Gnome 4 Announced!

pete_1967 · #1 14th August 2012, 08:35 AM

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Almost exactly one year ago, GNOME 3 was released with much fanfare. But to the surprise of many, it was not warmly welcomed. Indeed, it has polarized the Linux community, mainly because it was such a radical departure from the familiar and popular GNOME 2. Although some praised the new interface, it seemed that many more geeks were not impressed, leading to a rather bitter war of words on various online community forums.

The main reason for all the controversy was that GNOME 3 boasted a much "cleaner" interface. By "clean," I mean that the desktop was far less cluttered. Visible menus and icons were far fewer than in GNOME 2, but the trade-off was that to access all the features of GNOME 3 it was necessary to use various esoteric keyboard combinations, including CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and even the previously-unused Windows key. In addition, right-mouse clicks and "hot corners" are crucial to making GNOME 3 functional. Many users feel that GNOME 3 is less intuitive than GNOME 2, and that productivity may suffer as a result.

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Despite the backlash, not everyone agrees that GNOME 3 was overambitious. Indeed, one experienced GNOME developer assured me that the opposite was true. "The real problem with GNOME 3," he said, "is that it wasn't ambitious enough. We made too many compromises to suit desktop users. In fact, computers that do useful work are so 20th century - we've moved on."

Thus, rather than compromise with GNOME 4, developers have doubled-down. While GNOME 3 sought to bridge the gap between desktop and portable devices, GNOME 4 goes one step further - it's meant to power ALL computing devices, even those which don't have a keyboard, mouse or screen. As such, it offers a refreshing break from the rigid, specialized operating systems of the past. Thus, we have one interface which can run anywhere. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife - one device that does everything, none of them well.

The official announcement

glway · #2 14th August 2012, 09:59 AM

I'm slightly confused here. Are they going to try and make it more shiny and flashy and effectively more of a pain to get used to or are they going to try and make it more usable? I get that there is a hype around tablets and other useless hardware like that but come to think of it none of those uses gnome and probably never will. If all the changes were made to fit someone's needs then why wasn't gnome 3 accepted very well. Personally I don't think I got to like it that much, rather than got used to it but let's face it-even the basic stuff was annoying. Try answering a skype call with those hot corners. It usually takes 5-6 clicks before you manage to hit the button. And come to think of it i think those exact hot corners were (and still are actually) the thing that annoyed me the most. As far as everything else-I'm fine with it. The large icons were also annoying but the css files did the trick for me... So my question remains-will they add more annoying features or will they try to stick with the more usable everyday "procedures"?