For the laptop with closed lid, I have no idea what is the problem. It works out of the box for me.
I'm not exactly sure what does dontzap do, but apparently its X.org issue, not Gnome.
I agree they made some controversial changes. I don't really like the bottom tray. I don't like the lack of any meaningful customisation. Some really stupid shit was that they hid Power Off option for some time.
Then again, it is so good when it comes to my workflow I just roll with it. There are some prosthetics that helped me re-add some functionality - it was really annoying that background programs wouldn't show up in the top bar.
And my point kinda was that they did complete overhaul of UI, but then sticked to it (more or less). Layout isn't changing dramatically every few months.
GNOME has being going out of their way with the philosophy "less is more" Re. configuration.
So yes, the laptop lid does work out of the box, what doesn't work is when you're listening to music on your laptop and you close the lid. There is nothing you can do through gnome to stop this. You must install configuration programs.
Zap is a ridiculously useful key combo for X which signals X to kill itself and all the processes X spawned. On most distributions X will immediately restart fresh. The urge to restart on windows can often be fulfilled by a Zap in Linux. The keycombo can be unexpected though (ctrl+alt+backspace) so they disable by default, FINE. There is nothing you can do through GNOME to change this setting. You must configure X yourself.
Here's the thing, gnome 3 is still capable of configuring X for you, they just removed the interface to it. Check it out, this was gnome 3.4! [1] (from [2])
Don't get me started on Nautilus. You're using Gnome? Try uninstalling nautilus and using Nemo. It's a fork of the old Nautilus by the guys at Linux Mint.
> Don't get me started on Nautilus. You're using Gnome? Try uninstalling nautilus and using Nemo. It's a fork of the old Nautilus by the guys at Linux Mint.
I have Nautilus 2.32 pinned over here with an otherwise Xfce-y DE. The latter still doesn’t seem to have figured out how to deal with icons on the desktop in a decent way.
I'm not exactly sure what does dontzap do, but apparently its X.org issue, not Gnome.
I agree they made some controversial changes. I don't really like the bottom tray. I don't like the lack of any meaningful customisation. Some really stupid shit was that they hid Power Off option for some time.
Then again, it is so good when it comes to my workflow I just roll with it. There are some prosthetics that helped me re-add some functionality - it was really annoying that background programs wouldn't show up in the top bar.
And my point kinda was that they did complete overhaul of UI, but then sticked to it (more or less). Layout isn't changing dramatically every few months.