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I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing f

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I love Gnome's design. Maybe I'd make title bars skinnier and add corner tiling?
kitsunesoba 5y ago
The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_element_colors https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...
- akselmo 5y ago
  I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    In some cases badly designed themes (like dark gray labels on black backgrounds) are the culprit, but most often it’s a result of the app developers hard coding colors in their UI elements assuming all users will be using a similar theme. That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t hard code colors.
    - akselmo 5y ago
      Agreed, definitely. OS should provide basic colorsheets that the apps use, and those sheets should be freely modifiable. Which is why I really like KDE.
      - account42 5y ago
        KDE (or rather Qt) goes even further and still let's you completely change the way interface elements are rendered, which is great because it means you can use the same look across versions if you want to and are not beholden to the latest design fad.
    - jamesgeck0 5y ago
      - Gnome includes high contrast and dark modes and encourages app developers to test against them. - Requiring apps not to use custom colors alone won’t fix it. Any bespoke UI element an app includes is at risk of breakage when a custom theme redefines the entire world. https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
      - kitsunesoba 5y ago
        I build bespoke UI elements for iOS apps all the time and building them in such a way that they look and function correctly not only across light/dark and accessibility modes but also future OS versions is not that difficult, and with how they’re built I don’t see them breaking even if iOS took on a radically different appearance. They might not match perfectly but usability will not be impacted. If this is not reasonably possible with GTK, then it seems pretty clearly like a weakness of how GTK handles themes. Personally, I believe that CSS is ill-suited for the task and is responsible for many of the issues depicted in that blog post.
        floatboth 5y ago
        > not only across light/dark and accessibility modes but also future OS versions When Apple makes a future OS versions they are expected to avoid breaking apps. The comparison here would be not to future iOS versions, but to arbitrary jailbreak tweaks that overhaul the look system-wide. You're not ensuring that will look good with your app ;)
  - thawaya3113 5y ago
    This is exactly the reason. But people seem to deliberately obscure why the Gnome devs are doing this and instead accuse them of being lazy and/or dictators etc.
    - account42 5y ago
      Removing themes because they have in some rare cases caused problems is a pretty lazy response.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes). Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.
    - Andrex 5y ago
      Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.
      - kitsunesoba 5y ago
        Yep and that’s great, but there are still other legitimate uses for theming. One of mine is cutting down padding to reasonable levels — GNOME is much more usable to me when using a theme like Nordic or Skeuos, both of which do that.
        pinephoneguy 5y ago
        Or putting the scroll bar back, or getting rid of the awful client side decorations.
  - rvense 5y ago
    I switched from Mac to Linux (in 2008-2009) because I could understand it and make it my own, among other things with theming.
  - guelo 5y ago
    I do say that. The light-grey on top of light-grey theme means a lot of times the only way to tell which is the foreground window is by looking for the 3 colored dots.
asddubs 5y ago
I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons. As you say, unlabelled mystery meat and hamburger menus. I'll admit, part of my dislike for the new title bars is probably irrationally rooted in just wanting things to stay like they were on windows 98 when I first became familiar with computers, forever, and never to diverge too much from that. But those unlabelled icons, they really do puzzle and frustrate me. On websites too
- account42 5y ago
  I disagree with the notion that wanting the interface to stay the same just for the sake of it staying the same is irrational.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons. It's a key part of touch readiness. There's even a Windows-like theme for Gtk3+ that looks really close to the original, you might like it better than the default look.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    They could at the very least put labels under or next to the icons. In regards to touch-readiness: TBH I've had a laptop with a touchscreen, and I never once used the touchscreen on it productively in any way. On a tablet it's a different story of course, but no one is forcing them to do a one-size-fits-all approach. But yeah, my main complaint is really just that stuff isn't labelled. Everything else I can begrudgingly understand somewhat
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > They could at the very least put labels under or next to the icons. On a desktop, you should be able to hover with the pointer and get tooltips. Mobile is more of a challenge, but it's not like text would be any better. You can't fit much text in the typical mobile touch target.
      - 5y ago
fsflover 5y ago
> Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DLQWv8P5Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DLQWv8P5Hw
- cmeacham98 5y ago
  It's cool they have this (mostly) working on mobile, but those gestures are pretty clearly all copied from Android and not a result of KDE Desktop's design decisions.
