22 ms·

Gnome has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked (2021)

365 points by weberer 4y ago

honkler 4y ago
stick a note onto the commode or the toilet door that reminds your family members of the fact.
shadowgovt 4y ago
> First of all, how do developers so casually ignore this issue? GNOME has never struck me as a project interested in implementating polish work. Polish work is disproportionately hard (it sometimes upends your understanding of the problem, forcing you to rethink your core structures, which impacts other features. In short, polish work has a tendency to explode). > Second of all, how do users so casually ignore this issue? GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers. Those who couldn't take it stopped using GNOME.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Thumbnails are not polish. They’re an essential feature of working with images.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The devil's advocate response is "How essential could they be? We went decades without 'em." I don't think it's the right answer, but it's an answer that works (GNOME continues to be the dominant Linux desktop environment in spite of lacking that feature).
    - jasonlotito 4y ago
      Completely realizing you aren't actually making the "devil's advocate response," but I think the response to that is "We went for a millennia without electricity, too." Just because we went without something, doesn't mean we should accept life without it at this point.
    - TillE 4y ago
      GNOME has enjoyed the status of being basically usable, if not particularly good, throughout its history. I still remember KDE going through what felt like years of being unusably broken during its clumsy transition from 3 to 4. That's a lot of the desktop Linux experience, really - everything constantly in flux, never quite usable. I don't blame anyone for this, it's hard to get stuff done without someone paying a team to do it, but it's really unfortunate.
      - doubled112 4y ago
        After flip flopping a bunch, I ditched both GNOME and KDE for Xfce and haven't felt like I've missed much. It might need some better defaults, but you only have to fix them once on a new install. Nothing huge changes, and really, I'm not looking for much. A launcher. A way to switch windows. Volume and brightness buttons/applets are nice to have. A system tray. I've heard somebody somewhere along the lines call it the "Debian of DEs" and I can't argue with that.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- bombcar 4y ago
  If Apple or Microsoft had something like this "misfeature" in their OS, they could and likely would lose sales. GNOME has no customers and can't lose sales, therefore they don't have to care at all.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > If Apple or Microsoft had something like this "misfeature" in their OS, they could and likely would lose sales. I disagree. Microsoft and Apple[1] had both had immense blunders that users hated, yet those users still paid money for the blunders. At least with Gnome, people switched. [1] I've used almost all the Window Managers and Desktop environments since 1995, I've used Windows since 1995. The current apple GUI is more painful to figure out than I had expected when I started using it last year. It's easily one of the least intuitive environments that I've come across, and watching non-tech users struggle with it reinforces my point.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Sure - not everyone will stop using it, but some will, and that's lost sales. Even if it can't be quantified, the concept can be "sold" to some executive and get the problem fixed.
  - gh02t 4y ago
    I mean, GNOME is the default on several commercially supported distributions. Redhat is the largest contributor. Granted, a lot of those commercially supported distributions are for customers who don't care about GUI uses but Ubuntu and RHEL/Fedora have a decent number of workstation users. KDE/Plasma have much less commercial support (AFAIK) and are probably closer to what you're saying, but at least to my tastes manage to be much more sensible.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      But does anyone buy those - the very term "commercially supported" implies it's being marketed toward companies (think: enterprise) and everyone knows enterprise software is the most user-friendly ever invented (oh wait, the users are the purchasers).
- toyg 4y ago
  > GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers. Wasn't the whole spiel of Gnome 3 that it was all about "UIXP" and perfection on defaults, sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? That's effectively all about interfaces that do very little, but do it very well - i.e. they are super-polished, if less featureful. It is true, though, that a lot of people stopped using GNOME. In fact, despite Ubuntu and RedHat effectively pumping users into the ecosystem for years, most Linux folks I know use either KDE or boutique DEs.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I don't know enough about GNOME's history, but I wonder if the people making those promises fell into the trap of believing that a more polished desktop environment would be one with cleaner code, and when they said super-polished they meant clean abstractions. A super-polished UI (in the sense of "well-rounded, meets expectations, minimizes user surprise, behaves predictably") has messy abstractions because humans are messy. I've never met one that looked good on the outside and didn't have ugly snaggy bits on the inside to get all that good-lookingness to actually work in the corner cases. Perhaps GNOME has fallen into the trap of sacrificing features for purity of form. If they're saying things like "We'll have thumbnails when someone can figure out how to do it cleanly" they've fallen into that trap.
  - robonerd 4y ago
    > sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? Scratch "if necessary". Power users have privilege, so deliberately throwing them curveballs for the sake of equitable outcomes seems to be the GNOME way.
    - bityard 4y ago
      I want to downvote this for being outrageously cynical and mean-spirited, but also I'm afraid it could actually be true
- jklinger410 4y ago
  Yet GNOME is the most polished Linux Desktop Environment.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    It's easy to polish something that doesn't have many visible parts.
ducktective 4y ago
At this point, it has become evident that they don't "want" to support this feature. So you're limited to what KDE has to offer if you need this. Personally, I've bailed on the whole DE thing. Take the tiling-wm-pill and move on. Now I have to deal with tumblerd random high-cpu usages and thunar's unexpected crashes.
- bstar77 4y ago
  I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience. I would use a tiling window manager (and have) on something like a chromebook or if I'm a youtuber that does everything in a VM at 1080p. I have a hybrid approach that I use with XFCE (aggressive window snapping with custom shortcuts), but it's hardly a typical tiling window manager experience. Regarding Thunar, I don't have any issues, but if you are not using it in XFCE, you might want to try and see what plugins you are loading. Some expect XFCE and could be the root of your issues.
  - ubercow13 4y ago
    Something like i3 would work great on a monitor like that. Something like dwm maybe less so.
  - tlamponi 4y ago
    > I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience. I'm using i3 / sway on both, my Workstation's 40" 21:9 (5120x2160) and my private 32" 16:9 4K displays, and see no reason why a bigger display, or one with a higher DPI, would make using a tiling window manager working worse, on the contrary, for me, it's all the more important to have good management if I got more "screen estate" to handle. IME using tiling WMs on bigger/HiDPI screens is a fantastic experience.
    - colinsane 4y ago
      i’m also enjoying sway specifically on large displays. 34” ultrawide (21:9) 3440x1440. i had gnome running on it for a while but i specifically switched to sway because it’s easier to make use of the ridiculous real-estate. i can have like 4 separate vertical splits before it gets cramped. no one wants to manually position 4 windows on a screen. i also run sway on my 14” laptop simply because i share my OS config between the two machines. i like its workspaces and notifications and being able to tweak `waybar` exactly how i want it, but the actual tiling functionality is pretty useless. at _most_ i’ll do two panes per workspace — at which point you’re in territory any DWM would do well in.
clircle 4y ago
Can anyone explain why this bug has gone so long without a fix? Is it technically challenging to fix, or does the Gnome team disagree that thumbnails are necessary?
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  I read over the ticket[0] and from what I could see it was mostly bickering about the format of the patch or something. I didn’t really see any “ba humbug, command line is all you need” kinds of posts from some graybeard. So in short it looks more like an organizational problem than a technical or even political problem. [0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    More like a disorganizational problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law >Conway's law is an adage that states organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after the computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was: >Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. >— Melvin E. Conway In Gnome's case, the structure of its design is a copy of its disorganized communication structure.
justsomeguy123 4y ago
Gnome people basically looked as how Apple managed to be firm about design and though they can be even tougher since they do it for free. Such reasonable / obvious requests linger for decades and after a while the system has been rewritten and bugs are auto-closed. I no longer report any bugs nor care.
