Dear Gnome: Please listen to your users

// August 8th, 2011 // Free Software

Regressions in Gnome 3 from Gnome 2

Keep in mind: much of what I mention the below is done on purpose by design by the Gnome project, and aren’t necessarily bugs per se.

When Gnome 3 was released I pretty much immediately took the plunge and upgraded to it. I initially used the default Gnome Shell for a bit. There were some really big regressions right away. You can’t change your fonts, icon theme, GTK theme… I found a tool called gnome-tweak-tool that does allow changing those things, but I find it annoying that I can’t do it via the default system-settings tool.

Then there’s the screensaver. It just shows a black screen without showing any fancy interesting things on it. Personally I don’t care all that much, but the typical user really values being able to customize their systems. With pretty much every deployment I work with I have clients asking me if they can have their company logo (or something similar) show on the screensaver. Now I have to tell them that I’d have to charge them extra for that because Gnome doesn’t think that people should be able to use their computers the way they want it to.

Then there’s the power settings. Why can’t I choose what my laptop does when I close the lid? In Gnome shell I can’t choose where my clock will be. I can’t even choose where my system notifications will be. To make it worse it’s in a place that requires me to move my mouse to a specific corner that is way out of my way, and once I do that I have to carefully move my pointer over the applets because they change position. I’ll stop about Gnome shell now otherwise I’ll go on about it all day long.

Gnome 3 Fallback Mode

Gnome 3 fallback mode offers some consolation. It gives me a familiar and much more usable desktop than Gnome shell. It’s much better with multiple displays and also larger displays. I can still choose what window manager I want to use (although I’ve noticed when I use compiz then alt+right-click doesn’t work anymore when I want to customize my panels). Sadly, it’s not really the complete old Gnome desktop, it has the same problems as listed above. Some Gnome upstream projects also simply don’t work anymore. Pessulus, Sabayon and Nanny are currently broken. I know it’s open source and I could just fix it myself (that’s probably going to be a whole blog entry on its own), but I don’t have the time maintain that on top of what I’m currently doing. It *SADDENS* me that we’ll have to drop all three tools from Edubuntu 11.10 if we can’t fix it in time (to be honest I don’t think anyone else cares, apologies if I sound like a cynical asshole). Then there’s the migration from gconf to dconf/gsettings. I understand the benefits but it just happened too soon. Dconf is weird, complicated and badly documented. Try doing something like just setting a default position for an icon on a desktop for gsettings for multiple users. I dare you! This used to be something simple that we could take for granted before.

Then there’s the printing configuration!?

None of those buttons work! Well, the on/off button switches but makes no difference. And I can lock/unlock it. Besides that all it does is sit there and thinks it’s printing to no printers that are available. Oh, about that On/Off switches. It’s confusing to some users! Is it “Off” when it shows “Off”? Or will it be “Off” when I click on “Off”? (I know the answer to this, but I know a significant number of users who struggles with it).

Gnome system settings is really weird. There’s a keyboard (…dare I call it snap-in) module), but if I want to choose my keyboard type I have to do it under Region and Languages. There are seperate modules for “Displays” and “Screen”. How would a user know under which one the particular display setting their looking for will be?

Sorry…

Sorry for the rant, I love the Gnome project and the Gnome 2 series delivered exceptionally good software. I realise that some things in Gnome 3 will get better, but the problem is that so many things are bad on a design level already. Gnome Shell for example will never work well on LTSP because it’s not possible to run a local window manager (if you have a gigabit connection to a thin client, it will use 25MB/s just to move a window arround, running compiz or metacity locally uses *nothing*). Eek, I think I started doing it again, I digress.

What I’m asking from Gnome is, please listen to your users. They’re not as dumb as you think.

I’m sure someone will probably jump up in defense and defend some of the decisions that Gnome has made. I think it’s great that Gnome is trying some new and experimental things but at what cost? Also, at some point you kind of have to admit that you made a mistake and move on instead of relentlessly sticking to your principals.

Screw principles. Use science, it works!

24 Responses to “Dear Gnome: Please listen to your users”

Martin Owens says:

8 August 2011 at 01:21

Hey Mr. Carter,

Yeah, LTSP and multi-user configurations are really not what they’ve designed any of the desktops for. Gnome3 is a failure at a community center for petty much the reasons you’ve specified. and some more.

