4 ms·

Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement. Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays b

Can it really be called evolution? That sort of implies an improvement. Interestingly enough, the default GTK file chooser also sucks. I notice this nowadays because I broke something in my setup but I don't know what, and the default file chooser does not remember anything I do. Prior to that I found out that for opening files via the browser, I need to have e. g. xdg-desktop-portal-gtk running. Well, my browser never told me that; it just silently failed to download anything, I could not choose any local file for file upload. I only found out eventually, but when I found out, the fix was easy, but still, the question is why such things break silently. This is simply incredibly poor engineering and design, and that happens on linux too. That way they'll never achieve linux desktop of the year. The decision makers here are just horribly bad at designing anything. The whole GTK team fell victim to this, now that it is a GNOMEy toolkit only. When we ever get one-toolkit-that-fixes-everything (well ...), hopefully they are really allowing only mega-smart people who can think objectively and try to IMPROVE things rather than regress or take away functionality willy-nilly style (as the GNOMEy devs do).

wolfi1 3mo ago
evolution need not necessarily be an improvement, foe example mammals have a blind spot in their eyes because of the optic nerve, octopuses don't have a blind spot. but octopuses were before mammals
- adrian_b 3mo ago
  Biological evolution has indeed lead much more frequently to simplified, streamlined structures good for a single purpose, which had evolved from more complex and more versatile structures, than to more complex structures that had evolved from simple structures. The latter kind of evolution events, while very rare, had a greater importance by being the origin of various kinds of very successful living beings. Your example shows that because evolution proceeds through random search through the space of solutions, inside the neighborhoods of the starting point, followed by the choice of the best solution among the candidates, it frequently fails to find a global optimum, but it remains stuck on a local optimum. However, octopuses were not before mammals. Both octopuses and mammals had appeared around the middle of the Mesozoic, but this is not really relevant for their eyes, which already existed in much older ancestors, hundreds of millions of years earlier. Cephalopods and vertebrates with complex eyes already existed during the Ordovician. Chordates with complex eyes might have already existed quite early during the Cambrian, most likely before the separation between cephalopods and other mollusks, at a time when mollusks must have had only simple eyes that could detect light and perhaps the shape of shadows, but which could not form images. When cephalopods separated from the other mollusks, they did this by evolving the ability to swim, instead of being forced to crawl on the bottom like most mollusks. (Swimming was achieved by filling their shell with a gas, which made it buoyant, while the other mollusks were held on the bottom by the weight of the shell.) Chordates have also separated from their ancestors by evolving the ability to be fast swimmers (the elastic and incompressible dorsal chord reduced the energetic cost of anguilliform swimming in comparison with that for worm-like bodies that need to contract a muscular layer in order to prevent the shortening of the body when it is flexed). This is likely to not be a coincidence, so the evolution of complex eyes in chordates and cephalopods is likely to be linked with the evolution of swimming in both groups, which made important the detection of objects located in various directions, while for a bottom crawler it could have been sufficient to sense when a shadow appeared due to something coming above it.
- fifticon 3mo ago
  I concur, I would say evolution is more like "adaption" than improvement.
inigyou 3mo ago
at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.
- fifticon 3mo ago
  I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all.. One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
  - lunar_rover 3mo ago
    > One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?" You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Same thing Windows did. Did anyone like it?
      - noisem4ker 3mo ago
        Hardly anyone, and in fact they eventually brought back the "up one level" toolbar button.
      - breakingcups 3mo ago
        I do! I love skipping back 4 folders in one go.
janci 3mo ago
I never understood why file open/save dialog is a separate thing. I want to use my file manager to open and save files!
- formerly_proven 3mo ago
  Win32 has good news for you!
- Kwpolska 3mo ago
  You need a separate UI to handle things like entering the file name and filtering for appropriate files. Windows was designed so that the same file browser component is used in the Explorer and in open/save dialogs (but with Windows 7-era UI), but on Linux, which file manager should GTK use? GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    GTK being GIMP ToolKit and not GNOME ToolKit, I hear they frequently annoy the GNOME team by not deleting features that GNOME wants to delete.
  - janci 3mo ago
    I'd love if that UI was part of the file manager. totalcmd.exe or Finder.app or mc or Krusader etc.
  - 1718627440 3mo ago
    > GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME. It is. I happily use a GTK desktop environment and it is not GNOME.
edoloughlin 3mo ago
One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file... (Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)
- bombela 3mo ago
  plus the filter search is very slow. plus the async race conditions if you click or keyboard enter too quickly.
kenjackson 3mo ago
How is this not an improvement?

