9 ms·

GNOME 3/Shell was something I hated with every fiber in my body until someone told me to actually give it a chance. They said "don't compare it to Windows, don

GNOME 3/Shell was something I hated with every fiber in my body until someone told me to actually give it a chance. They said "don't compare it to Windows, don't compare it to macOS, don't compare it to Gnome 2, just try and learn its idioms and go from there". It turns out, at least for me, he was 100% right. I grew to really like Gnome after I dropped all preconceived notions about what it was supposed to be. I ended up loving the fact that the number of virtual desktops is dynamic, I ended up really liking how much could be done without a mouse, and I ended up being kind of surprised how it was both pretty and fast on my (admittedly fairly beefy) laptop. I use macOS right now dude to the fact that I got it at a discount, but the next computer I buy will probably be a Linux machine, and it will probably be running Gnome.

bacchusracine 5y ago
>don't compare it to Gnome 2, just try and learn its idioms and go from there If they didn't want to have comparisons to Gnome 2 (or Mate these days) then they should have named it something else. Keeping the name Gnome and then coming out with something so radically different from the previous desktop practically demands comparisons, not invites them.
simion314 5y ago
The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME). The bad architecture of the GNOME shell does not give me trust in the competence of the GNOME shell team (maybe they fix parts of it in GHOME4), the poor GTK story is also a bad point, arrogant developers, designers and community is also a bad point. Last time I checked they did not have real usability/UX studies except of some super old student homework projects so they imposed their concepts without real data to back it, so IMO without GNOME beeing the default on most distributions it would not have the share it has. But if you like it then is great, I don't want to switch anyone to some better DE, I just want to explain that the reason I dislike the project is not about the padding or the GUI look and feel, on short I dislike the project because of their philosophy and bad developers/designers attitude and bad architecture.
- md8z 5y ago
  "The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME)." I don't understand any of these comments. There is actually a real design process that happens in GNOME. It's not just removing things because they think users are idiots. We can talk about issues in the process but I don't think your characterizations are fully correct here. When it comes to things like the system tray and decorations and such, I don't know what you mean by imposing. If you build apps for KDE then you are going to build them "the KDE way" using KDE APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. If you build apps for iPhone then you are going to build them "the iPhone way" using iOS APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. And so on. So I don't understand why you could single GNOME out for this. If you don't like their way, they you can go build an app for KDE or iOS or whatever. I can't see how anyone is being forced to change anything to support GNOME.
  - alexvoda 5y ago
    Qt apps actually integrate great with plenty of hosts. VLC, Krita, Kate, Kdenlive, etc. work great on Gnome & XFCE & Cinnamon & LXDE & Mate and on Windows and Mac too, and of course on KDE. Maybe not native great but still great (in a world of Electron apps, I no longer expect apps to integrate native great). Gnome apps look bad anywhere other than Gnome. They look bad even on other GTK based DEs like Mate or Cinnamon.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I agree, though it's worth noting that GTK apps (particularly GTK2/3+, not necessarily GTK4/libadwaita) tend to behave and look pretty normal on any desktop that enforces a native-looking stylesheet. GNOME apps, however, do tend to look quite alien, even on their own desktop many times. Not quite sure what the disconnect is there.
jabbany 5y ago
