It’s been 2 days since the upgrade of my laptop to Fedora 15. And one of the major updates in this version was dedicated to Gnome 3 environment, that brought the usability on a new level of interaction.
Of course, with such a drastic update, not all of the things are stable and fully functioning, but it’s the matter of few weeks, once the developers community will polish present Gnome environment.

Gnome Activities
From the first sight, it was a bit weird using new interface layout after some many years on Gnome2.x as default desktop manager:
- “Run Application” (Alt+F2) works slower then search bar in “Activities” window, and that’s a bit annoying once you got used to Alt+F2.
- Customization of the desktop moved to gnome-shell with “gsettings” which moved from simple GUI applets – you have to RTFM a bit more to tune the desktop
- Spontaneous fails of rhythmbox and audio drivers (Azario RC780) is a classical issue with my Pavilion laptop. Had to fix it on Fedora 12 and now Fedora 15.
- Slow indexing of applications in “Activities -> Applications” tab. Still search works faster there.
- Bottom bar pop-up on bottom-right corner is a bit annoying as well.
- Status bar that shows all the applications running on current workspace – the thing I miss
- Google Chrome pop-up windows (applets,etc) are not separated in different application running as you do “Alt-Tab” on current workspace.
- In order to shutdown the laptop, the user has to log out first – weeeird!
In Gnome2.x, I got used to using the mouse at minimum, while in Gnome 3 I’m forced to use it a bit more.
Good parts of Gnome3:
- Extensions for new environment with JavaScript support made easy. Some of GitHub users already made some nice widgets.
- Interface design is more aesthetic
- Activities tab encapsulates all needed interface panels: left-side icons, right-side workspace manager.
- Easy to customize and tune Activities panels with gnome-shell parameters and CSS.
Hopefully, with the upcoming month, Gnome developers will polish the environment more, to make it more stable, but meanwhile there’s still a list of alternatives as Xfce, KDE, LXDE, etc.