14 ms·

Gnome Turns 25

133 points by miohtama 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dtx1 4y ago
Gnome turns 25...still no image preview in the filepicker
- ginko 4y ago
  And people that try to provide workarounds will get called 'clowns' and sabotaged by the GTK people: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    I love using Gnome but I hate the Gnome developer mindset. Everybody but them is an incompetent fool because they dare use their precious code in a different way. Every time one of these issues come up I consider just switching to KDE because although the UI doesn't sit as right with me, the developers and culture around the KDE project just seem so much better.
  - kuschku 4y ago
    If users have to use debug flags because your software has no customizability whatsoever, the fault isn't with the users using those flags, the fault is with the developer not offering proper solutions. WTF Gnome, why do you hate your own users so much
    - ducktective 4y ago
      Actually the fault is with the users who still put up with random philosophies of certain app developers. It's a free world. Move on to something else. Recommend i3wm with Xfce apps.
      - jraph 4y ago
        The GTK file picker is practically unavoidable. It's in important applications like Inkscape, Gimp and was unavoidable with electron apps too until recently. Moreover, most users don't actually follow the discussions with the developers. They would not know about their philosophy. Also, this is not the only criterion when choosing software. And given how Gnome and GTK are (still) everywhere, I'd find it worth having this kind of things fixed even if I don't/didn't personally use the thing. I don't think blaming the users is a solution.
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        The closest thing to a solution is to blame the distros for shipping the apps incorrectly and encouraging users to do unsupported things like combining several apps from several different desktops together without testing them, when this has never really been a thing that ever worked correctly. The correct way to get portal support is to use the flatpak versions of those packages, because those are the only packages that have actually been designed and tested to work with the portal. And if you are a person who really does not like flatpak, then you should ask your distro to start integrating sandboxing and portals into their own package managers and testing/supporting the packages that way.
        ginko 4y ago
        Flatpak? Are you serious?
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        I am not sure what you are asking, other than asking for me to repeat myself. I gave the reason why Flatpak is the only option here.
        ducktective 4y ago
        The Correct Way™ is actually NixOS/GuiX these days. I had major issues when I used Snap GUI apps. Like it was not clear where did the config file saved to or sometimes the file picker couldn't even detect my drives (due to sandboxing). It was doing its own thing regarding theming. If Flatpak is anything like this, then it's not a viable solution.
    - Crysstalis 4y ago
      The environment variable was disabled because of a bug report on reddit that it was causing other issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/vhij0o/gtk_use_portal1_environment_variable_causes_gnome/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/vhij0o/gtk_use_porta... In this case, the arch wiki was actively telling users to do things that could break their system. It was a debug flag that was only intended to be used by developers and causes a number of other side effects. So it is no surprise that they changed it. Technically it was not removed, it was only moved into a flag that is only available in debug builds.
      - kuschku 4y ago
        So why don't they add a proper flag? I'm now running debug builds of gnome to get that functionality back. I wish everyone would abandone GTK and instead switch to Qt, but as long as that hasn't happened yet, I'll have to use such environment variables to get GTK apps to look and work consistently on a Qt desktop.
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        The short answer is because any flag will break other things. There is another suggestion to not require any flag, but it probably will not be implemented because of this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5026 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5026 It is not possible in open source to force everyone to use one toolkit, in my opinion you are wasting your time by wishing for that. There are dozens of toolkits to choose from and the number seems to be growing. The fragmentation has only gotten stronger over the last 25 years, if Qt was the clear winner the proliferation would have stopped long ago. Now there is pretty much no chance that you will be able to hack every toolkit to get all of them to look and work consistently. In particular, the way an app works is decided by the HIG it follows, not the theme. This is reflected in the entire design of the app, to change it requires redesigning the whole app. It cannot be changed just by setting some environment variables.
        kuschku 4y ago
        It’s mostly an issue with games or java apps or electron using Gtk dialogs. Those apps don’t feel native anyway, but the areas where they interact with the OS at least should feel native. I don’t care about Gtk apps themselves, because I just don’t use any proper Gtk apps (I want my apps to be customizable, after all, and I build my own programs to be customizable too). Why is it always Gnome developers and fans who hate any attempt to make Gnome apps look and feel more like other toolkits? No one expects Gnome apps to work 1:1 like Qt apps, but it feels like every step in the right direction is met with constant hate and objections.
zasdffaa 4y ago
A couple f years ago I installed linux on a machine to do some dev that wasn't supported in windows. My first time exposed to gnome. I have never used such a mis-designed clueless UI, and I could not believe the number of outright bugs I encountered. It was like it was designed by kids.
