GNOME 3.8 Released

https://www.gnome.org/news/2013/03/gnome-3-8-released/

by krakensden • 13 years ago

107 90 13 years ago

ebtalley• 13 years ago

I finally got fed-up with unity on my laptop and followed some blog instructions to pull the latest apt version of gnome (3.6) and I have to say that so far I have been pleasantly impressed. Its a paradigm shift from classic window managers that I have cut my teeth on but all in all the polish is so much greater than unity.

congrats to the gnome team, not everyone has bought into it but you've converted me.

aroman2• 13 years ago

I think the "Classic mode" is really the biggest, most game-changing thing here. There are a whole lot of people who hate GNOME Shell (I am not one of them. I'm not a fan either, but I don't think the shell is a step backwards) and are either staying on the outdated GNOME2 platform or hacking on top of GNOME3 to bring back GNOME2.

This, I think, is a great solution which acknowledges the desire/need, but addresses it in a way that embraces newer technologies ("classic mode" is built on GNOME3, in fact), rather than simply rolling back to older dated ones.

Kudos to the GNOME team for this and the entire release!

ovis• 13 years ago

So what do you think this means for MATE and Cinnamon?

andyking• 13 years ago

With any luck, a speedy demise.

It doesn't make any sense to have in one corner, an out-of-date desktop environment in MATE, and in the other corner, Cinnamon fragmenting things yet further.

I want a "traditional" DE in the GNOME 2 style, I don't feel the need to have a tablet UI on my desktop PC with keyboard and mouse. But I'd rather not have to go back to ye olde software to do this. I'd like GNOME to take into account those of us who want to use the new technologies without pretending our 17-inch monitor is a 7-inch tablet.

aroman2• 13 years ago

I wouldn't go so far as wishing them a speedy demise -- if building something like that makes you happy, who am I to hope that it comes to an end.

I do think that those projects will naturally and healthily die out, or perhaps evolve into other forms and directions. They're good projects, I just don't think they are as needed now as they were pre-3.8. And I think for most people, the basic desire/need to have a GTK2/GNOME2-based experience will largely be satisfied by GNOME 3.8.

rogerbinns2• 13 years ago

I liked Gnome Shell but I have large dual monitor systems and run multiple copies of the same apps. The least worst way of dealing with those has been a taskbar. I tried to use extensions but they broke on every new release as well as having random quirks, so I gave up and use the the legacy mode. I'm hoping the new classic mode actually works well. Example issues I've found before are being unable to reorder taskbar buttons, not bringing apps to the foreground when hovering over their buttons during a drag and drop, not having a usable system monitor (I have no need to sort through 3 pages of candidates on a website) and hiding the message area.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

It's interesting to me how all the major next-gen UIs (GNOME Shell, OS X Lion, Windows 8) are all getting huge pushback from users.

VMG2• 13 years ago

I believe that to be status quo bias. I remember discussions with people who preferred Win3.1 to Win95.

ajross• 13 years ago

Well, of course it's status quo bias. I think the deeper question is whether the bias is justified or not. In 1995 the desktop UI paradigm was still in flux. The paradigm that the world settled on in the mid-90's hasn't changed much in the last 18 years.

Except now it is, driven largely by innovation in device UIs that are not desktop PCs. I think there's a real and valid question as to whether trying to unify a desktop and "tablet" UI makes sense.

That said, I will say that of the recent attempts to come up with a new UI paradigm, I like Gnome 3 the best and it's what I use daily.

breakall2• 13 years ago

You may or may not consider it a "major next-gen UI", but I'd throw Ubuntu's Unity in that list as well.

While I'm on the topic, I love the way Unity consolidates system bar, app title bar, and app menu bar. This single screen real estate saving technique is what keeps me using Unity. Every time I switch into Gnome, *box, etc., open Firefox, and see 3 bars all taking up screen real estate, I go back to Unity.

