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Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

53 points by signa11 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago
I don't get why "Linux on desktop" people feel the need to continually reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is, just to be novel or different. This goes back to things like KDE3/KDE4 and Canonical's Unity. What is wrong with a more traditionally designed desktop metaphor such as how it's implemented in XFCE4 or LXDE? As a baseline for comparison I've used very nearly every linux or BSD based GUI desktop (on top of xfree86 or xorg) that has existed in the past 20 years, since the earliest days of KDE2 and Gnome. And I'm presently using a fairly normal XFCE4 setup.
- admax88q 6y ago
  I don't get why classic desktop people feel the need to continually complain the GNOME does not implement the classic desktop paradigm. We get it, you want the classic desktop paradigm. Nothing wrong with that, but that ship has sailed years ago with regards to GNOME. And why shouldn't people implementing GNOME for free have fun and experiment. Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    I'm not even so much complaining about GNOME, which these days has actually reverted to something much closer to a classical desktop metaphor that is equally suitable for technical users and noobs... But every other group of people with a new GUI idea that thinks "Nope, we're gonna reinvent the wheel and make a new weird GUI just because". Linux on desktop is already what, 1% to a max of 2% of desktop market share world wide? And then you have people building weird stuff on top of xorg or wayland that is used by one percent of that one percent just for the sake of being different. If it's intended and promoted for technically sophisticated users to play around with? Sure, great idea I suppose, the more the merrier. But so many of these concepts are pushed as a "better, easier to use, more user friendly for noobs" GUI, when in fact all it does is split the market and confuse the end user. In particular I'm thinking of the various efforts that have been made to clone the MacOS user interface, including the Dock. I should note that my opinion above also applies to Windows 8/8.1, which was clearly a misstep, as evidenced by Microsoft returning to a much more classic desktop environment design for Windows 10. At least they acknowledged what went wrong and backed away from it. Sort of like a GUI version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFzc0wAtFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFzc0wAtFs
    - herbst 6y ago
      My mum, sister and dad represent my noob test group. All of them had no issues when i converted them to gnome 3. In my opinion it actually is a more user friendly desktop and it worked for them. Only my dad is used to windows at all, so the other two dont weight every desktop against win95
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun. That might be the tragedy of IT: unlike, say, traditional japanese joinery, traditional computing is not (yet?) a thing, and it really should be.
    - admax88q 6y ago
      Of course anyone here is welcome to dedicate their life to crafting the perfect windows 9x style desktop experience. I would wager that there's actually less interest in such an experience than GNOME complaints would have us believe.
- grawprog 6y ago
  Not sure why you're throwing KDE into this. I've been using it for almost a decade now. It's stayed fairly consistent, offers the familiar desktop, panel and launcher style interface, is fully customizable in just about every way. Doesn't hide anything from you, doesn't make things obtuse or opaque. Never tried to force some mobile interface on you. It's pretty much the opposite of GNOME in every way.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Did you see or use KDE4 when it was new? KDE4 was a radical departure from the earlier design, which looked like a mimicry of Windows Vista for "reasons".
    - beojan 6y ago
      Compared to Gnome 3/40 or Windows 8 or even Windows 10, Windows Vista was positively sensible. Its problem was hardware requirements that were hard to meet at the time. By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.
      - 3836293648 6y ago
        And how most drivers needed to be rewritten
    - grawprog 6y ago
      Yeah i did. That 'look' makes not much of a difference when you can customize every single aspect of the desktop environment. My desktop looks and functions identically now to the way it looked and functioned in KDE3 and KDE4, apart from some small improvements and changes I've made over the years. The problem with newer versions of GNOME is, you get what they give you and you better like it cause that's all she wrote.
- herbst 6y ago
  Personally i am done with the win95 approach of desktop. What i want is a desktop that does not get into my way but is able to present me with whatever i want a few keystrokes away. Gnome 3 did a really great job in that.
- diragon 6y ago
