Gnome3 for the experienced (FUN Stuff!!!)

[autocrosser]

Nautilus from GNOME 3.4 still works fine here... GTK 3.6 kills GDM, GNOME Shell and Cinnamon (not sure about XFCE since I can't log into it without GDM working, don't know how to switch the session X uses from the console...). Just got a couple clutter-gtk updates that might make a difference, gonna backup again before I re-test installing GTK3 updates... Also noting that GNOME Shell themes need working on, some things have changed and new things have been added, the old themes *mostly* work but there are a few flaws to iron out...

I am liking this though, I needed something to do with my themes, and this is perfect.

EDIT: A couple other things to note, Cinnamon still works (without GTK3 updated...), but the new lock screen doesn't work with Cinnamon, so Cinnamon can't lock the screen anymore (not that *I* mind, I don't lock it anyway, but some people might care...)

Well, I'm also on 3.6--the only "real" problem I'm having is that GDM has defaulted to the stock Debian look---I've already barfed my install once trying to get the "stock" Gnome3 GDM look..(removing desktop-base & then removing & reinstalling Gnome-Shell, Session & GDM3 is not a very good idea )......Anyone have a idea to get rid of the ugly Debian login & get to the Stock Gnome3 GDM??

All in all--not too bad---rather smooth transition.....

[GregE]

Well, I'm also on 3.6--the only "real" problem I'm having is that GDM has defaulted to the stock Debian look---I've already barfed my install once trying to get the "stock" Gnome3 GDM look..(removing desktop-base & then removing & reinstalling Gnome-Shell, Session & GDM3 is not a very good idea )......Anyone have a idea to get rid of the ugly Debian login & get to the Stock Gnome3 GDM??

All in all--not too bad---rather smooth transition.....

Hi,

In the past just removing desktop-base and rebooting would lead to the default blue stripy background in GDM3. My system is a more recent install from a testing snapshot and the default seems to be a mid-dark gray plain background that matches the default desktop wallpaper of gray with the Debian swirl. I presume that is from desktop-base. Maybe you are looking for something that is no longer there?

[autocrosser]

Hmmm.. I had thought of that.... I'll try it again, perhaps I had not done things in the "correct" order.

[GregE]

I downgraded gnome-desktop3-data to 3.4 and then I was able to get nautilus 3.4 reinstalled. So much of the system relies on nautilus it has to be there in one version or another.

I then edited /usr/share/gnome/gnome-version.xml to read 3.6.1 and now System Settings reports the correct version. I have put experimental's pin priority back below sid and now it is all stable and dist-upgrades run without breaking anything.

[autocrosser]

I removed desktop-base & then reinstalled GDM3---only difference is that I now have a solid blue background with the Debian login-in---any other ideas?

[autocrosser]

Well--I got rid of the "joy" swirl wallpaper--I'm still stuck with the ugly Debian log-in ......still working on that one.

[karashata]

You may want to edit /etc/gdm3/greeter.gsettings and change the settings available in there to what you desire. Debian (rather nicely) made GDM somewhat easier to configure the appearance of than other distros, but only if you're aware of the settings file in the first place. If you try to change the appearance any other way it'll be overwritten by the settings in /etc/gdm3/greeter.gsettings.

You can also configure GDM to use the GNOME Shell-based greeter instead of the older style (though there's still no way to set a custom user theme for GDM Shell without replacing the default theme completely).

If you (or anyone else) are interested, this is how I have GDM configured on my LMDE installation:

Code: Select all

# These are the options for the greeter session that can be set
# through GSettings. Any GSettings setting that is used by the
# greeter session can be set here.