IMO Gnome's window management and desktop stuff is just fine. But that unified toolbar-menubar-titlebar design for apps? That's just atrocious... There's no rhyme or reason for what is placed where. Some things become "buttons" on the bar while others are hidden under a hamburger menu, and yet others have just disappeared... I can use MacOS & Unity's "shared" menu bar. I can also use Windows's per-app menu bar (/ribbon bar). But this hybrid thing just has me scratching my head time and time again. The inconsistency that's so annoying. Why is the new tab button inside the burger menu for the file manager (https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/25/filemanager.png https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/25/filemanager.png) when it's in the top left for the terminal app (https://www.tecmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Gnome-Terminal-for-Linux.png https://www.tecmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Gnome-Ter...)? Why is the toggle to turn off wifi all up there in the title bar and not part of the page or the sidebar where I'm looking for it??? (https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/gnome-control-center-to-get-a-completly-new-design-in-future-gnome-releases-498878-4.jpg https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/gnome-control-ce...) Is the title-menu-tool bar representing app-wide, tab-wide or page-wide options??? Arrrgh!
- tombert 5y ago
  I know everyone complained about the shared bar, and I do understand the complaints, but I guess I've always had laptops with relatively big screens, and as a result I never felt a lack of real estate due to the bar. I will acknowledge it would be nice if you could have an easy way to hide it though.
  - jabbany 5y ago
    A shared bar I can live with but the combo menu-tool-title bar is really annoying. It's also a GNOME design that has grown to affect things outside GNOME because it's implemented on GTK3. So even if you use a different window manager, apps still have this confusing bar thing...
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
Gnome3/Unity made the same mistake in my books. Cinnamon won me over very quickly. Since then I very much liked budgie ubuntu. However, my newest love is POPos. The distro from the system76 folks. It has tiling built in if you want it.
alexvoda 5y ago
I can not have any sympathy for Gnome as long as it keeps breaking extensions and any other form of customization. Pure Gnome is not great for me. Gnome could be, but if any fix I apply will inevitably break, it simply isn't something I want to spend time on. I am very interested in something like Material Shell (1) or PaperWM (2) both inspired by 10gui (3), but if the Gnome foundation layer will keep shaking anything above itself, I just do not want to bother with it. (1) https://material-shell.com/ https://material-shell.com/ (2) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM (3) https://web.archive.org/web/20140414061316/http://10gui.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140414061316/http://10gui.com/
- tombert 5y ago
  I think part of the reason that that never bothers me is because I'm very much a "keep things vanilla" person. I don't typically customize a lot about my desktop outside of disabling tap-to-click and setting caps lock to escape. I don't install custom themes, I don't use most "quality of life" improvement extensions. I think I usually try and "adapt around" the OS, for better or worse. As a result, updates don't really break much for me.
smoldesu 5y ago
GNOME 3 is truly phenomenal, not enough people give it credit for being a nearly perfect touchscreen OS with powerful desktop options front-and-center. By comparison, the new GNOME 40 release feels like a lazy attempt at trying to be MacOS, which is definitely not what GNOME meant to me. Now that the majority of extensions are broken again, it's even harder to tune it for my personal workflow. I had to ditch it for KDE, unfortunately. I hope they head in a more interface-agnostic approach, for the future.
- 24t 5y ago
  GNOME has a major governance problem; the devs don't seem to care about anyone else in the GNOME ecosystem. Thumbnails in the file picker is such an egregious example it's become a huge joke in the linux community. It amazes me that GNOME is still the default DE on so many distros, especially as KDE has so many sane defaults and makes for a smoother transition for users coming from Windows.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I see many comments to this effect, but I think it's a misconception. I really doubt changing the governance is going to get issues like thumbnails fixed. From my perspective, what is actually missing is a lack of money and/or qualified volunteers.
    - bacchusracine 5y ago
      >a lack of money Maybe if they'd quit genuflecting to boondoggles like OPW to the point of bankruptcy they'd have more money? And even better, maybe more people would donate? https://lwn.net/Articles/594583/ https://lwn.net/Articles/594583/
      - md8z 5y ago
