My Impression of Gnome Situation

To me it seems, and with the Gnome Shell release this has become even more pronounced, that the situation around Gnome is like the situation around political parties in Czech Republic. They mostly lost touch with reality and majority of people either lost their interest in them, became their haters or their (almost) unconditional adorers. Pointing out an issue equals hating now (and yes there are some exceptions). I have lost faith. Sadly. In both. Does it need to happen to Fedora as well? If we gnomeifficate anaconda, we might end-up like this as well. Users aren't as dumb as we tend to make them. People don't want grey lives with nothing to look forward to, with nothing to choose from. With computers treating them as monkeys. I don't want an environment where I cannot choose between grey two-colour symbolic icons and colorful normal ones. Is reaching out specifically to women making them feel equal?

No, I'm not promoting choice in general. Linux is not about choice. I realize there are lines you should not cross. We cannot sensibly support two parallel audio stacks in Fedora. We cannot sensibly support Hurd or BSD kernel in Fedora. We cannot sensibly support any random combination of system libraries. But we can let user customize their HDD layout when installing. We can show them nice professional looking installer (don't get me wrong, I agree that the installer needed rewrite of its internals, I just don't agree with many of the UI changes that went along with the code redesign). We can show them KDE quality design. We can promote open standards while not setting the hurdle too high for using proprietary or patent encumbered. We can let them choose desktop background by clicking on desktop. We can let them turn off their computer. We can let them install OpenOffice without breaking LibreOffice. Are we?

Fedora Desktops – Quick Look

Hello to all.

Yesterday and today I've been working on packaging the wallpapers for Fedora 19. Since we have a couple of new desktops in Fedora, I thought it would be good to expand our coverage to them as well. In short – since Fedora 19, new wallpapers will be visible in backgrounds selectors of Gnome, KDE, Mate and Xfce. LXDE does not show any pictures and has a plain file chooser for that, Cinnamon uses Gnome stack, but has a bug in its backgrounds selector (read on), so the background is usable but not visible.

I've had various experiences with testing the packages in the desktops and as a couple of these were driving me mad, I thought I'd write a quick showcase. I needed precisely two things – terminal to install/remove the WIP packages and means to set the background. So, up to some initial word or two, this will be about how to run a terminal and how to change a background in these desktops. Also, even though I did it in new user account, widget themes might not reflect fedora defaults as I changed them at one point and I also didn't reset configuration between switching the DEs. Maybe someday I'll test default config and do a quick review of look'n'feel.

For convenience I'll review the desktops alphabetically.

Cinnamon

On first look I thought this might be good – it had panel, menu and looked almost fine. First problem was the symbolic icons in system-tray. I had no idea what half of them meant, but at least there were bubbles popping out that clarified things a bit. Desktop wasn't clickable. Menu got me mad the more I tried to work with it. I could say, from my point of view (POV), this desktop is a wasted effort. If I wanted Gnome 3 I would use Gnome Shell, if not, I don't see the point of choosing this over Mate or XFCE. For me this was even more painful experience than Gnome Shell. It was like choosing the worst features from all the desktops I tried and putting them together.

So let's look how I start terminal. First I open a menu. Ugh. A bunch of icons, three columns, the first one without any text. Huge padding. The third column changes contents on hoover in the second column. I always hated dynamic menus on web and this is not an exception. Scrollbars everywhere because of the padding and fixed height. As I rarely start apps by typing their names, actually rather dislike doing it that way, this is absolute pain for me.

Now for the desktop background. As I noted earlier, desktop is not clickable. So I had to figure out how to change it. So, let's find settings. Oh, it's one of those icons without text…

This gets me into a common interface that I know from other desktops as well. This is good. No big issue here. One tiny complaint might be that theme, desktop and background are three separate tools. Also I wonder, why it uses different icons than the rest of the desktop?

So, let's click background.

Huge. What a huge waste of space. The images are neatly small, probably the ideal size, with a nice shading to boost, but that huge white-space totally kills it. Plus point for showing image name, minus for not showing image author. Furthermore, our background is missing. Because it's XML. It's supported (as evident by it being actually used as background), but not selectable. Someone who actually uses Cinnamon should fill bug about it. The background changes on click. Space waste is common with Gnome. The All Settings button could have been on the same row with the Close one. There is no single reason why one should be at the top and the other at the bottom.

GNOME

First impression terrible. Black theme, grey washed-out symbolic icons, no pop-up bubbles, no menu. Animation everywhere. Second impression better than Cinnamon, still not usable for me. Inexplicable removing/hiding of useful features, re-adding some of them three releases later, sometimes adding unneeded steps in-between (read on for more info on this). However it's actually usable desktop. It would be a pain for me, but it would probably be easy to use for my grandma, for kids used to touch interfaces on iPads, for game console or for browsing the internet (after all, it basically behaves like something between the web and modern Android-powered phones and it uses web technologies like javascript and css *ugh*).

