26 ms·

Bug 698544 – Background configuration is missing in terminal profile editor

• GhotiFish 13y ago
  It its core. I don't disagree with what gnome is doing. Removing an old feature is fine by me if you have something better. If you have something better. but... If you're just trying to homogenize your user base, then you deserve the acrimony you're going to get. I'm glad this story got some publicity. Thanks Signez!
• mseepgood 13y ago
  I fail to see a single use case for terminal transparency. It makes text less readable.
  • static_typed 13y ago
    Surely choice is good? I fail to see a single use for comments that dismiss the right of optionality for others.
    • mseepgood 13y ago
      No, choice is poison to a software program and should be avoided unless there are very good reasons to justify an additional option.
      • keithpeter 13y ago
        I would suggest that retaining an option needed by some users with unusual perceptual requirements is a 'very good reason' (Personally, I do leave my XFCE4 desktop on default settings, but I do alter defaults in some packages)
        • jodrellblank 13y ago
          If it was the only terminal emulator, there would be a good reason. The person in the link commenting "PUT IT BACK EVERY OTHER TERMINAL EMULATOR HAS IT" is more baffling. Both wanting choice and options, but at the same time not wanting to have to change when there are other options.
          • keithpeter 13y ago
            "If it was the only terminal emulator, there would be a good reason." Gnome Terminal may (effectively) be the only terminal emulator available to you if you do not have rights to install software or to change default software.
            • jodrellblank 13y ago
              If you are in an environment where you have to take what you are given, then whinging to the software developers to add in the functionality your boss won't let you have seems like the wrong move.
              • mpyne 13y ago
                Yes, you're right. They should apparently be whining to their boss to use something other than GNOME instead instead of trying to fix their work environment at the source.
                • jodrellblank 13y ago
                  I'm assuming the said boss would not have approved the update to GNOME without first checking that all the features they require the workforce to have in order to work, are present. Then yes, they should. If the boss gives you lemons, you don't go to the lemon tree and ask if it can make lemons that read email, browse NFS shares and change screensaver settings. You go to your boss and say "just-lemons isn't good enough".
                  • vacri 13y ago
      • lambda 13y ago
        You know, I understand wanting to put a little pressure back on the "make everything configurable" crowd; there are a lot of software engineers who go a bit overboard on the "just make it an option" approach to design, and then wind up with big, bloated, buggy software that tries to do everything but fails at most of it and is frustrating to configure. However, "choice is poison" is a rather extreme over-compensation for this problem. Sometimes, options really do provide value. And many times, if they are designed correctly, they don't substantially increase cost; if the features are orthogonal and implemented independently, the additional complexity is only linear with the number of features, not quadratic or worse as happens if they are too interrelated. I understand that we want to get away from the "you need to spend hours customizing your environment to make it usable" approach to design that plagues some open source project, but going to the other extreme and saying that "choice is poison" is just as bad.
      • DanBC 13y ago
        This is a baffling opinion to have on HN.
        • cturner 13y ago
          There's plenty of precedent. The plan9 guys were very explicit about not having variable colours in acme. The suckless.org team say that you can configure whatever you like, but only through changing the source code. BeOS aimed to have no configuration and good defaults. I'd rather have something that was well thought through and is internally consistant than a grab-bag of customisation, none of which coexists well - like most linux desktops.
        • Joeboy 13y ago
          I'm not baffled. Giving people fewer options seems like a pretty popular paradigm these days. We tried "Give people choice" in the '90s and '00s, and it turned out people were mostly unimpressed. "Opinionated software" is the paradigm du jour.
    • wereHamster 13y ago
      Linux is not about choice (http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/m...) was posted to HN a few days ago.
      • mattacular 13y ago
        And still, a lot of seemingly smart people are baffled by the fact that Linux has failed to penetrate the mainstream OS market for personal computing...
      • mseepgood 13y ago
        Also relevant: http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html This text is the unofficial Gnome UI manifesto. If you don't agree with it then you probably will never be happy with Gnome and should use something else.
      • tobiasu 13y ago
        The personal opinion of Adam Jackson is the ultimate and only truth.
    • marssaxman 13y ago
      Choice may be good, but it always comes at a cost. Each choice takes time to design, to code, to test, to document, to support, and most importantly to learn. Software designers should aim to offer the smallest number of options they can get away with.
      • keithpeter 13y ago
        In new software, I can see your point. This issue relates to a removal of a previously available option.
