A couple weeks ago, I wrote some posts on GNOME Shell which included a number of criticisms of the desktop environment that will likely become Ubuntu’S default at some point in the future. Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently got in touch to offer his responses to the problems I found with the new interface. Here’s what he had to say.
In general, Jon’s message was that many of the criticisms I made of GNOME (not Gnome, I’ve realized…) Shell were unfair, given that its targeted release date remains six months in the future. For example, Jon assured me that my experience with a laggy interface was likely due to known bugs involving certain Intel GPUs, which the GNOME developers are working on fixing.
More notably, Jon pointed to GNOME Shell’s Message Tray as the answer to the difficulties I had switching between windows in the absence of a taskbar. The Message Tray feature remains incomplete, but this animation provides an idea of what it will look like.
Jon and I also discussed the inability to categorize items in GNOME Shell’s application menu. As Jon pointed out, “Categorization in general is somewhat problematic,” and GNOME developers are working on a new approach to make it easier to locate applications and documents.
3D Support
Jon gave me a lot of reasons to believe in GNOME Shell, and until we see a product that’s closer to completion, a lot of the attacks I made against it remain unfair.
After all, the GNOME developers went out of their way to make the development version of the Shell readily accessible to the public–it can be compiled very easily using the JHbuild tool, even by people like me who barely know what they’re doing–and they don’t deserve criticism for issues that will likely be addressed later in the development process.
That said, I do still have one major concern regarding GNOME Shell: its dependence on 3D acceleration. This isn’t exactly a criticism, because there are many valid reasons for the decision, but it is something worth discussing within the open-source community. Making OpenGL support a prerequisite seems like it will prove problematic for many users, especially those who use Linux because they want solid performance on older machines.
I have a six-year-old desktop that I don’t plan on retiring anytime soon, and its SiS GPU totally lacks 3D support on Linux. This means I’ll be out of luck when GNOME 3 becomes the default in Ubuntu–I’ll have to choose between not upgrading to the latest Ubuntu release, or switching to an alternative desktop environment.
Similarly, the dependence on OpenGL will likely become a problem for NVIDIA users who rely on closed-source drivers for 3D support, which Ubuntu doesn’t ship by default. Granted, this is the distribution’s issue, not GNOME’s, but it still could present huge difficulties down the road. The nouveau project will hopefully make the proprietary NVIDIA driver obsolete in the future, but nouveau’s 3D support is currently far from complete, even though Fedora has started shipping with it.
GNOME developers’ response to concerns regarding 3D support focuses on the necessity of taking advantage of hardware acceleration in order to keep up with other desktop interfaces, and to make 3D effects more than mere eye candy. They also promise that efforts will be taken to ensure GNOME 3 applications remain compatible with GNOME 2, for the benefit of users who can’t upgrade.
That all makes sense, and it’s not fair to expect GNOME developers to support ancient hardware and remain innovative at the same time. All the same, I think the dependency on 3D acceleration is not quite as trivial as the programmers seem to assume. It may well be for the best, but it will nonetheless force distributions to make hard decisions on whether to adopt GNOME 3, based on how committed they are to supporting older machines and how much they want to avoid proprietary graphics drivers.
If nothing else, distributions should start taking steps now to prepare to deal with the 3D dependency, so that it doesn’t suddenly become a fiasco down the road.
Autumn Anticipation
Maybe 3D support will turn out to be a non-issue–after all, it is true that virtually all computers made in the last four or five years should have no problem meeting the system requirements–and GNOME Shell may prove to be an amazing, path-breaking desktop environment when it’s complete. We’ll have to wait until at least this fall before we’ll know for sure.
N.B.: Jon created a great FAQ list for GNOME Shell that helps to clear up a lot of confusion surrounding it and its vision. It’s definitely worth a read.
Thanks for being willing to admit that what you had said was wrong. I know some other blogs would have just said that there were bugs that were causing the problems; not admitting that they were the once who made a mistake by not doing any research.