  i3 has been quite stable for several years and doesn't seem to be changing. Perhaps the problem is that you're trying to follow the latest UX fads instead of staying with something stable, not to mention clearly superior. But of course, Gnome is the default in many Linuxes so I understand how easy it is to just flow with it.
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  Unity made a better utilization of widescreen displays by having taskbar (dock; called launcher) moved to left but retaining notification indicators in a top panel which also functioned as integrated menu and title bar for maximized applications. (Meaning no vertical space was wasted.) The dash was also arguably more useful than the start menu. You had one single utility which looked for both programs to run and files. Also closely related to Dash, Unity offered HUD which was a way to search through menus and change system options. (HUD was similar to Humanized Enso.) It's interesting to compare with a default XFCE4. You have a quick launcher which is pointlessly distinct from the taskbar, taskbar is at top wasting vertical space, and also maximized windows have their title and menu bar wasting even more. Also what you mean with _traditionally designed desktop_? Unity takes inspiration from Mac OS (dock, global menu) which had a desktop-oriented metaphor and predates any popular desktop environment.
- jamienicol 6y ago
  There's nothing wrong with XFCE or LXDE, if that's what you like then use them. But I don't understand why such users always feel the need to criticize gnome, not for it's actual issues but because they don't like its paradigm. I for one couldn't be happier that they decided to "reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is". I find its paradigm intuitive and efficient.
- Shorel 6y ago
  Canonical's Unity was no reinvention of anything. It was the application of better concepts from both OSX and Windows. That was it strength. Top menu (better mouse usability), HUD (better keyboard usability), grid virtual desktops (better visual muscle memory), and so on. Nothing there was new or unique. But it was more ergonomic than the alternatives now. I still miss the HUD, and the reason I use Gnome is support for autorotation, and other hardware features. And the fact that Unity now is a dead end. It seems you did not use Unity, and you were part of the group of people who caused its demise by endlessly complaining.
  - mousepilot 6y ago
    I personally would like to thank everyone who caused the demise of Unity!
    - Shorel 6y ago
      I disagree so much, but your candidness deserves an upvote!
      - mousepilot 6y ago
        heh well I guess in unity's defense, it didn't get in the way as long as I could find the terminal button.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
Thanks! Most likely saved headache with rollback. Will probably wait month or more with upgrade. So far (from articles like yours): - Dash to dock broken - Extension management (FLATPACK?) broken
stickyricky 6y ago
For the curious, Gnome 40 has an official marketing page[1]. 1. https://forty.gnome.org/ https://forty.gnome.org/
throwaway4400 6y ago
Is the three finger swipe a "gesture"? I'm guessing a decent amount of older hardware does not recognise a three finger swipe. So workspace browsing would be broken ootb for these users.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  Nothing would be "broken". If you have a multitouch trackpad you can use A, if you have a mouse you can use B, if you have just a keyboard you can use C, if you have just a touchscreen you can use D,... Same confusion years ago with the login screen. No, you don't have to swype. You can or you can press any key, just like on any PC ever.
  - throwaway4400 6y ago
    I didn't see that information on the tour screenshot. If it is indeed the "same confusion", then that points to a communication problem.
inDigiNeous 6y ago
Basic stuff like minimizing a window does not work (with Firefox). Great job Gnome 40 team. I wonder truly also, why does anyone develop Gnome and why does Gnome get picked to be the default environment for Ubuntu still. I wish Linux -developers would see the way of unifying their powers finally, but no, desktop year of Linux 2025 still probably means not having basic UI stuff figured out, while macOS and Windows troddle on to have at least a working and figured out base environment which to build actual features upon. Also, the naming .. Gnome, Gimp. Who likes to use software with these names ? :P
- jamienicol 6y ago
  Firefox doesn't have a minimise option because it implements its own title bar. You can disable that in firefox prefs. Or the native menu is accessible with win key + (right?) click. I wouldn't know exactly because I've never once felt the need to minimise a window in gnome 3+. People develop and use gnome because it works well and they like it.
- kaba0 6y ago
  That’s quite an attitude when talking about free software. Also, as have been said plenty of times, Gnome is opinionated very much. And it is not the usual stacked wm, after using it for a time, I’ve never ever wanted to minimize something. Of course it won’t be everyone’s thing, feel free to use the thousand other wm’s out there, that can minimize for you...
