What is the difference between gnome 2 and 3

What they keep forgetting is life always changes. A good instructions should provide a basic guide to new and existing users who recently changed the system. The relationship of applications to categories is many to many.

An application can be assigned to multiple categories. That is rarely a problem. I partly agree that change is good, BUT the changes should NOT be made in the mainstream version of a software until the users want that!!!

If for example the Gnome 3 version had a quick way to make itself like Gnome 2 then there would be little critisism and we would not have fragmented the developers or users among Gnome3, Gnome2, Mate, and so on - even Unity would maybe not have existed had there been a fallback while Gnome3 was polished Change is good but not when forced.

I am talking about things like Search functionality, copy-paste between applications, file managers - why should KDE and Gnome use different code for this? Not to say that alternative options for how to search content in files, mail, calendars etc is pointless, however I do not see why they should be desktop specific?

Why not make Dolphin, Nautilus, and so on desktop independent and let the user choose what is best for them? Again - keep in mind that not all people have time to learn a "better" workbench layout every now and then - give them time to try when the time is right for them to try. More common code definitely makes sense but there are a lot of reasons it's hard to pull off. And that's assuming you only count the stuff after the Linux version of Qt got a GPL-compatible license.

I've also heard that, at least sometimes, KDE refuses to use GNOME-originated libraries simply because they consider the code quality to be too poor or the features too much work to reinvent. Also, I've seen quite a few examples of various individual developers working in or around the GNOME project simply not being the kind of people you want to rely on. Basically, the Qt-based and GTK-based library ecosystems have built up so much inertia due to their history and communities that it will take a gargantuan effort to take any truly significant steps toward re-unifying the underlying infrastructure.

Yep, and that is exactly what is happening. That is the freedesktop and XDG standards. This includes things like D-Bus, which is now used by everybody. GNOME is the pioneer in advocating shared-code and standards. Because you can't. Integration is key to making an efficient seamless desktop. More will possibly become shared but there will always be separate applications for different environments.

Discalaimer: I am not a Gnome user. I tried Gnome 1 and prefered KDE 1. I have used Gnome 1 and 2 and 3 for at least 2 week straignt to give it a chance. I have tried every desktop out there for 2 weeks. If you know and customize the hotkeys, most any DE can be blazingly fast in switching between apps and virtual desktops. With Fluxbox I can take a desktop with 10 apps on it, put 8 of the 10 on different desktops while remainging on the current desktop in about 10 seconds.

It takes me about 2 seconds to flip thru all 4 desktops. These pepole would have reminded me that Gnome 2 was superior because I could do all of that with the mouse. Hi everyone. We appreciate your thoughts and opinions and thanks for joining the conversation.

Please be respectful of your peers and keep the conversation constructive. I got fed up of irritations in G3 and just tried KDE and it suprised me in a very good way. After few days I got used to it enough and it is in almost any way better than G3 and even G2, not to mention the disaster that is Ubuntu Unity. Desktops Gnome3 versus Gnome2 Gnome 3 vs. Gnome 2 vs. Image by :. Get the highlights in your inbox every week. Darl McBride? I wished it could so some simple things… like, you know, screensavers.

MATE supports screensavers, incidentally. Topics Linux. About the author. Joseph Ottinger - I am a writer, musician, programmer, husband, and father. I read way too much, and probably write too much as well - but my passion is transfer of information, so that's okay. Recommended reading 7 Linux commands to use just for fun. Transfer files between your phone and Linux with this open source tool. Why I use Linux to manage my yoga studio. How to update a Linux symlink.

Turn any website into a Linux desktop app with open source tools. Stephan Sokolow on 07 Sep Permalink.

Hussam Al-Tayeb on 09 Sep Permalink. Stephan Sokolow on 09 Sep Permalink. Shawn H Corey on 10 Sep Permalink. Adam Tauno Williams on 11 Sep Permalink. Hussam Al-Tayeb on 11 Sep Permalink. Greg Smith on 11 Sep Permalink. Stephan Sokolow on 11 Sep Permalink. John on 11 Sep Permalink. In the battle between Gnome 3 vs Gnome 2 vs change, Gnome 3 wins. I can agree with that. Unidentified on 11 Sep Permalink.

Adam Tauno Williams on 12 Sep Permalink. There was lots of discussion about these changes for a long time before they hit the pavement. Brian Fristensky on 12 Sep Permalink. I always found it easy to find things in these menus.

