Gnome Shell .. What have I missed

[drewlong]

As its that time of year when can all get excited about a new distro I figured I would do things a little differently this time round and have been playing around with VirtualBox, Fedora, SuSe and particularly anything to do with Gnome-Shell.

And its Gnome-Shell I could use your help or opinion with. I played with it ... it grew on me .. and on balance I think I like it ... BUT ..
Compared to what we have now curtsey of Mint Menu I cant see the benefit. Step back and think about it for a moment.

I can move the mouse to a corner and see my favourites .. Mint - move and click.
I can move the mouse to a corner then move to applications .. Mint - move, click, move click ...

So far it has saved me 2 mouse clicks but eaten up a bunch of system resource to do so. I know there is more to shell than just this but following the same logic with other features I cant see the benefit compared to Mint, some other distros yes, but not Mint.

So here is the question, am I just being dim ? have I missed something vital .. do you have a different take.

Please do not mistake this post as a dig at Gnome I think the guys have done a good job. They have delivered something new and innovative, more importantly they have delivered it with thought to legacy support and provided a fallback position at the same time. M$ never ever show this much respect for their users and KDE fell short of the mark with version 4.... I just cant figure out the real benefit compared to what we already have through Mint

Please let me know if I missed something..

[proxima_centauri]

I'm not sure what sort of response you are looking for.

From your post I gathered you think gnome-shell is faster to use; but mintMenu is still better in function for other things? such as?

I personally find gnome-shell much easier to operate, faster, and more efficient for my day-to-day activities than without it.

[Silent Warrior]

Also, one of their usability tweaks include making the things you need to click bigger - makes it easier for those with some types of disabilities, we're told. I can only agree that this goal appears to have been met - I'm free to click really sloppily now. (I'm not sure it sits 100% well with me, but now that I've managed to destroy Gnome 2 utterly on my installation - I didn't even mean to, you know; PPA to da people! - I feel it's growing on me, as well.)
Another thing is customizability. The way I hear people talk about it, we might even be looking at a near-KDE level of versatility. The customiser might have to know their way around CSS, though. I guess it'll be handled by extensions instead of direct configuration.

[hal8000]

I dont think you've missed anything in Gnome shell. Its the default DE in Fedora 15 now and most people love it or hate it.
FRom a developers view, its easier to work with than Gnome 2 as there are less toolkits and libraries (only what I've read, I am
not a devoloper).

From a user point of view the lack of a panel and something to focus on makes it a little harder to use, and as you say why
move a mouse to task switch when you can press alt+tab?
The worst part of Gnome 3 is that it requires hardware acceleration to work with and it failed to work properly for me with
an ATI HD5770 card and fglrx driver - for this reason I've come back to Gnome 2.32 - and Linux Mint.

[Silent Warrior]

I just discovered you can use the Windows-/Meta-key to get to the task switcher, actually.

(And I suppose the hardware acceleration thing is another reason to keep KDE around for a rainy day?)

[mpiter]

I like the way Gnome Shell handles several workspaces containing each several windows. You go to the upper left corner, and you see something similar to Compiz Expo plugin. You click one of the workspaces, and you have something similar to Compiz Scale plugin keeping the Expo view on the screen. I think that is a nice way to manage the workspace/window set.

[jmak]

Hello,

I used Mint before, but since gnome 3 came out I shifted to arch linux. But I'm looking forward to see gnome-shell appear in Mint and come back and try it. Does anyone know when gnome 3.2 will be available in Mint Debian?

Gnome-shell is great. It is like an addiction. I especially like the way workspaces are implemented. Now, I use them as tabs. I could never go back to the earlier version, after using gnome-shell it looks so outdated.

Gnome shell works great with xf86-video-ati open-source driver, no need for the propriatory one. My video card is Radeon HD 3600 and gnome-shell runs as fast as xfce.

[mpiter]

Does anyone know when gnome 3.2 will be available in Mint Debian?

No. It will be available this month in the mainstream Linux Mint release. I do not know about Mint Debian.

[karashata]

A good chunk of GNOME 3.2 is available in Debian's experimental repository if you're willing to take the risk of a little instability and don't mind being a little picky-choosy about which packages you update. Right now the only package specific to GNOME 3.2 I have held back is gnome-desktop3-data, since most of the GNOME apps haven't been updated to 3.2 yet and still depend on the older version.

If you want to play it a little safer, you should probably wait for GNOME 3.2 to enter the unstable (SID) repository, though even there you're still risking potential system instability.

I might recommend making a backup image of your current setup before you attempt to update, if you decide to pursue that path, just in case things go horribly wrong or you decide you want to go back to what you had and wait it out.