81 ms·

GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

• 29athrowaway 6y ago
  The reason people use Windows is: - Because it comes preinstalled in their computers. - Because that is what schools and workplaces use. - Because MS Office is the de-facto office suite (although now you have Google Docs, LibreOffice, FreeOffice, etc) - Because most games are released for Windows. All these reasons are pretty sad.
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    Personally I use Windows because I like the OS model, and the GUI, and the workflows.
• whatever1 6y ago
  Linux was always a Terminal-first OS. The UI efforts never came close to the depth that MacOS and Windows have. Take for example the scaling issue. It has been now almost half a decade with 4k Displays, and Linux still does not know how to deal with it other than 100% or 200%. Currently Linux is unusable for anyone with a modern display. I appreciate the work that all the contributors put -for free- in projects like gnome and kde, but unfortunatelly, it is not enough. You need a Giant with financial incentives to drive this, like Google did with Android.
  • priomsrb 6y ago
    Not sure what you mean. I use a 3440x1440 display with 118% global scaling using KDE.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • ncmncm 6y ago
    I use 4k displays. Everything involving font, chrome, and icon sizes is perfect. Don't know what you are having trouble with.
    • whatever1 6y ago
      Glad it works for you. It does not for most of us. Including multi-monitor setups or various glitches in rendering. Google Kubuntu Fractional scaling to have a glimpse. A few examples: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1253744/inconsistent-resolution-positions-fractional-scaling-for-4k-display-hd-dis https://askubuntu.com/questions/1253744/inconsistent-resolut... https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=164736 https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=164736 https://pointieststick.com/category/high-dpi/ https://pointieststick.com/category/high-dpi/ Probably there are workarounds, kernel patches, magic scripts that might solve the above, but honestly I don't have time to spend on these. It should just work. I use an OS to get work done, not to fix the OS.
  • viseztrance 6y ago
    Funny thing. The company I worked for, bought me a 1440p ultrawide screen to use on my mac at (the same I used home on my linux workstation). It displayed no scaling options whatsoever - NONE. Other displays (4k 16:9) shown it but not that. And unlike linux, or windows you can't even set the font size globally. Suffice to say, that this isn't a solved problem everywhere else.
    • tsar9x 6y ago
      On macOS you need to "Option-Click" on Scaled radio button to see full list of resolutions.
      • viseztrance 6y ago
        The resolution was correct, but the scaling options were hidden.
        • rubatuga 6y ago
          You need to enable HIDPI then install something like “resolution menu”
  • heavyset_go 6y ago
    > Take for example the scaling issue. It has been now almost half a decade with 4k Displays, and Linux still does not know how to deal with it other than 100% or 200%. Currently Linux is unusable for anyone with a modern display. Fractional scaling works fine on KDE, and it's worked for over a year since I first started using it.
  • josephg 6y ago
    I use two monitors on linux mint with cinnamon. One is a 4k display, and the other a normal display. Display scaling works fine - but once enabled I get a weird bug where I can see a duplicate, frozen mouse cursor on my screen based on where the mouse was in the login prompt. And it hovers on top of all other windows. Somehow the mouse cursor bug is related to the HiDPI scaling options. I've learned to just use the downstairs toilet. I move the mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen before I log in.
  • gattr 6y ago
    Non-integer scaling has been working fine for me for a few years now. I use Fedora + KDE, 175% on my 24" 4K monitor and 225% on 4K 15.6" laptop. I just had to manually increase the mouse cursor size, and in Firefox change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to the scaling factor.
  • Nursie 6y ago
    > Linux still does not know how to deal with it other than 100% or 200%. I've been using fractional scaling for years. I had to learn how to use xrandr, but it works great. Better than windows or macos in the end, I can specify exactly what I want where.
• jancsika 6y ago
  Somebody in Gnome did an awesome thing and I want to know who it was: If I open my laptop after being logged in, I can just start typing my password and the login manager does the right thing: "Hey, he's probably typing a password. Let's throw it into the password widget and see what happens..." I'm on an XPS running Ubuntu 20.04. Who implemented that feature? It's a great ergonomic feature and improves the UX of logging in so much.
  • uncledave 6y ago
    The scary thing is we’ve moved on from there on other platforms because those problems were solved forever ago. I sit at my Mac desktop, press any key on my keyboard to wake the machine or tap the touchpad and I’m logged in. Being impressed with the very small changes is a symptom that there are lots of small problems. The most important change for me is I rarely if ever have to enter a password now while at the same time, no random joe can sit at my computer and use it.
    • samatman 6y ago
      ...did you skip the part where you're wearing an Apple Watch? Because when the watch isn't on my wrist, I have to either enter my password or hit TouchID, waking up the computer gets me to the password dialog box. Which, to be fair, I can start typing the password directly because the cursor is in the correct place. And this is what you would want, if waking it up meant no authentication then J Random Badguy could in fact walk up and pwn my computer.
      • jancsika 6y ago
        Also for the record, regarding uncledave's general principle: > Being impressed with the very small changes is a symptom that there are lots of small problems. This is directly contradicted by my use case on my XPS under Ubuntu 20.04. I no longer have "Gnu anxiety" on my laptop-- the overarching fear that the values for the next default behavior I run into were chosen at random by troglodytes. Suspend/resume just works. I haven't fiddled with a single touchpad setting and it works the way you'd expect on a Chromebook. Camera works, audio is fine, battery life is decent, and so on. I did get a tinge of anxiety when clicking the desktop scaling setting, but it seems to have worked perfectly so far.
• senko 6y ago
  Users like these are why maintainers of open source software are burning out.
  • londons_explore 6y ago
    These user complaints are 100% legit... But we need some good funding model to pay someone to fix them. Good funding models are something the opensource world has been missing for a while...
    • xgbi 6y ago
      He IS actually offering a bounty, though..
      • wizzwizz4 6y ago
        “There's some hypothetical money to claim from somebody, somewhere” is not a good funding model. At best, you'll get a dozen additional issues sorted in a large project.
    • onli 6y ago
      I wouldn't be confident that funding is the solution here. This is about adding a feature to a project that seems to be completely disinterested in that feature, some recent answers from project developers in the gitlab issue are even hostile to it. Likely to be not something money can fix, this goes directly into the deep rooted problems GNOME has with usability.
    • viraptor 6y ago
      The complaint is legit. But making a page about your pet issue to create emotional response and cause rants about gnome on social media? That's annoying. Here's a better structure for the post "This is an issue that really impacts me and I care a lot about. See existing bug / discussion links. I can't solve it myself, but it's important enough that I'm willing to put up bounty for that work." I don't think anyone would complain about it.
• londons_explore 6y ago
  Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs... It's such a shame, because fixing most of these small bugs is far less work than building new features. Nobody wants to put the work in though... Nobody has the overarching vision of a consistent UX that just works out of the box without oddities, quirks and workarounds.
  • noncoml 6y ago
    > Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs... I agree, this is the problem. GUI OS developers like to work on big features and eye candy but forget to fix the basics. I have yet to find a Window system that: 1. Works without glitches in HiDPI setups. Especially mouse pointer glitches. 2. Comes out of the box with fonts that don't feel like thorns in the eyes, including the browser.
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    Part of the reason no one wants to put in the work is because all it takes is a technical dictator to say "I don't like this approach, let's rethink this", and scuttle your weeks of work. Even if you got a sign-off on the approach earlier. This has happened enough times to me in open source projects that I only submit code to projects that I know have reasonable maintainers that I've interacted with in the past. Developers frequently hate it when "product people" get a say in the direction of the product, but the alternative is commonly to have developers prioritize perceived code purity over actual user interests. And emphasis on "perceived", because usually the codebase is a hot mess but maintainers want it to be their hot mess, not someone else's.
  • chmod775 6y ago
    Oh but people did put in the work[0]. The problem is that gnome maintainers are hostile towards anyone from outside their little bubble wanting to get in some patches. [0]: https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk
• lol768 6y ago
  Sounds like there is already a working patch on GitHub, but it's not been reviewed because an MR wasn't opened on GitLab?
• reddotX 6y ago
  no desktop, no system tray icons.. gnome is a joke
  • amiga-workbench 6y ago
    Tools and features have ergonomics and affordances that suggest a certain way of using them, and desktop filling just seems to encourage people to make a massive mess. Even when I was a Windows user, desktop icons were the first thing to go. Not having quick access to a dumping ground meant that I had to go out of my way to make a mess. As for a lack of system tray icons, the practical upshot is that my system bar isn't littered with multiple special snowflake applications, each with their own unique icon art style and mismatching proportions.
    • heavyset_go 6y ago
      > As for a lack of system tray icons, the practical upshot is that my system bar isn't littered with multiple special snowflake applications, each with their own unique icon art style and mismatching proportions. Plasma Desktop's System Tray widget that lets you hide icons you don't want to see. You can disable the widget, or configure it to show no icons at all.
      • vetinari 6y ago
        The problem with that is, that applications will assume it is present and enabled. If it is not, they will inflict a pain on the user until it is enabled again. For example Skype. With default being off, it is applications that have to be careful. They can use it, when they detect it is present, but cannot assume it anymore.
        • heavyset_go 6y ago
          You can make the System Tray show no icons unless it is invoked to deal with applications that behave poorly. System trays exist on most platforms, and apps, especially cross-platform apps, will sometimes assume that they exist. I prefer to use a system that can handle those apps.
• etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  This brings up a great point about GNOME. GNOME appears to try to emulate macOS at times, but tends to try to oversimplify and paradoxically be quite user-unfriendly.
  • curt15 6y ago
    GNOME has an obsession with a "distraction-free" interface that really takes keyboard shortcuts to navigate efficiently. For example, despite the popularity of the dash-to-dock extension, the GNOME developers stubbornly refuse to make the dock built-in. So with the default setup, mouse users (like many in my family) need two large cursor movements (flick to the left corner, then slide down to the dock) every time they need to switch between applications[1]. In fact, at least one core developer has even floated the possibility of removing the dock and its list of currently running apps altogether. [1] No, the window previews aren't really useful because their positions are non-deterministic and it's hard to rapidly distinguish mostly white, unlabeled windows anyway.
• antonios 6y ago
  Indeed. Unbelievable omission for a project that touts simplicity and usability above else.