- Avamander 4y ago
  I loathe all auto-closing so much, it's such a cheap way out of issue triage. The ostrich method of project management. It's a good red flag though, I know not to waste my time on the project. Who knows what major issues have been auto-ignored. It can be especially inane if the issues are also locked automatically, you're already ignoring the issue why the f can't you let people discuss workarounds or request reopen.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Firefox Android did that and I stopped contributing. It's not even that I hold a grudge, but the ostrich method is extremely frustrating to the reporters
  - heretogetout 4y ago
    I keep hoping someone will be gutsy enough to build and deploy a bumpbot (or bots!) to combat stalebot.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      I keep hoping it will simply gain a way to say 'I still care, this is still an issue, there's no new information to add, (nor asked for!) it's just not being prioritised so please leave it open'. Or infer that after a couple of stale removals. Sure they close a lot of junk from drive-by question askers which helps maintainers, but they piss off a lot of good citizens providing information on actual bugs/feature requests that are just waiting for attention too.
      - 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Related: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719796 - Jan 2021 (724 comments)
capitainenemo 4y ago
Huh... I just opened Pluma in MATE and used the file opener, and it had image previews in the list view. I never really paid much attention to this though, so no idea if the MATE team added it or what. They are a bit smaller than I'd like though... let's see if there's a configuration option for that.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Huh... I just opened Pluma in MATE and used the file opener, and it had image previews in the list view. I never really paid much attention to this though, so no idea if the MATE team added it or what. But, MATE isn't Gnome. That's almost their slogan, how could you not know?
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    Heh. Well, it's a fork of Gnome2 which was their main selling point. I just can't remember if these previews existed in Gnome2 before the fork or not.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Per TFA: > No, individual file previews aren’t "thumbnails."
  - capitainenemo 4y ago
    I mean that every line in the file picker has a small image beside it. It's just that since it's a list view, they are a bit smaller than I'd like (set to line height). I guess increasing line height or font size would help. Nonetheless it's good enough for roughly figuring out what image is what. I tested both in Pluma and Firefox - this seems normal for MATE file pickers, but I don't know if it was normal in Gnome2 as well and I never noticed.
    - djur 4y ago
      The article mentions the availability of thumbnails in list view and considers that insufficient: "It’s still only in list view, this is somehow worse"
bstar77 4y ago
This is a weird hill to die on. I've never cared much about the file picker and the individual file preview is "good enough" to ensure you pick the correct file. Now if Nautilus didn't have image previews in "icon view", then that's cause for rioting in the streets.
- petepete 4y ago
  You'd expect the file picker and nautilus to share behaviour though, right? Also for me, if I open the file picker from Chrome/Edge/an Electron app it's forced full screen and there's no preview on the right either. I love GNOME, use it on both desktop and laptop, but this is one of those things that's just bad.
  - bstar77 4y ago
    I definitely agree that it's strange that Nautilus can do this and the file picker can't. I also agree that consistency is important, but this issue has never caused me problems so I don't think anything of it. There are other things in Gnome that are keeping me from using it after being a vocal supporter for decades.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I think the difference is that GtkFilePicker is a part of the running GTK program, like firefox for example. If you wanted to get all of nautilus' features, you would have to embed all of nautilus into your program, including features that would be innapropriate fir a file picker Maybe instead of just using GtkFilePicker on linux, it should first check if there's an available "xdg-file-picker" in the environment, which gnome sets to nautilus with some flags to run it in file-picker mode.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        Embedding Nautilus doesn't mean enabling all its features. That said, I don't know if that's a problem, either. Windows does exactly that for its file picker - it's basically embedded Explorer, complete with context menu integration etc. And it works.
superkuh 4y ago
The biggest problem with GNOME right now is Gtk3 and gtkfilechooserwidget.c. It is so spaghetti and so many things rely on it that no one at GNOME is willing to work on it for fear of breaking something. And for the same reason they won't accept drive-by patches. It is, effectively, frozen broken, and has been for many years. This applies to any attempt to add thumbnails to the file chooser but there are far worse, actual bugs, beyond the lack of thumbnails. As of right now if you File->Open in any program using modern Gtk3 and try to paste a file path in you'll get an error instead of pasting your filepath in a text field to open, "The folder contents could not be displayed\nOperation not supported" http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail.jpg http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail.... It's unfixable behavior because the GNOME devs stopped respecting their own gsettings, org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode, to FORCE the path-bar experience on everyone. Because no one needs to type file paths, apparently. So why bother respecting the settings for path-bar or filename-entry? Their demographic doesn't care. Unfortunately gtk3 is used by far more than GNOME's demographic. They have fixed this bug in gtk4, for all the good that does.
- easytiger 4y ago
  Suspect one of the impetuses behind such stagnation is that in reality not that many Linux users use GUIs to do file stuff as so many of us live in the command line.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    Gtk3 filechooser worked fine until 2014. Distros with gtk3 released before this have a gtk3 lib that handles pasting file paths in the file chooser and the gsettings still work. My last desktop with functional Gtk3 is Ubuntu 14.04 on Extended Service Mantainance (ESM) support. But it'll age out of support fairly soon.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> Suspect one of the impetuses behind such stagnation is that in reality not that many Linux users use GUIs to do file stuff as so many of us live in the command line. GTK is a GUI toolkit. It is literally made for building GUI applications. The Gnome developers are building a graphical DE. Your reasoning doesn't seem to sensible to me.
urlwolf 4y ago
I've used KDE all this time and never noticed. Try it, it's not heavier than LXDE nowadays, which is saying something!
- whalesalad 4y ago
  kde gang
- smoldesu 4y ago
  KDE 5.25 is very exciting, it feels great being on a desktop that gets updates where features are added instead of removed. Definitely the place to be in 2022!
- bityard 4y ago
  I love the fact that right there on KDE.org there's a screenshot of Kontact with that big obnoxious vertical "HTML Message" black bar in the middle of the screen. I remember reading a bug report some 10 or 15 years ago to allow it to be hide-able somehow at least with the author just flat-out refusing to do it or allow patches for it. I'll never use Kontact for this reason but I do like most of the rest of KDE.
laerus 4y ago
> it’s much easier to accept mediocrity than to pursue adequacy. pretty much describes most of today's software
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Yes it does. I'm looking at a thumbnail in my Gnome file picker right now. I'm on Fedora 36 (Gnome 42) Edit: It looks like the specific complaint is that the Gnome file picker does not allow icon view. That is true, but I still see two thumbnails: one next to the actual file, and one in the thumbnail pane. A better title might be "Gnome has no file picker icon view and I create flamebait titles."
- mohit052 4y ago
  Well written though
- xdfgh1112 4y ago
  As a longtime gnome user I knew exactly what he meant. Icon view is what we want. The others are practically useless for quickly identifying a file.
- robonerd 4y ago
  A "thumbnail" that's one tenth the size of my actual thumb's nail is hardly deserving of the term.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
phanimahesh 4y ago
Gnome design is sometimes weird.
someweirdperson 4y ago
ls doesn't show a preview either. When forced to use windows the first thing I do is turn this feature off. Something doesn't feel right when a tool to list files tries to process content of files (e.g. image processing did come with severe security holes in the past, and it probably still does today). Both of my toilets are working perfectly though.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  file-picker is a GUI tool whose language is visual instead of text. If ls must do text processing and formatting to output that colorful list, so too must file-picker do image processing to complete its function.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Your toilets work because you keep a jug of water next to them to pour directly into the bowl to flush it, because you disconnected the toilet tank. You've decided that a tool that tries to remove waste shouldn't also intake water. After all, intakes have failed in the past and flooded houses. Better to do that part by hand to be on the safe side. This is the nature of desktop UI. Your argument for purity of function is sound, but users want their desktop UI to read images for thumbnails and previews anyway because an image file means more to them, semantically, than a pile of inscrutable bits inside a file pointer. Desktops, over time, become a junk drawer of the features "most users want" for "controlling their computer" in the space between dedicated programs.