  - traverseda 5y ago
    That's fine, if the Android gestures work well they can feel free to adopt them. GUI toolkits getting not-invented-here syndrome is terrible.
  - vore 5y ago
    With UX, copying others should be the default: don't make users learn a completely new set of behaviors that aren't the ones they've been using every day.
  - ognarb 5y ago
    Plasma Desktop/Mobile developer here The first version of Kirigami (the tookit used by plasma mobile) had a very interesting concept around navigation and people hated it. We still have some remnants of this with some floating buttons that are easy to reach for the thumb but also often on top of the content. I really prefer us to copy a bit the UX of Android/iOS than spending a lot of effort trying to come up with our own UX concept that is not inferior of the one of Android/iOS. We are just an handful of developer and none is paid to work on it.
    - allisdust 5y ago
      Please stick to copying the Ux. KDE desktop shines for this very reason that there is no learning curve. First versions should always be heavily inspired by something and later versions can be about innovation. Thank you for working on KDE!
_jal 5y ago
Agreed. Visually, it is... fine, I don't care that much and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing. And personally I don't care too much about theming, but either it should be supported, or not. But it is so dumbed-down now that I find it pointless as a desktop. I try it out every time I rebuild, and become frustrated with how it doesn't do any number of perfectly reasonable things to want from a Linux desktop. Then some random component I don't even care about starts misbehaving enough to be distracting, and I switch back to blackbox.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing Icons work better as touch targets due to their uniform shape. So I think the change is driven by ergonomics as well, in a context where touch support is already expected.
  - jcelerier 5y ago
    Touch is as relevant as 3d screens lol. I remember buying a laptop with a touchscreen back in 2011, there are as many today as there were back then. Tablet usage has dropped to less than single digits and are pretty much a dead form factor except maybe the iPad pro. Etc..
- brimble 5y ago
  > Agreed. Visually, it is... fine, I don't care that much and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing. And personally I don't care too much about theming, but either it should be supported, or not. I'd take inability to cope with, at the very least, color palette theming, as suggesting that a program or ecosystem probably has some serious problems with accessibility.
goodpoint 5y ago
The "don't theme my app" movement is really harmful to the application ecosystem. Especially true for users with partial visual impairments, but also for other users that want to have a consistent style on their desktops or phones.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  Not to mention, some people just want to theme their desktop. To make the computer feel like it's theirs.
  - grey_earthling 5y ago
    > Please read the letter all the way to the end. This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup. https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
    - _2paq 5y ago
      This is the most misleading part of the entire text on that website, almost as if it was written by a skilled poltician who knows how to lie on your face. They say that they're not against tinkerers but that's exactly what they've done with libadwaita and libgranite.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      I have read through it. I just vehemently disagree that their requests are reasonable. The only reason why people care so much for their apps' "branding" is being enforced by product management. Absent that pressure, you get a reversion to the Windows ecosystem pre-2005 (more or less), where every user can make their desktop as nice or ugly as they want, and by and large, the sky isn't falling. Because everyone works with the platform and tries to fit into it instead of breaking the mold.
      - grey_earthling 5y ago
        Who's “product management” in this context? Most of these apps are just made by one person. Again, this letter isn't about users making their desktop nice or ugly; it's about distros applying stylesheets to apps without checking whether the app remains usable, and leading users to expect that this is the app developer's responsibility.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
I'm still burnt by the fact that RedHat contributes so much code to Gnome that they basically control it. They made Gnome wholly dependent on systemd and this is how RHEL was able to influence every distro out there, of consequence, to adopt systemd as well. No systemd? Then you'd have to maintain your own patched fork of Gnome. That aside, Gnome's UI is horrendous and can only be made better by installing tons of poorly supported extensions. It's like a lesser MacOS (and frankly, i despise MacOS's desktop as well). KDE and XFCE aren't perfect, but as far as MacOS, Gnome, Windows 8.1, 10, and further, and other Linux desktop environments, KDE and XFCE blow them out of the water. Mate, Cinnamon and others just don't have the stability or functionality. I'm not really enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE trying to bring stuff to mobile. It's been a fool's errand. Here it is, 2022, and they never captured a chunk of the desktop market. The phone market at one point had Ubuntu (very very briefly), FirefoxOS (even more brief), Blackberry (gone), Android (multiple versions), Windows Phone (gone), and iOS. All that's really left is iOS and Android. Google is looking to replace Android with an OS that lacks the Linux kernel. So what you got left? Pine phones? It's even more niche and more hobbyist than desktop linux was in 2001. The year that linux makes any serious inroads into mobile will come just like the "year of the linux desktop" came. Which is never. So we've ruined a perfectly good desktop environment and poured countless man-hours into KDE and Gnome for mobile and to what end? Why? WHo's going to use it? What's the point? What's there to accomplish? Beyond some college kid being real proud of his Summer of Code project, nothing of note will materialize from this.