  • type0 6y ago
    They don't champion simplicity and usability, it's only an excuse to remove code and functionality that maintainers don't want to deal with
• sampo 6y ago
  The Xfce file manager, Thunar, has thumbnails. For casual use at least, it is very similar to the Gnome file manager.
  • incanus77 6y ago
    Sounds like a good alternate toilet.
  • puzzlingcaptcha 6y ago
    Interestingly, Thunar has had a similar pet peeve: it could not remember per-directory view settings (e.g. sorting order). This was finally fixed a couple months ago, 13 years after the original bug was filed (#3521).
    • colonwqbang 6y ago
      I started writing a comment about this but then I saw that it finally got fixed! Not a day too soon, it makes thunar a lot easier to recommend to others. And saves me some time when looking for things in my downloads directory!
  • opencl 6y ago
    The post isn't actually about GNOME's file manager (which does have thumbnails), it's about the GTK file picker which is the same in any DE.
    • lmz 6y ago
      And without reading the bug, the issue with adding thumbnail support to that one is probably because thumbnails need to be cached to be fast, and it would be odd for a filepicker to be creating its own cache files (since it can't make any assumptions about the system it runs on).
      • ubercow13 6y ago
        It's not that. Firstly there is a standard for where to cache thumbnails at least on Linux, and secondly the file picker already generates (or at least displays) thumbnails. It's shown in the article. It's just that GTK has no suitable widget for showing them properly.
• teekert 6y ago
  Omg, this is insane, I now realize I automatically memorize the first 3 and last 3 parts of filenames I need in the picker... For screenshots I read the date very carefully and fear the day I upload a wrong one. I was going to the toilet with a plunger, not even realizing it. Btw, if you work on MacOS (which has been a while for me now), you get very used to hitting space everywhere to get previews. What a feature!
  • vetinari 6y ago
    FYI, Gnome Files has exactly the same preview via space as Finder.
  • another_kel 6y ago
    There's also QuickLook on Windows 10 store which does the same thing. https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9NV4BS3L1H4S https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9NV4BS3L1H4S
  • therealmarv 6y ago
    There is a solution called GNOME Sushi which enabled that also in GNOME. Also a Windows solution is existing (forgot the name)
  • swebs 6y ago
    I just don't even use the picker. Most sites support just dragging the image from Nautilus.
    • teekert 6y ago
      Yup, also a workaround I use very often.
  • city41 6y ago
    I don't understand the wrong screenshot fear. Can't you confirm it's the right one once you select it and see the preview to the right?
    • 6y ago
• drivingmenuts 6y ago
  > First of all, how do developers so casually ignore this issue? Second of all, how do users so casually ignore this issue? Because it’s not important enough to them to force a fix. Hard to believe, in this day and age, but some developers have other priorities, especially when working with free software. I question if this is actually a bug. It seems to be working as intended, just not the way the author wants. Seems like the quickest solution would be for the author to either take on the job themself, or absent the time or expertise, pay someone else to do it.
  • Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    There's a patch on GitHub [1], but apparently the code quality isn't up to GNOME's standards (?) [1] https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk
• enriquto 6y ago
  In this time and age, do we really need "desktops"? If you only need a full-screen terminal and a full-screen browser (as is the case for many people), the whole desktop thing is unnecessary clutter.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Someone is living in one hell of a computing bubble.
  • etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    Terminals are probably never again going to be the primary computing interface for most people.
    • mgreenly 6y ago
      Without question I think that's true, but they certainly will be the primary interface of some people forever.
    • enriquto 6y ago
      > Terminals are probably never again going to be the primary computing interface for most people. So what? Neither are desktops! The question is that the total number of terminal users is certainly increasing year after year.
      • nl 6y ago
        > the total number of terminal users is certainly increasing year after year Perhaps, but the proportion of them is certainly decreasing (especially if we include devices like tablets and phones in "computing interfaces").
  • guerrilla 6y ago
    Yes, I want to be able to look at more than one thing at a time.
    • 6y ago
• albertzeyer 6y ago
  You will find lots of such examples of a feature which you personally find very important and wonder why such a simple thing is not supported yet. I guess everyone has such examples. And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows. For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration is still not implemented. I implemented it a while ago for Xorg, which is outdated now, and also the maintainer was not happy with my approach. It's now a long outstanding proposal for libinput, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/7 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/7 / https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/405 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/405 (original bug report from 2010: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29905 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29905). Anyway, I guess there are actually not too much people caring about this feature. And the intersection of those who do and those who have enough free time and knowledge to implement this is just empty. Btw, I don't quite understand the comment about KDE. It sounds like the the author claims that KDE lacks other relevant features. But comparing Gnome vs KDE, it is quite clear that KDE has much more features. This is never a complaint I heard about KDE.
  • swebs 6y ago
    At least enough people care that its become a meme in some tech communities. https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme
    • jdright 6y ago
      Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.
      • Shared404 6y ago
        > there is no excuse to keep using Gnome. Don't know that I agree there. I actually really like GNOME's workflow on laptop, especially with Pop OS's extensions.
• sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  Thumbnails are performance hogs
  • enneff 6y ago
    For who?
    • airstrike 6y ago
      All of us on a Pentium II 300MHz with 32MB RAM
      • josefx 6y ago
        I don't think GNOME runs on those specs.
        • bananamerica 6y ago
          I think that was a joke, dude.
        • p_l 6y ago
          I think I had fast and reliable thumbnails at those specs, but GNOME3 would lag too much (GNOME 1.4 did because Nautilus was borked, but at least 1.4 didn't patronize me as "dumb user, we the gnome/rhel devs know better what you need")
        • rleigh 6y ago
          GNOME 1.2 would have. It wasn't until the arrival of Nautilus with 1.4 that the requirements jumped and the performance tanked.
        • smabie 6y ago
          woosh
      • sgt 6y ago
        Sweet. How many BogoMIPS ya got?
• therealmarv 6y ago
  GNOME is in general terrible for everything with image related work (last tested on Ubuntu 20.04). In the past I thought finder on macOS is terrible (it's still the worst piece of macOS and I don't like it) but GNOME files aka Nautilus tops it for sure (also because of space wasting issues). XFCE and KDE both do a better job than GNOME in this regard. And also Windows Explorer was and is much much better in this area.
  • sercand 6y ago
    Why do you don't like Finder? I couldn't think any issue with it.
    • therealmarv 6y ago
      My biggest complaint: Normal Copy and Paste does not work. My mother is used to Copy and Paste and it would work in Linux but not in macOS finder because of: think different Also why are folders sometimes cluttered all over the place and shorts cuts so weird? Well I fixed it all with Forklift but I also grew up with Norton Commander ;)
      • Teever 6y ago
        I actually filed a bug report with Apple in 2005 regarding the inability to cut and paste files in Finder. They actually responded a few years later and said that this is the intended functionality. Maddening.
        • Zarel 6y ago
          They do support copy and move, which I think is clearer that the file doesn't get deleted if you don't "paste" it (and safer than if it did). It's probably annoying to learn a new paradigm, but you could make the argument that it's worth it to learn something that isn't lying to you.
      • spideymans 6y ago
        Can you elaborate? Copy and Paste works exactly as I'd expect in Finder.
• its-summertime 6y ago
  > Okay. Well, how much money should I pay for someone to fix this then? I’m legit offering a bounty here. How much are you willing to offer?
  • michaelt 6y ago
    The problem with feature bounties is: $500 is a lot to give, but not much to receive.
    • sterlind 6y ago
      it'd be nice if there were some quickly-accessible bounty portal (maybe even from the DE itself) where proposals could be upvoted and crowd-funded. 500 people see it and offer $10 and that's a $5000 bounty, payable on merge or returned in 90 days. people could even run side-hussles of proposing features in the hopes that they're funded.
• snvzz 6y ago
  There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken. Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there for several years now: 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of files on a smb3 mount) 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it) 3. Wait for the whole list to load Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the list gets automatically selected (discarding your selection). Thus, if you select a file and click open, in the time between you select and click open, the selection can auto-change and you'll end up opening something else than what you've selected. It is this bad.
  • keyle 6y ago
    Right. So typical bug of redrawing selection once the list is rendered. On the plus side it should be an easy fix?
    • Qub3d 6y ago
      Given that we've seen multiple examples in both TFA and other comments in the discussion here pointing to simple bugs that have A) been open for 10+ years and/or B) locked and closed as WONTFIX, I don't know if that "plus side" is valid here.
  • ht85 6y ago
    Let's do another... Open any directory with 3+ items. As first item is highlighted, quickly hit <down arrow>, <enter>, <down arrow>. The 3rd item opens... There is a lag when hitting <enter> and the last <down arrow> is processed out of order :/
    • buckminster 6y ago
      This is bad but it's not unusual. There are similar issues in Firefox and Windows. Nobody gets UI asynchrony right. There are race conditions in everything. It's particularly noticeable with a slow computer.
      • 6y ago
• hedora 6y ago
  This has somehow gotten worse in recent years. When saving, it used to be you could use the mouse to navigate to a directory, then type the desired filename, and press enter. Now, typing the filename initiates a contextual search within the current directory. Clicking in the filename textbox and starting to type doesn’t work either. You have to highlight the base (not the extension or “.”) of the filename. At that point, you can finally start typing the name of the file you want to save. The same problem occurs if the file chooser happens to already be in the directory where you want to save the file.
  • wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Doing some introspection (all too rare for me!), I find that this is the reason I've started avoiding creating new files in LibreOffice, and why my Downloads and Pictures folders are flat, unstructured messes. Too many programs use the GNOME file selector.
    • Spivak 6y ago
      Isn’t that “better” in some sense? You don’t have to actually categorize anything in order to find it later. Just type what you want and let tracker pull it up for you. If I could just “accio my black jeans” I wouldn’t bother organizing my closet.
      • wizzwizz4 6y ago
        I suppose it might be better? But the folder-first sort means I've got a miscellaneous pile of extracted archives very far away from the archives themselves… it's a complete mess.
