In short, it is awesome.
Why?
Quick Boot
Well it’s the first thing you see when you try out Fedora 15. It boots up in seconds! Systemd supports parallel service starting which makes the system boot extremely fast, and gives each daemon it’s own cgroup. Systemd is also easy to configure, and it’s one of the best features on Fedora 15.
Awesome Desktop
GNOME 3 is truly awesome. It is a big change and it takes a while to get used to it, but apart from few annoying bugs (list at the bottom), it works perfectly.
GNOME Shell is well designed, quick, has nice effects and looks good. It will put an end to new users saying “those panels looks like Windows 95″ (which I heard a lot when I showed Fedora to others).
The lack of task-bar, window list or dock was criticized again and again, but I find it one of the best features of the shell. It makes multi-tasking really efficient. You can switch between windows of the same application using alt+` or switch applications using alt+tab, or using the Overview Mode. Plenty of easy ways to switch between windows, without having a distracting window list visible all time.
Pressing the “super key” (aka Winkey) brings the awesome Overview Mode, which allows you to see all open windows, make them bigger using the mouse wheel (so you can see the window a bit better), lunch favorite applications, see your workspaces and such. It allows quick searching in installed applications, nautilus bookmarks and recent documents. Clicking on the search box is unneeded, because it’s always gets your input when you are in overview mode. (eg. if I want to start gedit, I press the super key, write “ge” and press enter). Yay for keyboard control!
Empathy messaging integration is also helpful, the new network manager menu is really easy to use, and the persistent notifications in the hidden notification area is a great solution to the over-crowding of the old gnome 2 notification area.
Getting rid of deprecated libraries: Not fully accomplished yet, but GNOME and Fedora are slowly moving towards this goal. GNOME Shell doesn’t require HAL, Bonobo, gconf , libgnomeui, libpanelapplet and the list goes on and on. For developers, it means code that is easier to maintain. For users, it means faster desktop environment.
When gnome panel will be ported to GSettings, fallback mode won’t require gconf as well, But this probably won’t get into 3.
Although gnome 3 lacks of panel applets and default customization GUIs, it is much more extendable from gnome 2. It is possible to write plugins using JS, which can do much more than legacy panel applets.
Gnome 3 workspaces implementation is awesome. You don’t need to manually create a fixed amount of workspaces – Instead, there is always (I think there is some limit but haven’t found out yet) extra workspace waiting for you below the workspace you are currently using. Workspaces in gnome shell are displayed vertically, so to make sure keyboard shortcuts will make sens, the default key combinations for switching between workspaces is crtl+alt+Arrow Up and crtl+alt+Arrow Down.
I’d recommend reading the Cheat Sheet.
Easy to use control panel
Gnome 3′s control panel is really a great improvement. Keyboard layout configuration moved to the much better fitting panel, “Region and Language” and keyboard shortcuts configuration moved from their own dialog to the keyboard panel. Those are only minor changes. All control panels were updated, and now they are easier to use and understand.
Better (default) fonts
Gnome 3 changed the default font from sans-serif DejaVu Sans to Cantarell, and it looks much better. That’s the reason I choose Cantarell to be the font of this blog.
Free 3D Acceleration for Everyone
Not exactly everyone, but if you have Intel, Nvidia, or ATI GPU, you can enjoy 3D acceleration with free and open source drivers – out of the box. True, Fedora 14 also had this feature, but it required installing extra experimental package for 3D acceleration support in nouveau (the free nvidia driver). Fedora 15 comes with this support out of the box, and kernel 2.6.38 is a real improvement in this area.
Tons of Other Features
Comparing to the really boring Fedora 14 (the only feature affected end-users in Fedora 14 is faster jpg compression and decompression!), Fedora 15 brings many interesting features that improves end-user’s experience of Fedora.
Conclusion
These are only some the reasons I find Fedora 15 awesome. It is definitely a release you shouldn’t skip, definitely something worth trying. Many bloggers who reviewed gnome 3 (and/or Fedora 15) didn’t try to understand the benefits of the changes, and didn’t try to get used to it. If they will try, I’m sure most of them would find it awesome.
Little annoyances
Nothing is perfect, every software has bugs in it, but the only bugs I see are little annoyances, and really not critical:
- Gnome bug #644297 – Empathy icon would not stop blinking if you read your messages only in the shell integration.
- Gnome bug #643595 - The shell doesn’t show urgency hint. Makes me miss pings on IRC if my speakers are off. (This is perhaps the most annoying bug in gnome 3).
- Power off is hidden by default, only shows when pressing alt. This is not discover-able and in my opinion – bad design.
- Instead of using the nice blue-ish folder icons from fedora-icon-theme, Fedora 15 uses the ugly gray gnome-icon-theme folder icons. Why?
- Fedora bug #684688 – nouveau doesn’t support my GPU with DVI
(Didn’t work in 13 or 14 either) - Fedora bug #679373 – Monodevelop is broken in Fedora 15, and I need it for a school project…
- Fedora bug #691042 – python-genshi doesn’t work with python 2.7, which means I’m unable to build my local copy of fedoraproejct.org so I could do some website updates for Fedora 15…
Hi.
Very nice post
I have to agree with you, the GNOME Shell is not as bad as anybody say. One major thing why I don’t use it is the missing possibilities to configure the apperance of GNOME and its applications. That’s why I use KDE.
Regards
gnome-tweak-tools allow you to tweak some advanced gnome 3 settings, including GTK theme, icon theme, fonts and more.
> You can switch between windows of the same application using alt+`
Really nice for a qwerty keyboard but I wonder how this is mapped on other keyboard layout.
