Gnome 3 Has Arrived and Linux Came With It

Linux has been terrible. I don't mean that in a technical way, it's been amazing for servers, development work, and custom/embedded interfaces for years. If you want a system that either doesn't run on Wintel or that you need to be completely stable in all situations, you use linux. No, I mean it's been terrible for the average desktop user, which is the majority of people who use a personal computer today. Only recently has linux actually stepped up to the plate, providing things that Windows XP had been doing for the past decade and Vista/7 for the past 4. Gnome 3 stepped into the limelight this year as the savior of the Linux Desktop, and many of its backing components (known as dependencies in the linux world) have to a lesser extent as well. Let's start at the bottom and work up:

UDEV, the system which detects and presents hardware as generic files to the system really has its act together. Since I up and ragequit (yes its a word, I swear) linux two years ago, HAL, the pain in the butt extra layer that took UDEV notifications and forwarded it onto other applications is dead and gone. UDEV has picked up where it left off and does a much better job. When you plug a new piece of hardware into a system, it shows up as long as device drivers are built into the kernel. Let me repeat that.... when you plug hardware into your system, whether that be a USB key, SD Card, USB Microphone, etc..... IT WORKS.

X11, is the backbone of the graphical interface for desktop environments and their programs. Without it, you get a nice, plain, boring command prompt like C:\> or $. X11 now just works. I'm serious. Anybody who used to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and throw a million lines in there about graphics hardware, mouse, keyboard, display size, modelines, blah, blah will know that being able to start X without having to mess with that file is like God starting the rapture in the middle of south Chicago.

Gnome 3 is absolutely huge. It takes all the horrible and plain interfaces from Gnome 1, Gnome 2, KDE 1, 2, and 3, XFCE, Evolution, and more and throws it all out the window. It looks amazing, runs like a dream, and productivity goes through the roof. There's a small learning curve, for example, instead of switching applications by using the task bar on the bottom of the screen you simply swipe your mouse to the upper left corner. It takes a little getting used to, however its well worth it.

That being said, there is another desktop environment being developed over at Canonical, the folks who produce Ubuntu Linux. Its called Unity. I think it stinks. They forked the code from Gnome 2 and tried to make some kind of sidebar that groups programs like Windows 7 does, but I have to say, it doesn't work right. Even if it did work correctly, I think the premise is terrible. Gnome 3 is built from an entirely new codebase and done with style and elegance. Unity is a bolt on of legacy code and with it comes all of the old and stale problems of Gnome 2 with the new problems of code that is trying to use that system in a more productive way. They probably should have just stayed with Gnome 2, or better yet, use Gnome 3 in fallback mode, which is essentially the same thing, except with the new code.