- ac29 6y ago
  > Basic stuff like minimizing a window does not work (with Firefox) Works fine for me on GNOME 40. Couldnt say why it didnt work for the blog author.
squarefoot 6y ago
Please stop putting action/choice buttons (Ok, Cancel, Yes, No, etc.) on windows title bars! There has been a reason why they were placed at the bottom: I grab a window by its title bar and if needed I can arrange it through the closest controls over there that should be only the buttons to act on the window itself and not the contents, then I read the contents and while doing so my focus moves towards the window lower side, so that when I'm done I can take a choice through the closest controls I can find there which are the ones acting on the content of the window. You think title bars waste too much space? Well sometimes I do too, but placing controls on them is a solution that creates new problems; just make them thinner, but please stop breaking decades of functional UI design with this nonsense.
- kaba0 6y ago
  Just a note that you can press Super, and drag a window from anywhere.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    I know that, the problem is having to move the attention back to the upper part of the window after having read its contents: it's counter intuitive as I have to move my eyes up to down to read, then up again to take an action.
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago
  Even worse, because they’re “decoration”, they’re hidden if the window is fullscreened. So if I full screen a file picker dialog, the action buttons get hidden too.
- zxzax 6y ago
  What you're describing doesn't match the GNOME HIG. Buttons should actually be on the bottom for dialogs that require you to read through and then make a choice: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/dialogs.html.en https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/dialogs.html.en The buttons should only placed in the headers for other dialogs that require more explicit actions before the dialog can be dismissed, such as the file selection dialog.
rubatuga 6y ago
It's the year of the linux desktop everyone.
pjmlp 6y ago
An aging travel netbook that I have with XFCE is going to be the last one with GNU/Linux natively installed, when it dies it is going to be only macOS/Windows devices around here. Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Gnome has been on this UI course for years. Personally I can't stand it, it breaks a lot of sensible UI conventions and assumes either trackpad or a touchscreen, perhaps they think everyone is on a laptop all the time. Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether? Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated). Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there. I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE. [1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Because for better or worse, Gtk is considered the GNU/Linux UI toolkit, so it means while one might use KDE, every cross platform framework (with Qt's exception) sees Gtk as the "native" GNU/Linux UI toolkit.
    - nly 6y ago
      Sadly Qt 5, due to the Qt Company pushing FOSS "freeloaders" on to bleeding edge and unstable versions of Qt 6[0], is becoming less and less viable for non-commercial, cross-platform app development. Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1] The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9). The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come. Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3]. Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise. GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercial_only/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia... [1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/qt5-base/trunk/PKGBUILD#L31 https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages... [2] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-April/029560.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-A... [3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/
kaba0 6y ago
I don’t understand this shitting on open source software. Criticism would be okay, but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith. > Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried. > Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example. > The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results. It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel. > Desktop scaling Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).
- ldng 6y ago
  You don't understand ? I don't know, maybe a decade of not listening to its actual user instead of pouring ton of work for fantasied ones ? Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design. If Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base. See, user too can be very opinionated ;-)
  - alex_duf 6y ago
tsar9x 6y ago
I gave up on Gnome, there are many things that I had to tweak to have productive environment, and I don't like to be part of experiments(Gnome 40) on my machines. I simply moved to i3/sway, best decision ever.