      • jasonlotito 13y ago
        > Software designers should aim to offer the smallest number of options they can get away with. That's should always be second to providing solutions. Solve the problems that transparency solved first. If you aren't aware of the problems that transparency in terminals provided, then removing it is purely an act of ignorance.
        • mseepgood 13y ago
          The thing is transparency didn't solve any problem. It was just a nerdiness thing.
          • chumpalump 13y ago
            Nerdiness is evolution. Flowers are colorful and fancy to attract bees. Transparent terminals are colourful and fancy to attract hackers (aka users).
          • keithpeter 13y ago
            How do you know? 1) Have you searched the literature on perceptual defects and enablement? If so I'd love to see references. 2) Have you consulted widely on mailing lists that Gnome Terminal users use and checked use cases? If so, can you link to those? I'd like to see them.
          • arjie 13y ago
  • deathcakes 13y ago
    Apparently nor do the Gnome devs. Shame they don't seem interested in listening to justifications.
  • keithpeter 13y ago
    I happen to agree with you and I don't use any degree of transparency in terminal windows. I suspect the issue at hand is the removal of a feature that was available previously without explicit discussion or explanation.
  • mattacular 13y ago
    Do you also fail to see a single use case for politeness? The ticket responder could have taken like ~2 minutes to explain the decision to remove it instead of being exceedingly rude.
  • amouat 13y ago
    I quite commonly use it when I want to see an application behind the terminal e.g. I might be editing code in vim whilst the application or browser window is open in the background. Also, it just looks nice! By having an appropriate background image and playing with the opacity it has a negligible affect on readability.
  • dsr_ 13y ago
    Allowing people to choose their own text colors and backgrounds is inefficient and can make text less readable. There ought to be a small set of allowed combinations that have optimal contrast, referred to by simple names. Allowing people to choose their own fonts can make text less readable. There are only 3 or 4 reasonable choices anyway, so all others should be dropped. Allowing themes to change window decorations can cause confusion and reduce usability. Let's drop that. Having more than one window manager available is inefficient and means that more developer time is wasted in duplicative effort. Only one window manager is needed. Having more than one web browser is inefficient and means duplicated effort. Drop all other browsers. Having more than one Linux distribution is inefficient. Having more than one OS is inefficient. Having more than one system architecture causes needless work. Supporting any NIC that isn't the best makes the system less efficient. Drop inferior NICs.
    • mseepgood 13y ago
      I agree with most of your points. Within one product there should not be too much choice. But choice between different products i.e. Linux distributions or operating systems is ok IMHO.
      • acc00 13y ago
        I am pretty sure the comment you are replying to is satire.
        • pekk 13y ago
          Satire on GNOME, or Apple? edit: I think the question is relevant, because part of what is going on here is that projects like Ubuntu and GNOME are taking cues from Apple's success
          • mpyne 13y ago
            Apple supports both transparency and blur on their terminal app, AFAIK...
    • 13y ago
  • diffsir 13y ago
    I have a cheat sheet open behind my terminal, for say c-vim keybindings. Instead of switching windows continuously https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660711#c8 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660711#c8 RTFA it does not make text less readable: https://bug698544.bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=243774 https://bug698544.bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment....
    • mseepgood 13y ago
      > I have a cheat sheet open behind my terminal, for say c-vim > keybindings. Instead of switching windows continuously Drag the windows side by side with the snap feature. > RTFA it does not make text less readable The text would be more readable with an opaque background.
      • paranoiacblack 13y ago
        Side by side so I have less editing space? I have emacs and terminator split 5 or 6 ways and optionally fullscreened if needed. Being able to read documentation, cheat sheets, watch videos, live reload, and handle issues while not switching windows through my terminal is a giant productivity boost. Side-by-side just makes both parts less enjoyable, especially on a small laptop screen.
        • justinhj 13y ago
          I do the same. I make notes on a web page, book or slide deck in emacs by setting transparency. If someone came along and removed it to just because of internal code changes I don't care about I would also be angrily posting on bug reports. http://justinsboringpage.blogspot.ca/2009/10/transparent-emacs-on-windows.html http://justinsboringpage.blogspot.ca/2009/10/transparent-ema...
        • sbrother 13y ago
          I do the same, and setting terminal transparency is usually the first change I make to a new box after importing my .emacs. With your terminal split at least 4 ways stuffing it over on one side of the screen is a non-starter. And even with multiple monitors, I find I can work faster if I can glance at the API docs without having to change my gaze, rather than having to find my place in code again each time I look away.
  • maaku 13y ago
    Small screens.