      • nl 6y ago
        The assumes you know the name of the random image you downloaded to insert into the document. mjx3AmQXM5OrkxV7.jpg isn't super easy to remember (as a random real example chosen from my downloads directory)
        • 6y ago
• acgkmopvvgvmgv 6y ago
  Pretty sure 99% of regular people would be happy if there was a desktop with GNOME 2 feature parity but with a good Wayland compositor and probably some modern features that would come from that (multimonitor, VRR, ...). I just can't understand how anyone could defend GNOME 3. Their own staff have to use extensions (that break every update), even Fedora (!!!) has to patch GNOME packages now. They kept fighting that their workflow is superior and now they are going to change it all over next release. They keep butchering their toolkit, I can only use Qt applications now. Hell I'll take even Electron over GTK. For me the Linux desktop with a WM is the perfect balance of exposing the internals and UX. It could be better but that's true to every OS, at least here I have my freedom. I'm keeping my eye on KDE, seems like they rewrote their less than ideal compositor (legacy X11 is a burden) and maybe in a year I could be using that. I've once heard someone say that GNOME is Microsoft's favorite DE. You can guess why.
  • nightfly 6y ago
    Have you looked at MATE? https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/
    • zapzupnz 6y ago
      And somewhat related, TDE is the KDE 3.5 of the modern era. https://trinitydesktop.org https://trinitydesktop.org (I say modern era; it’s more or less just recompiled. Still comes with some of the yuckiness of days gone by, like aRtsd for audio.
    • twic 6y ago
      Or Cinnamon: https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/ https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/ I've been running Cinnamon on a few machines for years, and it mostly works fine, which for a Linux desktop is high praise. The file picker has thumbnails (although it only has a list view, so they're ant-size). I haven't used MATE. My understanding is that MATE started life as Gnome 2, whereas Cinnamon started life as Gnome 3 reskinned to look like Gnome 2. Both have grown considerably from their starting points.
• stephen82 6y ago
  Install PCManFM and that will do; an extremely lightweight File Manager which I happen to use parallel with Thunar.
  • ubercow13 6y ago
    This post is about the Gtk file picker, not file managers.
  • miguelmota 6y ago
    I use pcmanfm but there's no thumbnails in file picker still. They are separate programs it seems.
• agurk 6y ago
  So I just checked on my install (Gnome 3.38.2, Debian testing) and all the GTKFileChooser windows I could find had the thumbnails representing the underlying images. Interestingly I checked a few apps I have installed through Flatpak, and they generally didn't have thumbnails for the same dialogues, although sometimes did for the "recents". Unless this has been recently added as a feature, it sounds more like he has another issue affecting his desktop rather than outright missing functionality. Or could this be a Debian applied patch? I couldn't find any details after a quick google.
  • ubercow13 6y ago
    Can you provide a screenshot?
    • agurk 6y ago
      If you read the article more closely than I did originally there is an example of what I see in their original article [0]. The thumbnail is part of the list view and they want to see a thumbnail without the other file details. [0] https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome2.png https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome2.png
      • fvdessen 6y ago
        We want to see all the thumbnails at once, not just the selected one.
        • agurk 6y ago
          The screenshot from the article is very low resolution, so it's quite hard to see if you don't know what you're looking for, but it does have a unique thumbnail against each filename. The underlying complaint is that people want this to be bigger.
      • ubercow13 6y ago
        Yes, they are so small that they are completely useless. What is needed is a widget like the one from Windows at the top of the article that actually shows all the thumbnails at a decent size so you can use them to actually locate the right image.
• johnchristopher 6y ago
  > One might also say "Just use KDE!" Yeah, I guess I could use KDE, just like I use the downstairs toilet instead of the other ones. Yeah but when you go to the downstairs toilet you can't bring in your favourite newspaper because the paper its printed on isn't compatible with the light bulb and you can't read it. Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails.
  • nisa 6y ago
    > Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails. Not true. Firefox on current Arch/Plasma works fine with the KDE filepicker.
    • johnchristopher 6y ago
      It's completely true on Kubuntu 18.04. Ah ! now that I think about it I remembered a little trick https://askubuntu.com/questions/1100261/how-do-i-make-firefox-64-use-the-kde-file-selection-dialog https://askubuntu.com/questions/1100261/how-do-i-make-firefo... Have to try it again.
      • ognarb 6y ago
        Kubuntu 18.04 is a bit too old, if I remember correctly this was implemented only recently.
        • johnchristopher 6y ago
          I remember doing that last year, or even the year before. Anyway, a distro released in 2018 and still supported until 2023 and 2028 for extender support can't be "a bit too old" for something like the file picker. I mean, people were making fun of me when I told them I was using that ubuntu distro that had no mp3 support by default but it was 15 years ago.
  • heavyset_go 6y ago
    > Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails. Not if you set the GTK_USE_PORTAL environment variable. $ GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 firefox The above will make Firefox use the KDE filepicker.
• 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  OSS is not designed to solve user problems, it's designed to solve developer problems. Therefore it will always suck compared to a commercial product developed for users. Good product design solves users' problems. (And usually there's somebody who will get fired if they wait indefinitely to solve it)
  • bsdubernerd 6y ago
    As a dev I still have to interact with the file picker a huge number of times in a single day. The GTK file picker is perhaps one of the worst offenders that's irritating devs, power-users and plain regular users. Patches get dismissed. I don't know where the problem is. It's as if the GNOME team had a vision, but didn't actually try to see how this vision plays out using the tools they're making.
    • 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
      > I don't know where the problem is. The problem is nobody's gonna get fired for not solving the problem in GNOME. Nobody is accountable, and nobody has to cooperate on and solve the user's problem. One person can be a blocker for 10 years and nobody can do anything about it. The second thing Leadership is useful for is forcing people to do the right thing. That seems to be missing here.
      • bsdubernerd 6y ago
        I'm not convinced. Leadership is somehow preventing these fixes to be merged with "design decisions".
• johannes1234321 6y ago
  Gnome uses Gtk; Gtk is the Gimp Toolkit. It was created for an image editing program. In a way funny that their file picker is missing such an feature one would expect in an image editing program these days. (From scrolling offer the discussion I can in parts see the architectural constraints they have and can image they have other priorities ...)
  • trissylegs 6y ago
    If you notice the dependcies: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/gimp/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/gimp/ GIMP still runs GTK 2. The version from ~10 years ago.
    • pferde 6y ago
      They're actually well on their way to switch to GTK3. I guess it takes a while. https://www.gimp.org/news/2020/11/06/gimp-2-99-2-released/ https://www.gimp.org/news/2020/11/06/gimp-2-99-2-released/
    • Biganon 6y ago
      GIMP is also one of the most atrocious UX I've come across
    • johannes1234321 6y ago
      According to Wikipedia[1] GtkFileChooser is from 2.4 in 2004. So that was designed more than 16 years ago. Not sure when Windows got the feature, but previews could have been thinkable then and machines powerful enough to handle it with some usable threshold. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK
• seltzered_ 6y ago
  Reminds me of a different story involving Bill Gates, toilets, and user interface design: https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfish.com/blog/2012/03/12/the-day-bill-gates-called-me-rude-and-other-lessons-in-user-experience/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfis... "At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following: “Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t combine them into one thing to reduce their learning curve. We don’t merge them into one object because each of them are in use in fundamentally different ways at different times.” Then the pause. Then Bill’s verdict. ["That's just rude."] Ouch. As I saw my career disintegrate before me, I started to question just how “beautiful” my analogy really was. To his credit, Bill was forgiving, and met with me many times after that, giving me numerous opportunities to get him on board with all manner of ideas coming from my team (with varying degrees of success on my part). Ultimately, I never did succeed in making Bill really comfortable with a more emotional approach to software design. But the real lesson of the day was learned. In the software industry, as long as the engineering-minded run the show, the notion of subtle and textured user experience design that balances the emotional and functional aspects of a software experience will always struggle to take root." -- I keep a running list of little workflows and experiences I generally love on macOS and see if alternatives exist here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3mF-c4vqV3CqyEWXuqaAiXoA/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...
  • hitekker 6y ago
    Great anecdote. The outrage in its comment section indicates the author struck a nerve.
  • z3t4 6y ago
    If a software developer would design a bathroom. eg. DRY (don't repeat yourself) mantra. Class Toilet extend Basin.
  • bborud 6y ago
    There was a paragraph in that article that made me think of something >”But engineers (like everyone) see the world through their lens. Engineers look at code all day. And when they see two pieces of code doing roughly the same thing, they immediately think about ways they could eliminate the wasted effort by combining them into one piece of code that performs both functions”. I shudder when thinking of all the times I have wasted time trying to generalize something only to end up with code that is harder to understand, awkward to use, more complex, more prone to bugs, or all of the aforementioned, just because there is a stupid voice in my head going “do not repeat yourself”. With maturity comes the insight that not repeating yourself is good. But sometimes avoiding it makes things worse and costs a lot more.
• swebs 6y ago
  Someone created a fix for this 3 years ago. The Gnome maintainers refuse to add it for whatever reason. https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk
  • type0 6y ago
    > The Gnome maintainers refuse to add it for whatever reason. Because the issue would be solved, "this is why we can't have nice things"
  • shp0ngle 6y ago
    well, they rewrote everything to gtk4, so that would need to be updated
  • konjin 6y ago
    Gnome is notoriously terrible for not accepting patches outside of redhat employees. I tried adding a patch to gnome in the 00s and the number of hoops they expected me to jump through along with the tone made me never install their de again.
• p1necone 6y ago
  Aren't there plenty of little UX niggles in macOS/windows just like this that haven't been fixed for years either? I'm not sure why this is being used as a reason why "Free desktop operating systems are a joke". I think "use KDE" is perfectly valid advice here too. The toilet analogy doesn't really hold, your satisfaction of software that works for you shouldn't be at all affected by the existence of software you don't like and don't use, that's just silly.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    The point is that there are fewer because people actually have to use that UI that can't figure out workarounds.
  • ncmncm 6y ago
    There are overwhelmingly many such contempties in Apple and MS systems. Not more, but different and disabling. Apple and MS don't try to present the illusion that what they build is for your benefit. People know they are Big Corporations that care less-than-nothing for you or me, or our wants or needs, and that it is only by luck when we can get them to do anything at all. It is the imagined promise that Free Software is done for our benefit that lends us the delusion that things should be the way we want them. In fact, Free Software things are much more likely to actually work, in the way that somebody wants, than Apple's or MS's. Just, not you. In the case of Apple and MS, there is typically no living individual who wants it to do what it does, but changing it would require initiative whose attempt at exercise would severely punished.