- hyperpl 6y ago
  Yeah Gnome sort of reminded me of using Windows again where I was always manually tweaking my environment through dialogs for each new setup. I've since tried to move away from all of this starting with Gnome back in 2000/2001 (think I first went to xfce before switching to tiling WMs)
- clircle 6y ago
  I like i3/sway on small screens, but on my large 4k screen all the windows are too big, too much white space. For me, the tiling paradigm does not work with big monitors. Linux on the whole doesn't work well with 4K. I don't know what the solution is, I just want 150% UI scaling like windows.
  - tsar9x 6y ago
    I'm using i3 with 4k monitors, just set Xft.dpi: 163 in Xresources and that's it. Depending on your applications, you may need to tweak some individually, for example Spotify can be adjusted via cli argument. There's one con, you can't have mixed HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays. For sway it's much easier, you can have DPI scaling per monitor, but XWayland apps are blurry, so I'm waiting for all my apps to be updated to Wayland. There's experimental sway/wlroots branch with proper XWayland scaling, but I don't have easy way to install it.
ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
I'd be really interested in a detailed review of Gnome by someone who actually wants this model of interaction. I, for one, do not care about it so have no slightest inclination to bash Gnome or, to be honest, even try it by this point. But I don't mind to read why it's great for someone else. If you want classic desktop, there's always LXQT, MATE, XFCE, OpenBox, JWM or even KDE.
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  Not exactly a review, but there's a page on GNOME Shell design available on GNOME wiki. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design
baxuz 6y ago
This article honestly just feels like a symptom of a larger issue of how Linux is being handled for general desktop usage. And I know that this is Hacker News and there will be thousands of people screaming "but it works on my machine"... It doesn't work for the vast majority of other peoples' machines. So much that having a cheap smartphone often provides a more functional environment for the average user.
michelledepeil 6y ago
Ha, it seems phosh for the librem 5 might have pushed too many changes upstream to gnome. FWIW those paradigms seem to work great in the mobile context.
akagusu 6y ago
I'm a happy Gnome user since Gnome 2 was released and I like the mobile-like style of Gnome and other desktops, but I agree with almost all criticism directed to Gnome 40 and Gnome in general. Did I like Gnome 40? Hell, yeah! Is it suck? Hell, yeah! It sucks because, again, it disrupts my workflow, a little less than Gnome 3, but yet is a redesign with no good reason except the taste of Gnome devs. Of course they can do whatever they want, but it is disrespectful with users that invested their time not only using but promoting Gnome and its ecosystem. I have a keyboard-centric workflow and yet it is really annoying how much clicks I need when I use the mouse because despite having keyboard shortcuts there are a lot of stuff in Gnome hidden in menus, buttons and dialogs with no shortcuts at all. People say the criticism is from people that don't use or don't like Gnome, but it is not true. Gnome users have a lot of criticism but Gnome devs don't care about it. Even developers that build apps using GTK and Gnome have criticism but, again, Gnome devs don't care. I think Gnome 40 is a good time for both Gnome devs and Gnome users learn how to receive these criticism, from both people inside and outside Gnome community.
- tagirb 6y ago
  What redesign do you mean? Asking seriously, because I haven't noticed anything but the icon change.
bluefish009 6y ago
i don't like gnome*, that's why i am using tinywm.
cryptos 6y ago
I wonder whether UX tests are performed during the development of Gnome. A big number of the design decisions seeming arbitrary. Overall there is very little usability progress since Gnome 3 appeared. Gnome has long been my favorite desktop, but they never managed to trim Gnome for usability and efficiency. Instead their followed a weird concept of minimalism and a pointless touch oriented (as if anyone would use it on a smart phone!) UI. As much as I like the idea of Linux as my primary desktop OS, I've given up. In the future I see Windows macOS and ChromeOS but no Linux on classical computers (not smartphones and tablets).
tagirb 6y ago
It turns out that my Manjaro is already running Gnome 40. Honestly, I didn't even notice when this upgrade took place, but now I finally get why the icons have changed! :D Gnome may not be perfect, but as a DE it provides enough features, flexibility, simplicity and visual appearance. In the end, it's not the DE you're working with, you just need it for setting up your system, running your apps, window management, etc. Best is when you just forget about having it and Gnome is okay with that regards.