Now on to the terminal. First go to top-left to open activities. Empty. As its primary task is probably switching between windows, I haven't entered any menu yet. First I have to click on the icon that looks like grid nodes (what's the idea? It does not even remotely suggest that this will get me app list).

Huge. So I finally got into the menu. With huge icons and (when compared to the icon size) small text. Weird looking scroll-bars everywhere. So next step is select category (you don't expect me to find Terminal among zillions of uncategorized apps, right?) and find terminal. Animations everywhere.

It's better than cinnamon, but the two steps to get into menu are strange and ineffective. Gnome Shell isn't optimized for using mouse. But lets continue to background selection. This is the worst background selection I've ever seen. I think the following four pictures speak for themselves, but let's explain a little bit first. So again, desktop is not clickable so I need to go through control center. Let's skip for now the fact that I don't see Theme or Appearance there (maybe I forgot to install something), the control center is categorized (like in XFCE) and Background is there. No issue from me. Kudos for the categorization. But then, after selecting Background, a completely useless window appears. It just shows the desktop. Whoa. Does that mean there are no pictures to select from? No. The desktop is actually clickable. I don't understand why this single step is included. It obviously extraneous, unneeded, confusing. Then the selection itself normal. I can select from installed backgrounds, pictures from XDG_PICTURES or plain color. The UI could be better, it could be worse, but it serves its purpose. The pictures are big, but there isn't too much of white space in between them, so no issue. However. Neither picture name, nor its author is present. Fail. The background does not change until I click Select.

One common thing about gnome and cinnamon is it's use of awful flat grey everywhere. No single hint of colour or shaded gradient. In sheer contrast to the next DE.

KDE

This takes a lot of time to actually start, but then you are finally welcomed by a desktop that looks like designed by an artist. Yes. This is the only Fedora desktop that looks great and consistent. It can be clearly seen the theme has been designed by professionals and lots of time has been invested in it. For my taste it has too much animations, but knowing KDE it can be probably turned off. UI is another story though. Not my cup of tea, but about half of linux users like this, so I'll say it's good and detailed but for me it offers too much detail, it easily becomes overwhelming. It does not usually waste space. This is a desktop I could use after a bit of customizing.

Now let's start terminal. Like many people are used to from file managers, right-click on desktop offers you to start terminal in KDE. So +1 from me.

Another way is through menu. The design is similar to cinnamon, but works better. It looks like cinnamon took the idea from KDE, kept its worst parts (fixed size, scrollbars anywhere, change menus on hoover) and made it even worse by adding gnome-like bits. While it behaves menu like, it's still in the same place, things get replaced, and due to fixed size, scrollbar is not uncommon. This is one of the worst parts of KDE, from my POV, but unlike Cinnamon or GNOME it does not get on my nerves.

To change desktop wallpaper, right-click on it and select Default Desktop Settings. I don't fathom the word Default in the name, but other then then all cool. What comes up is finally something that has done things right.

The image sizes are reasonable, white space is neither too big nor too small and most importantly, it shows both name and author of the wallpaper. Let's repeat it because it's important. KDE is the only Fedora desktop environment that shows both wallpaper name and its author in its Desktop Background selection app. This is how it should be done. The only thing that would make it even better would be to also show the license. You need to click Apply to change the background.

LXDE

Lightweight desktop with all it takes. It's fast, it works, but it's simple. Configuration might take longer than in other DEs but it looks like highly usable desktop if you don't mind less features. Now let's start terminal. Finally a sensible categorized menu without scroll-bars. As expected, terminal is quickly found.

Changing the wallpaper is also standard. Right-click on desktop and select Desktop Preferences.

The selector itself is light weight. No previews, just a file chooser and a few more options. Cannot probably expect much more from a lightweight desktop, right? And it does it's work without any unnecessary steps.

Mate

A direct continuation of a desktop I used to use. This is fork of Gnome 2 with the intention to provide and upgrade Gnome 2 experience and as such it behaves. Nothing unexpected. Menus work as usual, icons have colour, things are usually efficient. I still could use this, but nowadays I prefer XFCE. So let's start terminal. It's almost the same as in LXDE.

Nothing really wrong here, but too big icons and too much padding. If you have small screen or many apps, scrollbars appear. There's an option to start it from desktop context menu like in KDE as well.

Same goes with desktop settings. Directly accessible from desktop context menu. This is what we get.

Image size good, padding could be smaller, but just like with GNOME – no name, no author. Fail. Wallpaper changes on click.

Xfce

I'm not sure in which category this falls. It's not lightweight like LXDE, it's similar to gnome 2, but it's not gnome 2 ;-) Currently my desktop of choice so I skip on praising this time, only one note – the default config looks "bleh", but its actually highly tweakable and after some time it can be made look really good (although partly due to the lack of really professional looking GTK2/3 themes not as good as KDE). Starting terminal in XFCE is quickest of all the DEs I've tried thanks to special launchers to "Preferred Applications" that are also included in default bottom panel.

It can be also started from menu. It's similar to Mate, but it's all-in-one solution. There isn't separate menu for Settings and Administration. The icons are smaller, there's less padding so it takes much longer for scrollbars to appear. This is what I like the most.