trynumber9 4y ago
Luckily for the Gnome team, Microsoft ripped out features from their desktop interface in Windows 11. So Gnome might look comparatively functional when Windows 10 is EOL.
binbag 4y ago
Dude, please, please get your drains fixed. It's bothering me now.
- onionisafruit 4y ago
  I finished the article unclear whether or not the toilet story is a parable.
hedora 4y ago
I suggest searching for JWZ CADT for a 19 year old article describing the same class of problems with Gnome. My pet peeve: "<ctrl>-s filename <enter>" does something horrible instead of writing to filename.extension.
- account42 4y ago
  Why no just link it: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Anyone who still has their brwoser sent cross-site Referer headers in $current_year deserves what they get.
tannhaeuser 4y ago
My top gtk3/gnome 30 wtfs: - the (all too well-known) file picker issue where when you type something it interprets it as file name filter rather than, you know, the file name you want to save under - missing top menu (but a bar is still there wasting space for a ... clock wtf) - general window positioning; like, if you open an app, rather than just opening a window as new top window, gnome opens it behind others and pushes a notification "FF is ready" wtf - mainstream desktop apps not ported to dark mode, so those icons look even more puzzling I could go on, but I'm definitely leaving gnome/gtk apps behind. I've eyed KDE Plasma which could give me everything I ever wanted from a DE, but I was using Ubuntu/gnome because it was mainstream enough that everything just works OOTB. I'm also totally not looking forward to wayland, containerize-all-the-things such that basic file workflows stop working, and other attitudes, all the while the apps I'm using are exactly the same I've used 15 or 20 years ago, without new ones coming. I think I'm going back to Mac.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> the (all too well-known) file picker issue where when you type something it interprets it as file name filter rather than, you know, the file name you want to save under That one drives me insane. >> general window positioning I want my applications to come up where they were when I last closed them. This used to be up to the app under X, and I'm fully on board with the Wayland idea that an application shouldn't know or be able to modify its window position. But that means putting things where they were is the DE/compositors responsibility now, and I fear they're going to fight that idea forever. I hope I'm wrong though.
  - regularfry 4y ago
    > I'm fully on board with the Wayland idea that an application shouldn't know or be able to modify its window position Why? Genuine question - that sounds like an incredibly opinionated position for the display server to force up the stack, and I don't have a good intuition for why it should be necessary.
    - occamrazor 4y ago
imwillofficial 4y ago
I found this article funny, engaging, and touched on a point that I’ve had for years about Linux on the desktop. (I won’t spoil it)
em-bee 4y ago
so the technical question then is: how can i replace the file picker that the apps on my desktop use?
- em-bee 4y ago
  a startingpoint for answers may be here: https://superuser.com/questions/944119/replace-gtk-file-dialog-with-alternative https://superuser.com/questions/944119/replace-gtk-file-dial... there is an xdg-desktop-portal feature that allows this, or pretend that a different desktop is used by setting XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP for the application, as well as KGtk which is a library that can be loaded with LD_PRELOAD. either of these have to be applied per application though.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Fork those apps, remove GTK, add Qt.
compiler-guy 4y ago
Someone remind me: When was the "Year of the Linux Desktop"?
- hallarempt 4y ago
  1994, for me...
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    20 years after heat death of the multiverse.
- aliswe 4y ago
  For me it was around 2008, when kompiz came on Ubuntu ... those were good years.
marktangotango 4y ago
Wow, I just read a rant on a site that hosts static websites, damn I miss that! Sounds like this person needs to snake his sewer line.
aidenn0 4y ago
Since the comments here are rapidly turning into a "dump on GNOME" section, does anyone know if there is a master list of "What the GNOME documentation calls an application" <-> "What everybody else calls an application" e.g. - "Passwords and Keys" <-> "seahorse"
- hda2 4y ago
  I want a master cheatsheet for gnome commands too. These are some of the commands I needed to memorize when working with gnome: nautilus <-> File Manager evince <-> Document Viewer eog <-> Image viewer baobab <-> Disk Usage Analyzer
  - DivineBicycle 4y ago
    Tbh KDE is worse at this because at least when you are using Gnome it won't call Nautilus Nautilus. It will call it Files, unlike on Plasma where Dolphin will be called Dolphin instead of being called Files or File Manager, which means that people who don't know Dolphin is the file manager will just be really confused as to what Dolphin is, especially if they don't already know that this icon always means file manager no matter what 0S you're on. Linus actually had this issue when he couldn't figure out what Kate was because he saw Kate and he thought what's Kate. Whereas on Gnome it would just say Text Editor instead of gedit. If you are using the terminal, you are more likely to know the actual name of the program so that's less bad for me. And on KDE if you are opening graphical applications through the console, you still have to open them through their weird code names. For example, Dolphin which makes no sense whatsoever. Just the same as Nautilus makes no sense whatsoever so that arguement is somewhat disingenuous.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      For me, I use evolution for email, which uses the GNOME keyring and I couldn't for the life of me figure out that I needed to install seahorse to manage it. Of course I'm not even remotely in their targeted user base since I don't run GNOME, but it annoyed me nonetheless.
ho_schi 4y ago
File picker horror? Use the built-in file picker of Javas own Swing-Toolkit. Integrating a GUI into a programming language library is inherently wrong. And while Sun was on the wrong path they doubled down and spread it across multiple platforms because they assumed their GUI was a solution. It wasn't and luckily Java based applications disappeared - with the exception of Java based developer tools.
CommanderData 4y ago
Isn't this a problem with open source in general? It's hard to coordinate and improve software effectively among people with different ideas of what something should look like. This is why Windows and Mac will always remain dominant desktop operating systems, I think. It only takes a few issues like this for a user to give up and go back to the big two players. I'm not sure what the proper term is but having thousands of MS developers working and being led by managers, defined organizational processes and sense of direction vs hundreds of thousands open source developers led by their own ideas, what good and should look like, and different motiviation, a lack of coordination and a organisational process as big as a paragraph inside an obscure README.md Too many cooks in the kitchen sour the soup.
- Ruq 4y ago
  This is probably why Linux has been such a large success. For all the submissions, suggestions, filtering by those lower down the chain...at the end of the day it's Linus that says "Yes" or "No". (And/or chews people out for bad code.)
  - sbuk 4y ago
    That's the kernel. DE's are their own beast.
- olddustytrail 4y ago
  > Too many cooks in the kitchen sour the soup. That sounds like a translation from another language? The English idiom is remarkably similar: "Too many cooks spoil the broth"
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    Everybody wants to make it into the "Too Many Cooks" credits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8 (Is that RMS with the machete?)
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  Except for the part where tons of people are up in arms because MS removes or changes their UI. Fisher price, new control panel (XP), vista, UAC, start menu search, ads, mandatory logins, new control panel (8/10/11), new inflexible taskbar and so on
vladcodes 4y ago
Is that a blog of someone from Trolltech? Tell them their site doesn't support OS-managed dark theme switching. — No, using custom CSS isn't "dark mode"
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > No, using custom CSS isn't "dark mode" I mean, in this case, it literally is as easy as adding an alternate CSS style and then managing the proper dark-mode switching. ...not that this is really a concern in the first place. If you read through someone's blog and the best comment you have is on their website's OS integration, I think you've got your priorities misaligned.
  - vladcodes 4y ago
    Easy is a comparative evaluation. To someone it's easy to recompile Nautilus with one of the thumbnails support patches or implement thumbnails generation via an external script. Literally.
epistasis 4y ago