  • eterps 13y ago
    If you use a big screen your brain will be able to refocus faster when you look from one side to the screen to the other and back again when there are more recognizable patterns in the background.
    • riobard 13y ago
      Any study proving this?
  • jasonlotito 13y ago
    How can I use a full screen terminal window and still read documentation in that same screen?
  • ISL 13y ago
    Transparency makes me happy. With aterm (transparent only to backgrounds, not other windows) and an imagemagick script to shade backgrounds, I get to have pretty much any photo I want as a background, and it doesn't impact my work. Only exception: astronomical photos with lots of stars. Very hard to resolve a white '.' character. Shading script is short. Here it is for reference: #!/bin/bash # should set my background and darken the image for aterm # imagemagick documentation here: # http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-options.php#fx convert $@ -fx 'u/2.0' ~/.shadedbackground.jpg fbsetbg -c ~/.shadedbackground.jpg And, my aterm options: aterm -tr -sl 10000 -fg white -bg black Terminals that permit a dynamic view of obscured windows are also occasionally useful. For example - keeping an eye on small process-monitoring gui while continuing to code.
  • mpyne 13y ago
    Are you sure you're aware of how it's implemented? In a good terminal (e.g. konsole) the text remains fully opaque while only the background becomes transparent. This is more difficult than simply setting a window-wide opacity, which is why the terminal must have its own support for it. So you maintain the readability benefit while still being able to see major changes to the window behind the terminal if necessary (something which I have found occasionally useful).
    • 0x0 13y ago
      Agree 100%. Even OS X's built-in Terminal.app offers this; there's even a blur effect on the transparent background which is pretty awesome.
      • joosters 13y ago
        Yes! I never understood having transparent terminals before, but one day I discovered that configuring a slight amount of transparency, together with the blur, can be really useful. The terminal still stays clear to read.
  • berkut 13y ago
    Not if it's done subtly (5-8% transparency) - if you've got multiple windows in a screen, it greatly enhances context in terms of what windows are where.
  • elithrar 13y ago
    > I fail to see a single use case for terminal transparency. It makes text less readable. I've always liked it for the ability to see/read documentation on a window behind the terminal. Specific use cases include referring to man pages, API docs and the like where I can't just copy+paste something and/or need to check config.conf against the settings/defaults in online docs. It's especially useful on smaller screens where I don't have the luxury of having a 80-char wide terminal side-by-side with a browser window (and avoiding horizontal scrolling).
  • wode 13y ago
    You want a user case? To read code, check API information or shortcuts through the window you're working in. My screen estate at work is severely limited. Also, it just looks better, and that matters, because I spend a lot of time in terminal windows. I haven't been a Gnome user for many years though... Exactly for reasons like this. They have removed a few features too many. IIRC, last time I tried to log in with a Gnome session to see if anything had improved, I couldn't turn off cursor blinking in the terminal. I've been using Linux since way before Gnome existed, and it does piss me off that (from the perspective of a power user) it's less usable now after all those years than it was in the first few years of its existence. Gnome turned on its own users long ago, and I think the year of the Linux desktop might be further now than ever, especially for the Gnome project in its current form. It's an illusion to attract new users if even the old ones don't want to use it anymore. I wish the Gnome project good luck, but they are clearly sailing a different sea.
• Kjeldahl 13y ago
  I like transparent shell backgrounds. I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 13.04 using Gnome 3.8 (using the team-gnome3 ppa), and my terminals still has transparent backgrounds (with a setting in the profile menus that allow me to modify it as well). So I guess either Ubuntu or team-gnome3 patches Gnome to keep the transparent stuff in?
  • xiaomai 13y ago
    The gnome3 ppa is still 3.6 for the most part unless you are also using -staging.
    • Kjeldahl 13y ago
      Ok, thanks. That's quite confusing. I'm using the Gnome 3.8 shell, with mostly 3.6 Gnome packages. Looks like I'm in for a surprise when I upgrade in the future.
• fixxer 13y ago
  I don't use transparency and I think it smells like feature creep... but taking it away from those who have become semi-dependent on it is very different from having the foresight to have not added it in the first place. I think those users have a legitimate gripe. I hate it when my development environment gets screwed with.
• Tomdarkness 13y ago
  I understand that Bugzilla may not be the appropriate place for the discussion. However, the reporter did not seem to be impolite in any way and may of not been aware there was a more suitable location to discuss the change so I'm not sure what warranted the blunt reply from the first developer who replied. The reply later on from Tobias Mueller seems much more appropriate.
