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The GNOME crew just do not get it.

There is near-universal hatred for everything about GNOME 3. We aren't talking about nitpicking, either. People outright hate everything about GNOME 3.

Existing GNOME users are fleeing to Xfce, KDE and other environments like never before. GNOME 3 surely isn't bringing in that many new users, if it has even brought in any.

It's clear that the GNOME project is tearing itself apart. Most long-time users have given up hope of things getting better. We can't blame them, considering that each GNOME-related announcement brings bad news (even if the GNOME developers mistakenly consider it to be good news).

This announcement just reinforces the feeling that bad ideas rule at the GNOME project these days.

I'm not sure what you're saying is true. I, personally, am a huge fan of GNOME 3 and everything the project has done and plans on doing. Most of my friends (Linux users) are also satisfied, and have no major problems with it. But we usually don't talk about it on Hacker News or other message boards, because we're happy with what we have.

People who are unhappy are much more likely to speak out than those who are content. Clearly, GNOME 3 has annoyed a lot of people, judging by how many people are angry. But I think that generalizing and saying there's "near universal hatred for everything about GNOME 3" is a bit unfair.

Would you mind talking about it a bit more then? Tell us what aspects of Gnome 3 are great and what's great about them?

The main reason I don't buy what you're saying is that no other widely-liked open source software project suffers from this sort of silence from "satisfied" users.

I often hear and see people advocating the use of KDE and Xfce, for example, even in discussion that isn't directly related to them. It isn't isolated to desktop environments, either. People who are happy with Linux Mint, for instance, are very willing to express their like in public.

In general, highly satisfied users will openly say good things about the application, project, distribution or system that they enjoy using.

But we don't see that spontaneous expression of enjoyment when it comes to GNOME 3. In fact, the only time I ever see people claim to like it is when somebody says or posts something about how GNOME 3 is generally disliked by most. There are always two or three people who'll say that they like it. However, their number always pales in comparison to the far greater number of people in the same discussion who express dislike or outright disgust for GNOME 3.

I think the fact is that GNOME 3 is widely hated. That doesn't mean that there aren't a few token users who do enjoy it. But given the significant backlash toward it, the high degree of negativity whenever it's discussed, and the lack of traction it has gained so far, I think it's pretty safe to say that it isn't seen in a good light.

Agreed. People should use what they want to use. I personally hate KDE. I find that particular UI to be the most insane and ugly mess I've ever used. That doesn't mean I go to KDE related thread and talk about how the KDE people don't get it and don't listen to their users.

What annoys me are these comments by people claiming to represent "Gnome's users". No, they represent some of Gnome's users - a group that does not include me.

You do realize that many of the people who speak out against GNOME 3 the loudest are long-time GNOME users who suddenly found their productive and usable desktop environment had been torn apart and replaced with an inefficient, tablet-oriented mess, correct?

I think that they do represent GNOME's users extremely well. The fact that the GNOME project is currently trying to reach out to less-technical users shows that they don't make up an important part of the GNOME user base.

Driving away the most advanced GNOME powerusers, especially those who have the abilities necessary to contribute to its continuing development, is one of the worst things the GNOME project is doing these days.

I love GNOME 3.

Me too.

I love Cinnamon[0] a fork of GNOME3.

[0] http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

What I'd like to suggest is that all Linux platform developers seriously consider going the opposite way and providing real "computers" to those holdouts, like me, who still need to get real work done and know how to navigate a real file system and even [gasp] a command line.

I hope a gnome dev reads this.

Some of the gnome developers came and visited us onsite earlier this year. They did it to "study real users" and get feedback on the gnome3 UI.

Some background: we were representing ~500+ Real Paying Gnome Users, not some nebulous fantasy persona that gnome hopes to get as a user in the future. We are the real customers. We are high-end computer graphics researchers, software developers, and some of the most talented CG artists in the world.

We are content creators, not content consumers.

My gut feeling after the meeting was that they were so stuck in their decisions that they really didn't care about the feedback we had for them. They spent their time defending their positions with platitudes like, "well, you have to try it first. Maybe it's not that bad".

No one liked the magic hot-corner activities window. That's not how we work. The gnome3 philosophy seems to be centered around single applications that consume the entire window, and no configuration. Our workflow is having lots of separate terminals, windows, and a mix of applications running at once. Our world views are drastically different.

