The Kyle File

I got my workspace grid back! Seems it's compatible with GNOME 3.8 now. Yeehaw!

The Workspace Grid gnome-shell extension is awesome! It gave me back the 3-by-3 grid I was missing from GNOME 3.2 and fallback mode.

So I went ahead and took the plunge and upgraded to GNOME3. My experience has actually not been that bad so far. I did have to upgrade to the latest git version of Orca, because the Mozilla products appear inaccessible to the version of Orca that ships with GNOME. I also have no desktop for some reason in the “fallback” mode, and I can add the main menu applet to my pannel, but I can’t make it completely replace the menu bar in the top left corner that activates when I press alt-f1. However, all these problems are pretty much just minor annoyances to me, since everything else seems to work at least as well as before the upgrade, and I didn’t really use the desktop launchers and icons that much anyway. The desktop will probably become more of a problem when I plug in my mp3 player, but since it shows up in /media, I shouldn’t have a problem with that either. I’m sure I’ll find more bugs, but I’m actually fairly happy with my upgrade decision overall.

According to an Arch Linux News release, GNOME3 will be moved to the Extra package repository, completely replacing GNOME2. This may happen as early as today or tomorrow, most likely depending on how soon the mirrors synchronize.

I am aware that much work has been done to get accessibility features up and running, but I have also read that GNOME3 won’t be fully operational with Orca until the 3.2 release. I just performed what is likely to be my last upgrade before GNOME3 is moved, but I don’t really want to ignore the gnome package group in all future upgrades until the 3.2 release, which could break something, I definitely don’t want to stop all upgrades on my system until 3.2 is released, and I most certainly don’t feel like going distro hopping again, now that I found one I really like.

Has anyone reading this tested GNOME3 with Orca? I know that gnome-shell isn’t working well, but does fallback mode work out of the box? What major pitfalls can I expect in this release, and how easy is it to correct any problems I may experience? Feel free to leave your answers in the comments at the bottom of this post, or you can also respond on Identica, Twitter or Facebook, each of which has a link to or a copy of this post.