Today I'm enjoying GNOME 3 in Fedora 23.

The GNOME desktop, at this stage in the 3.x series, is definitely in the iteration stage after a long time in the "sorry about the lack of functionality but not sorry" stage.

If my Citrix apps didn't suffer a bit more in GNOME than in Xfce (mainly because Citrix doesn't care all that much and my apps' developers don't care at all), I could see myself in this environment more of the time.

The dark theming helps. I do the same in Xfce, and in some ways dark theming (aka Adiwata Dark) is maybe a little bit further along in GNOME because it meets with the project's minimalist goals.

Or that's how I'd like to think about it.

In related dark-theming news, Fedora did fix yumex-dnf to work with dark themes (no more dark blue type on black). Now it has to fix the trouble with kernel updates (in which old kernels are NOT deleted, while they are in regular ol' console dnf).

One unfortunate thing: The Eclipse IDE looks like HELL with dark theming. Eclipse developers, you wound me.

As I ease in to learning how to code in C++, I have a couple of "real" IDEs at my disposal (chiefly Netbeans and Microsoft Visual Studio), I was pleased to find out that my favorite not-quite-an-IDE Geany will build and run both Java and C++ code.

And Geany can do this on Linux/Unix, Windows and Macintosh computers. (It uses the Unixy g++ even in Windows for C++ code.

I even tested a Perl script in Windows, where I'm using Strawberry Perl. Geany will automatically run a Perl script (on a Perl-equipped Windows computer) when I click on the "Execute" button. It opens Perl in the Windows terminal and runs the script without needing to leave the "IDE."

Note: I did install Microsoft Visual Studio Community because I have a feeling I'm going to need it (though instinctively I lean toward Netbeans, and practically am using Geany).

One thing I'm learning about C++ as I dip the very tips of my toes into its vast waters: Like Perl but more so, there is definitely more than one way to do it.