The Linus view of GNOME 3.2

[Alan Cox]

I've been playing with 3.2 a bit today an F16.

The F16 installer is a trainwreck - crashes if an old disk has a partial
raid array on it, then crashes when you try and report the crash. Try
again and it decides my install options contain a conflict, go back to
fix it and it hangs. It eats 750MB of memory yet it *still* can't even
manage to do basic 'Guess my location/locale' stuff using geolocation
tools.

The desktop is looking rather better than before. The dock and some of
the extensions actually turn it roughly back into a desktop and the
transitions and planning for the most part are smooth. Some of the most
annoying bits of behaviour seem to have been tidied up. Yet to try it on
a big display however. A big display really really needs things like
application menus on the backdrop right click to avoid all the mouse
waving in Gnome 3 (and indeed Gnome 2 defaults).

It's a pity they are still desperately trying to hide the extensions in
the default install. Granted some of them don't work, they conflict with
each other and the design is far inferior to the Gnome 2 applets but it's
heading the right way, and some of the other style and design work is
certainly better than Gnome 2. The Gnome extensions web site is also
designed to help this process - but I suspect because they way all the
extensions seem to fight each other it'll be a rough ride initially.

Performance seems a bit better but it ought to be given it's running
off SSD.

I still think the biggest mistake was calling it "Gnome". It's
something quite different and they'd have upset a lot less people if
they'd not tried to pretend it was the same experience as Gnome.

Alan