53 points by signa11 6y ago

I don't get why "Linux on desktop" people feel the need to continually reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is, just to be novel or different. This goes back to things like KDE3/KDE4 and Canonical's Unity. What is wrong with a more traditionally designed desktop metaphor such as how it's implemented in XFCE4 or LXDE? As a baseline for comparison I've used very nearly every linux or BSD based GUI desktop (on top of xfree86 or xorg) that has existed in the past 20 years, since the earliest days of KDE2 and Gnome. And I'm presently using a fairly normal XFCE4 setup.

admax88q 6y ago
I don't get why classic desktop people feel the need to continually complain the GNOME does not implement the classic desktop paradigm. We get it, you want the classic desktop paradigm. Nothing wrong with that, but that ship has sailed years ago with regards to GNOME. And why shouldn't people implementing GNOME for free have fun and experiment. Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun.
- walrus01 6y ago
  I'm not even so much complaining about GNOME, which these days has actually reverted to something much closer to a classical desktop metaphor that is equally suitable for technical users and noobs... But every other group of people with a new GUI idea that thinks "Nope, we're gonna reinvent the wheel and make a new weird GUI just because". Linux on desktop is already what, 1% to a max of 2% of desktop market share world wide? And then you have people building weird stuff on top of xorg or wayland that is used by one percent of that one percent just for the sake of being different. If it's intended and promoted for technically sophisticated users to play around with? Sure, great idea I suppose, the more the merrier. But so many of these concepts are pushed as a "better, easier to use, more user friendly for noobs" GUI, when in fact all it does is split the market and confuse the end user. In particular I'm thinking of the various efforts that have been made to clone the MacOS user interface, including the Dock. I should note that my opinion above also applies to Windows 8/8.1, which was clearly a misstep, as evidenced by Microsoft returning to a much more classic desktop environment design for Windows 10. At least they acknowledged what went wrong and backed away from it. Sort of like a GUI version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFzc0wAtFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFzc0wAtFs
  - herbst 6y ago
    My mum, sister and dad represent my noob test group. All of them had no issues when i converted them to gnome 3. In my opinion it actually is a more user friendly desktop and it worked for them. Only my dad is used to windows at all, so the other two dont weight every desktop against win95
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun. That might be the tragedy of IT: unlike, say, traditional japanese joinery, traditional computing is not (yet?) a thing, and it really should be.
  - admax88q 6y ago
    Of course anyone here is welcome to dedicate their life to crafting the perfect windows 9x style desktop experience. I would wager that there's actually less interest in such an experience than GNOME complaints would have us believe.
grawprog 6y ago
Not sure why you're throwing KDE into this. I've been using it for almost a decade now. It's stayed fairly consistent, offers the familiar desktop, panel and launcher style interface, is fully customizable in just about every way. Doesn't hide anything from you, doesn't make things obtuse or opaque. Never tried to force some mobile interface on you. It's pretty much the opposite of GNOME in every way.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Did you see or use KDE4 when it was new? KDE4 was a radical departure from the earlier design, which looked like a mimicry of Windows Vista for "reasons".
  - beojan 6y ago
    Compared to Gnome 3/40 or Windows 8 or even Windows 10, Windows Vista was positively sensible. Its problem was hardware requirements that were hard to meet at the time. By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.
    - 3836293648 6y ago
      And how most drivers needed to be rewritten
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Yeah i did. That 'look' makes not much of a difference when you can customize every single aspect of the desktop environment. My desktop looks and functions identically now to the way it looked and functioned in KDE3 and KDE4, apart from some small improvements and changes I've made over the years. The problem with newer versions of GNOME is, you get what they give you and you better like it cause that's all she wrote.
herbst 6y ago
Personally i am done with the win95 approach of desktop. What i want is a desktop that does not get into my way but is able to present me with whatever i want a few keystrokes away. Gnome 3 did a really great job in that.
diragon 6y ago
i3 has been quite stable for several years and doesn't seem to be changing. Perhaps the problem is that you're trying to follow the latest UX fads instead of staying with something stable, not to mention clearly superior. But of course, Gnome is the default in many Linuxes so I understand how easy it is to just flow with it.
forgotpwd16 6y ago
Unity made a better utilization of widescreen displays by having taskbar (dock; called launcher) moved to left but retaining notification indicators in a top panel which also functioned as integrated menu and title bar for maximized applications. (Meaning no vertical space was wasted.) The dash was also arguably more useful than the start menu. You had one single utility which looked for both programs to run and files. Also closely related to Dash, Unity offered HUD which was a way to search through menus and change system options. (HUD was similar to Humanized Enso.) It's interesting to compare with a default XFCE4. You have a quick launcher which is pointlessly distinct from the taskbar, taskbar is at top wasting vertical space, and also maximized windows have their title and menu bar wasting even more. Also what you mean with _traditionally designed desktop_? Unity takes inspiration from Mac OS (dock, global menu) which had a desktop-oriented metaphor and predates any popular desktop environment.
jamienicol 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with XFCE or LXDE, if that's what you like then use them. But I don't understand why such users always feel the need to criticize gnome, not for it's actual issues but because they don't like its paradigm. I for one couldn't be happier that they decided to "reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is". I find its paradigm intuitive and efficient.
Shorel 6y ago
Canonical's Unity was no reinvention of anything. It was the application of better concepts from both OSX and Windows. That was it strength. Top menu (better mouse usability), HUD (better keyboard usability), grid virtual desktops (better visual muscle memory), and so on. Nothing there was new or unique. But it was more ergonomic than the alternatives now. I still miss the HUD, and the reason I use Gnome is support for autorotation, and other hardware features. And the fact that Unity now is a dead end. It seems you did not use Unity, and you were part of the group of people who caused its demise by endlessly complaining.
- mousepilot 6y ago
  I personally would like to thank everyone who caused the demise of Unity!
  - Shorel 6y ago
    I disagree so much, but your candidness deserves an upvote!
    - mousepilot 6y ago
      heh well I guess in unity's defense, it didn't get in the way as long as I could find the terminal button.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

