Review: GNOME 3

Shell Main Screen

About 2 months ago, I previewed GNOME 3. At that time, it was many weeks away from the final release, so there were still many things to be done. Since then, many things have changed, and a few days ago, GNOME 3 was finally released for the whole world to see.

The biggest change in GNOME 3 is of course the GNOME 3 Shell. This has gotten several changes, updates, and other revisions through its development. Since then, however, a GNOME 3 fallback mode has also been added. One of the common complaints about GNOME 3 has been that the new Mutter WM requires 3D effects to work correctly, and not all computers have this, especially older ones. This is where GNOME 3 fallback mode comes in, so in addition to trying out GNOME 3 Shell, I have also tried GNOME 3 fallback mode.

Fallback Main Screen +
Calendar Applet +
User Profile Menu Applet

I did all this thanks to the efforts of the Fedora developers in building the latest live ISO image of GNOME 3; I made a live USB of it using UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see how much has changed in two months.

Shell Epiphany + Gedit + ALT+TAB Switcher

After changing the BIOS and booting, I was greeted by the same desktop as before, with an unclickable desktop and the same unmodifiable panel with the same layout as before. I will say that the panel looks a little thinner and hence more efficient with vertical space, and that the panel fonts look a little nicer than before. However, as there is a whole lot of unused space in both the panel and the left side of window titlebars, I would like to see the top panel turn into something like Elementary OS's WingPanel, with the panel horizontally shrunken to the minimum and allowed to cover the unused titlebar space in maximized windows. The full-width notification area is still present at the bottom. There are a couple improvements, though: the calendar applet (accessed by clicking on the clock) is more fully-featured, and the notification area no longer has random strange applets running. One bad thing about the user profile menu on the right side of the panel is that it seems like it is no longer possible to directly shut the system down without first logging out. I'm not really sure why this is.

Shell Activities Windows Screen

One of the big functional changes to the windows in GNOME 3 is the removal of the buttons to maximize and minimize windows. I'll admit that when I first heard about this decision, I was outraged. Why would the developers be so boneheaded and remove window controls that have become standard over the last two decades? Now, however, I understand why the decision was made: with the concept of Activities and the removal of the always-available task manager in the panel, it doesn't make sense to "minimize" a window anywhere anymore. Maximizing still makes sense, though, so to deal with that, the developers have made windows dragged to the left or right side of the screen respectively take up the left or right half of the screen and those dragged to the top of the screen take up the full screen (except for the top panel, which is always present). This behavior is much like it is in Microsoft Windows 7, and it works well. I also think it'll be much more effective at preventing users from accidentally closing applications that they really want to maximize or restore.

Shell Activities Applications Search +
User Profile Menu Applet

Despite the fact that the buttons to minimize and maximize windows have been removed, the titlebars are still as thick as ever. Why? I realize that GNOME 3 was designed to be highly usable on touchscreen interfaces, meaning thick titlebars would make it easy to manipulate windows, but on netbooks, which GNOME 3 is also targeting, this is a huge waste of precious vertical space, along with the separate vertical space for the menubar. I've included a picture [include] of what might make it better. In addition, the navigation bar and scrollbars are quite thick and thus take up too much space as well.
One nice aesthetic change is that of the tab design: in applications like Nautilus, Gedit, and Epiphany, the tabs have nice slanted designs, akin to how tabs look in Chromium. It's a nice change from bland rectangular tabs, but that may just be me.

Shell Nautilus + Workspace Switcher Animation

Activites have remained essentially the same, as have all the animations, so if you want to read more about those, please refer to my earlier preview post. One nice change is that unlike last time, search worked; in addition to searching for applications, I could also successfully search for favorite places as listed in Nautilus, and I could even search for random stuff on Google and Wikipedia which is similar in functionality to the Linux Mint Menu, and that would bring up an instance of Epiphany, the default web browser. Switching windows in either Activities or ALT+TAB is exactly the same as before.
Speaking of other applications, Nautilus seems to have included one improvement from the Elementary mod, and that is the reorganization of the side pane, which is a welcome improvement. Epiphany seems a lot more stable and fast than before, which is good. Cheese Webcam Booth seems to have improved as well with enough effects to make it Apple PhotoBooth's equal. Unfortunately, it crashed every time I tried to take a picture; that's not good.

The Control Center, now known as System Settings, has been reorganized and revamped and now looks a lot like a simpler version of the KDE 4 System Settings program, which is not a bad thing. This is also how I switched into fallback mode.

Shell: What Titlebars and Menubars Should Look Like

After logging out and logging back in, I found myself in an environment much more like that of GNOME 2.X. There are two panels again, one on top and one on bottom. It still isn't possible to right-click either the desktop or panels to modify them, but it feels a lot more familiar, in any case. On the left side of the top panel is a menu with two items: "Applications" and "Places". For those of you familiar with the traditional GNOME layout, "System" has now been incorporated as a separate submenu in "Applications". The rest of the panel is very similar to that of GNOME 3 Shell, except that the notification area applets function more like old GNOME 2.X notification area applets as opposed to the new unified menu-like indicator applets. The clock is present in the middle of the top panel, but its calendar applet is much more like that of GNOME 2.X. One good thing about the user profile menu applet in fallback mode is that the option to directly shut down is back. Yay! The bottom panel has a simple task manager to the left and a workspace switcher to the right.
In terms of other aesthetics, the menus are now all plain white instead of black and shiny to better accommodate older graphics cards. Similarly, the ALT+TAB switcher looks like it did in GNOME 2.X instead of the shiny new theme in GNOME 3 Shell. Also, as the traditional desktop paradigm is present, so are the window buttons to maximize and minimize windows. Otherwise, the fallback desktop does a good job of accommodating older computers while preserving many of the improvements in GNOME 3.
One issue that occurred when switching to fallback mode is that when I tried opening Gedit, it crashed. Thankfully, that was the only time that happened.

Fallback Main Menu + Nautilus + Gedit

Well, that's where my time ended with GNOME 3. GNOME 3 Shell seems a lot more mature and usable than it did two months ago, while GNOME 3 fallback mode presents a compelling traditional alternative to GNOME 3 Shell. My issue that GNOME 3 Shell seems like it was designed solely for touchscreen interfaces remains, though, so while GNOME 3 Shell seems great for netbooks and tablet computers, I would like to see GNOME 3 fallback mode as the default for larger laptops and desktops. Furthermore, I would like to see the desktop log in automatically log into GNOME 3 fallback mode if an older graphics card is detected, and only log into GNOME 3 Shell otherwise. I realize and support that the GNOME developers want to push forward the cool new interface instead of the older just-in-case one, but I'd rather not see people turned off by GNOME just because their older computer got logged into GNOME 3 Shell by default. Personally, I will be waiting for when the Linux Mint developers release version 11 "Katya" with GNOME 3 in a traditional Linux Mint layout, but I think that new users will take well to GNOME 3 Shell, while veterans who refuse to use GNOME 3 Shell will take well to GNOME 3 fallback mode.