First of all, great article. It’s wonderful that you open a space for those who felt the need to issue a reply to your previous piece. It’s very useful to read their opinios and explanations.
The point you make about 3D support is the most valid one of them all. I wonder (out of ignorance)… do netbooks come with 3D support?
Anyways, if, in the future, there’s no way out in GNOME but using “Shell” with 3D, those computers which don’t meet the requirements can siply migrate to another distribution designed for such boxes, like Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Puppy, DSL Linux and so.
Regards!
Where is the problem?
The classic gnome UI is aveilable in gnome3. Old sistem may use them and Metacity works whith all gnome-3 app.
If you have a old sis VGA card (very poor choise…) you may use gnome 3.0, 3.2 ecc with nautilus shell
Anna: yes, most netbooks come with 3D support. 3D support will mostly be an issue only for people with older hardware, or for those with graphics cards that lack good Linux drivers (those cases are increasingly rare but they do exist).
(And expecting people to buy new “Linux-friendly” hardware if theirs lacks 3D support is not realistic: unless you have unlimited money, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you run Linux with the hardware you have, not the hardware you wish you had.)
“Categorization in general is somewhat problematic”
Sounds pretty unimaginative to me. The thing about categorization is it needs to be flexible enough for an app to belong in multiple categories. Totem is both a video player and a music player, for instance.
The “search for a specific application’s name” and “drill down through a tree of categories to find an application” navigation methods are complementary to each other.
If we already know we want to open gedit, we should be able to type “gedit” into a box and open it immediately, with no intermediate waste of time.
If we know that we want a text editor, but we don’t know what it’s called, we should be able to type “text editor” in a box, and it should show gedit as one of the options.
If we know we want to do a thing with another thing, but we’re not sure what either is called, then we can’t search for it by typing. But if we know it’s sort of similar to this other concept, we should be able to navigate a conceptual hierarchy and see which things are similar to which other things and find it that way.
The hardware requirements doesn’t really represent an issue today, and theoretically the gnome developers are right in wanting to offer a shell for today’s computers. But the greatest problem in imposing a strict dependency on hardware acceleration stands in the (lack of) quality of the 3d drivers. Also, it’s ok if the distributors ship the nouveau drivers for nvidia based graphic cards. But I own a laptop with an ati video chip, how am I supposed to work in gnome 3 if I can’t access my aplication if the linux distro won’t come with the graphics driver preinstalled?
@JasonCook599 – as I understand, after getting in touch with someone from GNOME Shell developers/designers the author felt that it was unfair to criticize something, which is not finished. But “mistakes”, “wrong”? What are the mistakes the author did?
When I had a look at GNOME Shell recently I have similar thoughts as those mentioned in the previous article. But lets not put words in someone other’s mouth.
GNOME Shell failed to impressed me one bit. For me it was slow, ugly, inconvenient. When someone develops something new, it should grab you attention and make you say: yes, this is really better way of doing X, this idea has potential. Not make you wonder what is this and that and HOPE that somewhere in the future near version 1.0 it will make sense to you. Example – Zeitgeist. Do I have some stuff in Zeitgeist that are not like I wanted them – of course, every piece of software is not written especially for me, so I always want more, but the difference with GNOME Shell is, that Zeitgeist has clearly good idea and is immediately obvious what the advantages of using it are. The protectors of everything GNOME usually say – but you don’t want change, that is why you oppose our brilliant idea. No, Zeitgeist, tracker also needed paradigm shift in user’s mind, but they were useful, offering better ways in doing the usual things a user do. And I really am unable to see how GNOME Shell makes user’s experience better and to justify the severely different way of using the desktop. And this is without getting near the requirements of 3D, etc. The only positive thing I see is that GNOME Shell uses JS, which hopefully will bring more developers to the GNOME desktop. So, this concludes my personal rant.
