Fedora 28 gnome - horrible

[fedup4ever]

Once Fedora dropped gnome2 and moved to gnome3, I had to switch to MATE because I found gnome3 quite horrible to use. Now that Fedora 28 is out and many years have passed since I evaluated gnome3, I thought I'd give it another go.

Unfortunately, I found gnome3 equally horrible as I did so many years ago. For example, the virtual desktops are forcibly up/down only, while I prefer them to move left/right. Another example, is the uncustomizable toolbar, which can't have my own icons and applets. Overall, the "apple osx" idea of a single running app being the focus is horrible indeed, other desktops like MATE and Cinnamon are much more user friendly in that aspect, I can use more effectively my Ultra-wide monitor.

No wonder Fedora came up with the idea of spins, if it wasn't for them, I'd be long gone to some other distro. Currently, I use Cinnamon over MATE, its buggyer than MATE, has much less features and doesn't seem to have much of development, but it has a more modern UI.

Just my humble opinion

[alphacrucis]

I have been using gnome shell for a couple of years, I don't have any problem with it. I use a handful of extensions that improve the experience. dash to dock is a must.

[lsatenstein]

My understanding is that you, Fedupforever, are unable to adjust to another paradigm. Since Gnome is ubiquitous, it won't help you to switch distributions. As long as Mate satisfies your work/usage habitudes, stay with it. Perhaps you could try KDE plasma. It may please you and satisfy your left to right presentation accustomed way of using Linux.

Gnome has extensions. Did you explore "window list"? or Taskbar by zpydr.

Gnome is quite configurable.

[hrsetrdr]

Mate is my DE of choice, being a [former]longtime Gnome 2 user. I could "make" Gnome 3 work if I had to, but I'd rather exercise a Linux choice and go with a more favorable DE, rather than put up with a Windows like struggle to get an OS to serve the user, rather than forcing the user to re-invent their world.

[tankist02]

To make Gnome 3 usable I have to install a bunch of extensions and hope they won't break after next upgrade. With XFCE/Mate I have everything I need right there and they take less resources. The choice is obvious.

[fedup4ever]

First of all, thank you all for your comments.

I see that several people are quite happy with gnome3, but I have to agree with @lsatenstein above, that I am unable to adjust. But then again, why should I adjust?

The user interface is there to serve me and adjust to my needs, which is what @hrsetrdr above is right about, why "make" gnome3 work (with extensions, etc) when others (like mate/cinnamon) will work without any adjustments?

I asked a few new users to Linux, to try fedora 28 with gnome3 and all of them struggled to understand the user interface. So maybe gnome3 is doing more harm than good, to fedora as a default desktop? just wondering...

[antikythera]

possibly they should do a combined ISO of GNOME and KDE from which you choose during install which desktop to use. that way there's at least an alternative mainstream GUI available. there isn't the room to include all of the desktop environments available or the ISO would get way too large for people on capped bandwidth or very slow internet connections. there is of course the netinstall ISO with which you can already choose an alternative. again, this only works effectively for people with decent internet as it can take a long time to download and install the packages otherwise. if the connection drops during the install it's a pain to start it again.

[srakitnican]

I think it would make sense to include at one more additional window manager that is both easy on resources and have more traditional workflow. Something like openbox with a taskbar. That should not take too much of the ISO size, but would provide great convenience. Of course QA is then an issue to support additional software combinations. Especially since GNOME software is designed more or less to work only with GNOME, everywhere else just looks out of place.

[antikythera]

thread moved to reviews, rants, raves...

[joncr]

While I agree that Gnome 3 with its defaults and with no extensions adheres to awkward expectations about user behavior -- it is surprisingly amenable to keyboard users, which maybe isn't such a great thing for people who lean on their mouse -- there are certainly more than enough reliable extensions to make it worth while to look through them for tools to alter the interface to something more amenable to personal tastes. You can, for example, add a traditional bottom panel and a traditional menu in the left corner of that menu.

I think it's worth remembering that representation of virtual desktops amounts to a visual effect. The same thing happens regardless of how they are depicted on screen. That said, stock unaltered Gnome requires too many keystrokes to change desktops. (You can hold the Window key and use the mouse wheel to scroll between desktops but I prefer moving the mouse cursor out of application windows and scrolling the wheel there, without the need to use the keyboard.)

It's as easy to put as many individual app windows on screen in Gnome as in any other interface. I use dconf-editor to change the defaults about maximizing windows, disabling tiling, centering new windows, etc.

Agree that Fedora's Cinnamon spin is very nice. My main gripe, and it's trivial, is the paucity of themes, which I expect is due to the differences in GTK3 releases in Fedora vs Linux Mint.

I also find the windows managers in Gnome and Cinnamon, Mutter and it's derivative, Muffin, faster and smoother on my hardware than Marco in MATE. Subjectively, of course. But browser scrolling is visible better.

[bedtime]

Perhaps you could try KDE plasma. It may please you and satisfy your left to right presentation accustomed way of using Linux.

If one doesn't mind the bloat (i.e., has the resources to run it well) and one likes eye-candy, KDE can be a dream come true. But, if you want to give KDE a fair try on Fedora, please do a fresh install with a KDE spin disk; just throwing 'sudo dnf group install kde-desktop-environment' into the command line will get you it, but, at least for me, it will be very buggy. I've also heard several confirming reports of this. One bug was the inability to install any themes at all due to some type of url bug.

For some reason Fedora focuses more on programs as a whole and not individually. Gnome shell, for example, is extremely integrated in Fedora. Once you start stripping things away it tends to fall apart much more easily than Debian or Arch, in my experience. As well, minimal setups seem to take much more work in Fedora for me (ex., just installing xorg programs and manually issuing 'startx'...)

But, for some good news, selinux has been much improved in Fedora, and I've yet to have a single bug with it so for. I even have it kernel compiled for 'setenforce 1' (always on; cannot be shut off without recompiling the kernel). The other distros are not even close to Fedora's integration with selinux.

And I trust Fedora's out-of-the-box security much more then the latter distros; so, for me, it's worth the trouble.

[lsatenstein]

Hi Bedtime. Fedora Magazine / Planet Fedora or it was a Gnome Publicity posted an article about Gnome efficiency. Gnome developers and gurus have found ways to eliminate the tying up of 300megs of ram. Furthermore, they indicate that they can also optimise some of the code.

We are probably 5 to 6 months too early for those enhancements to trickle down to Fedora 28. Most likely, we will be seeing them at the tail end of Fedora 29 or within Fedora 30.

Sigh.

FWIW / FYI I run both KDE and Gnome from two separate drives. My default is Gnome 3.28.2 and that's because I started with it and know it better than KDE Plasma.
But eventually, as I use KDE more and more, it will become my default interface.

For my wife / kids and grandkids, their preference is Gnome, simply because they are intensive android cellphone users.