- nomad41 4y ago
  It's funny because that's my exact experience using Windows. Buggy and incredibly bad defaults, completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls. macOS is bearable and I can be productive on it, but I think GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity. To each their own, I guess.
  - zasdffaa 4y ago
    > completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls. Certainly not. I suspect you aren't familiar with win, it has a lot of these although MS seems determined to wreck them. I'm no MS shill, I wish they would DIAF, but I do find windows highly reliable and the UI was pretty good until they decided to fuck with it. By comparison I found gnome actively user hostile. Even small niceties that windows has are missing (eg one of very many, go up a folder in windows and the folder you were on will be the one selected, very handy). I would like to sit down with you and compare experiences, but ain't going to happen. Glad it works for you though.
  - input_sh 4y ago
    > but I think GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity I'd agree if it weren't for the default keyboard shortcuts. Like every app in existence uses ctrl+tab to switch between tabs, but GNOME's apps (like Files and Terminal) use ctrl+pgdown.
    - cuu508 4y ago
      I use Alt+<number> to switch to n-th tab. It works in Files, Terminal, Sublime Text, Firefox, GIMP.
    - 4y ago
beebeepka 4y ago
As a long time user, and a front-end developer, Gnome 2 and its derivatives don't make much sense to me. "Vertical taskbar? Not on my watch!" Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to setup a vertical bar and complain about them using a repeating 1x30px (don't remember the actual number) image for background, rendering the bar barely usable. Something MS nailed back with windows 95! Gnome 3 is mostly fine but not before you reach for at least a couple of basic add-ons. I truly believe believe they are trolling people with the default behaviour of Gnome 3 I liked Canonical's Unity very much, although it's no longer the prettiest. I realized that last part due to the recent reboot
- lproven 4y ago
  « As a long time user, and a front-end developer, Gnome 2 and its derivatives don't make much sense to me. "Vertical taskbar? Not on my watch!" Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to setup a vertical bar and complain about them using a repeating 1x30px (don't remember the actual number) image for background, rendering the bar barely usable. Something MS nailed back with windows 95! » Thank you for saying this, because I very often feel like I am a lone voice crying in the wilderness when I point this out. « I liked Canonical's Unity very much, although it's no longer the prettiest. I realized that last part due to the recent reboot » Also this. This, though: « Gnome 3 is mostly fine but not before you reach for at least a couple of basic add-ons. I truly believe believe they are trolling people with the default behaviour of Gnome 3 » This, however, less so. It is possible to give GNOME 3 a partial makeover into something better, with a lot of addons, some now getting very hard to find. The snag is that addons are tied to that particular version of GNOME Shell, and thus inevitably, an OS update that updates the shell breaks your entire desktop. The misplaced confidence of the GNOME team is such that they provide but do not embrace the addons scene, and so there is no support for a safe mode, for example, so that if your addons crash the desktop can recover. I would guess that the dev team use it unmodified and do not test for such things. "If you break it, you bought it." IOW: we didn't supply the extensions, so if they broke your desktop, it's not our problem.
ralmidani 4y ago
I use the latest Ubuntu with Gnome and it seems… OK? I’m not super picky, I can find my way around - and tolerate - anything as long as it’s not Windows. That said, I have a Framework laptop for my personal use (my company gives us Mac devices), and they say Fedora has the best driver support. Since I’ll be evaluating a new distro, I’m also considering taking another serious look at KDE after a long time using Ubuntu’s Unity and Gnome. Concretely, what would I gain, and what might I lose?
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I still miss Unity sometimes :( One thing I don't particularly like about the "new" Gnome is that it makes the searchable launcher[0] fullscreen. So whatever context you're in is completely covered up by the launcher when you simply want to search for something to open. Remember when Windows 8 did the same thing? Microsoft moved away from that pattern since then. For all of the issues people had with Unity (the Amazon integration circa 16.04), at least it got the launcher somewhat right[1] [0] Gnome launcher: https://imgur.com/l422pxK https://imgur.com/l422pxK [1] Unity launcher: https://imgur.com/sfw76Et https://imgur.com/sfw76Et
- mmsimanga 4y ago
  I have the same attitude as you do. When I was younger I spent so much time tweaking and changing Linux distros and desktops. Now I just install any Debian based distro and enable the dark theme. I pretty much leave everything as default. I spent most of my time in the apps I use, DBeaver for database work, Firefox and whatever editor I am using. I am bemused by the passionate partisan comments in this thread. I am long past that but thankful to all developers working on Open Source desktops.
  - ralmidani 4y ago
    Yeah, I have a hard time justifying hyper-customization. I understand that folks want to work efficiently, but as a dev, I need to stop and think about what I’m doing. I also have a tendency to rabbit-hole (actual feedback from my peers and manager), and if I leave myself unchecked I’ll probably spend more time “optimizing my workflow” than doing actually useful stuff. These days, the only real changes I tend to make are installing oh-my-zsh (thereby outsourcing the low-level tweaks to someone else) and Sublime with a handful of plugins (does that count?).
