xrandr DPI setting (important for IntelliJ, i3 and the like):
xrandr --dpi 144
Put it into .xinitrc, Gnome autostart, i3 config or wherever your DE runs stuff at session startup. I also run it after resuming since it sometimes resets itself.
Now, the most important part - the Gnome scaling settings. Instead of increasing the scaling factor, I leave it at 1x and only increase the text scaling. It's a fractional value and applications still resize appropriately (bonus: reduces the amount of whitespace):
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.5
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1
Worked well with everything I use (Evolution, virt-manager, LibreOffice, Terminal...).
IntelliJ works fine out of the box with java-1.8.0-openjdk. I recommend the Iosevka font, but any font will work.
Latest Chromium respects the settings and support scaling by a fractional value.
When I'm using a low-res screen, I simply render at a high resolution and then scale it down:
While it looks slightly off, you get used to it quickly and I spend most of my workday looking at a downscaled screen without any discomfort.
The result is pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent distro. I'm happy to help anyone who is struggling to get this working!
On a more general note, the recent changes in Fedora are amazing! Out-of-box experience went from "a lot worse than Ubuntu" to best-in-class.
The reduced-resolution thing has been a trick for ages, I just refused to use the 4k screen I paid a premium for at half res with horrid (seriously, horrid complete with artifacts and fuzz, I even patched xrandr to disable bi-cubic filtering trying to make it ok and still couldn't stand it) looking text aliasing.
I'm impressed you'd call that "pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent distro"
Pretty much sums up why I don't think I'll ever really be ok with a Linux DE for daily usage. If that's what your users consider comparable to macOS why bother aspiring to reach macOS's perfect (seriously, perfect, even when you mirror across a low res screen and a high res screen it lets you use the high res screen at a higher size with perfect scaling) handling of any mix of resolutions.
This is why I won't suggest anyone ever use Linux as a desktop. The level of technical details and steps needed just to get hardware you already own to work... It's like buying a luxury car and then having to assemble the thing.
I've been doing something very similar under Ubuntu for the last year or two (I manually launch a script that resembles your last xrandr snippet whenever I dock my hidpi ThinkPad with my 1440p secondary display). It tends to have varying degrees of success depending on updates that come out.
For one, I have to repeat some of the commands in my script because otherwise I don't end up with the same end result every time. After it's done, for some reason the cursor arrow flickers when it's on the primary display. Sometimes, if I'm unlucky, UI window shadows will draw in the wrong place, and when I'm REALLY unlucky the script crashes X entirely.
Right now I'm hoping that Wayland (or, if I have to, Mir) end up built in a way that makes this kind of configuration stable, intuitive, and sane.
This is incredible. I had written a comment on the original thread on why I had moved to fedora after 14 years of using Ubuntu and this post confirms that I made the right choice.
For some unkNown reason, Fedora is considered "bleeding edge" and unstable..While Ubuntu is considered mainstream. The truth is that fedora is probably the most polished Linux distribution out there right now..Including a brilliant UI experience.
The only doubt I had was whether fedora is taken seriously inside redhat...And this post pretty much takes care of that.
I'm a bit late to the party, but what I'd like most from Fedora (and by extension, Gnome / Systemd, ... devs) is something on the meta level.
This isn't meant to sound harsh, but I don't know how to say it. Please don't do the cascade of attention-deficient teenagers thing. Please take backwards compatibility seriously. And please give me a stable distribution.
Stable doesn't mean a years old Firefox. CentOS is not stable, it is stale. Stable can mean always going with the latest and greatest software. But it means I write a program now, and I can be sure it works 5 years later with no or minimal changes - and importantly, not looking fallen out-of-time! A frozen Gnome 3.24 is not stable, it is stale once development moves on. Gnome was stable in, say, ~2.14 - 2.28 (I'm just making the numbers up) - it was still receiving new features, widgets, themes. The same applies to Fedora as a whole.
If you have to ship multiple versions of libraries, then be it so. But even better would be to influcence the developers to avoid breaking changes. Take backwards compatibility religiously, like Microsoft. I know it is not easy, but that is what I'd really love to see (before e.g. three finger guestures).
There is a big overlap between Fedora developers, and Gnome/Glib/Systemd/Networkmanager/Wayland/... developers, so you are in a great position to do so.
