REVIEW First Look at Gnome 3

Exploring the Gnome 3 desktop New Generation The new Gnome desktop offers a simpler work environment – once you become accustomed

to the new navigation tools. By Shashwat Pant

ith nine years of exhaustive have placed the emphasis on eliminating founded in 2000 to frame the guidelines development and fixes for hassle and . and oversee the project. Gnome 2.x, developers have Until recently, the Gnome desktop en- The Gnome 2 focused on the usability W finally unveiled a new re- vironment was very much a mixed-bag side of the desktop environment, provid- lease. The brand new Gnome 3 includes experience – not enough frills for ing users with a lucid interface and a several new features and a completely beginners and not enough profes- plethora of basic applications. Nifty tools rewritten toolkit. A new Gnome sional applications for advanced like , , and in- offers a more unob- users accustomed to the likes of creased usability. Gnome 3offers a revi- structed desktop experience. KDE. Gnome developers tended talized desktop experience and provides The Gnome developers to focus on providing a stable a glitch-free interface that thrives on the desktop experience at the ex- latest technologies. pense of a major environment overhaul. But with Gnome 3, the New Era Gnome project takes a major leap Gnome 3 (code-named ToPaZ for “Three forward. The ravishing new desktop Point Zero”) marks the beginning of a environment is out to provide you completely new desktop experience (Fig- with a next-generation experience. ure 1). The developers took a long time to develop and test the new release. In Gnome Evolution fact, almost all components were ready a In 1997, the GNU Project [1] of year ago, but the Foundation delayed the the Foundation release to double-check and improve the released the Gnome project new desktop [2]. In this article, I'll take to provide a true FOSS eco- a closer look at the new features (see system for desktop applica- "My Gnome" box). tions. The accompanying The biggest change in the new Gnome Harmony project, which environment is the introduction of a provided APIs compatible brand new shell. The new Gnome Shell with the (then) non-GPL now offers a more practical approach. Qt, came to a halt when The Shell, which was built with the Clut- Qt was released under an ter drawing toolkit, offers a decent work open source license. experience and provides good support Gtk+ was chosen as for hardware acceleration. the base toolkit for Gnome 3 introduces the new Gnome development. window manager, which replaces the old The Gnome Founda- manager. Mutter lets you man- tion was age windows and provides soothing ef- fects. Unfortunately, with Metacity gone, all the Metacity-based widgets and win- dow enhancements like Emerald are deprecated as well. Albert Albert Isenberg, 123RF Shashwat Pant Shashwat Pant is a FOSS enthusiast and a hardware freak. He likes to tweak his hard- ware for optimum performance. He is an IT Engineering student studying in India.

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044-047_Gnome.indd 44 5/17/11 11:23:01 AM REVIEW First Look at Gnome 3

icon. You can even zoom in and out sim- ply by using your scroll wheel over any of the active windows. Very nifty indeed. The Activities pane serves as a one- stop shop for the Gnome environment. It acts as a window navigator, incorporat- ing a workspace switcher, dock, and ap- plication manager. Also unique about the Activities pane is the introduction to a brand new Dock-like panel, which doesn’t show up on the desktop and will only be visible when you have the Activ- ities pane open. The Dock lists all the ac- tively and the most widely used applica- tions, offering a handy shortcut for start- ing and switching apps. Next on the Activities pane is the Ap- Figure 1: The Gnome 3 desktop in action. plication browser. Yon can switch be- tween the application browser and an Under the hood, a brand new Gtk+ 3 Activities pane on the very left. In the active window by simply clicking on the toolkit supports application develop- middle section of the panel is the Clock. Windows or Applications button on the ment, and several APIs have received Gnome has included additional features top left below the panel. On opening the updates. Gnome 3 provides tighter hard- with the Clock. For instance, the clock application manager/​browser, you will ware integration and is tailor made to widget will show the Calender and the notice large icons dominating the center work with new age devices such as tab- Appointments when clicked. The top position of the desktop. Unfortunately, lets and netbooks. right of the panel displays the Notifica- applications are not separated or orga- The intelligent hardware detector will tion menu, which is analogous to the no- nized; however, a small category selector configure the environment to work with tification panel offered with . is provided on the right when you open attached devices and will list appropriate If you click the Activities pane, or just the Application Manager. options. For example, when used with a mouse over it, you will notice a classic The Activities pane even provides a trackpad-equipped laptop, Gnome will swirl effect. (A nice touch reminiscent of search option, which is very handy for automatically configure the hardware the Plasma Manager Icon in KDE desk- searching applications and files. The and show trackpad instead of mouse set- top.) When you click the pane, you will search features additionally allow you to tings. Of course, these changes will only be greeted with a Exposé/​Win- complete your search online via Google take effect when coupled with the proper dow Picker effect, which displays all ac- or Wikipedia (Figure 3). drivers, so a lot will depend on the distro tive windows across the screen – as The most powerful and probably the vendor. shown in Figure 2. best feature of Gnome 3 is the work- Once you have the active windows space switcher. You can access work- First Impressions segregated, you can apply various ac- spaces in the Activities pane by navigat- The first thing you’ll notice about the tions. For instance, you can close any ac- ing your mouse to the very right (Figure new Gnome is its simplicity. Gnome 3 tive window by clicking the small X 4). By default there is one workspace. takes a completely new approach that might require an adjustment for many users. The developers rolled the tools for basic things like task management and workspace management into a single en- tity dubbed The Dashboard/​­Activities. As you can see in Figure 2, the stan- dard desktop is still reminiscent of Gnome 2. The panel is on top with the My Gnome This review is based on the first revision of the Gnome DE (i.e., Gnome 3.0.0). I used the DE with the Fedora Gnome (Live) ISO and Fedora 15 beta. My hard- ware comprised an AMD Phenom II X4 running at 3GHz with a Radeon 4770 VGA adapter. Figure 2: Gnome Activities dashboard with the Exposé effect.