)
Thanks for the tip though (I do use qwerty
Also, this can be changed in keyboard settings of the new control-center.
Keyboard
→ Shortcuts
→ Window Management
→ Move between windows of an Application
It’s not « alt+` », it’s « alt+key_above_tab ».
On the US qwerty keyboard, it happens to be « alt+` », and on the French azerty keyboard, that would be « alt+² ».
I tested it on a Finnish keyboard layout, and here it is alt+§, which is also conveniently right above the tab key. I guess they try to always pick the same position for the action, regardless of that character the key would normally produce.
Nice article, one tiny nit:
“Gnome 3 changed the default font from sans-serif to Cantarell, and it looks much better. ”
I dunno why everyone gets this wrong, as it’s kind of obvious, but ‘sans-serif’ isn’t a font. ‘sans’, ‘sans-serif’, ‘serif’ and ‘monospace’ are *not* fonts, on any modern Linux system: they are aliases. They are expected to exist in the fontconfig configuration and be mapped to whatever the distribution wants the default sans, serif and monospace fonts to be. So apps can just specify the font ‘sans’ and get whatever the distro (or user) wants the default sans serif font to be. There is no actual font simply called ‘sans-serif’.
So, in F15, Cantarell does not ‘replace sans-serif’; it _is_ sans-serif, the ‘sans’ and ‘sans-serif’ alias maps to Cantarell Sans, for GNOME. Previously, it would have mapped to Liberation Sans or Deja Vu Sans, I forget which.
Both Liberation Sans and Deja Vu Sans were mapped to sans-serif. Lately it was Liberation Sans
Very nice article Elad. Enjoyed reading it.
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About that fourth Annoyance on the list:
That’s not a Fedora thing. I think that’s Gnome. Anyway, you can get the Blue Icons back with gsettings. Set the icon-theme to ‘fedora’ and you should be okay (make sure the fedora theme is installed though). I expect this to be the default scenario when Lovelock is released.
On what hardware does it boot in (few) seconds? (Having seen your enjoyable profiling post, I don’t remember! I am guessing Intel quad-core of some sort. Is x86_64 so different? Now is the summer of my discontent (and thanks, it’s very nicely changed over Fedora 11′s.)
I have few cues as to what I am using! Cayce from Pattern Recognition has missed everything but sanding down my Windows keys to paint in the window manager/gnome-3-panel-type-B/whatever in and clear-seal over it. Where’s the colophon in any gnome app, anyhow; or am I supposed to follow the init and gdm scripts to guess what’s open, what’s a daemon, etc., subscribe to the freedesktop.org lists, install source, cross-index that with the list archives by hand and then know, or is there a sort of wine-and-cheese gallery thing I should have attended, convened, etc. where the artists at least explain aesthetically why I would never want to use alt-grave for you know, vim or emacs again now that it is 2011.
What about virtual screen sizes?
Console and terminal paging should have appropriately changed, you know? Instead I find something as descriptive as console taking 40% CPU when I’m running packagekit…I may as well chalk it up to an invisible xterm called up for remoting, right?
Using nForce4, suspend works great; but Hibernate is unlisted and unsuspend…is it the power button? It doesn’t do anything after that unless I hold it 4 seconds….
For that matter, it seems (well, using 05-06-17 nightly build updated) that if I hit the…what are we calling it and where can we buy key covers, again?…windows key, the screen won’t blank like that.
Lag in alt-tab when pagefile well in use.
No RMB/MMB/scrollwheel/etc. options?!
I wanted open applications arranged according to dirtree or sectored wheel common to du visualization, per memory, CPU and pagefile use!
To that end…supposing I wanted to quit lg in order to RTFM; would a hint about hitting esc. hurt? Also, ‘quit undefined’ lacks the panache of messages like ‘extra ignored’ etc.
Where is Tomboy running at this point (it runs with no window the pager knows about, no panel tickler, etc.) and how do I import my old .note files?
Why does gnome-system-monitor lack subtlety and cpu-niceness over the last (panel applet) one, (e.g. analysis of what’s IOWait, CPU, network details, etc.) and what do I do to fix it?
Empathy v. Evolution; fight, or dbus concord?
So; I want to know why there’s no gui for vfswhatever, I want to know that vfs doesn’t crash or not have tools when I boot from the actual (TBA in 3 days) Fedora 15 (Gnome, x86-64) liveCD, whether the kernel patches for quick context change are in there, and a few other things.
Very nice, stable work BTW. It waits until I hit the Dell Support key before laughing outright at me.
wow, that’s a long comment. Unfortunately, I can’t answer all your questions here, maybe you should ask them in a mailing list where more experienced people would read it.
I’ll try to answer few:
>On what hardware does it boot in (few) seconds?
Intel i3, Western Digital WD5000AAKS hard drive. After optimizing startup a lot, I got it to boot in 10 seconds!
>but Hibernate is unlisted
Yeah, that sucks, I think there is a gnome bug open about it.
>Lag in alt-tab when pagefile well in use.
What are you running that makes it use the swap space? I have 2GB of RAM, and it only uses the swap space when I do virtualization
>Where is Tomboy running at this point (it runs with no window the pager knows about, no panel tickler, etc.) and how do I import my old .note files?
Tomboy was replaced by Gnote. You can simply open Gnote and import the files.
>Instead I find something as descriptive as console taking 40% CPU when I’m running packagekit…
Sounds like a bug, you might want to report this.
I’m sorry I couldn’t answer all your questions, and thank you for your comment.