pjmlp 4y ago
The maturity of a desktop project that drops the GUI designer, expects devs to simply type raw XML, while the upcoming designer uses Web technologies to draw what are supposed to be native UIs.
voxadam 4y ago
Interesting, I had no idea that KDE predates GNOME by more than two years. I would have assumed that GNOME release years before KDE. It's not important who came first, I'm just expressing my surprise.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  Gnome was created in part as a response to kde using the Qt toolkit which at the time had some licensing issues. This is why gnome was based on the gtk toolkit which was free as in speech.
Symmetry 4y ago
Huh, looks like I've been using Gnome for most of its history (since Feisty). Replacing the default window manager with xmonad has gotten a little more complicated over the years I've been doing it but I'm still happily writing this from my Gnome-monad setup thanks to the magic of autostart and `--replace`.
- loloquwowndueo 4y ago
  I don’t think you have - 25 years means Gnome has been around since 1997, while Feisty was the 7.04 Ubuntu release, so about a 10-year difference.
  - jraph 4y ago
    2007 to now is 15 years, that's more than half of 25, which is 12.5.
ognarb 4y ago
Looks like I will need to update https://carlschwan.eu/2021/04/29/health-of-the-kde-community/ https://carlschwan.eu/2021/04/29/health-of-the-kde-community...
jl6 4y ago
25 years since Gnome was created. 10 years since the type-ahead find bug was opened on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681871 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681871 (bug now moved to Gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1157 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1157) 7 years since a patch was provided to fix the issue. Still waiting. Note that this was a feature that Gnome used to have, but removed. Windows Explorer and macOS Finder both have the feature too.
- fsh 4y ago
  This is not a "bug" or an "issue", it is a matter of taste. Some users prefer search, others prefer a simpler "jump to file" function. The maintainers have decided to implement the former. Arrogant comments like this really make me wonder why people are still putting work into open-source projects.
  - elcritch 4y ago
    The newer issue proposes to provide both methods, similar to windows. The “bug” seems to be that the maintainers prefer one style and refuse to let others add the alternative. That would jibe with what I’ve read about other anti-user attitudes in Gnome.
    - bandrami 4y ago
      This is a project that officially says things like "unless it's an accessibility issue users shouldn't be selecting system fonts" and "why are we even talking about allowing themes?"
    - Crysstalis 4y ago
      Adding more and more confusing options is generally what is seen as being anti-user. If you really care about this, it is trivial to use a different file manager with GNOME. It is not going to be useful to keep insisting that designers capitulate to a set of demands, after years of them saying that it conflicts with the stated goals of the system.
  - 4y ago
zvmaz 4y ago
I have used all possible DEs and Window Managers, and finally settled on Gnome. I feel that I am very efficient using it, more so than when I was using tilling window managers (wmii, i3, dwm, etc.). Gnome is just an incredible piece of software that works out of the box. Try it.
- 098799 4y ago
  When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me", which is fine, but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.
  - Darmody 4y ago
    To me it means: I don't have to spend a whole week tweaking stuff so the DE won't get break my workflow with annoying things. Which then translates to bugs here and there, inconsistency and may other problems. And while Gnome is a pain in the *s sometimes because they remove features, it's still better than the alternatives to me.
    - nik5 4y ago
      Why would you spend whole week, if you can copy the configs from older machines?
      - Darmody 4y ago
        Because some tweaks can't just be saved and restored later.
        behnamoh 4y ago
        which is one of Gnome's problems. I don't want to install extensions only to realize they won't work on the new Gnome version.
kombine 4y ago
KDE is more powerful and configurable in every way, unlike of forcing the user into a particular paradigm like GNOME does. Also the software suite is stellar.
- 2143 4y ago
  > more powerful "More powerful"? What does that mean, in the context of DE?
  - nani8ot 4y ago
    "More powerful" in the context of features. E.g. Kate (text editor) has many advanced features not available in Gnome Text Editor. For me the reduced feature-set of Gnome apps is what I want because I don't usually need them. I like the (imo) clean and easy UX of Gnome apps.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - indymike 4y ago
    I think both Gnome and KDE are pretty nice... Powerful is probably not the right word. KDE has a lot more features, and a lot more of those features are user configurable. Gnome has taken the path of a well executed, smaller feature set with fewer places the user can customize. KDE has taken the path of more features, but at the cost of more code, and more things that could have bugs. Personally, I love customizing everything, so I prefer KDE. But both Gnome and KDE are fantastic and give OSX a run for its money on usability, and both are superior to Windows 11 (which by the way is the best Windows UI since about XP).
- greyw 4y ago
  It's also full of bugs. Kwin_x11 regularily crashed on me requiring a manual restart of it. I'd rather have something that works than a lot of configuration options that don't work. I'm using gnome nowadays (without any extensions)
- 4y ago
loeg 4y ago
