GNOME 3 rant

Crivens

Crivens

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Well, GNOME 3 is starting to really bug me off. One simple update to the ports tree, and suddenly things like editors/gedit start to think that they know better than me how I would like their border decoration or where the close button for a window shall be. Close buttons belong to the top-left corner, not next to other buttons. Also, the title bar is not supposed to have 10% of the screen estate, you designers! And it would be cool if the toolkit would take some hints about what sliders and stuff were set to look like. If I wanted to run applications carrying a huge baggage of layers upon layers, not heeding the look and feel of the preferences set, not operating like expected (like, where the fuzz has the menu gone?), then I can use even more advanced bloatware under Wine. That also does not look like it belongs, has weird shortcuts, comes with several layers of abstraction and is said to be designed with the user's experience in mind. As an old D&D nut, I know that experience is dealt out when fighting evil things, so that adds up at least. But this nanny-layout is starting to make Xfce unusable.

These tools, which now look intrusive on my desktop, are now scheduled for replacement. Or is there a way to beat them into submission?
 
Crivens said:
Close buttons belong to the top-left corner, not next to other buttons.
Click to expand...

For moving the close button (and/or other buttons), see: https://gnomeshell.wordpress.com/2011/09/10/change-the-window-title-buttons/

Crivens said:
Also, the title bar is not supposed to have 10% of the screen estate, you designers!
Click to expand...

You can install a compact theme to reduce the title bar size, but it may not help much for applications that put functionality in the title bar (i.e. most GNOME applications). For me, reducing the font size helped a bit.

Crivens said:
And it would be cool if the toolkit would take some hints about what sliders and stuff were set to look like. If I wanted to run applications carrying a huge baggage of layers upon layers, not heeding the look and feel of the preferences set, not operating like expected (like, where the fuzz is the menu gone?)
Click to expand...

GNOME shell is a complete reimagining of the desktop. You can get a GNOME 2-esque feel by using GNOME Classic (or whatever it's called), or you can try to keep an open mind and give it a few weeks. I've used it since 3.0 on Linux and I actually quite like it.

As for the menu, it's likely been moved to the application menu at the top of the screen (next to the activities button in the default install). Not all applications use this, but most (if not all) GNOME applications have implemented it.

Crivens said:
As an old D&D nut, I know that experience is dealt out when fighting evil things, so that adds up at least. But this nanny-layout is starting to make Xfce unusable.
Click to expand...

Haha, I understand the sentiment. I actually tried a few different desktop environments when GNOME Shell came out because I wasn't sure if I was ready for the switch. I actually like GNOME Shell better than the others now, mostly because I feel like it fits a bit better into my keyboard-driven workflow. I even tried a few tiling WMs, but I kept coming back because of features I missed in GNOME Shell.
 
It seems I have not been clear in one point - I do not use GNOME as my desktop. I am using Xfce, but that seems to be something that GNOME applications seem to be happily ignoring - that they do not run under a GNOME Shell, but in a different DE. They dictate the look and feel to me, and even somehow get rid of the default title bar placed on them by the window manager. There is no GNOME Shell running here, and I am getting more serious each day that it never will.
 
Looking more into it, it appears Xfce is written against GTK+ 2 (I thought it was GTK+ 3), whereas editors/gedit is written against GTK+ 3, so they would be themed differently. I run into the opposite problem with Firefox not using GTK+ 3 themes because it builds against GTK+ 2.

I don't know if themes are dependent on the DE or if the toolkit handles it internally, but if the latter is true, you may have some luck with some of my directions above, though you may have to dig into the CSS to tweak it to your liking. If the former is true, you may have to look for replacements for the GNOME applications you use.
 
You can change the GTK3 theme - check ~/.config/gtk-3.0 directory whether it contains any configuration files and change the theme name it uses. You could also make a soft link: ln -s /usr/local/share/themes/<theme_name>/gtk-3.0 ~/.config/gtk-3.0 (I don't know whether it is a good idea, but it might work).
 
serpent7776 said:
You can change the GTK3 theme - check ~/.config/gtk-3.0 directory whether it contains any configuration files and change the theme name it uses. You could also make a soft link: ln -s /usr/local/share/themes/<theme_name>/gtk-3.0 ~/.config/gtk-3.0 (I don't know whether it is a good idea, but it might work).
Click to expand...
Thank you, I will try that. By now I have found out that the settings tweaker for this expects a running GNOME Shell, which I find absurd. Install the complete hog, only to tell some parts to play nice?

fonz, great news.
 
serpent7776 said:
You can change the GTK3 theme - check ~/.config/gtk-3.0 directory whether it contains any configuration files and change the theme name it uses. You could also make a soft link: ln -s /usr/local/share/themes/<theme_name>/gtk-3.0 ~/.config/gtk-3.0 (I don't know whether it is a good idea, but it might work).
Click to expand...

No :mad:, to use the unified theme (GTK2 and GTK3) install x11-themes/gnome-themes-standard, then change the value of the /Net/ThemeName property.
Code: 
xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Net/ThemeName -t string -s Adwaita
You can also install x11-themes/clearlooks-phenix-theme.

x11-themes/gtk-xfce-engine supports GTK3, but only 3.2.x and 3.4.x. Since GTK 3.10, new widgets have been added, especially GtkPopover, GtkFlowBox, GtkActionBar and GtkHeaderBar.

Support of GTK3 in Xfce is "work in progress", the unstable release of x11/libxfce4menu (implementing Xfce's specific widgets) now has GTK3 support, but some regressions persists.
 
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