  • city41 6y ago
    Frankly I find the whole blog post silly. All OSes/software have trade offs. It's just a question of what is important to you. I'm primarily an Ubuntu user but I have one Windows machine. There are things in Windows that just flabbergast me that people put up with. And Windows users can easily say the same thing about most Linux variants.
    • proactivesvcs 6y ago
      IMO it's perfectly valid criticism in its lambasting of the bug itself as well as its vintage. When I want to upload a screenshot, photo or video to an email, an IM, a web page etc., I really do not want to send the wrong one.
• zapzupnz 6y ago
  On macOS, when you drag a file into an Open or Save panel, the panel’s current directory switches to the dragged file’s containing directory and highlights that dragged file. On Windows, when you drag a file into an Open or Save panel, the dragged file is moved from its original location to the panel’s current directory. It is a destructive action! That may be one little thing but it’s part of a whole number of reasons why I dislike using Windows. Alas, all the counter arguments to any and all reason I might give for preferring macOS do sound like toilet-plunging family members.
  • alkonaut 6y ago
    What’s a save panel? You mean a save dialog? Note that on windows there are at least 3 generations of save dialogs. Which one you see depends on which generation of the api is used. The most common one is the more modern which is basically just an explorer window. Dragging a file into an explorer window works that same regardless of whether it’s an open/save dialog or not. It’s a move/copy operation (depending on e.g modifier keys). I didn’t quite get the point of dragging a file to a save dialog at all though? (Assuming that’s what you meant by panel) is it that you wanted to use it for navigate+set-name? That to me as a windows user seems alien. I expect it to work as an explorer window! Expectations are everything. The principle of least surprise doesn’t really work cross platform I guess.
    • zapzupnz 6y ago
      Yes, a save panel is a save dialogue. It’s just Apple terminology. > I don’t quite get the point of dragging a file to a save dialog at all though? On macOS (since forever) and iOS (since 11), there is a heavy focus on drag. You should be able to drag anything from any app to any other app and something should happen. This is facilitated both by system-level frameworks (so that all apps can gain correct drag-handling behaviour out of the box) and can be further enhanced by an app’s developer. That begins with behaviour you might ordinarily expect from most apps: drag a image file from Finder into a Word, it should embed the picture; drag an audio file from iTunes into an open Audacity project, it should add the audio as a new track; or, drag highlighted text from a text field to the desktop and it will create a text snippet file containing that text. On Windows, apps need to implement this behaviour manually. Figuring out how to deal with certain file types is not built into every app out of the box. On macOS and iOS, it’s not just built into every app, it’s built into the operating system itself. It’s a fundamental feature of Cocoa, open which all native apps are built, so every app gets the correct behaviour for free. Dragging and dropping is super powered on Apple platforms. For example, proxy icons: on any given document window (a window for an open document, like a Word document, Photoshop document, Final Cut project, etc), the name of the document is preceded by an icon that represents the document. You can actually drag that icon off the window’s title bar to any other on-screen element that supports receiving dragged objects — an open document, a Finder window, an email, a text field, etc. I say all of this to cement one point: dragging and dropping is a key interface metaphor on macOS and iOS/iPadOS. So, imagine I have a browser window open asking me to upload a file. If I have that file open, why should I navigate the directory hierarchy in the open panel? I can just drag the proxy icon for that document straight into the open panel. Bam, the open panel is pointing at the correct location. Or perhaps I’ve just downloaded an image from the web that I want to share with my friend. Again, I can open up my favourite messaging program, click on the Add Attachment button, and drag the image in from my Dock’s Downloads stack. (Although, that’s a slightly odd example; I wouldn’t bother with the Add Attachment button, I’d actually just drag the file directly from the Downloads stack on to the app and expect it to figure out what I want to do) For save panels, I might already have a folder open in Finder where I want my document to be saved. When I save the document for the first time and the save panel appears, I can either drag that folder or its proxy icon from Finder straight into the save panel — bam, the save panel is pointing to the correct place. Or perhaps I want to save a file into the same place as an open document. Again, I would just drag the proxy icon of an already-open document into the save panel, bam, we’re looking at the right folder. Notice: these actions are non-destructive. Non-destructive actions follow the principle of least surprise. All I’m doing is telling an open/save panel where I want to be. > That to me as a Windows user seems alien. I expect it to work as an Explorer window! Ask yourself what the basic function of an open/save panel is: to select a location for a file (and in the case of a save panel, give it a name). Of the four CRUD operations, only C and R are directly relevant. Something shouldn’t act as something else, especially if it’s destructive. That, in my opinion, violates the principle of least surprise — an interface to C or R should not U or D. The only thing I expect to act as an Explorer window is … an Explorer window.
• turminal 6y ago
  And despite all such issues everyone still has the time to argue about things like stopthemingmy.app
• ehutch79 6y ago
  It’s open source. I’m sure they’re accepting pull requests.
  • bsdubernerd 6y ago
    Not really. This is not the first or the last one fixing horrible behavior in the default file picker. Most of the time there's a deliberate reason the picker was designed this way, and the GNOME team won't accept your patch. I personally stopped contributing to GTK very late in the GTK 2 series with very similar problems, and stopped using GTK in my projects since GTK 3. GTK used to be my favorite toolkit back in the day.
    • type0 6y ago
      I saddens me that GNOME and GTK are so hostile to new or inexperienced contributors, most of the time the development happens in a GNOME/GTK Cabal; I heard about but couldn't believe it until I saw their responces myself. I really is worse than that and puts a stain on the whole Linux open source movement (if you can even call it that).
      • dleslie 6y ago
        They're hostile to users who post bugs! It's an absolutely toxic developer community who rejects any reflection upon the quality of their product that could somehow indicate that there exists problems with their design vision. It doesn't matter that they've made the UI harder to use for those with ability concerns, or that their market share is dwindling, or that they've steadily lost developers for most of a decade. Everyone should give up and move on; I use MATE and am happy, others like Plasma and Xfce. There's plenty of vastly superior DEs with healthier developer attitudes.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• mseepgood 6y ago
  It's a design decision. There is no right or wrong.
  • viraptor 6y ago
    It's a design decision if both sides have competing benefits and you choose one. In this case it's a planning / engineering decision: other work is prioritised higher than implementing the previews.
    • mseepgood 6y ago
      If it was just that then the blog author and the combined technical intelligentsia of Hacker News could jump in and make it happen by implementing it.
      • viraptor 6y ago
        I'm not sure why you say that. Bugzilla had a partial patch with some outstanding issues needing polish. Nobody rejected it, but nobody is working on it anymore. You're welcome to take https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk/pull/1 https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk/pull/1 and continue the work in a gtk PR on gitlab. You can jump in and implement it. The last few comments are basically "here's a patch that works", "ok, open a PR then" (and no follow up)
  • corty 6y ago
    There are design decisions that are wrong. Invisible emergency exit signs are a wrong design decision. Making the emergency off button the same color and shape as the light switch is also a wrong design decision. And yes, I think the original problem is also a wrong design decision. Design isn't just art, design of functional objects needs to be functional. That means that there is an objective criterion for wrong design: if it isn't functional, it's wrong.
• TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  I have a lot of issues with gnome on the latest Ubuntu. When you open a folder with icon view, sometimes loading the folder just stalls. You have to go back and open it again and then it’s fine. Also selecting multiple items with ctrl click only works in list view. There’s some bug in icon view where when I click on an item it instantly scrolls my window and selects something else. It’s honestly weird that this basic aspect of file browsing is so broken. I do wonder too if I’ve broken my system or if it always behaves this way. As an aside right now I’m designing a part in the free version of the commercial software OnShape and I just discovered it does not support scaling a sketch. There is a long support thread going back 5 years of people asking how to do this and recommendations for elaborate workarounds. I decided to export the sketch as a drawing, open it in the free and open source program QCAD, select everything and choose the “scale” option, scale as desired, save, then upload to OnShape. FLOSS needs to be better than this but as someone else said commercial software has issues like this too. The reality I think is that we need to look at how to better fund open source, as time strapped teams aren’t super functional in general.
• skynet-9000 6y ago
  How about when you try to save a file, so you choose File Save As, change the directory, and then try to start typing the filename and it starts searching (recursively!) instead of letting you type your new filename? Even better (not), then it lands on the first matching search item and makes the filename that filename?
  • apricot 6y ago
    That insane bug was reported many times, and every time the developers reply that they won't fix it, it's our workflow that's broken. Are we sure GNOME developers aren't some kind of agents provocateurs working against free software?
    • ironmagma 6y ago
      In this case, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
    • phendrenad2 6y ago
      I mean, their name is Red Hat...
  • tsjq 6y ago
    This is an insane bug (or feature?), drives me crazy every single time
  • Mockapapella 6y ago
    Wait, this is a GNOME thing and not a Linux thing? WTF? I've used GNOME for over a year now but this thread is seriously making me consider switching to something like KDE...
    • kstrauser 6y ago
      A lot of people love GNOME, so I'm speaking from a place of personal opinion and not as objective fact: I loathe GNOME and only used KDE on my Linux desktops because GNOME seemed to have a motto of "there's only one way to do it, and it's going to be awful". KDE isn't perfect, either, but GNOME was a death by a thousand cuts.
• lrossi 6y ago
  Meanwhile, Qt seems to have the same issue: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-3796 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-3796
  • jcelerier 6y ago
    thumbnails work in kde tho: https://www.google.com/search?q=kde+thumbnail+file+dialog&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=kde+thumbnail+file+dialog&tb...
• arnaudsm 6y ago
  Bounties can be a great way to stimulate open-source projects! You can use BountySource or IssueHunt to create one.
  • juniperplant 6y ago
    I would avoid BountySource: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  That is a great metaphor, and pretty much nails why so many tecchies have difficulty with true usability.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Hahaha this made me realize a workaround I use. I always drag and drop from Nautilus to upload. Hahaha oh man. Talk about being trained by inferior tooling.
