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Warning, rant ahead: File chooser grid view (ie thumbnails) - that's nice, but I'm so jaded at this point to care anymore. I've been using ubuntu on and off as

by dsego 4y ago

Warning, rant ahead: File chooser grid view (ie thumbnails) - that's nice, but I'm so jaded at this point to care anymore. I've been using ubuntu on and off as my personal system for the past 15 years, it sure beats windows in many respects (typing this on MacOS). But I'm just too old to be excited by UI features that should've been here long ago and that were the standard in the software of the late 90s and early 2000s. There has also been a vocal part of the community defending the lack of thumbnails in the file picker, so this whole story has a bitter taste to it. One more thing, it feels like open source systems and UIs are developing at a glacial pace these days, either the tools used to develop open source software are sub-par or maybe there is a lack of people working on it and effort put into it. So glacial that in the age of AI, a grid view is somehow a notable feature. There seems to be less to be excited about these days and I have given up expecting great things.

rhaway84773 4y ago
This seems like a misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. The “vocal parts of the community” were not against the UI change. For the most part, being the ones who were charged with putting in effort to make this improvement for free, they were pointing out the significant technical challenges it involved, and they couldn’t find someone to volunteer their own personal time for free to take on this challenge. As Gnome has made massive strides towards simplifying its codebase, these changes become far more achievable and reasonable (click through to the developer changes page and you will see GTK4 has deprecated something like 20 possible file picker classes, in favor of 3, which provide equivalent functionality). Of course, the same people who complain but are unwilling to either put effort or money towards fixing these supposedly deal breaking problems, have also spent the last 2 years complaining about the code and architecture cleanup effort Gnome devs have made to make it possible to fix those problems.
- onli 4y ago
  That is unsubstantiated. How would we know that the same people complained about code cleanups and not having a file picker? Do you have any proof? Users like me who got annoyed by never being able to easily select the wanted image (when in a gtk app), for many many years now, had no insight into any architectural changes or code cleanups of gtk4. So there weren't any complains from this group there. This is the typical "everyone is against us" you often hear from the gnome side. It's a shame to read this under such a nice release, which has only positive changes as far as I can see, it really seems to address a lot of the criticism in a good way.
  - asoneth 4y ago
    > How would we know that the same people complained about code cleanups and not having a file picker? I also saw some complaints of this form. If I recall correctly they were non-contributors complaining that Gnome devs were dedicating too much time to refactoring and deprecating APIs and not spending enough time implementing features that they wanted. I'll give you that Gnome developer communication often comes off as defensive, but as an outsider I'm also shocked at the volume and tone of complaints they get -- I doubt I would be able to put up with such toxic users for very long.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
      I wanted to make some minor changes and the kind of toxicity being directed at developers was scary, even as someone who was only looking to help with some translations, etc. Ever since that experience I’ve become highly sympathetic to open source devs of all stripes. The only partial exception are blatantly corporate projects making blatantly corporate decisions (eg React/Angular or VS Code telemetry)
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Im not on the Gnome side. I haven’t contributed beyond very basic bug fixes and would hardly consider my contributions to Gnome meaningful. But as part of searching for some contribution to make I went through a whole list of bug and feature requests. And while it’s almost impossible to prove that the people are the same, what was very evident was the sense of entitlement displayed by both groups. Frankly, even as someone who isn’t part of the Gnome community and was simply looking to maybe fix some language translations, the toxicity from the people who didn’t contribute anything was overwhelming. It’s fair enough to complain about something not being up to par. But that very quickly transforms into claims that the developers have an evil agenda.
    - onli 4y ago
      I'm also engaged in a (way smaller ofc) FOSS project and I can relate a bit, but it's just not proper to mix the different kind of criticisms into one, and to create the image of one enemy. GNOME is big enough that there is a lot of feedback, but that only makes it more important to properly evaluate that feedback. The file picker bug situation and the bug report handling was just horrible (the quotes in the thread above show that quite well), the project has only itself to blame for the negative attitude it got from that. Let there be praise that this situation might improve now (will take ages until GTK4 is everywhere, probably never), not use this situation to bash the users that took the time and effort to give their feedback.
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  I'm not sure what the hell you are talking about. It took like 5 years for someone from the dev team to acknowledge the first bug report [0]. Look at the attitude shown towards the constant request for implementation [1]: > Got patch? Share. Gotn't? Just CC and be silent. Really facinating thread... I read it every year to remind myself that my brother was born that year and now, 18 years later he's an adult so he's allowed to have beer and use a filepicker in GNOME [0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154 [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154#c32 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154#c32
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >> Got patch? Share. Gotn't? Just CC and be silent. Indeed. This hostile attitude towards criticism of lack of basic QOL features, is what's keeping Linux at ~2% market share, away from the average users, and we'll be perpetually stuck in "$CURRENT_YEAR is finally year of the Linux" meme. Hate Windows all you want kids but if you look at independent online tech related forums where people ask questions or problems on Windows, the answer is always a solution and never "RTFM!" KDE should be commended for acknowledging and fixing some of the usability issues highlighted by the "Linus Tech Tips Gaming on Linux challenge" fiasco form 2021, when most of the Linux community went full neckbeard on him telling him he shouldn't use Linux if he doesn't know how to use the terminal.
    - j1elo 4y ago
      That's because people who answer are being paid to do so, or have other types of incentive system put in place, and they wouldn't want risk losing them by writing what they actually think. Not so much with open source, where the one answering has (potentially) just came back home from work and is just taking the time and energy to do it from their own free time and goodwill while they sip a beer and think about what to make for dinner in a couple minutes.
      - Dalewyn 4y ago
        Between Windows volunteers and Linux volunteers, I've found the former much more amicable. Paid support guys from Microsoft on the other hand: No offence to them, but they're useless.
- sprash 4y ago
  This also seems like misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. First of all, it is absolutely laughable that something as essential as a thumbnail file picker is missing for that long, literally decades. Several patches have been submitted by people "willing to put muh effort and money in it" and got rejected because superficial idiotic reasons. On the other hand vast amount of resources are put into widely unpopular changes like client side window decoration, removing configuration options, turning everything into a tablet UI or breaking font rendering. And the "massive strides towards simplifying its codebase" means nothing more than dropping backwards compatibility on a regular basis while making everything more bloated and resource demanding. Maybe Gnome is a project to sabotage the FOSS desktop. Stranger conspiracies turned out to be true. Personally I'd recommend: Don't use their software. Don't contribute to their ecosystem. Don't go to their conferences. Don't ever give them any money.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Thank Icaza and RH for that. Gnome when it was born it was amazing. They shipped a window manager with LISP capabilities, Sawfish. Totally the opposite of Gnome3. I wish the FSF forked over Gnome in order to bring a Guile interface to Mutter instead of GJS. It would be much better. I memember when I discovered emacs when I was 15 or so, I was astounded. Self-documenting, with geek-nerd culture in every bit of it, a text editor with a chatbot, tetris and a text adventure bundled with it and it also was a LISP interpreter. You could do mail, news, IRC and with proper plugins, play IF text adventures with Malyon, allowing you to copy and paste from everything to everything. Now with Gnome 3 thanks to ReadHatware/XMLpest/SystemD everything wants to be a bad NT clone from Micros~1 with SystemD instead of svchost.exe.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    Lol, we’ve already entered the realm of conspiracy theories. This is exactly the toxicity that I was talking about. I suspect most open source software projects would be thrilled to have individuals like you not be their users.
    - sprash 4y ago
      So who is the target audience of GNOME then? Does it even have users? The EEE practices of Microsoft were a conspiracy theory as well until everything about it got confirmed as true in the Halloween Documents.
- 0dayz 4y ago
  It reminds me of the Firefox users who to this day view Mozilla with contempt for having deprecated old add-ons or some barely used feature (highly recommend reading your average pale moon user's reaction when pale moon does the same)
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
    At some point, Mozilla changed from being about the users to being about Mozilla Corp. So yes, I will continue to view Mozilla with hostility until the day they die. Firefox (and Thunderbird) needs new management.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    Right? How dare those users be upset at their workflow being broken? Everyone knows that if you can't write code, you should have no expectation of software ever working for you! After all, the only other way to ever have any legitimate opinion about any product ever is if you're paying for it, but we conveniently fix that problem by making it literally impossible to pay for Firefox! Why can't the users just shut up and be grateful for the features that haven't yet been ripped out? (/s)
  - dagurp 4y ago
    Seeing how many people stopped using Firefox, maybe they have a point?
    - 0dayz 4y ago
      Firefox decline was way before add-ons deprecation, it more or less started with Chrome being a few versions in due to simple configuration, streamlined ui, increased security and most importantly performance.
  - RunSet 4y ago
    I don't feel any contempt for Mozilla but at the same time Firefox was never as enjoyable to use once it began chasing Chrome. I would put the high water mark at Firefox 3.6.n. Generally speaking, FireFox still retains most of the same features, it's just harder to configure it to be well-behaved (tab bar on the side was a native Firefox preference originally- now it is a real learning experience to set up). There is also a lot of stuff bundled and enabled with Firefox by default that ought not be included at all (WTF is a "pocket"?).
- simion314 4y ago
  >This seems like a misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. This is false, GNOME devs were promoting the idea that you do not need the feature. So the GNOME devs/fans were telling everyone that they are doing thingd wrong, for example if you want to upload a image you should not use the Upload button and get the File Selector dialog, the GNOME way is to Drag and Drop the image from the file manager. Question is how you explain other DEs have this feature? What makes it so hard to do it in GNOME, is the C language,t he tool, some missing fundamentals in the gnome core stuff ?
  - kps 4y ago
    > some missing fundamentals in the gnome core stuff ? Yes. Policy fundamentals, though, not technical fundamentals.
- carlosjobim 4y ago
  > unwilling to either put effort or money towards fixing these supposedly deal breaking problems He put his money to fix the deal breaking problems by buying MacOS.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Simplifying they did, to the detriment of the whole development experience.
aaomidi 4y ago
Linux desktop has not had this much velocity basically ever. We went from it being unusable for most work to useable for nearly everything in the last half decade.
- bandrami 4y ago
  But it's so very much worse than it was 15-20 years ago. Sadly the peak was the mid-oughts, and it's been just getting worse ever since.
- anthk 4y ago
  Gnome 2 or XFCE4 with the autoconfiguring X.Org instead of X11 was good enough since the 2.6 Linux release, FreeBSD 4.3 or since OpenBSD 4.6. OpenBSD with toadd/hotplugd brings the same capabilities on device automounting as Linux without a dependency nightmare. If you simlink /vol to /run/media/$USER, you magically get UDEV-like mounts. Add tray-app from packages and you'll almost get the same usability as Ubuntu on device automounting. From that everything went downhill on desktops, with tons of bloat to do basic things.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  Some of that is also due to Electron for better or worse. Slack, VSCode and so on.
- awill 4y ago
  Why do you say that? gnome 2,X was great. My recollection was that almost everyone hated gnome 3
- dagw 4y ago
  I don't know. I feel like 2002-2008ish was the most exciting time for the Linux desktop. It was going from strength to strength and really holding its own. Around 2009-2010 something happened and Linux really fell behind on the desktop front.
- lproven 4y ago
  Totally false. It was OK by about 2000, good by 2005-2006. Then Microsoft threatened to sue, everyone panicked, all the big players did weird phone-like UIs or Mac-like UIs and the little independents who weren't worth suing went off and made half-assed Win9x clones. Microsoft got what it wanted. It sowed discord, broke up a harmonic community, and drove it to the four winds. If you've only seen it since 2010 or so, all you've seen is people trying to reassemble the wreckage.
vidanay 4y ago
> One more thing, it feels like open source systems and UIs are developing at a glacial pace these days, either the tools used to develop open source software are sub-par or maybe there is a lack of people working on it and effort put into it. So glacial that in the age of AI, a grid view is somehow a notable feature. There seems to be less to be excited about these days and I have given up expecting great things. The glacial pace of the whole Wayland vs. X11 situation has nearly put me off desktop Linux completely in the last few years.
jrm4 4y ago
100%. I'm reminded of when people had to beg to get phones to have a "dark mode," i.e. something Windows 95 could do easily. The correct answer is modularity, just let US pick the file-picker. THAT is what Linux/Free/Open-Source, etc. SHOULD be all about, and this is why Gnome is more-or-less dead to me.
- tristan957 4y ago
  You can pick the file picker. That is what the XDG Desktop Portals are all about.
  - kps 4y ago
    Which GNOME decided to break, because you're a “clown” if you use it. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829
    - lemper 4y ago
      now that's a new low.
superkuh 4y ago
It's not just thumbnails. In ~2015 Matthias Clasen of Redhat removed the ability to chose between filename-entry and path-bar mode in the gsettings org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. This meant it was no longer possible to open a File->Open dialog in a Gtk3 using program and paste or type a file path (like, /home/user/somefile.txt) into the File->Open window. Instead only the mouse-using bubble buttons 'path-bar' mode is available. When you attempt to paste a file path into the file->open dialog you get an error, "The folder contents could not be displayed.\nOperation not suported". (ref: http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail.jpg http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail....) When hundreds of people asked about this bug he said, >It is a private gtk setting, you don't really have any business tweaking it. It may disappear at any point. (ref: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788700 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788700) and all attempts to get them to fix the bug since have failed. I continue to ask in #gtk on IRC at least once every year. Gtk3 is permanently frozen broken and the same bug actually still exists in Gtk4. If you open a file->open dialog and just paste a file path you get an error. I have attempted to re-write the relevant sections of gtkfilechooserwidget.c myself, just for my machines, but I have only succeeded in allowing typing/pasting in File->Open dialogs the first time they're activated in a program. Never the subsequent activation. Index: gtk+-3.24.5/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c =================================================================== --- gtk+-3.24.5.orig/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c +++ gtk+-3.24.5/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c @@ -8607,8 +8607,8 @@ gtk_file_chooser_widget_init (GtkFileCho priv->load_state = LOAD_EMPTY; priv->reload_state = RELOAD_EMPTY; priv->pending_select_files = NULL; - priv->location_mode = LOCATION_MODE_PATH_BAR; - priv->operation_mode = OPERATION_MODE_BROWSE; + priv->location_mode = LOCATION_MODE_FILENAME_ENTRY; + priv->operation_mode = OPERATION_MODE_ENTER_LOCATION; priv->sort_column = MODEL_COL_NAME; priv->sort_order = GTK_SORT_ASCENDING; priv->recent_manager = gtk_recent_manager_get_default (); I've talked to Gtk4 users on #gtk IRC and apparently this bug still exists in Gtk4. When they refuse to fix things like this you have to wonder who they're making Gtk for. Business users of IBM/Redhat's who's employees use a mouse for everything, I guess. And yes, I know gtkfilechooserwidget.c is spaghetti and it's hard to change anything without breaking something someone else wants. But this is core functionality. It should not be ignored. Especially not for an entire decade.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>maybe there is a lack of people working on it and effort put into it. This has always been the case with FOSS GUIs. When everyone is happy CLIing everything and telling those who aren't to get bent, GUIs move at a snail's pace. I think it's amazing we even have stuff like GNOME, KDE, and xfce in the state they are in today.
csdvrx 4y ago
> it feels like open source systems and UIs are developing at a glacial pace these days Check out hyprland: hyprland.org
- lproven 4y ago
  Same old same old. I don't want a tiling WM, thanks. I'm a big boy, I've been using WIMPs for 35 years, and I can manage my own windows very nicely with a few keystrokes. I don't need a tool to do it for me and fail to read my mind. I also don't want a bloody great horizontal panel across the top of the screen wasting 1cm of vertical space on a widescreen display. No it does not help if it's visually broken up into separate islands: it's dead to me. Wasted space. Either use it, and you'd better find a remarkably good set of uses for it, or give it back.
  - csdvrx 4y ago
    > Same old same old. I don't want a tiling WM, thanks. That's a very naive take of tiling. For traditional tiling, maybe. But unlike WM that do tiling only, hyprland does more: it supports my keystrokes and lets me configure how much of space each window get, while also letting me "float" the windows like a regular window manager > I'm a big boy, I've been using WIMPs for 35 years, Have you considered the possibility you are so set in your ways that you are neglecting new and useful tool? The tone of your comment reminds me of the summary dismissals of fzy. > I also don't want a bloody great horizontal panel across the top of the screen wasting 1cm of vertical space on a widescreen display Then make the panel vertical instead of horizontal, or just close it lol - all of which can be done with a few keystrokes
    - akho 4y ago
      > But unlike WM that do tiling only, hyprland does more: it supports my keystrokes and lets me configure how much of space each window get, while also letting me "float" the windows like a regular window manager All dynamic tiling WMs do those things. Hyprland is not special in that way.
    - lproven 4y ago
lannisterstark 4y ago
[flagged]

by dsego 4y ago

rhaway84773 4y ago

This seems like a misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. The “vocal parts of the community” were not against the UI change. For the most part, being the ones who were charged with putting in effort to make this improvement for free, they were pointing out the significant technical challenges it involved, and they couldn’t find someone to volunteer their own personal time for free to take on this challenge. As Gnome has made massive strides towards simplifying its codebase, these changes become far more achievable and reasonable (click through to the developer changes page and you will see GTK4 has deprecated something like 20 possible file picker classes, in favor of 3, which provide equivalent functionality). Of course, the same people who complain but are unwilling to either put effort or money towards fixing these supposedly deal breaking problems, have also spent the last 2 years complaining about the code and architecture cleanup effort Gnome devs have made to make it possible to fix those problems.

onli 4y ago
That is unsubstantiated. How would we know that the same people complained about code cleanups and not having a file picker? Do you have any proof? Users like me who got annoyed by never being able to easily select the wanted image (when in a gtk app), for many many years now, had no insight into any architectural changes or code cleanups of gtk4. So there weren't any complains from this group there. This is the typical "everyone is against us" you often hear from the gnome side. It's a shame to read this under such a nice release, which has only positive changes as far as I can see, it really seems to address a lot of the criticism in a good way.
- asoneth 4y ago
  > How would we know that the same people complained about code cleanups and not having a file picker? I also saw some complaints of this form. If I recall correctly they were non-contributors complaining that Gnome devs were dedicating too much time to refactoring and deprecating APIs and not spending enough time implementing features that they wanted. I'll give you that Gnome developer communication often comes off as defensive, but as an outsider I'm also shocked at the volume and tone of complaints they get -- I doubt I would be able to put up with such toxic users for very long.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    I wanted to make some minor changes and the kind of toxicity being directed at developers was scary, even as someone who was only looking to help with some translations, etc. Ever since that experience I’ve become highly sympathetic to open source devs of all stripes. The only partial exception are blatantly corporate projects making blatantly corporate decisions (eg React/Angular or VS Code telemetry)
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Im not on the Gnome side. I haven’t contributed beyond very basic bug fixes and would hardly consider my contributions to Gnome meaningful. But as part of searching for some contribution to make I went through a whole list of bug and feature requests. And while it’s almost impossible to prove that the people are the same, what was very evident was the sense of entitlement displayed by both groups. Frankly, even as someone who isn’t part of the Gnome community and was simply looking to maybe fix some language translations, the toxicity from the people who didn’t contribute anything was overwhelming. It’s fair enough to complain about something not being up to par. But that very quickly transforms into claims that the developers have an evil agenda.
  - onli 4y ago
    I'm also engaged in a (way smaller ofc) FOSS project and I can relate a bit, but it's just not proper to mix the different kind of criticisms into one, and to create the image of one enemy. GNOME is big enough that there is a lot of feedback, but that only makes it more important to properly evaluate that feedback. The file picker bug situation and the bug report handling was just horrible (the quotes in the thread above show that quite well), the project has only itself to blame for the negative attitude it got from that. Let there be praise that this situation might improve now (will take ages until GTK4 is everywhere, probably never), not use this situation to bash the users that took the time and effort to give their feedback.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
I'm not sure what the hell you are talking about. It took like 5 years for someone from the dev team to acknowledge the first bug report [0]. Look at the attitude shown towards the constant request for implementation [1]: > Got patch? Share. Gotn't? Just CC and be silent. Really facinating thread... I read it every year to remind myself that my brother was born that year and now, 18 years later he's an adult so he's allowed to have beer and use a filepicker in GNOME [0] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154 [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154#c32 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154#c32
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >> Got patch? Share. Gotn't? Just CC and be silent. Indeed. This hostile attitude towards criticism of lack of basic QOL features, is what's keeping Linux at ~2% market share, away from the average users, and we'll be perpetually stuck in "$CURRENT_YEAR is finally year of the Linux" meme. Hate Windows all you want kids but if you look at independent online tech related forums where people ask questions or problems on Windows, the answer is always a solution and never "RTFM!" KDE should be commended for acknowledging and fixing some of the usability issues highlighted by the "Linus Tech Tips Gaming on Linux challenge" fiasco form 2021, when most of the Linux community went full neckbeard on him telling him he shouldn't use Linux if he doesn't know how to use the terminal.
  - j1elo 4y ago
    That's because people who answer are being paid to do so, or have other types of incentive system put in place, and they wouldn't want risk losing them by writing what they actually think. Not so much with open source, where the one answering has (potentially) just came back home from work and is just taking the time and energy to do it from their own free time and goodwill while they sip a beer and think about what to make for dinner in a couple minutes.
    - Dalewyn 4y ago
      Between Windows volunteers and Linux volunteers, I've found the former much more amicable. Paid support guys from Microsoft on the other hand: No offence to them, but they're useless.
sprash 4y ago
This also seems like misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. First of all, it is absolutely laughable that something as essential as a thumbnail file picker is missing for that long, literally decades. Several patches have been submitted by people "willing to put muh effort and money in it" and got rejected because superficial idiotic reasons. On the other hand vast amount of resources are put into widely unpopular changes like client side window decoration, removing configuration options, turning everything into a tablet UI or breaking font rendering. And the "massive strides towards simplifying its codebase" means nothing more than dropping backwards compatibility on a regular basis while making everything more bloated and resource demanding. Maybe Gnome is a project to sabotage the FOSS desktop. Stranger conspiracies turned out to be true. Personally I'd recommend: Don't use their software. Don't contribute to their ecosystem. Don't go to their conferences. Don't ever give them any money.
- anthk 4y ago
  Thank Icaza and RH for that. Gnome when it was born it was amazing. They shipped a window manager with LISP capabilities, Sawfish. Totally the opposite of Gnome3. I wish the FSF forked over Gnome in order to bring a Guile interface to Mutter instead of GJS. It would be much better. I memember when I discovered emacs when I was 15 or so, I was astounded. Self-documenting, with geek-nerd culture in every bit of it, a text editor with a chatbot, tetris and a text adventure bundled with it and it also was a LISP interpreter. You could do mail, news, IRC and with proper plugins, play IF text adventures with Malyon, allowing you to copy and paste from everything to everything. Now with Gnome 3 thanks to ReadHatware/XMLpest/SystemD everything wants to be a bad NT clone from Micros~1 with SystemD instead of svchost.exe.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  Lol, we’ve already entered the realm of conspiracy theories. This is exactly the toxicity that I was talking about. I suspect most open source software projects would be thrilled to have individuals like you not be their users.
  - sprash 4y ago
    So who is the target audience of GNOME then? Does it even have users? The EEE practices of Microsoft were a conspiracy theory as well until everything about it got confirmed as true in the Halloween Documents.
0dayz 4y ago
It reminds me of the Firefox users who to this day view Mozilla with contempt for having deprecated old add-ons or some barely used feature (highly recommend reading your average pale moon user's reaction when pale moon does the same)
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  At some point, Mozilla changed from being about the users to being about Mozilla Corp. So yes, I will continue to view Mozilla with hostility until the day they die. Firefox (and Thunderbird) needs new management.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Right? How dare those users be upset at their workflow being broken? Everyone knows that if you can't write code, you should have no expectation of software ever working for you! After all, the only other way to ever have any legitimate opinion about any product ever is if you're paying for it, but we conveniently fix that problem by making it literally impossible to pay for Firefox! Why can't the users just shut up and be grateful for the features that haven't yet been ripped out? (/s)
- dagurp 4y ago
  Seeing how many people stopped using Firefox, maybe they have a point?
  - 0dayz 4y ago
    Firefox decline was way before add-ons deprecation, it more or less started with Chrome being a few versions in due to simple configuration, streamlined ui, increased security and most importantly performance.
- RunSet 4y ago
  I don't feel any contempt for Mozilla but at the same time Firefox was never as enjoyable to use once it began chasing Chrome. I would put the high water mark at Firefox 3.6.n. Generally speaking, FireFox still retains most of the same features, it's just harder to configure it to be well-behaved (tab bar on the side was a native Firefox preference originally- now it is a real learning experience to set up). There is also a lot of stuff bundled and enabled with Firefox by default that ought not be included at all (WTF is a "pocket"?).
simion314 4y ago
>This seems like a misrepresentation of the entire file picker saga. This is false, GNOME devs were promoting the idea that you do not need the feature. So the GNOME devs/fans were telling everyone that they are doing thingd wrong, for example if you want to upload a image you should not use the Upload button and get the File Selector dialog, the GNOME way is to Drag and Drop the image from the file manager. Question is how you explain other DEs have this feature? What makes it so hard to do it in GNOME, is the C language,t he tool, some missing fundamentals in the gnome core stuff ?
- kps 4y ago
  > some missing fundamentals in the gnome core stuff ? Yes. Policy fundamentals, though, not technical fundamentals.
carlosjobim 4y ago
> unwilling to either put effort or money towards fixing these supposedly deal breaking problems He put his money to fix the deal breaking problems by buying MacOS.
pjmlp 4y ago
Simplifying they did, to the detriment of the whole development experience.

