Category: Gnome 3

Gnome Predictions

I have a couple of rather cynical predictions about what new problems Gnome 3 could bring to Linux (or Fedora, in particular) that I feel like writing down here just so I can say "I told you so!" as I begrudgingly look into installing Arch Linux on all my computers at some point in the future.

• Obsoleting of the Gnome Sound Applet: this one seems very likely to happen within the next couple releases of Fedora. The gnome-sound-applet isn't very useful in the Gnome Shell desktop environment, because the Shell has its own built-in volume control icon on the top panel.

  The reason it's still around is probably just for the Gnome 3 fall-back desktop, where you get a two-panel layout similar to Gnome 2, which still has a decent system tray on the top panel. For Gnome 3 users without hardware acceleration, the gnome-sound-applet comes to the rescue to let these users continue adjusting their sound volume.

  But, with Gnome Shell software rendering coming in Fedora 17, the need to maintain the system tray sound applet will quickly vanish, since even Gnome 3 users without hardware acceleration will be seeing the same shell desktop with its own built-in sound applet. This sucks a lot for XFCE and other desktop users. One of my favorite things about the Gnome sound applet is the ability to increase the volume higher than 100%, which XFCE's clunky old sound mixer applet still can't do.

• Obsoleting of the Network Manager applet: I strongly hope not. But at the same time I could see this being something the Gnome developers would consider seriously. The argument would probably go a little something like this:

  "There are currently hacks in place in Gnome Shell that allows us to run the NetworkManager applet, but place its icon in the shell panel instead of the normal system tray. So, it makes sense to just program the NetworkManager to go directly to the Gnome panel instead, and no longer support the system tray version anymore. This is good for Gnome, and anybody using XFCE or some other desktop that will have objections to this change, well they can just switch to some other distro. We don't care."

  On this one, I hope I'm wrong. But due to Gnome's short-sightedness with some of their recent design decisions (ruining Zenity, anyone?) I wouldn't be shocked to see them come up with such an idea.

So, there they are. Obsoleting the sound applet? Very likely. The NetworkManager? I really don't know how likely they are to do this, but this would probably be the thing that finally pushes me to abandon Fedora entirely.

Xfce for Gnome 2 Refugees

Ever since I jumped ship from Gnome to Xfce a few years ago when Gnome 3/Shell was first announced, I've configured my Xfce desktops to strongly resemble the standard Gnome 2 panel layout.

Click the screenshot for the full size version.

Along the top panel I have my Applications and Places menus, app launchers for my commonly used programs, my CPU usage graph, notification area and clock. On the bottom panel are my task bar and workspace switcher. These are all standard Xfce panel applets.

The details for anyone who's interested (the only panel applet options shown are the ones that differ from the default options):

• Top Panel:
  Orientation: Horizontal
  Size (pixels): 24
  Length (%): 100
  • Applications Menu
    Button title: Applications
    Icon: a Fedora icon in /usr/share/pixmaps...
  • Places Menu
    Show: Label Only
    Label: Places
  • Separator
  • Many Launcher applets for my commonly used programs
  • Separator
    Style: Transparent
    Expand: checked
  • Brightness plugin
  • Screenshot
  • CPU Graph:
    Background: black
    Width: 48
    Show frame: checked
    Show border: unchecked
  • Separator
  • Notification Area
  • Separator
  • DateTime:
    Layout Format: Date Only
    Date Format: Custom: %a %b %e, %l:%M %p
    The DateTime applet has a drop-down calendar, unlike the normal Clock applet.
• Bottom Panel:
  Orientation: Horizontal
  Size (pixels): 24
  Length (%): 100
  • Window Buttons
  • Workspace Switcher

So, any Gnome 2 refugees who can't stand Gnome 3... Xfce 4.8 is a very good option and you can configure it to look and feel just like Gnome 2.

Zenity and GNOME 3

Another mini rant about GNOME 3.

To add to the reasons why GNOME 3 impacts other areas of the Linux ecosystem in ways I wish it wouldn't, they have changed the behavior of zenity and removed a feature just because it no longer makes sense for GNOME 3.

Zenity, btw, is a command line program for displaying simple dialog boxes and things that may be useful for bash scripts. It can pop up alerts, progress bar windows, open/save dialogs, etc.

One feature it used to have was --notification, which let you put an icon in the Notification Area ("system tray") on your desktop. But now, since GNOME 3 doesn't have the same concept of the Notification Area as other desktop environments, Zenity's --notification option no longer puts an icon in the Notification Area.

