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I may be alone here, but maybe there are mountains of functionality never tackled in Gnome. Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for exampl

I may be alone here, but maybe there are mountains of functionality never tackled in Gnome. Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. Meanwhile, the visual design has been hashed over and over: I've lost count. Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities?

cwillu 5y ago
The cascade of attention deficit teenagers is a jwz classic, which I won't link directly because… jwz.
smoldesu 5y ago
> Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities? My lips curl ever so slightly apart, my tongue perched between both rows of my teeth. A faint whistling sound escapes between my two incisors and tongue, reminiscent of the "th" consonants that one might expect to hear in the word "thumbnails". Before I'm even capable of getting to the word "filepicker", hundreds of people are stepping on one another to come tell me what I already know. A wave of developers have risen from their standing desks, eager to beat me down for such a blatant disrespect of their favorite desktop. Fourty-some people have convened to demonstrate how I can click and drag icons from Nemo onto a file selection dialog as a replacement. Others yet are deriding me for not implementing it myself, and lacking respect for the developers. Some people have taken to referencing their code of conduct, while more are furiously typing on Twitter, desperate to label me a troll and move on with their life. They all filter off after around 25 minutes. None of them used that time to put thumbnails in the file picker, thou... oh my god, they're coming back again...
audidude 5y ago
> Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. All they had to do was go fix the input drivers, the user-space library to communicate them, the compositors to be able to mediate gestures, the toolkits to process them, the X11 server extensions, wayland protocols, etc... One of the biggest problems in this is that you can't just fix one input driver. You have to go fix them all so that the experience is consistent across as much as hardware as possible.
- imglorp 5y ago
  Oh yeah, I get it, there's a ton of work there. And I am grateful to everyone touching Gnome over the last 2 decades. I have even supported the trackpad fellow. I'm just asking where the developer attention cycles are being spent.
spiffytech 5y ago
A lot of work in OSS desktop environments is driven by someone having a personal interest in building a feature. I wonder if that plays into in (in addition to the effort hurdle mentioned by audidude). I turn off trackpad gestures every time I get a new machine - I just don't get any use out of them. I can't be the only one. And since Gnome lagged behind on gestures, we could presume many Gnome developers either have perfectly good gestureless workflows already, or haven't even had the opportunity to see what gestures can do.

cwillu 5y ago

The cascade of attention deficit teenagers is a jwz classic, which I won't link directly because… jwz.

smoldesu 5y ago

> Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities? My lips curl ever so slightly apart, my tongue perched between both rows of my teeth. A faint whistling sound escapes between my two incisors and tongue, reminiscent of the "th" consonants that one might expect to hear in the word "thumbnails". Before I'm even capable of getting to the word "filepicker", hundreds of people are stepping on one another to come tell me what I already know. A wave of developers have risen from their standing desks, eager to beat me down for such a blatant disrespect of their favorite desktop. Fourty-some people have convened to demonstrate how I can click and drag icons from Nemo onto a file selection dialog as a replacement. Others yet are deriding me for not implementing it myself, and lacking respect for the developers. Some people have taken to referencing their code of conduct, while more are furiously typing on Twitter, desperate to label me a troll and move on with their life. They all filter off after around 25 minutes. None of them used that time to put thumbnails in the file picker, thou... oh my god, they're coming back again...

audidude 5y ago

> Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. All they had to do was go fix the input drivers, the user-space library to communicate them, the compositors to be able to mediate gestures, the toolkits to process them, the X11 server extensions, wayland protocols, etc... One of the biggest problems in this is that you can't just fix one input driver. You have to go fix them all so that the experience is consistent across as much as hardware as possible.

imglorp 5y ago
Oh yeah, I get it, there's a ton of work there. And I am grateful to everyone touching Gnome over the last 2 decades. I have even supported the trackpad fellow. I'm just asking where the developer attention cycles are being spent.

spiffytech 5y ago

A lot of work in OSS desktop environments is driven by someone having a personal interest in building a feature. I wonder if that plays into in (in addition to the effort hurdle mentioned by audidude). I turn off trackpad gestures every time I get a new machine - I just don't get any use out of them. I can't be the only one. And since Gnome lagged behind on gestures, we could presume many Gnome developers either have perfectly good gestureless workflows already, or haven't even had the opportunity to see what gestures can do.