Spaghetti Western Gnome 3 Review

About a month ago I upgraded to Gnome 3 on my Arch Linux laptop.

Despite all the complaining in the Linux world about the new Gnome 3 and Unity interfaces I'm mostly happy with it so far, but there are some things that annoy me. So, lets break this down Eastwood style.

The basic desktop.

THE GOOD

1. It looks nice.

I like the user interface, for me it hits a good balance between eye candy and responsiveness. Watching early screencasts of Gnome 3 I thought that the eye candy looked mostly gratuitous, but after running it myself for a while, it does all tie in nicely with the desktop functionality. So points for Gnome's design team.

2. It's Stable.

I can't speak for other users but I've been running this on Arch with the open source ATI video driver and can't remember encountering a single bug or random crash, which is impressive for such a major version leap (KDE 4 springs to mind).

3. Window Management is good.

Finally a popular Linux desktop environment that has good window management. Comparing two windows side by side and maximizing windows are now done by very intuitive mouse gestures. To maximize just drag the window to the top of the screen, to maximize it to half of the screen drag the window to the left or right. Simple and awesome. The other thing is a pretty cool Mac-like window overview which I really like. I think these features are the biggest win over Gnome 2.

The Mac-like window overview.

THE BAD

1. Launching Applications is clumsy.
For people who haven't yet seen Gnome 3 this is hard to explain but you need to move the cursor to Activities at the top-left of the screen then click Applications, then select a category, and then select your app. A lot of mouse mileage. For common apps you can add them to a dock on the left hand side which makes launching much faster. However I recently discovered you can press the windows key and just start typing the name of the application, this is really fast and effective, so I usually launch apps like this now.

Launching Applications.

2. No minimize button on the windows.
I don't miss the maximize button at all but I did miss the minimize button. I use that a lot to unclutter my workspace. I fixed this by installing the Gnome Tweak Tool and re-adding the minimize button.

3. Shutdown is only visible in the system menu once Alt is pressed.
This makes no sense to me, when finishing using my laptop I only suspend it approximately 20-30% of the time and of those times I usually just close the lid. I appreciate that simplifying the system menu is a good thing but this is just confusing and only caters for the workflow of a minority of users.

I CAN HAS POWER OFF?

4. Opening Multiple Instances of the same Application
It's kinda weird the way Gnome 3 handles this, if you go to applications and click on a program it will be launched if it isn't running or if it is already running will just take you to the running instance. I like to open several terminal windows at the same time, so instead to open more than one I have to use File -> Open Terminal from a running instance. When using Alt-Tab to switch between windows it also groups the same applications (see screenshot) but I quite like that personally.

Update 14/06/11: Ctrl-Click on an application will open another instance.

Alt-Tab with Application Grouping.

THE UGLY?

Ain't got nothing really, I'll likely be updating my desktop computer to Ubuntu 11.04 soon, so maybe Unity will prove better sport in this department.