7 ms·

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

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.
  - mbreese 4y ago
    It makes sense to me. Developers work on a project (and most definitely open source developers) because they feel some friction with a system. Maybe it’s a task they want to automate, or a bug in some software they need to use. But either way — there must be some pain point that is causing them friction. This is what causes some program/feature to be written or updated or fixed. If those developers have a perfectly good work around, then there is no pain point for them. It doesn’t matter if it is a pain point for their GUI-exclusive users. If they don’t feel the pain, it won’t be prioritized.[*] This isn’t a criticism of Gnome per se, but rather a reality of time management. There is only so much time to go around, which means features and bugs get triaged. If none of the developers feel like this is enough of a pain to get into the quagmire that is the GtkFileChooser (?) widget, then it will not be touched. [*] That is, of course unless they are being paid to do the work. If you are volunteering, then you get to choose what work to do. If you’re getting paid, the suddenly not working on the file chooser could become a pain point for the developer (as they might not get paid). Which is the major advantage commercial OSes have over their open source competition.
    - simion314 4y ago
      GNOME devs want the users to use drag and drop instead of the file pciker, in their mind file picker is outdated and should be removed, in their mind having thumbnails there is duplicating having thumbnails in the File manager. I am joking but I think they considered removing tabs because you should use multiple windows and ENJOY the cool Window manager their designed to switch between windows.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        You're joking, but this is literally the line of logic that GNOME's maintainers have used for the past ~5 years. > "Xorg is outdated and should be removed, everyone port everything over to Wayland!" > "AppIndicator is outdated and should be removed, if anyone uses it (see: everyone), they can impliment it themselves!" > "Native packaging is outdated and should be removed, Flatpak is the future now!" > "Having a proper library of native widgets is outdated and should be removed, so we're replacing it with Libadwaita!" ...and so on and so forth...
hedora 4y ago
The file chooser has been broken since at least gnome 2, and was antiquated in the gnome 1 days. I don't believe it will work in gnome 4.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pixelat3d 4y ago
>> 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? Control + L will turn the path bar into a simple string w/ autocomplete. Am I missing something here or are you talking about pasting a path into the filename portion of the dialog?
- bityard 4y ago
  Hiding important features behind arbitrary keyboard shortcuts is definitely on my list of things I hate about modern desktop environments. (Not to mention, extremely unfriendly to accessibility.)
torginus 4y ago
This is a pet peeve of mine - why is it that in Linux it's idiomatic to start like 5 processes and pipe their outputs together to find a file containing a certain word from the shell, but something like a file chooser cannot be its own program?
- usrn 4y ago
  GNOME often rejects the ideas from the rest of the ecosystem.
- jordemort 4y ago
  You'd need some way to inform the window manager that "windows from this process should be considered modals over this window of mine" - probably something that's in the realm of the possible to hack together?
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    How do message box (alert) popups work?
    - pixelat3d 4y ago
      in GTK when you instantiate the window you pass what is called the "transient for" property (https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/method.NativeDialog.set_transient_for.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/method.NativeDialog.set_transient_...). That informs the dialog what it belongs to. If you were to re-engineer this to make the file picker its own process, then you would have to fundamentally change the way it functions, sadly. Edit: And I think Wayland would make this impossible? Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't you lose basically all inter-window introspection with it? There may be some negotiation process, but I don't know how you would go about accessing an entirely separate application's context under that pipeline.
      - no_time 4y ago
        I bet this info isnt written down explicitly except in this comment. The freedesktop.org community really needs it's own Raymond Chen pass down all the accumulated arcane knowledge.
lobocinza 4y ago
The biggest problem with GNOME is that the organization needs to get their shit together. Their priorities and design choices are awkward at best so I must say they don't care for their users at all.
- thetallguyyy 4y ago
  GNOME's design choices are either extremely good or extremely bad. I like the general workflow, but the panel looks like some crummy i3 config. You could almost get rid of GNOME's panel altogether, placing the network icon etc on the "Applications" view. You can't even switch Audio or Bluetooth devices using the panel. It's dead real estate.
- llllllllllll9 4y ago
