6 ms·

Introducing GNOME 46, "Kathmandu"

117 points by whalesalad 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dvirsky 3y ago
I haven't used Linux as a desktop in over 2 years, and I really miss Gnome.
zeta0134 3y ago
Is it at all possible to convince gnome-styled file pickers to put the "Open" and "Cancel" buttons on the bottom of the window? It's really jarring when working alongside other applications that either implement their own native file pickers or use a different widget toolkit. Gnome seems to be the only DE really pushing this style, and it's *really* hard to find the relevant settings. Maybe I don't know the implementation-specific keyword to help with the hunt?
- whalesalad 3y ago
  This is why I stick to KDE. I like a lot of the aesthetic elements of GNOME, and some of their apps are pretty good, but I dislike the pseudo-macos simplicity that you mention. It's like an attempt to be more like mac, without the good parts of mac.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    Not needing to rely on hacked-together and essentially unsupported extensions for core functionality that breaks every other update is a nice plus too. Besides, the aesthetics and workflow are portable from GNOME to KDE with some configuration (though not the other way around).
  - ragnese 3y ago
    In KDE apps, can you move where the Cancel and Open buttons are in file dialogs? If not, then your comment is a non sequitur.
    - whalesalad 3y ago
      They are just in reasonable and intuitive places to begin with. KDE arguably has an obscene amount of customization capabilities, though. I woudln't be surprised.
infinityplus1 3y ago
The improvements seem extensive. Nice to see progress happening.
blueflow 3y ago
There is no section for bugfixes?
softirq 3y ago
GNOME has come a long way, but its stubborn insistence on not having a desktop with a real application launcher remains a huge usability misstep. GNOME's marketshare is the desktop, and so the initial value proposition of a hybrid UI seems very much wishful thinking, while the keyboard based workflows it seems to want to enable are better served by tiling WM such as Sway, and do not make sense for the "default" WM that is picked up by casual converts who are used to a point and click system. Overall it's just a confusing mess for new users, which Canonical/System76 rationally get rid of (which is probably a majority of the GNOME user base). So why does GNOME continue down this path. Is it a fear of being "just like everyone else" by using a tried and true dock/application bar? Is it a desire to not be the front running WM and be more "niche" to power users? I still don't really understand their decision making process.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Two things that made me switch to XFCE, JavaScript based extensions affecting performance, complete refusal to add back support for Windows shading (roll up).
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    That's why System76 is writting extensions in Rust and runs them in seperate processes.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Whatever compiled language, even with my C related rants, I am happier with C written XFCE extensions than the GNOME JavaScript ones. The separate process is an interesting point, back in the day dynamically loading code into the host process was the way to go, due to hardware resources and how demanding would be to use UNIX IPC for everything. Now a couple of years later, with the existing hardware resources, and the ongoing stability and security issues of loading code into process, turns out separate process is a good idea after all.
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    which extensions are js-based? there's no gnome extension to do roll-up windows?
nullifidian 3y ago
Just an anecdote: I'm currently patching nautilus to move ellipsisation of long filenames in the list view mode from center to right aligned, because of course there is no option for it, but technical books tend to have several authors, long names, and with Gnome's default center ellipsisation I can only see the author list and the year of a book. Another pet peeve of mine is the lack of type ahead. The relatively recent type ahead efforts were blocked (or stalled) by "design considerations" https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/issues/142 https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/issues/1... As the result Gnome Files is very unpleasant to use for deep trees with thousands of files in every directory on spinning media (zfs). The standard search feature also destroys context, i.e. being able to see the files filtered out by the query. This release is also consecutively the third time they moved the list of ongoing file operations -- from top right, to top left, to bottom left. With all the obsession about "not confusing users" that the Gnome's leading figures declare the constant change in the UX should be one of the primary sources of the actual confusion users experience.
- rstat1 3y ago
  One of many annoyances I have with GNOME, is that they still insist on forcing their slow search crap, instead of doing the sensible thing (that literally everyone else does) and give type-ahead search.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  I just want Miller Columns like macOS Finder. Either Gnome or KDE, that view always feels "right" to me.
  - hollandheese 3y ago
    Pantheon Files has them. Can fit in well enough as a Nautilus replacement.
awill 3y ago
Gnome breaking compatibility of extensions on EVERY single release means I hate relying on extensions for anything important.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Gnome breaking all of System76 Cosmic extentions resulted in them saying "We rather make our own desktop instead of having to rework everything all the time".
- benrutter 3y ago
  Urgh yes! As far as I understand this is all because extensions have to opt in and say "yes this works with the new gnome" or else it won't run so even if everything actually dies run fine, it won't work until an update is patched. I do understand the gnome team wanting to guarantee a good user experience with extensions, but I can't help but think the damage caused by breaking every extension on every release is worse than some of them working unpredictably.
- lambdanil 3y ago
  The "workaround" I have found for this is to use a slow-updating, non-rolling distro; in my case it's Debian.
svara 3y ago
I'm sure this year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  NixOS finally convinced me to switch, since the declarative config and rollback functionality meant I went from accidentally bricking (or at minimum "mysteriously unstabling") each previous Linux distro I tried at least once a year (NixOS basically gives you built-in safety belts to counter all the untested possible Linux configurations) to being able to mess with configs to my hearts' content with aplomb (since backing out is trivial and can be done in GRUB). It really feels like "Linux, unleashed" and like I've made the "final distro hop." There is a feeling of "Yep, this is it!" I have the same fearless feeling to alter configs that I have in macOS, except with, you know, more open-source and less walled-garden... Plus, I can finally boot off ZFS and a mirrored boot drive with no worries thanks to an excellently written guide and first-class ZFS support (just pick the latest ZFS-compatible kernel via a special config that automatically does this for you!) The negative of course is that Nix/NixOS have a learning curve. Once you grok it, though, you will literally want to install it on ALL your machines. It has eliminated so many headaches (assuming you can find the right option to tweak).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  It has been for me for a while now, it comes packaged on a desktop VM like VMWare Workstation, Virtual Box, and now WSL. The only I still bother are classical desktop like towers and NUCs, on laptops I have less headaches with a VM. Then for everything else, my distributions are Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and whatever Sony decided to use on their Blue Ray players.