Terminal can also be stared from desktop context menu.

Background selector can be run from the same place as well. This is what it looks like.

No waste of space, preview included, simple selector. No name, no author, but filename is present, so while it isn't fail, there's still lots of room to improve. Wallpaper changes on select.

Conclusion

While I was writing this, I realized that even though I write it alphabetically, it also reflects how I like the DE I write about – the first one least, the last one most. Interesting coincidence. If I had to draw some conclusion I'd say that traditional desktops are very good for starting applications, terminal especially, KDE is midway and GNOME and Cinnamon lag behind. I think the change from menu to something else is making things worse rather than better (this counts for Windows 7 as well, I find it very hard to find an app I want to start there without using keyboard). When selecting background, KDE is the obvious winner with both being quick and easy and providing most of important information. Gnome and Cinnamon both fail tremendously in this. Last, when it comes to design, KDE is the obvious winner with a very professional polished look, traditional GTK2 based desktops are so-so with lots of room for improvement, Cinnamon and GNOME are terrible and very amateurish from my POV.

So in short, while I use Xfce, and will continue doing so, from this short comparison, KDE comes out as the winner.

Who the heck are modern desktops for?

This question has been bugging me for a while since GNOME 3. Nowadays in advanced countries, computer education is part of regular school curriculum. Children are taught what is CPU, what is graphics card, what is memory, how to turn on/off computer, how to behave on the net, how to use word processor, tabular calculator, presentation maker, sometimes even databases or easy programming. Unless in really rich school they are taught usually on something like Windows XP, they know the classical desktop. And they are confused by interfaces like Windows 7 and Gnome shell.

I am 24, my first desktop was Windows 3.11 (at school), then I grow up on Windows 95/98/2000 and Windows XP after finally switched to linux. I'm not that old to not be able to adapt, yet after years spent with linux I find the old Windows ineffective (just find something it the long non-categorized menu of theirs or try to run a few apps at once) and just recently I had to navigate Windows 7 with a touchpad. Let me tell you, it was a major pain in the ass. In my family everyone except me now uses Windows 7 on regular basis and they always complain about it. I haven't heard them ever complain about user interface when in Win XP or Gnome 2.

So why do the heck do we need the change that makes an assumption that presenting user with huge icons of every app installed instead of neat two-level categorized menu is more easy to use (it does not take a very bright person to tell that Movie Player would be categorized under Sound&Video)? Why do we need a change that makes an assumption that customization is a bad thing (I believe that different people have different needs and customizing a desktop to certain level can make it more effective to use for them)? Why do we need a change that effectively tells you that having more terminal windows open at once is a bad thing (yes, even though most common terminal emulators have tabs, I still find it more effective in certain cases to have three or four windows of terminal opened at once and nicely tilted on the desktop)? Why do we need a change that hides your favourite apps when not in "Activities" overview?

Who the heck is the modern desktop designed for? Honestly saying, not for me and not for anyone I know personally either.

Maybe It's Me Who's "Obsolete"

Lately I've been thinking that maybe the reason why I don't get along with GNOME 3 is not gnome's fault but rather my fault. Why? Here's a couple of reasons.

• I prefer real paper and pen when it comes to math/physics, which however wastes lots of time…
• Capitalistic society is kind-of maze-like for me.
• In lots of tasks I prefer CLI/TUI to GUI tools.
• I have neither facebook nor twitter account.
• I prefer acoustic musical instruments to electronic ones.
• I prefer to write (x)html/css in text editor, i.e. with all the tags written by hand.
• I use TeX.
• I prefer classical music to popular music (in a sense of rock, metal, hip-hop, pop, disco, ...)
• I find kissing in public place embarrassing if not inappropriate (isn't that personal stuff?).
• Sometimes I wish I were born in pre-industrial era in some scarcely-populated forested mountains.
• I prefer real books to e-books and still read them (currently I'm reading Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami).
• My primary means of e-communication is e-mail, but I prefer meeting and talking with people IRL.
• I use mobile phone solely for making calls, writing/reading sms and checking trains' schedules, I don't have a smartphone.
• I dislike dynamic web, the most I can fathom is youtube, e-shopping and e-banking.
• I think playing with C preprocessor, fortran, ruby etc. is fun. I don't like Java, C++ and C#.
• I prefer 2D computer games to 3D ones.
• I believe getting a girlfriend is always because in the long run I'd like to marry her. I dislike divorce and "love promiscuity" (i.e. changing girlfriends/boyfriends often), (although on the other hand I don't mind different than usual kinds of set-ups [like gay or lesbian marriage, harem, reverse harem, etc.] and consensual prostitution [i.e. offering sexual services as a paid and taxed product without either party being forced into it])
• I believe that the inside is more important than looks in case of (wo)men.
• Ok, this list is long enough, isn't it? Time to stop it with: I don't like parties and loud music.

