People who are using GNOME 3: how is the experience for you? I personally switched to Xfce from GNOME 2 when GNOME 3 came out and I don't think I am going back, but it will be good to see how the experience has been, given the negativity that surrounds it.

This might be heresy being that I'm a GNOME foundation member, but at first I did not much like GNOME 3 at all. After about 3.4 it started having the polish I expected. Now, I actually really enjoy using it. The extensions are super nice and having an interactive javascript console to extend / hack on your window manager is super nifty (if you know javascript of course).

All in all, I think it is quite solid. Currently I use Fedora 18 for most of my workstations, but just updated my home desktop to Fedora 19 and notice they have the "GNOME Classic" option, which is essentially a beefed up version of the fallback mode. If you prefer GNOME 2.x, take a shot at installing Fedora 19 or 20 if you like to live on the edge. Login to the GNOME Classic session (click the sessions button in the login screen) and try it out. I think you might actually like it.

As an eternal sceptic of new things tech who really didn't much care for GNOME 3.x at first, I've actually fallen in love with it. Can't say I have any issues at all other than it doesn't do amazing with 9 monitors, but how many OSS devs have setups like that ;D

Gnome 3 sucks without good graphics drivers, it's very laggy and feels heavy.

On my laptop with Radeon HD 3200 using the open source drivers (from Fedora 19) it's hardly usable and spins the hell out of the fans.

Thanks god for MATE.

We're always trying to work better with graphics drivers, and I personally wrote a bunch of of patches this cycle to help with performance. If you're still having issues, please file bugs with the radeon driver and with us.

I also sit twenty feet from the the lead radeon driver developer, so I'll ask him tomorrow if there's anything we can do to help him out.

Running it on an Atom with Intel graphics here (netbook driving decent monitor). Works well as long as I don't have three open Gmail tabs.

The Radeon drivers must be terrible.

I bopped around in it for a few minutes on my Atom/Intel graphics EeePC and found it unbearably heavyweight compared to Awesome. I don't know what they are doing wrong, but merely interacting with a bunch of xterms with it was unbearable. Maybe you are just use to it.

It sure feels heavy compared to CDE or twm either, but that's hardly fair.

I think it is eminently fair. It isn't performing a fundamentally different task, but it stutters and burns lower powered machines up.

Radeon opensource drivers are just fine. KDE with composite WM runs smoothly. Sometimes I play heavy games with Wine (Civ4, Stalker...). And did I mention resolution: 3000x1600

Two slightly OT questions, if you don't mind:

a) How did you manage 9 monitors? b) Any good solution to moving windows to the next/previous/up/down monitor?

Expensive and modern video cards and a company that lets me test exotic hardware desktop setups. My standard desktop I'm typing from now has 6 monitors for instance. We can get as many as we want if they help us do our job. I work for a finance company, thats about all I'll detail :)

For moving the windows, I drag them. It isn't that difficult.

For "b" I use a combination of xdotool & wmctrl to move stuff between the monitors without the use of mouse.

Interesting; would you share these scripts?

Sure, this is what I use now:

http://dl.nux.ro/utils/movewin.sh

I've loved GNOME 3 for as long as I've used it, but I've had (apparently) non-typical usage habits since before GNOME 1.x came out. For example, I know a lot of people hated the fact that GNOME 3 did away with the Win95-style taskbar at the bottom of the screen, but even under GNOME 2 I used to ditch it as quickly as possible.

For my purposes, GNOME 3 lets me easily dedicate workspaces to different tasks, it lets me easily open as many terminals and Vim windows as I like, and it lets me easily open two windows side-by-side (an editor with code and a terminal for running tests, or an editor with HTML and a browser for previewing, etc.) so I'm pretty pleased with it.

I'm a little worried about some of the changes GNOME 3 has gone through; as it migrates from traditional in-window menu-bars to a single button in the global bar at the top of the screen, that's probably going to put a crimp in my sloppy-mouse-focus habits. This new "header bars" concept probably isn't going to play very nicely with my custom title-bar-button-order setup (I prefer the traditional Mac close-at-top-left, zoom-at-top-right configuration). Still, I'll probably get used to it over time.