  • type0 6y ago
    Depending on the application there is not always that possibility available.
• CarVac 6y ago
  My personal theory about why this isn't fixed is that in open-source software, if you halfass a UI implementation one time it keeps that halfass implementation more or less eternally because it's "good enough" for the person who learns to work around it. For my photo editor Filmulator I resolved to not add features that haven't had the UI fully thought through. For a while it meant it was definitely subpar capability-wise, but now that it's approaching feature completeness it means that it's actually intuitive and streamlined to use.
  • allenu 6y ago
    I agree with your theory. For instance, I’ve tried Anki and found it incredibly confusing to use. However, a lot of folks online comment on how it just works for them and how they can’t see how you’d improve upon it. I’m convinced that if you work with something enough and absolutely need to work with it, you find workarounds and eventually forget that you’re using workarounds. I use Inkscape regularly and have issues with its UI. If I click and drag an object fast enough, often the object beneath the one I want is selected and dragged. It’s absolutely frustrating but I eventually learned to click, pause briefly, then drag to get around it. I’ve invested too much time learning the tool to move onto something else at this point.
• apricot 6y ago
  Comparing the GTK File chooser dialog to a clogged toilet is an insult to clogged toilets.
• pachico 6y ago
  I read all the post hoping for a happy ending about the toilet issues. Spoiler alert, there isn't such end.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  Maybe I will switch to KDE. Does the file picker in Chrome use that if I am running KDE? Someone said you have to trick Firefox in that case to not use GTK.
  • yyx 6y ago
    It does on my system. Maybe firefox trick works on Chrome too.
• ncmncm 6y ago
  The contempt for user experience displayed at Gnome, over such a long period, is breathtaking, in its way, but Gnome are certainly far from alone. Apple presents the same experience, to me, except involving different details. Windows, too. KDE, too. Maybe one or other get icon-view in file pickers right, but there is a lot else to be got right, and they don't. More importantly, they neither want to get it right, nor want to enable you to get it right. The commonality is not the details, which differ, but the attitude. "This is our thing, not your thing, so we will do what we like, not what you like." This is most evident in cases when a shiny new release, with hundreds of new singing, dancing penguins, breaks a thing that used to work. "The old release was better." "But look, dancing penguins!" "Dancing penguins do nothing for me." "But look, dancing penguins!" "I want a way to switch back." "NO. Dancing Penguins!" Apple's great achievement is getting their customers to believe that they always and only ever cared about the dancing penguins, and to forget instantly about each thing that had once worked, once it is gone. Gnome aspires to that, but lacks Apple's reality distortion field, so must make do with contempt.
  • type0 6y ago
    > Gnome aspires to that, but lacks Apple's reality distortion field, so must make do with contempt. The difference is that GNOME can be fixable with a few settings tweaks and patches, the same can't be said about MacOS.
• alkonaut 6y ago
  Note that showing the thumbnails would likely be simple enough. The whole desktop system needs a system for generating and maintaining those thumbnails too. Those systems are always complex and messy (remember thumbs.db?) A dialog that opens every file in the directory to read the image and show it, won’t be very popular. So implementing this feature isn’t a change to a dialog but an implementation of something akin to the windows thumbnail cache https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_thumbnail_cache https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_thumbnail_cache
  • ATsch 6y ago
    Nautilus does already have such a cache though. But there is little to no code sharing between nautilus and the gtk file picker, which I think is the actual problem here.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • alkonaut 6y ago
      That the file save dialog isn't based on the explorer tool is precisely why a windows file save dialog has e.g. thumbnails "for free" while the gtk file picker doesn't. It very clearly explains why you want to choose to base every file listing tool on the single file navigation tool. Any effort that goes into one is reflected in the other. If that means a surprising UX at times - that's probably worth it.
• fortran77 6y ago
  And this, to the surprise of people who think because I'm some 1337 h4x0r I must be running Linux, is why I use Windows 10. If I need Linux, I spin up a VM.
• userbinator 6y ago
  Windows' file picker is actually an almost fully-featured Explorer instance, and is easily accessible from any application with a single function call. The "loose components" model that a lot of OSS seems to follow means that things like this require more effort, despite the fact that GNOME is supposed to be an integrated environment. What’s the point of doing a whole upgrade of the GTK toolkit while ignoring this problem? An unfortunate consequence of the incessant trendchasing that has taken hold of the software industry, closed and open source alike. Frankly, I am as puzzled as the article author how solving existing problems is somehow shunned in favour of ignoring them and making "new things"... which usually tends to just create more new problems instead. No one seems to value stability and the strive toward perfection anymore. This phenomenon has been ascribed to "resume driven development", but I'm not sure if that is completely responsible for it.
  • t0astbread 6y ago
    Or maybe no one who's in the position to implement a feature like that or get it integrated wants it enough to prioritize it over new features. Some aspects of perfection are subjective. Addendum: I'm not arguing icon view is not a great feature though.
  • ubercow13 6y ago
    >The "loose components" model that a lot of OSS seems to follow means that things like this require more effort, despite the fact that GNOME is supposed to be an integrated environment. It seems like the opposite. It's the tight integration of the toolkit with applications that causes this issue. If there was loose integration between the file picker and the application and its toolkit, like with the newer xdg-deskop-portal protocol, it would be simpler for someone to create a better file picker witout risking breaking anything else, and for applications to be made to use it.
• bionade24 6y ago
  That's why Qt can do shit and people like me will still prefer it over GTK. There were many fixes for this problem, none got merged.
• sn_master 6y ago
  "If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you, it’s because you’re used to mediocrity." He's lucky to have his own website. That statement would get him downvoted/deplatformed in most places unless its about Windows.
• hmottestad 6y ago
  Ooohhh. I remember the magic pixel in Gnome back when I was a student at uni. If you managed to mouse over that one single pixel in the corner you were allowed to resize the window...
• znpy 6y ago
  > https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File:Gloriouskdefilepicker.png https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File:Gloriouskdefilepick... KDE Fixed this. As usual, regular old stuff is broken as hell in GNOME and has been working for years in KDE. Nothing new under the sun.
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  Imagine these sorts of honest computer novices watch you use GNOME. Imagine how silly you look to the 99% of the population who uses a functioning file picker. Been trying to point this out for years. I love Gnome (not sure why, I guess because it used to be lighter than Qt?) but it's gotten really tired-looking. I think back to when I used to use Enlightenment on top of Gnome and everything was super-configurable and it looked way ahead of other UIs. Some things are still better, like semi-transparent terminal windows. But I can't remember the last time I looked at Linux desktop environment and thought 'wow.' A lot of things are...pretty clunky.*
• gyger 6y ago
  Although this rant complains a lot, the programmers in the bug report acknowledge that they like this fixed, but also explain that there is architectural debt in the code that makes it hard to implement. Being a user in Gnome, I have to say would be nice if it is there, but this will not break my whole experience.
  • Subsentient 6y ago
    Honestly, they should just toss the file picker and write a new one. It wouldn't be too hard to do. I've written custom file pickers in Qt before, and I've used GTK+'s API a lot for other things, it's not very different. I think they'd just need some guy to spend 3 days on it.
• domano 6y ago
  Does searching in Nautlius still lose focus after every single character?
• rbanffy 6y ago
  Interestingly, I never noticed it until now. I guess it's extremely important for some people and not important at all for others.
• anewguy9000 6y ago
  author of gnome file picker here. jk, where are you? what do you have to say for yourself!
• benibela 6y ago
  Windows 98 had the best GUI Everything that came later has turned into crap Also, I use the Lazarus Pascal IDE. After updating from Kubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10, it has started crashing every other time I open a file with its GTK2 file chooser.
• still_grokking 6y ago
  As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if their BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying! They refuse since over a decade to implement some generic way to open the file-picker native to the running DE. They force their garbage usability on everybody, even people that would prefer not to use "anything Gnome". Same issue with CSDs, by the way. Like I said: They can have their broken stuff at their place if they prefer it like that. But it's utterly antisocial to force that stuff on everybody without any opt-out possibility. They even actively and deliberately break and remove configuration options. That's just not OK.
  • arendtio 6y ago
    Somehow I feel pity for Gnome users. It reminds me of the early KDE 4 days, just that they seem to be stuck in this limbo for a much longer time. Gnome 3 was released in 2011...
  • Spivak 6y ago
    You can actually fix that! Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in your environment and then basically all your GTK apps will use the platform file picker.
    • still_grokking 6y ago
      It works fine with Firefox for me since some time. But does it really work with all GTK apps? I would have to install some Gnome app to test. Maybe someone else could confirm? This would be progress! (Even it uses some parts of Flatpak under the hood, which is less nice). I'm a little bit skeptical as Firefox had to add support for the desktop-portal before it started to work.
    • wander_homer 6y ago
      No, the GTK application needs to explicitly add support for that feature, by using the newer GtkFileChooserNative API, introduced in GTK 3.20, instead of the older and more extensive GtkFileChooser API. In my experience it's still a complete hit and miss whether a GTK application supports native dialogs and of course you actually might loose some features with it, since the new API doesn't support everything of the old one.
• barrkel 6y ago
  This is why I use bash for almost all filesystem operations across all desktop operating systems. I don't deal with image files on disk, mind. I use various media databases to handle those (and audio and video) with tagging, timestamps, previews, thumbnails etc. in a dedicated UI.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• thoughtsunific3 6y ago
  Until Hacker News deletes this account they will be promoting the following: - 9/11 never happened. - Jews were responsible for the propagation of Communism. - New Testament is false
• 6510 6y ago
  Windos 10 can display thumbnails too! You have to find the settings dialog of something called One Drive, disable something called "Files On Demand service" and restart the PC.
• thoughtsunific5 6y ago
  Until Hacker News deletes this account they will be promoting the following: - 9/11 never happened. - Jews were responsible for the propagation of Communism. - New Testament is false
• cam_l 6y ago
  I guess using KDE would be, to keep the analogy going, a Toto. It cleans the pipes before that shit even gets to the toilet. Though I do find the various ways you adapt your work flow to tools amusing. Like the file picker thumbnail rarely bothers me, because I have a habit (hard won) of using clear naming for files. Though it does annoy me that Sushi doesn't seem to work in the file picker. That said, what really annoys me, every day, is the breadcrumb bar. Damn that to hell. If you are serious about naviagtion, why not just show me the whole tree? And I have to press Ctrl-L to revert to a text directory imput, and then, or otherwise click fifteen times to navigate to another directory.
