How did Gnome 3 get so good?

[zekopeko]

Very subjective but Unity is a badly drawn G3 rip-off that visually lacks the cohesive, professional polish present in the G3 UI


I agree there is some waste of screen real-estate but - and would go so far as to say that I like Unity's use of the top panel for the app menu... kudos to Unity for that one - shame the rest of it is such an obvious and badly drawn G3 rip

Let me just correct you because you are misinformed. Gnome-Shell is a semi rip-off of Unity. Here is some more info:

http://digitizor.com/2010/11/16/gnom...influenced-it/

[gsmanners]

So it's not difficult to develop a theme and I expect a lot of themes in the near future.

With enough tweaking, Gnome Shell might wrap around to being just as good as Gnome used to be.

[satanselbow]

http://digitizor.com/2010/11/16/gnom...influenced-it/

You hav my apologies... even more unfortunate that G3does it all so much better then

[uRock]

I have fedora 15 in a vbox. Not impressed what so ever. Even with 3d acceleration activated, gnome shell does not work. Even though the VBox change log for the latest release claims GNOME3 and Unity should work with it.

[BigCityCat]

About the lack of customisation: it's true that there are not much customisation options right now. But most elements of the GUI (color, font etc of panels and notifications) can be themed with CSS and the more complex parts (placing of the panel itself and so) with Javascript.

So it's not difficult to develop a theme and I expect a lot of themes in the near future. I also expect some hacks in the near future: some programs like ccsm that are just a GUI to change the CSS and javascript in the themes.

About your waste of space, maybe, the default theme wastes some space, but I didn't really care and maybe there will come some slimmer themes.

There are plenty of themes already. I like Elementary.

http://gnome-shell.deviantart.com/

but I still don't like the way shell functions. I'm using Kubuntu. I also tried both opensuse and fedora. Both I didn't like. Ubuntu makes things alot smoother. If you like shell then you should wait about a month for Ubuntu 11.10 and you will be able to install it and each boot you can choose between unity and shell. If you wanted you could install kde and have all three in the same easy to use distro.

[BigSilly]

Well I dunno about Vbox, but I have it installed on Opensuse in it's own partition directly and I love it. I have played with Unity and I like it, but overall my preference is for Gnome 3 and shell. Maybe Ubuntu will change that over time, we'll see.

[BigCityCat]

I was using shell via ubuntu ppa. I had no problems with it except I didn't really like it. I didn't hate either.

[cbowman57]

I've seen two complaints about Gnome3:
1. Lack of customization. Is that addressed?
2. A lot of wasted space in the top part of windows. Is that addressed?

I think so.

[cbowman57]

The two things that I see that need immediate improving are the indicators in the bottom right - the accordion behavior is terrible, they need to stop moving around,....

Shell is the reason I'm using Fedora 15 all the time now.

There is an extension to kill that accordion effect.

G3 shell, it's not just for Fedora, Suse & Arch anymore.

[mikewhatever]

Speaking of rip-offs, how can you rip-off something that is free to use, modify and redistribute? May I suggest taking a peek at the GPL before posting more nonsense on what appears to be the very nature of the free software.