The file picker has always been one of the weakest parts of our GUI paradigm, and it has been since the Mac. Navigating file system via GUIs is slow, painful, and for me takes a ton of cognitive effort after a short amount of time of accumulating files. Coming up with a system for organizing files is kind of hard in itself. Reorganizing as the number of files outgrows the system is also painful. And choosing a place to save a file is often the best time to start a reorganization. But if I save a file in a new location, having to switch apps and now go back to that same spot in the hierarchy and reorganize is painful. I don't have a good solution, just complaints, unfortunately. But after ~50 years of GUIs and hierarchical file systems I'm surprised somebody more clever than me hasn't come up with a better solution.
- makecheck 4y ago
  And it hasn’t evolved with cloud/sandboxing/magic-paths/whatever. Like today on the Mac I used the popup directory path to try to navigate to the parent directory (since it showed it to me, and it was selectable) and it couldn’t; it just threw me to my home folder as if that was my request. I can only assume it was some weird cloud thing but when path navigation itself is a question mark we have problems.
- pathartl 4y ago
  This comment reminds me when Apple revamped Finder to include "All My Files". To me it felt like they were giving up. "FINE! Can't find something? HERE'S EVERYTHING!" These sort of pseudo-directories honestly bother me more than just plain old hierarchy. For example on Windows, "This PC/Documents" is really "%userprofile%/Documents", but to get to %userprofile% you have to go to C:\Users\<username>. But there's TONS of other stuff that lives in %userprofile%
  - epistasis 4y ago
    There's few things I despise more than the "All My Files" view, because it is so useless to me. Perhaps it works for some, however!
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
izoow 4y ago
This reminds me of the problem with scrolling on Chromium, and now because of Electron a whole bunch of other programs. A single click of the scroll wheel moves the page by 100 px on Windows, for some reason it’s only 53 px on Linux, which means scrolling is twice as slow. This is not just compared to Windows, but it’s also much slower compared to other native Linux programs. If you search for this issue, there are countless discussions and half broken attempts to work around this problem, including Chromium bug reports including some that are now nearly 10 years old. It’s 2022 and scrolling in Chromium and Electron apps with a mouse on Linux is still unbearably slow with no way to adjust that. There used to be a hidden CLI option, which was added for ChromeOS which probably had the same issue, but that was later removed. The best solution I found so far is running patched libinput that multiplies the scroll amount delta by whatever you want, and having a daemon running which watches the window that is currently being scrolled and alters that scroll multiplier accordingly. It’s absurd that this is what I have to do to get acceptable scrolling behavior with a mouse on Linux.
- tiberious726 4y ago
  Have you tried disabling smooth scrolling?
- dpedu 4y ago
  The program "imwheel" helped me work around an issue like this.
fartcannon 4y ago
I came to Linux from a Windows world, so KDE always made more sense to me. I think, with the exception of 4.0, KDE has been fundamentally less bad than gnome since at least 2002. A sweet spot for me was KDE3.5 and then again current day KDE plasma. I like the customisability. I think the gnome foot is a better icon, though.
jrm4 4y ago
Here is the ultimate problem with GNOME. It is essentially a lie. What I mean: Imagine you bought a ticket for Matrix 4, and they showed John Wick. That's what GNOME 3 did. They made a new and different product; whether you like it more or less than the last one isn't the point. They betrayed the reliance we had on the old thing by a "lie of omission." A more honest approach would have been to name Gnome 3 something different (and perhaps hand the Gnome name off to the MATE people?)
- mr_beans 4y ago
  Except John Wick has been better than all the Matrix movies but the first
  - jrm4 4y ago
    That actually doesn't contradict my point. It's fine if you like it better, the problem is pretending it's the same thing.
einpoklum 4y ago
The Gtk file picker has for years offered a notoriously horrendous user experience. A lot of critical functionality is missing in the name of the GNOME people's vaunted simplicity or what-not. ... although reading superkuh's comment, maybe the explanation is more mundane (and sad) than that.
aliswe 4y ago
the sad situation of desktop Linux is kind of reminiscent of democracy and how people work in general.
teawrecks 4y ago
The writer seems willingly disingenuous. Not having a feature isn't the same as having a bug. The software is behaving exactly as designed. Do you say that older versions of windows develop "bugs" as soon as a newer version adds a new feature? Of course not. I agree with the conclusion though, these little missing conveniences add up to a worse experience for converts. I understand open source apps choosing not to do things exactly the same way as proprietary solutions, but we at least need something as good. That said, it has always been the case that if a feature didn't exist in the pile of software that was freely and openly provided to you, you would either contribute the feature yourself or just go elsewhere. So the bounty would have sufficed, there is no point in being a shithead about it.
mikelward 4y ago
When I try to attach a file in Chrome on Linux, it shows a file picker that defaults to only showing files I recently uploaded, which is the exact opposite of what I want.
Ruq 4y ago
This comment might come off a little off-topic but I think it's pretty related. The Gnome Project has always struck me of having this Apple-Like attitude of "We know Best", and subsequently ignoring/shrugging off user concerns/issues/etc. It's pretty obvious that Gnome is at the very least "inspired" by macOS. Heck Apple started version bumping by whole numbers at right about the same time Gnome switched from 3.x to 4x. I use it on my Touchscreen Convertible Laptop (with Wayland), since it supports multi-touch gestures (on the touchpad too), and as long as I install extensions to bend Gnome to my will, it seems to work pretty darn well for me. (For example, adding window tiling with the https://github.com/Leleat/Tiling-Assistant https://github.com/Leleat/Tiling-Assistant extension). Perhaps there is a better way that I should switch too, but currently I remain ignorant.
marcodiego 4y ago
In case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233
- bityard 4y ago
  This was reported before some HNers were even born.
JoeyBananas 4y ago
jonathankoren 4y ago
> This bug has received over one hundred comments over the course of nearly two decades. This is best counter argument to the old saw that “Open source will always get better.”
butz 4y ago
With recent donation from Microsoft, GNOME will surely fix this critical issue, right?
dontbenebby 4y ago
This is a great example of "that's an explanation, not an excuse", albeit a weird one O_o
dark-star 4y ago
Switched to KDE because of stupid crap like that. Never ever looked back My advice: download a live-system with a KDE desktop and give it a spin, maybe?
bscphil 4y ago
> This file picker does not have a thumbnail view. It is broken software. Thumbnails are not a cute little extra, they are essential. This is as bad as a file picker that doesn’t list the name of the files, only their creation date, or inode serial number. It is broken software. No, individual file previews aren’t "thumbnails." As is unfortunately typical of articles like this, it overstates its case to the point of making it difficult to engage with. No, it isn't as bad as a file picker that doesn't list the names of the files. No, for most things one uses a file picker for, it isn't essential. For that matter, I was actually completely unaware that my file picker (I use KDE) supports showing a thumbnail view. I did not know this because I have not ever needed to use such a feature. I use the file picker in "details" mode exclusively. On the rare occasional where I need to disambiguate two files because I don't know the name of what I'm looking for, the image preview has been more than sufficient. I'll certainly grant that this is a feature that it makes a lot of sense for a file picker to have, and for a handful of use cases (trying to find a single image in a large directory of badly named image files) it might even be essential. But this tendency to overstate one's case is at the very least irritating, and IMO it leads to unwarranted attacks on developers that makes people shut down and resist spending their time on solving your problem.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eternityforest 4y ago
This seems to be a Linux exclusive problem. In general Linux is great, but there's so many people that really don't care about usability. The problem with open source is that programmers often set priorities(Which is why I'm a fan of Cathedral model software). FOSS programmers love to program so much, that everything they write is usually a tool to help make other programs. Without outside feedback, or some kind of strong mission to really focus on the mainstream, the whole entire ecosystem can turn into jusr one massive IDE made of loosely coupled utilities.
IYasha 4y ago
Yo... You know what's more retarded on this GNOME screenshot https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/Filepickermeme.png https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/Filepickermeme.png than the absence of thumbnails? The button order. Don't use GTK. Ever! Do you get me? [No][Yes]
greyhair 4y ago
I read the entire mediocre post. I need to take a dump now. Luckily, my toilets both flush, so I can choose whichever is most convenient. Right now I wish I had a third one in the basement, but that would require a pump, which would likely fail.