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ton hampers productivity. An easy solu- tion is to keep shifting windows to other workspaces, but that can get confusing, too. The biggest problem with Gnome 3 could be the usual problem of working with hardware drivers in the Linux eco- system. The new desktop thrives on composite effects, which can be depen- dent on the hardware. The best hope is that distro vendors will address these is- sues properly. To cope with the uncer- tainty, the Gnome team has added a fail- back mode that resets to the old Gnome look. Given that Gnome 3 is still rela- tively new and untested, a failsafe mode that looks like Gnome 2 does not seem Figure 3: The Search Wizard in Gnome 3. better than staying with Gnome 2 in the first place. The beauty of the Gnome 3 workspace non-Apple users. The new theme could switcher is that you do not have to set a use some better area management; the Conclusions definite number of workspaces. It auto- Application header takes a lot of space, The biggest question on everyone’s mind matically adds another workspace de- thus reducing the usable workspace. is: How usable and productive is Gnome pending on the active windows in the 3? The ultimate answer to that question current workspace. As soon as you open Pits and Holes is still uncertain. The astounding devel- a window, the new workspace manager Even under heavy testing and a stable opment and new look have opened new automatically spawns a workspace; simi- release portfolio, Gnome 3 has many horizons for end users, but it is still un- larly, it removes a workspace if no active potholes that need patching. One prob- clear whether Gnome has the flexibility windows are in the adjacent workspace. lem is the Activities Dashboard. A user and stability necessary for professional has no idea how many windows are use. New Panel and Theme open and in which workspace they are Gnome 3 still has many positives The Gnome panel has been completely working. Of course, you can figure it out when compared with the first release of redesigned to aid the new Dashboard by clicking on the Activities pane again KDE 4.0, thanks to the poor roadmap (Figure 5). The panel now only shows and again, but a stable and practical so- and implementation by KDE during the one window list: It only shows the task- lution should be implemented. first release. Compared with the 4.0 re- bar listing of the actively selected appli- Another problem is the loss of the min- lease of KDE, Gnome is quite stable; I Linux Magazine cation. Thankfully, it doesn’t shift the imize and maximize buttons. Although didn’t encounter any crashes or bugs toolbar to the panel as does Ubuntu removing the maximize button makes whatsoever. The missing features aside, Global Menu with its Mac-like menubar. sense, because it is possible to maximize Gnome 3 still provides a good user expe- The idea is to unclutter the panel with by double-clicking on the window rience. With backward application com- obnoxious entries, but at times, it be- header, the removal of the minimize but- patibility, you can still use old Gnome on the go comes really infuriating to have to switch back and forth to the Activities pane or to Subscribe to our Digital Edition use the Alt+Tab combination. The Gnome design team has done a - Quick & easy access decent job dressing up the new Gnome. The theme does the job well and has in- - Read PDFs offline herited many traits of the Nautilus Ele- - Keyword Search mentary project. With the new theme, a new dark gray gradient is implemented

around the Actions Menu of the window, Mikhail Dudarev 123RF which looks very elegant and profes- sional. Gnome 3 also changed the method used to make a selection. The checkbox is gone, and, unfortunately, iPhone-style slide buttons are offered instead. The new button style looks good, but it is kind of confusing to use, especially for Figure 4: The workspace switcher displays workspaces on the right side of the screen.

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044-047_Gnome.indd 46 5/17/11 11:23:05 AM lmi_1-2q_digisub.indd 1 25.03.2011 10:33:38 Uhr review First Look at Gnome 3

Figure 5: Gnome 3 panel breakdown, left to right: Activities pane, clock widget, accessibility widget, user manager widget.

applications, with the exception of those happening with KDE 4.6. With the If you are still wondering about that thrive on the deprecated APIs and Gnome 3.2 deadline finalized, I hope switching to the tablet-friendly style of- managers like Metacity. they will push the missing applications fered by Gnome 3, I recommend you Gnome 3 and Ubuntu share the (font manager, widgets, more configu- give the old desktop a little break and try same underpinnings; however, Gnome 3 rable desktop) to the new desktop. out a tablet yourself. Check out the still bags the prize for being simple. Nei- Gnome 3 is indeed a step ahead. I am Gnome 3 release notes for more informa- ther the Gnome or Unity Shell is sympa- glad developers finally came up with a tion [3]. nnn tico with the previous desktop metaphor, bold and radical release. They have and the missing features cause some in- done a commendable job with building Info convenience. a tablet-friendly desktop environment. [1] Gnome: http://www.​­ .​­ org/​­ Despite the favorable state of Gnome 3 Some possible improvements might be [2] Gnome features: compared with the KDE 4.0 release, the making the workspace switcher, panel, http://www.​­ gnome.​­ org/​­ gnome‑3​­ developers will need a couple of more and windows management tools a little [3] Release notes: http://library.​­ gnome.​­ ​ releases to catch up with what is really more visible. ­org/misc/​­ release‑notes/​­ 3.​­ 0/​­ Linux Magazine on the go Subscribe to our Digital Edition - Quick & easy access - Read PDFs offline - Keyword Search Mikhail Dudarev 123RF

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