I’ve been trying out the Fedora live USB image of Gnome Shell and it’s a pretty exciting change. The fonts and marsh mellowness of it all needs sorting out but all the same it’s a refreshing change that shows an exciting future for desktop Linux.

There are two immediate areas that I think could easily be hugely improved though, and I don’t know why the designers have not seen this.

1] The minimise buttons have gone as they don’t fit in with the new shell way of doing things. The suggestion is that “workspaces cold be a replacement for minimization”.

That’s fine but in order to do that workspaces need to be instantly accessible, otherwise moving between maximised windows / applications becomes problematic. Specifically the problem in Gnome Shell is that I have to move the mouse to the top left and activate Activities, then move the mouse all the way to the right hand side of the screen, click on the workspace I want that has my alternate application, and then double click again on the workspace or click the application within. This means that I can’t just click between minimised and maximised applications in different workspaces as I might wish.

I suggest that a much, much easier way of achieving this would be to simply add an icon set on the bottom right of the screen that represents 4 or so workspaces as small icons. Simply clicking on one of these icons would immediately slide the required workspace into view. Clicking back to the original workspace would be just as easy and this immediateness would compliment the minimise-less way of doing things. Currently changing workspaces in the Shell is a counter intuitive bind. So I suggest that this “NEW” feature be implemented asap.

2] Now that we have a easy and fast way to use workspaces, the first thing that I want to do is launch applications in my workspaces. The dock makes this easy for a small set of applications that I have added to favourites. However I can’t add all my applications to the dock as this would be impracticable, so I have therefore to once again, slide my mouse to the top left over Activities, this brings up current workspace Windows, so I have to click on Applications and then either scroll through a mesh of huge icons representing all the applications on my system or move my mouse again to the right select a category and then scroll through more icons until I can see the application that I wish to launch.

Whilst the icons and animation of this feature are smooth and bold, it is a little too long winded a process to find an application that I just want to launch for a purpose and the graphic element and journey in travelling to this application is unnecessary for me.

I suggest that a much, much easier way of achieving this would be to simply add a menu to the top left of the screen for Applications. Simply clicking on this tab would open a drop down menu of application category’s that in turn show sub menus of the applications themselves. Hence any and every application on the system would be accessible via no more than two clicks of the mouse. I am sure that this, second “NEW” feature would be a significant improvement to the currently visually attractive but somewhat convoluted method of finding and launching a program.

Gnome Shell looks great and once these improvements and some other usability improvements have been implemented I am sure that it will be a great new desktop.