14 DAY TRIAL // Gnome 3 doesn't have too many fans among power users and when the father of Linux, Linus Torvalds, speaks out against Gnome 3 and switches to Xfce, it doesn't look good. Linus believes that Gnome 3 has serious usability issues.
"I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was 'too complicated' for the user to remap some mouse buttons," he wrote in a comment on Google+, responding to a post by Red Hat's Dave Jones.
"In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's 'too complicated' to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do,"
Of course, Linus Torvalds is not representative of a broad user base, not even of a regular Linux user, but his words carry a lot more weight than almost anyone else in the Linux community.
"Here's an example of 'the crazy': you want a new terminal window. So you go to 'activities' and press the 'terminal' thing that you've made part of your normal desktop thing (but why can't I just have it on the desktop, instead of in that insane 'activities' mode?)," he writes.
"What happens? Nothing. It brings your existing terminal to the forefront," he says.
He's hardly the only one who shares this feeling, many power users find Gnome 3 confusing and annoying. In some respects they are right, but there is also the problem of getting used to having things in a certain way.
When something new comes along, that changes the way things work, like Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity do, regardless if it's for the better, some people are going to hate it.
Some of them eventually come to terms, some find alternatives. Which is what Linus is doing, he's ditching Gnome altogether and moving to Xfce.
"I'm using Xfce. I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really," Linus said.
Of course, he could have just as easily continued to use Gnome 2, which is still supported by most Linux distributions and which he could certainly have compiled for his system.
It's also interesting to note that Linus Torvalds was a KDE user until KDE 4 came along, when he switched to Gnome. Now that Gnome 3 is out, he's abandoning ship again.