365 points by weberer 4y ago

stick a note onto the commode or the toilet door that reminds your family members of the fact.

> First of all, how do developers so casually ignore this issue? GNOME has never struck me as a project interested in implementating polish work. Polish work is disproportionately hard (it sometimes upends your understanding of the problem, forcing you to rethink your core structures, which impacts other features. In short, polish work has a tendency to explode). > Second of all, how do users so casually ignore this issue? GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers. Those who couldn't take it stopped using GNOME.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Thumbnails are not polish. They’re an essential feature of working with images.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  The devil's advocate response is "How essential could they be? We went decades without 'em." I don't think it's the right answer, but it's an answer that works (GNOME continues to be the dominant Linux desktop environment in spite of lacking that feature).
  - jasonlotito 4y ago
    Completely realizing you aren't actually making the "devil's advocate response," but I think the response to that is "We went for a millennia without electricity, too." Just because we went without something, doesn't mean we should accept life without it at this point.
  - TillE 4y ago
    GNOME has enjoyed the status of being basically usable, if not particularly good, throughout its history. I still remember KDE going through what felt like years of being unusably broken during its clumsy transition from 3 to 4. That's a lot of the desktop Linux experience, really - everything constantly in flux, never quite usable. I don't blame anyone for this, it's hard to get stuff done without someone paying a team to do it, but it's really unfortunate.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      After flip flopping a bunch, I ditched both GNOME and KDE for Xfce and haven't felt like I've missed much. It might need some better defaults, but you only have to fix them once on a new install. Nothing huge changes, and really, I'm not looking for much. A launcher. A way to switch windows. Volume and brightness buttons/applets are nice to have. A system tray. I've heard somebody somewhere along the lines call it the "Debian of DEs" and I can't argue with that.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
If Apple or Microsoft had something like this "misfeature" in their OS, they could and likely would lose sales. GNOME has no customers and can't lose sales, therefore they don't have to care at all.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > If Apple or Microsoft had something like this "misfeature" in their OS, they could and likely would lose sales. I disagree. Microsoft and Apple[1] had both had immense blunders that users hated, yet those users still paid money for the blunders. At least with Gnome, people switched. [1] I've used almost all the Window Managers and Desktop environments since 1995, I've used Windows since 1995. The current apple GUI is more painful to figure out than I had expected when I started using it last year. It's easily one of the least intuitive environments that I've come across, and watching non-tech users struggle with it reinforces my point.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Sure - not everyone will stop using it, but some will, and that's lost sales. Even if it can't be quantified, the concept can be "sold" to some executive and get the problem fixed.
- gh02t 4y ago
  I mean, GNOME is the default on several commercially supported distributions. Redhat is the largest contributor. Granted, a lot of those commercially supported distributions are for customers who don't care about GUI uses but Ubuntu and RHEL/Fedora have a decent number of workstation users. KDE/Plasma have much less commercial support (AFAIK) and are probably closer to what you're saying, but at least to my tastes manage to be much more sensible.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    But does anyone buy those - the very term "commercially supported" implies it's being marketed toward companies (think: enterprise) and everyone knows enterprise software is the most user-friendly ever invented (oh wait, the users are the purchasers).
toyg 4y ago
> GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers. Wasn't the whole spiel of Gnome 3 that it was all about "UIXP" and perfection on defaults, sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? That's effectively all about interfaces that do very little, but do it very well - i.e. they are super-polished, if less featureful. It is true, though, that a lot of people stopped using GNOME. In fact, despite Ubuntu and RedHat effectively pumping users into the ecosystem for years, most Linux folks I know use either KDE or boutique DEs.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I don't know enough about GNOME's history, but I wonder if the people making those promises fell into the trap of believing that a more polished desktop environment would be one with cleaner code, and when they said super-polished they meant clean abstractions. A super-polished UI (in the sense of "well-rounded, meets expectations, minimizes user surprise, behaves predictably") has messy abstractions because humans are messy. I've never met one that looked good on the outside and didn't have ugly snaggy bits on the inside to get all that good-lookingness to actually work in the corner cases. Perhaps GNOME has fallen into the trap of sacrificing features for purity of form. If they're saying things like "We'll have thumbnails when someone can figure out how to do it cleanly" they've fallen into that trap.
- robonerd 4y ago
  > sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? Scratch "if necessary". Power users have privilege, so deliberately throwing them curveballs for the sake of equitable outcomes seems to be the GNOME way.
  - bityard 4y ago
    I want to downvote this for being outrageously cynical and mean-spirited, but also I'm afraid it could actually be true
jklinger410 4y ago
Yet GNOME is the most polished Linux Desktop Environment.
- int_19h 4y ago
  It's easy to polish something that doesn't have many visible parts.

ducktective 4y ago

At this point, it has become evident that they don't "want" to support this feature. So you're limited to what KDE has to offer if you need this. Personally, I've bailed on the whole DE thing. Take the tiling-wm-pill and move on. Now I have to deal with tumblerd random high-cpu usages and thunar's unexpected crashes.

bstar77 4y ago
I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience. I would use a tiling window manager (and have) on something like a chromebook or if I'm a youtuber that does everything in a VM at 1080p. I have a hybrid approach that I use with XFCE (aggressive window snapping with custom shortcuts), but it's hardly a typical tiling window manager experience. Regarding Thunar, I don't have any issues, but if you are not using it in XFCE, you might want to try and see what plugins you are loading. Some expect XFCE and could be the root of your issues.
- ubercow13 4y ago
  Something like i3 would work great on a monitor like that. Something like dwm maybe less so.
- tlamponi 4y ago
  > I've not seen anyone using a tiling window manage with 32" and larger 4k displays. It's just an awful experience. I'm using i3 / sway on both, my Workstation's 40" 21:9 (5120x2160) and my private 32" 16:9 4K displays, and see no reason why a bigger display, or one with a higher DPI, would make using a tiling window manager working worse, on the contrary, for me, it's all the more important to have good management if I got more "screen estate" to handle. IME using tiling WMs on bigger/HiDPI screens is a fantastic experience.
  - colinsane 4y ago
    i’m also enjoying sway specifically on large displays. 34” ultrawide (21:9) 3440x1440. i had gnome running on it for a while but i specifically switched to sway because it’s easier to make use of the ridiculous real-estate. i can have like 4 separate vertical splits before it gets cramped. no one wants to manually position 4 windows on a screen. i also run sway on my 14” laptop simply because i share my OS config between the two machines. i like its workspaces and notifications and being able to tweak `waybar` exactly how i want it, but the actual tiling functionality is pretty useless. at _most_ i’ll do two panes per workspace — at which point you’re in territory any DWM would do well in.

clircle 4y ago

Can anyone explain why this bug has gone so long without a fix? Is it technically challenging to fix, or does the Gnome team disagree that thumbnails are necessary?

spookthesunset 4y ago
I read over the ticket[0] and from what I could see it was mostly bickering about the format of the patch or something. I didn’t really see any “ba humbug, command line is all you need” kinds of posts from some graybeard. So in short it looks more like an organizational problem than a technical or even political problem. [0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  More like a disorganizational problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law >Conway's law is an adage that states organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after the computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was: >Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. >— Melvin E. Conway In Gnome's case, the structure of its design is a copy of its disorganized communication structure.

justsomeguy123 4y ago

Gnome people basically looked as how Apple managed to be firm about design and though they can be even tougher since they do it for free. Such reasonable / obvious requests linger for decades and after a while the system has been rewritten and bugs are auto-closed. I no longer report any bugs nor care.

