There are lots of articles out there explaining what’s awkward about Gnome 3… I think maybe this one (plus its comments) is one of the best ones I’ve read for a while. An interesting point made there is what you get by way of auto-completion when you Google the phrase gnome 3 is:

That tends to suggest that a lot of people visiting Google don’t have a high opinion of Gnome 3 -which isn’t the same thing as not liking Gnome Shell, I realise… but close enough for an opinion piece, I think!

To add to the list of gripes you’ll find knocking about the Internet, I would add my own pet peeves:

• I like wobbly windows and desktop cubes! Compiz (which provides them) doesn’t work with Gnome Shell, period. No desktop bling means me no happy!
• Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down switches between workspaces (virtual desktops)… but only for the main monitor in a dual monitor setup. My right-hand monitor stayed stuck displaying whatever it was displaying before the workspace switch: it seems inconsistent. It’s certainly annoying.
• Ctl+Alt+Up/Down to switch workspaces sometimes doesn’t (switch workspaces, that is). If I had the Nautilus file manager open on my main monitor on, say, workspace 2, then when I switched ‘downwards’ from workspace 1 into workspace 2, intending to head for workspace 3, Nautilus would appear to ‘capture’ my keypresses so that the next Ctrl+Alt+Down would actually start to navigate through my directory tree displayed on workspace 2 instead of switching workspaces. It’s tricky to describe, but damned annoying when it happens (the only fix being to switch to the mouse, move the cursor away to empty space, then switch back to the keyboard and continue the workspace switching from where it left off). Even more irritating is the fact that if you switch workspaces really fast, Nautilus doesn’t get to grab the keypresses and everything works as it’s supposed to. Linger just a millisecond too long on the workspace displaying Nautilus, though, and it breaks as described. And that sort of inconsistent behaviour is a nightmare to live with.
• Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down doesn’t work if you’ve got a VMware Workstation session open on one of the workspaces: once again, the virtual machine ‘captures’ the keypresses so that you stop switching between the host’s workspaces and are now doing something unpredictable in whatever guest OS you’re running. As a big VMware user, that’s a major problem.
• Clicking an icon in the application launcher visible in the Activities window doesn’t actually launch an application: if the app. is already running, it switches to that instance of it instead of launching a new one. That’s frequently not what I want! You have to right-click an icon and then select the ‘New Window’ menu option to achieve a genuinely new app. instance. This is claimed to be a feature of the new environment in the official blurb:

For many applications, such as XChat IRC, Telepathy, Evolution, Calculator, or Chess, it makes most sense to only run one instance of the application, so switching to the existing window of the application is what the user wants if the application is already running. However, in GNOME 2, the user had to know whether such application is already running before making a decision to click on a launcher to open a new window of the application. Accidentally opening a duplicate window could mean having an unnecessary extra Calculator window cluttering the desktop or signing in into IRC under a second nick. By combining the application launcher and the application switcher and making switching to the already running copy of the application the default behavior, we give the user confidence that if they just go ahead and click on the application icon, the right thing will happen.

The level of condescension involved in the Gnome developers telling me what ought to make “most sense” to me is really quite breathtaking, I think. This is definitely not the way *I* work, even if it’s the way they assume it to be. I really don’t need someone to give me confidence that software has read my mind and made the right decision for me: I want to decide for myself how many calculators or chess games I have running at once! (I have Windows for when I want auto-everything!!)

Anyway, the upshot is that I found Fedora 16 (or its Gnome Shell front-end) to be slow and unproductive. I realise that’s me probably just being old-fashioned and unwilling/unable to change… but either way, it means that Fedora 16 bit the dust earlier today. Gnome 3 fallback mode wasn’t doing it for me either, and given that I’m not about to suddenly love KDE or XFCE or any of the other bazillion desktop environments out there -I simply want my Gnome 2 back, really- I decided to go retro: Scientific Linux 6.1 is my new desktop of choice. It has at least a few years of life ahead of it, and maybe by the time it reaches the end of its days, Gnome Shell might have improved to being vaguely usable and productive! Fingers crossed.

The default artwork for the release (see left) is, to my eyes, frankly alarming -well, if not alarming exactly, at least not very good! It’s only a wallpaper change away, but I do wish Fedora would stop trying to theme their desktops to match their fairly arbitrary choice of version codename (in this case, Fedora 16 is codenamed Jules Verne, as in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Yeah, I think it’s a bad idea for a desktop theme, too!)

And I’m still not convinced by Gnome 3 (initial horror with Fedora 15′s implementation of it gave way several weeks ago to keen enthusiasm, but that has since been replaced by indifferent dislike… there’s nothing much I’ve seen in Fedora 16′s implementation that counts as a major improvement). Otherwise, there’s the usual software-stack updates (Firefox is at version 6, for example; and you get 3.4.2 of LibreOffice thrown in), but most of the changes are, I think, under-the-hood stuff and aren’t likely to revolutionise your Linux life!

I have successfully tested a Gladstone-prepared 11g Release 2 installation on the new release. There is the usual pile of software the OUI claims doesn’t exist (click Ignore All when prompted, because they do). There is also the expected ‘Error in invoking target agent nmhs of makefile ins_emagent.mk‘ problem during the linking phase. The workaround here is to run the fedora-linking-error-fix.sh script in your Desktop directory which Gladstone will have created for you (just navigate there with Nautilus and double-click the shell script when the linking error occurs, then click Retry in the Oracle Universal Installer. It’s plain sailing after that).

Interestingly, one of the reasonably significant changes made in this release (enough to get a mention in the release notes, anyway) is that, by default, a Desktop directory is no longer created for you during installation. However, Gladstone is hard-coded to write its fix-up script there, so a /home/<username>/Desktop directory needs to exist: create one before you start if you need to.

Of course, there can be no guarantees: what works in an alpha release might be broken by any subsequent beta, let alone the final, finished distro. But since it’s working right now, a revised, Fedora 16-aware, version of Gladstone is downloadable from the usual place.

Incidentally, I have not tested a 10gR2 installation on Fedora 16, and won’t be doing so. As was mentioned in various discussions on this blog lately, 10g Release 2 is out of mainstream Oracle support these days, and I don’t therefore propose to spend any more time on it from now on. So Gladstone may or may not work for 10g: feel free to give it a whirl, I guess.

It’s not that there’s anything particularly wrong with Ubuntu (switching the side the window controls are on from right to left was pretty stupid, but it wasn’t the end of the world!). It’s just that we use Centos/Red Hat servers a lot at work and Fedora is a more natural ‘fit’ to them than Ubuntu is.

I’ve been a strong critic of Fedora in the past, it’s true. It’s managed to be the only distro not able to actually boot on my home PC, for example; and it’s had a bit of a track record with ghastly theming and weird wallpapers. But Fedora 13 seems perfectly sane in those respects when compared to some of the previous Fedoras -and it seems stable and fast. It’s slightly more bleeding edge than Ubuntu …and very much bluer!

It does take a little more work to get ‘just right’, though: Google Chrome isn’t in the standard respositories, for example; and playing DVDs and MP3s involves more fiddling than an Ubuntu user might be comfortable with. But to anyone even vaguely comfortable with a text editor and a terminal, it’s definitely not a show-stopper. I’ll be documenting a few of my favourite workarounds here over the next few days.