The removal of GDM is going to be a kicker for me, having written a custom gdm greeter to manage user registration in a community center setting. But no god could convince the developers to help with making their software extensible enough to work in different settings than their own personal laptops.

If Gnome3 doesn’t get better, I may have to fork gnome2 or perhaps some blend there in to get a desktop suitable for public use.
jonathan says:

8 August 2011 at 02:00

Yeah GDM is a big piece of software, but it does bother me that it takes longer for the new GDM to start up than the rest of my system (I’m on SSD so I don’t think it’s an IO issue). I guess since you mentioned LTSP I can also mention that dconf doesn’t work over NFS. So if your home directory is on NFS then boo-hoo.

Gnome 2 fork is too much work, some people did consider it but changed their minds when they realised just how much work it is.

I tried KDE and it’s gotten a lot better. I wish kwin could work as a local app, that would be nice. Well I won’t go too much in detail in KDE since that’s probably also a blog post on its own.

I’m kind of tempted to try Xfce again. Actually, I’ll install it right now…
Martin Owens says:

8 August 2011 at 03:49

I don’t know, GDM isn’t that big, I’d say it was medium sized. It’s about about 4 core facets and ~25 functional parts. The lack of documentation is what kills me as a programmer.

Ah well my system requires NFS, so dconf will have to be ejected from future ubuntu releases I use in the community center. Can’t have gnome hacks messing up my system.

We shall have to see where it goes.
cgb says:

8 August 2011 at 05:03

I’m a Gnome user and I love those changes, so they should listen to ME, not to you.
Duncan says:

8 August 2011 at 06:35

I don’t want to start the Gnome vs Unity argument all over again, I am one of the majority of users who aren’t happy with either, but have you tried GS on other distros. I have noticed that a number of problems under Ubuntu don’t occur on Fedora or Debian versions. On the one hand, the Ubuntu version (PPAs for Natty or Oneiric upgrades) are not complete, and on the other, Unity requires so many hacks/patches in order to get it to work. Finally, the removal of GDM from Ubuntu is a Ubuntu decision, not Gnome’s and and a gnome3 version can be installed from their site, as can many other bits missed off the Ubuntu Oneirc release.

There are far too few options to customize GS when you initially download but you can (in theory) change anything you want – and there are numerous extensions already available to fix most user’s annoyances. The theory is that Gnome 3 provides the integrated services, and you pick what you need or how they are represented by extending the shell via js/css files. The default shell is exactly that; it is the Gnome team’s current vision, but can be changed “easily”. The paradigm is similar to Firefox default + add ons. This is quite the reverse of Unity, which has very little customization (eg. no ability to turn off the overlay scroll bars, no control over menus etc) and where a C programmer must ask for his modification to accepted onto the development tree so that it may be forced on all users. The continuous changes to the menu system as Oneiric has been developed is a perfect example of the user being subjected to the whims of a few programmers in the inner circle. Ultimately, from a design point of view, GS is the most flexible – thats “in theory” and if you have the time and patience.

GS has many technical issues, many more than have been mentioned above, but so does Unity – see the memory leak reports for the latest Unity/Compiz upgrades leaving some people unable to run Unity for more than a few hours before requiring a reboot. Indeed, whilst the number of minor bugs is rapidly decreasing as each alpha version arrives, the number and severity of major bugs is increasing.

For these reasons, and having tried to make it usable for almost a year now,I have given up on Unity. Like many I have reverted to Ubuntu Classic (although the presence of Unity still causes problems). With the loss of Classic mode in Oneiric I will have no Gnome-oriented option left other than GS or its Fallback. My experience of GS is much shorter lived and its theoretical potential leads me to continue to experiment with it, in the hope that when the technical issues are resolved, I will be able to create a useful working environment. But as they stand neither Unity nor GS on Natty or Oneiric is ready for daily use, as has been recognized by the flood of people leaving Ubuntu for other distros (according to DistroWatch).

For getting things done, I shifted to XFCE, and its really rather good.
Bilal Akhtar says:

8 August 2011 at 07:55

Hi Martin and Jonathan,
GDM is large (not *very* large, but large). The code base of GDM was not a direct issue; but the main issue with it was the sheer number of Debian/Ubuntu downstream patches applied to make it work with the rest of the stack. Even GNOME2 releases of Ubuntu have had issues with patches. If we had chosen to stick to GDM yet again, the number of patches would’ve grown, not shrunk. The last time I checked it, it had around 32 patches. Huge.

