I broke down, and upgraded my old aging Fedora install on my desktop. Simply because my old F14 comes with ancient X versions that don't contain all the fixes to make intel 3D really work well. And yes, things really do work better on the graphical side.But with F17 comes gnome3. And I knew I'd have trouble, but also knew that most of the worst crap could be fixed with extensions, and I'd used 3.4 on my laptop enough to know it should be all somewhat usable.
But christ, it's a "one step forward, one step back" kind of thing. Change the font sizes? No can do - until you install the tweak tool, because the standard settings panel still doesn't do something as fundamental as that. Ok, I knew it used to be broken, I knew the work-around, but it's still broken?
So I go to extensions.gnome.org, and install the panel favorites extension that not only obviates the need for the stupid dual "first go to activities, then go to favorites", but also fixes it so that I can get multiple terminals without doing the whole "three times widdershins and left-click" dance.
That gets things usable.
And then I want auto-hide. But now extensions.gnome.org says "You do not appear to have an up to date version of GNOME3". Oh? So 3.4.1 (current F17 as of today) isn't up-to-date enough? Oh wait, no, it's actually just that the chrome plugin seems broken. Fire up firefox instead - now it works. And I can get panel settings and enable auto-hide so that I don't need to look at that butt-ugly thing that has clearly been designed by some goth teenager that thinks that black is cool.
But where did the "Lock Screen" button go? I can still find +Sriram Ramkrishna's extension by searching for it, but it's grayed out - and apparently for a reason. It doesn't seem to work any more.
And how do I add --enable-webgl --ignore-gpu-blacklist to the google chrome favorites entry? I'm pretty sure I was able to edit the startup details for the favorites in some version of gnome3 with some random installed extensions (probably the frippery set), but it's impossible to find now.
I have to say, I used to think that the "extensions.gnome.org" approach to fixing the deficiencies in gnome3 was really cool. It made me go "Ahh, now I can fix the problems I had".
But it turns out to be a major pain, when it basically ends up as a really magical way to customize your desktop, which breaks randomly and has no sane way to do across machines. And the extensions seem to randomly break when you update the system, so they don't work as well as they would if they just came with the base system.
End result: extensions.gnome.org may be a really cool idea, but it seems to have some serious usability problems in practice. And the whole gnome3 approach of "by default we don't give you even the most basic tools to fix things, but you can hack around things with unofficial extensions" seems to be a total UX failure.
Who do I need to fuck to get standard font size and panel options, instead of having to wade through this kind of "unsupported and random extensions that look ugly as hell and break randomly" crap? Maybe if I told people I was going blind, and claimed the font size was an "accessibility" feature, people would care? Never mind that I want to make the fonts smaller.
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