• arendtio 6y ago
  Sometimes I wonder if I should just quit starting my own side projects and instead take one open-source project and just work to improve the quality. No new and shiny stuff, but boring bread and butter business. For example, I like XMPP, but many clients seem to have quality issues. So I could start writing tests for them and therefore find and fix bugs?
  • rablackburn 6y ago
    I have similar thoughts. I finally swapped to desktop linux last year and tried to be very mindful about all the little niggling issues I ran in to. I think the difference between an okay piece of software and a great piece of software is how cognizant the designers and developers are of these things. It's partially why I use an iphone now over android. Even if I disagree with how something is done it's usually evident that Apple at least _thought_ about it. It's not perfect, there's still the occasional interaction that's just plain bad, but those moments are much rarer than I encounter on my PCs (Xubuntu/MX Linux). If I ever have the resources to retire I think I'd dedicate a solid chunk of my time to just work on those quality issues. Just to preempt the replies, this is how most of these conversations go: Alice: I dislike [x] because I can't do [a]. Bob: Oh, why are you trying to do [a]? You can accomplish that by doing [b], [c], and then [d]. [a] doesn't really make sense, let me explain the model behind how this all works. Alice: Thanks for explaining the model to me, but I still just want to do [a]. Could we expand the model, or handle this as an edge case? Bob <any of the following replies> : No! [a] breaks the model! Things are much simpler if you just embrace the model. : If you want to do [a] go use this other product that's broken in other slightly annoying ways. : If you want to do it, you can open a PR adding it. But we probably won't add it because it doesn't fit the current model, and we consider that 'bloat'. It's difficult to get into contributing to some of these projects because you come in with a change you want to make, but you have no standing in the project to effect that change (or are out of your depth and need to convince a more established dev to help you). Which makes perfect sense, a project with random contributors adding their own preferences is anarchy. It really seems like the best projects have a very strong guideline/interactions framework, or a BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) who takes UX very personally. Most open-source projects are founded with a strong technical vision, but not a strong UX one. The closest I can think of in the open-source desktop space is ElementaryOS. Which is lovely, but I dislike a few of their core decisions enough that using it is a pain. The dream is a DE that enforces strict UX paradigms...but also lets you customize them easily. But I'm not sure if that's even possible. Even Apple isn't perfect and they're just trying to enforce one 'Apple way' to do things.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• intricatedetail 6y ago
  The file pickers in general in Linux are just dreadful. Wouldn't companies who release commercial products on Linux contribute to it by assigning a team to overhaul this? It's unbelievable that it seems okay to them to leverage "free" OS that people wrote sacrificing time with their families often after work into the night, without giving anything back. It especially looks bad when companies make billions off of these tools and won't share a penny with contributors nor open source their products.
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    I don't think it's a contributor problem, I think it's maintainers who don't approve of the changes necessary to make something work. In this case Gnome and KDE teams need to work together to fix this, and they're insular and will never cooperate.
• rubycon22 6y ago
  This is the one problem that torments me every time I am reminded of it. Just today, once again, I tried doing the hack to make programs use the kdialog instead of the GTK filepicker. kdialog works, however none of the thumbnails are showing! Only the icons showing the filetype. I don't use a desktop environment, only a tiling window manager, so that's probably it. But what pains me is as much as I search, I don't know what the hell to install that will make the thumbnails work in the filepicker even though thumbnails work everywhere else. Every time I must go through this, I want to cry. The linux community thinks they are so superior, yet they cannot implement this one little thing.
  • Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    > I don't use a desktop environment, only a tiling window manager, so that's probably it. I don't use the Linux desktop often, so perhaps this is an ignorant comment, but doesn't not using a DE require a certain amount of elbow grease anyway? If you wanted a more polished/less DIY experience, it seems to me that you should be using a DE.
    • rubycon22 6y ago
      You're right but that isn't the point.
  • yyx 6y ago
    Why don't you use DE? You can change window manager.
• benlivengood 6y ago
  While we're complaining about Gnome: why can't nautilus handle more than 10k files in a directory? Especially an NFS or Samba share. I installed Thunar in order to browse the pictures I have on a local server. I think 10K file names should fit in cache on any processor made in the last 10 years. readdir isn't that slow.
• skratlo 6y ago
  Gtk and GNOME is utter trash, it's going nowhere, has no art direction nor QA process. It's for the large part responsible for Linux desktops having negligible adoption. I wish there would be a open-source, but not free desktop environment built with Qt. Not free because you can't have just about everyone pushing their opinion on it. There has to be a team with strong design and QA skills behind it.
• fnord123 6y ago
  There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the thesis is as follows: "This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else." The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, DEC, Solaris. It was the OEM bundling and the illegal anti competitive behaviour for which Microsoft was found guilty. This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop. If it were about quality, surely everyone's favourite UX would have been dominant. But it isn't; it sits around the same usage stats as Linux. And while bugs exist in GNOME and Gtk, I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`
  • klodolph 6y ago
    OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors. OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make money from development tools. BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft. I don’t think I can be in a room with five people without getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed—it appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn’t have much of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some ways it was seen as more of a “toy” than its competitors. DEC’s business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s. Making good processors isn’t enough, it turns out. Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows. > This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop. To be clear, I’m not saying that that isn’t the main reason—just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did a ton of things right. They made new operating systems that consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as possible for developers. Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • rablackburn 6y ago
• coding123 6y ago
  The worst experience in Gimp is also the file picker.
• luxuryballs 6y ago
  I feel this way about Ubuntu remembering my screen configurations without having to manually edit a file, why this isn’t a first class feature is totally confusing to me.
• rtpg 6y ago
  I’m legit worried about consumer FOSS, and especially around how work just kinda gets stuck in this limbo when an issue is over, say, 3 years old (I recently had this come up with a 12 year old FF bug as well) I desperately want to pay, like, $100/month to get some guarantee of cleanup work on the free software I’m using (FF, GNOME, and Emacs in particular) Lots of software projects do fundraising for lots of auxiliary stuff but I really want maintainers to be paid
• gfxgirl 6y ago
  MacOS also has this issue. The thumbnails are so small as to be useless. Especially if you have multiple similar images. In the Finder you can choose larger thumbnails but not in a file open dialog. Used to be able to several versions of the OS ago though you had set some internal OS setting (no UI) but that setting no longer works. If Windows does anything better than MacOS this is one tiny area. I don't understand who at Apple thinks not being able to have large thumbnails is a good design.
• Jedd 6y ago
  The author unfairly attributes adequacy (or at least consistency) to the Microsoft desktop environment. Start Microsoft Windows, open up File Explorer, remove the ever-present 'Type' column (because if you're old school you'll have suffixes enabled), then go to Options and say 'Save this view format for ALL Explorer instances'. Within an hour you'll have a Type column back in some new Explorer window, to inform you that your file.pdf is a PDF file type. Any and every version of Microsoft Windows file explorer has done, and continues to do, this. It's hugely frustrating. If you're using Gnome then it's a relatively easy (free, ethically sound, painless, etc) process to switch to, say, KDE, and enjoy pleasant file explorer/pickers. If you're forced to use Microsoft Windows (say for work) then you are stuck with this particular broken toilet.
  • rablackburn 6y ago
    I don't think the author attributes universal consistency to Windows? They just say that this particular issue has been 'solved' by Windows since 1998. It's been raised as an issue in Gnome since 2004 and still hasn't been fixed. I agree with most of what they say, and I think the point is that we're uniquely bad at addressing these issues in the open-source world. We accept a degraded UX experience (which I think this unarguably is from a normal user's point of view) because at least it's not proprietary lock-in. But it's a big reason why desktop GNU/Linux doesn't crack 2% usage. Inversely, I think this is _the_ core value proposition of Apple's ecosystem. They pay particular attention to consistent, unsurprising integration, and the Apple experience offsets their iron-grip over your device for most users. It's easier to convince someone to change how they do a task if you consistently deliver pleasant UX. I recently had the opportunity to help a _very_ 'normal' user with their computing, and it was remarkably eye-opening watching them interact with their machine (Windows at the time, but they also use a Mac). Indeed, they hated Windows because it wasn't as consistent as a Mac, but Windows was dealing with their ambiguous interaction remarkably well I thought. Much better than a GNU/Linux DE would have. If we want a world where normal people can use free software for their everyday computing needs this is something we need to get much better at. Forget 'normal' users even, these projects (and threads on HN) are full of _developers_ arguing back and forth that they find it infuriating/unusable. And unfortunately not many of us have the time and money to contribute code or fork projects to increase competition and spur improvements. (also, hi again Jedd :) )
• glandium 6y ago
  There are many ways the file picker is broken, but, anecdotally, this is not one of them on my system.
• blablabla123 6y ago
  > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted Free OSs have been doing very well. The ultimate reason I 100% switched to Free OSs was because I couldn't stand software crashing at random points in time anymore. With Windows (especially 98 like in the article) anything can crash, during boot, Explorer, Word, the Desktop, and in the past it did. Maybe part of the reason Free OSs did better at this is that they did solve things differently and didn't implement every single feature. That said, Free OSs offer other features: focus follows mouse, configurable window behavior, virtual screens etc. I think this is why I will never be able to use Windows again because it feels just too constrained. Nowadays I use macOS for Desktop though but only because they make such nice hardware. It's only a question of time until I either install Linux or get a new Laptop with Linux.
• vortico 6y ago
  I've had a thought in the back of my mind to write a replacement/alternative for the GTK file picker for years. I've probably spent at least a day total using it throughout my life, so it would make sense to spend a few days on it to help myself and others. To improve it I would remove several features I don't need, add features I would use, and repair subtle but important workflow issues such as key commands and widget focus issues. But how extensible is it? Would it require a recompile of GTK? Or perhaps a shared library plugin? Realistically, the likelihood of me actually diving into this is low due to life keeping me too busy.
  • mmplxx 6y ago
    > the likelihood of me actually diving into this is low I was all the time thinking of this since "I've had a thought in the back of my mind to write a replacement".