Are there any other shells/window managers/whatever that do this same bar consolidation???

renke1• 13 years ago

Yes, that is actually the only feature I like about Unity. The rest bugs me too much though. That's why I love programs where I can hide the menu bar and toggle it via a shortcut (a lot of KDE programs can do this). This is especially useful in programs like image viewers and PDF readers (say Okular).

duaneb4• 13 years ago

Mac OS X only has one bar.

systematical• 13 years ago

this actually annoyed me.

onosendai• 13 years ago

I'm in the same boat. While I've been using GNOME for the past few releases and really enjoying it, I switched to a Thinkpad X230 recently.

Unity really shines on the relatively low 1366x768 resolution and increases usability tremendously. Every vertical pixel counts, and it's surprisingly good at optimizing screen real estate. Now if they could only make it crash less... it's been abysmal in the stability department. GNOME has been pretty stable since about two releases ago.

abrowne• 13 years ago

When apps are maximized in Gnome 3, the window title bar is supposed to hide/blend into the panel/menubar like in Unity. Lots of apps don't do it yet, though.

For Firefox, try this extension to hide the title bar when maximized: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/htitle/

While you're at it, if you're on Gnome, try the excellent Gnome 3 theme: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adwaita/

jebblue• 13 years ago

I wasn't a Unity fan but I have to agree with you, the screen space saving is amazing. Another thing that's cool about Unity is that the launcher is on the side which on the _modern_ screens which are vertically challenged for some odd reason, works really well.

bitwize• 13 years ago

The desktop UI has reached something of a local maximum which users are content with.

In the absence of justification for refining the desktop UI, UI vendors have developed another excuse to change shit on people: the mistaken impression that more tablety UIs are more progressive and easier to use on the desktop. Which is false on its face, given the different ergonomic constraints between a desktop PC and a tablet.

Nrsolis4• 13 years ago

I really, really want to go to a full Linux desktop.

What keeps holding me back are dumb things like video driver support, peripheral support for things I use, and general awkwardness with the whole plug/unplug state of affairs that is de rigueur in the laptop space.

Has any of this changed?

voidlogic3• 13 years ago

I use Gnome3 but with Cinnamon simply because its one of the few ways to be both using a newer desktop environment and have an experience (after a little bit of moving things around) that looks like what I am used to, like and want. I love tablet UIs... on my tablet. I realize designers/developers of UIs want the elegance of one UI paradigm to rule them all, but content production on a desktop and content consumption on a mobile devices are not at all alike.

loboman2• 13 years ago

I tried Cinnamon for a while and I was very happy with it... except for its performance; it is quite slow; I recently went back to Gnome Classic, and although it is not as nice as Cinnamon, it is much faster.

ctbeiser2• 13 years ago

I'm not convinced Lion (or Mountain Lion) is getting a 'huge' pushback from users. I heard isolated groanings on launch from people who didn't like adapting to natural scrolling or the new saving paradigm, but that all disappeared within a few weeks. My friends with Windows 8 on non-touch laptops have, after several weeks, continued to have the opinion that the touch-UI (née Metro) is 'stupid,' and they're not huge nerds either.

CoffeeDregs• 13 years ago

I've really enjoyed Gnome3 and have appreciated the quick cycle of updates.

I just looked at upgrading to 3.8 on Debian Sid/Experimental. Looks difficult, but not too bad... BUT gnome-settings-daemon 3.7.92 depends on systemd. Interesting. This may force the conversion from init... And it's systemd v44 (so pretty crusty).

kunai3• 13 years ago

After losing faith in Unity (the workflow sucks) I reluctantly switched to Gnome Shell. Originally I thought I would have been back to Xfce or Openbox or WindowMaker in an instant.

I was wrong. Gnome Shell has turned out to be quite the bit of kit. It's polished, fast, smooth, and now really stable. The workflow is also incredibly productive and fast.

The only thing I miss is a minimize button, but because the workspace system is so great in Gnome Shell, I don't find myself wanting it all too often, and when I do, I just add another workspace or switch focus.

It's amazing how much thought seems to have been put into this interface. It's equally amazing how many are so quick to shun it.

u2328• 13 years ago

You can re-enable the minimize button using the Gnome Tweak Tool without too much trouble. Admittedly, I think that button should be enabled by default, and it is annoying to have to install a different package, but the option is available.