All in all, I like do Fedora. As others have said, it is really polished, like Ubuntu used to be. I used to use Debian and Ubuntu, but when things started moving and breaking under me (and in order to get up to date things I couldn't just live on a ESR) I moved to Windows. Once the Wayland dust settles, I'm definitely looking to move back to Linux/Fedora again.
Yes! IMHO a stable distribution is more important than new features. The fact that 16.04 has broken my network access because of my NAS mount point is one more proof that people at ubuntu and gnome are still trying to mimic windows and have not understood the differentiating advantages of unix: stability and network.
At work, my most used windows applications are firefox, putty, Xming and VNC viewer to access hundreds of sites (Portuguese, Nederlands, home computer and all the linux computers of the enterprise with a X11 display forward). Tunnels are configured in putty so that I can show my current projects without putting them on internet. My wife traveling with her laptop can wake the home PC (wake on lan) and mount the disks (sshfs) to access files.
I do not want to spend hours fixing system issues (like I did before on windows). I just want a stable system where I can add some minor customizations (like the PES preview http://torvalds-family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.h...) and add some docker images with tailored development environments.
So, we are working on this, not just with Flatpack, but with a broad initiative we call "Modularity". (I know that's not the best name, but naming things is famously one of two hard problems in CS¹.) The big problem in operating systems in general is "too fast + too slow", and we are aiming to solve it. See https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/ for background on this initiative, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZftb2Wgi4 if you like your information in video-presentation form.
1 . Along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors, of course
I've found Fedora HiDPI support tolerable, but still weaker than Windows. As the article notes, fractional scale isn't do-able.. I have a 15" 4k laptop...2x isn't quite right, as I can't quite fit a comfortably sized browser window alongside a comfortably wide terminal window. My ideal development environment has a browser and a term splitting the screen not quite in half (browser slightly bigger).
The tiling features are weaker in Gnome than in Windows, now, as well (which is kinda sad, since tiling window managers originated on Linux/UNIX/BSD systems). I can drag to the side for each of my windows, and then drag the center bar to get just the right balance between browser size and terminal size. On Linux, I've got some kind of tiling plugin, but it requires me to specify window size by selecting from a 4x4 grid. So, more cumbersome to get my screen setup, and with less control; it's the perfect storm of poor UI: Harder to use while doing less.
I'm still more productive in Linux than in Windows. Windows is a mess for developing across many languages...I've literally got five different Perl installations (that I know about), only one was intentionally installed, and they all fight with each other, and I never can get the path right to make all of my stuff Just Work. At least three different Pythons (I intentionally installed a Python 2.7 and a Python 3.x, but a third came along with some other package). The Python's are waging a turf war, too, and things never seem to work right. Also, multiple versions of gcc and development environment; only one actually works (probably due to paths, again). At least I only have one Ruby interpreter installed on the system (that I know of).
But, at least the graphics drivers are solid, and the quality of the general Windows user experience has increased dramatically since I last used it for any work.
Nonentheless, I love Fedora. It's my favorite desktop OS, and has been for many years. I've tried Ubuntu, but find I don't really agree with a lot of their choices. They seem to leap before thinking things through, sometimes, in an effort to be on the cutting edge. And, a lot of their "invented here" stuff is often inferior to the stuff the rest of the community has been working on.
Please try the text-scaling-factor trick I detailed above and report back. I'm curious.
Try i3 as tiling WM. It might look intimidating at first, but it really improves productivity (and I say that as someone who refused to use one for far too long).
As a couple of other folks have mentioned, it’s important to keep in mind that the premise of that original post was, "what could Ubuntu do better?" In that context, what you DON’T see there are the things that Ubuntu does well already, but that folks feel might be lacking in Fedora.
Speaking for myself, I can tell you that a HUGE part of the reason I stick with Ubuntu are their LTS releases. Those are just super important to me: more than most anything, I value a desktop that I don’t have to overhaul/reinstall on a frequent basis. Ubuntu’s five years of support puts it way out ahead of Fedora’s one.
(As a developer, I of course need to stay more up to date than the LTSes themselves are, but that’s what /usr/local/ is for. It’s trivial to keep those things up to date myself, and frankly, even Fedora would be too slow for me with most of that.)
[Note: I also cross-posted this comment on the blog itself.]