The best version of GNOME was Gnome 2. Before Gnome 3, I used Gnome for years. They really burned a lot of users with that reduction in functionality and consistently user-hostile attitude. The closest modern desktop environment to Gnome 2 is KDE’s Plasma. It’s easy to use out of the box and doesn’t require any configuration (unless you want to do that kind of thing, and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+).
- squarefoot 4y ago
  What's much worse is that most of the problem is on GTK, whose terrible post V2 design affects lots of software outside of Gnome.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Plasma seems like the worst part of KDE to me. It looks nice and has good functionality when it's working, but unfortunately it's riddled with bugs. Panels crash all the time and don't come back until I restart plasmashell. I gave up on Plasma. I still use kwin and several KDE applications, like Dolphin, but now I use those with LxQT instead of Plasma. It doesn't look as stylish, but it seems to be rock solid. Plus I still get all the nice compositing effects and configurability of kwin.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Worth noting that this approach would have been impossible to execute on GNOME Shell, which integrates its shell, compositor and window manager in a single component.
- silisili 4y ago
  I liked 2 the best, especially with a dock. I understand what they were attempting in 3, but it was such a letdown. Writing everything in JS was a weird decision. I remember for the first few releases, having to constantly restart the shell because the JS engine leaked so badly. You could watch RSS grow indefinitely everytime you moused over the top left corner. It's a lot better now, usable with a few extensions...but I still think what a waste it was tossing 2 like they did. Extensions are an OK idea, but because they're mostly JS and CSS, there doesn't seem to be much safety there. It's very common for them to break each release because of some obscure attribute change.
Postosuchus 4y ago
Am I the only one who feels that Gnome, somewhat hilariously, is unable to get basic consistent UI over 2.5 decades - something that KDE nailed down at ... what was it? ... KDE 1.1? I mean it is kind of sad, but educational - you get the project without clear goal, with zero consistency, without any regard to backward compatibility - and after 25 years you end up effectively with a mediocre window manager and a bunch of programs with wildly inconsistent UIs (which predictably break next time your UI toolkit goes from 2.4.8 to 2.4.9 making a migration to the new minor release a multi-year saga which invariably loses features that worked before)... Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)...
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  They had it nailed in Gnome 2.x, but they let self-styled designers constantly churn the UX. Designers who will never admit that UX churn is bad UX.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Well, KDE is still stubbornly sticking to the wrong order of OK/cancel buttons. It's quite puzzling.
  - Narishma 4y ago
    There is no wrong order.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)... To blame rms of all people for what you've described demonstrates a lack of understanding his scope of influence and participation in gnome especially in this era. I can get behind blaming rms for gcc's missed opportunities, ultimately ceding its dominant position to clang/llvm. He clearly overplayed his hand there. But when it comes to gnome I recall little more than mailing list bickering over gnome being a GNU project or not and what the G in GNOME stands for. Perhaps my memory is failing here, but it feels crediting rms with anything more than wasting a bit of gnome devs time and frustration would be overstating it. Not that any FOSS devs need more of that with how entitled and obnoxious users already can be, but they tend to have developed thick enough skin to ignore rms's aspy silliness. Can you provide any examples to the contrary?
Klasiaster 4y ago
For a polished GNOME experience I recommend Fedora (once you know how to install the missing media codecs). Even Firefox there runs natively under Wayland and you also benefit from the latest advancements such as the Thunderbolt or performance managers.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  Fedora in general is more "sane" than most other distros. Something about it just feels mature, stable, and well-thought-out.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    It’s because Red Hat has the engineering talent and bodies to make a cohesive system by carrying a frankly insane amount of patches to bend all software to the RHEL way and tackle extremely ambitious userspace plumbing projects. I’m so sad at what IBM will eventually do to them.
  - Klasiaster 4y ago
    I think the proposal process works very well to modernize the distro and drive forward the improvements of the default installation, while in Debian the teams seem to do their own thing and innovation is very slow and even controversial (e.g., the systemd or merged /usr/ migration are sad examples but even small things like a good zram setup, systemd-oomd, and btrfs by default make a large difference).
jrm4 4y ago
I'm really glad to see this because I think we can now have a smarter conversation than the typical one on why people dislike Gnome so much and why it is okay, even good to criticize it. People get angry at me for insulting it because of the ridiculous "It's open source so you don't have the right to criticize" argument. As this shows, there's a lot of corporate contributions to the codebase. For better or (mostly) worse -- that means the project will likely have much more of a "proprietary-like" mentality than perhaps what we think of when we say Free/Open Source. This plays out, right? The thing people don't like about Gnome frequently boils down to backward-breakage and not being able to meaningfully contribute. And yet, Gnome enjoys a lot of popularity in the space that affects the "Linux" ecosystem, and I think the way they do things messes it up. This is why, for now, I am explicitly anti-Gnome. I hope it changes, or I hope it gets less popular.

