I've seen the future: Fedora 15 with Gnome 3.0. I haven't even tried Gnome 3.0, but, just by looking at the ridiculous screen shots, I'm filled with seething hatred. The round corners, the huge title bars that only contain a close button, and the blue stripes are all vile. This is certainly is an irrational, unscientific response. I will give it a try when 15 is final in a couple of months, though.
I guess I'm just saddened that, yet again, some bit of the software ecosystem that I liked has been turned upside down. I'm still filled with a seething hatred for the gizmo-laden toolbar of Microsoft Windows and Power Point. After a year with them, I am still much less productive than I was before. I can understand their thinking, I guess. They see that the future is moving to iPhone-style interactions, and they want a Desktop that can be iPhone-ized or something.
I also feel somewhat sad about the odd bloatware that Guile has become. I liked Guile 1.8 a lot, but, 2.0 isn't really very fun for me. It's the debugging that kills me. There is never any good way to extract the information I need. The stack and backtrace is always so devoid of useful information. You can't really single-step in any meaningful way. It has the same feel as trying to debug C compiled with -O3.
But, I *am* an old man now. Get off my lawn. Do I even need to move on to Gnome 3.0?
The truth is that despite using Fedora 14 with Gnome 2.x for almost all of my Linux devel, I don't think I use much Gnome functionality. There are tons of Gnome programs, but, I don't use any of them. The whole list of Gnome functionality I use is
- Network manager
- File manager
- Terminal
- System monitor
- PDF viewer
- Image viewer
- Emacs
- The development stack: gcc, guile, autotools, etc.
- Fedora / Adobe Flash
The software work that pays me money involves me using
- C#.NET for Windows 7
- MS Office: Word, PowerPoint, Outlook
- VxWorks
My social life is all
- Yahoo Mail