maztaim 3y ago
I am seriously considering a look at KDE 6. I've kind of settled on Gnome plus some extensions (arc menu and dash to panel) over years, but they don't really give me exactly the feel I want, and the extensions I use may or may not work the way I expect them to at the time Gnome releases. Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made. I've tried i3/sway and hyperland recently. The problem is they don't work well with all the applications I need to support (zoom, slack). Gnome typically "just works" and is why I wind up continuing to use it.
- foresto 3y ago
  You might want to wait a little while, or look at 5 instead, because Plasma 6 was only just released and is still shaking out early bugs. > Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made. This extends into the toolkit as well. I was happily using XFCE until it adopted Gtk 3, at which point it quickly went downhill. The GNOME maintainers' insistence on designs that I find frustrating, the frequent removal of common desktop features that I use, and the general fragility imposed on applications that surfaces whenever the toolkit gets minor updates, all conspired to drive me away. It took some time and effort to migrate to KDE Plasma, but it was worth it. I'm pretty happy with my desktop again.
  - juujian 3y ago
    The KDE 6 Changes are mostly under the hood, so you don't lose a lot in terms of user experience either way.
- jwells89 3y ago
  GNOME is somewhat frustrating to me because there’s a number of things that I feel it gets more “right” than KDE, at least for me, but there’s about as many things that it doesn’t. KDE gets a lot of things “somewhat right” but also gets more less wrong, making it maybe better overall but still not leaving me satisfied. I appreciate that both exist free of charge as the result of a lot of time that people didn’t have to volunteer and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I’m glad both exist and continue to be maintained, but regardless, the situation leaves me much less jazzed about the Linux desktop than I’d like to be. Window manager setups might be a solution, but they take a lot of effort to make as polished as any of the major DEs, requiring the user to hunt down daemons to get tray items and the like. They also have a strong disposition towards hyper-minimal tiling which isn’t my thing, something along the lines of openbox is probably the most minimal I’d want to go but WMs like that don’t see much fanfare.
hannofcart 3y ago
After spending most of a decade in i3wm, I decided to give Gnome a try again. The most debilitating issue that I kept running into over and over again was extension memory leak. After a restart and within a week, gnome shell process would end up using 10GB. And all guides on how to debug this seem to say: turn off extensions one at a time to see what's leaking. Speaking to others I realised that I'm not the only one facing this. I just threw in the towel and switched to KDE. It has been smooth sailing since. Gnome shell desperately needs a resource monitor for extensions IMO.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  I wonder what percentage of users uses extensions other than distro defaults
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    I use a bunch thanks to NixOS' ease of installing them, such as the one that previews a file by hitting spacebar (which is a knock-off of the same functionality in MacOS).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Given that GNOME has quite a few stuff that they shift into extensions, even distro defaults make use of them.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    GNOME Tweaks has a lot of settings options that should be in the default software.
greyw 3y ago
A very nice release, especially the new VRR support is awesome.
rcarmo 3y ago
As someone who mostly accesses their Linux desktops via RDP, I’m curious to see how good the new integrated RDP support is (all my `xorgxrdp` setups are tweaked to do sound, accelerated graphics, etc.)
acheron 3y ago
More great work from the University of Bob Seger.
- neilsimp1 3y ago
  Sorry, what?
  - acheron 3y ago
    Sorry, just making low content posts. It's a punchline from an entirely unrelated Norm Macdonald joke ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBs5Al_eudc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBs5Al_eudc ), but I thought of it because Seger had a famous song called "Kathmandu".
betaby 3y ago
Gnome is the best advertisement for KDE Plasma.
sebazzz 3y ago
For the RDP remote login, assuming they refer to the MS RDP protocol, are they using xrdp as a backend or have they developed something themselves?
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  I think it's implemented by gnome-remote-desktop, which uses FreeRDP for RDP support. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
firecall 3y ago
Please bring back Miller Columns! NeXTSTEP had them in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns Here are two reasons I stick with macOS: 1) Miller Columns 2) The Magic Mouse Not the only two, but two seemingly unreproducible features by other desktop OS vendors and makers of peripherals! :-)
yason 3y ago
Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The ctrl-shift-f for a global search sounds like a generally bad idea that will conflict with a lot applications. Or maybe it doesn't impose itself on applications but only the desktop, I don't know. But one thing I know that if I disagree with Gnome developers then I'll have a hard time working around and hacking my own way in. I've usually ended up starting to patch Gnome/Gtk components at which points I just realize that it is absolutely futile and I give up. Gnome used to be the marvel of configurability. Around Gnome2 time there were gazillion settings and options that you could change, and even more via gsettings/gconf. Then the UI was gradually dumbed down but you could still configure most things. "Tweak" tools appeared. Now it seems I bump into an ideological obstacle left and right, and even the tweak tools won't let me change anything much besides some cosmetic properties. Mate has some rough edges but it's pretty much the only thing that still works for a power user that wants an UI with a traditional window manager of my choice instead of whatever tiling configuration is in hype this year.
devinprater 3y ago
It's amazing to see the accessibility improvements listed in an actual release note. I do wish the images on the page were labeled with Alt-text though.

117 points by whalesalad 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dvirsky 3y ago

I haven't used Linux as a desktop in over 2 years, and I really miss Gnome.

zeta0134 3y ago

Is it at all possible to convince gnome-styled file pickers to put the "Open" and "Cancel" buttons on the bottom of the window? It's really jarring when working alongside other applications that either implement their own native file pickers or use a different widget toolkit. Gnome seems to be the only DE really pushing this style, and it's *really* hard to find the relevant settings. Maybe I don't know the implementation-specific keyword to help with the hunt?

whalesalad 3y ago
This is why I stick to KDE. I like a lot of the aesthetic elements of GNOME, and some of their apps are pretty good, but I dislike the pseudo-macos simplicity that you mention. It's like an attempt to be more like mac, without the good parts of mac.
- Intralexical 3y ago
  Not needing to rely on hacked-together and essentially unsupported extensions for core functionality that breaks every other update is a nice plus too. Besides, the aesthetics and workflow are portable from GNOME to KDE with some configuration (though not the other way around).
- ragnese 3y ago
  In KDE apps, can you move where the Cancel and Open buttons are in file dialogs? If not, then your comment is a non sequitur.
  - whalesalad 3y ago
    They are just in reasonable and intuitive places to begin with. KDE arguably has an obscene amount of customization capabilities, though. I woudln't be surprised.

infinityplus1 3y ago

The improvements seem extensive. Nice to see progress happening.

blueflow 3y ago

There is no section for bugfixes?

softirq 3y ago

GNOME has come a long way, but its stubborn insistence on not having a desktop with a real application launcher remains a huge usability misstep. GNOME's marketshare is the desktop, and so the initial value proposition of a hybrid UI seems very much wishful thinking, while the keyboard based workflows it seems to want to enable are better served by tiling WM such as Sway, and do not make sense for the "default" WM that is picked up by casual converts who are used to a point and click system. Overall it's just a confusing mess for new users, which Canonical/System76 rationally get rid of (which is probably a majority of the GNOME user base). So why does GNOME continue down this path. Is it a fear of being "just like everyone else" by using a tried and true dock/application bar? Is it a desire to not be the front running WM and be more "niche" to power users? I still don't really understand their decision making process.

pjmlp 3y ago
Two things that made me switch to XFCE, JavaScript based extensions affecting performance, complete refusal to add back support for Windows shading (roll up).
- panick21_ 3y ago
  That's why System76 is writting extensions in Rust and runs them in seperate processes.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Whatever compiled language, even with my C related rants, I am happier with C written XFCE extensions than the GNOME JavaScript ones. The separate process is an interesting point, back in the day dynamically loading code into the host process was the way to go, due to hardware resources and how demanding would be to use UNIX IPC for everything. Now a couple of years later, with the existing hardware resources, and the ongoing stability and security issues of loading code into process, turns out separate process is a good idea after all.
- pmarreck 3y ago
  which extensions are js-based? there's no gnome extension to do roll-up windows?

nullifidian 3y ago

Just an anecdote: I'm currently patching nautilus to move ellipsisation of long filenames in the list view mode from center to right aligned, because of course there is no option for it, but technical books tend to have several authors, long names, and with Gnome's default center ellipsisation I can only see the author list and the year of a book. Another pet peeve of mine is the lack of type ahead. The relatively recent type ahead efforts were blocked (or stalled) by "design considerations" https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/issues/142 https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/issues/1... As the result Gnome Files is very unpleasant to use for deep trees with thousands of files in every directory on spinning media (zfs). The standard search feature also destroys context, i.e. being able to see the files filtered out by the query. This release is also consecutively the third time they moved the list of ongoing file operations -- from top right, to top left, to bottom left. With all the obsession about "not confusing users" that the Gnome's leading figures declare the constant change in the UX should be one of the primary sources of the actual confusion users experience.

rstat1 3y ago
One of many annoyances I have with GNOME, is that they still insist on forcing their slow search crap, instead of doing the sensible thing (that literally everyone else does) and give type-ahead search.
bloopernova 3y ago
I just want Miller Columns like macOS Finder. Either Gnome or KDE, that view always feels "right" to me.
- hollandheese 3y ago
  Pantheon Files has them. Can fit in well enough as a Nautilus replacement.

awill 3y ago

Gnome breaking compatibility of extensions on EVERY single release means I hate relying on extensions for anything important.

panick21_ 3y ago
Gnome breaking all of System76 Cosmic extentions resulted in them saying "We rather make our own desktop instead of having to rework everything all the time".
benrutter 3y ago
Urgh yes! As far as I understand this is all because extensions have to opt in and say "yes this works with the new gnome" or else it won't run so even if everything actually dies run fine, it won't work until an update is patched. I do understand the gnome team wanting to guarantee a good user experience with extensions, but I can't help but think the damage caused by breaking every extension on every release is worse than some of them working unpredictably.
lambdanil 3y ago
The "workaround" I have found for this is to use a slow-updating, non-rolling distro; in my case it's Debian.

svara 3y ago

I'm sure this year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop.

pmarreck 3y ago
NixOS finally convinced me to switch, since the declarative config and rollback functionality meant I went from accidentally bricking (or at minimum "mysteriously unstabling") each previous Linux distro I tried at least once a year (NixOS basically gives you built-in safety belts to counter all the untested possible Linux configurations) to being able to mess with configs to my hearts' content with aplomb (since backing out is trivial and can be done in GRUB). It really feels like "Linux, unleashed" and like I've made the "final distro hop." There is a feeling of "Yep, this is it!" I have the same fearless feeling to alter configs that I have in macOS, except with, you know, more open-source and less walled-garden... Plus, I can finally boot off ZFS and a mirrored boot drive with no worries thanks to an excellently written guide and first-class ZFS support (just pick the latest ZFS-compatible kernel via a special config that automatically does this for you!) The negative of course is that Nix/NixOS have a learning curve. Once you grok it, though, you will literally want to install it on ALL your machines. It has eliminated so many headaches (assuming you can find the right option to tweak).
pjmlp 3y ago
It has been for me for a while now, it comes packaged on a desktop VM like VMWare Workstation, Virtual Box, and now WSL. The only I still bother are classical desktop like towers and NUCs, on laptops I have less headaches with a VM. Then for everything else, my distributions are Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and whatever Sony decided to use on their Blue Ray players.

maztaim 3y ago

I am seriously considering a look at KDE 6. I've kind of settled on Gnome plus some extensions (arc menu and dash to panel) over years, but they don't really give me exactly the feel I want, and the extensions I use may or may not work the way I expect them to at the time Gnome releases. Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made. I've tried i3/sway and hyperland recently. The problem is they don't work well with all the applications I need to support (zoom, slack). Gnome typically "just works" and is why I wind up continuing to use it.