        I don't understand how this is related, the FAQ explains that was a one time accounting error that was resolved. "As a result of these issues, we have only just now finalized our 2014 budget. In the meantime, we made assumptions based on previous years' incomes and expenditures, and we authorized expenditures for this year based on those assumptions. Those assumptions proved to be more optimistic than reality. In addition, while our outgoing payments to interns must be strictly timed, the incoming payments from sponsoring organizations are very fluid, thus we have had to front the costs of OPW. Fronting these costs has resulted in a budget shortfall. "The situation has already improved as some 2014 Advisory Board fees and outstanding OPW invoices have been paid. The board expect more to be paid within the next 4 weeks. If there are no unexpected issues and no delays, the freeze should be lifted by July." The foundation didn't go bankrupt. Also: 1. The foundation doesn't (currently) even fund any developers despite having resolved those issues, because developers are pretty expensive. 2. I wasn't referring to the foundation specifically anyway. If you don't want to support the foundation you can just donate to a developer/project individually, if they are open to it. 3. I don't think the issue can be reduced to lack of donations. Donations are good but aren't really a reliable funding source. A healthy project usually needs other funding sources than just donations.
Vinnl 5y ago
Generally I find this to be a rewarding strategy for approaching digital interfaces: try to understand what the designer was going for, and go with the flow. Often it works quite well, and while a small deviation might be more similar to what you are used to, the friction it causes with other parts of the interface can offset those benefits.
- simion314 5y ago
  >try to understand what the designer was going for, and go with the flow. This is bad, I should do whatever some dude decided I should do? Example from yesterday , I am testing Chrome and I discovered this browser does not have an option(not even a super hidden one) for "prompt me before quitting" except for Macs where this option exists and it is very visible in the menus. Why Windows and Linux does not have this option? Because designers think so, they know better then the users, they prefer some people getting frustrated, installing weird extensions or stop using the application because their giant EGO tells them that this option is too much, they read in a book somewhere that most users are idiots so the solution is to treat everyone as idiots.
  - Vinnl 5y ago
    You don't have to do anything; you don't even have to use the software in the first place. All I'm saying is that often the choices do make some sense when taken together, or at least more sense than combining some of them with patterns that weren't considered in the design, and thus will work better for you. But if that's not the case for you, or if you don't believe that to be the case, then don't - nobody's forcing you.
    - simion314 5y ago
      The issue is when the code exists, the option exists but a fucking designer decides that say 5% of users can be screwed over because his GIANT ego says so. Explain me how it makes sense, please Google the issue with Chrome, read the user issues and then figureout why this things are how they are. Don't waste your time if you don't want to be changed your mind though, the short story is; 1 users need this option, someone with a touch screen was having issue closing the tabs and he was quiting the browser 2 the code exist(and is enabled on Mac) 3 Firefox,Vivalid and other browsers have this option 4 not all Chrome/Chromium users are button licking designers or low RAM idiots that an option somewhere in about:config is too much 5 there was no UX study to support hiding this option. Sure, I will not use Chromium but you can't stop me complain when I see stupid decision made by designers or developers to satisfy their ego, so I will NOT stop complaining, Chromium UX is bad, GNOME UX is bad, you can 1 accept the criticism, yes sometimes designers/leaders are bad, see Apple reverting the keyboard changes after years of fanboys pretending Apple is perfect and users are the problem 2 ignore the criticism, probably you have better things to do then defending some random designer 3 copy/paste some shit excuse like "only 5% users use that so removing is fine" where the numbers are fake , and the rule applies selectively to only whatever the big ego designer decides to remove (other excuses are : is too much work, is too hard for our developers to maintain it, use a third party insecure extension/patch, don't use that, etc.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
