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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

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.

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.