5 ms·

Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would

by zxzax 5y ago

Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would stop trying to revive these ancient flamewars without acknowledging the current state of things (not saying this is your fault, but a little diligence always helps). The second two links you're posting are again, the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of patches are accepted, you just happened to stumble across two of the contentious ones that got a big outrage response on reddit. Please go look at the other thousands of issues and MRs against GTK if you don't believe me, it's not just GNOME people filing those. I would say I thoroughly agree with the last article you posted. There has never been a "Linux platform." It was always Motif versus KDE versus GNOME versus Enlightenment versus all the rest. Historically they only cooperated with each other on certain things. If none of them refused to cooperate, we would still probably be using Motif. We can come up with various reasons for why this fragmentation happened but placing all the blame for that on GNOME for going its on way doesn't make many sense when this fragmentation always existed.

traverseda 5y ago
> It's not an illustrative example. What I'm describing is a cultural problem. If you don't think that link is illustrative than you don't understand what it is I'm trying to illustrate.
- zxzax 5y ago
  Again this particular cultural problem was resolved a long time. Ubuntu and XFCE and GNOME have since all aligned on this matter. I see what you are trying to illustrate, maybe it was true 10 years ago, but it's not now. Cultures can change you know.
  - jstimpfle 5y ago
    As someone who has to occasionally work on a Gnome desktop, I can confirm that they still haven't fixed type ahead in Nautilus. Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. (I have multiple terminal windows open and switching between them is a pain, it has to be seen to be believed). Two big annoyances, and reading that type-ahead thread quoted above is quite an experience. Being in my 30s, it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. And I strongly disagree with that sentiment "it's ours, go make your own if you don't like it". Point is, I do not want to use their crappy product but I have to, due to political forces that extend from Red Hat to what my employer has installed on that computer in the lab that I have to deploy and test my software on. If I had a choice, I would prefer to install there my simple arcane plain window manager, xterm (fast and crisp), and just enough junk so I can do my work. My Thinkpad X220 with this setup is actually pleasant to use and has required basically 0 maintenance in the last 6 years.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      >it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. Please do not assume bad faith. Type-ahead has some confusing usability issues, such as that it only matches against the beginning of the filename, which from my reading is why it probably will not be brought back. The way forward is to help get the current solution up to par. I feel your pain, but giving up and reverting to old type-ahead behavior will only ensure that the issue never gets a proper fix. It's very hard to have a conversation about this when people assert that the real cultural problem is that a particular feature they want isn't implemented. >Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. Has this been reported?
      - jstimpfle 5y ago
        I don't assume bad faith, following Hanlon's razor it's obviously stupidity and probably a culture of arrogance engrained into a larger group (I know very little about the organization there, but there has been a lot of heated debate for years about other groups connected to redhat). How can they otherwise ignore such an obvious, massive load of complaints with dismissive and side-stepping comments? > Type-ahead has some confusing usability issues, such as that it only matches against the beginning of the filename Please, explain to me, what exactly is confusing about that? That it matches precisely against the beginning of the filename? It's the exact polar opposite of confusing, and furthermore it's extremely useful in my (and many others') workflow for navigating large directory trees where I know which path I want to take in advance (obviously this is a frequent situation for all the things I'm currently working on). And I am convinced this is not a coincidence or a pecularity of my workflow, precisely because the behaviour of type ahead is simple and predictable and also matches how humans tend to remember names, which is most likely by their initial letters. This old and proven workflow reduces a lot of stress coming from increased visual-motoric interaction, compared to the search behaviour in Nautilus where the screen gets updated in unpredictable ways (both in terms of the files that are displayed, and also in the time lag to when they are displayed and interactable). We're talking multiple or many seconds of wait and stress that this behaviour can cause, even on beefy machines. Noone working in UI would disagree that operations should aim to take less than 100ms. (by the way I don't dispute that more involved navigation facilities are useful sometimes, for example I like to use glob-patterns that start with a * or something from time to time. However prefix search is clearly the most accurate and fastest tool for like 90% of my navigation needs).
jcelerier 5y ago
> Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other area this issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 is proof that it hasn't been resolved at all. Just reading GNOME maintainer's entitled comments ("If individual applications rely on non-standard behavior from compositors, those applications should get fixed. ", "I mean Qt should use GTK to draw decoration.") make my blood boil
- zxzax 5y ago
  I don't see how that is entitled. If you have technical arguments for why you disagree then I'd love to discuss that. Qt linking against GTK is not such a strange idea either, I believe at one point there was GTK theme engine for Qt that used GTK drawing functions to draw Qt widgets.