Why do you want Gnome-3.0 to support a 6years old machine. you can just install Lucid and keep it with the long support. But making Gnome-3.0 support old machines or even considering it, will make them hold back and limit their options
You guys are missing the point and so are the gnome-shell developers.
Gnome-shell 2.29.1 was fast on my machine because of the nvidia graphics card. but was it usable? no, it was confusing and plain ugly.
Sorry to say this. I am a huge Gnome fan and have been so since gnome1.
[...] The Case for Gnome Shell A couple weeks ago, I wrote some posts on GNOME Shell which included a number of criticisms of the desktop environment that will likely become Ubuntu’S default at some point in the future. Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, recently got in touch to offer his responses to the problems I found with the new interface. Here’s what he had to say. [...]
Oh dear. This has KDE 4 launch written all over it. When developers start complaining users are being unfairly critical of work they’ve released to the community it’s a bad sign.
When developers sweep aside users concerns user move on to something else. KDE found that out the hard way. Even Linus Torvalds switched to Gnome which he supposedly dislikes because of the botched implementation of KDE 4.
Linux developers are often quite arrogant in that they adopt this mantra of “he who writes the code decides”. Well that’s all well and fine so long as you have an army of users eager and willing to use your code. Otherwise you’re writing code for the sake of writing code. Which is pointless.
Personally I’ve seen enough of Gnome Shell to make my mind up. I don’t like it. Even Windows Vista has a fall back for graphically weaker systems. The Gnome developers are making a big mistake here. And the seem hell bent on making that mistake.
Good luck to them.
aikiwolfie:
Where exactly did you read that there was no fallback for graphically weaker systems?
reference: mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-April/msg00014.html
“So, the official plan is basically that people can still use the GNOME 2 panel and window manager with GNOME 3 applications and libraries, if necessary, but this is a transitional state, and to get the GNOME 3 experience, you need hardware acceleration.”
The GNOME developers have made it a point to state multiple times when directly asked that the GNOME 2.x panel based UI will still work with GNOME 3 applications. The GNOME 2.x UI framework will be available and will be compilable with the same underlying toolkit libraries. There IS a planned fallback and that is the GNOME 2.x interface.
Its not an all or nothing switch like happened with the move from KDE 3.x using qt3 and KDE 4.0 with qt4 and all the applications needed to be ported forward for qt4.
-jef
Well, thats the beauty of Free Software. You don’t HAVE to use Gnome, there is plenty of choice. This is why Ubuntu Netbook Remix is switching to e17. Non 3d can be considered legacy, and thats ok with me. Btw, Sis is the only thing i can think worse than S3, and the dreaded GMA500.
This is not a launch. This is not a release. This is not recommended software. They are simply making it possible for normal users to try it out, if they want to experiment, to keep track of development, and to give us a chance to contribute ideas and comments.
I really admire them for doing that, for not holding back until 2011-2012 before letting users try it out and express themselves.
Personally, I think it’s a beautiful idea and I’m sure it will be a wonderful addition to the choices of desktops we have. Is it ready yet? No, not at all. It isn’t supposed to be.
I’m surprised Chris, you caved, with so little substance too. The points you made in your previous article were valid. The GNOME devs put out a preview release so people could preview it, witch is what you did. They complain you criticize incomplete features then why isn’t there even placeholders for those features?
The message tray? I looked at the demo, nauseating. But thats IMO
The menu? Hmm post five sums that up nicely.
3D? To me that argument is like drive-by-wire. It doesn’t matter how well the system works, you still need an actual connection to the accelerator “just in case” Keeping GNOME 2 is just temporary what happens after that? Plus they have no plan at all to make any of the shell modular. Its all or nothing, so kiss compiz goodbye.
The whole thing is based on Java script?? isn’t that the stuff we tend to block in web browsers because of security risks and slow downs? And they want to run a desktop on it?? Let me tell you from experience with an underpowered system JS is crap compared to gtk. JS may bring in more developers, but they going to be mad when they realize they still need to learn gtk for the rest of the UI apart from the shell. But wait, thats right the shell isn’t even tied to the theme and theres no way to change it.