- trasz 5y ago
  I wonder if people who develop those apps actually use them in real life, or do they simply treat it as yet another software development job. The latter could easily explain the problem: by failing to “scratch one’s own itch”.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I moved from being a Linux zealot during the late 1990's to just use it on the server room, because what I really cared was UNIX actually and ironically all commercial UNIXes have had a better desktop story on having a full development stack story and with exception of macOS all others are practically gone. Ironically despite all my C remarks, XFCE is one of the best experiences on desktop Linux, followed by KDE. Just to think that on a past life I did write articles promoting Gtkmm.
malermeister 5y ago
GNOME has design zealots similar to Apple, but with more bizarre choices. Their whole crusade against tray icons and a usable task list have been painful to deal with. Do they just not like multitasking?? It's sad too, because there's a lot of nice UI/UX in there, it's just buried under all sorts of crazy choices. Thankfully, there's extensions to restore some of the missing functionality. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloa... These two fix those weird design decisions and make GNOME a pretty good desktop.
- tristan957 5y ago
  Status icons were built on old and fractured technologies. They are coming back. Designs and technical discussions are happening right now.
  - malermeister 5y ago
    That's great to hear! It does bring this to mind though https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Is there a similar reason GNOME doesn't have a convenient task list?
  - floatboth 5y ago
    A dedicated tray is a concept tied to windows 95 style UX. I hope the new designs are more about standardizing ways to indicate various statuses and actions of "the app" broadly, without dedicated status icons. For example download progress is still only an Ubuntu Unity protocol that KDE also supports because they can but it's all not freedesktop standard.
    - melony 5y ago
      It's not just Linux that suffers from outdated tray APIs. It is the same on Windows. To create a status tray icon button, you need to call the Win32 Systray API (the oldest Windows subsystem, forget about using WinUI or UWP). The way apps like Google Drive and Dropbox do their fancier systray popups is that they get the x,y coordinates via the systray API (NOTIFYICONDATA passed to ShellNotifyIconA) and then render a chromeless window at the location with a slide up animation via something like Electron. I don't think the default systray menu can be styled to any reasonable extent.
pinephoneguy 5y ago
My favorite thing about Gnome is that I don't have to use it. It's there so that the subsystems get used by normal people and bugs get hammered out and I can do the same thing with a small shell wrapper.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  My least favourite thing about GNOME is that it has co-opted GTK and sabotaged it so that even determined developers stand no chance of achieving native look and feel on other platforms and desktop environments. The G in GTK now (de facto, not de jure) stands for GNOME. (Expressed otherwise: I kind of have to use parts of GNOME because it has infected GTK and it’s much more difficult to avoid GTK than to avoid the rest of GNOME.)
  - _2paq 5y ago
    With the advent of libadwaita, GTK really is GNOME toolkit. Most advocates are really deceptive when they talk about this and say GTK4 is agnostic to platforms but I haven't come across a single non-trivial GTK4 app that isn't based on libadwaita. Even LibreOffice is becoming a libadwaita app. The GUI ecosystem on Linux is mostly dead. I'm trying to switch to CLI and TUI apps for all of my tasks. If they don't exist, I'll try to create them.
    - account42 5y ago
      > The GUI ecosystem on Linux is mostly dead. Qt says hi.
      - _2paq 5y ago
        > Qt says hi. Yeah, Qt feels better to use compared to GTK but with bugs like these https://bugreports.qt.io/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/QTBUG-85297 https://bugreports.qt.io/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/QTBUG-... and having to pull in hundreds of MBs of dependencies to use just one KDE app, say Gwenview, I'd say that platform agnostic GUI apps are either dead or rare. qBittorrent is a good example of such a rare app that works really well across desktop environments and window managers on Linux.
72deluxe 5y ago
I can't stand the popup menus from a single button, like the single button in Firefox. The Gnome apps seem to have adopted it and it is horrible. I would like a proper menubar so I know what the accelerators are without having to move from keyboard to the mouse. It's so slow.
einpoklum 5y ago
It's not even about likability, GNOME UI simply denies users access to functionality. Now, on a mobile, you typically don't have the time/attention/focus to actually scrutinize things much, and you need simple actions to be over-emphasized, so that kind of UI philosophy is tolerable (arguably beneficial); on the desktop it's the opposite.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I love Gnome's design. Maybe I'd make title bars skinnier and add corner tiling?

