First attempt to blog: GNOME 3

In the forums I’ve already mentioned it in some posts: I’m in love with GNOME 3, and I’m becoming aware what it is in GNOME 3 that’s made me falling for it…it’s simplicity at first glance. All just there for a smooth working experience.

After running into lots of dependency errors at first, I found my way to keep KDE4 running with almost working networkmanagement -the status of the networkconnection(s) is not shown, but I can connect-. Then I started configuring the equivalents in GNOME 3 for the apps I used in KDE4: Empathy for Kopete, Evolution for my alltime mailclient Opera ( I keep Opera for some accounts ), Banshee for Amarok etc etc. In short: I wanted a true GNOME 3 experience, not just the desktop, but it’s apps as well. Again, I love it.

Yes, there are some issues:

  • Whenever gnome-shell is updated, I need to replace the gnome-shell.css by my own version, with small adjustments for the icon size of the Applications layout

  • Importing contacts from Opera into Evolution was a job I needed my programmers way of thinking, afterwards I found a site that does it for you, but I got then alright now.

  • Banshee lacks some of my favorite application features: the import of lyrics and guitartabs that Amarok has. Well, I can live with that, When needed I can still start Amarok’

Yet, the overall experience on my laptop, which I use mostly for work, is overwhelming. So, I’d like to dedicated my first blogpost here to the openSUSE GNOME 3 team, and thank them for what they delivered so far.

I am using Opensuse 11.4 with the Tumbleweed repository activated. The curious thing that I have found is that that Gnome 3 Preview works far better for me than the proper full Gnome 3 install from the Gnome Stable repository. I followed the instructions for the full Gnome 3 install found at
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GNOME_3.0
Once it was installed, Gnome 3 was very slow and the application icons looked horrible.
I removed the new repository and downgraded everything and ran
zypper dup
The Gnome 3 Preview was available and it was fast, slick and the icons looked great. I guess that this is an example of early development bugs.
Ralph Ellis

@Ralph_Ellis: there’s a separate GNOME 3 Tumbleweed repo: Index of /repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed:/GNOME/openSUSE_Tumbleweed
This is the one I’m using. It’s going to throw some dep. errors on you concerning Networkmanager, if you want to know what I’ve got installed, maybe it’s better to start a thread in the forums