So far as I see it The GNOME dev’s are taking the “You don’t like it use something else” approach, witch boggles the mind when you consider all the feedback they themselves asked for.
@Jef Spaleta: I tried it on a VirtualBox VM with a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 and no 3d support. I used the package in the Ubuntu repositories. All I got was a black screen. There was no defaulting back to the Gnome Panel.
Either way I’ve seen enough of Gnome Shell and I don’t want it.
aikiwolfie:
Did I say it defaulted back to the old panel on its own yet? No I did not. I said that gnome 2.x panels will continue to be maintained as a fallback when needed and GNOME 3.x applications will be usable with the GNOME 2.x panels.. contrary to the KDE 4.0 situation which included a significant API break by jumping from qt3 and qt4 requiring qt3 versions of somethings to be running to support qt3 kde 3.x apps.
I did not say that GNOME 3.x auto detects when fallback is needed yet.
More likely than not distributors are going to help taste the hardware configuration prior to desktop start checking for supported hardware and fallback to gnome 2.x layout if you try to load gnome shell based desktop on unsupported hardware or in a virtual machine lacking 3d support. This is not an impossible task but something your distributor will need to decide how to handle. Anyone in Ubuntu talking about how to handle that yet? What hardware is and is not supported will be distribution specific there’s no way that GNOME what all the distributions support in their hardware configurations to just have a static white/black list.
-jef
I’ve tried gnome-shell, and it SUCKS. A UI is supposed to help you, all this one does is get in the way. And since you won’t be able to use Compiz anymore, you will lose all of the functionality it brought to the Gnome desktop.
Of course, the real problem is that they just don’t care what the users want, they want GLITZ. I’ll switch to LXDE.
I’ve played around with gnome-shell, on the ubuntu lucid beta, and with earlier versions, as well. I have an ATI card and gnome shell works fine with the latest open source drivers. Obviously, it needs lots of work, but I like what I see so far. It’s efficient on screen real-estate (I’d use it on a netbook), and works well on a touchscreen because it has fewer tiny buttons. The hard thing is the current difficulty in accessing hidden windows. Hopefully that gets addressed in a new and interesting way. If (when?) Zeitgeist gets full integration into all the menus in the shell, things will improve a lot, too.
With regard to the Compiz complaints, Mutter has plug-in support (Gnome shell is basically just a mutter plug-in), so I think the fact that you can’t run compiz with Gnome shell will not be as bad once people start writing plugins for it. I’ve been poking around in the mutter code and documentation and writing plugins is already easier than on compiz, but the documentation is still very much incomplete. I do hope that gnome-shell will be easily customizable, though.
Just keep on using gnome-panel if you don’t like gnome shell. Or you can even switch to KDE or XFCE
GNOME Shell is a window manager. It integrates deeply into a bunch of other resources, to provide a better/different way of accessing applications, documents and other data. It has a radically different interface to Metacity.
The world didn’t end when Metacity replaced the previous window manager. Compiz may not work with GNOME-shell enabled, but Compiz+GNOME apps will continue to work. For those of us who like to hack our window managers in lisp, there is still Sawfish.
I tried GNOME-shell out about six months, expecting to play with it for 10 minutes and turn it off. I actually used it for a couple of days. There were a few things that didn’t function that I needed and there were a lot of rough edges, but there was a lot to like too.
Pre-release software is a mixed bag. It doesn’t always work as expected (or envisioned). It doesn’t always “improve” as it gets older, depending on your personal perspective. The best way to guide a project like this is to find time to use it, submit well-reasoned enhancement or alteration requests and participate. Discussions on remote message boards is at best crying in the rain.
I think most business laptops & desktops in use would not have 3D acceleration. I’m using a fairly recent (2.5 year old) Toshiba M600. It’s a Core2 duo, with 2 gigs of RAM and I can easily run WinXP and Ubuntu (in a VM) together.