Avamander 4y ago
I loathe all auto-closing so much, it's such a cheap way out of issue triage. The ostrich method of project management. It's a good red flag though, I know not to waste my time on the project. Who knows what major issues have been auto-ignored. It can be especially inane if the issues are also locked automatically, you're already ignoring the issue why the f can't you let people discuss workarounds or request reopen.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Firefox Android did that and I stopped contributing. It's not even that I hold a grudge, but the ostrich method is extremely frustrating to the reporters
- heretogetout 4y ago
  I keep hoping someone will be gutsy enough to build and deploy a bumpbot (or bots!) to combat stalebot.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    I keep hoping it will simply gain a way to say 'I still care, this is still an issue, there's no new information to add, (nor asked for!) it's just not being prioritised so please leave it open'. Or infer that after a couple of stale removals. Sure they close a lot of junk from drive-by question askers which helps maintainers, but they piss off a lot of good citizens providing information on actual bugs/feature requests that are just waiting for attention too.
    - 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Related: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25719796 - Jan 2021 (724 comments)

capitainenemo 4y ago

Huh... I just opened Pluma in MATE and used the file opener, and it had image previews in the list view. I never really paid much attention to this though, so no idea if the MATE team added it or what. They are a bit smaller than I'd like though... let's see if there's a configuration option for that.

lelanthran 4y ago
> Huh... I just opened Pluma in MATE and used the file opener, and it had image previews in the list view. I never really paid much attention to this though, so no idea if the MATE team added it or what. But, MATE isn't Gnome. That's almost their slogan, how could you not know?
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  Heh. Well, it's a fork of Gnome2 which was their main selling point. I just can't remember if these previews existed in Gnome2 before the fork or not.
aidenn0 4y ago
Per TFA: > No, individual file previews aren’t "thumbnails."
- capitainenemo 4y ago
  I mean that every line in the file picker has a small image beside it. It's just that since it's a list view, they are a bit smaller than I'd like (set to line height). I guess increasing line height or font size would help. Nonetheless it's good enough for roughly figuring out what image is what. I tested both in Pluma and Firefox - this seems normal for MATE file pickers, but I don't know if it was normal in Gnome2 as well and I never noticed.
  - djur 4y ago
    The article mentions the availability of thumbnails in list view and considers that insufficient: "It’s still only in list view, this is somehow worse"

bstar77 4y ago

This is a weird hill to die on. I've never cared much about the file picker and the individual file preview is "good enough" to ensure you pick the correct file. Now if Nautilus didn't have image previews in "icon view", then that's cause for rioting in the streets.

petepete 4y ago
You'd expect the file picker and nautilus to share behaviour though, right? Also for me, if I open the file picker from Chrome/Edge/an Electron app it's forced full screen and there's no preview on the right either. I love GNOME, use it on both desktop and laptop, but this is one of those things that's just bad.
- bstar77 4y ago
  I definitely agree that it's strange that Nautilus can do this and the file picker can't. I also agree that consistency is important, but this issue has never caused me problems so I don't think anything of it. There are other things in Gnome that are keeping me from using it after being a vocal supporter for decades.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I think the difference is that GtkFilePicker is a part of the running GTK program, like firefox for example. If you wanted to get all of nautilus' features, you would have to embed all of nautilus into your program, including features that would be innapropriate fir a file picker Maybe instead of just using GtkFilePicker on linux, it should first check if there's an available "xdg-file-picker" in the environment, which gnome sets to nautilus with some flags to run it in file-picker mode.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      Embedding Nautilus doesn't mean enabling all its features. That said, I don't know if that's a problem, either. Windows does exactly that for its file picker - it's basically embedded Explorer, complete with context menu integration etc. And it works.

superkuh 4y ago

The biggest problem with GNOME right now is Gtk3 and gtkfilechooserwidget.c. It is so spaghetti and so many things rely on it that no one at GNOME is willing to work on it for fear of breaking something. And for the same reason they won't accept drive-by patches. It is, effectively, frozen broken, and has been for many years. This applies to any attempt to add thumbnails to the file chooser but there are far worse, actual bugs, beyond the lack of thumbnails. As of right now if you File->Open in any program using modern Gtk3 and try to paste a file path in you'll get an error instead of pasting your filepath in a text field to open, "The folder contents could not be displayed\nOperation not supported" http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail.jpg http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail.... It's unfixable behavior because the GNOME devs stopped respecting their own gsettings, org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode, to FORCE the path-bar experience on everyone. Because no one needs to type file paths, apparently. So why bother respecting the settings for path-bar or filename-entry? Their demographic doesn't care. Unfortunately gtk3 is used by far more than GNOME's demographic. They have fixed this bug in gtk4, for all the good that does.

easytiger 4y ago
Suspect one of the impetuses behind such stagnation is that in reality not that many Linux users use GUIs to do file stuff as so many of us live in the command line.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Gtk3 filechooser worked fine until 2014. Distros with gtk3 released before this have a gtk3 lib that handles pasting file paths in the file chooser and the gsettings still work. My last desktop with functional Gtk3 is Ubuntu 14.04 on Extended Service Mantainance (ESM) support. But it'll age out of support fairly soon.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> Suspect one of the impetuses behind such stagnation is that in reality not that many Linux users use GUIs to do file stuff as so many of us live in the command line. GTK is a GUI toolkit. It is literally made for building GUI applications. The Gnome developers are building a graphical DE. Your reasoning doesn't seem to sensible to me.

urlwolf 4y ago

I've used KDE all this time and never noticed. Try it, it's not heavier than LXDE nowadays, which is saying something!

whalesalad 4y ago
kde gang
smoldesu 4y ago
KDE 5.25 is very exciting, it feels great being on a desktop that gets updates where features are added instead of removed. Definitely the place to be in 2022!
bityard 4y ago
I love the fact that right there on KDE.org there's a screenshot of Kontact with that big obnoxious vertical "HTML Message" black bar in the middle of the screen. I remember reading a bug report some 10 or 15 years ago to allow it to be hide-able somehow at least with the author just flat-out refusing to do it or allow patches for it. I'll never use Kontact for this reason but I do like most of the rest of KDE.

laerus 4y ago

> it’s much easier to accept mediocrity than to pursue adequacy. pretty much describes most of today's software

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Yes it does. I'm looking at a thumbnail in my Gnome file picker right now. I'm on Fedora 36 (Gnome 42) Edit: It looks like the specific complaint is that the Gnome file picker does not allow icon view. That is true, but I still see two thumbnails: one next to the actual file, and one in the thumbnail pane. A better title might be "Gnome has no file picker icon view and I create flamebait titles."

mohit052 4y ago
Well written though
xdfgh1112 4y ago
As a longtime gnome user I knew exactly what he meant. Icon view is what we want. The others are practically useless for quickly identifying a file.
robonerd 4y ago
A "thumbnail" that's one tenth the size of my actual thumb's nail is hardly deserving of the term.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

phanimahesh 4y ago

Gnome design is sometimes weird.

someweirdperson 4y ago

ls doesn't show a preview either. When forced to use windows the first thing I do is turn this feature off. Something doesn't feel right when a tool to list files tries to process content of files (e.g. image processing did come with severe security holes in the past, and it probably still does today). Both of my toilets are working perfectly though.

cuteboy19 4y ago
file-picker is a GUI tool whose language is visual instead of text. If ls must do text processing and formatting to output that colorful list, so too must file-picker do image processing to complete its function.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Your toilets work because you keep a jug of water next to them to pour directly into the bowl to flush it, because you disconnected the toilet tank. You've decided that a tool that tries to remove waste shouldn't also intake water. After all, intakes have failed in the past and flooded houses. Better to do that part by hand to be on the safe side. This is the nature of desktop UI. Your argument for purity of function is sound, but users want their desktop UI to read images for thumbnails and previews anyway because an image file means more to them, semantically, than a pile of inscrutable bits inside a file pointer. Desktops, over time, become a junk drawer of the features "most users want" for "controlling their computer" in the space between dedicated programs.

trynumber9 4y ago

Luckily for the Gnome team, Microsoft ripped out features from their desktop interface in Windows 11. So Gnome might look comparatively functional when Windows 10 is EOL.

