01:48
Mr. Asim Rajput
The developers behind the GNOME project have announced the official release of GNOME three.0, a significant redesign of the open source desktop surroundings. The update introduces a new desktop shell that offers a streamlined window management workflow and a more modern look and feel. The new version also represents a major architectural overhaul, with lots of important enhancements to the GNOME platform's technical underpinnings.
The work to deliver GNOME three.0 has a long history. It took the developers years to reach a consensus about how to proceed with the new version, and years more to implement it. The protracted development period has largely paid off in stability and coherence. It is fit for duty out of the beginning gate, though there is still lots of room for further improvement.
Lots of of the substantial and far-reaching changes that the new shell brings to the GNOME user experience are compelling and thoughtfully crafted. The new desktop will likely appeal to users who share GNOME's philosophy of debris-free computing, but there's parts that appear to have been pared down aggressively. The whole surroundings is significantly less configurable than its predecessor and is missing a handful of important features.
The work to deliver GNOME three.0 has a long history. It took the developers years to reach a consensus about how to proceed with the new version, and years more to implement it. The protracted development period has largely paid off in stability and coherence. It is fit for duty out of the beginning gate, though there is still lots of room for further improvement.
Lots of of the substantial and far-reaching changes that the new shell brings to the GNOME user experience are compelling and thoughtfully crafted. The new desktop will likely appeal to users who share GNOME's philosophy of debris-free computing, but there's parts that appear to have been pared down aggressively. The whole surroundings is significantly less configurable than its predecessor and is missing a handful of important features.
History and culture
The original vision for a new GNOME surroundings first surfaced in 2005 and became known as Topaz, a wordplay on the phrase three-point-zero. This preliminary work to revitalize the desktop failed to gain traction among the GNOME development community which felt that substantial changes were unnecessary and would cause undesirable disruption for users.
The decision resulted in gradual stagnation, finally leading to a general feeling among some contributors of frustration with the dearth of direction and technical progress in the desktop surroundings. That period is best described by Andy Wingo's historic GNOME Decadence essay. The desire for new innovation caused a new GNOME three.0 plan to materialize in 2008, finally winning broad support among the developers.
At the time, the objective was to deprecate legacy APIs and gradually replace a number of the underlying infrastructure without making major changes to the user-facing parts of the stack. The plan changed drastically when an work to improve the traditional GNOME panel led to the emergence of the GNOME Shell project, which soon became a key part of the GNOME three.0 update. It's been under active development since that time and has only now reached maturity.
The predictability and conservativeness of GNOME's release management strategy and development model have played a immense role in driving the GNOME desktop environment's popularity among Linux distributors and other commercial stakeholders. The preliminary trepidation among the GNOME developers about moving ahead with a major update was partly based on concerns about how a immense half-baked overhaul would impact all of the users who depend on GNOME in production environments. It was clear from the beginning that a three.0 plan had to minimize that kind of friction and the done product had to land on its feet.
Lots of care and attention has clearly been dedicated to making sure that GNOME three.0 is fully baked. Years of intensive work by lots of volunteer and paid developers have resulted in the current product. Virtually all of the underlying infrastructure was prepared last year, but the release was pushed back in to 2011 in order to facilitate a final redesign of the shell user interface and permit everything to settle in. The additional two months of polish is evident in the new version's relative maturity.
Quality
The new GNOME Shell is built largely with the Clutter drawing toolkit and depends on composites rendering to function properly. In the event you don't have compatible graphics hardware or drivers, you won't get to run the new shell. It will in lieu punt you back to a more conventional one.x-style desktop with regular GNOME panels.
Although GNOME three.0 offers a robust desktop, there is issue that significantly detracts from its reliability. Hardware-accelerated rendering is absolutely essential to making a contemporary and competitive desktop computing experience, but the poor state of Linux graphics drivers makes it impossible for program developers to depend on that capability. The open source drivers are hit-and-miss, and the proprietary binary-only drivers from the major hardware manufacturers are buggy and liable to misbehavior.
