[pic]

Bugs I've hit in GNOME 3, in the last 5 minutes:

  • gnome-shell's "run" pop-up lost focus and I couldn't get rid of it. Nor could I launch another "run" dialogue, which is my normal route for starting software.

  • I tried to coax my web browser into launching a terminal by browsing to file:///usr/bin/gnome-terminal. Instead, it downloaded a copy to ~/Downloads. Fine, no problem, because after another click it launches nautilus to handle the file. (This is not a bug).

  • nautilus doesn't know what to do with the file. Apparently I haven't installed a handler for viewing executable files. I'm guessing the copy of gnome-shell isn't +x. nautilus does sensible things when another file (such as a picture) is marked +x, so why doesn't it do so for the opposite case?

  • This is such a bizarre error message I try to take a screenshot of it. I take one, then take another (cropped). I try to save the second picture over the first one, but gnome-screenshot complains that it cannot find a file somewhere in /tmp.

  • The flash plugin crashed in the middle of streaming an album. I'm almost not allowed to complain about the flash plugin crashing.

  • After and around and inbetween all that, I downloaded an .amz file (an Amazon MP3 download file, in fact, of the album I'm failing to stream) which I hoped to run through clamz (a command-line, open source tool that can interpret AMZ files). nautilus offers clamz as a launch option in the right-click menu, but it's not the default handler. If I select "properties" to set the default handler, clamz is not in the list of available handlers.

  • After sending the HUP signal to gnome-shell, I've got rid of the "run" pop-up, but now something has happened to it's $PATH and future "run" pop-ups can't find anything in the standard locations, like /usr/bin.

  • since the flash plugin died, nothing else seems to be able to make any sound, so I can't play the album I downloaded anyway.

I didn't set out to bug-hunt this morning, I'm actually trying to get some work done.

Whilst this is a particularly bad case of stacked-bugs, it's unfortunately, pretty representative of what it's like to try and use a Linux desktop at the moment. Every day I go through a similar experience.

I've just had to give up and log out and back in again. The shell path bug above has re-surfaced in a new session. Great.

I'm waiting on a delayed laptop at work. I'm very tempted to cancel the order and just use a Mac Air instead (we have one spare). It seems I'm walking the inevitable path of F/OSS desktop frustration and the end for many people seems to be the Mac… perhaps I should spare myself the pain of the journey. In the mean time, It's bye-bye to GNOME and off to Xfce for me.