I gave GNOME 3 a shot on a secondary computer. I immediately had to install tweaks for some basic customization: changing the theme was one, and having both displays switch when moving between virtual desktops. Dynamic number of desktops is a cool idea, but I think GNOME isn't even going far enough in this direction. I'd like to see something more extreme, where this effectively replaces window switching. In general, I found it consistent and useable if you adjust your workflow. But once I was done with the machine, I took no steps to use GNOME on my main computer. I prefer to build my own workflow rather than submit to some prescribed one. Another negative is that GNOME 3 apps don't integrate so well with KDE (huge, wm-oblivious headerbars), which means I won't use them either.
AnonymousPlanet 5y ago
I had a similar experience with a number of environments a couple of years ago, including macOS, Unity, KDE Plasma, and the often hated Windows 8. It was a refreshing and exciting journey. I was looking forward to do the same with Gnome 3, but failed. Gnome 3 was a jarring experience with too many design choices that looked good on the surface but had an amateurish execution. It didn't help that some of my colleagues back then who are UI designers were quick to point out all the beginner's design mistakes that are being made in Gnome 3. Mistakes that had been pointed out to the Gnome 3 creators a number of times. But any criticism was always met with arrogant dismissals. I think Gnome 3 tries too hard to be usable on tablets. There are a lot of compromises that waste screen space (especially vertically) and create the need for unusual measures like hamburger menus inside title bars etc. If you look at macOS you can see how buttons in tittle bars are executed professionally. On top of that, it's hardly usable without extensions. And the extension eco system is brittle at best and a security nightmare at worst. Maybe things have changed in the meantime. But my past experience with Gnome was so horrible I'm very reluctant to give it another try.
- md8z 5y ago
  In my experience, it's not really seen as being good form to raise major criticism about the design unless you have some standing with the designers, drive-by comments don't really help a whole lot as the person may not be making the comments with full knowledge of what the goal and target user is. If they wanted their feedback to be heard, I think it would help to start in smaller areas and then work up from there. The reason the widgets take up a lot of screen space is for accessibility reasons, I think the article mentions how this is a good thing :)
  - AnonymousPlanet 5y ago
    macOS, e.g., achieves the same level of accessibility without wasting screen space, without hamburger menus, and without aesthetic mistakes. In my view, the Gnome 3 designers came off as arrogant beginners, dismissing any criticism - even from well known designers - as the ramblings of people stuck in the past. I'd call that bad form as well. I haven't been up to date on this the last years and really hope things have changed for the better and that the Gnome 3 people display more maturity.
torginus 5y ago
I didn't hate GNOME shell because of the UI - I hated it because of the sheer volume of bugs and performance problems it caused. Some people think macOS is the best, some prefer Windows, some prefer some Linux DE. Imo, all modern shells have zeroed in on a paradigm - give the user some icons to quickly launch/switch between his most used apps, and give him a quick search to find the rest. Other than that, in a world where people use VS Code, Slack, Spotify and Chrome, the underlying system barely matters from the user perspective as long as it works.
- tombert 5y ago
  I feel like a lot of the performance and stability complaints were absolutely true in the first ~2 years of Gnome shell, but when I gave it another shot in 2018 on a computer with an AMD CPU and GPU, it ran basically flawlessly for me. I definitely agree that everything being said, it matters less and less which environment you're actually using. I used to have fun with XMonad but I realized that I was spending 90% of my time in tmux, and about 10% of the time within a browser, so all one of these "optimized" windowing environments offered me was nerd-points. I felt like Gnome Shell got out of my way pretty quickly without it being too hard to pick up.