They are simple and make sense. Ignore user satisfaction at your peril. Are you listening, makers of Microsoft Metro? Luya Tshimbalanga on 13 Sep Permalink. That is several question. You might want to split them up. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. What are the differences between Gnome 2 and Gnome 3? Vincent Untz blogged about it earlier It would also be worth noting that desktop shell and window managers are separate things.

Improve this answer. Manish Sinha Manish Sinha It can be done. Should be possible. Delorean 9, 1 1 gold badge 17 17 silver badges 41 41 bronze badges. Unity is a custom shell for gnome2, is it correct? Manish: I was talking about the On Link under 4 is broken. Removed it. Florian Diesch Florian Diesch Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. A handful of window managers, like IceWM and Ratpoison, are older than Gnome, but are less widely used.

Similarly, Trinity, the successor fork to KDE 3, is a year younger and used by a few aficionados. Exactly how many use one of these descendants has never been tallied, but the total is likely enough to place them as a group among the half dozen leading desktop environments today.

Looking at this continued popularity, I have to wonder why, and the possible answers suggest what a majority of users look for in a desktop environment. Even in Gnome 2 had little that was original.

It offered a standard interface, with a desktop, panel, and menu, like the one that Windows 95 had introduced seven years earlier. Its menu is particularly poorly suited to the massive content of modern storage devices, requiring endless clicks that are only tolerable because users have adjusted to them gradually. The most praise that could be given Gnome 2 is that, along with KDE 3, it marked the point where desktop environments for Linux achieved a rough parity with their proprietary equivalents.

Although new releases would come out every few months or so for the next decade, the basic functionality remain unchanged. In the next major release, Gnome would have no where to go except in a new direction. Perhaps that lack of originality is exactly what makes Gnome 2 so long-lived. In that sense, Gnome 2 and its survivors are intuitive. The fact that Gnome has always tended towards a minimalist design philosophy makes it even more intuitive.

What that means is that if you used most versions of Windows over the last couple of decades, you can adjust to Gnome 2 and its survivors in a few minutes. It will be familiar and unsurprising — and a considerable aid to those trying Linux for the first time.

In fact, the familiarity is so great that there are videos on Youtube explaining how to make both Gnome 3 and MATE look like different versions of Windows or the other way around. The resemblance is not perfect, yet the fact it can be done at all emphasizes how similar Gnome2-like DEs are to Windows.

As far as they are able, most DEs tend to develop an ecosystem of applications and utilities. In the case of Xfce, that ecosystem is limited, but in most popular ecosystems, such as Gnome and KDE, the ecosystem consists of hundreds of pieces of software. The size of the ecosystem may add to the familiarity of a popular DE like Gnome 2, allowing users to quickly learn applications as well as the desktop. Around the turn of the millennium, DEs only offered their own ecosystem.

In addition, they offered different ways of working. For instance, during the first general release of Gnome, its developers were officially working towards a Gnome Office. Gnome 3 also defaults to a different layout, with applications launched in the overview and used on the main stream.

However, in Gnome 2 the emphasis is not on the customization of the workflow. Instead, once files and applications are selected, Gnome 2 recedes into the background. As you work, the fact that you are working in Gnome 2 is of no importance.

It is basically an application launcher and only comes to the forefront when you log in or out, or launch another application. Considering the user revolt when Gnome 2 was replaced, or even the hostile reception of KDE 4, I suspect that Gnome 2-like DEs remain popular because a launcher is all that a sizable number of users want. Not all users, certainly, want the same thing. About a third of Linux desktop users favor KDE. However, perhaps as many just want a launcher.

If so, they find exactly what they want in Gnome and its survivors. Still, the next time desktop developers decide on major innovations, they might look at how Gnome 2 persists and concentrate on simply providing a launcher. After all, that is all many users seem to want. Published in Desktops.

I use the Mate desktop since it is more like Gnome 2 to me. No mater how hard I have tried, I cannot like the Gnome 3 Desktop.

For me, it was because personal customization was easy and irritated that I would have to learn more things just to get my desktop back to what I had it designed for. I had my desktop designed exactly how I liked it for my personal workflow when Ubuntu went to the Unity desktop and Gnome3 came around and it was near impossible to recreate my desktop. And would still prefer Gnome2.