JoshTriplett2• 13 years ago

gnome-shell doesn't have a minimize button because it doesn't have an application list for the window to minimize to; minimized windows just disappear. You can only find them in the activities overview or the alt-tab list.

Also note that you can still minimize a window by right-clicking on the title bar and choosing "minimize"; you just don't have a button for it.

dvirsky• 13 years ago

This. I really love Gnome 3, and I really don't get all the bad vibe it's been getting. With a few extensions you can get back pretty much everything you might miss about it, and it's really slick and stable (especially compared to KDE).

mixmastamyk4• 13 years ago

For me the problem isn't so much the new stuff, but what is continually lost. For example, I was a heavy user of emblems and a frequent user of spatial mode, but they are now gone without replacement. I now stumble through hundreds of folders that all look the same.

Want to change the colors they've chosen? No can do... but you know what could do that? Windows 3.1 (and basically every other OS since ~1990) could. :/

That gigantic new clocks app is less useful than the elegant Calendar/Locations dropdown from Gnome2. It's still around in classic-mode but it no longer stays open by default (dunno why).

Five+ years ago I remember there were also helpful apps, like a "service control manager" gui, similar to the Windows MMC that actually worked. Oh, and Ubuntu removed sessions too.

My experience is that the Linux desktop loses as much as it gains every year. Almost twenty years of work and it still feels like a 0.5 alpha. The SGI I worked on 20 years ago could save my session automatically for x-sake, and the GUI was about as good.

krakensden• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure those were the RedHat system-* apps, and I think RedHat and Fedora still ship those.

anonymous• 13 years ago

Have you tried the latest KDE? It's very customisable and hasn't crashed or required manual restart for me once in the last 3 years, even when I leave it running for days.

Edit: It also has session-saving support.

old-gregg• 13 years ago

Are you talking specifically about this version? If so, how hard/possible is it to install Gnome 3.8 on top of an existing X, say under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS? Thanks!

kunai3• 13 years ago

I'm on 3.6 right now; so I can't comment. I don't think it would be too difficult, though.

./configure make make install

voltagex_• 13 years ago

For 13, there's also https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/gnome3

You may be able to use the source packages to build 3.8 for your current version.

Yaa101• 13 years ago

If you install gnome tweak tool then you can set all buttons to the title bar of your windows, except for the menu button on the left side.

As extension developer I agree with your sentiment, all the missing parts are slowly returning, Gnome 3 shell is not bad, it was just put out to the world way too early.

I was very critical when I saw the first versions of gnome shell but things are really going well for it.

It has many development languages to choose from like Python, C, C++, Vala and even Javascript. It uses CSS as styling. Several backends to output to X, Wayland coming, HTML (which is impressive and good use when owncloud is integrated). Soon you can use your desktop everywhere not like VNC but realtime.

dbaupp• 13 years ago

It's not that stable: I'm running 3.2 and it is full of memory leaks, to the point that I have to restart it every so often when it's using upward of 700MB of ram.

Other than that, I agree. It can be hid away nicely so that u can work in full screen bliss, and the extension ecosystem looks like it could rival Firefox interms of variety.

(Edit: maybe the leaks are caused by the extensions I'm running, and hopefully it gets better in later versions.)

sciurus• 13 years ago

FWIW, there have been several releases that may have addressed this.

  3.0 	April 2011 
  3.2 	September 2011 
  3.4 	March 2012 
  3.6 	September 2012
  3.8 	March 2013

donniezazen2• 13 years ago

Gnome has improved much since 3.2.

snogglethorpe2• 13 years ago

> The only thing I miss is a minimize button,

You can easily add a minimize button to gnome 3 — somewhere in the various configuration settings, there's a "title bar layout" parameter which lets you set specify which buttons to use, and where to put them (roughly).

[...rummages around...]