Gnome Turns 25

133 points by miohtama 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dtx1 4y ago

Gnome turns 25...still no image preview in the filepicker

ginko 4y ago
And people that try to provide workarounds will get called 'clowns' and sabotaged by the GTK people: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I love using Gnome but I hate the Gnome developer mindset. Everybody but them is an incompetent fool because they dare use their precious code in a different way. Every time one of these issues come up I consider just switching to KDE because although the UI doesn't sit as right with me, the developers and culture around the KDE project just seem so much better.
- kuschku 4y ago
  If users have to use debug flags because your software has no customizability whatsoever, the fault isn't with the users using those flags, the fault is with the developer not offering proper solutions. WTF Gnome, why do you hate your own users so much
  - ducktective 4y ago
    Actually the fault is with the users who still put up with random philosophies of certain app developers. It's a free world. Move on to something else. Recommend i3wm with Xfce apps.
    - jraph 4y ago
      The GTK file picker is practically unavoidable. It's in important applications like Inkscape, Gimp and was unavoidable with electron apps too until recently. Moreover, most users don't actually follow the discussions with the developers. They would not know about their philosophy. Also, this is not the only criterion when choosing software. And given how Gnome and GTK are (still) everywhere, I'd find it worth having this kind of things fixed even if I don't/didn't personally use the thing. I don't think blaming the users is a solution.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        The closest thing to a solution is to blame the distros for shipping the apps incorrectly and encouraging users to do unsupported things like combining several apps from several different desktops together without testing them, when this has never really been a thing that ever worked correctly. The correct way to get portal support is to use the flatpak versions of those packages, because those are the only packages that have actually been designed and tested to work with the portal. And if you are a person who really does not like flatpak, then you should ask your distro to start integrating sandboxing and portals into their own package managers and testing/supporting the packages that way.
        ginko 4y ago
        Flatpak? Are you serious?
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        I am not sure what you are asking, other than asking for me to repeat myself. I gave the reason why Flatpak is the only option here.
        ducktective 4y ago
        The Correct Way™ is actually NixOS/GuiX these days. I had major issues when I used Snap GUI apps. Like it was not clear where did the config file saved to or sometimes the file picker couldn't even detect my drives (due to sandboxing). It was doing its own thing regarding theming. If Flatpak is anything like this, then it's not a viable solution.
  - Crysstalis 4y ago
    The environment variable was disabled because of a bug report on reddit that it was causing other issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/vhij0o/gtk_use_portal1_environment_variable_causes_gnome/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/vhij0o/gtk_use_porta... In this case, the arch wiki was actively telling users to do things that could break their system. It was a debug flag that was only intended to be used by developers and causes a number of other side effects. So it is no surprise that they changed it. Technically it was not removed, it was only moved into a flag that is only available in debug builds.
    - kuschku 4y ago
      So why don't they add a proper flag? I'm now running debug builds of gnome to get that functionality back. I wish everyone would abandone GTK and instead switch to Qt, but as long as that hasn't happened yet, I'll have to use such environment variables to get GTK apps to look and work consistently on a Qt desktop.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        The short answer is because any flag will break other things. There is another suggestion to not require any flag, but it probably will not be implemented because of this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5026 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5026 It is not possible in open source to force everyone to use one toolkit, in my opinion you are wasting your time by wishing for that. There are dozens of toolkits to choose from and the number seems to be growing. The fragmentation has only gotten stronger over the last 25 years, if Qt was the clear winner the proliferation would have stopped long ago. Now there is pretty much no chance that you will be able to hack every toolkit to get all of them to look and work consistently. In particular, the way an app works is decided by the HIG it follows, not the theme. This is reflected in the entire design of the app, to change it requires redesigning the whole app. It cannot be changed just by setting some environment variables.
        kuschku 4y ago
        It’s mostly an issue with games or java apps or electron using Gtk dialogs. Those apps don’t feel native anyway, but the areas where they interact with the OS at least should feel native. I don’t care about Gtk apps themselves, because I just don’t use any proper Gtk apps (I want my apps to be customizable, after all, and I build my own programs to be customizable too). Why is it always Gnome developers and fans who hate any attempt to make Gnome apps look and feel more like other toolkits? No one expects Gnome apps to work 1:1 like Qt apps, but it feels like every step in the right direction is met with constant hate and objections.

zasdffaa 4y ago

A couple f years ago I installed linux on a machine to do some dev that wasn't supported in windows. My first time exposed to gnome. I have never used such a mis-designed clueless UI, and I could not believe the number of outright bugs I encountered. It was like it was designed by kids.

