GNOME It is one of the best desktop environments on GNU/Linux, and therefore one of the most popular. Even though it is not one of my favorites, I still have to admit that it has a lot of good things, but also bad things, and that is what this article is about.
The idea is not to lash out at GNOME. We must start from the idea that everything I will say below is only my personal opinion and that my tastes are not the same as those of the rest. We will see the good things, and the bad, trying to be as impartial as possible.
I've been testing a little deeper GNOME-Shell in recent days, and I can recognize its good and bad things, however, it still does not meet my expectations and I will talk about that in this article as well.
As we know, GNOME 3.16 was released yesterday, filling the hearts of fans of this Desktop Environment with hope and longing. And what is the cause of all this fuss? Well, in the opinion of many, they are doing things right now, at least most of them.
### The bad things about GNOME 3.16.
I clarify, many of the things that I am going to mention regarding negative things can be solved or changed through extensions, however, I am going to refer to GNOME Shell as it is conceived by its developers, by default and without additions.
#### The windows interface
I'm not an interface designer, but you don't have to be an expert to see that the guys at GNOME have tried to get very close to the look and feel of OS X. Who's to blame them? Not me, because although this will be the first negative point, on the other hand it is something that I love.
What I am saying may be contradictory, so I will try to explain myself better. The appearance of the applications and the Desktop Environment in general I like, because it is precisely very close to the style of OS X.
GNOME You haven't been the only one trying to * imitate * or * copy * the * Apple * OS. With the same copy philosophy we have Unity, the only thing missing is to put the Dock on the left at the bottom, something that shares the GNOME Shell design, and in both cases by default, they cannot be moved from the place .
But okay, if the goal is to bring GNU/Linux users something with more style, well they have succeeded, however, copying sometimes has its drawbacks. As we all know, GNOME now *merges the title bar and window buttons with the tools menu*, in true OS X style, in something they call CSD. Ok, so what disadvantage does this bring?
Visually only a few, but technically if the application dies, the window dies and therefore we lose control of it. We cannot close it, minimize it, or anything like that. And this represents a problem for it to be a negative point? It could be, I would say, since an answer to this will depend on what we are doing at the time the window hangs .. * (Be careful with those who see pr0n sneakily ehh) * ..
#### The new system tray
Something that many users do not like is that GNOME does not allow to place the applications in the upper right corner of the screen, that is, in the area of ​​the panel where the system tray is supposed to go, but they have arrived in this version 3.16 with a solution: a small panel at the bottom left * that appears jumping * only when there are applications that use the system tray, and that we can hide or show.
So far the idea is not bad, why fill the top panel with icons? However, there are a couple of things that I don't like or that I find as a failure:
- It is located at the bottom left, when we are adapted that the system tray is on the right side, it does not matter if it is up or down, but on the right. This can be uncomfortable for some (myself included).
- If we hide it and the application that is minimized is not compatible with the * new notification system * we will not find out anything. For some it may be good, for me it is very bad, because the applications that I bring to the * tray * are precisely those that need to be there so that they notify me and are in a visible place.
#### We still don't have a task bar.
If we want to change the window or simply see that we have open, what should we do? By default, GNOME does not include the Maximize / Minimize buttons in the windows, since its developers may assume that we want to have all the windows open, one below the other or on separate desktops.
However to see the open applications we have 3 options as far as I know:
+ Go with the mouse cursor to the top left to show the * dashboard *.
+ Do the same but pressing the key Super L (the one with the Windows flag).
+ Or switch between apps using Alt + Tab.
If you find any of these three practical or comfortable options ok, but to me it does not seem accessible or usable at all.
#### Silent Notifications
One of the great achievements of this version 3.16 are the notifications that now go to the top along with the clock. I'll talk about these later, now I'm going to refer to the notifications of certain actions that in GNOME 3.14 worked and now they don't.
An example of them is when we connect an external device, for example a USB memory. What happens, has someone found out that we tapped a USB port? NO, if we don't look at the little round dot that appears next to the clock, we won't find out.
I don't even see the option in the notification preferences that allows me to add removable devices as part of the notifications (pardon the redundancy). And now, if someone is so kind, can you tell me how to unmount the removable device once it's mounted without having to open it? Nautilus? There is no option for this anywhere.