The GNOME Tweak tool can help configuring GNOME for HiDPI settings through scaling factors. Also changing fonts, themes and such.
The default GNOME themes are functional but I never enjoyed them much. Sam Hewitt made an excellent theme for GNOME, including a full icon and cursor set. It really does improve the look and feel of GNOME.
Pretty cool to see some acknowledgement from the Fedora crowd, but almost everything listed here is "maybe in a future release" rather than being present now.
Amazing response. In the Ubuntu thread many people argued as if the issue were Linux. me and I assume others as well are tired from answering that this all is long fixed in some way or another especially if you can not show them a friendly easy guide that just works. Glad to know fedora got that all covered.
Will forward to my fancy pants friends with 4k touch screen laptops
Who needs this? It is the one thing I tell people to stay away from when they're shopping for hardware.
If you can get by with integrated graphics, do it. It saves energy and a whole lot of frustration. Stick with upstreamed drivers only if you want to keep your sanity.
I rather have no dedicated graphics and couldn't care less about touch pad and screen but want a decent keyboard. People want different things, that's something Apple always sucked for
> touchscreen - no one uses this after day 2 or wants fingerprints on their screen
As a counterpoint: I've turned off the touchpad on my Surface pro 4 - and constantly touch non-touch screens when I'm helping others...
I rarely use a pointing device though - for example I use vimperator/vimium for web browsing and vi for editing (or vi keybindingings in vs code).
But I guess I agree that I don't want a touch screen without a great pen with at least some pressure sensitivity - drawing really is so much more fun and easy - both diagrams, notes and doodles.
you mean the XPS 15 ? this is pretty much what you described and you can buy it right now. You missed on thing though - NVME SSD compatibility. Its the only innovation in hardware that can get you performance gains for the next couple of years.
I gave up the 2 ram slots in exchange for a single removable NVME SSD slot for the ultra thin XPS 13. The integrated graphics card is powerful enough to play Bioshock Infinite.
make a 15" version that weights only 2kg and has 1080p or the retina size and maybe for some people the 4k version.
with fedora and open hardware.
i would buy it on day one.
Im very happy with Linux Mint 18 on my MacBook Air (2013model). The best hardware and Mint made possible using rEFInd boot manager. Everything 'just works'.
If anyone's interested in trying Fedora I'd suggest checking out Korora, it bundles the Fedora base with nice themes and some essential packages/repositories that Fedora refuses to bundle based on their free software guidelines (like VLC) and some more sensible defaults (like Firefox as default browser instead of Epiphany).
I've tried running newer CentOS and Fedora GNOME environments but they always feel so much slower than Xfce or unity. When I open ps it shows gnome-shell constantly using 10% cpu and 20-30% memory. Opening menus and switching desktops is such a pain with all the delay. I found this true with Virtual Machines as well.
I have also experienced memory issues. With the weather extension, gnome-shell goes from 150mb to 2GB in a week. Without extensions it still goes from 150mb to 400mb in a week, but it is much more manageable.
It doesn't use any CPU when idle for me? It does use a bunch when switching workspaces. But after that it drops back to 0%. It should NOT use CPU constantly.
There are memory leaks without any extensions, but usually it's an extension which causes the memory to increase.
Forum feedback, like HN feedback, is too extreme, and unless your product is exclusively marketed at the HN crowd, such feedback will be close to useless. You might have a big problem, for example, non-hackers can not write e-mails in Ubuntu, while HN-crowd are worried about battery life. So instead of taking one hour to fix the e-mail problem for thousands of users, you spend thousands of man-hours to marginally improve battery life to please a handful of users.
My biggest gripe with Fedora is Gnome. Modern Gnome has the worst (out of the box) window management I've ever encountered. Its default alt-tab behaviour is insane (you have to use alt-tab + arrow keys to navigate multiple terminal instances because it automagically groups things in an unusable manner). Virtual Desktops used to better, now they're more basic and less versatile. When my touchpad is disabled, Gnome somehow thinks this is a mistake and enables it against my will, with no option to disable it.
Yes, there are workarounds for all these issues. My favourite workaround is installing awesomewm and refusing to touch Gnome.
Funny, window switching is my favorite feature of Gnome 3.