I'm on Debian with Gnome 3.8 and been quite happy overall.

I was recently working on a Gnome 2.x machine and couldn't believe how terrible and difficult to use it all seemed – even though I used 2.x for many years.

I'm not sure where all the Gnome 3 negativity came from. But I understand that a small detail can be enough to derail your experience with it. In my case, that would be the "Launch new instance" behaviour: clicking on the launcher focused on the existing instance, instead of creating a new one. But with a tiny gnome shell extension it was resolved. I have other extensions installed, but that's really the only one I want to keep.

I think the flak and hate they received was disproportionate… But then, pretty much the same happened with KDE3->KDE4, Win2k->WinXP, WinXP->Vista, Win7->Win8, and more recently with iOS6->iOS7. About the only time where a major UI change was introduced without too much trouble, was the MacOS9->MacOSX Public Beta transition; but I suspect there was just as much grumbling from the people on OS9, it just may have been that their voices got drowned out by the excitation of the new users attracted by the new "lickable" interface.

> I'm not sure where all the Gnome 3 negativity came from

Gnome 3.0 "stable" was like an alpha product and it's hard to have the (ex) users forget a negative experience.

Disclosure: I'm sympathetic with today's Gnome but the Gnome 3.0 mess made me an happy XMonad user

Yeah, sorry about that. We really should have handled that differently.

I wish the Gnome Team all the best

I just can't use Gnome 3 - it feels like you're straight-jacketed into only changing the approved settings by some dev who's 'decided for you'. I haven't used 3.8, but whenever I start a new system I try gnome 3 for a bit... and it quickly drives me away.

Things like deciding for me that I can't place items on the desktop. It's my desktop - if I want to put things there and 'clutter' it, then I should be able to.

Things like having a file manager that requires modifier keys to send things to the trash. Not delete them outright, just send them to the trash. If I fat-fingered something, then I still have the safety net of being able to pull it out of trash - it's the whole point of trash.

Then there's trying to get a Windows user to shift to linux with Gnome. "How do I..." You can't. "Oh, then how do I..." You're not permitted to. Yes, I know I said linux gives you much more control, but... ...and so we have one less linux user as she returns to an OS she can personalise beyond a background colour.

Gnome3 is too much about form and not enough about function, and makes the rather insulting assumption that the average user is pretty dumb. Is gnome 3.10 nicer than previous gnome 3's? Sure. Is it nicer than a traditional desktop? Not in my experience.

Great, I have Gnome 3 hidden behind i3 WM ;-)

Gnome GUI still creeps through of course, and generally does the trick, although lack of drag & drop system wide is the single biggest fail whale design decision of the Gnome 2 to 3 transition, IMO (if anyone has drag & drop in Gnome 3 without a WM wrapper, chime in, will happily retract the claim if this is i3 specific).

I'd like to go with a Gnome-less stack when I upgrade to Fedora 19, but you know, Gnome, despite its warts does come with a ton of built-in convenience out of the box, so unless I find myself unemployed in the near future (i.e. with time on my hands), Gnome + i3 it will be (i3, BTW, is pretty much a wonder joy of awesome, no pun on that other WM intended).

Does that imply you can actually use any custom window manager with Gnome 3 these days?

Installing xmonad on Ubuntu actually gives you a display manager option for a combined session automatically, which is what I use these days.

EDIT: Still requires editing your xmonad.hs to have it play nicely with GNOME, though.

Any benefits over "just" xmonad + xmobar?

All the normal gnome widgets and launchers on the bar (I have one at the bottom of the screen) for stuff I don't do enough to have keybindings for, mostly.

In my experience, yes, have both i3 WM and Awesome WM setup in my fedora 18 + Gnome 3 install.

Assume the same for other WMs

I'm on 3.8 in Fedora 19 and my overall impression is it's pretty fast & clean.

