3 ms·
IMVHO Gnome designers are simply not free. They mostly came from RH before, IBM now corporate/management "environment" so they must follow a certain line, a rea
by kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO Gnome designers are simply not free. They mostly came from RH before, IBM now corporate/management "environment" so they must follow a certain line, a really bad one.
They can do something good, but their are locked on many other aspects. As a result the formal Free project is not that free.
Beside that, yes Unity was a good desktop, something there when you want it, discrete otherwise. Gnome SHell in comparison suffer from secondary narcissism doing it best to be at the center of anything. But desktop concept is finished.
Modern desktops start with icons and than we realize how stupid is putting icons on screen that get continually covered by applications, modern desktops start with floating WM and then we realize how absurd is wasting time moving windows around instead of a simple flexible screen subdivision. Background prove their non-sense, menus prove their absurdity vs command-line/search&narrow tools, ... Essentially the desktop of the future is the classic document-centric desktop from Xerox workstations and LispM after them. We have timidly started such migration with web crapplications that are document-based even if the document is not ours nor easy to change by the end user. We have started calling Notebook UIs the most advanced desktop UIs etc. We have started with quicklaunchers and than "dash" concept, with "tagged" file management and so on. Probably 50-60-70 years after Xerox PARC pioneering works we will have rediscovered what they have implemented back then.
So far personally, the most modern desktop I know is Emacs/EXWM since I have a free tiling WM, I can manage my files with org-roam/org-mode/org-attach instead of a hierarchy of files and folder, I can link pretty anything and have anything integrated. Still not much GUI for the modern time, not like Pharo at least, but far more modern than anything else I've used so far... In a decade probably such modern desktop we will be kind-of mainstream...