I use alt-tab to change application, alt-` to change windows of the application. Quite easy to navigate IMO. It never occurred to me to use the arrow keys inside of the window switcher.
The one thing I do miss is a good tiling layout. There's a few plugins out there but not one I found actually works.
The biggest grouse I have with most linux desktops I have is the font rendering. I understand that it is to do with the patents on cleartype etc, but its been so many years with this problem
Don't get me wrong, warts regarding high DPIs have existed for far too long and definitely need some love, but I'm a bit sadder the few complaints I see about design direction were not taken on board.
Running what appears to be a touch UI (definition: very few buttons, those that exist are large, lots of dead space, information density very low) with a mouse feels shockingly unproductive, and at least personally, conveys the impression of working with a mobile app toy rather than a workstation used for getting work done.
You can't look at this and not see shades of iOS's Springboard. Very touch friendly on small mobile device screens, very wasteful on large ones, like the kind most of us have at our desks.
...and like the kind that most of G3's users will be running it on.
I'm forced to write off G3 as yet another misguided attempt to unify touch and mouse UIs, in an attempt to appeal to the kind of newbie user that wouldn't even be running G3 in the first place.
I'd settle for better font rendering, and a better way to debug which extension causes Redshift to not work or makes the logout dialog take 20 seconds to show up (with the desktop frozen in the meantime). Extension debugging needs love.
[+] [-] lima|9 years ago|reply
Was a wild ride since Skylake + 4k + docking station became stable only recently with Linux 4.9, but scaling always worked.
Here's what it takes:
Xft DPI and hinting settings (font rendering):
xrandr DPI setting (important for IntelliJ, i3 and the like): Put it into .xinitrc, Gnome autostart, i3 config or wherever your DE runs stuff at session startup. I also run it after resuming since it sometimes resets itself.Now, the most important part - the Gnome scaling settings. Instead of increasing the scaling factor, I leave it at 1x and only increase the text scaling. It's a fractional value and applications still resize appropriately (bonus: reduces the amount of whitespace):
Worked well with everything I use (Evolution, virt-manager, LibreOffice, Terminal...).IntelliJ works fine out of the box with java-1.8.0-openjdk. I recommend the Iosevka font, but any font will work.
Latest Chromium respects the settings and support scaling by a fractional value.
When I'm using a low-res screen, I simply render at a high resolution and then scale it down:
While it looks slightly off, you get used to it quickly and I spend most of my workday looking at a downscaled screen without any discomfort.The result is pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent distro. I'm happy to help anyone who is struggling to get this working!
On a more general note, the recent changes in Fedora are amazing! Out-of-box experience went from "a lot worse than Ubuntu" to best-in-class.
[+] [-] BoorishBears|9 years ago|reply
I'm impressed you'd call that "pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with a recent distro"
Pretty much sums up why I don't think I'll ever really be ok with a Linux DE for daily usage. If that's what your users consider comparable to macOS why bother aspiring to reach macOS's perfect (seriously, perfect, even when you mirror across a low res screen and a high res screen it lets you use the high res screen at a higher size with perfect scaling) handling of any mix of resolutions.
[+] [-] peterwwillis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BHSPitMonkey|9 years ago|reply
For one, I have to repeat some of the commands in my script because otherwise I don't end up with the same end result every time. After it's done, for some reason the cursor arrow flickers when it's on the primary display. Sometimes, if I'm unlucky, UI window shadows will draw in the wrong place, and when I'm REALLY unlucky the script crashes X entirely.
Right now I'm hoping that Wayland (or, if I have to, Mir) end up built in a way that makes this kind of configuration stable, intuitive, and sane.
[+] [-] Adaptive|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|9 years ago|reply
For some unkNown reason, Fedora is considered "bleeding edge" and unstable..While Ubuntu is considered mainstream. The truth is that fedora is probably the most polished Linux distribution out there right now..Including a brilliant UI experience.
The only doubt I had was whether fedora is taken seriously inside redhat...And this post pretty much takes care of that.
[+] [-] captainmuon|9 years ago|reply
This isn't meant to sound harsh, but I don't know how to say it. Please don't do the cascade of attention-deficient teenagers thing. Please take backwards compatibility seriously. And please give me a stable distribution.