Haven't had much luck getting gnome-shell-extensions running well. I got the weather one going by taking the one from the gnome site rather than the rpmforge package but system monitor, pomodoro timer and a couple of others aren't playing ball for me currently.

I have had to google how to do a bunch of different things since switching to it. I still don't know any commands except restart for the snazzy alt+f2 command overlay.

I'd most like it to add a apple key+space style search from the mac world.

Most interesting new app there is "boxes", a virtual machine / remote machine viewer / manager mashup thing. Looks quite promising to me.

When you say you want to search like Spotlight from the keyboard, what do you want to search that it doesn't already? Just press WinKey/Meta/Super and start typing when the overlay comes up. I added a calculator extension in there, as well as one to search Firefox bookmarks, and it's pretty much got me covered.

I have Fedora 19 with 3.8 on one of my machines as well. Can you, or anyone, tell me what's the deal with crappy font? I'm comparing it to what is in CentOS 6.4 and in RHEL 6.4. Does anyone know where this can be changed to look, er, better?

Yeah, the stock fonts on Fedora look absolutely terrible (especially on the web). To get usable fonts:

1. Install freetype-freeworld from RPM Fusion

2. Get the Microsoft fonts like Arial, Times New Roman, and Verdana

3. Edit your ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf to contain the same XML under the section "Subpixel-hinting and Font-smoothing" here: https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts

Hey, thanks a lot! I'll try this when I get back to my Fedora machine. Thanks again.

I switched to Gnome 3 (and Gnome Shell) the moment it was released. The biggest problems IMO were the broken/dropped features and the graphics driver glitches. The shell, which is what I suppose defines the experience, was great from day 1. I consider it a major leap forward and, for the most part, it just feels natural and does what you want it to.

A lot has improved since the first release, removed features came back, bugs were fixed, UI was tweaked. There are still some (stupidly) rough edges here and there that piss me off but you get used to them, wait for a fix, or use a shell extension.

Verdict: Buy (unless you want a tiling window manager)

In the past three years I've seriously used Gnome 2, awesome, xmonad, XFCE, Openbox, KDE, and Gnome 3. For window managers without Desktop Environments I generally rolled my own, but used GNOME DE under xmonad.

What got me started on all those was that early Gnome 3 had major problems with multi-monitor, and in general lack of finish/configurability.

I am using Gnome 3.8 on Fedora 19 now, and it is great. I'm very productive in it, and in my opinion it's the most polished UI. I run a three-monitor setup and program mostly.

That said, I would have chucked it without gnome-tweak-tool. GNOME 3 has brought back some of the configurability it lacked originally. Personally I use it to set Sloppy window focus, turn off dynamic workspaces and set 4 static, and make keyboard shortcuts for just about everything.

As for command-line configurability, I run 'gsettings list-recursively | sort > gs-before.txt' before running gnome-tweak-tool and then after to compare to see what the settings names are. I then use that to create a 'post-install' config file so my changes are documented and if I reinstall I don't have to manually flip buttons. For example, to set sloppy window focus mode:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode 'sloppy'

Anyway, so far so good with GNOME 3.8, and am looking forward to Fedora 20 and GNOME 3.10.

I use Gnome 3.8 with my archlinux, and I've tried it because it was giving me the least problems, now I can't touch anything else because it just seems slow and not as intuitive. It gets under your skin in a good way.

The best thing about it is also when it gets "a bit funky" it's as easy as "alt+f2 r" to fix it and have it running as good as new.

I too have switched from GNOME 2 to Xfce, since it suits _my_ needs better than GNOME 3 does.

I'm not sure if the hypothesis is correct, but it seems that GNOME 3 is targeting the desktop market that Apple has so well-cornered and optimized. There are things that do not logically make sense, to me, within Mac OS X and subsequently GNOME 3, but just the same they are included in the desktop GNU/Linux initiative.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is the path forward.

Depends of what you want, I use GNOME 3.8 on Fedora 19, is is smooth and fast.

I was not looking for the responsive as much as how much it effects your productivity.

