Following this recent trend of mine, where I like to write about my experience using GNOME and Fedora, I wanted to share a few cool things I have found after applying recent (almost final) GNOME 3.12 packages. I have applied these on top of Fedora 20, so if anyone is interested in learning how to do it, please drop a comment and I will share some basic instructions. First thing I have noticed is how GNOME 3.12 again makes things snappier and more responsive than they were in 3.10. If talking about desktop effects, well, GNOME Shell is not big on them, which I am happy with, but what bothered me was that the few there were weren't looking good. Frame drops and severe lag were all over the place, to the point where the overall experience was hit. Good news, fast forward to the latest GNOME 3.11 compilations and things are smooth and fast, even when having many windows open on the same workspace. The overall speed, from loading the session initially to opening apps and running daily tasks has also been improved throughout. For instance, showing the Activities Overview now loads faster than ever, with little to now delay in displaying all icons.
A very cool and superbly implemented feature is that a software search is now part of the general search feature. This by itself is not news, Unity implemented something along the same lines sometime ago, but that's precisely why I am saying it is superbly done. When using this feature on Unity, right after I get the results, I am desperately trying to find a way to disable it. It's that bad. Performance is ridiculous. However, not sure how they have done it, in GNOME Shell the results appear as if they were part of a local search, pretty amazing.
There have also been changes in the default GTK theme, which now gets renewed tabs and buttons, as shown below.
The user and session menu is another perfectly implemented solution. Intuitive, aesthetically consistent, elegant and concise, only showing the right information within a couple clicks max. Genius.
The Shell menus and popups have become a tad more transparent in this release, which I like.
The new Maps application is nice, following the trend of no bells and whistles, it just works, albeit with limited functionality at this point.
The lockscreen returns mostly unchanged, with the obvious exception of the main wallpaper, which looks great. It changes through the day.
So there you have it, no radical changes, but the continuous improvement is now a trend in GNOME and I must admit I like it more on every release. Up until 3.8 I thought it was fun and had tons of good ideas, it showed potential, but lacked in certain areas. That usually meant that I ended up going back to KDE after a while. GNOME 3.10 was the first release I found 100% complete and with very few weak spots, and 3.12 seems to improve even further. I have been using it exclusively for weeks and I really don't see myself changing soon... Unless the promising work they are doing on KDE5 ends up living to the expectations it's raising!
A very cool and superbly implemented feature is that a software search is now part of the general search feature. This by itself is not news, Unity implemented something along the same lines sometime ago, but that's precisely why I am saying it is superbly done. When using this feature on Unity, right after I get the results, I am desperately trying to find a way to disable it. It's that bad. Performance is ridiculous. However, not sure how they have done it, in GNOME Shell the results appear as if they were part of a local search, pretty amazing. 
There have also been changes in the default GTK theme, which now gets renewed tabs and buttons, as shown below. 
The user and session menu is another perfectly implemented solution. Intuitive, aesthetically consistent, elegant and concise, only showing the right information within a couple clicks max. Genius. 
The Shell menus and popups have become a tad more transparent in this release, which I like. 
The new Maps application is nice, following the trend of no bells and whistles, it just works, albeit with limited functionality at this point. 
The lockscreen returns mostly unchanged, with the obvious exception of the main wallpaper, which looks great. It changes through the day. 
So there you have it, no radical changes, but the continuous improvement is now a trend in GNOME and I must admit I like it more on every release. Up until 3.8 I thought it was fun and had tons of good ideas, it showed potential, but lacked in certain areas. That usually meant that I ended up going back to KDE after a while. GNOME 3.10 was the first release I found 100% complete and with very few weak spots, and 3.12 seems to improve even further. I have been using it exclusively for weeks and I really don't see myself changing soon... Unless the promising work they are doing on KDE5 ends up living to the expectations it's raising!
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