probably file this as a bug report when F15 is officially released, but I expect in a truly GNOME-ish fasion it to be solved by removing the "scrollbar on the left side" option :-/.
Anyway, it seems that XFCE+Sawfish combo works as expected, so I am definitely leaving GNOME when I install F15 on my workstations.