Looking at this list, it seems pretty obvious why I'm frustrated with GNOME 3 and happily switched to XFCE since Fedora 15 (and why, despite me being 23, I still don't have a girlfriend)…

Change is sometimes good, but…

…at other times it might not be so. The example of the latter is IMHO the abrt icon. Originally it was something like this:

and now it looks like this:


What I'm getting at, you might ask. Well, the new icon obviously looks much better and more polished but has one serious problem – I have not the slightest idea what the hell does it mean. Not to talk about the tiny fact that e.g. when it appears in my [bottom] panel (which is transparent and bellow it is F15's default background) it looks like nothing more than a strange 'A'. You know, when the old red siren with exclamation mark appeared everyone could tell that something went wrong, now he'll be just confused with what the strange 'A' means.

On a side note – almost all these GNOME3 greyscale icons are IMHO either ugly (good example of this is the new input-method sys-tray icon) or unusable with any other background than what they were designed for. Please, I want my colourful icons in systray in XFCE back, tell me what to do.

On another side note – if I find the time, I'll write a, hopefully short, critique on Gnome 3 default GTK theme Adwaitha which I think has great albeit wasted potential drown in inconsistency (like some widgets are designed very nicely with evidently lots of effort being put into them while others look like half-finished lets-put-something-plain-and-suggestive-here-and-maybe-improve-it-later kind of designs).

Unhappy with Gnome 3? Just ditch it!

What are the reasons to be unhappy? I bet most of you would guess. I'd just like to add that there's substantial difference between KDE 4.0 and GNOME 3.0 release and that is — while KDE 4.0 was just premature release, GNOME 3.0 is broken by design. No amount following minor releases can fix that. Yes, most of the changes to GTK 3.0 are good and enable people to work with this toolkit in a better way, but that's where GNOME 3 goodies ends. Unless you want a highly usable open-source software for tablet, Gnome 3 probably isn't for you.

And as Fedora 15 Alpha is behind the doors it's a good opportunity to try out other desktop. If you liked Gnome 2.x series you're probably left up with two options: KDE, which finally matured to be feature complete again, and XFCE which is steadily becoming better. LXDE seems poorly maintained at the moment so I wouldn't recommend it. And of course, if you, in addition, want a gtk based desktop then XFCE is the only option (right now).

XFCE is surprisingly configurable and with a bit of effort it can be turned from ugly duckling to pretty (and usable!) desktop. Say, would you guess the screenshot bellow is actually XFCE?


OK, I agree, it's not as mature as KDE or Gnome 2.x series but I guess if enough of us put our money where our mouths are we could accelerate its development considerably. As a starter, let's identify the issues ;-)

Two Things in F15 That Are New For Me

• I switched to Fedora n+1 even before Alpha for the first time. Full-time. And I'm not looking back.
• I'm using XFCE now and I'm not looking back.

So if I had to find anything positive on GNOME 3 it would be that it brings more attention to alternatives, mostly XFCE. So I propose this: "Let's stop shouting about Gnome 3, where we are not being listened to, and try our luck with XFCE." So I started a wiki page for gathering suggestions (feel free to add yours/start discussion on its discussion page). The goal is: make XFCE rock in Fedora 16.

Why I Think Gnome 3 Is a Dead End

In short because it's cat-dog. What I mean is – what is the new gnome target audience? To me it seems like it tries to satisfy everyone which obviously cannot work. Let's look at the potential users who might want to use it.

Newcomers. Imagine a computer virgin. He buys a computer (like he would buy say a television) already preconfigured and pushes the power button. Now what should he do when it is fully booted? How to present the workspace to him? I think "start" button from windows wasn't a totally wrong idea – the user sees it and thinks: "oh, I'm probably supposed to start here". The menu itself however was always badly executed. Too many applications with strange names, sometimes even in categories.

Gnome shell uses activities button instead of start button which is probably a little bit less suggestive but should give away pretty easily what it does. And instead of menu you're presented with table. Again filled with zillions of icons and non-familiar names like firefox. What the hell is that? And the user is lost. Now one thing that I don't completely understand is the need for activities button at all if there was made a decision to keep desktop clean of icons. The desktop could be well used for presenting the user with what he can do. However the main point is how to present him the apps. Surely a big globe labeled "browse the web", two heads seemingly chatting labelled "chat with friends" or notebook with pen writing something on it labeled "write a document" would give the user much better idea what to do than firefox wrapped around globe labeled "firefox", blue connected heads labeled "empathy" and stylized oo-writer icon labeled "OpenOffice.org Writer".

Furthermore, the less options the user is presented with, the better. He does not need to be presented on his workspace with 10 different apps doing the same thing. The maximum that could be presented to him is some sort of artsy icon labeled "personalise your workspace" with all the settings. The settings would, as its label suggest, let him stylize his desktop look and for slightly more knowledgeable users let them choose whether they want to browse the internet with firefox or chrome (for example) or how early they want screensaver to kick in in case of inactivity.

Also, since people use their notebooks increasingly also for presenting, setting up dual head should be almost one of the easiest things on the world. User plugs in an external projector/monitor, dialog pops up that he did so and how he wants to set it up – clone or extend his current workspace. Nothing more, nothing less.