# Theming options
# ===============
#  - Change the GTK+ theme
[org.gnome.desktop.interface]
gtk-theme='Shiki-Nouveau-Wise'
#  - Use another background
[org.gnome.desktop.background]
picture-uri='file:///usr/share/backgrounds/linuxmint-debian/gelsan_debian.png'
picture-options='zoom'
#  - Or no background at all
# [org.gnome.desktop.background]
# picture-options='none'
# primary-color='#000000'

# Greeter session choice
# ======================
# Use 'gdm-shell' for the GNOME Shell version.
# Never use anything not starting with 'gdm-'.
[org.gnome.desktop.session]
session-name='gdm-fallback'
# session-name='gdm-shell'

# Login manager options
# =====================
[org.gnome.login-screen]
logo='/usr/share/icons/gnome-colors-common/scalable/places/gnome-colors.svg'
fallback-logo='/usr/share/icons/gnome-colors-common/scalable/places/gnome-colors.svg'

# - Disable user list
# disable-user-list=true
# - Disable restart buttons
# disable-restart-buttons=true
# - Show a login welcome message
# banner-message-enable=true
# banner-message-text='Welcome'

# Prevent the power management icon from showing up
[org.gnome.power-manager]
icon-policy='never'

# Disabling sound in the greeter
#[org.gnome.desktop.sound]
#event-sounds=false

# The metacity compositor doesn’t go well with the greeter
# so just to be sure
[org.gnome.metacity]
compositing-manager=false

[karashata]

A few more things to note about my experience so far with GNOME Shell 3.6, after updating my Shiki-Nouveau themes to work more nicely with it:

- The lock screen's appearance can only be minimally customized with user themes. A lot of it seems to be hard-coded to match the default GNOME Shell theme, which really kinda sucks...
- Not sure why Hotot notifications used to integrate with GNOME Shell 3.4's notification system, since Hotot uses its own notification system, but they don't anymore with GNOME Shell 3.6...
- Seem to have developed an error with Plymouth that causes GDM to fail to load, and I cannot drop to a virtual terminal to attempt to manually start an X session. I'll have to look into why that might be happening, or possibly remove Plymouth for the time being... (Odd, since I *had* GNOME Shell 3.6 and GDM 3.6 installed before and nothing like that happened, but a bad update yesterday forced me to revert to a working backup I made pre-GNOME 3.6 update and only after reinstalling the updates did this begin happening...)
- The new message tray seems to work best at 60px height or greater (the tray icon size seems to be hard-coded, and anything less than this starts to cut off the bottom of the icon), though with it pushing the rest of the screen out of the way this isn't really a bad thing... It also *definitely* needs to be fully opaque (outside of the overview, which is handled differently), otherwise you get a clipping of the bottom of the screen showing up behind it...

I'm certainly enjoying this, hopefully I'll be able to fix a few of my issues so everything works as nice as it had been without having to make some compromises or sacrifices...

[bimsebasse]

A few more things to note about my experience so far with GNOME Shell 3.6, after updating my Shiki-Nouveau themes to work more nicely with it:

- The lock screen's appearance can only be minimally customized with user themes. A lot of it seems to be hard-coded to match the default GNOME Shell theme, which really kinda sucks...

gdm draws from the default /usr/share/gnome-shell/ theme, same as before with the gdm.css file. The only thing you can do is overwrite the default theme. I was excited at first because they have put login styling into the main gnome-shell.css, so I thought they had implemented user theme support for gdm through custom shell themes, but no, same as before, just not in a separate gdm.css file. I've deleted the login and screen lock sections from my custom themes, and the image files related to it - gnome shell won't draw from your custom css for screen lock and login screen anyway.

- The new message tray seems to work best at 60px height or greater (the tray icon size seems to be hard-coded, and anything less than this starts to cut off the bottom of the icon), though with it pushing the rest of the screen out of the way this isn't really a bad thing... It also *definitely* needs to be fully opaque (outside of the overview, which is handled differently), otherwise you get a clipping of the bottom of the screen showing up behind it...

Tried to manipulate it back to a gnome 3.4 look without success too. For the message tray it's probably best to just keep the default theme's sizes and only change backgrounds and effects.

[karashata]

I shrank the message tray itself to 60px to match the (seemingly) minimum height necessary for the Summary Mode (which is what actually holds the tray icons), and it works nicely like that.

Some of the lock screen stuff can be changed, so I wouldn't remove it out-right. I tweaked the notifications in particular to match the main GNOME Shell notifications for my themes, though I don't know what applications would actually push notifications to the lock screen to be able to check to see how they look/work.