I'm very productive with it, mainly because GNOME Shell has very good keyboard usability, fron launching an applications typing the win-key plus the first two letters, from switching from the same applications Windows with alt-(key above tab) etc. I almost don't use the mouse.

I've been using it since the initial release and really like it. It's important however to keep an open mind and don't resist change at all costs.

Also keep an eye out on the extensions.

The killer feature is extensions.gnome.org

After you spent some time customizing it, I cant use any other WM that does not bring in this ease of customization.

After that, the WM gets out of your way.

Sounds like I'm going to have to give it a try, then. I usually go minimalist with WMs because, as you said in your last sentence, it "gets out of your way." That's the best thing an interface can do.

Felt like distro hopping again anyway, might as well try out the new Gnome while I'm at it.

What sort of extensions do you get the most mileage out of? Browsing through them, I see a few that look neat (like the 'Drop Down Terminal' one), but many seem to be extensions that correct problems that GNOME introduces anyway (Workspace Indicator, Remove Accessibility, etc).

I'm not who you were asking, but I like Maximus and "Hide Top Bar". Maximum screen real estate for working.

well, good point - but then again, every default is a problem for someone.

I'm also OK with the Gnome maintainers removing the middle click behavior IFF they give me an extension to bring it back.

the power is "how" and not "what". If they can fix the theme manager of Gnome (I'm still stuck on Gnome 3.4 on 12.04, so I dont know), it will be great.

I'm imagining "Recipe Packs" in the future - one click sharing of your customized desktops. Who cares if the default is blue or red.

Sawfish?

My experience has been positive for Gnome 3.10 (I'm running Fedora 20 nightly). I don't feel to be more productive using other DEs though I can certainly switch between them easily (I do coding, graphic design, and 3d modeling). The majority of the changes listed on that page just made it look and function a lot better overall. I think they're headed in the right direction.

I tried hard until 3.4.2, then I stopped trying and started running the "fallback mode".

Now I'm happy. Now I understand that trying to use it when it forces you to change your workflow is a terrible idea. I needed months to get used to the new desktop and a week to completely forget it.

So I guess I'm a Gnome 3 user without really using Gnome 3, if that makes any sense.

Edit: formatting

Initially I was skeptical, but it soon turned into joy. Now I can't live without it. Try it for 1-2 months, there's no looking up.

My Ubuntu boxes run Unity, but my Fedora laptop runs Gnome and I'm quite happy with it. Unity is a better fit for small screens, but Gnome is just fine.

It's true some fine tuning is no longer easy to do and that the Gnome team makes some decisions I disagree with, but, all things considered, it works and stays out of the way.

There's a lot of things I like about it, but with regard to productivity, I was lost until I coded an extension to provide a bottom panel with a task list.

Well, I tried to use GNOME 3 and Unity, both had really annoying quirks, so I switched to GNOME Classic, which is essentially like GNOME 2.

I think I'll be switching from unity to this now. Unity just never did grow on me, even though I use Mac all day at work.

I want to like Unity, and I use and love my Mac, but for some reason it just doesn't seem to stick for me either.

Hm. Looks pretty nice; I'll be interested to see how it runs on my (rather old) desktop; the version of GNOME (I think 3.0) that came with Fedora (15, I think) ran terribly slowly. I can't seem to find any good info on the performance differences of Wayland and Xorg, though.

check this out http://fooishbar.org/tell-me-about/wayland-on-raspberry-pi/

Thanks! I had found a link to just the video, getting the context is much more interesting.

Which distribution is best suited to try out GNOME 3.10 in virtualbox ?

There's a live image here you can give a shot: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/misc/promo-usb/gnome-3.10.iso

I think it's based on Fedora but I haven't tested it myself yet so I'm not sure.

I'm using Fedora 20 nightly now and it's working nicely. You can try it or the Alpha.

It will take some time for distributions to package the latest release. Arch Linux typically has the new release in a month or so.