  this is seriously a mystery to me. how do people use gnome? how can you be productive with it? i tried so hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782882
  - bityard 4y ago
    I use GNOME only because my favorite OS right now is Pop OS and it's what they ship by default. Otherwise, I'd still probably be laboring to get KDE, XFCE, or MATE to be a satisfactory experience. The only thing that makes GNOME bearable for me are a handful of extensions and post-install tweaks. Specifically Dash-to-Panel and ArcMenu. The biggest thing that still annoys me is the GNOME folks have this fetish about stuffing as many widgets as they can into the titlebars of windows.
  - lobocinza 4y ago
    I use GNOME and honestly like it despite the many flaws. May be some sort of Stockholm syndrome, IDK. As I see I spent most of my time on the CLI or on the browser so the DE in itself doesn't matter that much and GNOME advantage is that I don't have to waste time troubleshooting and customizing it (not even possible sometimes) so I can focus on the things that matter. If you compare DEs pages on Arch Wiki, GNOME by far has the smaller 'Troubleshooting' section. Also when you use something for a long time you know how to workaround it's limitations and fix things while.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I don't get your last comment? Everything is going to move into gtk4 or move to other toolkits as gtk3 gets obsoleted, it's the way of the world.
kgeist 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. I wonder, why can't they introduce something like gtkfilechooserwidget2.c leaving the original widget intact?
- nine_k 4y ago
  A lot of work, maybe? Also, bug-to-bug compatibility?
  - kgeist 4y ago
    It could be a cleaned up version of the widget minus the warts. Applications wouldn't need bug-to-bug compatibility if it was a conscious choice to upgrade to a new widget.
- BenFrantzDale 4y ago
  The big guest Jon for me is, in 2022, why write UI code in C? (I say this as one who contributed to GNOME a little (all icons) back in like ’98–’02 and who writes high-performance C++ professionally.)
amluto 4y ago
Try typing the name of a folder that will be found by the integrated tracker search into a gnome file chooser that’s trying to save a file. Then double-click that folder. The results are poor, to say the least.
kennywinker 4y ago
I understand how things get this way, but it is a super easy problem to fix: 1. spin up a new file picker: GTKFilePicker.c 2. add a deprecation warning to gtkfilechooserwidget.c 3. wait 20 years, then git rm gtkfilechooserwidget.c
llllllllllll9 4y ago
i installed a new debian box for work and i forgot to choose xfce4 so went with the default. gnome 3. i tried. i tried so hard to get used to it. for 2 horrible months i tried. i only need a terminal, emacs, browser, thunderbird, the occasional screenshot and it was still horrific. to be clear it was only the usability that was a nightmare. i experienced no bugs. it's solid. but wow it is unusable. please, please, please someone at gnome headquarters ... can you make it usable? look at win10, win11, macos, kde, chromeos they all work fine. can't you do something like that? i believe you have the best software stack out there, and you're throwing it away with that frightful design. this is tragic.
- kstrauser 4y ago
  This is purely my impression and not something I could prove, but it feels like Gnome wanted to have an out-of-the-box Mac-like experience, while not really understanding while people like using Macs. "You don't have a million configuration options on a Mac, so neither should we!" doesn't account for Apple having whole departments working on UI things, choosing sane defaults, etc. People don't like macOS because it doesn't give them options, but because it tried to make good decisions and patterns so that they won't need to tweak everything. I know lots of people don't like Macs because they're not super tweakable, and that's fine. It's still my impression that Gnome is aiming for that target, while not quite understanding why a lot of people do like Macs.
  - llllllllllll9 4y ago
    100% my impression as well. and you're right. macos is fine from a usability point of view. everything in gnome UI feels like they started strong, stayed strong, and then gave up half way ... (so many examples there's no point listing them anymore) and yeah put the clock in the middle of the bar while we're at it too. and yet, you feel the potential no? no bugs whatsoever for me. :/ back to xfce4. clunky, but consistent. some bugs. it's ok.
    - kstrauser 4y ago
      For sure. It's so close to being amazing, which makes it all the more frustrating.
jsrcout 4y ago
You may know this, but if you type / in the file chooser window, it replaces the path buttons with a text bar that you can type or paste into. I discovered that by accident, probably a couple years after the text bar vanished...
- ugjka 4y ago
  or ~ if you want to navigate $HOME
pxmpxm 4y ago
My favourite idiocy is that gnome-terminal will offset the items in the right click menu and display hex and and octet translation of a number you happen to have highlighted... for reasons. When someone posted this as a bug because of the obvious unintended idiocies with this a being a default immutable behavior, the maintainer essentially told him to f off and go build his own version. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1644986 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1644986 Made another MacOS covert with that exchange, I'm sure.