He is also the type of user that will probably not work on multiple things at once, however e.g. when writing a document he'll switch to and fro between the composer window and one or other window with a reference he uses. This needs to be done also suggestively and ideally without zooming out/in. Probably some sort of semi-intelligent sliding.

As you can guess, gnome-shell tries a bit to appeal to these users but it's stuck up half way because of the following groups.

Windows/Mac Escapee. This kind of users already know how to use a computer, have some favourite apps and are expecting to be more or less able to keep their current work-flow. Gnome shell breaks that and will probably scare them away.

Power users. Working with many apps at the same time, relying a lot on terminal, customizing their desktop to best fit their needs. These will be annoyed with how gnome shell works. It slows their workflow, shuts them off of some settings they've been using for ages (like turn off display on laptop lid close) presents them with unnecessary animations. I don't know how for others, but for me gnome-shell makes e.g. writing a code (which in my case requires switching to and fro between terminal, file manager, gedit and web browser) pain it the butt.

Still from the design it seems like these people were thought of as well when making gnome shell. But that's the problem. It stopped halfway. It tries to be both for power users and newbies and ends up neither. Sorry, but I really can't see a way to satisfy both camps and that's why I think gnome 3 is bound to fail. And it's going to drag Fedora 15 down with it (being the default DE). But only time will show whether I'm right or wrong.

Disclaimer. This post contains only my personal opinions and it does not represent any usability studies or interest groups' positions and as such it might be utterly wrong, so the best you can do is to disagree with me and wait a few months/years to see who was actually wrong :D

Nitpicking on XFCE

As you might have noticed together with switching to Rawhide I've also switched to XFCE recently. Now that I'm quite used to it and have set it up in a way that it looks almost like my previous gnome set up, there are still some things that I don't like (or I am just dumb enough to don't know how to get rid of them :D).

So let's start with an obligatory screen-shot of my current desktop.
And now to actual complaints ;-) Beginning with the things that are on the screen-shot. I cannot drag-n-drop window buttons between themselves. I used this a lot in gnome to resort the windows for the ordering more functional than (like keeping the mail client always on the furthest left), I does not seem to be able to do that with xfce. Next comes the clock applet. I've found three none of which is perfect (one does not show date, another one does not have transparent backgrounds) with the one displayed being best. But as you see it's a bit cramped. IMHO there should be some space between the time and date, or an option to display it along side, not one above the other…

So, that was the top panel, now for desktop. For some reason right-clicking on the desktop peaks the cpu load and takes a while before menu appears (only for the first try, subsequent tries are reasonably fast). But the main issue are the filled rounded rectangles behind icon labels and way too big grid – I don't want only the wallpaper behind the icon labels and I want the icons to be closer together (while still this big). Another problem is when clicking on an icon it always opens thunar instead of the default file manager.

Now for the things in bottom panel. As I recall the workspace switcher behaves a little bit odd when setting up – when you switch number of rows of workspaces it takes effect only after re-logging which is a bit confusing (one is led to believe that it does not works only to be confronted with a working 2-row set-up after next log in).

Next is thunar. It seems to be a nice file manager but it lacks two killing features that were added in recent gnome releases to nautilus – tabs and two-panel browsing. While tabs are just more efficient substitutions for multiple windows, two-panel browsing makes moving and/or copying files around really pleasant. I hope the devs have it on their to-do list because, as I wrote before, using nautilus in xfce is kind of suboptimal.

And probably my final complaint is about setting up dual head. At home I have plasma TV which I can connect to via VGA cable. The problem is that while it supports 1368x768 60Hz resolution via this connection, it reports only 1024x768 60Hz, so I have to add that mode manually via xrandr. So far this is OK, this way it worked before in gnome as well. However even when I add that mode, the xfce config utility stubbornly refuses to set it up. Sigh. And to top it, there does not seem to be any way, in gui, to set the two monitors (integrated display and TV in this case) to be say next to each other. They're always over themselves and again I have to use xrandr directly to set the layout correctly.

And so that's probably all. And despite these little issues, I think XFCE is a really nice desktop environment almost ready to harbour all escapees from Gnome 3 in Fedora 15 ;-) In short, fix these above mentioned issues and it would probably be fully ready ;-)

Back to the Future – On Rawhide Again

So, I decided to give Rawhide a go and installed it as my second system (and thus replacing F12, because I skipped F13). So, here are some thoughts.

Given my position on gnome-shell (I really don't like it) I decided to give a go to something lightweight, so I downloaded lxde nightly build. Aah, it was a disaster. Whatever display manager was supposed to start was crashing, so I had to log in to tty and run startx manually. That worked, luckily. I didn't like the booted desktop environment one bit, but lots of other bits so I installed it to hard-drive. Of course, it haven't fixed the booting issue.

