What is wrong with GNOME 3?
Try it: you'll soon see.
Here's an example of half-baked thinking. I quite like the idea of being
able to start apps and switch between them them without needing to touch
the mouse. The first part works OK: [Windows]evo[newline][Windows] puts
me in Evolution provided that there's only one Evolution window open.
though its *much* slower than clicking the appropriate button in the G2
virtual screen switcher, *but* its broken if several windows are open for
the application you want to select because there are no keystrokes
defined that select or tab round the several windows shown on the
Activity page. Yes, you can hit [Windows] and get back to the screen
holding all these windows, but that's no use if the window you want is
hidden entirely under another on the virtual screen. The only way to get
to it is the hit [Windows] and double click the window you want.
As I said: not properly thought out.
But the worst bit is that as well as clicking 'Activities' in the top
left corner to get to the activity page, where you select the app you
want to run or give focus to by typing the first few letters of its name
or clicking an icon of image of a window, you can also get there by
gesturing at the top left of the screen with the mouse. All well and
good, but for two points:
- very many apps (e.g. Gedit, Nautilus) open by default in the top left
of the screen *and* they all open smack on top of each other. There
seems to be no way to change this default position or even to make
them cascade a la Windows.
- as you do other things this sensitive area tends to grow as time
passes and to overlap application windows including the one that
has focus. It gets bloody big too - something like a quarter circle
with its centroid in the top left corned and a raduis of half the
screen height.
The upshot of this that after typing for a bit, if you go to click on
'File' or 'Edit' and the application window is even closeish to the top
left corner, you find yourself dumped unceremoniously into the Activity
page. This is extremely irritating. If you're left handed (I am) and swat
to mouse to one side to get its cursor away from where you're typing,
very frequently it enters this magic area and again you end up dumped
into the Activity page.
Try it: you'll soon see what a pigs ear the Gnome UI has become.
And if you prefer GNOME 2 to both GNOME 3 and XFCE, why not just
use GNOME 2?
Because G2 been removed from the latest Ubuntu release and AFAIK the same
will happen with the release of Fedora 16.