As for the rest of the article, I couldn’t agree more. After using GNOME for the last 3 years and sticking badly to it, I just can’t stick to it anymore. Ubuntu Natty was perfect ‘coz it shipped Unity on top of GNOME 2.32, but Ubuntu Oneiric is a pile of ugly applications like Nautilus 3 and GNOME Control center. I agree Unity in Oneiric is really *really* awesome, but the underlying GNOME stack and applications are nowhere near “production ready”. No screensaver support (though we’re working on patching this), sucky power management options, etc, make GNOME unusable for me, be it Unity or not. I love Unity, but this time, because of its foundations, I had to abandon it and move to KDE.
Chris Coulson says:

8 August 2011 at 08:49

The issue with the printing dialog is because cups-pk-helper is not installed.

See https://launchpad.net/bugs/808829.

And I hate the on/off toggle switches too. Fortunately, a good theme can make it more obvious which state the button is actually in. The theme in your screenshot makes it quite difficult though…
A.J. Venter says:

8 August 2011 at 10:01

Dare I say it ? But this whole gnome 3 thing sounds exactly like the debate we heard when KDE4 was first released.
Now – KDE4 is maturing, and it’s an excellent desktop which wonderfully addresses everything you talk about here.
It seems a better choice than forking gnome 2…

Personally – I’ve become a big fan of LXDE – the lightweight desktop that is actually lightweight, but for the kind of environment where you are now, I would say that KDE4 is a much better choice than gnome 3. At least right now.

In part because gnome has always worked towards reducing customizability, they have been doing it for over a decade, it’s in their very core culture. They just finally reached the obvious endpoint of that line of thinking. It’s not all that different from what apple is doing (and gnome has been modeling after apple for almost a decade as well).

KDE was always the option for letting users customize and work the way THEY want to rather than the way the developers want them to – and I think everything I’m reading about gnome 3 is confirming what I’ve been saying for years – sooner or later the gnome approach to usability *always* backfires.
The same thing is happening to apple – it’s among the main reasons why android is rapidly killing off IOS in the market (anybody who has puts an ipad next to a galaxy tab is going to make the apple-fanboi sulk)

That said, there is one major downside to KDE. While kubuntu exists it has a very bad reputation in the KDE community and sadly it’s deserved. Ubuntu’s KDE work has always been horribly underdone, they have the worst integrated KDE desktop of any major distribution. Unless you are prepared to do the preconfiguration properly for edu (meaning all the stuff that kubuntu should do but doesn’t) it will be a major pain to work with. This is not a KDE shortcoming, users of KDE on distro’s like Fedora and OpenSuse have none of these complaints -it’s a well known issue with Ubuntu – stemming from Canonical giving Kubuntu far fewer resources (notably fewer developers) than they do the Gnome team, and those people then having to try and cut corners to make releases happen.
Michael Krog says:

8 August 2011 at 10:49

Having read a lot of post frmo people complaning about stuff like “why can’t I move that” and “why can’t I change that” I would recommend Gnome to target another audience.

Wait.. Ah.. They already did that!

Gnome 3 rockz!
Martin Owens says:

8 August 2011 at 12:41

I didn’t think Canonical gave any developer resources to Kubuntu at all. Same goes for Lubuntu, Edubuntu and others. They’ve really only got Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server as their developed platforms.

It’s a problem with most Ubuntu communities that we have a failure to gather together more resources for Kubuntu from the core contributors to kde. The trollish nature of various people doesn’t help, hating Ubuntu irrationally in order to stir up trouble. But like any FOSS project, it’s purely based on the amount of interested parties and KDE people just aren’t that interested.
A.J. Venter says:

8 August 2011 at 12:59

Actually you’re wrong. Kubuntu unlike the others you cite is not a community effort, it’s a canonical official release – and it has canonical staff working on it.
The difference is that Ubuntu has lots of developers from Canonical working on it, Kubuntu has exactly two.
The other major gripe is that Kubuntu has since it’s launch tried to do everything the Ubuntu way, and only gotten it half done. Until very recently it didn’t have an Ubuntu theme at all – it shipped with the default KDE theme, only it disabled half of it. It’s packages weren’t structured like the upstream packages leading to frequent breakages – and because they split packages that KDE keeps combined, a constant issue with programs that KDE users expect to be there not being included.
The project has been rife with other issues, broken dependencies in these custom-split packages and such-like are not uncommon.