Ah, try the following in a shell to get the classic Apple Mac button layout; other variations should be obvious:

    gsettings set org.gnome.shell.overrides button-layout close:minimize,maximize

[The equivalent GUI app is "dconf-editor"]

chousuke• 13 years ago

Gnome is showing steady improvement with every new release. Really impressive. The first versions of Gnome 3 were sort of lackluster, but nowadays I much prefer it over its predecessor.

olympus• 13 years ago

I wonder what will happen when Gnome 4 rolls out in the future. Will users jump to it like what happened from Windows Vista -> Windows 7? Will they still yearn for the days of Gnome 2, like some people still wish for Windows XP even though Windows 8 has been released? And why does every situation happening with Gnome seem to have a Windows analogy?

kimagure• 13 years ago

people are often rosy-eyed about things they used first/most so they often think things are nicer than they really are.

i remember for the longest time i thought my time with dwm were some of the nicest and yearned for tiling wm's in windows, but after trying it again i'm really glad i switched to win vista/7.

allerratio• 13 years ago

They will yearn for Gnome 3, just like they yearned for Gnome 1 when Gnome 2 was released.

WayneDB• 13 years ago

I went to the release notes to see how they implemented the Classic Mode. I was happy to read "Built entirely from GNOME 3 technologies..."

- https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.8/

Spittie• 13 years ago

As a KDE user, I'm constantly impressed by the amount of polish the Gnome team put into Gnome Shell.

While I don't like some of their design choice, They are coherent and try to focus on their ideals.

3.8 looks like a nice release, I might try it those days. Anyway, great work and good luck about the future Gnome team!

100982• 13 years ago

I never really understood WHY they felt the need for this radical change in UI. It may have gotten better with new releases, but why did they have to break everything in the first place? What, the usual desktop was not working well? Anyway, I'll give this a try and I'll do my best to not be biased...

grakic• 13 years ago

Making a new UI is fun :) People like to hack on fun things. It keeps the momentum.

ctbeiser2• 13 years ago

I never really understood why people feel the need to keep the UI mostly the same. It may not be as good at the first release, but why do people object to them breaking everything at first? What, was everything perfect already?

100982• 13 years ago

Because users are accustomed to the Previous Version. They have various specific ways of doing things. Your new UI breaks it, so now the user has to spend time readjusting their habits. It gets even worse if there is no simple, obvious way to re-establish the old workflow.

mixmastamyk4• 13 years ago

Because they didn't leave any option to "break everything". If the new stuff was mature when released it might be a different story.

Some people actually have work to do however and don't appreciate being forced from a 2.0 to a 0.5alpha without option. Unless you wanted to stay on an unsupported dist for years as I did with Natty (until recently).

Despite my complaints, experimentation is fine in my book... The best way of handling this would be to ship Gnome2 and 3/Unity side-by-side and let the user choose, but 2 was dumped immediately for something broken, unknown, and undocumented. There's no way to stay current without "busting" your desktop.

frozenport2• 13 years ago

Looks like SkyOS

nvrmor• 13 years ago

screencast http://youtu.be/ete5Us0-IpY

josteink• 13 years ago

I see there's mixed responses here, but more praise than I expected.

That said, too little, too late for me. I've now moved to a tiling window manager (i3) and I'm not planning on going back.

antoncohen• 13 years ago

I knew Red Hat was going to do something to make Gnome 3 more 2-like. It looks like this is it, Classic will be the default in RHEL 7 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=917679

donniezazen2• 13 years ago

The only thing that I still can't get my head around is Gnome 3's message and notification tray. Gnome 3.0 was released in Oct 2011 and software developers have showed no interest in Gnome's message tray. Most software still don't support or even care about it. In spite of this reality Gnome developers have refused to make any changes to their ideology of system icons and notification. TopIcon extension that puts system tray back to where it belonged has made Gnome useful for me.

fmoralesc• 13 years ago

Weird, but GNOME 3's notification system is what sold it to me. I hated to have tray icons visible all the time, specially because I don't neeed them all the time at all. But that's just me, I guess.

Yaggo• 13 years ago

Wow. OS X influence is pervasive, but despite (or because of) that, it looks great.

GNOME 3.8 Released

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