nomad41 4y ago
It's funny because that's my exact experience using Windows. Buggy and incredibly bad defaults, completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls. macOS is bearable and I can be productive on it, but I think GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity. To each their own, I guess.
- zasdffaa 4y ago
  > completely mouse driven with insufficient keyboard controls. Certainly not. I suspect you aren't familiar with win, it has a lot of these although MS seems determined to wreck them. I'm no MS shill, I wish they would DIAF, but I do find windows highly reliable and the UI was pretty good until they decided to fuck with it. By comparison I found gnome actively user hostile. Even small niceties that windows has are missing (eg one of very many, go up a folder in windows and the folder you were on will be the one selected, very handy). I would like to sit down with you and compare experiences, but ain't going to happen. Glad it works for you though.
- input_sh 4y ago
  > but I think GNOME is the perfect desktop for productivity I'd agree if it weren't for the default keyboard shortcuts. Like every app in existence uses ctrl+tab to switch between tabs, but GNOME's apps (like Files and Terminal) use ctrl+pgdown.
  - cuu508 4y ago
    I use Alt+<number> to switch to n-th tab. It works in Files, Terminal, Sublime Text, Firefox, GIMP.
  - 4y ago

beebeepka 4y ago

As a long time user, and a front-end developer, Gnome 2 and its derivatives don't make much sense to me. "Vertical taskbar? Not on my watch!" Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to setup a vertical bar and complain about them using a repeating 1x30px (don't remember the actual number) image for background, rendering the bar barely usable. Something MS nailed back with windows 95! Gnome 3 is mostly fine but not before you reach for at least a couple of basic add-ons. I truly believe believe they are trolling people with the default behaviour of Gnome 3 I liked Canonical's Unity very much, although it's no longer the prettiest. I realized that last part due to the recent reboot

lproven 4y ago
« As a long time user, and a front-end developer, Gnome 2 and its derivatives don't make much sense to me. "Vertical taskbar? Not on my watch!" Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to setup a vertical bar and complain about them using a repeating 1x30px (don't remember the actual number) image for background, rendering the bar barely usable. Something MS nailed back with windows 95! » Thank you for saying this, because I very often feel like I am a lone voice crying in the wilderness when I point this out. « I liked Canonical's Unity very much, although it's no longer the prettiest. I realized that last part due to the recent reboot » Also this. This, though: « Gnome 3 is mostly fine but not before you reach for at least a couple of basic add-ons. I truly believe believe they are trolling people with the default behaviour of Gnome 3 » This, however, less so. It is possible to give GNOME 3 a partial makeover into something better, with a lot of addons, some now getting very hard to find. The snag is that addons are tied to that particular version of GNOME Shell, and thus inevitably, an OS update that updates the shell breaks your entire desktop. The misplaced confidence of the GNOME team is such that they provide but do not embrace the addons scene, and so there is no support for a safe mode, for example, so that if your addons crash the desktop can recover. I would guess that the dev team use it unmodified and do not test for such things. "If you break it, you bought it." IOW: we didn't supply the extensions, so if they broke your desktop, it's not our problem.

ralmidani 4y ago

I use the latest Ubuntu with Gnome and it seems… OK? I’m not super picky, I can find my way around - and tolerate - anything as long as it’s not Windows. That said, I have a Framework laptop for my personal use (my company gives us Mac devices), and they say Fedora has the best driver support. Since I’ll be evaluating a new distro, I’m also considering taking another serious look at KDE after a long time using Ubuntu’s Unity and Gnome. Concretely, what would I gain, and what might I lose?

wildrhythms 4y ago
I still miss Unity sometimes :( One thing I don't particularly like about the "new" Gnome is that it makes the searchable launcher[0] fullscreen. So whatever context you're in is completely covered up by the launcher when you simply want to search for something to open. Remember when Windows 8 did the same thing? Microsoft moved away from that pattern since then. For all of the issues people had with Unity (the Amazon integration circa 16.04), at least it got the launcher somewhat right[1] [0] Gnome launcher: https://imgur.com/l422pxK https://imgur.com/l422pxK [1] Unity launcher: https://imgur.com/sfw76Et https://imgur.com/sfw76Et
mmsimanga 4y ago
I have the same attitude as you do. When I was younger I spent so much time tweaking and changing Linux distros and desktops. Now I just install any Debian based distro and enable the dark theme. I pretty much leave everything as default. I spent most of my time in the apps I use, DBeaver for database work, Firefox and whatever editor I am using. I am bemused by the passionate partisan comments in this thread. I am long past that but thankful to all developers working on Open Source desktops.
- ralmidani 4y ago
  Yeah, I have a hard time justifying hyper-customization. I understand that folks want to work efficiently, but as a dev, I need to stop and think about what I’m doing. I also have a tendency to rabbit-hole (actual feedback from my peers and manager), and if I leave myself unchecked I’ll probably spend more time “optimizing my workflow” than doing actually useful stuff. These days, the only real changes I tend to make are installing oh-my-zsh (thereby outsourcing the low-level tweaks to someone else) and Sublime with a handful of plugins (does that count?).

pjmlp 4y ago

The maturity of a desktop project that drops the GUI designer, expects devs to simply type raw XML, while the upcoming designer uses Web technologies to draw what are supposed to be native UIs.

voxadam 4y ago

Interesting, I had no idea that KDE predates GNOME by more than two years. I would have assumed that GNOME release years before KDE. It's not important who came first, I'm just expressing my surprise.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago
Gnome was created in part as a response to kde using the Qt toolkit which at the time had some licensing issues. This is why gnome was based on the gtk toolkit which was free as in speech.

