Journal chill's Journal: Fedora 15 and Gnome 3 Experiments #1 1
I am a KDE person. I've tried Fluxbox, Gnome 1 & 2, XFCE and half-a-dozen other desktops but have always come back to KDE. I like the way it works, and that I can customize it to work the way *I* want to.
So far, I had avoided Gnome 3 for two reasons.
The first is QT impresses me. It is clean, efficient, functional, professional and essentially a world-class framework. GTK and Gnome always struck me as an ad-hoc, sloppy mess of baling wire and duct tape group of code. Gnome was "we can make it work" to QT's "we can make it work and do it right". Your opinion may vary.
The second reason is found in documents like this one. Folks, if I wanted some pretentious asshole to tell me "we know better than you" and "you will work this way because we have decided it is the way you will work", I would have just bought a Mac and been done with it.
Now I'm the first to admit that frequently I am that pretentious asshole saying they know better and you should listen to what I say because I'm right and you're wrong. Actually, I get paid fairly well for doing just that. But there is a difference. I always say "this is the right way, you *SHOULD* do it that way" but leave the choice up to you. I don't tell people "you *WILL* do it this way, you have no choice".
It is the difference between how I treat my 20-something year-old children and the 3-year old. Gnome treats me like the 3-year old and I resent it. And they're wrong about some things, which is the unforgivable sin.
Still, I hadn't actually tried it for myself so when I decided I needed to reload my main machine from scratch, I opted to go with the default version of Fedora and not the KDE version and give it a fair shake.
[Sidebar: Why reload from scratch? Because I had the 64-bit version of Kubuntu on my main desktop and needed the Citrix Receiver to work properly. Citrix doesn't do native 64-bit and while it'll work with the 32-bit compatibility libraries loaded, plus some extra files extracted by hand from packages hosted elsewhere. It is a royal pain to actually set up and I was tired of messing around with it. Besides, all I have is 4 Gb of RAM so a pure 64-bit machine really brought me no benefits.]
[Sidebar: Why Fedora when I was running Kubuntu before? Because everything at work, and every other place I've ever worked, is Red Hat on the servers with some Fedora thrown in on development boxes. I also am doing a bit of work with SE Linux and support for that in Fedora/RHEL is superior to Ubuntu.]
So, for the last two weeks I've been running the default install of Fedora 15, with Gnome 3 and so far, it is pretty nice. I've just now gotten around to reading the FAQ on Fedora's website, so it answered some of my questions about how to fix certain pet peeves.
Most of the differences are just that, different. After two weeks of use, I've gotten used to the changes and for the most part they work fine for me. Some are better, some aren't. There is very little that rises to the level of "deal breaker".
[Rest of Rant Removed]
I had a nice rant against Gnome 3 going there, all of which revolved around various "pretentious asshole -- you WILL do it OUR way" items. However, after much digging, I found out that while the main developers still seem to believe Gnome is Mini-Me to Steve Jobs' Dr. Evil, things are greatly mitigated by various Gnome Shell Extensions.
My only real remaining complaint is that the entire thing seems designed around a smaller-screen, touch-based interface. The problem for me is I have a 22", 1920x1080 resolution screen and not a tablet. At least give me the OPTION to configure things to work better on a big screen.
That and their mangling of workspaces. But I need to see if there is a shell extension to make it do what I want before I return to my rant.
The result so far is that I can easily work with Gnome 3 and the applications it has without having to revert to KDE.
Interesting (Score:2)
I too am a kde users and often wonder why anyone would want to use Gnome. Could you go into a bit more detail about your findings?