kitsunesoba 5y ago

The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_element_colors https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...

akselmo 5y ago
I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  In some cases badly designed themes (like dark gray labels on black backgrounds) are the culprit, but most often it’s a result of the app developers hard coding colors in their UI elements assuming all users will be using a similar theme. That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t hard code colors.
  - akselmo 5y ago
    Agreed, definitely. OS should provide basic colorsheets that the apps use, and those sheets should be freely modifiable. Which is why I really like KDE.
    - account42 5y ago
      KDE (or rather Qt) goes even further and still let's you completely change the way interface elements are rendered, which is great because it means you can use the same look across versions if you want to and are not beholden to the latest design fad.
  - jamesgeck0 5y ago
    - Gnome includes high contrast and dark modes and encourages app developers to test against them. - Requiring apps not to use custom colors alone won’t fix it. Any bespoke UI element an app includes is at risk of breakage when a custom theme redefines the entire world. https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      I build bespoke UI elements for iOS apps all the time and building them in such a way that they look and function correctly not only across light/dark and accessibility modes but also future OS versions is not that difficult, and with how they’re built I don’t see them breaking even if iOS took on a radically different appearance. They might not match perfectly but usability will not be impacted. If this is not reasonably possible with GTK, then it seems pretty clearly like a weakness of how GTK handles themes. Personally, I believe that CSS is ill-suited for the task and is responsible for many of the issues depicted in that blog post.
      - floatboth 5y ago
        > not only across light/dark and accessibility modes but also future OS versions When Apple makes a future OS versions they are expected to avoid breaking apps. The comparison here would be not to future iOS versions, but to arbitrary jailbreak tweaks that overhaul the look system-wide. You're not ensuring that will look good with your app ;)
- thawaya3113 5y ago
  This is exactly the reason. But people seem to deliberately obscure why the Gnome devs are doing this and instead accuse them of being lazy and/or dictators etc.
  - account42 5y ago
    Removing themes because they have in some rare cases caused problems is a pretty lazy response.
stickfigure 5y ago
Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes). Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.
  - Andrex 5y ago
    Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      Yep and that’s great, but there are still other legitimate uses for theming. One of mine is cutting down padding to reasonable levels — GNOME is much more usable to me when using a theme like Nordic or Skeuos, both of which do that.
      - pinephoneguy 5y ago
        Or putting the scroll bar back, or getting rid of the awful client side decorations.
- rvense 5y ago
  I switched from Mac to Linux (in 2008-2009) because I could understand it and make it my own, among other things with theming.
- guelo 5y ago
  I do say that. The light-grey on top of light-grey theme means a lot of times the only way to tell which is the foreground window is by looking for the 3 colored dots.

