The huge number of touch devices in market is making ui developers optimize their apps for all those touch and mobile devices. One thing they don’t understand is how screwed up the app becomes for a developer on a normal workstation. I’m talking about gnome 3..
Gnome was my first desktop when I started using computers late 2009. I was happy with it and used it till the early releases of gnome3. I hate it with passion from then. There was “gnome classic” on my Debian sid for a long time but it felt buggy and clumsy. My network manager never worked, apps crashed very often and it was an overall mess!
Why am I saying this now? Recently they removed the tree view, they removed nautilus extra panes. It really annoy me because when I moved to xfce I really missed that feature in thunar. It let copying between multiple locations a bliss, and not anymore.
Whats wrong here? They just don’t understand that they CAN’T run the same thing on a touch device and a desktop.It does annoy people. Linus said he hates it and moved to xfce. It became so unusable so that the mint guys forked it, made cinnamon and its such a beautiful thing to use. Mint even became the most popular distro in the planet.
There was no reason to remove the bottom bar with minimized windows. I always used my tab key for switching apps.I never used it actually, but that tiny bar there told me about all open apps. Why save that tiny space there making it really harder to use?
Linus in this talk said subversion is the most pointless project ever. Sorry, I have to disagree. Its unity. Subversion surely comes just after it. Why did they remove the quick launcher icons on the top panel? Because its very hard to touch with your fingers. But at the same time, its really easy to do that with a mouse. Why do you have to go to a corner of a screen to do everything that can be done with a GUI? Removing C-A-t was like killing me. I must be pressing that over a million times everyday. Gnome 3 have serious usability issues. It might work for an idiot clicking his mouse here and there but not for a developer. Gnome3 just cant be customized. It cant minimize. Needs too many clicks to get things done.
Seems like windows 8 is going in a very similar path. I wont be surprised to see all of them, unity, gnome and windows dead soon.
I moved to xfce, and I am happy with it :)
I found few more people with a very similar thoughts here, here and here