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.
- mbreese 4y ago
  It makes sense to me. Developers work on a project (and most definitely open source developers) because they feel some friction with a system. Maybe it’s a task they want to automate, or a bug in some software they need to use. But either way — there must be some pain point that is causing them friction. This is what causes some program/feature to be written or updated or fixed. If those developers have a perfectly good work around, then there is no pain point for them. It doesn’t matter if it is a pain point for their GUI-exclusive users. If they don’t feel the pain, it won’t be prioritized.[*] This isn’t a criticism of Gnome per se, but rather a reality of time management. There is only so much time to go around, which means features and bugs get triaged. If none of the developers feel like this is enough of a pain to get into the quagmire that is the GtkFileChooser (?) widget, then it will not be touched. [*] That is, of course unless they are being paid to do the work. If you are volunteering, then you get to choose what work to do. If you’re getting paid, the suddenly not working on the file chooser could become a pain point for the developer (as they might not get paid). Which is the major advantage commercial OSes have over their open source competition.
  - simion314 4y ago
    GNOME devs want the users to use drag and drop instead of the file pciker, in their mind file picker is outdated and should be removed, in their mind having thumbnails there is duplicating having thumbnails in the File manager. I am joking but I think they considered removing tabs because you should use multiple windows and ENJOY the cool Window manager their designed to switch between windows.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      You're joking, but this is literally the line of logic that GNOME's maintainers have used for the past ~5 years. > "Xorg is outdated and should be removed, everyone port everything over to Wayland!" > "AppIndicator is outdated and should be removed, if anyone uses it (see: everyone), they can impliment it themselves!" > "Native packaging is outdated and should be removed, Flatpak is the future now!" > "Having a proper library of native widgets is outdated and should be removed, so we're replacing it with Libadwaita!" ...and so on and so forth...

hedora 4y ago

The file chooser has been broken since at least gnome 2, and was antiquated in the gnome 1 days. I don't believe it will work in gnome 4.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pixelat3d 4y ago

>> 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? Control + L will turn the path bar into a simple string w/ autocomplete. Am I missing something here or are you talking about pasting a path into the filename portion of the dialog?

bityard 4y ago
Hiding important features behind arbitrary keyboard shortcuts is definitely on my list of things I hate about modern desktop environments. (Not to mention, extremely unfriendly to accessibility.)

torginus 4y ago

This is a pet peeve of mine - why is it that in Linux it's idiomatic to start like 5 processes and pipe their outputs together to find a file containing a certain word from the shell, but something like a file chooser cannot be its own program?

usrn 4y ago
GNOME often rejects the ideas from the rest of the ecosystem.
jordemort 4y ago
You'd need some way to inform the window manager that "windows from this process should be considered modals over this window of mine" - probably something that's in the realm of the possible to hack together?
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  How do message box (alert) popups work?
  - pixelat3d 4y ago
    in GTK when you instantiate the window you pass what is called the "transient for" property (https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/method.NativeDialog.set_transient_for.html https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/method.NativeDialog.set_transient_...). That informs the dialog what it belongs to. If you were to re-engineer this to make the file picker its own process, then you would have to fundamentally change the way it functions, sadly. Edit: And I think Wayland would make this impossible? Someone correct me if I'm wrong here, but don't you lose basically all inter-window introspection with it? There may be some negotiation process, but I don't know how you would go about accessing an entirely separate application's context under that pipeline.
    - no_time 4y ago
      I bet this info isnt written down explicitly except in this comment. The freedesktop.org community really needs it's own Raymond Chen pass down all the accumulated arcane knowledge.

lobocinza 4y ago

The biggest problem with GNOME is that the organization needs to get their shit together. Their priorities and design choices are awkward at best so I must say they don't care for their users at all.

