thoth's Journal: Why the Gnome 3 hate?

One thing I don't get about various posters is the Gnome 3 hate. On the one hand people scream that desktops are just ripping off other well-known UIs and that there is no innovation and that's just tragic. On the other hand, people (hopefully different ones) scream whenever anything changes.

I recently switched my linux notebook from debian to fedora 16, for several reasons:

• I'm a RHCSA (yeah yeah spare me the drivel about how certifications are worthless; this one was paid for by work and I seized the opportunity) so running fedora helps me keep those skills up, since fedora (and centos) are closer to rhel than other distros, for obvious reasons.
• I want to become knowledgeable (and eventually proficient) with selinux, and that's already baked in. Yes I know you can aptitude install selinuxstuff but I'd rather stick closer to the source.
• I'd like to get LDAP going and all the instructions I found for debian on this were out of date; meanwhile the 389 project appears up-to-date and maintained, and that's closely aligned with fedora

A side-effect of this upgrade is now I'm running Gnome 3 as my desktop. And you know, it's just fine. Really. All the people finding it too difficult to switch need to HTFU as Chopper Reid would say. I expect that kind of whining from some end users, not IT types. Seriously, man up and deal.

Basically, instead of minimizing windows onto some taskbar, I just zoom to the upper left to invoke expose-ish mode, where I can scroll to a new virtual desktop, launch a new app, whatever. It works great and isn't as bad as you'd think from all the crying going on.

Fedora 16 works great for me, and Gnome 3 is just fine. I have two minor warts:

• I can't seem to get IBUS working for Simplified Chinese input. I have that installed, but the language selector won't toggle to "ch". I'll fiddle around more. I'm learning Chinese and having the ability for Chinese input (via typing pinyin on an American keyboard) would be great.
• VirtualBox messes things up... after installing vbox and vbox kernel modules, my system won't start X after a reboot. It just hangs there in text mode. I can log in, or boot runlevel 3, but no graphics. The error messages refer to problem probing the video capabilities of "virtual box something-or-other" so I had the idea of uninstalling vbox and the vbox kernel modules, and that work - next reboot and graphics could start. Basically it looks like whatever probes video for X is choking on the vbox video module. This didn't happen on debian, and I'm kinda bummed not to have virtual box on my fedora system (but then I have my other two notebooks I can run virtual machines on). If I were better at X I could probably find a config file somewhere to lock or set the video device to X doesn't have to probe; maybe this will let me have virtual box and also a graphical shell. I'll put that on my to-do list for later.

What I'd really like to work on next, as a hobbyist linux enthusiast, is either more knowledge/proficiency with selinux, or setting up the 389 Project LDAP server. If I get the LDAP server going, I'd consider migrating my debian file server over to fedora and setting up LDAP there, and eventually centralizing accounts on my various computers.

I agree

[PerlJedi]

Personally, I like gnome3. Knocking it seemed/seems to be the in thing to do, but I got used to it quickly, and actually have had fewer problems with it than I did with gnome2.

Perhaps my favorite thing now that I've gotten used to it is how easy it is to launch an application. I don't create "shortcuts", or need to bother remembering which category or sub menu a programs launcher is, just press the meta key and start typing the name of the program I'd like to run. Sure I could have set that up in gnome2 i