Thanks! Most likely saved headache with rollback. Will probably wait month or more with upgrade. So far (from articles like yours): - Dash to dock broken - Extension management (FLATPACK?) broken

stickyricky 6y ago

For the curious, Gnome 40 has an official marketing page[1]. 1. https://forty.gnome.org/ https://forty.gnome.org/

throwaway4400 6y ago

Is the three finger swipe a "gesture"? I'm guessing a decent amount of older hardware does not recognise a three finger swipe. So workspace browsing would be broken ootb for these users.

diffeomorphism 6y ago
Nothing would be "broken". If you have a multitouch trackpad you can use A, if you have a mouse you can use B, if you have just a keyboard you can use C, if you have just a touchscreen you can use D,... Same confusion years ago with the login screen. No, you don't have to swype. You can or you can press any key, just like on any PC ever.
- throwaway4400 6y ago
  I didn't see that information on the tour screenshot. If it is indeed the "same confusion", then that points to a communication problem.

inDigiNeous 6y ago

Basic stuff like minimizing a window does not work (with Firefox). Great job Gnome 40 team. I wonder truly also, why does anyone develop Gnome and why does Gnome get picked to be the default environment for Ubuntu still. I wish Linux -developers would see the way of unifying their powers finally, but no, desktop year of Linux 2025 still probably means not having basic UI stuff figured out, while macOS and Windows troddle on to have at least a working and figured out base environment which to build actual features upon. Also, the naming .. Gnome, Gimp. Who likes to use software with these names ? :P

jamienicol 6y ago
Firefox doesn't have a minimise option because it implements its own title bar. You can disable that in firefox prefs. Or the native menu is accessible with win key + (right?) click. I wouldn't know exactly because I've never once felt the need to minimise a window in gnome 3+. People develop and use gnome because it works well and they like it.
kaba0 6y ago
That’s quite an attitude when talking about free software. Also, as have been said plenty of times, Gnome is opinionated very much. And it is not the usual stacked wm, after using it for a time, I’ve never ever wanted to minimize something. Of course it won’t be everyone’s thing, feel free to use the thousand other wm’s out there, that can minimize for you...
ac29 6y ago
> Basic stuff like minimizing a window does not work (with Firefox) Works fine for me on GNOME 40. Couldnt say why it didnt work for the blog author.