My simple question, "if you move the menu bar to the top, and we all use sloppy-focus, doesn't that mean that if there's a window in-between the active window and the top of the screen that we'll lose focus as we try to move the mouse up to the top menubar?", was met with, "well, we didn't think that through. Yes, there might be problems with sloppy focus. <silence>". Uggh.

It's gotten to the point where we are afraid of what's going to happen when RHEL7 comes around and gnome3 is the default. We are paying customers and we don't want gnome3.

I love everything redhat does for the community, but I can't help but get a sense that they are cannibalizing their current users in hope of gaining some nebulous lowest-common-denominator user in exchange.

I really don't know what's going to happen, but XFCE looks like a serious alternative now. What if redhat won't support us if we use XFCE on the desktop? Well, we might have to search for a competitor. Who's the competition? Who's target customer is the high-end Linux desktop user? If that's you, I'd like to talk to you.

Has your group taken a serious look at KDE 4? It has reached or exceeded feature parity with KDE 3.5 across the board, it's a lot more stable now than any previous release of KDE ever has been, and it's well supported by RHEL (and SUSE, for that matter). Even though part of the KDE team is putting a lot of work into the tablet interface etc, the system is modular enough that the desktop doesn't suffer for it.

A lot of people tried early version in the 4.x series, and up until about 4.6 or so it was a crashy disaster, but it's really shaped up in the last year or two.

I'll preface this by mentioning that I am not the level of power-user you are (I don't rely on my OS for my job) therefore your specific needs are far different than mine.

Linux Mint has surprised me with v14 and Cinnamon. I used MATE in v13 and never thought I'd try the forsaken GNOME3 again. However with the new update I figured I'd give it a shot.

It's actually better, for my use case, than MATE. The workspace switching is very nice, the hotcorner for workspace quick view is great on my laptop, but it's configurable and shortcuts still work fine. Everything runs like it did in Gnome 2/MATE but it feels more modern.

All the while Mint is making Linux (well, Debian/Ubuntu) even more user friendly and cohesive.

I never want to have iOS or Microsoft's equivalent to be my primary OS. Leave that for my pocket. But I also don't want to roll my own distro (I tried Arch over the summer and ran into too many roadblocks with my laptop). Mint isn't finding a middle ground. It's just what I want.

Did you guys give a try to Unity on Ubuntu? I guess Canonical can give commercial support for Ubuntu.

> What I'd like to suggest is that all Linux platform developers seriously consider going the opposite way and providing real "computers" to those holdouts, like me, who still need to get real work done and know how to navigate a real file system and even [gasp] a command line.

For what it's worth, that's exactly what we're trying to do with KDE. We'll reorganize a UI to make it less confusing for routine tasks but for the most part we're about trying to make it possible to do complex work. Much like the Perl motto, we want easy things to be easy, and hard things to be possible.

Help is always welcomed though, we don't exactly have multiple distros feeding development time and resources directly into the project like some other desktop environments, and we don't really want to be force-fed by those means anyways as it makes it difficult to move in a direction not in accordance with what the company wants. One has only to look at Nokia's Qt to see what happens with that -- lots of progress on things important for mobile (specifically what's nice for Nokia, obviously), relative stagnation on other areas.

While I disagree that tablets and smartphones are mere toys, I do agree Desktop Linux devs seem to miss who the target user is.

I feel like the Linux platform is one of a small group of technologies where I, a developer and computer nerd, are the target user. They should embrace that, not try to push me away.

There are many other UIs for Linux targeting the nerd. Why shouldn't there be one targeting non-nerds? What would be wrong with that?

It sounds like you're saying that Gnome 3 is now targeting non-nerds and that nerds should use something else. Fair enough I suppose.

The thing that's incredibly frustrating from my perspective is that Gnome 2, for me at least, was perfect. It wasn't pretty but it let me launch applications, switch workspaces and use ALT-TAB the way that I wanted to and then pretty much got out of my way and let me get my work done. It was targeted at nerds and it's extremely frustrating that it appears to have been deprecated in favour of something that isn't.

An important thing to keep in mind is that GNOME 2 and earlier were developed first and foremost by programmers, from top to bottom. While there was some input from self-proclaimed "UI designers" and "usability experts", we generally saw experienced C programmers with a strong UNIX and X11 background calling the shots.

That changed with GNOME 3. The involvement of so-called "designers" was much more significant. They've been calling many of the shots. Changes aren't being made for pragmatic reasons, by the very same users who use GNOME to get serious work done. Rather, the changes are made purely for aesthetic or speculative reasons. In many cases, they appear to be direct rip-offs of OS X's approach.