binbag 4y ago

Dude, please, please get your drains fixed. It's bothering me now.

onionisafruit 4y ago
I finished the article unclear whether or not the toilet story is a parable.

hedora 4y ago

I suggest searching for JWZ CADT for a 19 year old article describing the same class of problems with Gnome. My pet peeve: "<ctrl>-s filename <enter>" does something horrible instead of writing to filename.extension.

account42 4y ago
Why no just link it: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Anyone who still has their brwoser sent cross-site Referer headers in $current_year deserves what they get.

tannhaeuser 4y ago

My top gtk3/gnome 30 wtfs: - the (all too well-known) file picker issue where when you type something it interprets it as file name filter rather than, you know, the file name you want to save under - missing top menu (but a bar is still there wasting space for a ... clock wtf) - general window positioning; like, if you open an app, rather than just opening a window as new top window, gnome opens it behind others and pushes a notification "FF is ready" wtf - mainstream desktop apps not ported to dark mode, so those icons look even more puzzling I could go on, but I'm definitely leaving gnome/gtk apps behind. I've eyed KDE Plasma which could give me everything I ever wanted from a DE, but I was using Ubuntu/gnome because it was mainstream enough that everything just works OOTB. I'm also totally not looking forward to wayland, containerize-all-the-things such that basic file workflows stop working, and other attitudes, all the while the apps I'm using are exactly the same I've used 15 or 20 years ago, without new ones coming. I think I'm going back to Mac.

phkahler 4y ago
>> the (all too well-known) file picker issue where when you type something it interprets it as file name filter rather than, you know, the file name you want to save under That one drives me insane. >> general window positioning I want my applications to come up where they were when I last closed them. This used to be up to the app under X, and I'm fully on board with the Wayland idea that an application shouldn't know or be able to modify its window position. But that means putting things where they were is the DE/compositors responsibility now, and I fear they're going to fight that idea forever. I hope I'm wrong though.
- regularfry 4y ago
  > I'm fully on board with the Wayland idea that an application shouldn't know or be able to modify its window position Why? Genuine question - that sounds like an incredibly opinionated position for the display server to force up the stack, and I don't have a good intuition for why it should be necessary.
  - occamrazor 4y ago

imwillofficial 4y ago

I found this article funny, engaging, and touched on a point that I’ve had for years about Linux on the desktop. (I won’t spoil it)

em-bee 4y ago

so the technical question then is: how can i replace the file picker that the apps on my desktop use?

em-bee 4y ago
a startingpoint for answers may be here: https://superuser.com/questions/944119/replace-gtk-file-dialog-with-alternative https://superuser.com/questions/944119/replace-gtk-file-dial... there is an xdg-desktop-portal feature that allows this, or pretend that a different desktop is used by setting XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP for the application, as well as KGtk which is a library that can be loaded with LD_PRELOAD. either of these have to be applied per application though.
phendrenad2 4y ago
Fork those apps, remove GTK, add Qt.

compiler-guy 4y ago

Someone remind me: When was the "Year of the Linux Desktop"?

hallarempt 4y ago
1994, for me...
- Ygg2 4y ago
  20 years after heat death of the multiverse.
aliswe 4y ago
For me it was around 2008, when kompiz came on Ubuntu ... those were good years.

marktangotango 4y ago

Wow, I just read a rant on a site that hosts static websites, damn I miss that! Sounds like this person needs to snake his sewer line.

aidenn0 4y ago

Since the comments here are rapidly turning into a "dump on GNOME" section, does anyone know if there is a master list of "What the GNOME documentation calls an application" <-> "What everybody else calls an application" e.g. - "Passwords and Keys" <-> "seahorse"

hda2 4y ago
I want a master cheatsheet for gnome commands too. These are some of the commands I needed to memorize when working with gnome: nautilus <-> File Manager evince <-> Document Viewer eog <-> Image viewer baobab <-> Disk Usage Analyzer
- DivineBicycle 4y ago
  Tbh KDE is worse at this because at least when you are using Gnome it won't call Nautilus Nautilus. It will call it Files, unlike on Plasma where Dolphin will be called Dolphin instead of being called Files or File Manager, which means that people who don't know Dolphin is the file manager will just be really confused as to what Dolphin is, especially if they don't already know that this icon always means file manager no matter what 0S you're on. Linus actually had this issue when he couldn't figure out what Kate was because he saw Kate and he thought what's Kate. Whereas on Gnome it would just say Text Editor instead of gedit. If you are using the terminal, you are more likely to know the actual name of the program so that's less bad for me. And on KDE if you are opening graphical applications through the console, you still have to open them through their weird code names. For example, Dolphin which makes no sense whatsoever. Just the same as Nautilus makes no sense whatsoever so that arguement is somewhat disingenuous.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    For me, I use evolution for email, which uses the GNOME keyring and I couldn't for the life of me figure out that I needed to install seahorse to manage it. Of course I'm not even remotely in their targeted user base since I don't run GNOME, but it annoyed me nonetheless.

ho_schi 4y ago

File picker horror? Use the built-in file picker of Javas own Swing-Toolkit. Integrating a GUI into a programming language library is inherently wrong. And while Sun was on the wrong path they doubled down and spread it across multiple platforms because they assumed their GUI was a solution. It wasn't and luckily Java based applications disappeared - with the exception of Java based developer tools.

CommanderData 4y ago

Isn't this a problem with open source in general? It's hard to coordinate and improve software effectively among people with different ideas of what something should look like. This is why Windows and Mac will always remain dominant desktop operating systems, I think. It only takes a few issues like this for a user to give up and go back to the big two players. I'm not sure what the proper term is but having thousands of MS developers working and being led by managers, defined organizational processes and sense of direction vs hundreds of thousands open source developers led by their own ideas, what good and should look like, and different motiviation, a lack of coordination and a organisational process as big as a paragraph inside an obscure README.md Too many cooks in the kitchen sour the soup.

Ruq 4y ago
This is probably why Linux has been such a large success. For all the submissions, suggestions, filtering by those lower down the chain...at the end of the day it's Linus that says "Yes" or "No". (And/or chews people out for bad code.)
- sbuk 4y ago
  That's the kernel. DE's are their own beast.
olddustytrail 4y ago
> Too many cooks in the kitchen sour the soup. That sounds like a translation from another language? The English idiom is remarkably similar: "Too many cooks spoil the broth"
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Everybody wants to make it into the "Too Many Cooks" credits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8 (Is that RMS with the machete?)
formerly_proven 4y ago
Except for the part where tons of people are up in arms because MS removes or changes their UI. Fisher price, new control panel (XP), vista, UAC, start menu search, ads, mandatory logins, new control panel (8/10/11), new inflexible taskbar and so on

vladcodes 4y ago

Is that a blog of someone from Trolltech? Tell them their site doesn't support OS-managed dark theme switching. — No, using custom CSS isn't "dark mode"

smoldesu 4y ago
> No, using custom CSS isn't "dark mode" I mean, in this case, it literally is as easy as adding an alternate CSS style and then managing the proper dark-mode switching. ...not that this is really a concern in the first place. If you read through someone's blog and the best comment you have is on their website's OS integration, I think you've got your priorities misaligned.
- vladcodes 4y ago
  Easy is a comparative evaluation. To someone it's easy to recompile Nautilus with one of the thumbnails support patches or implement thumbnails generation via an external script. Literally.

epistasis 4y ago

The file picker has always been one of the weakest parts of our GUI paradigm, and it has been since the Mac. Navigating file system via GUIs is slow, painful, and for me takes a ton of cognitive effort after a short amount of time of accumulating files. Coming up with a system for organizing files is kind of hard in itself. Reorganizing as the number of files outgrows the system is also painful. And choosing a place to save a file is often the best time to start a reorganization. But if I save a file in a new location, having to switch apps and now go back to that same spot in the hierarchy and reorganize is painful. I don't have a good solution, just complaints, unfortunately. But after ~50 years of GUIs and hierarchical file systems I'm surprised somebody more clever than me hasn't come up with a better solution.

