It’s great, but we prefer Cinnamon or Unity

Mar 28, 2015 11:05 GMT  ·  By

The highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment for Linux kernel-based operating systems has been announced on March 26, 2015, and has been declared by the GNOME development team as the best GNOME release yet. Of course, we wanted to give GNOME 3.16 desktop environment a try and see for ourselves the new features, apps, and improvements.

Therefore, we’ve decided to download the GNOME Live CD image based on the OpenSuSE Linux operating system, as at the moment of writing this article no other distribution offers the final build of GNOME 3.16 on a Live media. Yes, you can try to install GNOME 3.16 from the testing repositories of Arch Linux or from Fedora Rawhide, but that is not our thing.

We have to admit that we enjoyed each and every new functionality added to GNOME’s core applications and components, starting with the notifications when you delete files to Trash (does not work when bypassing the Trash, of course), the interactive notification popups from the top, which lets you answer to buddies directly, the improvements to Nautilus, the new look of the Eye of GNOME image viewer, and some of the new apps that have been included.

Great flat theme, not so great choice of fonts and the icon theme

The first thing you will notice when using the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, no matter if you’re installing a fresh copy of it or you've just updated your existing GNOME 3.14 installation, is the modern, flat theme painted with a dark gray color. We really enjoyed the new theme of the GNOME Shell user interface during the entire test drive, as well as the overlay scrollbars on windows.

What we still don’t like about GNOME is the poor choice of fonts, including their size, and icon theme. Those of you who tried or are installing GNOME 3.14 know exactly what we’re talking about, as many people complained a lot about this in the past. By default, everything is “big” in GNOME and we have no idea why. Some will go as far to say that it’s a tablet interface on their computers.

Of course, the size of the font and everything else can be adjusted at any time using the built-in GNOME Tweak Tool, which can be accessed directly from the GNOME Control Center, but it is the first impression that matters the most. Oh, and we still don’t know why Videos (a.k.a. Totem Movie Player), and now Eye of GNOME, are the only apps that use a dark theme.

Great new apps, especially the GNOME Calendar software

As we’ve mentioned in our in-depth GNOME 3.16 announcement, the desktop environment comes with a handful of new apps, such as GNOME Calendar, GNOME Books, GNOME Characters, GNOME Taquin, and, of course, GNOME MultiWriter. The awesome GNOME Builder app is also available in GNOME 3.16, but it must be installed separately.

GNOME Calendar is quite a great calendar app, exactly what was missing from the GNOME desktop environment. Future versions of the app will support even more calendar sources and will add new functionality. On the other hand, GNOME Taquin brings back memories from our childhood, and GNOME Characters is quite useful when you’re looking all over for that euro/pound sign.

As you might have heard, some the aforementioned apps are not finished, but their functionality is good enough for a test drive. Unfortunately, we were not able to test GNOME Books in the Live mode, neither GNOME MultiWriter, which is a very cool application if you want to write a single ISO image to multiple USB disks at once.

GNOME 3.16 is indeed a great release, but we prefer Cinnamon or Unity

GNOME 3.16 is indeed a great GNOME release, which brings a lot more features than GNOME 3.14. We love the new theme over the old one, we don’t like the icon theme, even if it was changed from previous releases, we adore the new apps, especially GNOME Calendar (too bad it’s just a preview), and we think that the new notification system and notification popups are exactly what the doctor ordered.

However, we prefer sticking with the Cinnamon desktop environment on our Arch Linux box, because of its simplicity and the great choice of customization it offers right nowt, and with the Unity interface on our Ubuntu box, because it’s a lot more professional, even if it’s using some of the old GNOME apps, such as Nautilus (Files). Of course, this is Linux, so we can enjoy those great new apps from GNOME 3.16 in Cinnamon too.

We don’t recommend using the GNOME Live CD based on openSUSE to try GNOME 3.16, because some functionality is missing and several apps did not even open, not to mention that we had problems when attempting to connect to wireless networks. Instead, we suggest waiting for your distribution vendor to publish the new GNOME 3.16 packages in the main software repositories, then install it from there or simply update your existing installation.

GNOME 3.16 (24 Images)

The new notification system in action
GNOME 3.16The new notification system
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