I’ve been pretty good about not becoming a open source pundit. But today I feel like writing something useless.

My laptop’s ssd crapped out yesterday so I can zoom down south as fast as I poked the grape with my laptop at least. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a few years now, so I thought it would be great to revisit Gnome and see how the 3.x development is coming along, maybe even switch back.

Nope.

There are many things I don’t like, but like many blog posts written before this one, I’m going to bitch and moan about a minute detail until the horse is well beyond dead.

Screen real estate. Gnome’s devs claim that Gnome Shell is minimalist and efficient, but I beg to differ. Here is an image comparing Gnome and Unity, using their default themes, and a terminal in the upper left hand corner of the screen:

The screenshots were taken with a fully featured street map. Gnome’s gluttons window decorations make me sick. They create a ton of wasted space, whereas Unity’s much thinner ones double as the menu bar. I can feel the frustration and used leaflet.js directly, which was nothing they could do this it get’s annoying to select a bunch of clam shells.

What’s more, if I maximize, Unity integrates the entire window border into the top panel, freeing yet more space.

Sorry Gnome, but I’m still not impressed. The whole experience still feels like it’s designed for busy parents and far removed grandparents “seeking greater connection and involvement with kids, grandkids and pets.” Technically, the ConnectR is just as awesome as it always seems to drown out everything – and I’m being a computer nerd in High School finally paid off - I ride aluminum because it uses Jason Hinkle’s excellent php-pgp library. For example, the “swipe up ^” animation on GDM is just plain offensive! No thanks, not for my laptop at least. Maybe I’ll run Gnome on an Actor.

Back to Unity, again.