However the laptop does not have a graphics card that allows 3D acceleration. so far I have not been able to run Compiz or any other app that requires 3D acceleration. Since its a business laptop, it has not been a problem so far. But with GNOME 3.0 – a lot of people with business laptops may not be supported.
It’s Gnome, actually. Used to be GNOME, though.
I’m not really an experimental user, I don’t have the expertise or the desire to install a preview to fiddle with, and all the descriptions seem long on concept and short on what you actually do to use it.
I’m still a little unclear how one launches an application in Gnome Shell. Not an application that you know the name of but only use every once in a while, an application like say Firefox or OpenOffice that you use daily and would normally have a launcher for. Do I have to type in the name every time, or does it have some reasonable shortcut that will still let me start my favourite apps with one click or a similarly small degree of effort?
Rufus: you can launch applications from a menu, although they’re not categorized at all (all applications on the system are lumped together, not differentiated according to their function as in the Gnome 2 menu) so you still have to have an idea what you’re looking for. However, Gnome Shell will also automatically create launchers based on the applications you use frequently.
Also note that you can install Gnome Shell without too much effort if you’re using Ubuntu 9.10 or later just by looking it up in the Ubuntu Software Center, since it’s in the Ubuntu repositories. The version you get from there will be considerably less up-to-date than if you compile it from source using the latest code (which is constantly updated), but it will still give you an idea of how it works. After you’ve installed the package, you have to type “gnome-shell –replace” to run it.
Running Gnome-Shell on ubuntu 9.10. All I can say is that it rocks!!! I hope that they plan ahead for multi touch screens.
I don’t quite get this 3D dependency – the animations it does don’t look much beyond what Doom 2 was doing on my 486 fifteen years or so ago, without any 3D hardware. And most of the time it is running with everything mapped one-to-one as far as I can see – surely that can be optimised away. I can live with the fact that the actual animations will be slower if I don’t have acceleration. (Noting that Moblin did similar things, also using Clutter, and still worked without acceleration).
Gnome Shell as the default on Ubuntu is a disaster waiting to happen. Yes, many of us have enough experience to tweak stuff on Ubuntu.
But a new/first time user is gonna take one look at this and run for the hills. They wont know how to work with it or make the proper adjustments. It will be a complete shock to them as nothing will look familiar.
This piece of trash is COMPLETELY unusable!! No tray, no panels, no customization. NOTHING!! The simplest of tasks is impossible. What used to take 1 or 2 steps to open something takes 3.
Another reason to support non-3D accelerated use: high-end 3D software. Some applications (I’m thinking of Autodesk Maya in particular) aren’t usable with compositing. mmm, irony…
tl;dr a lot of it.
I did see you claim that if you want to avoid GNOME-3 when it becomes default in Ubuntu, you’d have to switch. My understanding from the GNOME 3 Myths page (google it) is that one will still be able to create a panel-based (read: GNOME 2) interface IN PLACE of gnome-shell using GNOME 3. Remember, GNOME 3 is just a set of libraries and tools and apps. The panel and applet capability will still be there AFAIK.
wether computers 5 years old come with accelerated graphics is NOT the issue. supporting open source is- and i wish someone out there would have the cahonies to face that issue and not crawl under a rock when GNOME developers dole out the same tired old banter. i choose to support the darn hard work the open source driver folks are doing. the 2d drivers are fantastic and blow away nvidia on my machine. every now and then i reinstall the nvidia drivers but for naught. then i go back to nouveau and think about ways to give back to the community. GNOME 3, in its present course, is spitting in open source developers faces. candy it up however you like. i had hopes for gnome 3. i downloaded and compiled the shell and like the look and feel. but i wont use it until 3d nouveau works with it. ive installed kubuntu on a partition and kde on my ubuntu just so i could get used to kde. i use kwin instead of metacity for slightly more effects and way more speed – with nouveau.
when microsof- i mean gnome 3- plays nice, i will. kudos to the hard work of all the open source programmers.