alex diavatis | November 13, 2012

Gnome Getting Started | An Intro to Gnome [Work in Progress]

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Gnome 3 feels weird for someone that is coming from Windows. Different way to launch Apps, Embedded Chat and Notification System, Online Accounts, Workspaces etc. The goal is simple, lets make things more obvious to new users.

While Getting Started Help will land in Gnome 3.8, there is a work beyond this, that will arrive in later versions. 

How it works?

In Gnome 3.8 will also see the Initial Setup, which is a module separated from Installation Manager, to help us create our very first User Account. Unfortunately Ubuntu users will never see that, Fedora 19 has it already on their repos, and I am not sure what’s the case with other Gnome distros. If you don’t know what Initial Setup is you can check here.

After Initial Setup is done, there is a question if you want to launch the Getting Started, or skip this and start using your system. By accepting Getting Started you will start the new Gnome Intro Guide.

Jakub -Jimmac-Steiner says:

The intro video will play back fullscreen when you select the “getting started” at the end of the intial setup,  and at the end it will launch yelp with the getting started page opened. It’s a sort of a meta intro, it’s opt in. The videos will be rendered into a couple of languages, but only around 5, only left to right languages really work, but all languages will have subtitles.  Not all pages will have videos, some will be better off explained with text & images.


These are not the original sounds!

What will be really challenging is an intro to Workspaces use. I know that people from Windows cannot easily understand the concept of Workspaces and in Gnome2 or even in Unity they do not really use them. In Gnome 3 Workspaces is a first class citizen and one of the most powerful features.

Some people would prefer an interactive introduction to Gnome. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages, but lazy people certainly prefer videos -I am saying from personal experience :)

This is how  Getting Started Page looks today in Yelp, and of course is far from completed.You can get it from: http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-getting-started-docs/

A re-designed Gnome Help [Yelp]

McCann works to a new Help App, that will drop the casual “textual” mode  and will be more “web-ish” and modern. Basically Gnome follows a lot practices from Web-Services rather from other DE.


https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Help

This is just a very early draft, I think the first one. So nothing really to see apart from it will be pure Gnome App!

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  • ScionicSpectre

    Awesome- he’s done a great job. Now, showing how to ‘unsnap’ programs that lose their titlebars might be a good idea as well, but maybe that’s something for the help documentation. Just seems to be the one thing that’s not quite obvious to people that I hear complaints about most.

    • alex285

      What I really like is that (apart from icons in top bar that you can’t move) you can interact with Shell with any key. For example recently I found out that you can open/close notifications in message tray with up/down arrows!

  • chrys

    Strange Video :/.I think it would be better if the “newbe” se the real shell in the video not an animation so there is an higher recall value.

    • alex285

      you are probably right, but making video with “real” graphics would take much more space. If you launch these video inside Yelp (like in screenshots) and not full screen, it would be easier to understand what’s going on, because you have the actual Gnome Shell frond of you, and you can trying with the video playing.

  • font

    whats the name of the font in the video?

  • Lx495

    “What will be really challenging is an intro to Workspaces use. I know that people from Windows cannot easily understand the concept of Workspaces …”

    That’ll be me. I am open to a clear explanation of how this feature, Workspaces, is a benefit.

    When I use Ubuntu, it’s actually a feature I’d like to mute if not remove. Nobody uses it, no matter who uses that computer I set up for them.

    I would also like a clear explanation of the benefit of having no interaction with the desktop, by default. (Yes, I know I can go to extensions dot gnome dot org and find Advanced Settings and activate it, but that’s not my question.)

    Context: I’m using openSuSE (proper capitalization?) 12.2 on the ‘guest room’ desktop and openSuSE 12.1 on a secondhand notebook. Test-driving 12.3 with a live disc and I really like it. Kudos to whoever signed off on the single-color backgrounds.

    My big idea: Apart from accepting the conventions of Gnome3, I would like to help make it wildly ubiquitous in local US government offices.

    This is a great site. I check it every day. Keep up the good work.

    Lars

  • mdhill

    Hey Alex, not as glamourous as the new design, but Yelp itself has gotten some exciting new features.

    • alex285

      I didn’t notice, because first time I open Yelp 3.7 to try Getting Started Help :( It would be much appreciated if you could send some small sentences about Gnome features that we are missing.

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