Why the hell does Gnome have a hard dependency on systemd? I shouldn't have to change my init system just because I want an updated DE.

Systemd is a critical part of the Linux userland, and is now the standard Linux init system.

If you opt to run Linux without systemd, expect various userland things to break.

I wish this perspective were more widespread.

Systemd takes the cool stuff that's been getting into Linux under the hood and makes actually usable to everyday users and administrators.

And it's far easier to write a systemd unit than a startup script for any other init system (except DJB's daemontools, perhaps).

The "Linux userland"? Really? I wasn't aware Android had a hard dependency on systemd.

I'm all for opinionated design, but I hope we don't end up with a "Linux userland" in the sense we have a GNU userland -- that would be going towards too tight coupling of things that really shouldn't be coupled at all.

Its not about tight coupling. It is about one system supporting a feature, and the other "alternatives" not supporting it. So the choice becomes one between better software and compatibility.

"Choice" just means you are stuck coding for the lowest common denominator.

> the success of Mac OS X as the only relevant Unix on the desktop goes to show that whole, well-integrated systems are much more valuable than well-factored parts.

Certainly not as clearly as the success of Linux in the server world shows the opposite.

> Linux needs to become a whole, integrated system.

If the priority for Linux is to capture a bigger share of the dying desktop market at the expense of the server market, sure.

On the server side, the whole "framework for parts assembled ad hoc by a recipe for a task" model is becoming more, not less viable.

> If the priority for Linux is to capture a bigger share of the dying desktop market at the expense of the server market, sure.

RHEL's next release will come with systemd. The server market is not threatened by systemd, and the growth market in personal devices -- mobile -- will benefit from its power-management features.

> On the server side, the whole "framework for parts assembled ad hoc by a recipe for a task" model is becoming more, not less viable.

systemd units are much easier to write than init scripts.

I perhaps wasn't sufficiently clear; my issue was with the sweeping generalities about what MacOS X supposedly proved in terms of Linux needing to become that kind of integrated OS rather than a framework assembled from parts, not the specific idea that broad generality was offered to support about systemd (I don't really have a strong opinion on systemd either way.)

What about those who opt not to use Linux? Relying on a Linux only init service is pretty much a middle finger to the users of that software on those platforms.

Then your not going to be able to use Gnome 3. Personally, I'd rather they use advanced features even if they're Linux only. I'm sick of Linux being held back by some misguided notion that every application needs to be ran on a version of NetBSD from 10 years ago.

There's an effort to bring these features to OpenRC which works on Linux and FreeBSD, but the Gnome developers have shown absolutely no interest in assisting the project, even though they'll be limiting their own share of the desktop environment space.

I think it's important to have a standard API going forward rather than porting to ten different APIs. We'd be more than happy to support OpenRC if you implemented the logind APIs we require.

Licensing is an issue. Systemd's APIs are LGPL and OpenRC must remain under a BSD license.

An API doesn't have a license. It is just the code which has a license. Do you mean you want to copy the code to reuse it under OpenRC, or are you really talking about the API?

Regarding API license: Just ask systemd mailing list. They will tell you that API doesn't have a license, only the code.

The APIs are LGPL? As opposed to the implementation of the APIs?

Gentoo GNOME packagers decided they'd make GNOME in Gentoo depend on systemd. I don't see why you expect GNOME developers to help out with another init systemd. That should be up to init system developers. Just implement the same API and/or ensure the API is fixed so it can be implemented across init systems.

Amen!

It has a hard dependency on Logind. Logind was merged into systemd after the Gnome integration ( replacing ConsoleKit with logind ) happened. This means that Gnome became retroactively dependent on systemd-logind.

GNOME 3.8 does NOT depend on logind. That is optional. See https://blogs.gnome.org/ovitters/2013/09/25/gnome-and-logind... for a bit more detail. E.g. some features rely on systemd, so if you want those features you better run systemd.

Gentoo got this wrong and they prefer just depending on systemd to make life easier for them. However, I only expect GNOME to require logind (thus systemd) once we remove X support and only support Wayland. No idea how far off that is. For 3.12 the intention is to support both.