#### Apps lacking options
Please, whoever comes up with the old talk that you don't need to do anything but browse, copy movies, and organize documents, and the simplicity of GNOME lets you do that, can save yourself the trouble of typing your comment. And I say it from the respect, that history is more than old.
[quote] Many criticize KDE because it has too many options, and I wonder which one would be better: to have options that we don't use, but have them for when we need them, or never have them, or when we need them? [/ quote]
That is just what happens to me with GNOME and its applications. Nautilus The poor man does less every day, soon he will have fewer options than Thunar y PCManFM, if it has not already reached that point. For example, try renaming several files at the same time. Nor does it allow me to see the size of a file without having to go to its properties or selecting it, just to put a couple of examples. Gedit It is another that is fair, but hey, quite a bit that has color highlighting for different languages.
The new very beautiful GNOME calendar, in the style of Maya the calendar of Elementary OS, but managing our events contrary to what it seems (it should be very simple), can be a headache. I invite you to make a test, create an event for today, and that same event try to pass it for tomorrow, simply by dragging it. They cannot, they have to create a new one, put the same as the old one and delete the old one.
And I could go on, but to finish this section we have the GNOME Control Center, which is not only too simple in some cases, but to get to certain options we have to click more than in Windows.
#### Do we have to talk about the customization options?
Without * Gnome Tweak Tools * which to top it off is not included by default, we would have a pretty tough job with * DConf / Gconf-Editor * ahead to change, for example, the system font. It is a point that I will always criticize in the new GNOME.
#### Other details
The application or command launcher ( Alt + F2 ) does not have auto-completion, so we have to know the exact name of the application we want to launch.
### The good things about GNOME 3.16
But not everything is bad, it must be said. I repeat that one of the most interesting things about GNOME Shell 3.16 is precisely its interface and how simple it turns out to be. In general, and broadly speaking, it is a beautiful Desktop Environment within what it fits and includes some things that are less interesting.
#### Boxes or GNOME Boxes
A front-end for Qemu-kvm that deserves nothing less than praise. Something great considering that no one had ever thought of implementing such a simple tool to virtualize before. In this version it is simpler to use and more fun.
#### Interactive notifications
Something that I always liked about GNOME Shell, the power for example to reply to a private message by jabber from the notification itself.
The new notifications are not bad, but not being able to choose the ones we want to leave or close makes me very uncomfortable, some even disappear without one wanting to, or they remain stuck and cannot be eliminated (especially with Empathy's, which follows having bugs), but you are forgiven. They are very cool and are located in a good place, occupying a space that was previously underused.
#### Lock screen
Whether it is a copy of Windows or not, the GDM lock screen is beautiful, and even more so when we have notifications and can see them without accessing the desktop, although in part this can represent a serious problem for the privacy of users.
#### Screencast at hand
Another option that I have always loved about GNOME Shell is to be able to record our desktop with a simple combination of keys: Alt + Ctrl + Shift + R.
#### Extensions
Without them I highly doubt that anyone can survive more than a week in GNOME Shell, well, unless they are not very demanding. The only downside is that right now many of the ones that work in GNOME 3.14 are already disabled in GNOME 3.16. But without a doubt they are something good that we must mention.
### Conclusions on GNOME 3.16
For those who love simplicity and simplicity, they will undoubtedly find the ideal Desktop Environment in GNOME. Applications such as the new IRC client, the maps, the calendar, from their austerity they know beautiful, clean.
I love many applications such as the weather, which are very well done. However, at the end of the day you discover that you have just enough to be able to work and you cannot fully squeeze the Desktop.
There are others that I couldn't test like Music, because they gave me an error when trying to launch them with Python or something like that, and Empathy, I could never open a chat window with a friend. I think there are also some inconsistencies in terms of design (which is clearly aimed at tablets), because while we find huge buttons in the windows, the scroll bars are very narrow.
But generally speaking, with each release GNOME is becoming more focused on its goals and offering a more successful product. That I do not like it, that I do not find it productive, is just my appreciation, I know that many users feel comfortable. There may be other benefits that I have not yet used or do not know, I will see them with the day to day, anyway I hear suggestions and criteria in the comments.