bacchusracine 5y ago

>don't compare it to Gnome 2, just try and learn its idioms and go from there If they didn't want to have comparisons to Gnome 2 (or Mate these days) then they should have named it something else. Keeping the name Gnome and then coming out with something so radically different from the previous desktop practically demands comparisons, not invites them.

simion314 5y ago

The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME). The bad architecture of the GNOME shell does not give me trust in the competence of the GNOME shell team (maybe they fix parts of it in GHOME4), the poor GTK story is also a bad point, arrogant developers, designers and community is also a bad point. Last time I checked they did not have real usability/UX studies except of some super old student homework projects so they imposed their concepts without real data to back it, so IMO without GNOME beeing the default on most distributions it would not have the share it has. But if you like it then is great, I don't want to switch anyone to some better DE, I just want to explain that the reason I dislike the project is not about the padding or the GUI look and feel, on short I dislike the project because of their philosophy and bad developers/designers attitude and bad architecture.

md8z 5y ago
"The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME)." I don't understand any of these comments. There is actually a real design process that happens in GNOME. It's not just removing things because they think users are idiots. We can talk about issues in the process but I don't think your characterizations are fully correct here. When it comes to things like the system tray and decorations and such, I don't know what you mean by imposing. If you build apps for KDE then you are going to build them "the KDE way" using KDE APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. If you build apps for iPhone then you are going to build them "the iPhone way" using iOS APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. And so on. So I don't understand why you could single GNOME out for this. If you don't like their way, they you can go build an app for KDE or iOS or whatever. I can't see how anyone is being forced to change anything to support GNOME.
- alexvoda 5y ago
  Qt apps actually integrate great with plenty of hosts. VLC, Krita, Kate, Kdenlive, etc. work great on Gnome & XFCE & Cinnamon & LXDE & Mate and on Windows and Mac too, and of course on KDE. Maybe not native great but still great (in a world of Electron apps, I no longer expect apps to integrate native great). Gnome apps look bad anywhere other than Gnome. They look bad even on other GTK based DEs like Mate or Cinnamon.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I agree, though it's worth noting that GTK apps (particularly GTK2/3+, not necessarily GTK4/libadwaita) tend to behave and look pretty normal on any desktop that enforces a native-looking stylesheet. GNOME apps, however, do tend to look quite alien, even on their own desktop many times. Not quite sure what the disconnect is there.

jabbany 5y ago

IMO Gnome's window management and desktop stuff is just fine. But that unified toolbar-menubar-titlebar design for apps? That's just atrocious... There's no rhyme or reason for what is placed where. Some things become "buttons" on the bar while others are hidden under a hamburger menu, and yet others have just disappeared... I can use MacOS & Unity's "shared" menu bar. I can also use Windows's per-app menu bar (/ribbon bar). But this hybrid thing just has me scratching my head time and time again. The inconsistency that's so annoying. Why is the new tab button inside the burger menu for the file manager (https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/25/filemanager.png https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/25/filemanager.png) when it's in the top left for the terminal app (https://www.tecmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Gnome-Terminal-for-Linux.png https://www.tecmint.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Gnome-Ter...)? Why is the toggle to turn off wifi all up there in the title bar and not part of the page or the sidebar where I'm looking for it??? (https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/gnome-control-center-to-get-a-completly-new-design-in-future-gnome-releases-498878-4.jpg https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/gnome-control-ce...) Is the title-menu-tool bar representing app-wide, tab-wide or page-wide options??? Arrrgh!

tombert 5y ago
I know everyone complained about the shared bar, and I do understand the complaints, but I guess I've always had laptops with relatively big screens, and as a result I never felt a lack of real estate due to the bar. I will acknowledge it would be nice if you could have an easy way to hide it though.
- jabbany 5y ago
  A shared bar I can live with but the combo menu-tool-title bar is really annoying. It's also a GNOME design that has grown to affect things outside GNOME because it's implemented on GTK3. So even if you use a different window manager, apps still have this confusing bar thing...

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

Gnome3/Unity made the same mistake in my books. Cinnamon won me over very quickly. Since then I very much liked budgie ubuntu. However, my newest love is POPos. The distro from the system76 folks. It has tiling built in if you want it.

alexvoda 5y ago

I can not have any sympathy for Gnome as long as it keeps breaking extensions and any other form of customization. Pure Gnome is not great for me. Gnome could be, but if any fix I apply will inevitably break, it simply isn't something I want to spend time on. I am very interested in something like Material Shell (1) or PaperWM (2) both inspired by 10gui (3), but if the Gnome foundation layer will keep shaking anything above itself, I just do not want to bother with it. (1) https://material-shell.com/ https://material-shell.com/ (2) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM (3) https://web.archive.org/web/20140414061316/http://10gui.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140414061316/http://10gui.com/

tombert 5y ago
I think part of the reason that that never bothers me is because I'm very much a "keep things vanilla" person. I don't typically customize a lot about my desktop outside of disabling tap-to-click and setting caps lock to escape. I don't install custom themes, I don't use most "quality of life" improvement extensions. I think I usually try and "adapt around" the OS, for better or worse. As a result, updates don't really break much for me.

smoldesu 5y ago

GNOME 3 is truly phenomenal, not enough people give it credit for being a nearly perfect touchscreen OS with powerful desktop options front-and-center. By comparison, the new GNOME 40 release feels like a lazy attempt at trying to be MacOS, which is definitely not what GNOME meant to me. Now that the majority of extensions are broken again, it's even harder to tune it for my personal workflow. I had to ditch it for KDE, unfortunately. I hope they head in a more interface-agnostic approach, for the future.

