gnome 3

Well the new gnome 3 has certainly polarised the community. I must say I generally really like it, but also I’m not yet running it on my default machine. Historically I’ve upgraded my primary laptop to the current development release of Fedora around the beta release. This time I’ve not. Why? Well there’s one major feature that has “Just Worked” for me for as long as I remember and I use it every day I’m in the office that isn’t yet working well in gnome 3 and it would cost me way too much time on an average work day.

I have a Dell Latitude E-Series laptop with a docking station and a second screen. Pretty much everyone in our 300 person office has this config. People use them all a different ways. Side by side, stacked on top of each other, laptop closed with one screen etc. Some Gnome 3 just doesn’t work well with dual screens in a dock evironment yet. On Fedora 14 I can undock the laptop and head off to a meeting. When I undock all the windows collapse down onto the laptop screen. When I redock it detects my second screen is back and all my windows go back to the way they were. At the end of the day I suspend my laptop and go home, it works, when I return the next day it returns them as I had them. On gnome 3 the undock generally works well most of the time. The redock doesn’t. It doesn’t turn on the screen, reconfigure it as a second screen and put all the windows back on there. To get my windows back to the way I had them takes a good 5 mins of moving stuff around. Do that ten times a day and it adds up to quite a bit of wasted time that I just don’t have! Chatting with Jon McCann at RedHat Summit he mentioned it was likely a gsettings (I think from memory) problem and should be easily fixed (I will test patches!).

But there are things I love in gnome 3 and I would love to move to it permanently. The new evolution 3 is lovely! Our office uses Exchange as its corporate collaboration system. evolution-mapi allows me to do all the email/contacts/calendaring within Fedora generally without too much issue. v3 adds to that and evo 3 works pretty well! To get this lovely in the office while retaining my dual screen functionality I run a lvm VM on my laptop with F-15 and have evo running over a X session to the main F-14 desktop.

There’s lots of other nice things about gnome 3 and I look forward to being able to run it properly to get access to those things. There’s other regressions I know, and I can live with those. WPA Enterprise support (which again we use through out all out offices in Europe) has work arounds, the timezones in the clock I’m reliably informed will be back in gnome 3.2, people are working on gnotes and there’s a gnome 3 plugin for pidgin flying about (I would move to empathy when I can import my 5 years of logs that I use daily for reference). Those are minor, it was a massive change and there will always be regressions. I look forward to decent dual screen support again soon 🙂