• sombragris 6y ago
  I know that the authors explicitly rejects this, but "use Plasma". Seriously, these were non-issues at least since KDE3 times.
  • phendrenad2 6y ago
    KDE3 is an entirely different workflow
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kache_ 6y ago
  don't use gnome
• rosywoozlechan 6y ago
  If you switch to KDE you're just going to have a different set of similar problems.
• hda2 6y ago
  Not providing a standard view in their file picker is only one problem in a looong list of GTK/GNOME inadequacies. Try not having any way to set up or interact with system tray icons in a toolkit that purports to be a "cross-platform GUI toolket". It gets better when you learn that system tray support was only removed recently by GTK developers because GNOME doesn't have one anymore. The worst part of this is that even if I submitted a patch that implements system tray support, they would just reject it. I know this because I asked them. These days, GTK and GNOME seem to be designed only for gnome developers and no one else. All 5 or 6 of them.
• allenskd 6y ago
  I'm not really surprised at all this is still an ongoing issue. And by far I think people that work on the so called Human Interface Guidelines need to get off whatever ideology/belief they fed themselves for the desktop environment to finally, you know, grow for actual humans rather than their egos. At times it feels more like a cred, like when elementary OS was released I read so many comments on how Apple nailed the UI. From the site: >If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you, it’s because you’re used to mediocrity. If you think your experience all this time was normal, you’re completely mistaken—and it’s not least because you’re using a specific desktop environment that’s available only on Free operating systems that account for only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer usage anyways. I like the author just sarcastically points it out, because I remember reading years ago the same on both GNOME and elementary OS subreddits "it's because people are used to mediocrity". Or, you know, maybe people find it super helpful to being able to see the images without extra steps so they can choose whatever they want. And then it all just spirals down into: "Have you tried X/Y/Z?" no? Sucks for you buddy I guess you are stuck with mediocre people making design decisions. But as crud as I put it, I might not be wrong. That said, I have completely given up on all the nonsense someone would have to follow to file a enhancement report and discuss it just to be stuck on discussion for 10 years. There's just no time and energy for that, and at the end people would just ditch the desktop environment because it's just too much of a hassle to use.
• andromeduck 6y ago
  Gnome still can't resize a window properly on one of the most used operating systems on earth. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/1298 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/1298
• vfclists 6y ago
  This is a consequence of the unfortunate intersection between C++ and Javascript. UI design is an iterative affair and compile debug cycles just never seem to end. It is why you get all this meaningless requests to remove this tiny feature or that tiny feature. Apparently every little thing affects compile times and you have all these so called "developers" trying to gain attention or make some name for themselves by proposing insignificant things all the time. As for Javascript UIs - well they are all built on C++. If you can't get the C++ right, how can you get Javascript that depends on it right. Says Joe Amstrong - "I think the only computer languages one needs are C and Erlang, don't you think so?
• db48x 6y ago
  The author thinks that anyone using a file picker with no preview thumbnails is doing it wrong. I think that anyone using a file picker is doing it wrong. I frequently open files in projects that have tens of thousands of files scattered across thousands of directories. Any process for opening a file that involved navigating that directory hierarchy by clicking with a mouse would waste an enormous amount of time.
  • wander_homer 6y ago
    Well, for one using a file picker doesn't imply mouse usage and secondly, how would you do something like uploading a pdf or picture in your web browser?
    • db48x 6y ago
      I don't do that in my web browser. Instead I type a command in a shell that adds the file to a git repository, commits it, and syncs the repository with my web server.
      • wander_homer 6y ago
        And what about the servers you're not in control over, like web services which expect you to submit pdfs, videos or pictures like a resume, exercises and their solutions, scientific papers, a picture for printing...?
        • db48x 6y ago
          I can count the number of times I've used anything like that on the fingers of one hand.
          • wander_homer 6y ago
            And our university staff and students have to upload numerous files per week in that way and since you claimed they're doing it wrong I'd like to hear your alternative to that.
• miguelmota 6y ago
  If someone sets up a bounty on gitcoin or something similar I'd be down to contribute to sponsor this feature request. The thumbnail viewer would save me time from mistakenly choosing the wrong file when they're all labeled similarly.
• websap 6y ago
  How long till it makes it to a FAANG interview?
• dschuetz 6y ago
  > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. That's it. That sums up what's wrong with the Linux desktop. It's the little annoying, arbitrary and broken things. It's that constant denial (the 2 decades old GNOME bug report is the perfect example), that it's not broken, people are just using it wrong mentality among Linux desktop developers that breaks Linux desktop. I know, desktop is hard. I know we should be thankful to GNOME developers no matter what. I am thankful! I just don't want to use their broken software anymore. GNOME is dead to me since a decade. I just could not appreciate it as much as I wished to.
• agambrahma 6y ago
  I haven't had an opinion on Linux-on-the-desktop for _several years_ now, but TIL about ... "Neocities" (!) https://neocities.org/about https://neocities.org/about
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Zardoz84 6y ago
  What I find more a pain in the ass of the GtkFileChooser, it's that I can't type the path. It's very annoying, when you need to jump to a path that you have on the clipboard and you can't, and you are forced to navigate to these path because the removed a simple text field to puth the path. The equivalent from QT/KDE does this far better. It allows the user to switch from the graphical "user friendly" path representation to a crude text field where you can write/removed/modify/copy/paste the path.
  • luxcem 6y ago
    I think you can enter a path by pressing "Ctrl+l"
  • st1ck 6y ago
    Ctrl+L seems to work for me.
  • neop1x 6y ago
    CTRL+L works and I have been using it but I had to google it first to learn about it! It is not intuitive and bad experiemce. There could be a toolbar button for that or a permanently-visible address box or it could read clipboard and suggest something, be smarter.
• coldtea 6y ago
  How come this doesn't come up every time "just use Linux" is mentioned as some superior solution?
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  On a tangential note: the author knows how to write. The first few paragraphs of "rant" on his toilets are just brilliant. I wasn't sure I was going to read the whole thing, but after reading these, I decided that this blog post deserved my time.
• andi999 6y ago
  If you think about it it is even worse. For UX the file picker should be the same software as the OS file browser, not a rewrite. So staying in the example, he actually has two additional functioning toilets on the other levels, but unfortunately the room where they are in does not have a door but 4 solid brick walls.
• lloydatkinson 6y ago
  > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. > It stands though that KDE seemed to have this feature working for ages, and they’re doing it for free too. Also, operating systems from the olden times also had it too—Windows 98, as you see at the top of this HTML document. I'm sure this will upset NN but it is 100% the truth.
• maelito 6y ago
  Android's file picker is usable, with thumbnails, but not great either. But most file transfers are done through shares.
• xuhu 6y ago
  GtkFilePicker can't be worse than the Windows folder browser dialog: https://i.stack.imgur.com/umdE9.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/umdE9.png You have to scroll through that keyhole of a window that you can't resize and it starts with the Desktop, so it's "Desktop - Computer - C:\ - Users - Me - Documents - Images - ..." every time.
• p4bl0 6y ago
  I see a lot of people recommending KDE in the comments. While I use KDE it also has big issues in its file picker. Most notably, when a save dialog is open it looks like the filename is focused and selected but if you start typing it actually does a search rather than editing the file name. I don't know if Gnome also has this issue, but it is quite annoying.
• b0rsuk 6y ago
  I've become a fan of terminal, I use the i3 tiling window manager. Thumbnails is one of the few remaining reasons why I occasionally launch Thunar file manager. Whenever I have a messy folder like Downloads, having thumbnails at a glance makes it easier to spot patterns in it and decide where to put files. Thumbnails are one of the best features of graphical interfaces.
• stelf 6y ago
  This whole story points to one obvious yet very conveniently ignored fact about free software and their UIs in particular - implemented is whatever is convenient to be written and whatever the author thought would be okay, and not to the user... because, well, because it comes without any warranty and this is a great excuse to deliver only what oneself (the primary dev) needs and not what the potential users would need. Occasionally the two (needs) overlap and then great piece of feee software is born... And because there is no warranty and typically the top devs are also (sorry) somewhat narcissistic - they would seldom enquire end users about the perceived usability of UIs. Take arbitrary open source appliance targeted at end-users and you can easily argue that it’s somewhat broken from usability pont of view. Sad but it is what free software is.
• scotty79 6y ago
  Gnome seemed always vary bad to me. Missing a lot of convenient features. I used KDE instead which had all the features I expected plus some more that Windows didn't have yet but totally should have. I was always wondering why Gnome is so weird and broken. Why does it exist? Who uses it? I found out when I got my hands on first Macbook in my life. While KDE mirrors Windows, Gnome mirrored some version of MacOS. Using MacOS was as horrible for me as using Gnome. A lot of basic features that I took for granted in Windows and KDE were missing or hidden so weirdly that I couldn't find them without googling. And I had to google each time I needed them because placement was so weird that my brain just refused to remember something this stupid. And yet some people used Macs, liked Macs, adjusted their daily routines to work with something that for me was missing basic functionality. And praising it! "Of course! That's how it works! That's what the plunger is for! That's completely intuitive!" M1 chip might be all the rage but I refuse to touch Mac again till their os gets decent free window manager and file manager as alternative. Same way I'm not touching Gnome.
  • SebastianKra 6y ago
    I'm going to assume that you didn't spend very long with the system. I have switched between enough systems to know, that there is always some friction before you discover advantages. I have also used Windows and Mac in parallel long enough to know that you are objectively wrong. Okay just kidding - such things are, of course, to a certain level, subjective. But you didn't go into any details, so there's nothing to argue against.
    • scotty79 6y ago
      > I'm going to assume that you didn't spend very long with the system. I spent way to long with macos because the computer belong to my SO. She was an artist (used mostly Adobe) and wanted it for the aesthetics and was adamant to learn to use it and I had to guide her though tear-filled painful year long process of adjusting to macos ... 'quirks' Just to clarify, tears weren't induced by me. I was coming when the tears started flowing to offer solutions and emotional support. She persevered but I think she never was as efficient with mac as she was with windows previously. And I never stopped being occasionally called to task of researching and resolving some inanity. For me personally macos was terrible until I found Terminal. Then I just concluded it's just kind of linux with very bad gnome-like gui window and file managers. I know it's just my preference but learning gui with windows and then moving to macos for some advanced users is sheer pain that never subsides and some things just don't work (for some definitions of "work" like in the article we are commenting). As for the details I remember that on MacOS when you drag and dropped a folder somewhere where folder of the same name already existed, then sub-folders were not merged. Just replaced. So you were loosing files in target location that were not present in source location. That behavior is highly unexpected and destructive for someone coming from windows. If you select 100 files and right-click > show info, you get 100 popups ... hardly desirable.