  • bkor 13y ago
    Agree it was too blunt and not appropriate. The cause was that he was upset after various bugreports and private emails accusing him of all sorts of things. At one point it'll get to you.
• columbo 13y ago
  It's the attitude more than the bug. People (and to a greater extent Developers) don't always have the greatest grasp on language. And this DOES NOT mean everything needs to be 'sugar coated'. Want something removed? Create a definition of when you should activley remove something. Like this: Candidates for feature removal of (SYSTEM) * Does not impact how the application can be used * Requires manual testing * Is greater than 1% of the size of the application, or greater than 500 lines of code If X meets all three candidates it's up for removal. Any bug created can be referred directly to this list. There. You don't have to come out and say "We're terribly sorry, but unfortunately we've decided to remove this feature because of blah blah blah" and you don't have to just say "No.". Instead you can say "Removal decision is based on (INSERT LINK TO ABOVE), if you disagree (INSERT ACTION TO CHALLENGE)". What people want is something that gives the impression of a uniform set of decisions. They don't want to feel that people/developers are just being petty dictators.
  • cbhl 13y ago
    Conversely, it's the developers' time and energy. If the people requesting the feature care enough, they should go through the hoops necessary to (edit: learn how to code and) become part of the core team. For this _particular_ feature, it's a "rampant layering violation" -- translucent windows have been available in compositing window managers (Compiz, and whatever that thing that KDE uses) for at least three or four years. Assuming these users have a fast enough CPU/GPU, they can configure the desired behaviour using the ccsm graphical tool.
    • mbell 13y ago
      That is not a valid workaround as it applies transparency to the text as well, not just the background. I see no "rampant layering violation" here as the goal is not a transparent window, but rather a transparent background, big difference.
      • cbhl 13y ago
        Hm, I see your point. But I still think that accessing the data of other windows to draw a transparent background is a great deal of complexity for a terminal emulator -- AFAICT it means the terminal emulator has to be innately aware of the innards of the graphics system it's drawing to.
• deleted 13y ago
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• NelsonMinar 13y ago
  If accurate, this comment by Tobias Wolf is the craziest part: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544#c19 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544#c19 "He hid the removal among very unrelated changes (gtk to gsettings switch) and spread the rmeoval across more than one commit. Such that you cannot easily revert it. I strongly assume this was done intentionally."
  • Tobu 13y ago
    It can be reasonable to #if 0 a block of tricky code during a refactoring, just so that you can quickly cross the bridge to a working state. But removing it at that stage will make it impossible for the VCS to track changes to that piece of code, which makes it much harder to restore the functionality afterwards. The RAID/LVM removal from Palimpsest followed a similar pattern (code deleted during a rewrite of an underlying library), but the developer was willing to work on reinstating it. Here we don't really know what Persch thinks — though damn the users is a tempting guess.
  • johnchristopher 13y ago
    It is stated in the previous talk he mentionned that removal of that feature was planned. In they eye of 'Persch' this is not a bug, it is an improvement to GNOME. It's not a bug, it is the removal of a feature. Is a bug tracker really the most appropriate place to discuss in which direction a software is to go ? 'No' and a link to the relevant reason and workaround should be fine in that case but apparently that had already been discussed before (and a reason was given). I don't know if removing it through so much commits is good practice but if the feature was to go it doesn't make a difference in the end, he sculpts his piece of the software any way he likes it as long as it's feeature oriented, right ? Note: I have no advice on wether that feature should have been removed or not in the first place.
    • Tobu 13y ago
      By "talk" you mean the link to the "prefs redesign" bug, right? That bug was a good place to discuss which way the redesign would go, but Persch had already decided and made a branch to remove the code.
• eliben 13y ago
  It makes me sad how prone programmers are to condescension and dismissing attitude towards other programmers. Especially leads of open-source projects. Something about having all that influence gets into people's heads.
  • two 13y ago
    I run a large open source project. I don't think it's an ego thing. I wake up every morning with around 50 e-mails of people complaining and criticizing something I devoted a lot of time to writing, while asking nothing in return. Of course, there are many more happy users of the software. However, I can totally relate to his "No." response. I would cut him a little slack... he was probably just having an off day.