Basically the KDE community didn’t initially get interested in Ubuntu because it only shipped Gnome and the KDE packages just loaded the debian versions, then later when they started an official KDE branch did it so badly that KDE as a whole wasn’t drawn. Those KDE developers who like the debian way of doing things are using debian, those who want a more desktop oriented distro are using Mint.

Ubuntu initially shunned KDE (and it’s basically an undenied fact that it did so purely because Mark Shuttleworth was, at the time, completely unaware of KDE’s existence – he said it himself when he was a speaker at aKademy a few years ago) and that had the counterpoint that the KDE community shunned Ubuntu in turn, since they could work better on distro’s that catered to their choice.

I don’t think there was (much) genuine trolling involved, the KDE guys just used distro’s that cared about them, and since they didn’t use Kubuntu, weren’t bothered enough by it’s issues to help fix them.

I wasn’t trying to dis Canonical anyway, not in the least, I merely pointed out the pitfal that the best real competitor gnome has is the worst possible choice on Ubuntu. The reasons for this may be up for debate but the reality is that this is the way it stands, and I can’t very well suggest it to an Ubuntu based project if I am not going to be honest about that can I ?
Could have said it better: a letter to GNOME. Yes, another one. | 2buntu says:

8 August 2011 at 13:43

[...] Until the 0-day of blog nukes – take a read of this: Dear Gnome: Please listen to your users – by Jonathan Carter. [...]
jonathan says:

8 August 2011 at 13:51

@AJ indeed, some of the issues are similar to the ones when KDE transitioned to KDE 4.0. I don’t think that applies to the design issues though. How far they are set in stone? I think we’ll have to see. Canonical had full-time people work on Edubuntu in the past, but it didn’t quite work out.

@Duncan I test Gnome on Debian and Ubuntu regularly. Now and again I try it out on Fedora too just to check if the same problems are present there. On my laptop (my day-to-day system) I run Gnome 3 Fallback mode on Debian.
Hussam Al-Tayeb says:

8 August 2011 at 15:22

Dear Mr. Jonathan Carter. Gnome developers know better than you. No one said you should enjoy using your computer. This is a dictatorship. Your opinion does not matter. If Gnome developers enjoy see you suffering, then it’s their software and they are entitled to do whatever they want. So suck it up, install gnome-shell and just imagine this is your smart phone and not your desktop computer. Make some coffee too. Coffee works very well with terrible design decisions. Just keep in mind that you don’t know what’s good for you. Gnome developers know better.
Roshan says:

8 August 2011 at 16:32

Empathy uses that on-off toggle and each time I use it I find that I’ve forgotten which position is which. Honestly, I am not a fan.
Tim says:

8 August 2011 at 16:49

@AJ Actually, if you look at most reviews, it appears that most are switching to XFCE instead of KDE 4. This suggests to me that KDE still hasn’t won as many people over as I would have expected by now…I think the same core problems exist, but are hidden by a lack of voice (meaning those that complained the loudest have either capitulated or moved on). I expect the same to happen with Gnome eventually.
AJ Venter says:

8 August 2011 at 18:02

I think you may be partially right @Tim but I doubt it’s the whole story. XFCE serves a completely different target audience. Those who leave gnome over performance will go for XFCE as it promisses a lightweight environment.
More-over it’s an environment that is much more like windows.

KDE4 has become a stable, highly usable and highly mature desktop and it’s userbase has been growing consistently for ages.
However if what you’re looking for is a lightweight desktop more like older Windows, then you won’t go for KDE.

If Gnome is a lot like apple, then KDE4 is a lot like Windows7 though truth be told it’s more accurate to say that windows7 (and indeed Vista) is like KDE4 since KDE4 came out before Vista and most of the ideas that went into that desktop design were already in KDE.
Felipe Morales says:

8 August 2011 at 18:50

On the article comment about the notification system: its position is perfectly sensible, because of Fitt’s law (see http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/). It might be more annoying on very large screens, but even there, it’s not a bad choice. The target area might need to have more height, though (for touchscreen devices), but I imagine that’s difficult to implement.
GregE says:

9 August 2011 at 00:52

If you like to tinker and you are willing to put in the effort then Gnome 3 is great. It is still a work in progress so things are changing all the time. The magic word is extensions. With extensions you can do almost anything – including making Gnome 3 look like Gnome 2.