by zxzax 5y ago

traverseda 5y ago

> It's not an illustrative example. What I'm describing is a cultural problem. If you don't think that link is illustrative than you don't understand what it is I'm trying to illustrate.

zxzax 5y ago
Again this particular cultural problem was resolved a long time. Ubuntu and XFCE and GNOME have since all aligned on this matter. I see what you are trying to illustrate, maybe it was true 10 years ago, but it's not now. Cultures can change you know.
- jstimpfle 5y ago
  As someone who has to occasionally work on a Gnome desktop, I can confirm that they still haven't fixed type ahead in Nautilus. Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. (I have multiple terminal windows open and switching between them is a pain, it has to be seen to be believed). Two big annoyances, and reading that type-ahead thread quoted above is quite an experience. Being in my 30s, it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. And I strongly disagree with that sentiment "it's ours, go make your own if you don't like it". Point is, I do not want to use their crappy product but I have to, due to political forces that extend from Red Hat to what my employer has installed on that computer in the lab that I have to deploy and test my software on. If I had a choice, I would prefer to install there my simple arcane plain window manager, xterm (fast and crisp), and just enough junk so I can do my work. My Thinkpad X220 with this setup is actually pleasant to use and has required basically 0 maintenance in the last 6 years.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    >it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. Please do not assume bad faith. Type-ahead has some confusing usability issues, such as that it only matches against the beginning of the filename, which from my reading is why it probably will not be brought back. The way forward is to help get the current solution up to par. I feel your pain, but giving up and reverting to old type-ahead behavior will only ensure that the issue never gets a proper fix. It's very hard to have a conversation about this when people assert that the real cultural problem is that a particular feature they want isn't implemented. >Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. Has this been reported?
    - jstimpfle 5y ago
      I don't assume bad faith, following Hanlon's razor it's obviously stupidity and probably a culture of arrogance engrained into a larger group (I know very little about the organization there, but there has been a lot of heated debate for years about other groups connected to redhat). How can they otherwise ignore such an obvious, massive load of complaints with dismissive and side-stepping comments? > Type-ahead has some confusing usability issues, such as that it only matches against the beginning of the filename Please, explain to me, what exactly is confusing about that? That it matches precisely against the beginning of the filename? It's the exact polar opposite of confusing, and furthermore it's extremely useful in my (and many others') workflow for navigating large directory trees where I know which path I want to take in advance (obviously this is a frequent situation for all the things I'm currently working on). And I am convinced this is not a coincidence or a pecularity of my workflow, precisely because the behaviour of type ahead is simple and predictable and also matches how humans tend to remember names, which is most likely by their initial letters. This old and proven workflow reduces a lot of stress coming from increased visual-motoric interaction, compared to the search behaviour in Nautilus where the screen gets updated in unpredictable ways (both in terms of the files that are displayed, and also in the time lag to when they are displayed and interactable). We're talking multiple or many seconds of wait and stress that this behaviour can cause, even on beefy machines. Noone working in UI would disagree that operations should aim to take less than 100ms. (by the way I don't dispute that more involved navigation facilities are useful sometimes, for example I like to use glob-patterns that start with a * or something from time to time. However prefix search is clearly the most accurate and fastest tool for like 90% of my navigation needs).

jcelerier 5y ago

> Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other area this issue https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 is proof that it hasn't been resolved at all. Just reading GNOME maintainer's entitled comments ("If individual applications rely on non-standard behavior from compositors, those applications should get fixed. ", "I mean Qt should use GTK to draw decoration.") make my blood boil

zxzax 5y ago
I don't see how that is entitled. If you have technical arguments for why you disagree then I'd love to discuss that. Qt linking against GTK is not such a strange idea either, I believe at one point there was GTK theme engine for Qt that used GTK drawing functions to draw Qt widgets.