24t 5y ago
GNOME has a major governance problem; the devs don't seem to care about anyone else in the GNOME ecosystem. Thumbnails in the file picker is such an egregious example it's become a huge joke in the linux community. It amazes me that GNOME is still the default DE on so many distros, especially as KDE has so many sane defaults and makes for a smoother transition for users coming from Windows.
- md8z 5y ago
  I see many comments to this effect, but I think it's a misconception. I really doubt changing the governance is going to get issues like thumbnails fixed. From my perspective, what is actually missing is a lack of money and/or qualified volunteers.
  - bacchusracine 5y ago
    >a lack of money Maybe if they'd quit genuflecting to boondoggles like OPW to the point of bankruptcy they'd have more money? And even better, maybe more people would donate? https://lwn.net/Articles/594583/ https://lwn.net/Articles/594583/
    - md8z 5y ago
      I don't understand how this is related, the FAQ explains that was a one time accounting error that was resolved. "As a result of these issues, we have only just now finalized our 2014 budget. In the meantime, we made assumptions based on previous years' incomes and expenditures, and we authorized expenditures for this year based on those assumptions. Those assumptions proved to be more optimistic than reality. In addition, while our outgoing payments to interns must be strictly timed, the incoming payments from sponsoring organizations are very fluid, thus we have had to front the costs of OPW. Fronting these costs has resulted in a budget shortfall. "The situation has already improved as some 2014 Advisory Board fees and outstanding OPW invoices have been paid. The board expect more to be paid within the next 4 weeks. If there are no unexpected issues and no delays, the freeze should be lifted by July." The foundation didn't go bankrupt. Also: 1. The foundation doesn't (currently) even fund any developers despite having resolved those issues, because developers are pretty expensive. 2. I wasn't referring to the foundation specifically anyway. If you don't want to support the foundation you can just donate to a developer/project individually, if they are open to it. 3. I don't think the issue can be reduced to lack of donations. Donations are good but aren't really a reliable funding source. A healthy project usually needs other funding sources than just donations.

Vinnl 5y ago

Generally I find this to be a rewarding strategy for approaching digital interfaces: try to understand what the designer was going for, and go with the flow. Often it works quite well, and while a small deviation might be more similar to what you are used to, the friction it causes with other parts of the interface can offset those benefits.

simion314 5y ago
>try to understand what the designer was going for, and go with the flow. This is bad, I should do whatever some dude decided I should do? Example from yesterday , I am testing Chrome and I discovered this browser does not have an option(not even a super hidden one) for "prompt me before quitting" except for Macs where this option exists and it is very visible in the menus. Why Windows and Linux does not have this option? Because designers think so, they know better then the users, they prefer some people getting frustrated, installing weird extensions or stop using the application because their giant EGO tells them that this option is too much, they read in a book somewhere that most users are idiots so the solution is to treat everyone as idiots.
- Vinnl 5y ago
  You don't have to do anything; you don't even have to use the software in the first place. All I'm saying is that often the choices do make some sense when taken together, or at least more sense than combining some of them with patterns that weren't considered in the design, and thus will work better for you. But if that's not the case for you, or if you don't believe that to be the case, then don't - nobody's forcing you.
  - simion314 5y ago
    The issue is when the code exists, the option exists but a fucking designer decides that say 5% of users can be screwed over because his GIANT ego says so. Explain me how it makes sense, please Google the issue with Chrome, read the user issues and then figureout why this things are how they are. Don't waste your time if you don't want to be changed your mind though, the short story is; 1 users need this option, someone with a touch screen was having issue closing the tabs and he was quiting the browser 2 the code exist(and is enabled on Mac) 3 Firefox,Vivalid and other browsers have this option 4 not all Chrome/Chromium users are button licking designers or low RAM idiots that an option somewhere in about:config is too much 5 there was no UX study to support hiding this option. Sure, I will not use Chromium but you can't stop me complain when I see stupid decision made by designers or developers to satisfy their ego, so I will NOT stop complaining, Chromium UX is bad, GNOME UX is bad, you can 1 accept the criticism, yes sometimes designers/leaders are bad, see Apple reverting the keyboard changes after years of fanboys pretending Apple is perfect and users are the problem 2 ignore the criticism, probably you have better things to do then defending some random designer 3 copy/paste some shit excuse like "only 5% users use that so removing is fine" where the numbers are fake , and the rule applies selectively to only whatever the big ego designer decides to remove (other excuses are : is too much work, is too hard for our developers to maintain it, use a third party insecure extension/patch, don't use that, etc.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