makecheck 4y ago
And it hasn’t evolved with cloud/sandboxing/magic-paths/whatever. Like today on the Mac I used the popup directory path to try to navigate to the parent directory (since it showed it to me, and it was selectable) and it couldn’t; it just threw me to my home folder as if that was my request. I can only assume it was some weird cloud thing but when path navigation itself is a question mark we have problems.
pathartl 4y ago
This comment reminds me when Apple revamped Finder to include "All My Files". To me it felt like they were giving up. "FINE! Can't find something? HERE'S EVERYTHING!" These sort of pseudo-directories honestly bother me more than just plain old hierarchy. For example on Windows, "This PC/Documents" is really "%userprofile%/Documents", but to get to %userprofile% you have to go to C:\Users\<username>. But there's TONS of other stuff that lives in %userprofile%
- epistasis 4y ago
  There's few things I despise more than the "All My Files" view, because it is so useless to me. Perhaps it works for some, however!
- marcosdumay 4y ago

izoow 4y ago

This reminds me of the problem with scrolling on Chromium, and now because of Electron a whole bunch of other programs. A single click of the scroll wheel moves the page by 100 px on Windows, for some reason it’s only 53 px on Linux, which means scrolling is twice as slow. This is not just compared to Windows, but it’s also much slower compared to other native Linux programs. If you search for this issue, there are countless discussions and half broken attempts to work around this problem, including Chromium bug reports including some that are now nearly 10 years old. It’s 2022 and scrolling in Chromium and Electron apps with a mouse on Linux is still unbearably slow with no way to adjust that. There used to be a hidden CLI option, which was added for ChromeOS which probably had the same issue, but that was later removed. The best solution I found so far is running patched libinput that multiplies the scroll amount delta by whatever you want, and having a daemon running which watches the window that is currently being scrolled and alters that scroll multiplier accordingly. It’s absurd that this is what I have to do to get acceptable scrolling behavior with a mouse on Linux.

tiberious726 4y ago
Have you tried disabling smooth scrolling?
dpedu 4y ago
The program "imwheel" helped me work around an issue like this.

fartcannon 4y ago

I came to Linux from a Windows world, so KDE always made more sense to me. I think, with the exception of 4.0, KDE has been fundamentally less bad than gnome since at least 2002. A sweet spot for me was KDE3.5 and then again current day KDE plasma. I like the customisability. I think the gnome foot is a better icon, though.

jrm4 4y ago

Here is the ultimate problem with GNOME. It is essentially a lie. What I mean: Imagine you bought a ticket for Matrix 4, and they showed John Wick. That's what GNOME 3 did. They made a new and different product; whether you like it more or less than the last one isn't the point. They betrayed the reliance we had on the old thing by a "lie of omission." A more honest approach would have been to name Gnome 3 something different (and perhaps hand the Gnome name off to the MATE people?)

mr_beans 4y ago
Except John Wick has been better than all the Matrix movies but the first
- jrm4 4y ago
  That actually doesn't contradict my point. It's fine if you like it better, the problem is pretending it's the same thing.

einpoklum 4y ago

The Gtk file picker has for years offered a notoriously horrendous user experience. A lot of critical functionality is missing in the name of the GNOME people's vaunted simplicity or what-not. ... although reading superkuh's comment, maybe the explanation is more mundane (and sad) than that.

aliswe 4y ago

the sad situation of desktop Linux is kind of reminiscent of democracy and how people work in general.

teawrecks 4y ago

The writer seems willingly disingenuous. Not having a feature isn't the same as having a bug. The software is behaving exactly as designed. Do you say that older versions of windows develop "bugs" as soon as a newer version adds a new feature? Of course not. I agree with the conclusion though, these little missing conveniences add up to a worse experience for converts. I understand open source apps choosing not to do things exactly the same way as proprietary solutions, but we at least need something as good. That said, it has always been the case that if a feature didn't exist in the pile of software that was freely and openly provided to you, you would either contribute the feature yourself or just go elsewhere. So the bounty would have sufficed, there is no point in being a shithead about it.

mikelward 4y ago

When I try to attach a file in Chrome on Linux, it shows a file picker that defaults to only showing files I recently uploaded, which is the exact opposite of what I want.

Ruq 4y ago

This comment might come off a little off-topic but I think it's pretty related. The Gnome Project has always struck me of having this Apple-Like attitude of "We know Best", and subsequently ignoring/shrugging off user concerns/issues/etc. It's pretty obvious that Gnome is at the very least "inspired" by macOS. Heck Apple started version bumping by whole numbers at right about the same time Gnome switched from 3.x to 4x. I use it on my Touchscreen Convertible Laptop (with Wayland), since it supports multi-touch gestures (on the touchpad too), and as long as I install extensions to bend Gnome to my will, it seems to work pretty darn well for me. (For example, adding window tiling with the https://github.com/Leleat/Tiling-Assistant https://github.com/Leleat/Tiling-Assistant extension). Perhaps there is a better way that I should switch too, but currently I remain ignorant.

marcodiego 4y ago

In case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233

bityard 4y ago
This was reported before some HNers were even born.

JoeyBananas 4y ago

jonathankoren 4y ago

> This bug has received over one hundred comments over the course of nearly two decades. This is best counter argument to the old saw that “Open source will always get better.”

butz 4y ago

With recent donation from Microsoft, GNOME will surely fix this critical issue, right?

dontbenebby 4y ago

This is a great example of "that's an explanation, not an excuse", albeit a weird one O_o

dark-star 4y ago

Switched to KDE because of stupid crap like that. Never ever looked back My advice: download a live-system with a KDE desktop and give it a spin, maybe?

bscphil 4y ago

> This file picker does not have a thumbnail view. It is broken software. Thumbnails are not a cute little extra, they are essential. This is as bad as a file picker that doesn’t list the name of the files, only their creation date, or inode serial number. It is broken software. No, individual file previews aren’t "thumbnails." As is unfortunately typical of articles like this, it overstates its case to the point of making it difficult to engage with. No, it isn't as bad as a file picker that doesn't list the names of the files. No, for most things one uses a file picker for, it isn't essential. For that matter, I was actually completely unaware that my file picker (I use KDE) supports showing a thumbnail view. I did not know this because I have not ever needed to use such a feature. I use the file picker in "details" mode exclusively. On the rare occasional where I need to disambiguate two files because I don't know the name of what I'm looking for, the image preview has been more than sufficient. I'll certainly grant that this is a feature that it makes a lot of sense for a file picker to have, and for a handful of use cases (trying to find a single image in a large directory of badly named image files) it might even be essential. But this tendency to overstate one's case is at the very least irritating, and IMO it leads to unwarranted attacks on developers that makes people shut down and resist spending their time on solving your problem.

deleted 4y ago

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eternityforest 4y ago

This seems to be a Linux exclusive problem. In general Linux is great, but there's so many people that really don't care about usability. The problem with open source is that programmers often set priorities(Which is why I'm a fan of Cathedral model software). FOSS programmers love to program so much, that everything they write is usually a tool to help make other programs. Without outside feedback, or some kind of strong mission to really focus on the mainstream, the whole entire ecosystem can turn into jusr one massive IDE made of loosely coupled utilities.

IYasha 4y ago

Yo... You know what's more retarded on this GNOME screenshot https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/Filepickermeme.png https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/Filepickermeme.png than the absence of thumbnails? The button order. Don't use GTK. Ever! Do you get me? [No][Yes]

greyhair 4y ago

I read the entire mediocre post. I need to take a dump now. Luckily, my toilets both flush, so I can choose whichever is most convenient. Right now I wish I had a third one in the basement, but that would require a pump, which would likely fail.