So, I pushed up from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18 to Fedora 19 on my main box over the weekend, keeping with Gnome 3. (I know Fedora isn't one of GNU's favored distros, but, I'm pretty disciplined about keeping away from proprietary blobs.)
Anyway, Gnome 3 shell is everyone's favorite punching bag. For us old-timers, it certainly is unusual in its approach to work flow. But, I tried to adapt to vanilla Gnome Shell. I really did. I don't want to live in the past.
Nope. Still don't love the vanilla Gnome 3 experience.
Most of my aggravation centers around how all my windows are white with black text, but the borders on the windows are thin, so visually they all blend together. In the old days, I'd minimize the windows I didn't need, but, minimization is deprecated.
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| Whiter than an albino snowman at a mayonnaise festival. Also, note I'm cheating by using Docky. |
So, with my sea of overlapping white windows, I'm often either on the Activities menu or Alt-TAB selecting, hunting for my lost application.
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| I think I wanted the white window... |
Over and over, I'm asked to distinguish the white window with black text that I want from a set of miniaturized unreadable representations of white windows with black text. So instead of looking at the picture, I look at the title. But often, when there are many windows, the title is truncated, especially with editor or terminal windows.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing, normatively or canonically. I'm not sure what the intended workflow is. I guess I could set default settings so that each application uses a different background color.
Some days, I'd get so annoyed that I'd either use Docky, IceWM or I'd runlevel down to console only. As a consequence, I've gotten pretty good at running NetworkManager from the command line. (nmcli FTW!)
But with Fedora 19, all is forgiven. I can go into the gnome-tweak-tool and turn on all the default extensions and return to a more Gnome-2-like experience. I'm literally less angry today than yesterday. If you too are a cranky old man (or a crank of any gender and age for that matter), revisit Gnome and turn on all the extensions in gnome-tweak-tool. You might like it.
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| Ahh. Sweet, sweet taskbar and minimization buttons. |