The login screen stuff can probably go until they get around to implementing user theme support for GDM. That probably won't happen, though, so...

[bimsebasse]

I have removed screen shield and login stuff from two of my themes - trust me, it makes no difference.

[karashata]

I see your point... The lock screen must be similar to GDM in that it uses the default theme for its styling, and the only way to style it any differently would be to replace the default theme.

Anyone else wishing the GNOME developers would bake user theme support into GNOME Shell proper (and any other separate components that also get their styling from GNOME Shell) and add configuration options to System Settings for it rather than relying on an extension and Tweak Tool..? It would be nice to be able to have *everything* in a user session get styled with the custom user theme instead of *just* the Shell, plus with user theme support baked in we should be able to choose a custom user theme for the GNOME Shell-based GDM session.

Of course, that doesn't seem to be the direction the GNOME developers are going in *at all*, we're probably lucky we even have user theme support in the manner we do...

On a different note now: I figured out why upgrading GTK3 to version 3.6 was killing my graphical sessions. Turns out it was my themes at fault (or, actually, any theme using the Unico engine). I suspect the current version of the Unico engine doesn't work with GTK3 version 3.6, and, rather than failing somewhat gracefully as it did when GNOME 3.4 was being rolled out into Experimental (anything that relied on the Unico engine for rendering just wasn't rendered at all), it crashes the graphical environment entirely. I'm going to install the Unico engine from Ubuntu Quantal Quetzal and hope it works (it should, Quantal uses GNOME 3.6 so the engine should have been updated for it), otherwise I'll be stuck with the default Adwaita theme (or potentially any theme that exclusively uses the Adwaita engine) until Unico is updated in Debian Experimental.

[karashata]

Unico from Ubuntu Quantal does allow me to use my themes again, however they appear to be a bit buggy, and Nautilus in particular appears to have changed so much the old styling no longer works, making the application look terrible. It looks like I'm going to have some updating to do to make everything work nicely again.

Anyone able to give me a heads-up on what's changed in Nautilus so I know what I need to add to/fix in its style sheet for my themes to make it look good again?

[GregE]

3.6 Update

Gnome 3.6 is fast becoming complete in Experimental. Mine is working well and stable. I now have Nautilus 3.6 installed as well. I have two issues outstanding. Firstly Evolution will not install, which is not a big deal for me, but might be for some users. Secondly, my notification area is not working correctly. When I insert a USB drive all I get is a little disc icon on the desktop without the normal notification pop-up. I have installed an extension to handle removable drives and that certainly works well. Some of the 3.6 extensions from extensions.gnome.org fail to function. Either I am missing some lib or they have not been written to cover all distros.

Early days, but so far so good.

EDIT:

My issues with the notification area were fixed by selecting the default theme. The Shine theme I was using had the notification bar too narrow. I will edit the theme and see what happens.

[karashata]

You may want to take a look at the default theme's code to see what other changes you'll need to make to the theme aside from increasing the message tray and summary mode heights. If I recall, all of the #notification sections were replaced with .notification instead, as well as most of the #summary sections being replaced with .summary. You may also want to add the notification close button code (it's somewhere near the window close button code) to the theme and tweak it as necessary to make the button's appearance on the notifications look good.

There seem to be a lot of little changes throughout the default theme that may or may not also need to be applied to any older (GNOME 3.4) Shell themes. I ultimately just took the new default and copy-pasted all the appropriate bits from my themes into the corresponding sections in the new default theme, and tweaked some of the new stuff to better fit my themes' appearance.

Also, something I found out earlier today: There was a gir1.2-ibus-1.0 update yesterday that causes Banshee (2.4.0) to crash after playing one track, I don''t know if it affects newer versions of Banshee or not, but downgrading it fixes the problem, so I'll be holding that package back for a while.

[GregE]

You may want to take a look at the default theme's code to see what other changes you'll need to make to the theme aside from increasing the message tray and summary mode heights. If I recall, all of the #notification sections were replaced with .notification instead, as well as most of the #summary sections being replaced with .summary. You may also want to add the notification close button code (it's somewhere near the window close button code) to the theme and tweak it as necessary to make the button's appearance on the notifications look good.