asddubs 5y ago

I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons. As you say, unlabelled mystery meat and hamburger menus. I'll admit, part of my dislike for the new title bars is probably irrationally rooted in just wanting things to stay like they were on windows 98 when I first became familiar with computers, forever, and never to diverge too much from that. But those unlabelled icons, they really do puzzle and frustrate me. On websites too

account42 5y ago
I disagree with the notion that wanting the interface to stay the same just for the sake of it staying the same is irrational.
zozbot234 5y ago
> I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons. It's a key part of touch readiness. There's even a Windows-like theme for Gtk3+ that looks really close to the original, you might like it better than the default look.
- asddubs 5y ago
  They could at the very least put labels under or next to the icons. In regards to touch-readiness: TBH I've had a laptop with a touchscreen, and I never once used the touchscreen on it productively in any way. On a tablet it's a different story of course, but no one is forcing them to do a one-size-fits-all approach. But yeah, my main complaint is really just that stuff isn't labelled. Everything else I can begrudgingly understand somewhat
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > They could at the very least put labels under or next to the icons. On a desktop, you should be able to hover with the pointer and get tooltips. Mobile is more of a challenge, but it's not like text would be any better. You can't fit much text in the typical mobile touch target.
    - 5y ago

fsflover 5y ago

> Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DLQWv8P5Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DLQWv8P5Hw

cmeacham98 5y ago
It's cool they have this (mostly) working on mobile, but those gestures are pretty clearly all copied from Android and not a result of KDE Desktop's design decisions.
- traverseda 5y ago
  That's fine, if the Android gestures work well they can feel free to adopt them. GUI toolkits getting not-invented-here syndrome is terrible.
- vore 5y ago
  With UX, copying others should be the default: don't make users learn a completely new set of behaviors that aren't the ones they've been using every day.
- ognarb 5y ago
  Plasma Desktop/Mobile developer here The first version of Kirigami (the tookit used by plasma mobile) had a very interesting concept around navigation and people hated it. We still have some remnants of this with some floating buttons that are easy to reach for the thumb but also often on top of the content. I really prefer us to copy a bit the UX of Android/iOS than spending a lot of effort trying to come up with our own UX concept that is not inferior of the one of Android/iOS. We are just an handful of developer and none is paid to work on it.
  - allisdust 5y ago
    Please stick to copying the Ux. KDE desktop shines for this very reason that there is no learning curve. First versions should always be heavily inspired by something and later versions can be about innovation. Thank you for working on KDE!

_jal 5y ago

Agreed. Visually, it is... fine, I don't care that much and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing. And personally I don't care too much about theming, but either it should be supported, or not. But it is so dumbed-down now that I find it pointless as a desktop. I try it out every time I rebuild, and become frustrated with how it doesn't do any number of perfectly reasonable things to want from a Linux desktop. Then some random component I don't even care about starts misbehaving enough to be distracting, and I switch back to blackbox.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zozbot234 5y ago
> and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing Icons work better as touch targets due to their uniform shape. So I think the change is driven by ergonomics as well, in a context where touch support is already expected.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  Touch is as relevant as 3d screens lol. I remember buying a laptop with a touchscreen back in 2011, there are as many today as there were back then. Tablet usage has dropped to less than single digits and are pretty much a dead form factor except maybe the iPad pro. Etc..
brimble 5y ago
> Agreed. Visually, it is... fine, I don't care that much and the iconization of everything is probably just trend chasing. And personally I don't care too much about theming, but either it should be supported, or not. I'd take inability to cope with, at the very least, color palette theming, as suggesting that a program or ecosystem probably has some serious problems with accessibility.