Symmetry 4y ago

Huh, looks like I've been using Gnome for most of its history (since Feisty). Replacing the default window manager with xmonad has gotten a little more complicated over the years I've been doing it but I'm still happily writing this from my Gnome-monad setup thanks to the magic of autostart and `--replace`.

loloquwowndueo 4y ago
I don’t think you have - 25 years means Gnome has been around since 1997, while Feisty was the 7.04 Ubuntu release, so about a 10-year difference.
- jraph 4y ago
  2007 to now is 15 years, that's more than half of 25, which is 12.5.

ognarb 4y ago

Looks like I will need to update https://carlschwan.eu/2021/04/29/health-of-the-kde-community/ https://carlschwan.eu/2021/04/29/health-of-the-kde-community...

jl6 4y ago

25 years since Gnome was created. 10 years since the type-ahead find bug was opened on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681871 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681871 (bug now moved to Gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1157 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1157) 7 years since a patch was provided to fix the issue. Still waiting. Note that this was a feature that Gnome used to have, but removed. Windows Explorer and macOS Finder both have the feature too.

fsh 4y ago
This is not a "bug" or an "issue", it is a matter of taste. Some users prefer search, others prefer a simpler "jump to file" function. The maintainers have decided to implement the former. Arrogant comments like this really make me wonder why people are still putting work into open-source projects.
- elcritch 4y ago
  The newer issue proposes to provide both methods, similar to windows. The “bug” seems to be that the maintainers prefer one style and refuse to let others add the alternative. That would jibe with what I’ve read about other anti-user attitudes in Gnome.
  - bandrami 4y ago
    This is a project that officially says things like "unless it's an accessibility issue users shouldn't be selecting system fonts" and "why are we even talking about allowing themes?"
  - Crysstalis 4y ago
    Adding more and more confusing options is generally what is seen as being anti-user. If you really care about this, it is trivial to use a different file manager with GNOME. It is not going to be useful to keep insisting that designers capitulate to a set of demands, after years of them saying that it conflicts with the stated goals of the system.
- 4y ago

zvmaz 4y ago

I have used all possible DEs and Window Managers, and finally settled on Gnome. I feel that I am very efficient using it, more so than when I was using tilling window managers (wmii, i3, dwm, etc.). Gnome is just an incredible piece of software that works out of the box. Try it.

098799 4y ago
When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me", which is fine, but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.
- Darmody 4y ago
  To me it means: I don't have to spend a whole week tweaking stuff so the DE won't get break my workflow with annoying things. Which then translates to bugs here and there, inconsistency and may other problems. And while Gnome is a pain in the *s sometimes because they remove features, it's still better than the alternatives to me.
  - nik5 4y ago
    Why would you spend whole week, if you can copy the configs from older machines?
    - Darmody 4y ago
      Because some tweaks can't just be saved and restored later.
      - behnamoh 4y ago
        which is one of Gnome's problems. I don't want to install extensions only to realize they won't work on the new Gnome version.

kombine 4y ago

KDE is more powerful and configurable in every way, unlike of forcing the user into a particular paradigm like GNOME does. Also the software suite is stellar.

2143 4y ago
> more powerful "More powerful"? What does that mean, in the context of DE?
- nani8ot 4y ago
  "More powerful" in the context of features. E.g. Kate (text editor) has many advanced features not available in Gnome Text Editor. For me the reduced feature-set of Gnome apps is what I want because I don't usually need them. I like the (imo) clean and easy UX of Gnome apps.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- indymike 4y ago
  I think both Gnome and KDE are pretty nice... Powerful is probably not the right word. KDE has a lot more features, and a lot more of those features are user configurable. Gnome has taken the path of a well executed, smaller feature set with fewer places the user can customize. KDE has taken the path of more features, but at the cost of more code, and more things that could have bugs. Personally, I love customizing everything, so I prefer KDE. But both Gnome and KDE are fantastic and give OSX a run for its money on usability, and both are superior to Windows 11 (which by the way is the best Windows UI since about XP).
greyw 4y ago
It's also full of bugs. Kwin_x11 regularily crashed on me requiring a manual restart of it. I'd rather have something that works than a lot of configuration options that don't work. I'm using gnome nowadays (without any extensions)
4y ago

loeg 4y ago

The best version of GNOME was Gnome 2. Before Gnome 3, I used Gnome for years. They really burned a lot of users with that reduction in functionality and consistently user-hostile attitude. The closest modern desktop environment to Gnome 2 is KDE’s Plasma. It’s easy to use out of the box and doesn’t require any configuration (unless you want to do that kind of thing, and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+).