Now it uses GNOME 3's style of notification... which is, the same behavior as notify-send - it pops up a Growl-like black bubble in the corner of your screen with a temporary message (like "New updates are available").

This sucks.

I was playing with writing a desktop Google Voice app for Linux, which would have an icon in the Notification Area and notify about new texts and things. I was going to just use Tk for the GUI (even though it's ugly as sin on Linux) and use Zenity only for the notification icon. But I can't do that now! Now I might as well make my GUI in GTK+ so I can use the Gtk2 module for the notification icon.

GNOME developers, the universe does not revolve around GNOME. If Zenity's --notification is just going to duplicate the functionality of notify-send, you might as well just have switched to notify-send and leave Zenity how it was before.

More Bad Changes

Today (8/14/11) I discovered something else GNOME changed in Zenity.

I'd written a Perl script a while back that would act as a super simple front-end to Mednafen, an NES and GameBoy emulator. It just used Zenity to open a file select dialog to let you browse for a ROM to load.

But now, Zenity's file selection dialog doesn't have any way of letting you specify which directory it should look in by default. It used to start in whatever the script's current working directory was, but now it ignores all that and always starts in the "Recently Opened Files" list.

Fuck everything about GNOME. Do we need to fork Zenity now? This is so ridiculous.

GNOME's Impact on Everything

Today, Fedora 15 was released, so naturally I installed it right away. Despite a couple small bugs, it's working pretty well so far. However, I have yet another small rant to make about GNOME.

I've been very sceptical about GNOME 3 and gnome-shell (as I've talked about here, here and here). So, I had jumped ship to XFCE a couple years ago and will not be a GNOME user in the foreseeable future.

Now that Fedora is finally shipping GNOME 3, though, the GNOME dev team has again impacted me in ways I wish they wouldn't.

GTK2 Themes and GTK3 Themes

GTK is the widget toolkit used by GNOME and XFCE, and a lot of applications such as Firefox. GTK themes therefore are responsible for styling up the buttons, scrollbars, and other GUI elements in any GTK app.

The first impact of GNOME on the rest of the software ecosystem is that they moved to GTK+ 3.0 and everybody else is still catching up. How this affects XFCE?

• XFCE is still using GTK 2. Whatever, this is up to the XFCE team to work on.
• There is an extreme lack of GTK 3 themes. Fedora always ships with a dozen themes, but, only the default theme has a GTK 3 version. This means that under XFCE and all other GTK 2 desktop environments, themes work as they have before, but all the GTK 3 apps are broken now.

Screenshot of two XFCE apps (GTK 2) compared with two GNOME apps (GTK 3).

Setting any custom theme in XFCE makes all GNOME apps look ugly because there is no matching GTK 3 theme. Oh well, you think, just don't run GNOME desktop apps in XFCE?

The problem is that Red Hat and Fedora drink so much of the GNOME kool-aid, that all their other apps that aren't GNOME specific are also using GTK 3. This includes: the Network Manager (seen in the screenshot), and all the PackageKit GUIs (for graphically installing updates). There are probably other things too. This means that, to use XFCE or basically anything besides GNOME, you have to deal with ugly themes on a lot of "core" Fedora GUIs.

This problem should hopefully go away in the next release or two of Fedora, as XFCE and other apps are updated to GTK 3. I just hope Firefox doesn't decide to make the switch too early, though... that would drive me nuts if Firefox started looking this ugly.

My temporary hack of a workaround is that I made a symlink for gtk-3.0 for my current theme that points to the default theme's gtk-3.0, so at least GTK 3 apps don't look ugly... but they still don't "fit in" with my GTK 2 apps.

Volume Control Applet

GNOME's volume control applet used to be a program that puts an icon in your Notification Area to control your volume. This was cool: you could click the icon and it would pop down a slider for adjusting the volume, and if you went into the volume settings GUI you were able to adjust the volume up to 150% if you wanted to.

This is all gone now.

Why? Oh, because GNOME Shell has its own volume control icon built right into the desktop GUI directly, and it therefore has no need for a Notification Area based applet anymore. Never mind that other desktop environments like XFCE would find such a thing useful. Now I'm forced to go back to the old school "Mixer" applet in XFCE, which is nowhere near as elegant as the GNOME volume control applet used to be.

I'm tired of this "the whole universe revolves around GNOME" mentality that the GNOME developers exhibit. Most other desktop environments play nice with each other, most try to follow Freedesktop.org standards, but GNOME... GNOME wants to be your desktop environment; it wants to be your entire operating system.