goodpoint 5y ago

The "don't theme my app" movement is really harmful to the application ecosystem. Especially true for users with partial visual impairments, but also for other users that want to have a consistent style on their desktops or phones.

selfhoster11 5y ago
Not to mention, some people just want to theme their desktop. To make the computer feel like it's theirs.
- grey_earthling 5y ago
  > Please read the letter all the way to the end. This is aimed at distributions breaking apps by default, not tinkerers playing with their own setup. https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/
  - _2paq 5y ago
    This is the most misleading part of the entire text on that website, almost as if it was written by a skilled poltician who knows how to lie on your face. They say that they're not against tinkerers but that's exactly what they've done with libadwaita and libgranite.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    I have read through it. I just vehemently disagree that their requests are reasonable. The only reason why people care so much for their apps' "branding" is being enforced by product management. Absent that pressure, you get a reversion to the Windows ecosystem pre-2005 (more or less), where every user can make their desktop as nice or ugly as they want, and by and large, the sky isn't falling. Because everyone works with the platform and tries to fit into it instead of breaking the mold.
    - grey_earthling 5y ago
      Who's “product management” in this context? Most of these apps are just made by one person. Again, this letter isn't about users making their desktop nice or ugly; it's about distros applying stylesheets to apps without checking whether the app remains usable, and leading users to expect that this is the app developer's responsibility.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

I'm still burnt by the fact that RedHat contributes so much code to Gnome that they basically control it. They made Gnome wholly dependent on systemd and this is how RHEL was able to influence every distro out there, of consequence, to adopt systemd as well. No systemd? Then you'd have to maintain your own patched fork of Gnome. That aside, Gnome's UI is horrendous and can only be made better by installing tons of poorly supported extensions. It's like a lesser MacOS (and frankly, i despise MacOS's desktop as well). KDE and XFCE aren't perfect, but as far as MacOS, Gnome, Windows 8.1, 10, and further, and other Linux desktop environments, KDE and XFCE blow them out of the water. Mate, Cinnamon and others just don't have the stability or functionality. I'm not really enthusiastic about Gnome and KDE trying to bring stuff to mobile. It's been a fool's errand. Here it is, 2022, and they never captured a chunk of the desktop market. The phone market at one point had Ubuntu (very very briefly), FirefoxOS (even more brief), Blackberry (gone), Android (multiple versions), Windows Phone (gone), and iOS. All that's really left is iOS and Android. Google is looking to replace Android with an OS that lacks the Linux kernel. So what you got left? Pine phones? It's even more niche and more hobbyist than desktop linux was in 2001. The year that linux makes any serious inroads into mobile will come just like the "year of the linux desktop" came. Which is never. So we've ruined a perfectly good desktop environment and poured countless man-hours into KDE and Gnome for mobile and to what end? Why? WHo's going to use it? What's the point? What's there to accomplish? Beyond some college kid being real proud of his Summer of Code project, nothing of note will materialize from this.

trasz 5y ago
I wonder if people who develop those apps actually use them in real life, or do they simply treat it as yet another software development job. The latter could easily explain the problem: by failing to “scratch one’s own itch”.
pjmlp 5y ago
I moved from being a Linux zealot during the late 1990's to just use it on the server room, because what I really cared was UNIX actually and ironically all commercial UNIXes have had a better desktop story on having a full development stack story and with exception of macOS all others are practically gone. Ironically despite all my C remarks, XFCE is one of the best experiences on desktop Linux, followed by KDE. Just to think that on a past life I did write articles promoting Gtkmm.