Stable doesn't mean a years old Firefox. CentOS is not stable, it is stale. Stable can mean always going with the latest and greatest software. But it means I write a program now, and I can be sure it works 5 years later with no or minimal changes - and importantly, not looking fallen out-of-time! A frozen Gnome 3.24 is not stable, it is stale once development moves on. Gnome was stable in, say, ~2.14 - 2.28 (I'm just making the numbers up) - it was still receiving new features, widgets, themes. The same applies to Fedora as a whole.
If you have to ship multiple versions of libraries, then be it so. But even better would be to influcence the developers to avoid breaking changes. Take backwards compatibility religiously, like Microsoft. I know it is not easy, but that is what I'd really love to see (before e.g. three finger guestures).
There is a big overlap between Fedora developers, and Gnome/Glib/Systemd/Networkmanager/Wayland/... developers, so you are in a great position to do so.
All in all, I like do Fedora. As others have said, it is really polished, like Ubuntu used to be. I used to use Debian and Ubuntu, but when things started moving and breaking under me (and in order to get up to date things I couldn't just live on a ESR) I moved to Windows. Once the Wayland dust settles, I'm definitely looking to move back to Linux/Fedora again.
[+] [-] reacweb|9 years ago|reply
At work, my most used windows applications are firefox, putty, Xming and VNC viewer to access hundreds of sites (Portuguese, Nederlands, home computer and all the linux computers of the enterprise with a X11 display forward). Tunnels are configured in putty so that I can show my current projects without putting them on internet. My wife traveling with her laptop can wake the home PC (wake on lan) and mount the disks (sshfs) to access files.
I do not want to spend hours fixing system issues (like I did before on windows). I just want a stable system where I can add some minor customizations (like the PES preview http://torvalds-family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.h...) and add some docker images with tailored development environments.
[+] [-] mattdm|9 years ago|reply
1 . Along with cache invalidation and off-by-one errors, of course
[+] [-] arunarunarun|9 years ago|reply
edit: link to Christian's post about it -- https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2016/06/21/fedora-workstation...
[+] [-] SwellJoe|9 years ago|reply
The tiling features are weaker in Gnome than in Windows, now, as well (which is kinda sad, since tiling window managers originated on Linux/UNIX/BSD systems). I can drag to the side for each of my windows, and then drag the center bar to get just the right balance between browser size and terminal size. On Linux, I've got some kind of tiling plugin, but it requires me to specify window size by selecting from a 4x4 grid. So, more cumbersome to get my screen setup, and with less control; it's the perfect storm of poor UI: Harder to use while doing less.
I'm still more productive in Linux than in Windows. Windows is a mess for developing across many languages...I've literally got five different Perl installations (that I know about), only one was intentionally installed, and they all fight with each other, and I never can get the path right to make all of my stuff Just Work. At least three different Pythons (I intentionally installed a Python 2.7 and a Python 3.x, but a third came along with some other package). The Python's are waging a turf war, too, and things never seem to work right. Also, multiple versions of gcc and development environment; only one actually works (probably due to paths, again). At least I only have one Ruby interpreter installed on the system (that I know of).
But, at least the graphics drivers are solid, and the quality of the general Windows user experience has increased dramatically since I last used it for any work.
Nonentheless, I love Fedora. It's my favorite desktop OS, and has been for many years. I've tried Ubuntu, but find I don't really agree with a lot of their choices. They seem to leap before thinking things through, sometimes, in an effort to be on the cutting edge. And, a lot of their "invented here" stuff is often inferior to the stuff the rest of the community has been working on.
[+] [-] lima|9 years ago|reply
Try i3 as tiling WM. It might look intimidating at first, but it really improves productivity (and I say that as someone who refused to use one for far too long).
[+] [-] karlmdavis|9 years ago|reply
Speaking for myself, I can tell you that a HUGE part of the reason I stick with Ubuntu are their LTS releases. Those are just super important to me: more than most anything, I value a desktop that I don’t have to overhaul/reinstall on a frequent basis. Ubuntu’s five years of support puts it way out ahead of Fedora’s one.
(As a developer, I of course need to stay more up to date than the LTSes themselves are, but that’s what /usr/local/ is for. It’s trivial to keep those things up to date myself, and frankly, even Fedora would be too slow for me with most of that.)
[Note: I also cross-posted this comment on the blog itself.]
