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So after 25 years of plain old X window type interfaces (openview, twm, olvwm, fvwm1/2, lxde, xfce4) I've taken the plunge and given Gnome3 a go...
It was mostly prompted by my wife wanting something a little flashier too - we were both running xfce4 which was fine, but she felt her PC could do better... And until yesterday my PC wouldn't support the 3D necessary (anyone want to buy a 3-core AMD + APU motherboard?)
And you know what... It's growing on me. My previous virtual desktops have been usually arranged in a 3x3 manner and my work is almost always inside Xterms so I was a little unsure how I'd get on - however I also got a new monitor (24", 1920x1080 HD thingy) so it can host many full height (height is more important for me when working) terminals.
And actually taking a few moments to read the help browser and a few googles and off I went.
There is even a traditional "desktop" mode where you can have the file manage maintain the desktop - MS Windows fashion. I've never used this, (coming from twm origins) but wifey used it a lot, coming from a Win environment, but she's not enabled it yet.
I've been able to do a few tweaks (It has a "registry" type configuration which I bet is a million lines of xml somewhere) to do things I like like auto-raise windows and grab focus on mouse-over and add a few hot-keys to max-height a window with Ctrl-UpArrow, etc.
I was even able to add new applications into it by creating new files in /usr/share/applications for firefox and thunderbird (which wifey uses - I'm still on alpine here!) It does try to make you use Evolution all the time though.
Evolution vs. Thunderbird? I've done a few searches - seems much a muchness (Reports of Evolution being slow with imap - which is all we use) - but Gnome prefers Evolution for things like notifications, calendar, etc. anyone have a view?
There are things I don't like about it - the bar along the top - damn you, I want it at the right - give me back those vertical pixels! But I'm getting used to using the "Windows" Key now.
Still - it's fast and smooth - which I guess it ought to be, using the on-board GPU thingy, although my mobo is nothing special by todays standards - picked more for lower power than anything else - Intel "ivybridge" i3 processor and Asus motherboard with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. (Wifes PC is a little older with a Core2 Duo processor)
Not quite as fast yet as maybe the old xfce4 was at moving between virtual desktops - Move mouse to little virtual 3x3 representions & click vs. Ctrl+Alt+ up/down arrows moves between them, or Windows key + click - so it'll be intersting to see how I get on with some real work where I'd typically have 6 or 7 virtual windows open with xterms & apps running inside - but the extra screen real-estate might help to reduce that...
Not sure it would run om my old 512MB laptop though - it's all a bit heavyweight - the current top (sorted by memory) is:
%Cpu(s): 0.8 us, 1.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 97.9 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem: 3831912 total, 2010652 used, 1821260 free, 642984 buffers KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 used, 0 free, 789664 cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 5369 gordon 20 0 835m 257m 41m S 1.0 6.9 6:35.24 firefox 6104 gordon 20 0 540m 113m 41m S 0.7 3.0 3:00.88 gnome-shell 5437 gordon 20 0 208m 42m 19m S 0.0 1.1 1:06.58 plugin-containe 4011 gordon 20 0 56324 26m 12m S 0.3 0.7 1:14.34 xchat 3637 gordon 20 0 233m 20m 13m S 0.0 0.5 0:09.92 gnome-settings- 4033 gordon 20 0 171m 17m 12m S 0.0 0.5 0:45.07 xfce4-terminalThere's no "widgets" though (think they're called indicators) - unless I'm missing something obvious - so missing things like cpu meter, weather, and stuff like that. There's mention of them being in sid - sticking to wheezy for now though.
So ther you go. Not too much screaming, but a lot of dragging and -so-far- it's passing the wife test!
I have noticed an SDL application I have doesn't play nice when running it in full-screen mode though - maybe SDL2 will help there...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq