17 ms·

GTK File Chooser Dialog gets a thumbnail view after 18 years

278 points by handity 4y ago

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
- sho_hn 4y ago
  explorer.exe isn't responsible for file picker dialogs in Windows 98 (file picker != file manager). And the Win98 file dialogs didn't have thumbnail support. HN is no place for low-effort troll comments.
  - tiahura 4y ago
    The point stands. Explorer.exe 11 is nearly two decades ahead of GTK / Gnome. And MacOS is even worse. I just bought my daughter a MacBook and sat down with a Mac for the first time since 86. My expectations were high. I thought I was going to see a Unix GUI done right. Instead it’s nearly as clunky as CDE. MS may deserve grief about some things, but dang, Windows is about as polished as a product can get.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      > The point stands. Explorer.exe 11 is nearly two decades ahead of GTK / Gnome. No, it doesn't. Explorer is the file manager application on Windows. The file manager application on Gnome is called Nautilus, and Nautilus has had thumbnail support for a very long time. This is about the file picker dialog, which both on Windows and on Gnome/GTK+ is not coming from the file manager. You can say that dialog should have had for thumbnail support for longer, sure. It's also correct that Windows added thumbnail support to its file picker dialogs earlier. But Win98 did not have this, either, and Windows at least for some time did not have parity between the file manager and the file picker dialog.
      - Laaas 4y ago
        Do you have any idea why Nautilus isn't also the file picker?
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        sho_hn 4y ago
        No, no idea. It's surprisingly common for DEs across different operating systems to have several independent implementations of file lists/icon views between the file manager, the desktop background and the file picker dialogs. I think across Win, Mac, Gnome, KDE this actually describes most of these systems for most of their history. You sometimes do find code reuse or even sharing a process between the file manager and the desktop background. Windows has done this, and Gnome also had a phase like this. KDE recently unified the view code for the file manager (Dolphin) and the file dialogs, but the desktop background has distinct UI code (with the same directory model backend, and shared code for thumbnailing, context menus and other bits). In that case the reason is different UI frameworks (Qt widgets vs. QML).
        type0 4y ago
        Because, GTK, that's why https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/1bdb78a215f5e119c487b1cc1dbb8d54ed0913b3 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/1bdb78a215f5e119... https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme
        cuteboy19 4y ago
        I love how android solves such problems. Instead of making the decision of whether a file manager must somehow be able to handle file picking, every application is allowed to choose whether it can do file picking. For a file manager it would probably be trivial, but the wonderful thing about this design is that it is very flexible
    - Laaas 4y ago
      > Windows is about as polished as a product can get Windows still delegates to legacy Vista(XP?)-era UIs for certain settings.
      - jeroenhd 4y ago
        In the ODBC dialog you can find a Windows 3.1 style file picker still out there. They've stopped supporting the Windows 1.0 feature of clicking the window icon for the window menu though (and broke the "double click the top left icon to close" workflow in their weird new app designs, sadly).
      - seritools 4y ago
        And ironically, these are the _more_ polished pieces of UI in modern Windows
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      Windows 11 is the furthest thing from what I'd describe as a "polished experience". It too has suffered from braindead reversal of UX norms in the last decade.
byhemechi 4y ago
Does anyone else feel that gtk4 adwaita looks significantly worse than gtk3? they seem to have simply removed the gradients and it just looks half baked with only flat colours
- jgb1984 4y ago
  For me gtk2 is the best one. Everything that came after was both uglier and less usable.
  - Gualdrapo 4y ago
    At the time of the 2->3 GNOME transition, I agreed it needed some overhaul and started looking dated (the default&vanilla GNOME install, that is). But there were many decisions they took I could not understand: - The applications-places-system menu. As said in other post the other day, it was so clever to have all the stuff in your computer categorized in those three categories. You knew at first sight, even if you've never ever used GNOME2 before, where to send your mouse when reaching something, it wasn't a guess game like in Mac or that cram-everything-in-one-button like the Windows start menu - not to talk about the 'moving around your mouse through the whole screen to launch an app' like GNOME3/4 itself. - Clearlooks was the pinnacle of theming in Linux. Easily readable/scanneable and beautiful by default, 'themeable' up to the tiniest detail with a readable CSS-like syntax (I'm fuzzy on the details but seem to recall it wasn't a feature exclusive of Clearlooks). I concede Adwaita inherited visual inspiration from Clearlooks, but now with GNOME4 they decided to ditch it altogether. For some reason. - Technological aspects aside which I won't talk about because you people know much more than me on that, but restricting the user to customize their GNOME install was an double-edge sword they seem didn't thought much through. GNOME2 had an almost perfect balance between simplicity and customization capabilities; whereas with GNOME3 upwards it is up to devs decide many things (and it seems those decisions are based much on their criteria rather than their users...). That brought the unfortunate consequence of frustrating users with every unexpected change with releases, something didn't happened with GNOME2 (or maybe even before than that).
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
p-e-w 4y ago
GNOME and GTK look spectacular these days. Even when I'm using macOS I now find myself thinking that GNOME looks better. The design is very uniform and coherent, and overall simply beautiful to my eye. If only the usability was as good as the visual design...
- prima-facie 4y ago
  And to think most of this is done by a handful of volunteers + a few employees of open-source friendly companies like Redhat.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, I guess, seeing applications without menu bars (the greatest invention in IT, bar none (if you'll excuse the pun)) just makes me feel like I'm looking at someone putting square blocks on wheel axles or praying for lightning to hit a tree to get fire. Like one of the screenshots has in the title bar a looking glass, three tabs, a check mark in a circle, a hamburger, and the close button. What am I even looking at?
  - javajosh 4y ago
    >What am I even looking at? A 2-D array of lit pixels. Any other interpretation is on you!
  - sph 4y ago
    The greatest invention was the global menu bar, as seen on Apple computers. That is the only iteration of the menu bar that respects Fitts's Law: by putting it at the top of the screen, the menu bar has infinite height, so it is infinitely easy to reach. But Microsoft never got the memo.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      That was designed for a non-multitasking OS with a tiny screen. You have to wonder why they never stopped drinking their own kool-aid when technology changed.
criddell 4y ago
I always wonder when people choose to use the word peformant if that’s what they really wanted to say. I mean it’s good that the grid works well enough to be considered functional, but is that really what they were shooting for? I suspect they meant to say fast or maybe fast and small.
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  So your position is that they should have said "fast and small" instead of "performant"? I just want to make sure I understood you correctly.
  - lalopalota 4y ago
    > Performant means that something is working correctly or well enough to be considered functional. In a technology context, this term is believed to have originated with programmers seeking a concise word to express that a system or program will work, but may not yet be optimal. https://www.techopedia.com/definition/28231/performant https://www.techopedia.com/definition/28231/performant
    - jdale27 4y ago
      That's interesting. While that seems to be consistent with other definitions online, in my experience most software developers use the word as a synonym for "fast" or "efficient".
  - criddell 4y ago
    Only if that's what they were trying to say. Merely performant is good, but not that interesting.
GrayShade 4y ago
Yeah, I'd rather they fixed scrolling in large lists, which makes Nautilus almost unusable in directories with more than 500 items. So much for "scalable". And, ironically, touch support is currently broken, too. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  Hmm. I just opened a thumbnail view of a directory of 770 PDFs (with thumbnails disabled for now due to a HiDPI bug[1]) in Nautilus (GNOME Files) 43.0, and while the scrolling is a tad janky it basically works. I do dislike how long it takes to load that folder at first, yes, but I don’t think I understand your complaint here. [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2487 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2487
  - GrayShade 4y ago
    There's a video in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2689 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2689, but it doesn't show the problem that clearly. Try to go to /dev/char, scroll down, then scroll back up using the wheel. Another sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDrZluH4mww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDrZluH4mww.
- modzu 4y ago
  agreed! not to take away from the win here for the filepicker -- thank you :) but since fedora 37 scrolling is totally busted... think it only occurs on x (which i use over wayland for a dozen reasons). its pretty brutal tbh, scrolling is kind of... fundamental.
  - GrayShade 4y ago
    No, the bug I'm referring to also happens on Wayland.
    - modzu 4y ago
archseer 4y ago
There's also a dramatic video rendition by the author: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_lLm3a33WsE https://youtube.com/watch?v=_lLm3a33WsE
- gumboza 4y ago
  This is how I’m doing our product release notes from now on
dtx1 4y ago
/g/ is gonna implode
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  bruce3434 fucking won
javaunsafe2019 4y ago
As for many others here in the comment section gnome went downhill for me after the migration to version 3. gnome v2 was such an easy to use, clean and fast experience and after that it degraded not only from the usability perspective but also resource allocation. Suddenly my PC was stuttering when using Linux cause I only had my cpu to render the ui
Svip 4y ago
I wonder where this trend - fortunately a limited one - with putting confirm buttons at the top comes from? Humans naturally read from top to bottom. It naturally follows that the final action in any UI should be at the bottom. I find these buttons at the top extremely confusing, as I often - from my experience with reading - after I've dealt with the subject at hand (in this case, picking a file), assume the natural place to confirm my choice would be after it (i.e. below it). What are the UX arguments for placing the confirm buttons at the top of a dialog?
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  They give us what we wanted after years of pleading, but we pay dearly and mercilessly in other ways. Truly Faustian.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I wonder how feasible would it be to support a fork that added that feature. It seems self-contained enough to not require any public API changes. Just building the GTK source with some flag would turn on that feature, and dynamically linking against that GTK lib.so would make the thumbnails view accessible to the user. Did anybody care enough to try? (I personally don't; I use the file manager for any views I want, and drag the files from it onto an app, or onto a file chooser dialog. That feature, which is also present in macOS, was very much worth reproducing.)
    - traverseda 4y ago
      Gtk-mushrooms was one such fork, but I think gnome will make it pretty hard to maintain a fork if one starts getting popular.
- richajak 4y ago
  As I use XFCE as my daily driver, I never understand why the buttons in file dialog located as such. Is it decision from GTK or XFCE team ? I almost put the blame on XFCE team for this, :-( Can app devs who use GTK library overwrite this style?
j1elo 4y ago
A couple humorous takes on this: I swear that my initial reading of the title was "74 Decades Later", and I smiled because it fitted the feeling of how late this addition is arriving. Then I realized it'd be a bit strange that they used this kind of snarky sarcasm on their own blog, and had to re-read again the title. Also, > This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite ... read to me as > this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago I know HNers are very sceptical of the technical merits (or their lack thereof) that ground-up rewrites usually have. I only hope in some years, GTK 5 or 6 doesn't decide to trash all this work and starts from scratch again. Regardless, my congratulations to the people who pushed through and contributed their effort to make thumbnails back!
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago The whole "we needed to rewrite everything" is complete nonsense anyway. There are THREE patches posted on the issue tracker over a period of more than 10 years. They work well, too; people have maintained out-of-tree patches for this (IIRC there's even an AUR package for it in Arch Linux). GTK developers simply chose to ignore this. They explicitly solicited patches in that issue and then ignored those patches. Not "this patch needs work", just nothing. I get that reviewing patches is work too, but you can't solicit patches for an often-requested feature and then just ignore them. Well, you can, obviously, but it makes you an asshole. When a few years later someone pointed out the latest patch on GitLab it got shot down with a shitty snide "we're not going to look at random patches" comment and had the topic lock (it was on the old/now-deprecated BugZilla). But hey, got to have some historical revisionism to justify your shitty toxic behaviour towards volunteers and users.
  - doubleunplussed 4y ago
    I had a patch rejected after being told "patches welcome", for lacking detailed user testing or not matching any official user stories or something (which is BS, the rationale was just as good as anything), only for the person who rejected it to later implement the same feature just because it "feels" better. Years later after they forgot of course, otherwise they would have kept the feature unimplemented out of stubborn spite. I feel pretty salty about it. Don't say patches welcome if they're not, and don't apply selective burdens of evidence in favour of including a particular change. Some of them have huge egos and are stubborn as anything. If something wasn't their idea originally it can be a real uphill battle regardless of how sensible it is. Convince them it was their idea and suddenly the gates are open.
formerly_proven 4y ago
Now fix your synchronous dbus calls to gvfs on the UI thread in the file dialog init code that hangs everything for 20s whenever gvfs shits the bed (not rare when you have more than a handful of mounts). That bug is probably similarly old as this one.
- tpush 4y ago
  You can't demand anything; if your want it fixed, do it yourself or pay someone to do it.
  - formerly_proven 4y ago
    My employer actually forks quite a lot of money over to Red Hat to do just that.
    - tpush 4y ago
      Then you should probably talk with your employer, or your employer with Red Hat, instead of demanding things in comments on a post of some volunteer giving their time to implement something.
christophilus 4y ago
I always feel like I must be crazy because Gnome / GTK threads are always filled with comments about how terrible it is. Personally, I find it to be the most aesthetically pleasing and usable desktop environment I’ve used (having spent many years on Mac and Windows). I’m not sure what the disconnect is. Anyway, good thing we all have a wealth of choices. If you don’t like Gnome, there’s a huge universe of choices available to you! Long live OSS.
- javier2 4y ago
  Same. I rather enjoy using gnome. I just want the dock to be vertical…
- j1elo 4y ago
  You could share your thoughts or (positive) feelings about one of those design decisions that cause discontent: putting confirmation buttons and other UI controls on the title bar, when the natural human way of processing visual information is top-to-bottom (so a confirmation button makes more sense at the bottom area of a dialog). They are talking about it on a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027754 Do you feel that the crowded title bar design decisions are aesthetically pleasing and usable? (would really like to know the opinion on these topics from users that like how it's been done, instead of users who hate it, for a change)
  - christophilus 4y ago
    Yeah. It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me. Gnome’s UI is consistent, has good fonts and margins, is minimalist, and gets out of my way. It has all of the settings I need in one consistent, easy to search place. I get the entire screen available to me with no huge useless dock or similar thing taking up real estate. It just works and works mostly how I want. :shrug: It’s obviously not for everyone, but I like it. I also appreciate the focus and the way they cut out features that add complexity and inconsistency to the UI. So, I’m general, I’m a fan. It’s not perfect, but I like it a whole lot.
- galimaufry 4y ago
soulofmischief 4y ago
> In the last post, we discussed deprecating treeviews and cell renderers, among other things. All these deprecations cause a lot of work for applications and libraries using these APIs, so why are we doing this? > One of the reasons is to enable new features. Such as a grid view for the file chooser. It only took us 18 years! You can see the original feature request in Bugzilla. This is easily possible now because GtkListView and GtkGridView can use the same data models. This is exactly why I do not use GNOME. Absolute insanity.
- joshmarinacci 4y ago
  Why would they deprecate cell rendered and tree views ? How else do they make large virtualized components?
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    So that they could have a grid view for the file chooser, which they expect to eventually deprecate so that they can support a list view in the complete rewrite underway for GTK5.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    They made GtkWidget lightweight and fast. So CellRenderers have no reason to exist any more. Then they added new view widgets that use regular widgets instead of cells. An application can consistently be made using the same primitives that are flexible, themable, performant, etc. It is actually really nice.
    - soulofmischief 4y ago
      Computers are way faster than they were 18 years ago, so what I want to know is if, in 2003-2004, the code which provided the same functionality was less performant than it is now, or if somewhere along the GNOME development path it became bloated. Because otherwise my mind is blown about how fast my already snappy GNOME 2 Linux desktop could have been.
andrepd 4y ago
Unfortunately they also lost tons of functionality in the process. The fact that typing on a file picker starts a recursive search instead of simply jumping to the file/folder with the prefix you typed, is nothing short of hilarious. Gtk-classic is the only thing that keeps me sane https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
- bklaasen 4y ago
  ...and the filename is shown as a focused highlight, leading you to think that's where the focus actually is! But no, it's in the search field, at the bottom right of the dialog.
- rickstanley 4y ago
  Wow, it looks way better than GTK4! What happened?
- ComputerGuru 4y ago
  I could not believe that misfeature was actual, intended behavior from upstream gtk and not some stupid MBA-minded decision made by district maintainers when I ran into that on elementaryOS 6.
- mackrevinack 4y ago
  yea that really does my head in. that and not having consistent ctrl+L hotkey to open the dialog that lets you access/enter a full path of a folder
bratsche 4y ago
I really love all the great work the GTK developers have been putting into it!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gundamdoubleO 4y ago
End of an era. The lack of thumbnails in the file picker was what started my KDE journey years ago. Doubt I'll ever go back to a GTK desktop but glad to see this finally implemented.
superkuh 4y ago
Nice. Maybe in a handful of years there'll be applications besides GNOME itself that use Gtk4 and maybe the documentation will even exist. But right now the vast majority of applications use Gtk3 and Gtk3 has been frozen broken for a decade. Right now you literally cannot paste a file path into a file->open dialog without invoking some arcane key sequence to bring up the "path bar" first. If you just paste into a newly opened file->open dialog it litterally errors out. That basic functionality does not exist, let alone a luxury like thumbnails. I've talked to the Gtk devs about this and they say that 3 is will not be fixed, ever. They won't even accept patches because gtk/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c is so cursed.
aeyes 4y ago
The merge request even states that this was trivial to add... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/5163 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/5163
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  After a complete rewrite of GTK, making it faster, render on the hardware, add the widgets needed for this, etc. I still think this should have happened 10 years ago at least tough.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    Not only GTK4 existing but also Nautilus doing the port to GTK4 first adding all of the missing features and fixing bugs found along the way.
paulcarroty 4y ago
Hahah, congrats! This is not the technical problem, that's for sure. Maybe GNOME finally got a real UX expert from IBM :) I had few talks about it with GNOME devs, they said mostly "this is not a problem!" , "go fix it yourself!" and "we're volunteers, pay us". Most of it was in aggressive manner, just like in Trump supporters community. Glad I'm done with GNOME for now.
n3storm 4y ago
"Hay que joderse" as we say in Spain.
nightowl_games 4y ago
Theres always a ton of negativity associated with gnome. I'm just a basic linux user who doesnt have any problems, doesnt think about this kind of stuff. I think that's basically a glowing review.
laudecum 4y ago
jrm4 4y ago
What would be best (and of course, exactly the sort of thing that Gnome would likely oppose) is to be able to choose your own file chooser -- it should be modular like that. The most annoying thing these days is how they're all different. I just want one (and honestly, I'd love it to be my hacky fzf solution, but again, modular)
mhd 4y ago
That's the nice thing about the RiscOs way of saving and loading files, you never get in trouble because your file requester doesn't emulate all the features of your default file manager.
amluto 4y ago
> This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite of its rendering system, and the introduction of highly performant and scalable list & grid widgets. I hate to be the person who just complains about Gnome, but… a few years ago, you could type into the file chooser, and it would search, quickly, for matching files and folders and display them. Then it broke and didn’t get fixed for years. Once it got fixed, you see matches, but if you actually try to select a matching folder, you hit really hilariously bad bugs that wouldn’t pass the briefest test. Maybe Gnome could focus on getting old functionality working?
torginus 4y ago
Imo the problem with Linux GUIs is that there are 2 kinds of devs working on it: - Those who want to bring about The Year Of The Linux Desktop and believe this can be brought about by removing every remotely complicated feature under the sun. - Those who think the only purpose of GUIs is to display multiple terminals side by side.
- btrfsck 4y ago
  The enlightened, then, know that the only purpose of ANY desktop environment is to start the correct program when I hit "super" and then type the first 3-4 characters of a program name. And to do that left/right screen split thing when you hit super+left/right. I can't figure out how my workflow is that different from other linux users or if I'm just part of the silent majority. Literally all I ask of my DE is: - the super+search thing i mentioned above - run the following programs fullscreen: terminator, intellij, pycharm, vscodium, firefox And... that's just it. Oh wait, one more thing: - make video, wifi, audio, multiple monitors etc just work It's in service of that last one that I've been pretty happy with Gnome 3 the whole time it's been out. None of their shuffles or excisions have interrupted my workflow, so I don't mind it at all.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    When I have multiple screens I run 95% of my applications in fullscreen mode. There is not much heavy lifting that a DE needs to do. Occasionally I use split windows. Honestly, I think the latest version of gnome-screenshot that has been directly integrated into the DE is amazing.
  - torginus 4y ago
    I agree with the point you're making, however for some reason on Linux, desktop environments usually are far more extensive than that. KDE, GNOME, etc. usually don't only consist of an app launcher, but a file browser, text editor, archive manager, browser, image viewer and who knows what else. I never understood this tribalism, doesn't the spirit of open source mean that I'm free to choose the tools of my liking, may the best tool win, etc.? This certainly the case on Windows, where people usually just replace tools to their liking. Most distros usually strongly push the desktop environment's native apps for every niche.
29athrowaway 4y ago
I hope they fix the window switching issue that crashes gnome-shell and forced me to switch to another desktop.
sussmannbaka 4y ago
18 years of ignoring that patch out of spite :o)

278 points by handity 4y ago

sho_hn 4y ago
explorer.exe isn't responsible for file picker dialogs in Windows 98 (file picker != file manager). And the Win98 file dialogs didn't have thumbnail support. HN is no place for low-effort troll comments.
- tiahura 4y ago
  The point stands. Explorer.exe 11 is nearly two decades ahead of GTK / Gnome. And MacOS is even worse. I just bought my daughter a MacBook and sat down with a Mac for the first time since 86. My expectations were high. I thought I was going to see a Unix GUI done right. Instead it’s nearly as clunky as CDE. MS may deserve grief about some things, but dang, Windows is about as polished as a product can get.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    > The point stands. Explorer.exe 11 is nearly two decades ahead of GTK / Gnome. No, it doesn't. Explorer is the file manager application on Windows. The file manager application on Gnome is called Nautilus, and Nautilus has had thumbnail support for a very long time. This is about the file picker dialog, which both on Windows and on Gnome/GTK+ is not coming from the file manager. You can say that dialog should have had for thumbnail support for longer, sure. It's also correct that Windows added thumbnail support to its file picker dialogs earlier. But Win98 did not have this, either, and Windows at least for some time did not have parity between the file manager and the file picker dialog.
    - Laaas 4y ago
      Do you have any idea why Nautilus isn't also the file picker?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - sho_hn 4y ago
        No, no idea. It's surprisingly common for DEs across different operating systems to have several independent implementations of file lists/icon views between the file manager, the desktop background and the file picker dialogs. I think across Win, Mac, Gnome, KDE this actually describes most of these systems for most of their history. You sometimes do find code reuse or even sharing a process between the file manager and the desktop background. Windows has done this, and Gnome also had a phase like this. KDE recently unified the view code for the file manager (Dolphin) and the file dialogs, but the desktop background has distinct UI code (with the same directory model backend, and shared code for thumbnailing, context menus and other bits). In that case the reason is different UI frameworks (Qt widgets vs. QML).
      - type0 4y ago
        Because, GTK, that's why https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/1bdb78a215f5e119c487b1cc1dbb8d54ed0913b3 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/1bdb78a215f5e119... https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme
        cuteboy19 4y ago
        I love how android solves such problems. Instead of making the decision of whether a file manager must somehow be able to handle file picking, every application is allowed to choose whether it can do file picking. For a file manager it would probably be trivial, but the wonderful thing about this design is that it is very flexible
  - Laaas 4y ago
    > Windows is about as polished as a product can get Windows still delegates to legacy Vista(XP?)-era UIs for certain settings.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      In the ODBC dialog you can find a Windows 3.1 style file picker still out there. They've stopped supporting the Windows 1.0 feature of clicking the window icon for the window menu though (and broke the "double click the top left icon to close" workflow in their weird new app designs, sadly).
    - seritools 4y ago
      And ironically, these are the _more_ polished pieces of UI in modern Windows
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Windows 11 is the furthest thing from what I'd describe as a "polished experience". It too has suffered from braindead reversal of UX norms in the last decade.

Does anyone else feel that gtk4 adwaita looks significantly worse than gtk3? they seem to have simply removed the gradients and it just looks half baked with only flat colours

jgb1984 4y ago
For me gtk2 is the best one. Everything that came after was both uglier and less usable.
- Gualdrapo 4y ago
  At the time of the 2->3 GNOME transition, I agreed it needed some overhaul and started looking dated (the default&vanilla GNOME install, that is). But there were many decisions they took I could not understand: - The applications-places-system menu. As said in other post the other day, it was so clever to have all the stuff in your computer categorized in those three categories. You knew at first sight, even if you've never ever used GNOME2 before, where to send your mouse when reaching something, it wasn't a guess game like in Mac or that cram-everything-in-one-button like the Windows start menu - not to talk about the 'moving around your mouse through the whole screen to launch an app' like GNOME3/4 itself. - Clearlooks was the pinnacle of theming in Linux. Easily readable/scanneable and beautiful by default, 'themeable' up to the tiniest detail with a readable CSS-like syntax (I'm fuzzy on the details but seem to recall it wasn't a feature exclusive of Clearlooks). I concede Adwaita inherited visual inspiration from Clearlooks, but now with GNOME4 they decided to ditch it altogether. For some reason. - Technological aspects aside which I won't talk about because you people know much more than me on that, but restricting the user to customize their GNOME install was an double-edge sword they seem didn't thought much through. GNOME2 had an almost perfect balance between simplicity and customization capabilities; whereas with GNOME3 upwards it is up to devs decide many things (and it seems those decisions are based much on their criteria rather than their users...). That brought the unfortunate consequence of frustrating users with every unexpected change with releases, something didn't happened with GNOME2 (or maybe even before than that).
  - soulofmischief 4y ago

p-e-w 4y ago

GNOME and GTK look spectacular these days. Even when I'm using macOS I now find myself thinking that GNOME looks better. The design is very uniform and coherent, and overall simply beautiful to my eye. If only the usability was as good as the visual design...

prima-facie 4y ago
And to think most of this is done by a handful of volunteers + a few employees of open-source friendly companies like Redhat.
tmtvl 4y ago
De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, I guess, seeing applications without menu bars (the greatest invention in IT, bar none (if you'll excuse the pun)) just makes me feel like I'm looking at someone putting square blocks on wheel axles or praying for lightning to hit a tree to get fire. Like one of the screenshots has in the title bar a looking glass, three tabs, a check mark in a circle, a hamburger, and the close button. What am I even looking at?
- javajosh 4y ago
  >What am I even looking at? A 2-D array of lit pixels. Any other interpretation is on you!
- sph 4y ago
  The greatest invention was the global menu bar, as seen on Apple computers. That is the only iteration of the menu bar that respects Fitts's Law: by putting it at the top of the screen, the menu bar has infinite height, so it is infinitely easy to reach. But Microsoft never got the memo.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    That was designed for a non-multitasking OS with a tiny screen. You have to wonder why they never stopped drinking their own kool-aid when technology changed.

criddell 4y ago

I always wonder when people choose to use the word peformant if that’s what they really wanted to say. I mean it’s good that the grid works well enough to be considered functional, but is that really what they were shooting for? I suspect they meant to say fast or maybe fast and small.

weird-eye-issue 4y ago
So your position is that they should have said "fast and small" instead of "performant"? I just want to make sure I understood you correctly.
- lalopalota 4y ago
  > Performant means that something is working correctly or well enough to be considered functional. In a technology context, this term is believed to have originated with programmers seeking a concise word to express that a system or program will work, but may not yet be optimal. https://www.techopedia.com/definition/28231/performant https://www.techopedia.com/definition/28231/performant
  - jdale27 4y ago
    That's interesting. While that seems to be consistent with other definitions online, in my experience most software developers use the word as a synonym for "fast" or "efficient".
- criddell 4y ago
  Only if that's what they were trying to say. Merely performant is good, but not that interesting.

GrayShade 4y ago

Yeah, I'd rather they fixed scrolling in large lists, which makes Nautilus almost unusable in directories with more than 500 items. So much for "scalable". And, ironically, touch support is currently broken, too. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971

mananaysiempre 4y ago
Hmm. I just opened a thumbnail view of a directory of 770 PDFs (with thumbnails disabled for now due to a HiDPI bug[1]) in Nautilus (GNOME Files) 43.0, and while the scrolling is a tad janky it basically works. I do dislike how long it takes to load that folder at first, yes, but I don’t think I understand your complaint here. [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2487 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2487
- GrayShade 4y ago
  There's a video in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2689 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2689, but it doesn't show the problem that clearly. Try to go to /dev/char, scroll down, then scroll back up using the wheel. Another sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDrZluH4mww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDrZluH4mww.
modzu 4y ago
agreed! not to take away from the win here for the filepicker -- thank you :) but since fedora 37 scrolling is totally busted... think it only occurs on x (which i use over wayland for a dozen reasons). its pretty brutal tbh, scrolling is kind of... fundamental.
- GrayShade 4y ago
  No, the bug I'm referring to also happens on Wayland.
  - modzu 4y ago

archseer 4y ago

There's also a dramatic video rendition by the author: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_lLm3a33WsE https://youtube.com/watch?v=_lLm3a33WsE

gumboza 4y ago
This is how I’m doing our product release notes from now on

dtx1 4y ago

/g/ is gonna implode

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
bruce3434 fucking won

javaunsafe2019 4y ago

As for many others here in the comment section gnome went downhill for me after the migration to version 3. gnome v2 was such an easy to use, clean and fast experience and after that it degraded not only from the usability perspective but also resource allocation. Suddenly my PC was stuttering when using Linux cause I only had my cpu to render the ui

Svip 4y ago

I wonder where this trend - fortunately a limited one - with putting confirm buttons at the top comes from? Humans naturally read from top to bottom. It naturally follows that the final action in any UI should be at the bottom. I find these buttons at the top extremely confusing, as I often - from my experience with reading - after I've dealt with the subject at hand (in this case, picking a file), assume the natural place to confirm my choice would be after it (i.e. below it). What are the UX arguments for placing the confirm buttons at the top of a dialog?

HeckFeck 4y ago
They give us what we wanted after years of pleading, but we pay dearly and mercilessly in other ways. Truly Faustian.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I wonder how feasible would it be to support a fork that added that feature. It seems self-contained enough to not require any public API changes. Just building the GTK source with some flag would turn on that feature, and dynamically linking against that GTK lib.so would make the thumbnails view accessible to the user. Did anybody care enough to try? (I personally don't; I use the file manager for any views I want, and drag the files from it onto an app, or onto a file chooser dialog. That feature, which is also present in macOS, was very much worth reproducing.)
  - traverseda 4y ago
    Gtk-mushrooms was one such fork, but I think gnome will make it pretty hard to maintain a fork if one starts getting popular.
richajak 4y ago
As I use XFCE as my daily driver, I never understand why the buttons in file dialog located as such. Is it decision from GTK or XFCE team ? I almost put the blame on XFCE team for this, :-( Can app devs who use GTK library overwrite this style?

j1elo 4y ago

A couple humorous takes on this: I swear that my initial reading of the title was "74 Decades Later", and I smiled because it fitted the feeling of how late this addition is arriving. Then I realized it'd be a bit strange that they used this kind of snarky sarcasm on their own blog, and had to re-read again the title. Also, > This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite ... read to me as > this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago I know HNers are very sceptical of the technical merits (or their lack thereof) that ground-up rewrites usually have. I only hope in some years, GTK 5 or 6 doesn't decide to trash all this work and starts from scratch again. Regardless, my congratulations to the people who pushed through and contributed their effort to make thumbnails back!

Beltalowda 4y ago
> this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago The whole "we needed to rewrite everything" is complete nonsense anyway. There are THREE patches posted on the issue tracker over a period of more than 10 years. They work well, too; people have maintained out-of-tree patches for this (IIRC there's even an AUR package for it in Arch Linux). GTK developers simply chose to ignore this. They explicitly solicited patches in that issue and then ignored those patches. Not "this patch needs work", just nothing. I get that reviewing patches is work too, but you can't solicit patches for an often-requested feature and then just ignore them. Well, you can, obviously, but it makes you an asshole. When a few years later someone pointed out the latest patch on GitLab it got shot down with a shitty snide "we're not going to look at random patches" comment and had the topic lock (it was on the old/now-deprecated BugZilla). But hey, got to have some historical revisionism to justify your shitty toxic behaviour towards volunteers and users.
- doubleunplussed 4y ago
  I had a patch rejected after being told "patches welcome", for lacking detailed user testing or not matching any official user stories or something (which is BS, the rationale was just as good as anything), only for the person who rejected it to later implement the same feature just because it "feels" better. Years later after they forgot of course, otherwise they would have kept the feature unimplemented out of stubborn spite. I feel pretty salty about it. Don't say patches welcome if they're not, and don't apply selective burdens of evidence in favour of including a particular change. Some of them have huge egos and are stubborn as anything. If something wasn't their idea originally it can be a real uphill battle regardless of how sensible it is. Convince them it was their idea and suddenly the gates are open.

formerly_proven 4y ago

Now fix your synchronous dbus calls to gvfs on the UI thread in the file dialog init code that hangs everything for 20s whenever gvfs shits the bed (not rare when you have more than a handful of mounts). That bug is probably similarly old as this one.

tpush 4y ago
You can't demand anything; if your want it fixed, do it yourself or pay someone to do it.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  My employer actually forks quite a lot of money over to Red Hat to do just that.
  - tpush 4y ago
    Then you should probably talk with your employer, or your employer with Red Hat, instead of demanding things in comments on a post of some volunteer giving their time to implement something.

christophilus 4y ago

I always feel like I must be crazy because Gnome / GTK threads are always filled with comments about how terrible it is. Personally, I find it to be the most aesthetically pleasing and usable desktop environment I’ve used (having spent many years on Mac and Windows). I’m not sure what the disconnect is. Anyway, good thing we all have a wealth of choices. If you don’t like Gnome, there’s a huge universe of choices available to you! Long live OSS.

javier2 4y ago
Same. I rather enjoy using gnome. I just want the dock to be vertical…
j1elo 4y ago
You could share your thoughts or (positive) feelings about one of those design decisions that cause discontent: putting confirmation buttons and other UI controls on the title bar, when the natural human way of processing visual information is top-to-bottom (so a confirmation button makes more sense at the bottom area of a dialog). They are talking about it on a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027754 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027754 Do you feel that the crowded title bar design decisions are aesthetically pleasing and usable? (would really like to know the opinion on these topics from users that like how it's been done, instead of users who hate it, for a change)
- christophilus 4y ago
  Yeah. It’s fine. It doesn’t bother me. Gnome’s UI is consistent, has good fonts and margins, is minimalist, and gets out of my way. It has all of the settings I need in one consistent, easy to search place. I get the entire screen available to me with no huge useless dock or similar thing taking up real estate. It just works and works mostly how I want. :shrug: It’s obviously not for everyone, but I like it. I also appreciate the focus and the way they cut out features that add complexity and inconsistency to the UI. So, I’m general, I’m a fan. It’s not perfect, but I like it a whole lot.
galimaufry 4y ago

soulofmischief 4y ago

> In the last post, we discussed deprecating treeviews and cell renderers, among other things. All these deprecations cause a lot of work for applications and libraries using these APIs, so why are we doing this? > One of the reasons is to enable new features. Such as a grid view for the file chooser. It only took us 18 years! You can see the original feature request in Bugzilla. This is easily possible now because GtkListView and GtkGridView can use the same data models. This is exactly why I do not use GNOME. Absolute insanity.

joshmarinacci 4y ago
Why would they deprecate cell rendered and tree views ? How else do they make large virtualized components?
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  So that they could have a grid view for the file chooser, which they expect to eventually deprecate so that they can support a list view in the complete rewrite underway for GTK5.
- TingPing 4y ago
  They made GtkWidget lightweight and fast. So CellRenderers have no reason to exist any more. Then they added new view widgets that use regular widgets instead of cells. An application can consistently be made using the same primitives that are flexible, themable, performant, etc. It is actually really nice.
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Computers are way faster than they were 18 years ago, so what I want to know is if, in 2003-2004, the code which provided the same functionality was less performant than it is now, or if somewhere along the GNOME development path it became bloated. Because otherwise my mind is blown about how fast my already snappy GNOME 2 Linux desktop could have been.

