from Hacker News

GNOME 3: The Future of the Desktop

by obsaysditto on 7/15/10, 9:01 PM with 96 comments

• by rfrey on 7/15/10, 9:47 PM

  "This desktop will change the way people view, work with, and think of the desktop."

  I don't want to be a hater, and especially I don't want to disrespect the developers and designers who have put heart and soul in this and probably created some awesome stuff. But hyperbole like this example, and sprinkled elsewhere in the article, really gets my hackles up. I start looking at the pictures skeptically and my inner troll starts growling.

• by ThomPete on 7/15/10, 9:44 PM

  I really don't hope that is the future of the desktop. I mean really? Is that what we have to look forward to?

  In my world there can be no talk about the future of the desktop unless:

  The desktop metaphor and the current filesystem disappears.

  My machine starts to monitor what I do and actually use this (The Ghost Protocol)

  The machine starts to connect everything I do and build contextual maps automatically. For instance, I receive a picture in my mail and throw it into photoshop. When I then want to retrieve it I can not only look for name.psd but also for the context (Phil send it to me by mail)

  Then we can talk about a the future of the desktop.

• by bitwize on 7/15/10, 9:46 PM

  The OLPC's Activity metaphor is basically taking over and, having always loathed desktops and never understood why my computer must simulate a desktop (with all the clutter that implies), I like it.

  It's not just GNOME: iPhone, iPad, and Android apps are at their heart the same as activities (the Android API even uses com.android.Activity as the base class for Android apps).

• by Yaa101 on 7/15/10, 9:51 PM

  I am a Gnome user and I am not at all impressed, I liked Gnome because there was 1 way to do a certain task, now they gone the windows way of being able to do the task at many places, that is confusing and complicated. Gnome was simple but complete, but I guess fashion is more important than satisfied users, just like windows and OSX. I am not looking forward to the next fad.

  Anybody knows a simple and consistant and complete desktop that I can use when Gnome got screwed?

  B.T.W. I expect negative mod points for being viewed as nagger, but it is how I feel about this Gnome route.

• by SwellJoe on 7/15/10, 10:56 PM

  Workspaces are such an obviously great idea that it astounds me that Windows and Mac OS X still don't have them (I guess Mac OS X has a functional equivalent as of Leopard or Snow Leopard, if you squint right, but I find it less intuitive and I use it less even after months of having it available on my hackintosh). Given that they've been a part of X Windows window managers for a couple of decades, it's just astonishing that they've never made an appearance as a standard feature of other windowing systems.

  This, of course, isn't a new feature in GNOME 3, and so I guess it's not really relevant, but I just felt like ranting about the one thing that I think the Linux desktop has always had such a clear lead on, and that until you've used it you don't even know how much it sucks to not have it.

• by SandB0x on 7/15/10, 9:25 PM

  To see an image in full size, right click and choose "View Image" in Firefox or "Open Image in New Tab" in Chrome.

• by Goosey on 7/15/10, 9:22 PM

  Anyone else find this article really useless without being able to see the screen shots in higher resolution? I am interested in the UI improvements, but I won't be told about them. SHOW me.

• by pyre on 7/16/10, 2:56 AM

  The real question is: Does it have a feature to exclude certain files from the 'recently accessed files' list? There are many examples where you wouldn't want someone to see some of the files that you recently opened/worked with (i.e. top secret work, porn, whistleblower, etc).

• by jamesgeck0 on 7/16/10, 12:44 AM

  There are two features I'm excited about for Gnome 3 which were not mentioned. Both exist as ideas. Ideas are fragile, delicate things. Attack people, not ideas.

  The first is the "task pooper." http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/task-pooper-...

  The general idea is that things that pop up in your face are distracting, but notifications are good. Hence, the task pooper. It's a bar of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. You drop files and such into time slots on it, and they pop up again at the end (to either disappear into a filing system after a few seconds or be bumped back a few hours). I vaguely remember hearing something about being able to shove application notifications in it. Additionally, it can boil an egg at thirty paces.

  The second is Quicksilver/Launchy/Gnome-Do type functionality integrated at the GTK 3 level. http://www.cimitan.com/blog/2009/01/31/do-ifying-gtk-30/

  This will never happen, but it would be amazing. No more hunting for arcane menu items in The GIMP; just type "enable indexed color" or whatever. Alas, a strong argument against is would be that it would just encourages sloppy ui design, so I doubt we'll see it any time soon.

