Just a few weeks ago I tried Gnome 3 again (again!) and it still sucks as a productivity environment. I have better things to do. But as a geek, I'll be checking Gnome 3 again maybe in a year or more. No holding my breath for any surprises.

If it's not your preference, you can say that, but Gnome Shell is perfectly fine when it comes to productivity. Quick app switching, searching, app launching, etc... How do these things hurt productivity?

I personally dislike KDE, but that's just my taste. Some people love XMonad or XFCE, and some people even like Unity.

Dunno, I'm a developer and my workflow involves several different tools, Gnome Shell certainly doesn't hurt 'productivity'.

I'm also a developer whose workflow involves several different tools. One of those tools is Firefox, and I currently have several hundred tabs open in more than a dozen Firefox windows. I want to be able to instantaneously switch from Emacs to a specific Firefox window. I don't want to switch from Emacs to Firefox and then switch to a specific Firefox window (e.g., using Alt+`) like some desktop environments force their users to do.

The best solution I've found is to use a desktop environment or window manager that will display the Alt-Tab window list vertically with full titles displayed for all windows (which is similar to how I display tabs in Firefox using the Tree Style Tab extension). KDE and Openbox support this setup, and the last time I checked, Gnome didn't. So using Gnome would hurt my productivity.

This is not a typical use case. I do periodically see people leaving comments which claim that they usually have the entire World Wide Web open simultaneously, but not often enough for it to be a use case worth optimizing for.

Personally, having that many tabs open would make my head hurt. I'll generally have Vim open with a few open buffers, one browser window, one terminal, and the running program I'm working on...

Kind of the point. Just because one developer finds KDE or Gnome or x better doesn't make it a universal fact.

Many of us find Gnome suits us just fine.

> He could be like a lot of developers, lots and lots of documentation pages pointing to API info whilst they code :-)

Most documentation pages are searchable and well organized. No need to keep hundreds of open pages.

finally fixed this for me. Awesome-style window switching without Awesome-style window glitching.

Secondly, KDE comes with a full suite of applications [1] that all follow same philosophy of user choice than minimalism. Gnome severely lacks that kind of application database. For example, there are not many applications, including big names like Banshee, that use Gnome's message tray. Some applications use split menu and some don't. Overall, it's not a great user experience. Not to mention there is no way in Gnome to entertain Dropbox icon which is specifically designed for system tray.

[1] http://www.kde.org/applications/

   click split

For me, it's candy app switching but definitely not quick. Having to look at animated transitions is extremely distracting and definitely hurts productivity.

That said, I do use a few extensions, and I'm exploring writing ones as well. The fact that extensions are written in javascript is really nice (or awful, depending on how you feel about javascript). The built in debugger/console looking glass (type ALT+F2, then lg, the press enter) is very helpful, and window identification/selection is very simple. Being able to extend the environment in a relatively easy way with a scripting language is a big win in my book

ymmv, but I find it to be a nice environment. I'm not 100% satisfied, but I'm far more satisfied with it than, say, OSX or Windows, and slightly more satisfied with it than Unity or KDE.

On a more general note put me in the camp that feels gnome is getting better and better every release. I like what they have done with the header bars. Very clean interface. Initially i did nit like Gnome 3. I gave Unity and Cinnamon fair shots, 3 months each. Neither wowed me. Then I gave Gnome 3 another chance (it was 3.4 by then) and have not looked back.

Thanks, John

Wait, is Windows the only one not to have that implemented?

Other than 'native window placement' I find that pretty much every extension I have installed is a customisation where I want something to work in a particular way. It's not that Gnome is unusable by default, it's just more the minimal set of features that everyone uses.

For example, including a time tracker on the top bar by default would be wasteful, as would a timer. I want both of these though, so I go to a website and click a button and they work.

However, the lack of proper sandboxing / permissions breakthrough for the extensions is a real problem I don't believe has been solved yet.

We have an entire stack showing up to fix things in the right places not just in GNOME itself.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=531271#p531271

Does anyone have any better references to usability research on Gnome Shell?

[1] Did you know that in order to rebind cmd-tab on a mac, you have to kill the Dock of all things, run the program that binds cmd-tab, and then re-run the Dock? Every other key combo is explicitly configurable, afaik.

You might give xfce a try, as that's more like "real Linux" if you're a hacker used to something like fvwm2 where you have pretty much total control over the desktop.

I too am kind of disappointed in the "chasing Mac taillights" direction that Gnome has taken, dumbing things down. I guess it'd be ok if they were making significant inroads into the "mom" market where Macs are strong, but I don't think they are, and in the process seem to be losing some of the hacker market.

The one exception is one modifying alt-tab behavior so it doesn't group programs on different workspaces together. Honestly, that's the one behavior I cannot understand exists in the first place, makes navigating by keyboard nigh impossible.

To each its own but I really like the fact I can alt-tab between all applications as I tend to stick one application per screen because I mostly use a 1024x600 monitor. Thinking about it can see how that would be a problem with larger resolutions though. You would have to mentally discard icons that aren't relevant to the screen you are looking at.

I like gnome but I think Unity solved that problem in a more elegant way (icons on the dock can recall any applications whatever the screen it's living on).

Try doing that with multiple instances (3+) of your browser though. I've got general browsing on WS1, Netflix on WS2, tutorials and the likes on WS3, and usually Gmail etc on WS4. Imagine cycling through those, and sometimes more for various reasons, without separating by workspace. Tedious, tedious, tedious.

