Why all the Gnome Shell Hate?

[mamamia88]

Sure it's a drastic departure from gnome2 but as a standalone product it seems pretty good. If you are a heavy keyboard or a heavy mouse user you can do anything both ways for the most part. Also the firefox like method of customizing is pretty cool. So why all the hate on it?

[jerome1232]

I don't know, I can't stand it personally, I probably haven't given it much of a chance, I'm perfectly happy in Unity land.

[monkeybrain2012]

I don't hate it. I like it better than gnome2. I use Unity in Ubuntu but Gnome Shell in Fedora.

[BlinkinCat]

I'm really enjoying my time in Gnome Shell but find I prefer a limited number of extensions -

[3rdalbum]

Even more than Windows users, Linux users seem to get really indignant when anything changes. Especially things that have been around for a long time.

When Ubuntu changed the window buttons to the left side and the colour scheme to purple and orange... oh, it was enough to make people threaten to move to a different distro. For a freakin' colour scheme and a position change of a few buttons. I went through more change when I moved from a Macintosh to a PC.

Pulseaudio was buggy when first introduced to Ubuntu, but quickly matured to be a solid piece of desktop infrastructure. But you take a look in the Multimedia forum here and you'll still find people advising you remove Pulseaudio for any audio-related ailment.

In some circles, there's still hate toward KDE for bringing out KDE 4. Sure, its initial releases were unashamedly for early adopters only, but the fact that it was different seemed to be a big reason for loathing.

Unity and Gnome 3 have been victims of this too. Unity is good now. Gnome Shell was never bad and is more impressive than initially. But a lot of people are taking these changes almost as a personal insult.

You can't even change a system recovery keyboard combination without a lot of boo'ing and hissing, as witnessed when the X developers changed Control-Alt-Backspace to Alt-Printscreen-K. The latter does exactly the same thing, but works quicker and more reliably - and still people complain about "Ubuntu changes things for the sake of change". It makes me sick.

There's even people complaining about Wayland eventually replacing the X server. The software has not even come out yet and won't necessarily cause any changes in the user experience (except that things will work more reliably, faster and with support for more features of today's laptops), and there's still grumbling over "change for the sake of change".

I thought people would hate Windows 8 because of the change, but in fact Windows users seem fairly accepting of it. They can install a Start Menu replacement and there's a hack to boot straight to the desktop, and they're generally happy despite losing lots of functionality in their programs and having to tolerate the ugly flat colours of Metro.

It's just something about Linux users that makes them resistant to change.

[Primefalcon]

I tried both out... and while I probably could get used to gnome shell.... I found myself right at home in Unity.... liked it even in 11.04 tbh, and now that I am using 12.10.... I like it even better

I install ccsm to make a few changes such as making the icons smaller, but by and large I like the default experience, I used to make it so that the launcher never hid.... but now not hiding is the default

[monkeybrain2012]

Even more than Windows users, Linux users seem to get really indignant when anything changes. Especially things that have been around for a long time.

When Ubuntu changed the window buttons to the left side and the colour scheme to purple and orange... oh, it was enough to make people threaten to move to a different distro. For a freakin' colour scheme and a position change of a few buttons. I went through more change when I moved from a Macintosh to a PC.

Pulseaudio was buggy when first introduced to Ubuntu, but quickly matured to be a solid piece of desktop infrastructure. But you take a look in the Multimedia forum here and you'll still find people advising you remove Pulseaudio for any audio-related ailment.

In some circles, there's still hate toward KDE for bringing out KDE 4. Sure, its initial releases were unashamedly for early adopters only, but the fact that it was different seemed to be a big reason for loathing.

Unity and Gnome 3 have been victims of this too. Unity is good now. Gnome Shell was never bad and is more impressive than initially. But a lot of people are taking these changes almost as a personal insult.

You can't even change a system recovery keyboard combination without a lot of boo'ing and hissing, as witnessed when the X developers changed Control-Alt-Backspace to Alt-Printscreen-K. The latter does exactly the same thing, but works quicker and more reliably - and still people complain about "Ubuntu changes things for the sake of change". It makes me sick.

There's even people complaining about Wayland eventually replacing the X server. The software has not even come out yet and won't necessarily cause any changes in the user experience (except that things will work more reliably, faster and with support for more features of today's laptops), and there's still grumbling over "change for the sake of change".

I thought people would hate Windows 8 because of the change, but in fact Windows users seem fairly accepting of it. They can install a Start Menu replacement and there's a hack to boot straight to the desktop, and they're generally happy despite losing lots of functionality in their programs and having to tolerate the ugly flat colours of Metro.

It's just something about Linux users that makes them resistant to change.

Nice rant, agreed 110% Added to that are people still moaning about grub2.

[zombifier25]

Even more than Windows users, Linux users seem to get really indignant when anything changes. Especially things that have been around for a long time.

When Ubuntu changed the window buttons to the left side and the colour scheme to purple and orange... oh, it was enough to make people threaten to move to a different distro. For a freakin' colour scheme and a position change of a few buttons. I went through more change when I moved from a Macintosh to a PC.

Pulseaudio was buggy when first introduced to Ubuntu, but quickly matured to be a solid piece of desktop infrastructure. But you take a look in the Multimedia forum here and you'll still find people advising you remove Pulseaudio for any audio-related ailment.

In some circles, there's still hate toward KDE for bringing out KDE 4. Sure, its initial releases were unashamedly for early adopters only, but the fact that it was different seemed to be a big reason for loathing.

Unity and Gnome 3 have been victims of this too. Unity is good now. Gnome Shell was never bad and is more impressive than initially. But a lot of people are taking these changes almost as a personal insult.

You can't even change a system recovery keyboard combination without a lot of boo'ing and hissing, as witnessed when the X developers changed Control-Alt-Backspace to Alt-Printscreen-K. The latter does exactly the same thing, but works quicker and more reliably - and still people complain about "Ubuntu changes things for the sake of change". It makes me sick.

There's even people complaining about Wayland eventually replacing the X server. The software has not even come out yet and won't necessarily cause any changes in the user experience (except that things will work more reliably, faster and with support for more features of today's laptops), and there's still grumbling over "change for the sake of change".

I thought people would hate Windows 8 because of the change, but in fact Windows users seem fairly accepting of it. They can install a Start Menu replacement and there's a hack to boot straight to the desktop, and they're generally happy despite losing lots of functionality in their programs and having to tolerate the ugly flat colours of Metro.

It's just something about Linux users that makes them resistant to change.

OK, I'm going to link to your post everytime anyone rant about changes.

[jerome1232]

People need to moan, whine, hate, argue, debate and generally be idiotic, IT and Open Source helps gather them all up together

You say that like it's a bad thing. It sounds like a good time to me

[cprofitt]

Sure it's a drastic departure from gnome2 but as a standalone product it seems pretty good. If you are a heavy keyboard or a heavy mouse user you can do anything both ways for the most part. Also the firefox like method of customizing is pretty cool. So why all the hate on it?

I suspect it is less about Gnome Shell hate and more about change hate. KDE had the issue when it upgrades (and made changes), Gnome Shell is having it, Unity is having it, Windows 8 is experiencing it. When Apple finally updates the aged OS X (now the oldest OS compared to Windows 8 and KDE, Gnome or Unity) it will experience the issue as well.

People grow used to something and do not like change.