thetallguyyy 4y ago
GNOME's design choices are either extremely good or extremely bad. I like the general workflow, but the panel looks like some crummy i3 config. You could almost get rid of GNOME's panel altogether, placing the network icon etc on the "Applications" view. You can't even switch Audio or Bluetooth devices using the panel. It's dead real estate.
llllllllllll9 4y ago
this is seriously a mystery to me. how do people use gnome? how can you be productive with it? i tried so hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782882
- bityard 4y ago
  I use GNOME only because my favorite OS right now is Pop OS and it's what they ship by default. Otherwise, I'd still probably be laboring to get KDE, XFCE, or MATE to be a satisfactory experience. The only thing that makes GNOME bearable for me are a handful of extensions and post-install tweaks. Specifically Dash-to-Panel and ArcMenu. The biggest thing that still annoys me is the GNOME folks have this fetish about stuffing as many widgets as they can into the titlebars of windows.
- lobocinza 4y ago
  I use GNOME and honestly like it despite the many flaws. May be some sort of Stockholm syndrome, IDK. As I see I spent most of my time on the CLI or on the browser so the DE in itself doesn't matter that much and GNOME advantage is that I don't have to waste time troubleshooting and customizing it (not even possible sometimes) so I can focus on the things that matter. If you compare DEs pages on Arch Wiki, GNOME by far has the smaller 'Troubleshooting' section. Also when you use something for a long time you know how to workaround it's limitations and fix things while.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I don't get your last comment? Everything is going to move into gtk4 or move to other toolkits as gtk3 gets obsoleted, it's the way of the world.

kgeist 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. I wonder, why can't they introduce something like gtkfilechooserwidget2.c leaving the original widget intact?

nine_k 4y ago
A lot of work, maybe? Also, bug-to-bug compatibility?
- kgeist 4y ago
  It could be a cleaned up version of the widget minus the warts. Applications wouldn't need bug-to-bug compatibility if it was a conscious choice to upgrade to a new widget.
BenFrantzDale 4y ago
The big guest Jon for me is, in 2022, why write UI code in C? (I say this as one who contributed to GNOME a little (all icons) back in like ’98–’02 and who writes high-performance C++ professionally.)

amluto 4y ago

Try typing the name of a folder that will be found by the integrated tracker search into a gnome file chooser that’s trying to save a file. Then double-click that folder. The results are poor, to say the least.

kennywinker 4y ago

I understand how things get this way, but it is a super easy problem to fix: 1. spin up a new file picker: GTKFilePicker.c 2. add a deprecation warning to gtkfilechooserwidget.c 3. wait 20 years, then git rm gtkfilechooserwidget.c

llllllllllll9 4y ago

i installed a new debian box for work and i forgot to choose xfce4 so went with the default. gnome 3. i tried. i tried so hard to get used to it. for 2 horrible months i tried. i only need a terminal, emacs, browser, thunderbird, the occasional screenshot and it was still horrific. to be clear it was only the usability that was a nightmare. i experienced no bugs. it's solid. but wow it is unusable. please, please, please someone at gnome headquarters ... can you make it usable? look at win10, win11, macos, kde, chromeos they all work fine. can't you do something like that? i believe you have the best software stack out there, and you're throwing it away with that frightful design. this is tragic.

kstrauser 4y ago
This is purely my impression and not something I could prove, but it feels like Gnome wanted to have an out-of-the-box Mac-like experience, while not really understanding while people like using Macs. "You don't have a million configuration options on a Mac, so neither should we!" doesn't account for Apple having whole departments working on UI things, choosing sane defaults, etc. People don't like macOS because it doesn't give them options, but because it tried to make good decisions and patterns so that they won't need to tweak everything. I know lots of people don't like Macs because they're not super tweakable, and that's fine. It's still my impression that Gnome is aiming for that target, while not quite understanding why a lot of people do like Macs.
- llllllllllll9 4y ago
  100% my impression as well. and you're right. macos is fine from a usability point of view. everything in gnome UI feels like they started strong, stayed strong, and then gave up half way ... (so many examples there's no point listing them anymore) and yeah put the clock in the middle of the bar while we're at it too. and yet, you feel the potential no? no bugs whatsoever for me. :/ back to xfce4. clunky, but consistent. some bugs. it's ok.
  - kstrauser 4y ago
    For sure. It's so close to being amazing, which makes it all the more frustrating.

jsrcout 4y ago

You may know this, but if you type / in the file chooser window, it replaces the path buttons with a text bar that you can type or paste into. I discovered that by accident, probably a couple years after the text bar vanished...

ugjka 4y ago
or ~ if you want to navigate $HOME

pxmpxm 4y ago

My favourite idiocy is that gnome-terminal will offset the items in the right click menu and display hex and and octet translation of a number you happen to have highlighted... for reasons. When someone posted this as a bug because of the obvious unintended idiocies with this a being a default immutable behavior, the maintainer essentially told him to f off and go build his own version. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1644986 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1644986 Made another MacOS covert with that exchange, I'm sure.