So I tried to set it up as I'd like, but eventually gave up. Few weeks after that, I downloaded Desktop live and booted. My impression was: "have my PC turned to next-gen TV, err home multimedia center?" Still I decided to install it (to replace the lxde try), but no luck – due to a bug in anaconda, it thinks it's not live image…

So I've done it the harder way. Reboot to lxde, log-in, update, group-install gnome, install system-switch-displaymanager-gnome and set display manager to gdm. Nice, after that I finally got working graphical log-in, although during boot error message appears, that something cannot find root, but apparently it works. Let me add a little side comment here: the boot sequence is totally useless. Even if I escape from the graphical plymouth progress indicator, not boot messages appear. Whatsoever. How the hell am I supposed to tell that the booting actually is still in progress and not hogged up on some service?

But back to the main theme. So I logged in to gnome-shell (to my disappointment same looking as on desktop nightly) and tried it to use for a while. And I have to say, what was bad is even worse and the most important things I wanted (useful and quick way to switch between windows in one concrete task) are still not there. Desktop/task visualisation got small with no windows indicators on it whatsoever, so how the hell am I supposed to tell to which task do I want to switch? If I had to summarize my impression of gnome shell, it would be probably disappointment with trying to make PC from work tool into a tool for consuming, i.e. gnome shell would be awesome if it was a user interface to next-gen home media center or tv, but it's irritating when you actually want to work using it.

Next, not succeeding in finding a way to switch back to the old-school gnome, I group-installed xfce. I'm pretty impressed how fast and responsive these light-weight things are. On the flip side I had to get rid of gmixer to have only one sound-controlling applet in system try (why the hell do they still ship gmixer when pulseaudio mixer is now superior to it in more than one way?). Next I had a little trouble with configuring the panels – no spacing thingie, desktops do not show in two rows until next log in, there's no way to make them transparent… Texts bellow icons on desktop have some weird solid color background and there seems to be no way to turn it off, I cannot resort window buttons in "Window Buttons" panel applet, there seems to be no way to turn on compositing… But overall xfce seems to be usable.

I even switched, for the time being, to sylpheed mail client, which was installed by default on lxde spin. Even though its icons are rather ancient, the user interface is clean and easy to use and it seems much faster than evolution. But there still seem to be applications from gnome that I need like empathy, nautilus (yes I got addicted to two panel mode pretty hard), rhythmbox.

So in short, unless gnome-shell is postponed again, so long and thanks for all the fish and count me as new xfce user :-D

Oh, and btw. despite being still pre-alpha, rawhide is actually working pretty well (apart from annoying occasional graphic errors, new black&white gnome try icons [see the picture bellow] and unfinished gtk3 theme)!



EDIT: Actually I just found that compositing is possible with xfce so I have the bottom panel transparent again and windows have shadows :-)

EDIT 2: And now I have found how to rid myself of the weird looking frame around system try and how to add expansible space into panel so I have the bottom panel spanning whole screen again. Nice, I'm starting to like xfce more and more.

Upstream vs. Downstream—Clash of Visual Identities

In the past eight years or so, Gnome Desktop enjoyed more or less small yet steady improvements that have brought it to where it is now—IMHO one of the best desktop environments. However, along with the side push from the over-hyped release of KDE4, there has been a growing number of people who wished for a major change, instead of steady improvement. Their efforts are to be realized in GNOME 3 which will most likely be in Fedora 15. Let alone, for now, the tiny problem that this messes up my workflow in a way that it is much less efficient albeit much more eye-candy-ish. That's not the point of today's post. Today I want to focus on the problem of visual identity.

It is understandable that with such a big release upstream seeks even more aggressively to promote it. Along with the visual identity. And thus there is a request for Fedora 15 to use Gnome 3 wallpaper for Gnome 3 desktop. And here comes the problem—upstream wants its visual identity, while downstream also wants its own visual identity.

For a linux distro the ideal case is that across all flavours, the visual identity is the same. The work-flow, style, etc. remain DE specific, but widget theme, window decorations, panels, wallpapers, icons, fonts are consistent through them all. Of course I doubt there is any community around a specific distro, except maybe Canonical when they put their money into it, that can achieve that.

On the other side of the spectrum is upstream ideal case where all distros look the same. However this is in direct clash with the above ideal.

So how to solve this for Fedora? In past releases we have proven that we are able to make part of that identity—wallpapers and everything connected with them. And do it once per release. Should we now yield and use upstream defaults for F15, for GNOME? Should we treat them special? Remember, KDE4 wasn't treated specially back then. Why should GNOME be now?

While I understand why would upstream developers want that, I still think they should focus on promoting something different than visual identity. Yeah, they ought to use a consistent theme for that promotion, something that is available on all distributions as at least a second choice, something that "smaller" distributions without well-established design team could use. Something that we could call the canonical visual identity. However, they should not push it onto distributions. I think that if we are able to create a visual identity, or part of it, for Fedora specifically, we should, irrespective what anniversary any of upstream projects have, create and use it. As it is the visual identity that leaves the first impression and you should be able to tell just by looking that you're running Fedora when using defaults. And that's the memo, now shoot me :-D

PS: And of course, as part of Fedora, we should be the first to actually achieve the ideal of having a cross-DE single visual identity created fully by a community and the ones to push any changes necessary to make it possible upstream (not like Canonical who just like to reinvent a wheel instead of improving the almost-wheel).

