15 Apr 2012 vicious   » (Master)

XFCE 1, GNOME Shell 0

After a year of using GNOME-shell, I finally got fed up with it. GNOME shell is unfortunately really annoying to use. There are so many decisions it tries to do, that it does some of them wrong. New window placement, the whole status thing in the corner getting triggered when I don’t want it to, the overview getting triggered all the time by mistake, as well as for example custom launcher setup. When I run my script for editting latex it never shows evince and I have to focus it by alt-tab “by hand.” The whole Alt-Tab behaviour is totally nuts. I also really REALLY hate the fact that dialogs are now “attached” to their parents. I often need to look at the original window because I just forgot what I was going to type in, such as “how many pages did the document have again and what pag I am on now” when printing, this happens really really often for me, so gnome shell drives me up the wall. There are just so many little things like that that overall make it a total pain. Some are solved through extensions or change in behaviour, but I use several computers, so learning different behaviour just for my laptop is annoying.

Consistency be damned is the new motto now. From those new and cool interfaces, they are all quite different, Unity, Cinnamon, GNOME shell, (I haven’t tried KDE, I guess I won’t be able to go there out of GNOME loyalty, which was the only reason why I kept using GNOME shell for so long). Apparently rounded corners are more important than working correctly.

So at first I was happy with GNOME shell. Mostly because it seems to be aimed (despite what anyone says) at people who use the command line. People who mouse around will find GNOME shell annoying. For example my wife will not be searching for apps using the keyboard to launch them. Also the fact that it’s impossible to customize GNOME nowdays to a specific purpose easily (using dconf-editor which has totally broken UI, is really not an answer, I wasted lots of time trying to get some things to work). Either ues GNOME shell for what it’s specifically designed for, or use something else. So flexibility is also out the window.

GNOME shell seems to also think that your mousing is very precise, which it never was for me. I commonly press the wrong button, or the mouse will go somewhere it shouldn’t and the interface punishes you for it. See above about entering the overview by mistake (whenever I wanted to hit a menu or the back button or some such).

I tried LXDE, but it’s buggy as hell (at least in fedora). The window list seems to jump around, launchers don’t always work, the battery status doesn’t work, and workspace switcher is totally broken. OK, so no go there. I tried Cinnamon for a few days, but it’s bad in many of the ways that GNOME shell is. Unity is even worse.

I had some trouble with XFCE in the past (on ubuntu that was upgraded a few times, so it might not have been fair to xfce). Anyway, I installed it on fedora, and quickly set it up, and … it works. It’s not perfect, but I don’t need it to be perfect. I want it to just work, and so far it does. It gets out of my way, unlike GNOME shell which kept trying to get in my way. Plus it’s fast.

So kudos to XFCE. I think I’ll stick with it.


Syndicated 2012-04-15 18:50:49 from The Spectre of Math

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