"New in GNOME 3.10: Select to copy is disabled (but we let you keep middle-click to paste)"

Thanks, GNOME3.

Part of the wayland integration as well. Wayland won't support middle-click to paste, nor will it provide the X copy buffers. This means that middle mouse paste + mark-to-copy has to be provided by toolkits, in some kind of way. That also means that the toolkits need to figure out a way to do "copy on mark" without breaking the buffer already in clipboard. I somehow doubt that middle click to paste will survive the transition to Wayland.

Ouch. Here I was hoping the flood of (multi)touch screens would make things like the ACME editor more attractive, by having some set of gestures that allowed for universal "three (or more) button" GUIs. Or even Smalltalk, for that matter. Now in applications one can of course do whatever one wants -- but select to copy always seemed like a much better idea than the alternative (and as someone else alluded to, it's a big burden to drop on toolkit/app developers -- it really should be service the "system" provides).

Did they release it with select to copy disabled? Can't find anything about it on the site.

Nope, designers want to maybe change something to do with text selection. However, no plans yet. Slashdot made a fuzz about nothing.

Is there a gconf/dconf switch?

It looks really nice! Im especially happy that the useless "chat services" integration in the top right corner is gone.

The thing that replaces it looks very nice and useful, sort of like the Control Center in iOS 7.

The thing that has made GNOME 3.x useable for me is the "Dash to Dock" extension, that makes the dash always visible on the left. This is useful for me because I like to always see it and use it to navigate my windows with the mouse. I dont much care that it wastes a bit of space, I dont like maximazied windows anyway.

I use cinnamon, never tried wayland though, Gnome 3.10 looks great I'm giving it a try, I hope all the annoying things are gone now.

Can I use it with my hiDPI monitor?

Yes, support has been added as of 3.10. It is similar to what Mac OS does. People who do not want that can tweak it in tweak tool.

GNOME Shell on Wayland has released before Canonical's Unity releases on Wayland (or whatever else they plan to release on, e.g. their own Mir etc.). Big win for the GNOME community against its detractors from Canonical.

You know, this is not a zero-sum game.

It looks like Gnome has come a long way since the early 3.x releases.

I especially like the menu bar being used fully, not having that space wasted is a small detail that has a big impact. I will definitely be giving this a try.

Most stunning thing about 3.10 looks like the new maps application based on OpenStreetMap. Now I really wish I have a Surface Pro 2 with GNOME running on it.

Gnome3 and Unity drove me to dwm and I could not be happier

Gnome 2 + Xmonad was a pretty good combination for me, but I haven't used it in a while since I have a Mac at home and need to run Netbeans at work. (The Xinerama support in XMonad is highly unpleasant, too.)

What's wrong with xmonad's handling of xinerama? I seem to recall both awsome[a] and scrotwm[s] have decent handling of mulitscreens setups for drivers that doesn't support xrandr, or used twinview -- maybe I mis-remember what used to be my problem -- but these days xmonad works nicely for me, whenever I need more than one screen.

[a] http://awesome.naquadah.org/ [s] http://www.peereboom.us/scrotwm/html/scrotwm.html

It "works" fine, it's just completely unintuitive and user-hostile. Tried it for a week or two, even with the cheat sheet taped to my monitor I could not build an intuition for what it was going to do. I'm sure there's a reasonable-sounding explanation of how it worked (each monitor is a view of the stack-set, or some such thing) but trying to use it was intensely irritating and it never got better.

XMonad seemed very promising, I was just afraid I would go yak shaving and learn haskell so that I could configure XMonad , hence just settled for dwm.

You could. But my Xmonad config looks like this:

    import XMonad
    import XMonad.Config.Gnome

    main = xmonad gnomeConfig
           { modMask = mod4Mask }

So you can do it without learning a bunch of Haskell. If you plan on configuring it to all hell then it would be difficult without learning a little Haskell syntax, but you certainly shouldn't need to learn Haskell proper.