squarefoot 6y ago

Please stop putting action/choice buttons (Ok, Cancel, Yes, No, etc.) on windows title bars! There has been a reason why they were placed at the bottom: I grab a window by its title bar and if needed I can arrange it through the closest controls over there that should be only the buttons to act on the window itself and not the contents, then I read the contents and while doing so my focus moves towards the window lower side, so that when I'm done I can take a choice through the closest controls I can find there which are the ones acting on the content of the window. You think title bars waste too much space? Well sometimes I do too, but placing controls on them is a solution that creates new problems; just make them thinner, but please stop breaking decades of functional UI design with this nonsense.

kaba0 6y ago
Just a note that you can press Super, and drag a window from anywhere.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  I know that, the problem is having to move the attention back to the upper part of the window after having read its contents: it's counter intuitive as I have to move my eyes up to down to read, then up again to take an action.
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
Even worse, because they’re “decoration”, they’re hidden if the window is fullscreened. So if I full screen a file picker dialog, the action buttons get hidden too.
zxzax 6y ago
What you're describing doesn't match the GNOME HIG. Buttons should actually be on the bottom for dialogs that require you to read through and then make a choice: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/dialogs.html.en https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/dialogs.html.en The buttons should only placed in the headers for other dialogs that require more explicit actions before the dialog can be dismissed, such as the file selection dialog.

rubatuga 6y ago

It's the year of the linux desktop everyone.

pjmlp 6y ago

An aging travel netbook that I have with XFCE is going to be the last one with GNU/Linux natively installed, when it dies it is going to be only macOS/Windows devices around here. Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
Gnome has been on this UI course for years. Personally I can't stand it, it breaks a lot of sensible UI conventions and assumes either trackpad or a touchscreen, perhaps they think everyone is on a laptop all the time. Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether? Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated). Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there. I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE. [1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Because for better or worse, Gtk is considered the GNU/Linux UI toolkit, so it means while one might use KDE, every cross platform framework (with Qt's exception) sees Gtk as the "native" GNU/Linux UI toolkit.
  - nly 6y ago
    Sadly Qt 5, due to the Qt Company pushing FOSS "freeloaders" on to bleeding edge and unstable versions of Qt 6[0], is becoming less and less viable for non-commercial, cross-platform app development. Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1] The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9). The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come. Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3]. Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise. GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercial_only/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia... [1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages/qt5-base/trunk/PKGBUILD#L31 https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages... [2] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-April/029560.html https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-A... [3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/

kaba0 6y ago

I don’t understand this shitting on open source software. Criticism would be okay, but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith. > Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried. > Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example. > The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results. It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel. > Desktop scaling Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).

ldng 6y ago
You don't understand ? I don't know, maybe a decade of not listening to its actual user instead of pouring ton of work for fantasied ones ? Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design. If Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base. See, user too can be very opinionated ;-)
- alex_duf 6y ago

tsar9x 6y ago

I gave up on Gnome, there are many things that I had to tweak to have productive environment, and I don't like to be part of experiments(Gnome 40) on my machines. I simply moved to i3/sway, best decision ever.