aaomidi 4y ago

Linux desktop has not had this much velocity basically ever. We went from it being unusable for most work to useable for nearly everything in the last half decade.

bandrami 4y ago
But it's so very much worse than it was 15-20 years ago. Sadly the peak was the mid-oughts, and it's been just getting worse ever since.
anthk 4y ago
Gnome 2 or XFCE4 with the autoconfiguring X.Org instead of X11 was good enough since the 2.6 Linux release, FreeBSD 4.3 or since OpenBSD 4.6. OpenBSD with toadd/hotplugd brings the same capabilities on device automounting as Linux without a dependency nightmare. If you simlink /vol to /run/media/$USER, you magically get UDEV-like mounts. Add tray-app from packages and you'll almost get the same usability as Ubuntu on device automounting. From that everything went downhill on desktops, with tons of bloat to do basic things.
DrBazza 4y ago
Some of that is also due to Electron for better or worse. Slack, VSCode and so on.
awill 4y ago
Why do you say that? gnome 2,X was great. My recollection was that almost everyone hated gnome 3
dagw 4y ago
I don't know. I feel like 2002-2008ish was the most exciting time for the Linux desktop. It was going from strength to strength and really holding its own. Around 2009-2010 something happened and Linux really fell behind on the desktop front.
lproven 4y ago
Totally false. It was OK by about 2000, good by 2005-2006. Then Microsoft threatened to sue, everyone panicked, all the big players did weird phone-like UIs or Mac-like UIs and the little independents who weren't worth suing went off and made half-assed Win9x clones. Microsoft got what it wanted. It sowed discord, broke up a harmonic community, and drove it to the four winds. If you've only seen it since 2010 or so, all you've seen is people trying to reassemble the wreckage.

vidanay 4y ago

> One more thing, it feels like open source systems and UIs are developing at a glacial pace these days, either the tools used to develop open source software are sub-par or maybe there is a lack of people working on it and effort put into it. So glacial that in the age of AI, a grid view is somehow a notable feature. There seems to be less to be excited about these days and I have given up expecting great things. The glacial pace of the whole Wayland vs. X11 situation has nearly put me off desktop Linux completely in the last few years.

jrm4 4y ago

100%. I'm reminded of when people had to beg to get phones to have a "dark mode," i.e. something Windows 95 could do easily. The correct answer is modularity, just let US pick the file-picker. THAT is what Linux/Free/Open-Source, etc. SHOULD be all about, and this is why Gnome is more-or-less dead to me.

tristan957 4y ago
You can pick the file picker. That is what the XDG Desktop Portals are all about.
- kps 4y ago
  Which GNOME decided to break, because you're a “clown” if you use it. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4829
  - lemper 4y ago
    now that's a new low.