malermeister 5y ago

GNOME has design zealots similar to Apple, but with more bizarre choices. Their whole crusade against tray icons and a usable task list have been painful to deal with. Do they just not like multitasking?? It's sad too, because there's a lot of nice UI/UX in there, it's just buried under all sorts of crazy choices. Thankfully, there's extensions to restore some of the missing functionality. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1160/dash-to-panel/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloaded/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2890/tray-icons-reloa... These two fix those weird design decisions and make GNOME a pretty good desktop.

tristan957 5y ago
Status icons were built on old and fractured technologies. They are coming back. Designs and technical discussions are happening right now.
- malermeister 5y ago
  That's great to hear! It does bring this to mind though https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ Is there a similar reason GNOME doesn't have a convenient task list?
- floatboth 5y ago
  A dedicated tray is a concept tied to windows 95 style UX. I hope the new designs are more about standardizing ways to indicate various statuses and actions of "the app" broadly, without dedicated status icons. For example download progress is still only an Ubuntu Unity protocol that KDE also supports because they can but it's all not freedesktop standard.
  - melony 5y ago
    It's not just Linux that suffers from outdated tray APIs. It is the same on Windows. To create a status tray icon button, you need to call the Win32 Systray API (the oldest Windows subsystem, forget about using WinUI or UWP). The way apps like Google Drive and Dropbox do their fancier systray popups is that they get the x,y coordinates via the systray API (NOTIFYICONDATA passed to ShellNotifyIconA) and then render a chromeless window at the location with a slide up animation via something like Electron. I don't think the default systray menu can be styled to any reasonable extent.

pinephoneguy 5y ago

My favorite thing about Gnome is that I don't have to use it. It's there so that the subsystems get used by normal people and bugs get hammered out and I can do the same thing with a small shell wrapper.

chrismorgan 5y ago
My least favourite thing about GNOME is that it has co-opted GTK and sabotaged it so that even determined developers stand no chance of achieving native look and feel on other platforms and desktop environments. The G in GTK now (de facto, not de jure) stands for GNOME. (Expressed otherwise: I kind of have to use parts of GNOME because it has infected GTK and it’s much more difficult to avoid GTK than to avoid the rest of GNOME.)
- _2paq 5y ago
  With the advent of libadwaita, GTK really is GNOME toolkit. Most advocates are really deceptive when they talk about this and say GTK4 is agnostic to platforms but I haven't come across a single non-trivial GTK4 app that isn't based on libadwaita. Even LibreOffice is becoming a libadwaita app. The GUI ecosystem on Linux is mostly dead. I'm trying to switch to CLI and TUI apps for all of my tasks. If they don't exist, I'll try to create them.
  - account42 5y ago
    > The GUI ecosystem on Linux is mostly dead. Qt says hi.
    - _2paq 5y ago
      > Qt says hi. Yeah, Qt feels better to use compared to GTK but with bugs like these https://bugreports.qt.io/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/QTBUG-85297 https://bugreports.qt.io/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/QTBUG-... and having to pull in hundreds of MBs of dependencies to use just one KDE app, say Gwenview, I'd say that platform agnostic GUI apps are either dead or rare. qBittorrent is a good example of such a rare app that works really well across desktop environments and window managers on Linux.

72deluxe 5y ago

I can't stand the popup menus from a single button, like the single button in Firefox. The Gnome apps seem to have adopted it and it is horrible. I would like a proper menubar so I know what the accelerators are without having to move from keyboard to the mouse. It's so slow.

einpoklum 5y ago

It's not even about likability, GNOME UI simply denies users access to functionality. Now, on a mobile, you typically don't have the time/attention/focus to actually scrutinize things much, and you need simple actions to be over-emphasized, so that kind of UI philosophy is tolerable (arguably beneficial); on the desktop it's the opposite.