It is a large caveat that hangs like a raincloud over a desktop that is otherwise stable. It doesn't appear like there is much more that the GNOME developers can do to address the issue at this point. It is going to be up to the distros to be positive that working drivers are available.
The new GNOME Shell is built largely with the Clutter drawing toolkit and depends on composites rendering to function properly. In the event you don't have compatible graphics hardware or drivers, you won't get to run the new shell. It will in lieu punt you back to a more conventional one.x-style desktop with regular GNOME panels.
Although GNOME three.0 offers a robust desktop, there is issue that significantly detracts from its reliability. Hardware-accelerated rendering is absolutely essential to making a contemporary and competitive desktop computing experience, but the poor state of Linux graphics drivers makes it impossible for program developers to depend on that capability. The open source drivers are hit-and-miss, and the proprietary binary-only drivers from the major hardware manufacturers are buggy and liable to misbehavior.
It is a large caveat that hangs like a raincloud over a desktop that is otherwise stable. It doesn't appear like there is much more that the GNOME developers can do to address the issue at this point. It is going to be up to the distros to be positive that working drivers are available.
User experience
There's also some driver and hardware combinations that can run the shell, but exhibit bad behavior. For example, I noticed some strange visual artifacts and finally encountered a deadly error when I attempted to make use of the open SUSE-based surroundings on my desktop computer with NVIDIA graphics hardware. The Fedora version, which is what I used for this review, worked properly on the same computer.
The new shell is designed to be simple and unobtrusive. Basic task management functionality has been swept off the screen entirely and is available through a dashboard view that doubles as a workspace manager and application launcher.
In the standard desktop view, you will notice your windows open on the screen as well as a status bar at the top. The right-hand side of the status bar has pop-down bubbles that work like Ubuntu's indicator menus. These let you control audio volume, manage your network, & globally set a presence status. At the middle is a clock that pops down to display a calendar & upcoming appointments. The lefthand side has the Activities trigger as well as a slot that displays the currently walking application.
Predictably, clicking a window in the window management view will give that window focus and take you back to the regular desktop. You can also basically close windows from this view by hovering over a window thumbnail and clicking a black "X" icon that will appear over the window. You can use the scroll wheel to expand a specific window in the spread to get a closer look at its contents.
When you click the Activities trigger or move your mouse cursor to the top-left corner of the screen, the shell will display the launcher and window manager. The window management view shows you an Exposé-like spread of the windows that you have open on your current workspace.
When you click the Activities trigger or move your mouse cursor to the top-left corner of the screen, the shell will display the launcher and window manager. The window management view shows you an Exposé-like spread of the windows that you have open on your current workspace.
There is a bar along the lefthand side that works like a standard task dock. The bar has launchers for your favourite applications and will show highlighted icons for the applications that are walking across all of your workspaces. You can switch in to the full application launcher view by clicking the Applications item at the top of the screen. This will show launchers for all of your application and permit you to filter it by section. The launcher view works fundamentally as expected and did what I require it to do. There is a convenient built-in search box, with find-as-you-type functionality, that you can use to activate an application.
The right-hand side of the window management interface is dominated by the workspace tower. You will notice blocks representing all of your open workspaces, with thumbnail views of the windows that are open in each space. Unlike conventional virtual desktops, the new GNOME workspaces are not preconfigured in a static arrangement. In the simplest use case, there will always be at least active workspace and empty space. When you drag a window in to the empty space, it fundamentally spawns a new workspace. When you remove all of the windows from a workspace, it will disappear.
This liquid & dynamic approach to workspace allocation is much saner & more flexible than the conventional virtual desktop model. As some readers will probably recognize, a similar idea appeared in the Moblin netbook shell back in 2009. It is much more liquid & polished in GNOME two.0, however. This was basically my favourite feature in GNOME two.0 & it stands out as an very solid tiny bit of design work.
A hands-on look at GNOME 3.0
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