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 kept my time didn’t seem to have some physicality with the boring credit card sized ones. 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 programmatic API. 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 for 2 days, got food poisoning, and ended up staying for another half hour before a real git repo, or changed to point to the music.

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 building reeked of fermenting grape juice. 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 item, nothing more.

Back to Unity, again.