hyperpl 6y ago
Yeah Gnome sort of reminded me of using Windows again where I was always manually tweaking my environment through dialogs for each new setup. I've since tried to move away from all of this starting with Gnome back in 2000/2001 (think I first went to xfce before switching to tiling WMs)
clircle 6y ago
I like i3/sway on small screens, but on my large 4k screen all the windows are too big, too much white space. For me, the tiling paradigm does not work with big monitors. Linux on the whole doesn't work well with 4K. I don't know what the solution is, I just want 150% UI scaling like windows.
- tsar9x 6y ago
  I'm using i3 with 4k monitors, just set Xft.dpi: 163 in Xresources and that's it. Depending on your applications, you may need to tweak some individually, for example Spotify can be adjusted via cli argument. There's one con, you can't have mixed HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays. For sway it's much easier, you can have DPI scaling per monitor, but XWayland apps are blurry, so I'm waiting for all my apps to be updated to Wayland. There's experimental sway/wlroots branch with proper XWayland scaling, but I don't have easy way to install it.

ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago

I'd be really interested in a detailed review of Gnome by someone who actually wants this model of interaction. I, for one, do not care about it so have no slightest inclination to bash Gnome or, to be honest, even try it by this point. But I don't mind to read why it's great for someone else. If you want classic desktop, there's always LXQT, MATE, XFCE, OpenBox, JWM or even KDE.

forgotpwd16 6y ago
Not exactly a review, but there's a page on GNOME Shell design available on GNOME wiki. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design

baxuz 6y ago

This article honestly just feels like a symptom of a larger issue of how Linux is being handled for general desktop usage. And I know that this is Hacker News and there will be thousands of people screaming "but it works on my machine"... It doesn't work for the vast majority of other peoples' machines. So much that having a cheap smartphone often provides a more functional environment for the average user.

michelledepeil 6y ago

Ha, it seems phosh for the librem 5 might have pushed too many changes upstream to gnome. FWIW those paradigms seem to work great in the mobile context.

akagusu 6y ago

I'm a happy Gnome user since Gnome 2 was released and I like the mobile-like style of Gnome and other desktops, but I agree with almost all criticism directed to Gnome 40 and Gnome in general. Did I like Gnome 40? Hell, yeah! Is it suck? Hell, yeah! It sucks because, again, it disrupts my workflow, a little less than Gnome 3, but yet is a redesign with no good reason except the taste of Gnome devs. Of course they can do whatever they want, but it is disrespectful with users that invested their time not only using but promoting Gnome and its ecosystem. I have a keyboard-centric workflow and yet it is really annoying how much clicks I need when I use the mouse because despite having keyboard shortcuts there are a lot of stuff in Gnome hidden in menus, buttons and dialogs with no shortcuts at all. People say the criticism is from people that don't use or don't like Gnome, but it is not true. Gnome users have a lot of criticism but Gnome devs don't care about it. Even developers that build apps using GTK and Gnome have criticism but, again, Gnome devs don't care. I think Gnome 40 is a good time for both Gnome devs and Gnome users learn how to receive these criticism, from both people inside and outside Gnome community.

tagirb 6y ago
What redesign do you mean? Asking seriously, because I haven't noticed anything but the icon change.

bluefish009 6y ago

i don't like gnome*, that's why i am using tinywm.

cryptos 6y ago

I wonder whether UX tests are performed during the development of Gnome. A big number of the design decisions seeming arbitrary. Overall there is very little usability progress since Gnome 3 appeared. Gnome has long been my favorite desktop, but they never managed to trim Gnome for usability and efficiency. Instead their followed a weird concept of minimalism and a pointless touch oriented (as if anyone would use it on a smart phone!) UI. As much as I like the idea of Linux as my primary desktop OS, I've given up. In the future I see Windows macOS and ChromeOS but no Linux on classical computers (not smartphones and tablets).

tagirb 6y ago

It turns out that my Manjaro is already running Gnome 40. Honestly, I didn't even notice when this upgrade took place, but now I finally get why the icons have changed! :D Gnome may not be perfect, but as a DE it provides enough features, flexibility, simplicity and visual appearance. In the end, it's not the DE you're working with, you just need it for setting up your system, running your apps, window management, etc. Best is when you just forget about having it and Gnome is okay with that regards.