What's Wrong with GNOME 3?

Well, I have been a GNOME user since Ubuntu 9.10. If you are like me, you tried KDE a couple of times but found it a little disappointing in a few respects. GNOME felt at home, well, that was back when it was GNOME 2. Now, it is a different beast altogether.

GNOME 3 uses an overview mode to show activate applications, it doesn't have a list of windows by default and its settings are hidden under menus that make the new user wonder what the he** was the GNOME team on when they were dreaming this masterpiece of sh** up.

Some of features in the desktop were removed because they were deemed unnecessary. I get that, but then they added a cow and pretended to yell wolf. It became a little weird if you know what I mean.

GNOME became slow. I mean, slow. It became slower than Ubuntu's Unity and slower than slow.

GNOME started to add useless applications, such as Weather and Clocks. And they started to add things, no one in their right mind uses, such as Documents for Google Docs. It just doesn't work properly and makes people feel like they are trapped in a box, all of a sudden.

They made folders for some of their applications in the menu. I get that. But only two??? What the freak! It works, but it needs a lot of improvement.

Well, GNOME wants to create their own OS for development purposes. Why? Don't they have their desktop environment to iron out the errors first. And why don't they pair up with, say, Fedora or OpenSuse. They might want that!

Anyway, it's been a journey. Happy computing!

What to expect for Elementary OS 0.3

Elementary OS, known also as eOS, looks somewhere between Ubuntu's Unity Desktop, MAC OS X's dock, and GNOME 3. It does what it sends out to do: be elementary. However, elementary being a project where most of the applications are home-brewed takes a while to make a release final. There are betas, but those can act out without a proper warning.

Elementary OS 0.3, the next version after the currently in development version Luna, will have some obvious features, and some we might wish to see, but probably won't be ready anytime soon, at least a year from now. One of those features will be in the window manager, Gala, two buttons will be revised. Close will close an application, but maximum/minimum will be fullscreen/non-fullscreen modes. I think that could work as their movie player in progress, Audience, has this functionality and it works on-the-wall right now. Whether this will be only for a few applications or all the applications, who really knows now?

Music and Audience will probably see many improvements and be integrated with each other. Geary, the default mail client, will see searching, and probably integrated with more email accounts, besides GMail and Yahoo! Mail. Empathy will become Chat, a fork more or less. Lastly, AppCenter will replace Ubuntu's Software Center, and following that, GDEBI, this is found on Linux Mint by default, will be included by default for DEB handling.

The elementary theme, known as eGTK, will be updated to work with the version of GNOME on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. And elementary icon theme will probably change quite a bit, too.

All default applications will be renamed to simpler names, such as Chat and Photos. And someone will develop a torrent client, a naive YouTube client, etc. (all third-party apps of course)

These applications listed above are what I would like to see come to Elementary OS 0.3, but they probably won't because the developers are choosy about what gets on the disc image, and I completely understand why.

Anyway, happy computing.