Carterpants

I’ve been meaning to get to this post for quite some time now but just never pulled the trigger. I don’t even have a decent excuse really, but like it would matter. Anywhooo.. I took the plunge this evening and yum’d me up some GNOME Shell. yum install gnome-shell There will be a few dependencies downloaded, but yum will resolve everything. The download is quick and the installed footprint is less than 10MB. Yeah, an entire new desktop management system fits into 10MB.. you’ll never see that from Redmond.

Let’s get to the goodies. This first screen shot is of my current open windows. At first you may not notice much difference, but check out the top toolbar. Activities hmm? We’ll get into that in a minute, but that’s where all the magic happens. The clock/calendar has been moved to the middle of the tool bar while the Notification and User Switch Applets remain in the upper right corner. Somewhat unexciting so far but hold on to your Spongebob undies.

Now let’s move the mouse to the upper-left corner (or simply hit ALT-F1 for those keyboard only chaps out there), and blam we get a Compiz-like effect. All enabled Workspaces, and I’ll explain what “enabled Workspaces” mean later, are shown along with the applications currently managed by said Workspace. From here your next action can be one of very many

1. Clicking on an app window in the Workspace(s) will shift focus to that app in that Workspace
2. Clicking one of the Applications in your favorites list will launch the app
3. Entering some keystrokes in the Find box will quickly display apps, documents, bookmarks, anything on your machine matching your search
4. Access the typical Home folders
5. Peruse your recently used docs

They’re your Favorites, so its only natural that you can customize the apps shown in your list! Each application on your system is available in this quick and easy menu, just right click on your chosen app and “Add to Favorites”

You can expand the Recent Items list for a zoomed-view of the documents so you can get a better preview, should you so choose. Or if you’re blind. Or you just like more eye candy. I’m the latter.

Now I’ve added more active (or “enabled”) Workspaces and I’m able to see each one. Better yet, I can drag and drop currently active apps from one Workspace to another. For those keyboard-only folks you can still CTRL+ALT+Shift+Left arrow | Right arrow the selected window to adjacent Workspaces as in Compiz, but you get a cool new switching graphic to remind you where you are.

There is an option to enable this.. sidebar thingy on the left side of the screen, but I can’t say I’m really impressed by it much. Once you enable it, any icons on your desktop are moved over permanently. When you mouse over the sidebar the icons actually move with the expanding bar. I can’t decide if I like this or not though. It feels like the ghetto version, maybe the quick-n-easy version of the real Gnome Shell menu? Perhaps this will never see the light of day once the stable release becomes available, which wouldn’t sadden me in the least.

There you have it. The GNOME-Shell screen shots I promised long, long ago. I did find a few apps that didn’t play well in the new window manager (FileZilla I’m looking at you….) but that can only be expected from a beta. Overall I’m pumped for the entire GNOME 3 project to hit the repos, but GNOME-Shell will do a fantastic job of keeping me content until that time comes.

The only reason I still have a Windows partition is thanks to the impending Final Fantasy 14 release in September. Wine can only do so much with games developed with DirectX, and often the result is an experience slightly lower than that on a native Windows install. So be it. Emulation is emulation. OpenGL games though, you know that graphic engine not weighted down by proprietary Micro$oft licensing sludge, are a totally different story.

I’ve played a few native Linux games that were able to stretch my NVidia GT250 to the max, and I’ve always wondered how a complex OpenGL game would benchmark on Linux vs Windows. Apparently Phoronix can read my thoughts, as they’ve just published the Windows 7 vs Ubuntu OpenGL benchmarking results.

Dare I say, booya!

Hell, even some DirectX only games are being played on the latest version of Wine flawlessly. Take for example, StartCraft 2. Honestly, I should just put that poor partition out of its misery. Apparently there is really no need to keep it around!

Phoronix has released their latest benchmark results comparing Ubuntu 10.04 versus Windows 7 Professional. As I expected, Ubuntu spanks Windows in a majority of the tests. Why are you still using Windows? Wait that’s a misnomer, no one uses Windows they fight it.

Check out the performance results for yourself.

OOOOoooooOoooh the eye candy! GNOME 3 is scheduled to drop in September, but you can already grab the gnome-shell package from any distro’s repo and give it a spin. I would advise doing so within a VM just in case, its still in development after all.

Here’s a great article with some nice screenshots. I’m going to fire up a F13 VM tonight and play around, maybe toss up a review of it myself.

Since the install just plain wouldn’t work with my current hard drive situation, I figured I would toss Win7 into a nice little contained play area and let it shit all over itself without contaminating other data. Imagine that, the install (while running under Linux) completed just fine.

It works, in Linux that is