I gave GNOME 3 a shot on a secondary computer. I immediately had to install tweaks for some basic customization: changing the theme was one, and having both displays switch when moving between virtual desktops. Dynamic number of desktops is a cool idea, but I think GNOME isn't even going far enough in this direction. I'd like to see something more extreme, where this effectively replaces window switching. In general, I found it consistent and useable if you adjust your workflow. But once I was done with the machine, I took no steps to use GNOME on my main computer. I prefer to build my own workflow rather than submit to some prescribed one. Another negative is that GNOME 3 apps don't integrate so well with KDE (huge, wm-oblivious headerbars), which means I won't use them either.

AnonymousPlanet 5y ago

I had a similar experience with a number of environments a couple of years ago, including macOS, Unity, KDE Plasma, and the often hated Windows 8. It was a refreshing and exciting journey. I was looking forward to do the same with Gnome 3, but failed. Gnome 3 was a jarring experience with too many design choices that looked good on the surface but had an amateurish execution. It didn't help that some of my colleagues back then who are UI designers were quick to point out all the beginner's design mistakes that are being made in Gnome 3. Mistakes that had been pointed out to the Gnome 3 creators a number of times. But any criticism was always met with arrogant dismissals. I think Gnome 3 tries too hard to be usable on tablets. There are a lot of compromises that waste screen space (especially vertically) and create the need for unusual measures like hamburger menus inside title bars etc. If you look at macOS you can see how buttons in tittle bars are executed professionally. On top of that, it's hardly usable without extensions. And the extension eco system is brittle at best and a security nightmare at worst. Maybe things have changed in the meantime. But my past experience with Gnome was so horrible I'm very reluctant to give it another try.

md8z 5y ago
In my experience, it's not really seen as being good form to raise major criticism about the design unless you have some standing with the designers, drive-by comments don't really help a whole lot as the person may not be making the comments with full knowledge of what the goal and target user is. If they wanted their feedback to be heard, I think it would help to start in smaller areas and then work up from there. The reason the widgets take up a lot of screen space is for accessibility reasons, I think the article mentions how this is a good thing :)
- AnonymousPlanet 5y ago
  macOS, e.g., achieves the same level of accessibility without wasting screen space, without hamburger menus, and without aesthetic mistakes. In my view, the Gnome 3 designers came off as arrogant beginners, dismissing any criticism - even from well known designers - as the ramblings of people stuck in the past. I'd call that bad form as well. I haven't been up to date on this the last years and really hope things have changed for the better and that the Gnome 3 people display more maturity.

torginus 5y ago

I didn't hate GNOME shell because of the UI - I hated it because of the sheer volume of bugs and performance problems it caused. Some people think macOS is the best, some prefer Windows, some prefer some Linux DE. Imo, all modern shells have zeroed in on a paradigm - give the user some icons to quickly launch/switch between his most used apps, and give him a quick search to find the rest. Other than that, in a world where people use VS Code, Slack, Spotify and Chrome, the underlying system barely matters from the user perspective as long as it works.

tombert 5y ago
I feel like a lot of the performance and stability complaints were absolutely true in the first ~2 years of Gnome shell, but when I gave it another shot in 2018 on a computer with an AMD CPU and GPU, it ran basically flawlessly for me. I definitely agree that everything being said, it matters less and less which environment you're actually using. I used to have fun with XMonad but I realized that I was spending 90% of my time in tmux, and about 10% of the time within a browser, so all one of these "optimized" windowing environments offered me was nerd-points. I felt like Gnome Shell got out of my way pretty quickly without it being too hard to pick up.