andrepd 4y ago

Unfortunately they also lost tons of functionality in the process. The fact that typing on a file picker starts a recursive search instead of simply jumping to the file/folder with the prefix you typed, is nothing short of hilarious. Gtk-classic is the only thing that keeps me sane https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic

bklaasen 4y ago
...and the filename is shown as a focused highlight, leading you to think that's where the focus actually is! But no, it's in the search field, at the bottom right of the dialog.
rickstanley 4y ago
Wow, it looks way better than GTK4! What happened?
ComputerGuru 4y ago
I could not believe that misfeature was actual, intended behavior from upstream gtk and not some stupid MBA-minded decision made by district maintainers when I ran into that on elementaryOS 6.
mackrevinack 4y ago
yea that really does my head in. that and not having consistent ctrl+L hotkey to open the dialog that lets you access/enter a full path of a folder

bratsche 4y ago

I really love all the great work the GTK developers have been putting into it!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gundamdoubleO 4y ago

End of an era. The lack of thumbnails in the file picker was what started my KDE journey years ago. Doubt I'll ever go back to a GTK desktop but glad to see this finally implemented.

superkuh 4y ago

Nice. Maybe in a handful of years there'll be applications besides GNOME itself that use Gtk4 and maybe the documentation will even exist. But right now the vast majority of applications use Gtk3 and Gtk3 has been frozen broken for a decade. Right now you literally cannot paste a file path into a file->open dialog without invoking some arcane key sequence to bring up the "path bar" first. If you just paste into a newly opened file->open dialog it litterally errors out. That basic functionality does not exist, let alone a luxury like thumbnails. I've talked to the Gtk devs about this and they say that 3 is will not be fixed, ever. They won't even accept patches because gtk/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c is so cursed.

aeyes 4y ago

The merge request even states that this was trivial to add... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/5163 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/5163

doodlesdev 4y ago
After a complete rewrite of GTK, making it faster, render on the hardware, add the widgets needed for this, etc. I still think this should have happened 10 years ago at least tough.
- TingPing 4y ago
  Not only GTK4 existing but also Nautilus doing the port to GTK4 first adding all of the missing features and fixing bugs found along the way.

paulcarroty 4y ago

Hahah, congrats! This is not the technical problem, that's for sure. Maybe GNOME finally got a real UX expert from IBM :) I had few talks about it with GNOME devs, they said mostly "this is not a problem!" , "go fix it yourself!" and "we're volunteers, pay us". Most of it was in aggressive manner, just like in Trump supporters community. Glad I'm done with GNOME for now.

n3storm 4y ago

"Hay que joderse" as we say in Spain.

nightowl_games 4y ago

Theres always a ton of negativity associated with gnome. I'm just a basic linux user who doesnt have any problems, doesnt think about this kind of stuff. I think that's basically a glowing review.

laudecum 4y ago

jrm4 4y ago

What would be best (and of course, exactly the sort of thing that Gnome would likely oppose) is to be able to choose your own file chooser -- it should be modular like that. The most annoying thing these days is how they're all different. I just want one (and honestly, I'd love it to be my hacky fzf solution, but again, modular)

mhd 4y ago

That's the nice thing about the RiscOs way of saving and loading files, you never get in trouble because your file requester doesn't emulate all the features of your default file manager.

amluto 4y ago

> This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite of its rendering system, and the introduction of highly performant and scalable list & grid widgets. I hate to be the person who just complains about Gnome, but… a few years ago, you could type into the file chooser, and it would search, quickly, for matching files and folders and display them. Then it broke and didn’t get fixed for years. Once it got fixed, you see matches, but if you actually try to select a matching folder, you hit really hilariously bad bugs that wouldn’t pass the briefest test. Maybe Gnome could focus on getting old functionality working?

torginus 4y ago

Imo the problem with Linux GUIs is that there are 2 kinds of devs working on it: - Those who want to bring about The Year Of The Linux Desktop and believe this can be brought about by removing every remotely complicated feature under the sun. - Those who think the only purpose of GUIs is to display multiple terminals side by side.

btrfsck 4y ago
The enlightened, then, know that the only purpose of ANY desktop environment is to start the correct program when I hit "super" and then type the first 3-4 characters of a program name. And to do that left/right screen split thing when you hit super+left/right. I can't figure out how my workflow is that different from other linux users or if I'm just part of the silent majority. Literally all I ask of my DE is: - the super+search thing i mentioned above - run the following programs fullscreen: terminator, intellij, pycharm, vscodium, firefox And... that's just it. Oh wait, one more thing: - make video, wifi, audio, multiple monitors etc just work It's in service of that last one that I've been pretty happy with Gnome 3 the whole time it's been out. None of their shuffles or excisions have interrupted my workflow, so I don't mind it at all.
- imtringued 4y ago
  When I have multiple screens I run 95% of my applications in fullscreen mode. There is not much heavy lifting that a DE needs to do. Occasionally I use split windows. Honestly, I think the latest version of gnome-screenshot that has been directly integrated into the DE is amazing.
- torginus 4y ago
  I agree with the point you're making, however for some reason on Linux, desktop environments usually are far more extensive than that. KDE, GNOME, etc. usually don't only consist of an app launcher, but a file browser, text editor, archive manager, browser, image viewer and who knows what else. I never understood this tribalism, doesn't the spirit of open source mean that I'm free to choose the tools of my liking, may the best tool win, etc.? This certainly the case on Windows, where people usually just replace tools to their liking. Most distros usually strongly push the desktop environment's native apps for every niche.

29athrowaway 4y ago

I hope they fix the window switching issue that crashes gnome-shell and forced me to switch to another desktop.

sussmannbaka 4y ago

18 years of ignoring that patch out of spite :o)