Trying Gnome 3 Again

I have a weird relationship with Gnome 3. I think in many respects, it’s the most technically impressive of the linux desktops. It’s reasonably fast even on slow and old machines, and they made all the right decisions about animation timing. It’s filled with nice touches- modal dialog homing, the blink-into-existence animation for dialogs, the automatic ‘next workspace’. The Google Calendar integration is wonderful.

On the other hand, it has a whole raft of goofy, annoying behaviors that I am a hundred percent sure will never be fixed, and I am a “bad person” for wanting to get fixed. Alt-tab behavior, for example. Instead of embracing the workspace concept, they neuter it, and alt-tab will randomly shove you between workspaces instead of letting you navigate between windows in your workspace. When alt-tabbing to a firefox window, I’ve even seen it move me to a different workspace even though there was a firefox window in the current workspace. It’s true that this is OS X’s behavior, and that OS X is popular and well regarded, but it’s hard to regard this as correct or useful. For people who want this behavior super-tab also does this- which will ‘just work’ for Mac users. Compromise! Configuration! Things that will never happen! Of course, now that I’m talking about 3.10 instead of 3.0, it’s probably too late to change- but people have been grumbling about it the whole time, to no great effect.

This is fixable, of course, with an extension. Installing these has become quite seamless, I have to admit. It’s still a goofy band-aid, and if you look at the list of popular extensions, the top ten all like that- unnecessary papercuts. Lots of them from the Gnome team.

I just can’t understand why this fight goes on. Sometimes you lose, and that’s OK.