Friday, April 8, 2011

GNOME 3 is nice

So GNOME 3 is out and I decided to give it a try with the Fedora live CD (or should I say USB stick). I must say I'm impressed. Overall it's really clean and just works. The new application chooser is downright brilliant compared to the old menu. I've tested some of the previews of GNOME Shell, and the thing has come a long way.

Of course, Alt-tab is still broken, the default (and only) theme is a bit top-heavy, window movement wasn't quite smooth on Intel GMA 950, there was the occasional crash of the new settings stuff, but all in all not bad for a .0 release. And the new direction means that there are now people working on the core user experience, something that appears to have been more or less neglected for a very long time.

Plus much of the new shell stuff is written in Javascript so should be easy to hack on in case the designers don't come to their senses any time soon (there's already an Alt-tab hack).