PPS: Yes, Fedora is all about upstream, but IMHO that makes sense in bug reporting/fixing, feature implementing, etc., not in default settings.

Change default font sizes rather than DPI

it's easy and most likely the correct way to change your font size

My Idea of Future Gnome Desktop

Since I read a blogpost about GTK+ 3.0 Theming API Hackfest I've been thinking about how would like the Gnome 3 desktop to be... First I've had some more general ideas like: support real transparency everywhere, desktop should serve as a place for wallpaper and widgets, not as a storage room occupied by nautilus, gnome-panel should look slicker and be more interactive, ... But yesterday I've tried cairo-dock (which I haven't figured at all how to set it to not crash and work how I would like it) and that rather short experience gave me more clear idea what I'd like it to be.

First let's see what my desktop looks like now


There are two panels and an improvised storage room on the nautilus managed part more concretely:

• Menus
• Window list
• NetSpeed Applet
• CPU monitor
• Keyboard switcher
• Clock
• Desktop Switcher
• Application launchers
• Various session related applets - lock screen, log out, shut down
• Volume
• Trash
• Notification area
• Timetable
• Some documents, etc. on desktop

I find this layout particuraly useful since most things I am doing repeatedly are available on single click and the rest is two clicks ;-) Also thanks to the timetable on the desktop, figuring out which classes I have today is a matter of few seconds. And finally thanks to the network and cpu monitors I see how much I download/upload and how cpu behaves.

On the flip side this layout takes up a lot of space, the window list gets quickly filled, some of it feels rather duplicated with tray area (you know the 'minimize to tray' funcionality of nowadays's apps). Also the desktop itself feels cluttered and I cannot make the timetable bigger - the current size is as far as nautilus is able to scale.

And here's my (well let's say I rather put together various ideas from various people) solution trying to improve the usability as well as slickness (please note that the folowing image was made in inkscape, so it's not a real screenshot)



Now what has changed... Nautilus is no longer managing the desktop which in turn now serves as place for various widgets. I've put there the timetable in it's desired size (image widget - place an image you'd like on the desktop with desired size) and two monitor wigets - one for CPU and another for network. I can also imagine puting there a weather forecast, calendar, big analog clock, ...

Next thing that changed is that panel is no more. Instead there are two more widgets on the desktop - desktop switcher and dock area. There's not much to describe about the workspace switcher, just that it looks nicer and is not in any panel. More describing is due for the dock. Basically it's a reminiscent of the panel, but it's transparent, 3D-like and I've removed all differences between applets, application launchers, notification/tray area and window list.

The combination of launchers serving also for window list isn't a new idea, I've already seen it implemented in the cairo-dock, though due to frequent crashes I had not much fun with it. But as I said, I'd go even one step farther and merge also the tray icons. The idea behind is that there actually is no difference between those so why should we make one. It also saves a lot of space.

And now how it would work? Let's say I want to launch an audio player. I click on the audio player icon and it starts. The icon buttonises (shown with epiphany launcher) and starts to behave like it now behaves in task list and/or notify area. Right-click will hide (or focus if it is not focused) the window in the icon another right-click will bring it back, left-click will show a menu with the usual commands like play, previous, next, etc.

Now for pure notify icons it would behave slightly different, e.g. right-click on the signal icon (network-manager) will open a menu where you can select networks you'd like to connect to, left-click will open a menu with additional settings, just like it behaves now.

For the applications without their tray icon the launcher starts serving as a button in window list - right-click for minimize/focus, left-click for window menu.

When you'd want to open new window instead of focusing the current one, just hold shift and click the icon, or select new window from the menu that apears when you hoover over it. Windows of the same app would be grouped together and you'd select which one you'd like to choose by selecting one from the menu that appears when you hoover over the icon.

Next thing you can notice on the dock is menu and places. This would be similar to the Applications menu and Places menu, optionally the System menu as well, with the tiny difference that it would open on hoovering instead of mouse click.

This setup would mean that you'd have almost any action available for use on single click.

Final word to say about this is configurability, I think the dock should have an easy way how to manage the applets that are on it, prefereably similar to how you do it now with gnome-panel. The cairo-dock configuration window is a total no-no for me - in the basic view I wasn't able to set-up anything I wanted and in the Advanced view there was so much options that I got lost very quick.

Some WebKit news

Ok, with the recent talks about brand new browser by Google, I think I can post some "status-update" on the state of WebKit-gtk. Why? Because google chrome uses WebKit as its rendering engine - and that's very good news. With Google being directly interested in WebKit development we could say that bright future awaits. Google uses it, QT4.4 has it in, now we only need to implement it in gnome.

Among various speed and stability improvements there is one big news for me (at least) in the WebKit bugzilla. Patch [1] for correct font fallback (so far only for freetype backend) for the gtk port of WebKit [2]. I've built a RPM package [3] with this patch included and the result is great - I can finally read Japanese with WebKit.

