3 Apr 2011 vicious   » (Master)

GNOME 3

So just in case my last post seemed too negative: I do like gnome shell, and I am using it. I am just a grumpy kind of person, I always was. So some of the gnome 3 experience takes some getting used to, some of it is annoying, but it is kind of cool. I think it could have been a lot nicer if there were not so many on purpose annoying aspects of gnome shell. Another example: the internal microphone needs some tinkering with alsa levels. This was possible with the old gnome alsamixer, and I probably would have figured out what was going on if i had that. The command line alsamixer is too difficult for me (I can’t tell the difference between muted and not, and I have no clue how to move left/right channels separately, which is what needed to be done to make the mic to work).

My gripes are with the assumption that gnome is working on perfect hardware and only well written apps run under it. That will never happen, no matter how much we wish it to happen. 10 years ago I thought that within a few years linux experience will be 100% out of the box on almost any laptop. It’s still not there, and will never be there. That last 5% will take forever, not a couple of years. Mostly because even the windows experience is not 100% good out of the box even though it is preinstalled. I tried turning on windows first before wiping it, and it already had some issues even though it was the stock experience, but I found even the ipad to be buggy (and it made me laugh that marketa’s vista laptop has been crashing on shutdown ever since it was new, it started doing that before we even installed anything on it). I just tend to see problems with design that other people ignore for all the cool-aid they are drinking (this is especially true with apple and/or google).

Anyway, overall, I’m fairly happy with GNOME 3. And I’m sure it will get better in a few years. I’m just hoping that more essential things also get solved.


Syndicated 2011-04-03 20:29:44 from The Spectre of Math

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