Joachim Breitner

Running GNOME 3 and noone will notice

Published 2011-11-13 in sections English, Digital World.

Two days ago, I finally brought my system up-to-date with regard to the GNOME packages that I use. I was very reluctant because I am using a heavily customized gnome-panel and I waited until all the applets that I use have been ported to gtk3 and the libgnome-applet library. I am the Debian maintainer of one of these applets, link-notification-daemon, and I have made the changes and tested them in a chroot before, but now that I am actually using it, I found and fixed more visual glitches. I think by now it is as usable as it was before on GNOME 2. I am still looking for someone to step up as the new upstream maintainer for it!

I had some trouble with gnome-session and notification-daemon, thought I found the cause and reported it, but a day later I could not reproduce it anymore. Weird. Other problems, such as the “busy cursor” not disappearing after the session start, or evolution going into a freeze also have stopped occurring by themselves.

Other problems I found and fixed, for example the battery status applet was not visible until a major state change, or panel applets were not loaded due to a race condition, or tooltips not working (which called for a fix in gtk+ itself). I also added to the xmonad package the files required to allow the user to select “GNOME with Xmonad” in GDM, and found out how to have Galeon appear in the list of possible default browsers.

I don’t really have to say much about GNOME3 itself. I disliked the default font, Cantarell, mostly because of the extra spacing that reduced the number of folders and mail I can see in evolution. (Also see what nekohayo has to say about that.) I also was under the impression that the font is much lighter, and I started to adjust the position of my laptop monitor to increase the contrast. So I switch back to DejaVu Sans.

I also disabled the sleep-on-lid-close feature – I often run backups, or download stuff, or compile stuff, or calculate stuff, so I want better control over this.

So, I guess, now that everything is almost as it was in GNOME2, I can say I like it...

Comments

Hi Joachim, I too had some issues with applets ported to gtk3, I am referring to the clock applet in particular:



https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662172



Do you experience that one as well?



If you are interested here's my notes on the fallback-mode:

http://ao2.it/en/blog/2011/10/19/gnome-3-go-shell-not-just-yet-thanks



Regards,

Antonio
#1 ao2 (Homepage) am 2011-11-13
I have an issue with Gnome3 + xmonad: the alt+right click on gnome-panel to add/remove applets does not work when the WM is not metacity. I found many people with the same issue on the Internet, but no solution (except restart without xmonad each time I want to change my applets). Any idea?
#2 Gabriel am 2011-11-14
It works fine here, but I have configured xmonad to react to a different mod key. In the default configuration, maybe it catches the click and reacts on it somehow (raising the window in the stack or something)?
#3 Joachim Breitner (Homepage) am 2011-11-14
It worked, thank you very much for the suggestion.
#4 Gabriel am 2011-11-17

Have something to say? You can post a comment by sending an e-Mail to me at <mail@joachim-breitner.de>, and I will include it here.

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