GNOME 3 Shell in Fedora 15 GNOME 3 Shell in Fedora 15 Finnbarr P. Murphy ([email protected]) The Fedora 15 Alpha release includes a pre-release version of the long-awaited GNOME 3 Shell. After 8 years of use, the GNOME 2 desktop looks jaded and is technically difficult to maintain and work with under the hood. Visually and interactively it no longer competes with other desktops or devices for the hearts and minds of users. The GNOME 3 Shell has a modern visually attractive and easy to use user interface (UI) that is more akin to that of an IPad or a smart mobile phone. It provides the key interface functions like switching windows, listing and launching applications, and is completely different from the GNOME 2 desktop. It is based on the premise that using simple gestures instead of clicking a menu option is a more effective UI paradigm. Thus it takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware to utilize 3D effects. Animation and visual effects are intended to show the user the correlation between their action and the result of their action. As a result, you need to forget pretty much everything you know about the GNOME desktop and start afresh. A totally new user experience awaits you. I switched to using the GNOME 3 Shell some months ago when early builds became stable enough to use in my day to day work. I am basically happy with the new shell but feel some of the design features need revisiting to improve the user experience. The Alpha release of Fedora 15 (codename Lovelock) contains an alpha release of the GNOME 3 Shell. The first time you update your installation using yum or packagekit, your system is updated to a beta version of the GNOME 3 Shell. To date, most of the presentations on the Internet discuss the alpha version of the GNOME 3 Shell and not the beta version. If you see large plus (+) and minus (-) signs near the workspace manager on the right hand side of a screenshot, this indicates an alpha version of the GNOME 3 Shell. The GNOME 3 Shell is scheduled to GA in April 2011. The GNOME 3 Shell uses the Mutter window manager to provide its animation effects. Mutter is an abbreviation for the Metacity and Clutter technologies. Mutter was originally developed for Meego (formerly Moblin.) By the way, if you look under the hood, you will find that quite a bit of Moblin technology has ended up in the GNOME 3 Shell. You need hardware acceleration to use the GNOME 3 Shell as it uses a number of 3D capabilities. Most systems less than 3 years old should work out of the box. If hardware acceleration is unavailable, the GNOME 3 Shell defaults back to the old GNOME Panel. If you use Compiz, it will no longer work with the GNOME 3 Shell. In addition, the GNOME 3 Shell contains a significant amount of JavaScript code and can be styled using CSS. Adwaita (meaning one and only in Sanskrit) is the default theme for GNOME 3; see usr/share/themes/Adwaita. The default font is Cantarell. The GTK engine is Clearlooks; see /usr/share/gtk-engines/clearlooks.xml. Clearlooks was based on Red Hat’s Bluecurve theme. Who are the key design people behind the GNOME 3 Shell? The design has been lead from the start by William Jon McCann, a long-standing GNOME member and a Red Hat employee. In 2010 Jakub Steiner became the second member of the design team and that is when development went into high gear. If interested, you can read more about the GNOME 3 desktop design history. McCann deserves a lot of praise for shepherding the design through a long and sometimes contentious design and development cycle. Now for a quick tour of the beta GNOME 3 Shell in Fedora 15. When you log in, this is what you For personnal use only 03-15-2011 Copyright 2004-2011 Finnbarr P. Murphy. All rights reserved. 1/14
In this post I review the new GNOME 3 shell which shipped as part of the Alpha release of Fedora 15. I also demonstrate how the customize the shell using CSS and XML. It is one of a series of documents on how to customize the GNOME Shell that I have written.