Idunno, FireFox pretty nicely demonstrates that a simple, straightforward platform with an emphasis on extensions can be great. Your use-case doesn't necessarily match my use-case, and letting the users get lost in a sea of config files to customize them has kind of proven to just cause havoc... so why not focus on extensions?

I am sorry it sucks for you. For me, it works great.

I'm looking for an alternative to OS X, but I want a stable OS that I can use to get work done. If anything, Apple has been shipping too much broken software, too often. The last thing I want to do is switch to a platform that actually embraces pushing out a constant stream of poorly thought out features and a slew of regressions.

However, it's growing clear through Apple's actions that they aren't interested in supporting the traditional desktop computing market, and that they see iOS-style black box computing as the road forward.

For someone whose contributions to the platform have run the gamut from kernel drivers to VM runtimes to desktop apps, living in an iOS-like desktop is simply not tenable; I can't wait years for a platform vendor to decide that my particular use-case is worthy of their support.

It's like owning a wood shop and only being able to produce Ikea-style furniture. Endless streams of vendor-approved Ikea furniture, and nary a 30' hand-built sloop in sight.

However, most of the industry-changing software has been exactly the kind of thing you or I could never build on iOS -- even HyperCard would technically run afoul of Apple's iOS rules regarding downloaded code.

Apple lost their way, so I need to find a new platform.

We just have to accept that developers expect a lot of their environment, more than traditional users want, and more than what should be available by default in an OS. I am okay with installing plugins/tools/etc. to make me more productive.

This is pretty much what everyone recommends re Arch.

Debian testing is also similar.

I think that the state of Linux desktop right now is bad. GNOME3 is a pretty toy and KDE4 is ugly and (in my experience) unstable. Xfce is getting heavy, so it seems like people are all going to *box DEs. There used to be much greater diversity of well-supported desktop distros, like MEPIS, that weren't just another layer over Ubuntu.

Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now: Fast mirrors, systemd for reasonable boot times, up-to-date packages, no distractions or consumer focus (Ubuntu), well-supported and relatively stable. I strongly recommend the MATE+Compiz spin: https://spins.fedoraproject.org/mate-compiz/

It isn't any heavier than Windows. Hell, anything is lighter than Windows, and Vista has been running on almost every PC since 2005. So I'm not that worried about the "weight".

> Fedora seems to be the only decent distro for development right now

The only two breakages I've had in the last 6 months on Arch as my main development machine have been a kernel 3.13 bug that affects everyone (AMD cards are put in suspend mode even if they don't support it, which crashes the driver, and is fixed in 3.13.7) and an xorg configuration bug fixed in Xorg 1.16. Neither of which were game breaking, just inconveniences, but I did cherry pick my hardware to work with Linux (all open source drivers on everything, atheros nic, hd4600 + 7870 on Mesa, Intel ethernet and usb / etc).

Problem with Fedora is a severe lack of software availability. On Ubuntu you have PPAs, on Arch the AUR and pkgbuild.com, and on Suse you have the OBS, but on Fedora (and Mageia and friends) you have the rare independently hosted repo you have to add via config file. I've also had experiences with Fedora being just as unstable as Manjaro with their bleeding edgeness and lack of verbose testing on all devices before pushing near-vanilla kernels.

Even when Ubuntu switches to systemd, it is hard to recommend because rolling release just makes so much more sense in every use case except the unmaintained server or automation box, in which case I'd favor Debian anyway. I'm actually hopeful for Chakra, which is kind of floundering since they lost their web hosting and all kinds of nonsense, but the direction - consistent biannual update pushes to a rolling release, with thorough testing and a KDE base system that goes out of its way to avoid pulling it other frameworks for speed and footprint. It is a pretty pure fire and forget solution, albeit of course its just a community project.

ROSA is another one I'm hopeful for, since its business backed with support contracts and does some novel features on top of Mageia.

Oh my goodness, no. Rolling release requires that I be prepared to deal with breakage any time I install anything from the repos (because, as Arch says, "partial upgrades are not supported", as a practical matter I have to update everything before installing anything.) Breakage is also a routine possibility any time I install security updates.

I also have machines that connect to the Internet solely through a cellular data plan. I have no desire to such bandwidth for all these updates.

Rolling release gets me nothing I'm interested in. I use Debian stable on all my machines.

This is a failing of an improperly tested update, not of the model. You do need to beat all the possible glitches out of updates as they come in some testing repo, but if you do and you can deliver rock solid iterative updates it is the natural way to keep a system up to date.

GNOME, too, is going a long way forward. Windows still doesn't really have pixel scrolling for trackpads, which MacOS X has had for a very long time, but GNOME does.

I'd argue that the biggest Linux desktop issue is that package management systems are a bit of a mess, especially the dpkg / rpm kind. A system like this one should not have locks, nor require root access systematically. Thankfully, Nix fixes both, and ensures atomic upgrades and rollbacks. That project makes me hopeful for the future. Anyone can install and use it, no matter what distribution or package manager is used on their system. Their default repositories are rather large, although obviously not as large as others, but that's improving rather fast.

Beyond that, the fact that both KDE (Apper) and GNOME (Software) agree on using PackageKit by default, which grants them an app store that isn't tied to a specific package management system, is rather good news for the future.

Also, why is it necessary to update the kernel twice a week? And why isn't VirtualBox a core package?