superkuh 4y ago

It's not just thumbnails. In ~2015 Matthias Clasen of Redhat removed the ability to chose between filename-entry and path-bar mode in the gsettings org.gtk.Settings.FileChooser location-mode. This meant it was no longer possible to open a File->Open dialog in a Gtk3 using program and paste or type a file path (like, /home/user/somefile.txt) into the File->Open window. Instead only the mouse-using bubble buttons 'path-bar' mode is available. When you attempt to paste a file path into the file->open dialog you get an error, "The folder contents could not be displayed.\nOperation not suported". (ref: http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail.jpg http://erewhon.superkuh.com/gtkfilechooserwidget-paste-fail....) When hundreds of people asked about this bug he said, >It is a private gtk setting, you don't really have any business tweaking it. It may disappear at any point. (ref: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788700 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=788700) and all attempts to get them to fix the bug since have failed. I continue to ask in #gtk on IRC at least once every year. Gtk3 is permanently frozen broken and the same bug actually still exists in Gtk4. If you open a file->open dialog and just paste a file path you get an error. I have attempted to re-write the relevant sections of gtkfilechooserwidget.c myself, just for my machines, but I have only succeeded in allowing typing/pasting in File->Open dialogs the first time they're activated in a program. Never the subsequent activation. Index: gtk+-3.24.5/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c =================================================================== --- gtk+-3.24.5.orig/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c +++ gtk+-3.24.5/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c @@ -8607,8 +8607,8 @@ gtk_file_chooser_widget_init (GtkFileCho priv->load_state = LOAD_EMPTY; priv->reload_state = RELOAD_EMPTY; priv->pending_select_files = NULL; - priv->location_mode = LOCATION_MODE_PATH_BAR; - priv->operation_mode = OPERATION_MODE_BROWSE; + priv->location_mode = LOCATION_MODE_FILENAME_ENTRY; + priv->operation_mode = OPERATION_MODE_ENTER_LOCATION; priv->sort_column = MODEL_COL_NAME; priv->sort_order = GTK_SORT_ASCENDING; priv->recent_manager = gtk_recent_manager_get_default (); I've talked to Gtk4 users on #gtk IRC and apparently this bug still exists in Gtk4. When they refuse to fix things like this you have to wonder who they're making Gtk for. Business users of IBM/Redhat's who's employees use a mouse for everything, I guess. And yes, I know gtkfilechooserwidget.c is spaghetti and it's hard to change anything without breaking something someone else wants. But this is core functionality. It should not be ignored. Especially not for an entire decade.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>maybe there is a lack of people working on it and effort put into it. This has always been the case with FOSS GUIs. When everyone is happy CLIing everything and telling those who aren't to get bent, GUIs move at a snail's pace. I think it's amazing we even have stuff like GNOME, KDE, and xfce in the state they are in today.

csdvrx 4y ago

> it feels like open source systems and UIs are developing at a glacial pace these days Check out hyprland: hyprland.org

lproven 4y ago
Same old same old. I don't want a tiling WM, thanks. I'm a big boy, I've been using WIMPs for 35 years, and I can manage my own windows very nicely with a few keystrokes. I don't need a tool to do it for me and fail to read my mind. I also don't want a bloody great horizontal panel across the top of the screen wasting 1cm of vertical space on a widescreen display. No it does not help if it's visually broken up into separate islands: it's dead to me. Wasted space. Either use it, and you'd better find a remarkably good set of uses for it, or give it back.
- csdvrx 4y ago
  > Same old same old. I don't want a tiling WM, thanks. That's a very naive take of tiling. For traditional tiling, maybe. But unlike WM that do tiling only, hyprland does more: it supports my keystrokes and lets me configure how much of space each window get, while also letting me "float" the windows like a regular window manager > I'm a big boy, I've been using WIMPs for 35 years, Have you considered the possibility you are so set in your ways that you are neglecting new and useful tool? The tone of your comment reminds me of the summary dismissals of fzy. > I also don't want a bloody great horizontal panel across the top of the screen wasting 1cm of vertical space on a widescreen display Then make the panel vertical instead of horizontal, or just close it lol - all of which can be done with a few keystrokes
  - akho 4y ago
    > But unlike WM that do tiling only, hyprland does more: it supports my keystrokes and lets me configure how much of space each window get, while also letting me "float" the windows like a regular window manager All dynamic tiling WMs do those things. Hyprland is not special in that way.
  - lproven 4y ago

lannisterstark 4y ago

[flagged]