foresto 3y ago
You might want to wait a little while, or look at 5 instead, because Plasma 6 was only just released and is still shaking out early bugs. > Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made. This extends into the toolkit as well. I was happily using XFCE until it adopted Gtk 3, at which point it quickly went downhill. The GNOME maintainers' insistence on designs that I find frustrating, the frequent removal of common desktop features that I use, and the general fragility imposed on applications that surfaces whenever the toolkit gets minor updates, all conspired to drive me away. It took some time and effort to migrate to KDE Plasma, but it was worth it. I'm pretty happy with my desktop again.
- juujian 3y ago
  The KDE 6 Changes are mostly under the hood, so you don't lose a lot in terms of user experience either way.
jwells89 3y ago
GNOME is somewhat frustrating to me because there’s a number of things that I feel it gets more “right” than KDE, at least for me, but there’s about as many things that it doesn’t. KDE gets a lot of things “somewhat right” but also gets more less wrong, making it maybe better overall but still not leaving me satisfied. I appreciate that both exist free of charge as the result of a lot of time that people didn’t have to volunteer and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I’m glad both exist and continue to be maintained, but regardless, the situation leaves me much less jazzed about the Linux desktop than I’d like to be. Window manager setups might be a solution, but they take a lot of effort to make as polished as any of the major DEs, requiring the user to hunt down daemons to get tray items and the like. They also have a strong disposition towards hyper-minimal tiling which isn’t my thing, something along the lines of openbox is probably the most minimal I’d want to go but WMs like that don’t see much fanfare.

hannofcart 3y ago

After spending most of a decade in i3wm, I decided to give Gnome a try again. The most debilitating issue that I kept running into over and over again was extension memory leak. After a restart and within a week, gnome shell process would end up using 10GB. And all guides on how to debug this seem to say: turn off extensions one at a time to see what's leaking. Speaking to others I realised that I'm not the only one facing this. I just threw in the towel and switched to KDE. It has been smooth sailing since. Gnome shell desperately needs a resource monitor for extensions IMO.

iknowstuff 3y ago
I wonder what percentage of users uses extensions other than distro defaults
- pmarreck 3y ago
  I use a bunch thanks to NixOS' ease of installing them, such as the one that previews a file by hitting spacebar (which is a knock-off of the same functionality in MacOS).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Given that GNOME has quite a few stuff that they shift into extensions, even distro defaults make use of them.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  GNOME Tweaks has a lot of settings options that should be in the default software.

greyw 3y ago

A very nice release, especially the new VRR support is awesome.

rcarmo 3y ago

As someone who mostly accesses their Linux desktops via RDP, I’m curious to see how good the new integrated RDP support is (all my `xorgxrdp` setups are tweaked to do sound, accelerated graphics, etc.)

acheron 3y ago

More great work from the University of Bob Seger.

neilsimp1 3y ago
Sorry, what?
- acheron 3y ago
  Sorry, just making low content posts. It's a punchline from an entirely unrelated Norm Macdonald joke ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBs5Al_eudc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBs5Al_eudc ), but I thought of it because Seger had a famous song called "Kathmandu".

betaby 3y ago

Gnome is the best advertisement for KDE Plasma.

sebazzz 3y ago

For the RDP remote login, assuming they refer to the MS RDP protocol, are they using xrdp as a backend or have they developed something themselves?

neurostimulant 3y ago
I think it's implemented by gnome-remote-desktop, which uses FreeRDP for RDP support. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop

firecall 3y ago

Please bring back Miller Columns! NeXTSTEP had them in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns Here are two reasons I stick with macOS: 1) Miller Columns 2) The Magic Mouse Not the only two, but two seemingly unreproducible features by other desktop OS vendors and makers of peripherals! :-)

yason 3y ago

Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The ctrl-shift-f for a global search sounds like a generally bad idea that will conflict with a lot applications. Or maybe it doesn't impose itself on applications but only the desktop, I don't know. But one thing I know that if I disagree with Gnome developers then I'll have a hard time working around and hacking my own way in. I've usually ended up starting to patch Gnome/Gtk components at which points I just realize that it is absolutely futile and I give up. Gnome used to be the marvel of configurability. Around Gnome2 time there were gazillion settings and options that you could change, and even more via gsettings/gconf. Then the UI was gradually dumbed down but you could still configure most things. "Tweak" tools appeared. Now it seems I bump into an ideological obstacle left and right, and even the tweak tools won't let me change anything much besides some cosmetic properties. Mate has some rough edges but it's pretty much the only thing that still works for a power user that wants an UI with a traditional window manager of my choice instead of whatever tiling configuration is in hype this year.

devinprater 3y ago

It's amazing to see the accessibility improvements listed in an actual release note. I do wish the images on the page were labeled with Alt-text though.