A good GNOME 3 Experience

I’ve been using GNOME 3 full time for over 9 months, and I find it quite usable. I’ve had to learn some new usage patterns, but I don’t see that as a negative. It’s a new piece of software, so I’m doing my best to use it the way it’s designed to be used.

Sure, it’s different than GNOME 2. It’s vastly different. But it is a new UI paradigm. The GNOME 2 experience was over 9 years old, and largely based on the experience inherited from the old Windows 95 muxed with a bit of CDE. There were so many things that the GNOME hackers wanted to do — and lots of things all the UI studies said needed changing — that the old pattern simply couldn’t support.

Still, a lot of people are upset. Surprise. Most recently it’s been people running Debian Testing who just recently found that their distro has migrated its packages from GNOME 2.32 to GNOME 3.x. Distros like Ubuntu have been shipping GNOME 2.32 for ages; but it has been well over 2 years since anyone actually worked on that code. It’s wonderful that nothing has changed for you in all that time [a true Debian Stable experience!] but I think it’s a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is … different.

What I find annoying about these conversations is that if they had gone and bought an Apple laptop with Mac OS X on it they would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different.

Installing

I went to some trouble to run GNOME 3 on Ubuntu Linux during the Natty cycle; that was a bit of work but I needed to be current; now with Oneiric things are mostly up to date. GNOME 3.0 was indeed a bit of a mess, but then so was GNOME 2.0. The recently released 3.2 is a big improvement. And it looks like the list of things that seem targeted to 3.4 will further improve things.

I’m now running GNOME 3 on a freshly built Ubuntu Oneiric system; I just did a “command line” install of Ubuntu and then installed gdm, gnome-shell, xserver-xorg and friends. Working great, and not having installed gnome-desktop saved me a huge amount of baggage. Of course a normal Oneiric desktop install and then similarly installing and switching to gnome-shell would work fine too; either way you probably want to enable the ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3 PPA.

Launchers

One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional “Hyper” and then Caps + F1 .. Caps + F12 as launchers. I have epiphany browser on F1, evolution on F2, my IRC client on F3 and so on. Setting up Caps + A as to do gnome-terminal --window means you can pop a term easily from anywhere. You do the mapping in:

    System Settings → Keyboard Layout → Layout tab → Options...

and can set up launchers via:

    System Settings → Keyboard → Shortcuts tab → "Custom Shortcuts" → `[+]` button

(you’d think that’d all just be in one capplet, but anyway)

Not that my choices matter, per se, but to gives you an idea:

Accelerator	Launches	Description
Caps + F1	epiphany	Web browser (primary)
Caps + F2	evolution	Email mail
Caps + F3	pidgin	IRC client
Caps + F4	empathy	Jabber client
Caps + F5	firefox	Web browser (alternate)
Caps + F6	shotwell	Photo manager
Caps + F7	slashtime	Timezone utility
Caps + F8	rhythmbox	Music player
Caps + F9	eclipse	Java IDE
Caps + F10	devhelp	GTK documentation
Caps + F11	gucharmap	Unicode character picker
Caps + F12	gedit	Text editor
Caps + Z	gnome-terminal --window	New terminal window

That means I only use the Overview’s lookup mechanism (ie typing Win, T, R, A… in this case looking for the Project Hamster time tracker) for outlying applications. The rest of the time it’s Caps + F12 and bang, I’ve got GEdit in front of me.

Of course you can also set up the things you use the most on the “Dash” (I think that’s what they call it) as favourites. I’ve actually stopped doing that (I gather the original design didn’t have favourites at all); I prefer to have it as an alternative view of things that are actually running.

Extensions

People love plugin architectures, but they’re quite the anti-pattern; over and above the software maintenance headache (evolving upstream constantly breaks APIs used by plugins, for one example; the nightmare of packaging plugins safely being another) before long you get people installing things with contradictory behaviour and which completely trash the whole experience that your program was designed to have in the first place.

Case in point is that it didn’t take long after people discovered how to use the extension mechanism built into gnome-shell for people to start using it to implement … GNOME 2. Gawd.

Seeking that certainly is not my recommendation; as I wrote above the point of GNOME 3 and it’s new shell is to enable a new mode of interaction. Still, everyone has got their itches and annoyances, and so for my friends who can’t live without their GNOME 2 features, I thought I’d point out a few things.

There are a collections of GNOME Shell Extensions some of which appear to be packaged, i.e. gnome-shell-extensions-drive-menu for an plugin which gives you some kind of menu when removable devices are inserted. I’m not quite sure what the point of that is; the shell already puts something in the tray when you’ve got removable media. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Out in the wild are a bunch more. The charmingly named GNOME Shell Frippery extensions by Ron Yorston has a bunch of plugins to recreate GNOME 2 features. Most are things I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole (a bottom panel? Who needs it? Yo, hit the Win key to activate the Overview and you see everything!).

My personal itch was wanting to have 4 fixed workspaces. The “Auto Move Workspaces” plugin from gnome-shell-extensions was close (and would be interesting if its experience and UI were properly integrated into the primary shell experience), but the “Static Workspaces” plugin from gnome-shell-frippery did exactly the trick. Now I have four fixed workspaces and I can get to them with Caps + 1 .. Caps + 4. Hurrah.

You install the plugin by dropping the Static_Workspaces@rmy.pobox.com/ directory into ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/, then restarting the Shell via Alt + F2, R, and then firing up gnome-tweak-tool and activating the extension:

    Advanced Settings → Shell Extension tab → switch "Static Workspaces Extension" to "On"

Hopefully someone will Debian package gnome-shell-frippery soon.

Not quite properly integrated

Having to create custom launchers and fiddle around with plugins just to get things working? “Properly integrated” this ain’t, and that’s my fault. I respect the team hacking on GNOME 3, and I know they’re working hard to create a solid experience. I feel dirty having to poke and tear their work apart. Hopefully over the next few release cycles things like this will be pulled into the core and given the polish and refined experience that have always been what we’ve tried to achieve in GNOME. What would be really brilliant, though, would be a way to capture and export these customizations. Especially launchers; setting that up on new machines is a pain and it’d be lovely to be able to make it happen via a package. Hm.

AfC