wolfi1 3mo ago

evolution need not necessarily be an improvement, foe example mammals have a blind spot in their eyes because of the optic nerve, octopuses don't have a blind spot. but octopuses were before mammals

adrian_b 3mo ago
Biological evolution has indeed lead much more frequently to simplified, streamlined structures good for a single purpose, which had evolved from more complex and more versatile structures, than to more complex structures that had evolved from simple structures. The latter kind of evolution events, while very rare, had a greater importance by being the origin of various kinds of very successful living beings. Your example shows that because evolution proceeds through random search through the space of solutions, inside the neighborhoods of the starting point, followed by the choice of the best solution among the candidates, it frequently fails to find a global optimum, but it remains stuck on a local optimum. However, octopuses were not before mammals. Both octopuses and mammals had appeared around the middle of the Mesozoic, but this is not really relevant for their eyes, which already existed in much older ancestors, hundreds of millions of years earlier. Cephalopods and vertebrates with complex eyes already existed during the Ordovician. Chordates with complex eyes might have already existed quite early during the Cambrian, most likely before the separation between cephalopods and other mollusks, at a time when mollusks must have had only simple eyes that could detect light and perhaps the shape of shadows, but which could not form images. When cephalopods separated from the other mollusks, they did this by evolving the ability to swim, instead of being forced to crawl on the bottom like most mollusks. (Swimming was achieved by filling their shell with a gas, which made it buoyant, while the other mollusks were held on the bottom by the weight of the shell.) Chordates have also separated from their ancestors by evolving the ability to be fast swimmers (the elastic and incompressible dorsal chord reduced the energetic cost of anguilliform swimming in comparison with that for worm-like bodies that need to contract a muscular layer in order to prevent the shortening of the body when it is flexed). This is likely to not be a coincidence, so the evolution of complex eyes in chordates and cephalopods is likely to be linked with the evolution of swimming in both groups, which made important the detection of objects located in various directions, while for a bottom crawler it could have been sufficient to sense when a shadow appeared due to something coming above it.
fifticon 3mo ago
I concur, I would say evolution is more like "adaption" than improvement.

inigyou 3mo ago

at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.

fifticon 3mo ago
I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all.. One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
- lunar_rover 3mo ago
  > One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?" You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Same thing Windows did. Did anyone like it?
    - noisem4ker 3mo ago
      Hardly anyone, and in fact they eventually brought back the "up one level" toolbar button.
    - breakingcups 3mo ago
      I do! I love skipping back 4 folders in one go.

janci 3mo ago

I never understood why file open/save dialog is a separate thing. I want to use my file manager to open and save files!

formerly_proven 3mo ago
Win32 has good news for you!
Kwpolska 3mo ago
You need a separate UI to handle things like entering the file name and filtering for appropriate files. Windows was designed so that the same file browser component is used in the Explorer and in open/save dialogs (but with Windows 7-era UI), but on Linux, which file manager should GTK use? GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  GTK being GIMP ToolKit and not GNOME ToolKit, I hear they frequently annoy the GNOME team by not deleting features that GNOME wants to delete.
- janci 3mo ago
  I'd love if that UI was part of the file manager. totalcmd.exe or Finder.app or mc or Krusader etc.
- 1718627440 3mo ago
  > GTK sometimes likes to pretend it’s separate from GNOME. It is. I happily use a GTK desktop environment and it is not GNOME.

edoloughlin 3mo ago

One thing that drives me nuts every time I save a new file or 'save as'. File chooser appears and I automatically start typing to enter/change the filename. But the filter input always gets focus and now I'm filtering the list of visible files instead of naming my file... (Yes, I know I could try to submit a PR but I don't have the energy to figure out the Gnome governance process.)

bombela 3mo ago
plus the filter search is very slow. plus the async race conditions if you click or keyboard enter too quickly.

kenjackson 3mo ago

How is this not an improvement?