One of the worse news is that it seems Epiphany 2.24 will still use gecko, well, what can I say... Take your time and do it right and I'll be happy to wait (and test and report bugs) :-p

[1] https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=23155&action=view
[2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16792
[3] http://mso.fedorapeople.org/packages/RPMS/i386/WebKit-gtk-1.0.2-0.15.svn35913.fc9.i386.rpm

My Dissapointment with Fedora 9

Firts let me say - no, I am not going away from Fedora 9, but this release seems fatal for my sister's desktop computer (but works quite fine on my laptop).

When I first installed Fedora 9 (around beta) I was possitively impressed with it, as many things were improved and appart from video slowness everything seemed fine. The video fix required some action on my part + waiting for final. I switched to EXA in xorg.conf and in some of the updates for intel driver the slowness went away. If it wasn't for recent happenings I'd call Fedora 9 the best release ever, but now I am inclined to say the opposite - the worst Fedora release ever.

First brasero does not burn anything. It gets to the burn process, but never writes anything on the DVD, neither shows any progress (remains at 0%) nor any crash/fail messages. However it does not wreck the DVD and nautilus burned it fine, so I thought - oh, upstream has some bugs, it'll get fixed eventually.

But in the past two weeks I've encountered updates that broke a lot. First my computer started freezing (hard freeze) when connecting to wireless. Ok I switched to wired and waited for the fix (it's already fixed). Then gdm stopped loading. Ok I startx-ed from runlevel 3 to get my desktop running and waited for next update of gdm which fixed things. Today, I tried to burn an iso image of xfce spin of Fedora 9 I generated yesterday for purposes I describe later in the post. Nautilus fails. WTF? I remembered some rant about Fedora 9 updates on the planet fedora, in which the author said burning as user broke. So I tried burning it as root - successfully.

Well, as I use updates-testing, I can say these things are kinda expected, so I take them more like some kind of fun - you know, it's boring when everything works all the time :-D But that's for my laptop. Sister's desktop computers seems to hate Fedora 9.

The configuration is pretty old, odd and self-built - Athlon 900 MHx, GeForce 2 MX 400, 512 MB RAM, two HDDs (10 GB and 200 GB), one DVD burner, wifi card, SB Audigy 2. But it sort of worked with Fedora 6 - except for the wireless card. It was so much of a hassle to get it to work, that neither me (who wasn't able to get it work when we bought it), nor my father (who painfully got it work after hours spent on internet) wanted to do again. That's the reason I haven't upgraded to Fedora 7 or 8. Finally, in Fedora 9 the wireless card works out of box and my sister for some reason needed OpenOffice.org 2.4, so I decided to upgrade.

At first I had some problems with mislabled LVM (I have it extended over the two HDDs to gain more space). This I fixed with some help at, IIRC test-list (Fedora 9 was still in beta stage and I thought it was a bug in anaconda). Nevertheless I got it eventually installed.

I installed it using Live CD, because that way I can test if it works and the installation is faster. However after some time (and updates) problems started to appear - settings started to break. First what you notice is either missing wallpaper in GDM or notification message saying that default configuration for power manager is missing. WTF is that?! This does not happen all the time, which is strange even more. Also the worst case is after login missing icons in menus, missing wallpaper, metacity (if it is metacity) loaded in some strange mode with only window caption and one button in windows, panels layout totally off, half of the applications not working.

So I decided to try again and do another clean install. Install went fine, first log-in as well, but then kerneloops. Hm... I tought, it might not be fatal and sent that oops to devs. The issued yum update. During the update process, I got another kernel oops and several crashes - mostly of gconftool2 during some post-install stuff of some packages. Of course, after restart, the computer behaved broken and after loggin in, I got another kernel oops.

So one another install. Went fine, logged in, everything OK. Logged out - problem here: settings again could not be loaded. OK, restart to runlevel 3, startx and see if everything is OK, and do the updates, for convenience, do the updates from my laptop via ssh. Everything was OK, only on the command line I noticed a warring that /home/mso/.metacity/sessions/default.ms is missing. But that seems to be OK. After the updates I rebooted the computer to see, that it broke again. So reboot to runlevel 3 and startx to see that the computer is still broken. Also this time I got various gconf related messages, like that cursor size is set to 0 which is invalid, that window manager is not set, ... Also, when loggin in as mso, it says that /home/mso does not exist, even though I can cd to it :-/ That does not happen if I create new users, though the brokeness is even more for the new user - panel crash and the crash message displayed by bugbuddy is utterly useless.

So I decided to try build already up-to date spin - with xfce instead of gnome. Everything went fine, until disk formating with anaconda. It said that the disk is locked and crashed during format. Well, I give up now. I install once again the Desktop Spin, to have at least something on the computer and in the meanwhile I am downloading OpenSuSE 11.0 Gnome Live to see if it'll behave better.

Does anyone has suggestions how to fix/debug these issues, or what distro I might try?