RIP GNOME, 1999-2011

After using GNOME in Mint 12 for more than a week, pretty heavily, it's obvious that there is no hope for the GNOME project. You had a good run.

This is not my first attempt to use the new GNOME. I had hoped it would improve. It hasn't.

The interface is childish. It's the kind of thing an 11-year old does, and you tell him he did great, because he did a good job relative to his peers.

It's just soooo ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. Hideous.

Worse, it disrupts your work flow. In GNOME 2, if I regularly use an application, I can right-click and in a fraction of a second I've got a shortcut on the panel. If I want to find an application, that is extremely fast using the menu.

Why should I have to move to the upper left corner to reveal all applications, then click on a tab, then move all the way to the right side of the screen to choose which application group I'm after. Is there anyone in the world sufficiently stupid to think this is a realistic setup?

They clearly don't understand the point of having shortcuts. Shortcuts exist so that you have fast access to them. If you have to take an action to get to the shortcut, you've defeated the purpose. Someone with a 23" monitor has plenty of screen real estate, so I want shortcuts that do things as quickly as possible, with as little thought as possible.

I can't find the link right now, but someone in a forum said complaints about the hoops you have to jump through are nonsense. Just hit the Super key, type the name of the application, and hit enter.

Wow. If I wanted to do that, I'd use Emacs as my desktop. At least Emacs offers an efficient system of keyboard shortcuts.

It feels good to have written out this rant. Nothing but endless frustration due to clueless design decisions.

Luckily there are alternatives. KDE has improved a lot, and there is no question in my mind that KDE now offers a better user interface than either Windows or Mac. It took a while, but now they have something impressive to show for all their work. I have the user experience of GNOME 2 plus a whole lot of new stuff that increases my productivity. KDE didn't try to create a new approach to the desktop, they took the desktop experience and made it a whole lot better.

I'm using Scientific Linux as my main desktop at work, so I'll be happily using GNOME 2 for quite a while in the future, because SL comes with the 4.3 series of KDE. It's great to be a Linux user. Windows and Mac users are stuck with whatever gets shoved in their direction.