Thursday, December 15, 2011

Me and Gnome3

Hi. Quite a bit of time passed since my last past. That was busy time with continued hard work on (still forthcoming) Couchbase Server 2.0 release and, most importantly, I've found beautiful girl and got married!

Anyway, I just got remind that I should not forget about writing something from time to time. And today's "hot" topic is Gnome 3.

About a month ago (or was it 2 ? Time flies so weirdly with so much happening around me now) Debian Sid got Gnome 3. Even earlier it got some components of Gnome 3. Most noticeable was upgrade of gnome-terminal to Gnome 3 version. And that was almost immediately reverted back to gnome-terminal 2 from last Debian stable. The reason is very simple. Default theme of gtk3 (which is, naturally, used by all gnome 3 apps) is ugly. Like very very ugly. And, surprisingly, there's only one non-default theme engine for gtk3. The one that's heavily using CSS3. I don't like it's look either, but the most worrisome aspect of it is quite noticeable slowness. There are ways to adjust look with CSS3 hackery after all. I've found that some porting work of old gtk engines was initiated. But quick and minimalistic Mist engine I'm used to is not yet ported.

That's basically my whole Gnome 3 story. I cannot tolerate Gnome 3 not because of it's experimental UI, but because I need usable gtk3 theme first. I cannot even say what I'm thinking about gnome's UI, because I haven't even tried using it on daily basis.

Whoever makes Mist work on gtk3 will become my hero. Meanwhile, I was forced to find refuge in XFCE land, that's missing few things I had on my gnome 2 desktop.

3 comments:

  1. I tried to port mist to gtk3 but it didn't seem like easy, so it turns out that switching to urxvt (it doesn't use gtk decorations and dwm solved my issues :)) try urxvt its alt-s buffer search is awesome, also it is possible to speedily its startup time with urxvtc/urxvts

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  2. Yeah, your example made me consider switching to really lightweight desktop. But I'm afraid that getting used to it will take more spare time than I have.

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  3. avsej, try to share it on github :)

    as for me unico looks fine. and also gnome native theme is ok.

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