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Talking Points

WARNING: This page contains outdated info (we are working on updating it).

Here are our current Talking Points 1 about GNOME 3 and the GNOME Desktop Environment in general. (Also see other resources.)

When communicating with the public, these talking points are here to guide you. These are the points we think are important to tell everyone about.

You can use these points if someone walks up and says "what's this?" You can also use points if asked a difficult question. Answer the question briefly and then bring the conversation back to these themes. Transition back to the themes.

GNOME 3 talking points

The three big things about GNOME 3 are user experience, the development foundation/framework, and apps.

User Experience

"The innovative GNOME 3 user experience allows you to focus on tasks when working on your computer, while minimizing distractions. We've replaced distracting popups with a notification that displays for a few seconds at the bottom of the screen and then gets out of the way. Users who want to focus can ignore these, and users that want to follow up can check the notification tray."

"While using GNOME 3, the environment does everything it can to speed up your productive work. For example, invoking new applications can happen with only a few short keystrokes. " FIXME: what are those mythical keystrokes? Where are those apps remembered in the interface?

"Another important User Experience innovation is the new approach to managing multiple desktops. desktops are now created as needed, and destroyed when no longer useful. This allows you to easily sort your windows by activity, instead of having all of your tasks mixed together."

Development

"The GNOME 3 development foundation includes improvements in the display backend, a new API, and improvements in search, user messaging, system settings, and streamlined libraries. GNOME 2 applications will continue to work in the GNOME 3 environment without modification, allowing developers to move to the GNOME 3 environment at their own pace. The GNOME release notes include further details." FIXME: this is very vague. New API for what? What improvements?

"GNOME's developer technologies have been vastly improved for GNOME 3. A huge amount of consolidation work has enabled a large number of modules to be deprecated."

Applications

"GNOME Apps have added more social collaboration in GNOME 3. For example, users can now drag and drop Tomboy notes directly into Instant Messaging windows in Empathy. They can share their notes with anyone they are chatting with. Tomboy continues to combine simple note taking that its users love with an ability to easily share with friends."

"Social integration has been expanding in other applications as well. GEdit has exciting new features, allowing users to collaborate on text in real time. Unlike many online document collaboration tools, GEdit shows you every keystroke other users type, from directly within your desktop text editor. GNOME 3 is the best desktop environment for working in teams. Empathy allows for file transfer across a variety of IM networks. "

"To prevent data loss, many users have been moving data to the cloud. GNOME 3 is the only desktop environment on the market to include easy, 1-click cloud-based backup by default. The new release of DejaDup allows for one-click backup and restore to the popular Amazon S3 service. GNOME 3 leads the market in integrating desktop productivity with cloud resiliency."

Other aspects of GNOME 3

Approaches That Work

When you're talking with a skeptic, here are some approaches that are better than others.

GNOME overall

Practical benefits of Free Software

(see PracticalBenefitsOfFreeSoftware)


  1. Talking points are described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talking_Points (1)


2024-10-23 11:05