Comments on: GNOME Shell 2.28.0 – A Preview

By: Owen

Owen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:01:37 +0000

I’m closing this post for comments now – this isn’t the best place to discuss the shell because nobody but me will see all the good suggestions. See http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell for links to the mailing list, IRC channel, and Bugzilla.

By: Owen

Owen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:58:29 +0000

I’ve floated the idea that Super-arrows (super == logo key) should be like alt-tab + arrows, so you could start arrowing in the “alt-tab overview” without having to hit alt-tab once. Not sure if that’s the sort of thing you are asking for. You certainly don’t have to *keep* tab pressed down to use the arrow keys, you just need to keep alt down.

By: Owen

Owen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:54:18 +0000

It’s intentional that the contents of the top panel are much more locked down than they are with gnome-panel. You can’t really design interactions if you don’t know what you are designing for – e.g., the fact that the upper-left hand corner of the screen is hot (move your pointer there and the overview activates) is tied to the fact that the Activities button is there, so you won’t accidentally trigger the hot corner when doing something else. The display of the current application next to the Activities button will soon be turned into a menu for application-global options, and so forth.

(There’s no particular reason that we couldn’t add a place in the top panel for user configured launchers, but the intent is that launching favorited apps from the overview is fast enough that you don’t need launchers permanently on the main screen. Launchers are, to some extent, a workaround for how bad the gnome menus are at starting things. So, we will likely leave adding launchers to the top panel as the domain of gnome-shell extensions.)

By: Angelux

Angelux — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:42:01 +0000

It would be nice if I sholdn’t have to keep the tab key pressed when I use the arrows. Could this be done? or I’m the only one that wants that.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:26:21 +0000

Kudos on gnome-shell. The ideas that it implements are doubtlessly the future of task management. However, I fail to understand why it is replacing gnome-panel. Gnome-shell replaces many features that were previously implemented by panel applets, but it still needs to have a panel.

Gnome-shell does not appear to have any integration with the panel except for button to activate activities mode. Couldn’t the panel code in gnome-shell be removed and replaced by an ‘activities’ button on gnome-panel? Perhaps everyone feels that the panel code is bloated and outdated, but shouldn’t that be a separate project? (I wouldn’t argue with a gnome-panel 3.0!) Clocks, calendars, global menus, etc already exist for gnome-panel.

Also this would help adoption of gnome-shell because people could keep their window lists and quicklaunch icons still on the panel until they adapt. (I know that this is against gnome-shell’s principles, but it doesn’t have to come that way by default.)

Gnome-shell’s features were previously implemented by panel applets, but gnome-shell should not be a panel. It may replace features provided by panel applets, but it need not replace the panel itself. The user just won’t need those applets wasting space on the panel anymore!

(P.S. Everyone hated nautilus back in the day, and many developers thought that firefox was a useless concept. Just keep pushing forward.)

By: Owen

Owen — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:05:37 +0000

Well, Wayland is not an X server, it’s a new windowing system. Wayland, like the current X desktop, involves the idea of a compositing manager, and it makes conceptual sense to port gnome-shell to that role, but it’s not just running the code inside Wayland; a lot of things would change. Kristian Høgsberg – Mr. Wayland – has done some work already on a Wayland backend for Clutter which would be one part of the equation.