GNOME 3.12 arrives to openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it is fabulous

By -
In late March 2012 I gave +openSUSE 12.1 a second chance with +GNOME 3 after having a horrible experience with the version of KDE that shipped in that version. By April 4th I was a true believer in the GNOME Shell and the new user experience paradigm that was evolving in GNOME 3. Indeed, each version of GNOME since has been more exciting than the last, bringing massive improvements in performance, stability, reliability, workflow, and aesthetics. Indeed, a true tribute to the GNOME developers is that I hadn't been so sold on an environment since I left Apple's Mac OS X behind in 2010. Each version of GNOME has shown refinements as dramatic as anything I'd seen in Mac OS X, but at a breakneck pace. The latest GNOME 3.12 is not merely an incremental improvement like previous versions, but rather a shocking advancement. In this article I will allude to some changes that happened in recent previous versions since they deserve comment.

Elegance

I love an elegant desktop. In my days as a Mac snob, I got quite used to having a refined, elegant, and unified theme for my desktop and it's applications. Each version of GNOME 3 has shown significant improvements to it's visual appeal. 3.12 however takes this so much further with a nearly compulsive attention to refined details, resulting in an aesthetic that would make Steve Jobs swoon. The expansion of HiDPI support is very welcome and rounds out these refinements making all text and interface elements use your native resolution to maximum advantage. The clean elegance of GNOME 3.12 and it's applications is peerless. It would be surpassingly tedious to enumerate these refinements, and so I'd rather leave it to your own exploration.

Shell Function

The Gnome Shell itself has seen some refinements in functionality. The all in one User Menu (in the upper right hand corner) has seen improvements, chief of which is the addition of Wired (ethernet) network settings and overall improvements to the way network connection is managed from there. Location services have also been added to this menu. GNOME upstream has added the ability for the user to create application folders in the overview. However, this feature relies on gnome-software which is not installed by default and requires the upstream branding for packagekit. This feature should be moved into the shell itself. Another nice addition (I'll admit I may simply not have noticed it in previous versions) is that you can initiate specific actions from applications directly via context menu from the applications overview.

Online Accounts

I originally was going to include this in the software section below, but there is so much that has changed that it merits its own section. Firstly, the support for things it had before such as Windows Live, Google, and Facebook is rock solid compared to older versions. Of note, the automatic launch of Empathy has been removed from GNOME in a previous version, though Online Accounts still works with it. I will briefly go over the types of accounts supported and what capabilities they enable.
  • Google has not changed much, though it does seem to have gained support for Google Cloud Print. You can still access your Drive documents in the GNOME Documents application.
  • Windows Live has seen massive improvements. You can now access your OneDrive documents through the GNOME Documents application, and it will also set up your email account (outlook.com for example) with Evolution mail. Most impressive though is that it actually works reliably and consistently.
  • Pocket formerly known as Read it Later has also been added, though it currently does very little. So far only 'Videos' makes use of Pocket as  a plugin to play your Pocket saved videos. Developers say they will add integration to Epiphany or 'Web' in a future release of the browser. 
  • Flickr is included and is used by the 'Photos' application. I read somewhere that it can be used in some special way for desktop wallpapers.
  • IMAP and SMTP accounts can be set up directly from here for use with Evolution mail.
  • I believe the above are the only truly new notables to 3.12, I encourage you to take a look and see if you discover something new. I can revise this later.

