Of all the places I expected to fix my issue with Gnome 3 and Linux window environments, Ubuntu and Unity was quite likely the very last one I would have expected. I hadn’t had any experience with Unity in the past as I jumped the ISS Ubuntu a little before Unity’s time. However, I had read about how many people despise Unity compared to the traditional Ubuntu desktop and to be honest I can’t disagree with them more. Unity seems to just work for me, the system is sophisticated and mature and allows me to work very freely and easily with developing. While I do find the Unity dashboard a bit bulky and annoying, I find that I almost never use it. That is a sign of the success of this environment, it can be used in multiple ways by different people and be useful for all of them.

So, currently, my Linux development system is a manually stripped down version of Ubuntu off of a default install of 11.10. It runs Unity and it runs beautifully. I am very pleased that I have ended up at this point and will be sticking with Unity for a while until either Canonical effs it up like Gnome did with Gnome 3 or until Gnome becomes more usable. Linux Mint Cinnamon is also around the corner and Elementary OS is maturing quickly, so only time will tell for them!

The title of this post sounds like something out a christian revival blog…

You know, Gnome 3 is probably going to be just as good as Gnome 2 was. Gnome 2 wasn’t perfect at first either, many people disliked it. Right now however, Gnome 3 is far from perfect. To be honest, I find it unusable. The real problem is that Gnome 2 is already deprecated and losing support from software. The other day I updated and broke my Debian machine because tons of updates were being held back due to Gnome 3 dependencies. So now, I don’t know what to do. With the beautiful desktop environment I used to use bastardized into the idiotic Gnome 3, I’m running out of places to go. KDE is not an option, I can’t stand it. XFCE is alright, but altogether lacking compared to Gnome and what I’m used to and a pain to reconfigure, there aren’t GUIs for almost any settings it seems. I’m going to try Openbox but I can’t believe I’m having to go to that. Openbox is great if you need a lightweight GUI but this is my development machine we’re talking about. I want to use resources and have lots of useful features at my fingertips. I know, ultimately that I’ll just have to go back to Gnome once it gets more configurable but honestly I’m annoyed that I have to deal with this at all. I can understand bringing the codebase into this decade but its sort of expected that you’re not going to break everything and confound your users when doing so. If I was trying desktop linux for the first time right now instead of when I did 4 years ago, I probably would not stick with it. Gnome 3 is pretty and stable but when it comes to getting work done its useless and frustrating. I have almost no doubt I would have written it off not knowing that I could change my desktop environment and taken a long time to use it again.

Ultimately, I’m disappointed more than anything. Panels worked really well and was never complained about. Fixing something that isn’t broken always has backlash like this and I wish that the Gnome team had thought this out from a usability standpoint more before just deprecating Gnome 2. For now, I’m going to have to waste time migrating to another desktop environment and then, maybe one day, I can come back to Gnome and create a desktop environment that I can actually get work done on again.

The worst part is that everyone is thinking what I just typed, very few members of the Gnome community are satisfied with these changes and are having to find other desktop environments. The world of desktop Linux users has literally been sent into a chaotic mess with this blunder by the Gnome project and I truly believe its a big setback for the entire community of desktop Linux users.