There seem to be a lot of little changes throughout the default theme that may or may not also need to be applied to any older (GNOME 3.4) Shell themes. I ultimately just took the new default and copy-pasted all the appropriate bits from my themes into the corresponding sections in the new default theme, and tweaked some of the new stuff to better fit my themes' appearance.

I am not really a theme writer. I had a look at the code and moved on. However if you are interested to see another's work in the area, I found a theme that I like and that works. The author may have just cut and pasted from the default as well. It is called XGnome Enhanced.

http://www.deviantart.com/morelikethis/ ... 4#/d5iweo6

It has a neat transparent top toolbar as well.

[karashata]

I have to say, GNOME 3.6 is proving to be very frustrating to me.

GDM 3.6 seems to have trouble taking the hand-off from Plymouth w/ sysvinit, so I don't get a graphical login after the system finishes booting, and more often than not I can't drop to a console either to log in that way (or restart GDM so it actually loads). If I replace sysvinit with systemd (the service manager GNOME seems to prefer), Plymouth seems to hand off fine to GDM, however my Intel graphics driver doesn't seem to be properly loaded and instead I'm stuck with Gallium through LLVM and no 3D acceleration, so no GNOME Shell or Cinnamon.

GNOME Shell 3.6 I like. The new way of handling the message tray (nudging the whole desktop up out of the way) is rather nice, and, though it seems to be necessary to have the summary mode height set to 60px or higher, it's not really that bad since the desktop is nudged up out of the way of the message tray.

GTK 3.6, or more specifically, the Unico engine update that works with it, is extremely disappointing. Most of the stuff Unico used to be able to handle in CSS has been removed (inner and outer strokes, which made for styling buttons and such rather nicely in CSS, also check and radio button styling, probably other little things...) has been removed, causing many themes that rely on Unico for fully CSS-based styling to break rather badly. It would seem that image assets are going to be difficult to avoid with GTK 3.6. As such, I'm currently suspending further work on my themes until such time as a new engine comes along that allows for fully CSS-based styling such as Unico used to allow, or the Unico developers return much of the styling support they removed back into the Unico engine.

I like the new Nautilus. (The only issue I have with it is that my themes don't work well with it, and I can't figure out what's been changed to be able to fix it. This is outside of the Unico-related issues, which affect the whole theme. Since I'm currently not planning to update my themes to GTK 3.6, this is somewhat unnecessary, but it would be nice to know what to fix in case it becomes practical to update my themes at some point...)

All in all, I'm really having mixed feelings about this update.

I suppose I could remove Plymouth, since it doesn't really provide anything necessary for the operation of my system, and doing so would fix the issue with GDM not starting properly... I could also find a new GTK3 theme to use that works with the new Nautilus and GTK 3.6, though finding a theme I like is sometimes pretty difficult. That's ultimately why I made my own themes (based on one I found and liked, but wasn't *completely* satisfied with...), and eventually managed to make a passable update for the Shiki-Colors themes (based on what I learned from making the other themes, and borrowing most of the code from them and tweaking it wherever necessary)...

For now, I'm working from a backup I made pre-GNOME 3.6 updates, and I'm going to hold off updating for the time being. Once I've made up my mind what the best possible course of action is going to be, and possibly accepted that I may need to make a couple sacrifices in the overall look and feel of the system in favour of just having things work properly, I'll proceed with the updates...

[bimsebasse]

The message tray annoys me - I use the jupiter applet which creates a notification every time you change setting, say, from powersafe to ondemand, the message tray is thus soon overpopulated with those big 70x70 icons, and you have to close each one individually to get rid of them. In Cinnamon you can clear all notifications with one click, in Unity and Pantheon you see them for ten secs and then they disappear not bothering you again.

[karashata]

That seems rather odd, I would expect notifications from the same application should stack or something. Deluge seems to stack notifications in one icon if more than one pops up without being dismissed... I don't run very many applications that put up notifications regularly that persist until I purposefully dismiss them...

[xircon]

Jupiter caused the same problems for me. I junked it in the end, too irritating.