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> GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher You are the second person I see adding this qualifier. In other words, it isn't all that great until modified. I get

> GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher You are the second person I see adding this qualifier. In other words, it isn't all that great until modified. I get that you are also referencing other overall design paradigm. But the fact that such a, to so many people, essential piece is missing after so many years is just a bit odd to me. Granted, Gnome has improved over the years but there was a lot more missing that took a long time to get fixed and there is still a bunch of stuff that I think is user hostile. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base. If we are talking about historical examples (since then mostly "fixed"): - No Minimize or Maximize Buttons out of the box. Early Gnome 3 versions only had a close button. To get the minimize and maximize buttons back, you had to use the third party Gnome tweak tool. Apparantly we all needed to get on the tiling or workspaces train. - No option for a visible taskbar of any kind. Not even a clear dock with running applications, you had to actively enter the activies overview to switch windows. - No ability to place icons on the desktop, at all. No files, no shortcuts. It was just there to have a pretty background. - Dropping support for any sort of system tray (notifications area) leaving no place for background apps like messaging clients, sync tools, etc. - The "where heck is my power off button?!" enigma, the system menu didn't have a power off button unless you knew to old the alt key. Then if we are talking about stuff that I think is still broken: - The hate for visible menus where every gnome app has a hamburger menu that is impossible to turn off in the native Gnome apps and as far as I know also doesn't really have a work around. - While great for customizing things, the fact that extensions are seen as essential is also problematic to me. Extensions can, and will, break with newer Gnome versions. This in turn leads to a less stable experience. - Nautilus is just a poor mans file manager as far as I am concerned. If I could help it I wouldn't use Gnome. But I can't escape it entirely due to work related shenigans.

freedomben 1y ago
I'm a big fan of Gnome 3 and have been since (almost) the beginning (Gnome 3.4), and I think this is an extremely fair criticism/analysis. I agree with all of your criticisms (except we might quibble a bit on Nautilus, which I generally find pretty good but definitely not as feature-rich as some alternatives, so your point stands), although none of those have been deal-breakers for me personally. Despite my love for Gnome (and preference for over all others), there have definitely been frustrations over the years at design decisions and developer attitudes (lots of "I know better" and "you're using it wrong" which sometimes has it's place and within reason can be healthy, but in many cases I think was uncalled for). Still though, I think what the Gnome team has built is incredible
- 2b3a51 1y ago
  Oddly enough for reasons(+) I've been looking into Gnome's workflows and I have Debian Wheezy with 3.4 on an old machine and Debian 12 with Gnome 43 on the current laptop. I spent a happy hour drawing 'workflow diagrams' based on my interactions with the UI doing ordinary stuff. As might be expected most of the time I was in the 'desktop view' i.e. interacting with windows in one or more spaces. Only a small % of time was spent in either of the overviews (activities and applications, now relegated to an icon on the Dash). Can you isolate what it is about Gnome 3/4 that you like more than (say) a traditional bottom bar DE like xfce? (+)Looking at Endless OS. They use Gnome DE but with some modifications that I was trying to pin down the logic of. Main one is a persistent Dash that auto-hides.

freedomben 1y ago

I'm a big fan of Gnome 3 and have been since (almost) the beginning (Gnome 3.4), and I think this is an extremely fair criticism/analysis. I agree with all of your criticisms (except we might quibble a bit on Nautilus, which I generally find pretty good but definitely not as feature-rich as some alternatives, so your point stands), although none of those have been deal-breakers for me personally. Despite my love for Gnome (and preference for over all others), there have definitely been frustrations over the years at design decisions and developer attitudes (lots of "I know better" and "you're using it wrong" which sometimes has it's place and within reason can be healthy, but in many cases I think was uncalled for). Still though, I think what the Gnome team has built is incredible

2b3a51 1y ago
Oddly enough for reasons(+) I've been looking into Gnome's workflows and I have Debian Wheezy with 3.4 on an old machine and Debian 12 with Gnome 43 on the current laptop. I spent a happy hour drawing 'workflow diagrams' based on my interactions with the UI doing ordinary stuff. As might be expected most of the time I was in the 'desktop view' i.e. interacting with windows in one or more spaces. Only a small % of time was spent in either of the overviews (activities and applications, now relegated to an icon on the Dash). Can you isolate what it is about Gnome 3/4 that you like more than (say) a traditional bottom bar DE like xfce? (+)Looking at Endless OS. They use Gnome DE but with some modifications that I was trying to pin down the logic of. Main one is a persistent Dash that auto-hides.