• by snitko on 7/15/10, 9:34 PM

  I don't see anything revolutionary or extremely interesting and useful here. (a + b) is the same as (b + a). Anyone remembers this link when someone made a prototype of a desktop interface that you could manipulate by all of your 10 fingers? That was truly awesome.

• by code_duck on 7/16/10, 3:27 AM

  Well, looks a bit more slick than Gnome 2, but not revolutionary. Kind of a step towards KDE 4, which was really a step towards MacOS. If they can make it less buggy and more performant than KDE 4 (and... one would hope) then I'm sure I'll enjoy using it.

  ps. Seriously, whomever put together this article for Linux.com is inepxerienced enough to embed 1920x1080 images directly into the page, rather than thumbnails?

• by imsky on 7/15/10, 9:57 PM

  So they implement Spotlight search/Windows key search, show tiled desktops like countless other apps for Windows/OSX, and call it the "future of desktop?"

  The GNOME people should pay more attention to design, like using better fonts and not drenching the entire screen with dark gray. The next version is just as ugly as the previous ones.

• by jksmith on 7/15/10, 10:23 PM

  If the "Future of the Desktop" still means having to do installs and updates, then I look forward to living in the past. I've even gotten sick of being harangued by Android updates.

  After having written code for 20 years, I want zero responsibility for somebody else's code, and that includes doing updates.

• by commandar on 7/16/10, 12:25 AM

  Interesting that, after years of being accused of ripping off the Mac, the new Activities interface looks a lot more like Windows 7 than anything OS X.

  I've always said that the Gnome team is more interested in adopting good UI paradigms; this seems to pan that out.

• by atiw on 7/15/10, 9:54 PM

  So, I kinda got a little too excited when I heard a new desktop. But then, I have already seen all these concepts pretty much, haven't I? From what I got form the article, it seems like we will only get a couple of new "shortcuts". I REALLY am hoping his headline is true, and we do get a new desktop experience at least, when this releases...and I would LOVE it if GNOME surprises me when it comes out and is more than what I think it is.

• by d0m on 7/15/10, 9:49 PM

  I sure will give it a try. The author is right when he said people stopped to find gnome innovating.. and this is a genius move from the gnome team.

  I hope there will be an easy shell command to use the activity "find". For instance, activity firefox would start it and activity test.py could show me the activity view with all my files named test.py, etc.

• by logic on 7/15/10, 9:45 PM

  As an FYI: Gnome 3 is on the feature list[1] for Fedora 14, scheduled for release near the end of October[2].

  [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14/FeatureList

  [2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/14

• by jimbokun on 7/15/10, 9:34 PM

  Kudos for moving past the "let's just try to look like XP" design stage to thinking about how to improve usability.

• by Groxx on 7/16/10, 12:52 AM

  That looks... like everything I've seen before.

  Useful? An improvement? Oh heck yes, I like it like that. But this is no future, this is the present, and they're just slightly re-organizing.

  Hyperbolic prose, indeed.

• by tung on 7/16/10, 12:44 AM

  > There are actually three ways to open the Activities Window:

  > 3. Click the Super key (often referred to as the "Windows" key).

  Well, there goes my free unused keyboard shortcut modifier.

• by sad on 7/15/10, 9:31 PM

  I am a big fan of gnome-shell. I'll be an even bigger fan when it plays nicely with VirtualBox. Or is it VirtualBox that has to play nicely with gnome-shell?

• by BonoboBoner on 7/16/10, 7:53 AM

  Why does an article about a supossedly revolutionary Desktop UI include such tiny pictures only?

• by ahk on 7/16/10, 2:29 AM

  What a sad mix of windows and OSX. That Activities button is pure ugliness.

• by smallblacksun on 7/16/10, 12:07 AM

  The activities window sounds a lot like the Start menu in windows Vista/7.

• by billmcneale on 7/16/10, 2:36 AM

  TLDR: 2010 will most definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop.

• by st3fan on 7/16/10, 12:53 AM

  Sounds good. But it really is 'The future of the Linux Desktop'.

• by niels_olson on 7/16/10, 12:37 AM

  key question: does it work with compiz, or somehow support 3D?

• by joubert on 7/15/10, 10:46 PM

  is it touch-device optimized/aware?

• by jlcgull on 7/15/10, 9:35 PM

  But can it tile windows yet? :-)

  I know, I should use a "real" window manager if I need my windows to be tiled, but I feel that tiling is a real feature with a legitimate need that should be built into Gnome.

• by c00p3r on 7/16/10, 3:28 AM

  They life in a day-dreams. ^_^ Browser is the desktop. Even mobile browser.