Look at Frippery and the work of FPMurphy and others. You can move the clock, you can move the hot corner or disable it, you can have an Applications menu, you can have a bottom toolbar with task switcher and virtual desktop pager. In Fedora you just install extensions via the normal package manager, in the others it is still in development so you have to manually install them. Extensions are just snippets of Javascript that reside in ~/.local/gnome-shell/extensions. If you do not like the default desktop behaviour then change it. You do not need to be a developer to use extensions, installation is not difficult and the time will come when the distro makers will have packs of them in the repos and each distro will have a distinctive Gnome 3 behaviour.

While I do like Xfce on my notebook it is not in the same league as Gnome 3.
Links 9/8/2011: Linux 3.0.1, KDE 5.0 Roadmap | Techrights says:

9 August 2011 at 12:18

[...] Dear Gnome: Please listen to your users When Gnome 3 was released I pretty much immediately took the plunge and upgraded to it. I initially used the default Gnome Shell for a bit. There were some really big regressions right away. You can’t change your fonts, icon theme, GTK theme… I found a tool called gnome-tweak-tool that does allow changing those things, but I find it annoying that I can’t do it via the default system-settings tool. [...]
Kahlil Moonwalker says:

10 August 2011 at 10:14

It seems that Gnome 3 and OS X v10.7 were designed around the idea that desktop computers should be used the same way as a tablet. The problem with this logic is that tablets are really dumbed down in comparison as far as what they can do. I find it quite irritating that I can’t switch tabs by scrolling over them with the mouse wheel (or touchpad equivalent) and I understand the logic behind this regression is that tablet users might accidentally switch tabs without intending to. I also hate how large certain widgets and buttons are — obviously so it’s easier to press them on a TABLET! I understand that tablets are now a very big part of the average consumer’s daily computing, but I see them as being only supplementary to a REAL desktop computer, NOT as a complete replacement.
Jack Waterworth says:

12 August 2011 at 18:08

I couldn’t disagree with you more. Gnome-shell is obviously a new project and has some work to be done before it will be ‘ready’ for the public (in my opinon) but I found it is vastly improved from gnome2.

Half the stuff you complained about can be fixed with a little digging (including moving the clock and enabling screensaver), and I’m sure the customization will be improved in the near future.

The GNOME developers are not dumb but you have to understand that new projects need work. The team should be applauded for their great new look and feel. I personally would never go back to GNOME2. It feels prehistoric and I feel claustrophobic trying to use it.
eigenman says:

17 August 2011 at 02:44

I have very mixed feelings about gnome 3. It is very customizable, so, yeah, it can be improved in the long run. Most of the objections mentioned in this blog post are of that nature, and if those are your only issues, I think you will be very well off giving them a bit of time.

However, there is also every indication that the philosophy of the people behind the project are very different from mine. Linus’s objection about opening a terminal is the best example of that: it seems they figured that organizing the desktop based on applications is the way to go, since it’s been successful for MACs. However (maybe as a minority) I think that’s a terrible idea, and I would’ve rathered they tried to perfect document based sorting as it was done for, say, OS/2. Sadly, this is the type of change that is not easy to do using some javascripts, which is why I’m worried I will end up leaving gnome eventually.
AnotherJonathan says:

16 January 2012 at 20:59

…they figured that organizing the desktop based on applications is the way to go, since it’s been successful for MACs…

If you want an os that looks “macish” try PearOS. I installed it in a VM to play with a short while ago. The PearOS people have actually done a very good job of bending gnome3 into usability. (Unfortunately I am not really of fan of the Apple OS so I deleted that vm after I had played with it a while, but that is a personal preference on my part not a reflection on the quality of the distro.)

…Dare I say it ? But this whole gnome 3 thing sounds exactly like the debate we heard when KDE4 was first released.
Now – KDE4 is maturing, and it’s an excellent desktop which wonderfully addresses everything you talk about here…

I would not agree that KDE is excellent. I find it way less annoying then Gnome3 but that is as far I can go.