squarefoot 4y ago
What's much worse is that most of the problem is on GTK, whose terrible post V2 design affects lots of software outside of Gnome.
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Plasma seems like the worst part of KDE to me. It looks nice and has good functionality when it's working, but unfortunately it's riddled with bugs. Panels crash all the time and don't come back until I restart plasmashell. I gave up on Plasma. I still use kwin and several KDE applications, like Dolphin, but now I use those with LxQT instead of Plasma. It doesn't look as stylish, but it seems to be rock solid. Plus I still get all the nice compositing effects and configurability of kwin.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Worth noting that this approach would have been impossible to execute on GNOME Shell, which integrates its shell, compositor and window manager in a single component.
silisili 4y ago
I liked 2 the best, especially with a dock. I understand what they were attempting in 3, but it was such a letdown. Writing everything in JS was a weird decision. I remember for the first few releases, having to constantly restart the shell because the JS engine leaked so badly. You could watch RSS grow indefinitely everytime you moused over the top left corner. It's a lot better now, usable with a few extensions...but I still think what a waste it was tossing 2 like they did. Extensions are an OK idea, but because they're mostly JS and CSS, there doesn't seem to be much safety there. It's very common for them to break each release because of some obscure attribute change.

Postosuchus 4y ago

Am I the only one who feels that Gnome, somewhat hilariously, is unable to get basic consistent UI over 2.5 decades - something that KDE nailed down at ... what was it? ... KDE 1.1? I mean it is kind of sad, but educational - you get the project without clear goal, with zero consistency, without any regard to backward compatibility - and after 25 years you end up effectively with a mediocre window manager and a bunch of programs with wildly inconsistent UIs (which predictably break next time your UI toolkit goes from 2.4.8 to 2.4.9 making a migration to the new minor release a multi-year saga which invariably loses features that worked before)... Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)...

MichaelCollins 4y ago
They had it nailed in Gnome 2.x, but they let self-styled designers constantly churn the UX. Designers who will never admit that UX churn is bad UX.
kzrdude 4y ago
Well, KDE is still stubbornly sticking to the wrong order of OK/cancel buttons. It's quite puzzling.
- Narishma 4y ago
  There is no wrong order.
pengaru 4y ago
> Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)... To blame rms of all people for what you've described demonstrates a lack of understanding his scope of influence and participation in gnome especially in this era. I can get behind blaming rms for gcc's missed opportunities, ultimately ceding its dominant position to clang/llvm. He clearly overplayed his hand there. But when it comes to gnome I recall little more than mailing list bickering over gnome being a GNU project or not and what the G in GNOME stands for. Perhaps my memory is failing here, but it feels crediting rms with anything more than wasting a bit of gnome devs time and frustration would be overstating it. Not that any FOSS devs need more of that with how entitled and obnoxious users already can be, but they tend to have developed thick enough skin to ignore rms's aspy silliness. Can you provide any examples to the contrary?

Klasiaster 4y ago

For a polished GNOME experience I recommend Fedora (once you know how to install the missing media codecs). Even Firefox there runs natively under Wayland and you also benefit from the latest advancements such as the Thunderbolt or performance managers.

behnamoh 4y ago
Fedora in general is more "sane" than most other distros. Something about it just feels mature, stable, and well-thought-out.
- Spivak 4y ago
  It’s because Red Hat has the engineering talent and bodies to make a cohesive system by carrying a frankly insane amount of patches to bend all software to the RHEL way and tackle extremely ambitious userspace plumbing projects. I’m so sad at what IBM will eventually do to them.
- Klasiaster 4y ago
  I think the proposal process works very well to modernize the distro and drive forward the improvements of the default installation, while in Debian the teams seem to do their own thing and innovation is very slow and even controversial (e.g., the systemd or merged /usr/ migration are sad examples but even small things like a good zram setup, systemd-oomd, and btrfs by default make a large difference).

jrm4 4y ago

I'm really glad to see this because I think we can now have a smarter conversation than the typical one on why people dislike Gnome so much and why it is okay, even good to criticize it. People get angry at me for insulting it because of the ridiculous "It's open source so you don't have the right to criticize" argument. As this shows, there's a lot of corporate contributions to the codebase. For better or (mostly) worse -- that means the project will likely have much more of a "proprietary-like" mentality than perhaps what we think of when we say Free/Open Source. This plays out, right? The thing people don't like about Gnome frequently boils down to backward-breakage and not being able to meaningfully contribute. And yet, Gnome enjoys a lot of popularity in the space that affects the "Linux" ecosystem, and I think the way they do things messes it up. This is why, for now, I am explicitly anti-Gnome. I hope it changes, or I hope it gets less popular.