Software

GNOME 3.12 introduces some welcome changes and refinements to programs, as well as a few new ones. 
  • gnome-software is the app-store style interface (PackageKit frontend) in upstream GNOME. This is not installed by default in openSUSE. Besides installing software, the new user defined application folders in the shell are set up by this program. It can be installed in openSUSE, but appears to be broken as it repeatedly asks for authentication for setting a network proxy. However, I have no need of application folders since I merely search for whatever I want and find it's package management capability massively redundant in light of YaST and our own Software Search portal. 
  • Gedit is the default GNOME text editor since time immemorial. In 3.12 it has received a massive interface overhaul following the minimalist UI philosophy of GNOME 3. Despite the minimalistic new design overhaul, it appears that none of its familiar functionality has been removed. I like it.
  • Nautilus or 'Files' as it's labeled appears to have changed little, excepting that you may now connect to servers straight from the app menu on the activities bar. For me, this is a very welcome change since the last time I needed this functionality it had been entirely removed into a separate module that needed to be invoked from the CLI.
  • gnome-photos is not installed by default in openSUSE as the default photo manager, that distinction goes to the revered Shotwell. Photos however is a simple and elegant photo manager, now with Facebook integration through the GNOME Online Accounts. Likewise it also supports Flickr via the same mechanism.
  • Totem or 'Videos' as it is now labeled has seen a massive cosmetic makeover. Under the hood though, it sees a new plugin architecture for online video services. Notably, Online Accounts has support for Pocket and any saved videos there will be accessible in Videos.
  • Epiphany or 'Web' as it is labeled now has seen major changes both under the hood and cosmetically. The minimalistic UI gets out of your way enabling your content. Each tab now has it's own process, and so when one page crashes the rest of the browser will not be affected. In my testing of it, I've found it to be swift and reliable like no other non-mainstream browser before. I can for once see people actually using this browser. It also enables with a quick menu option the ability to save a page as a Web App that will then be added to your applications, launchable immediately from the shell. Support for Pocket should be added in a later version. When Epiphany is installed, it enables the ability to perform internet searches directly from the shell.
  • Polari is an early 'preview' application. Polari is the new GNOME upstream default IRC client. XChat for GNOME is shipped by default in openSUSE. Polari however is a beautiful and easy to use client, which immediately became my new favorite. Polari has excellent integration with the GNOME Shell, using Online Accounts and the notification and chat frameworks allowing you to see pending private messages in the lock screen, and responding to them directly from the shell notifications.
  • gnome-logs is a new system log viewer for GNOME. It is not shipped by default in openSUSE and is redundant since we have a YaST module for this purpose. It also appears that it does not yet work under openSUSE, likely due to wrong permissions. Though 'Logs' may not be an important application for us in openSUSE, it represents a significant step forward for less experienced users in any GNOME distribution since it makes it much easier to fulfill the request, "Ok, in order to help you I'm going to need a couple system logs."

Comments

  1. Steven DelgadoNovember 23, 2021 at 10:18 PM

    Some please help me pick out the best product among those mentioned on the site.Gnome with shovel and Lamp

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please share your insights, opinions, or questions. In that order preferably :p

Popular posts from this blog

Dual Boot configuration for Windows 10 and openSUSE with full UEFI and Secureboot support

By -
Image
Questions and preamble As has become normal, the FOSS/Linux community is peppered with anxiety over yet another major change to the tech landscape issuing forth from Redmond. With the release of Windows 10 comes a great many questions for the thoughtful, and this is especially true for our very own Linux communities. With gratitude we can recall our own past relief upon discovering that UEFI and Secureboot are not the herald of the end-times we had feared them to be. That being so does not however relieve the question of safely upgrading our dual-booting computers to Windows 10 without losing our ability to run Linux in tandem. Excitement for Windows 10 was largely absent in me. I had grown quickly comfortable to the Windows 8.1 work-flow as it shared some similarities in those key areas which I had already grown to love in the GNOME Shell. Further, Windows served a role limited to usage for proprietary software that I deemed not sensible to coax into service on a Linux OS. Howev
Read more

Life without Netflix, streaming on Linux can be awesome!

By -
    For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.     First off, when we are talking about Netflix we should consider why it is that it is so dominant. The opinions will vary, but I'll present my analysis. Hands down, Netflix has the largest selection of streaming movies, but that is where its superiority ends. Though there are many services, most are either too narrow, too expensive, or lack content; thus I will not cover them since we are looking for a replacement t
Read more

Giving 12.1 and Gnome 3 a second chance.

By -
When I started this blog, I intended to make it my step by step log of the trials and fixes experienced in openSUSE so that it may be a benefit to others. However, when I first tried 12.1 with KDE it was such a terrible experience that I rolled my machines back to 11.4. But this time I went with Gnome instead of KDE; since I had experienced some of the speed improvements in the newer KDE I knew that rolling back would make it seem even worse than it really was. And in any event, I needed the experience with Gnome in order to help others. Indeed, I learned the Gnome way and it was good. Brilliant actually, we have a FANTASTIC Gnome implementation. But now, I have recently acquired a new (to me) laptop with which to be a little more risky and experiment on. So, after trying a few distros I have come back to openSUSE 12.1, but this time with Gnome 3. And I must say, it is fantastic. One thing I feared with Gnome 3 was losing some of the functionality and refinement of
Read more