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
The default GNOME themes are functional but I never enjoyed them much. Sam Hewitt made an excellent theme for GNOME, including a full icon and cursor set. It really does improve the look and feel of GNOME.
https://snwh.org/paper
[+] [-] phkahler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soperj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miloshadzic|9 years ago|reply
* A better email app. Currently none can be said to work very well. I'm actually considering mutt at this point
* A better Gnome Calendar. I think this is coming in the next release.
* A PDF viewer that supports highlighting.
[+] [-] s_kilk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbst|9 years ago|reply
Will forward to my fancy pants friends with 4k touch screen laptops
[+] [-] RandyRanderson|9 years ago|reply
* 2 ram slots
* 2 M.2 SSD slots
* a decent kb
* a decent touchpad
* a decent screen
* discrete graphics
* good battery management (you can do this because it's only one)
* thunderbolt 3
* at least 3 usb ports
* no dvd
* ONE TRRS audio port
* ethernet
* HDMI for legacy reasons
forget about
* thinnest
* lightest
* or any other 'best' quality - it just has to be good
* touchscreen - no one uses this after day 2 or wants fingerprints on their screen
You will sell a lot of these.
[+] [-] xorcist|9 years ago|reply
Who needs this? It is the one thing I tell people to stay away from when they're shopping for hardware.
If you can get by with integrated graphics, do it. It saves energy and a whole lot of frustration. Stick with upstreamed drivers only if you want to keep your sanity.
[+] [-] dandelion_lover|9 years ago|reply
Upd: this is a 12" laptop. However, they offered Libreboot X400 before, which is 14". You can still get one via https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-installation-service/
[+] [-] herbst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|9 years ago|reply
As a counterpoint: I've turned off the touchpad on my Surface pro 4 - and constantly touch non-touch screens when I'm helping others...
I rarely use a pointing device though - for example I use vimperator/vimium for web browsing and vi for editing (or vi keybindingings in vs code).
But I guess I agree that I don't want a touch screen without a great pen with at least some pressure sensitivity - drawing really is so much more fun and easy - both diagrams, notes and doodles.
[+] [-] sandGorgon|9 years ago|reply
I gave up the 2 ram slots in exchange for a single removable NVME SSD slot for the ultra thin XPS 13. The integrated graphics card is powerful enough to play Bioshock Infinite.
And it runs Fedora brilliantly
[+] [-] lima|9 years ago|reply
Modern ThinkPads (Carbon X1, T460[s], ...) come pretty close to your requirements.
[+] [-] ccozan|9 years ago|reply
https://dot.kde.org/2017/01/26/kde-and-slimbook-release-lapt...
[+] [-] merb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zoom6628|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konart|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noja|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] broodbucket|9 years ago|reply
https://kororaproject.org/
[+] [-] petre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maweki|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javitury|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bkor|9 years ago|reply
There are memory leaks without any extensions, but usually it's an extension which causes the memory to increase.
[+] [-] herbst|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] z3t4|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tharkun|9 years ago|reply
Yes, there are workarounds for all these issues. My favourite workaround is installing awesomewm and refusing to touch Gnome.
[+] [-] justryry|9 years ago|reply
I use alt-tab to change application, alt-` to change windows of the application. Quite easy to navigate IMO. It never occurred to me to use the arrow keys inside of the window switcher.
The one thing I do miss is a good tiling layout. There's a few plugins out there but not one I found actually works.
[+] [-] goombastic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Karunamon|9 years ago|reply
Running what appears to be a touch UI (definition: very few buttons, those that exist are large, lots of dead space, information density very low) with a mouse feels shockingly unproductive, and at least personally, conveys the impression of working with a mobile app toy rather than a workstation used for getting work done.
GNOME3's launcher: http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/GNOME-3-16-...
You can't look at this and not see shades of iOS's Springboard. Very touch friendly on small mobile device screens, very wasteful on large ones, like the kind most of us have at our desks.
...and like the kind that most of G3's users will be running it on.
I'm forced to write off G3 as yet another misguided attempt to unify touch and mouse UIs, in an attempt to appeal to the kind of newbie user that wouldn't even be running G3 in the first place.
[+] [-] brightball|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gens|9 years ago|reply
But they sure do like to write blog posts about hip stuff.
[+] [-] bantunes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|9 years ago|reply
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650371