Update

It seems GNOME 3 does still have a Notification Area based volume control... they renamed the command from gnome-volume-control-applet to gnome-sound-applet, provided by the package control-center rather than gnome-media. Right-clicking the icon to go to the Sound Preferences brings up a GTK-3 GUI that includes a volume slider that goes to 150%.

So all hope is not lost, yet.

GNOME Shell Revisited

Update (Nov 17 09): The final version of Fedora 12 fares slightly better with GNOME Shell, but not by much. It also works just fine with Compiz Fusion within VirtualBox. Read more about it.

This is a sequel to my rant about GNOME Shell. I decided to back up my claims with an experiment.

Installing gnome-shell in a virtual machine with no 3D hardware acceleration.

Every single desktop environment that exists right now will run just fine in a virtual machine with no 3D hardware acceleration: XFCE 4.6 and older; KDE 4.3 and older; KDE 3.x and older; GNOME 2.26.3 and older; LXDE; and of course all of the desktop-less window managers (IceWM, et cetera).

GNOME 3.0, I claimed, with its GNOME Shell, will be the first desktop environment that will not run unless the user has 3D hardware acceleration, and that there is no fall-back. Here is the proof:

No Guest Additions; No 3D

I installed the Fedora 12 Alpha in a virtual machine with VirtualBox. Fedora 12 Alpha (11.92 Rawhide) is the latest development release of Fedora, and the Rawhide repository contains up-to-date packages for gnome-shell. So with this I don't have to worry about whether I just compiled gnome-shell in the wrong way; the Fedora dev team has built the RPMs here.

* Fedora 12 Alpha (11.92 Rawhide)
* VirtualBox 3.0.6 r52128 (2009-09-09)

Let's launch it!

And... what happens?

Basically, my screen is mostly black; I can't see any of my windows. I can see only a little bit of the GNOME Shell interface.

Let's put on the dumb end user hat and say Joe Average installed Ubuntu 10.10 which might come with GNOME 3.0 and GNOME Shell, he hasn't installed his nvidia drivers yet because they're proprietary and Canonical can't legally include them with Ubuntu, and he logs on and sees THIS. He's lucky that X11 didn't crash entirely and send him back to the login screen, but nonetheless he can't see anything. He can't see Firefox to start browsing the web trying to find a solution to this problem.

Okay, let's move on...

Guest Additions, No 3D

After installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions in the new virtual machine, but still not enabling 3D hardware acceleration, the results are...

Exactly the same.

I won't post screenshots because they look just like they did the last time. I get a mostly black, unusable desktop.

Of note however is that the terminal printed this upon starting the GNOME Shell:

OpenGL Warning: Failed to connect to host. Make
sure 3D acceleration is enabled for this VM.

VirtualBox knows GNOME Shell was requesting 3D support via OpenGL, and the guest additions driver gave me this warning. Let's move on...

Enabling 3D Acceleration

VirtualBox's 3D support is fairly new and still full of bugs. Actually their support for Linux guests is even more recent than the 3D support itself. I haven't tested running the ol' Compiz Fusion in VirtualBox, but I've heard that with the 3D support this becomes possible.

I've personally not used it. But it is known to be buggy; VirtualBox labels it as "experimental"... well, here's why:

In this experiment, even with 3D acceleration by the virtual machine, GNOME Shell is not usable. Again, though, VirtualBox's 3D acceleration is still in the "experimental" phase. It probably doesn't work a whole lot better with Compiz Fusion, either. Plus my video card might just suck (VirtualBox basically passes the guest's OpenGL calls directly to the host's video card).

But the thing to take away from this is:

• Desktops that work with basic video drivers:
  • GNOME 1.x series
  • GNOME 2.x series
  • Xfce 4.6 and older
  • KDE 3.x series and older
  • KDE 4.x series and older
  • LXDE
  • All window managers
• Desktops that don't work with basic video drivers at all:
  • GNOME 3.0 with GNOME Shell
  • (can you hear the crickets? yes, GNOME 3.0 stands alone, all by itself, in this category. sad. )

I rest my case.

Now let's see if the GNOME dev team can turn this around in the next year (doubtful; they all come off to me as a bunch of eye-candy-obsessed children who'd rather snazz up the desktop because they think it's "cool" than to worry about things like usability, functionality, or accessibility... and with absolutely no thought given to the user experience, and no usability studies done, etc.).

GNOME Shell for the lose.