Almost two and a half year ago GNOME 3 was in a very early state and most plans still had to be drawn up. At that time there was an interesting meme going on at Planet GNOME in which people blogged about their wishes for the large changes that would come to GNOME.
Inspired by that, I also blogged about what I would love to see in GNOME 3: ‘My wish for GNOME 3: better configuration tools‘. My gripe was the huge amount of tiny little configuration utilities that swamped the Preferences menu. Not only was it confusing to spread the settings across so many different windows, but it also looked bad and navigated horribly. The settings were spread out and not always easy to find.
A few days ago I installed the GNOME 3 LiveCD on my system to give GNOME Shell a try. I was amazed by the great progress that has been made with the GNOME Control Centre. Not only does it look much, much better than its previous incarnations, it also works much better.
Everything is now by default in one place. Navigation has improved. The way the configuration ‘capplets’ are designed is a lot more intuitive. It is not as cluttered anymore as it used to be and is easier to control. It is really a shame that it is not in Ubuntu Natty, because it is a tremendous improvement over what you currently get when pressing System Settings in the Session Indicator.
Looking back at the blog post I wrote in 2008 I can say that GNOME 3 has fulfilled my wishes for better configuration tools. It’s a great release, congratulations on this milestone, GNOME!