• jhy 6y ago
  I read this post this morning and felt pretty smug in my choice to use Windows. But when I went to share a photo this evening, I found that the Chrome file picker in Windows is actually much worse! Not only does it not show previews for thumbnails, it doesn't even show the image in the detail pane. It just shows the registered application icon. So, you get a sea of big blue (E) Internet Explorer icons. Not sure if this is a Chrome or a Windows thing, or if there's a setting for it. But as a user, I clicked about a bunch and couldn't find a way to see the actual images. https://i.imgur.com/NYHCDZw.png https://i.imgur.com/NYHCDZw.png
  • ferongr 6y ago
    There must be something wrong with your system. https://i.imgur.com/KtTbjkq.png https://i.imgur.com/KtTbjkq.png
• Chris2048 6y ago
  > I live in the UK, a country where people spend far more time evading work than actually doing any Uh, what?
• stuaxo 6y ago
  It seems like in Gtk3 and earlier there was an architectural reason, IIRC all the icons had to get created once and so would use loads of RAM. In Gtk 4 the limitation is lifted, so this might be a matter of someone implementing it.
• vermaden 6y ago
  Similar situation with ElementaryOS not having icons on the desktop ... or many other Linux 'desktop oriented' distributions without icons on the desktop.
• WhoCaresLies 6y ago
  you know they are linux screenshots, because font rendering is so bad no wonder people don't stay and please stop with the oversexualized kids anime pictures, i'm worried
  • WhoCaresLies 6y ago
    stop downvoting the useful feedback font rendering on linux is bad since forever https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/ pedo weeboos are infecting the internet with their over sexualized anime kid pics
• kuroguro 6y ago
  I've always hated the thumbnail view. Always turned it off on all windows machines - it might be just me but it's harder to find what I'm looking for 80% of the time. What's worse is that windows seems to find some sneaky way to turn it back on for some folders. Have multiple registry tweaks to show every folder in "details" mode that I have to run every couple of months for some reason to keep it that way!
  • andybak 6y ago
    I agree most of the time - aside from when I need to choose an image in a directory of (poorly named) images. Surely this is the situation where you do need thumbnail view? Does this never happen to you?
    • kuroguro 6y ago
      I agree, but that's really rare for me. Most of the time I find the right file by flicking trough the image viewer and memorizing the filename. Also it's a more generic problem - say for poorly named documents or other files that don't have thumbnails. Right click -> open seems to solve most of those times. So it does happen to me, but I still don't use it.
• ben_utzer 6y ago
  No one is talking of the highlighted color used by Ubuntu in their file pickers? I keep believing I can type the file name when saving but instead I am just filtering. Nothing was highlighted. That is bad.
• samwhiteUK 6y ago
  I've noticed this problem on XFCE, and using i3, and I always just assumed it's because I hadn't installed a proper alternative, and was just using the defaults. I'm ashamed to say I'm part of the problem :( I didn't realise it was like this on arguably the main Linux DE though. That's awful.
• MisterTea 6y ago
  A blog spam contains over 1,000 words criticizing a >10,000 word bug report yet does nothing to help. No code was written. No progress was made. Instead we are treated to a story about toilets and demands to complicate a rube goldberg user interface.
• andarleen 6y ago
  oh wow that's a lot of pedo stuff in those "thumbnails". is that normalised on HN these days?
• thedonkeycometh 6y ago
  It'll do is the main barrier to most software development. As anyone who has wrote software out to be used by common folk, the heretical workarounds often become the norm, and get perpetuated forwards in user manuals. No wonder computers have such a bad rap, most programmers see the UI as a annoyance and spare very little time ensuring the end user has a good experience. Ultimately, if you have a whole OS built by programmers... well, this is why Linux still hasn't took hold on the Desktop.
• Timpy 6y ago
  > Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else. I agree GNOME-3 is blocked toilet, but Windows 10 is also a blocked toilet. I have a file that I would like to open on my Windows 10 computer "passport.pdf", I hit the winkey and type "passport [enter]" to open the file. Windows launched a Bing search on Edge for the word "passport", but Edge has to go through its welcome dialog because I've never opened it before. This is only one example; all in all using Windows 10 is like taking a hike with a rock in your shoe. Windows WAS a monopoly because of its usability, but now it's ubiquitous because we're path dependant. Having to use Windows 10 for me is having to walk downstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. I wish I could stay on Windows 7 forever, but I'm very happy with Mint Cinnamon DE for now.
  • speeder 6y ago
    I am using a mix of Win7, Ubuntu, Win10 and old OSX on various computers. To be honest, so far Win7 is winning, it is the OS that gives me the least headaches. Win7 problems: occasionally something doesn't work because it is Win10 only and Wine can't emulate it. Also recently I had an issue trying to use hardware that was intended for Win98 but that is kind of expected. Win10: randomly updates without permission, reboots itself, break stuff that I need working (for example one time its unexpected updates broke the software my company use to generate invoices, meaning Windows10 update managed to singlehandedly shut down my company income for a couple days until we reinstalled our bank invoice software on Win7), has telemetry, insists in re-enabling telemetry after we disabled it, has ads, has games without permission, insists that we use Cortana, but then complains Cortana is not available in my country, and the list goes on. Ubuntu issues: the default interface is weird, there is no way to type file paths on filepickers, and this is quite maddening, it requires command line to do basic stuff too often, even native Ubuntu games might have bizarre issues with Fullscreen or random notification software hijacking the focus, and weirdly, it crashes more often than Win7, usually because of out of ram issues.
• chaganated 6y ago
  Who needs thumbnails? Most images are haraam anyway.
• peanut_worm 6y ago
  I am sort of new to linux but gnome seems kind of unstable. I have a lot more problems with graphical glitches and bugs with Nautilus/gnome than KDE plasma.
• arnon 6y ago
  624 comments further on HN, on top of a 1280 word essay about why GNOME has no thumbnails... And unfortunately this will change nothing, because of the immense amount of protectionism and self righteousness of these idealistic projects. I wish it was different, but with so many stakeholders it's really hard to reach a decision.
  • pndy 6y ago
    GNOME team seems to be busy for years on the goal of baking out some weird hybrid of macOS, iOS and own solutions that tries to be so far away from classic desktop paradigm as much it's possible so I'm not surprised at all that this issue is still not resolved. At least they managed to tame their DE to be not a resources hungry hog.
• bithavoc 6y ago
  In KDE, when browsing a list of files in Dolphin(KDE File Explorer), you can’t really select the entire row, you can only select the file if you click on the label which doesn’t span the entire row, there is no wide row setting and it’s really annoying, this is also marked as no-fix.
• agilob 6y ago
  This reminds me why I decided to use KDE years ago. KDE3 had image previews, GNOME didn't.
• danShumway 6y ago
  > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. I'm at least somewhat with the author in general, but this is a case of "grass is always greener" syndrome. I made a full switch to Linux from Windows in no small part because of issues just like this, I got tired of OneNote completely breaking on my Surface. Even on much more polished operating systems -- Mac's window snapping is still inexplicably awful for, as far as I can tell, no reason at all except that Apple refuses to copy the simple model that both Windows and Gnome adopted. We tolerate it. I purchased a 3rd-party program to replicate the functionality, and it sometimes works. A more drastic example, my proprietary router won't let me set a custom DNS server at the router level. It has an option to do so, but it doesn't do anything, and this is an open bug that people complained about for years that was just... ignored. And eventually they pushed a fix for it that broke everyone's routers and required manual rollback. If something isn't a showstopper, sometimes it just gets ignored in general. Has nothing to do with whether or not it's free software, and everything to do with whether or not somebody somewhere cares enough to fix it.
• awill 6y ago
  What's the root of the problem here? In other words, why has an important usability bug been ignored for years? Is the problem that Gnome is mostly funded by Redhat, and Redhat mostly focuses on enterprise usecases, as that's how they make money? I remember years ago Ubuntu had their 100 papercuts initiative, which seems like exactly the sort of initiative to fix a bunch of smaller desktop usability items that enterprises might ignore.
• eugenekolo 6y ago
  I really enjoyed the writing style.
• oneperson 6y ago
  Ctrl+f tells me that noone wrote about the xdg-desktop-portal. As far as I understand one could easily provide one's own filechooser implementation by replacing / compiling one's own desktop-portal.so
• esarbe 6y ago
  I like Gnome. I use it every day and I'm very satisfied. There might be little issues here and there, but no other DE gets out of my way and lets me do my work like Gnome. Thanks guys and gals!
• Anthony-G 6y ago
  When I read this article yesterday, it occurred to me that this was a specific symptom of what Jamie Zawinski cynically refers to as Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html > I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version. (No clickable link because he doesn’t like Hacker News as a referrer.)
• IgniteTheSun 6y ago
  Regarding your description of blocked toilet (i.e., where a plunger is needed every time): I used to have the same problem but then I realized that air bubbles came up every time I started using the plunger. That led me to realize that the toilet paper I was using trapped and carried a lot of excess air into the piping. I found another brand that is just as soft and strong but that does not do this - upon switching, the number of instances where a plunger was needed fell dramatically.
• franga2000 6y ago
  Word of advice from a KDE user: if you go switch, you'll find yourself writing another article just like this one about KIO. This is just the nature of FOSS. Those that are smart enough to fix it are also smart enough to find a "good enough" workaround - and that requires far less effort than fixing it.
• slod 6y ago
  His Durgo valve is stuck and needs lubrication. https://job-prices.co.uk/durgo-valve/ https://job-prices.co.uk/durgo-valve/
• slod 6y ago
  His Durgo Valve is stuck and needs lubrication. https://job-prices.co.uk/durgo-valve/ https://job-prices.co.uk/durgo-valve/