    • shubb 13y ago
      First of all, thank you for your work! I think this kind of angry dialogue isn't helpful. It won't bring people closer to agreement. But I don't think you can say "I made this thing, and gave it to you, so you can't criticize my actions regarding it". The core team of an open source project control what code gets into it. Some core team members are great programmers, or contribute a lot of time. Others are the real world friends or bosses of important team members. It's not like you could get up tomorrow, go full time on Gnome project, and expect to be able to put this feature back in. Regarding your 'I get nothing back, so go easy on me' point, this isn't always true. On some open source projects, many of the biggest contributors are working on the project for a company, and use their influence to take it in the direction the company wants. They are being paid, and changing what the project is in return that. If I don't like those changes, I'm not sure your argument applies. More generally, strong contributors to popular projects often consult or get jobs on the back of them. I can see how this stream of complaints could be disheartening. But you do have power. You have been entrusted with other peoples work. I think being held to account (politely) is sort of fair enough.
      • pekk 13y ago
        If I put a lot of work into making something, it does not make me accountable to do whatever you want to that work. Sorry, it does not work that way. But if I open sourced it, you can make the change yourself. Open sourcing it does not mean that other people are entitled to control it.
• obviouslygreen 13y ago
  Regarding the removal itself, this is an unfortunate trend that, as far as I'm aware, started in the last couple years with Firefox and Chrome inappropriately and unapologetically removing features and options (and changing standard behavior like the image view background color) that had previously been present and in use. I don't think it's really curable, as it always seems to be the result of inconsiderate people having too much sway over what gets pulled/committed, and that's just a risk of open source. The dev's attitude here is also shit... if you're not willing to reasonably address valid concerns related to decisions you've made that were obviously going to affect regular users, you have no place making those decisions and forcing them on others in the first place.
  • arjie 13y ago
    Veteran users of Gnome will recall the screensaver kerfuffle. IIRC, that preceded these browsers somewhat. In fact, Chrome didn't even exist at that time.
    • claudius 13y ago
      Wasn’t Gnome 2 already an attempt to clean up/remove features that had cropped into Gnome 1? I recall ‘veteran users of Gnome’ complaining about the lack of settings/options back in 2005.
  • jkrems 13y ago
    The trend towards a more concise feature set is I suppose a consequence of open source software maturing from "hackerware" to proper, widely used software. The moment your settings screen would benefit from a search functionality, you should reconsider "doing it all". Maybe they want to concentrate on a very basic Terminal solution, leaving more complex use cases and features to other implementations. At the same time: The reaction of the developer and they way it was done was pretty unprofessional. When redesigning a settings dialog and dropping a couple of 'em in the process, a proper changelog-entry would be the least.
    • return0 13y ago
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• DanBC 13y ago
  I understand why Gnome don't want huge configuration dialogues. Still, it's stupid and they're wrong. They should have a big "[return to default configuration] button that people must use before filing bugs or asking for support. But they should then also have a nice config file with configurations for everything. That allows tinkerers to tinker and to set up alternate support. It allows God_Designers_Coders to lock down everything in the One_True_Environment_Config. It certainly avoids threads shown in the OP, which are just a turn off for some developers.
• adrianlmm 13y ago
  first of all, the users are not giving any argument of why they need the transparency back, just "because I like it". Second, this is open source, hack it.
  • anona 13y ago
    Isn't "because I like it" a valid argument? Also, in the case of a feature being removed I feel that the onus is on the remover to make the case for why it should go.
    • adrianlmm 13y ago
      Come on, we are all developers here I want to think If I see a feature is just for aesthetic reasons with little purpose, then I could be considered as code sanitization, nobody really needs a transparent terminal, in the contrary, it may be contra productive.
      • anona 13y ago
        I don't agree that aesthetic features have little purpose in a desktop application - they are a major part of the user experience. In this case the transparency feature is clearly something that a lot of people consider worth having.
        • adrianlmm 13y ago
          Except they don't give a valid explanation for it.
          • vidarh 13y ago
            Yes, they do - there are lots of them in this thread. Either you are not paying attention, or you are making assumptions of the validity of other peoples experience that you have no basis for.
      • vidarh 13y ago
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• Udo 13y ago
  I think this bug report is an excellent example of how not to interact with your users. 1. Remove a long-existing feature without telling anyone, hidden in a minor update 2. A user reports it in a friendly and informative manner. Persch [dev] closes with a single word "No". That alone should make any user furious. 3. A discussion ensues with someone finally (and understandably) concluding that this was done intentionally. To which Mueller [dev] responds: "Please don't. Please give https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct a read. And please consider that this bugzilla is not meant to be a discussion forum but rather a place where actual bugs are kept." Holy crap, so we are to conclude that it was not done intentionally but it should not be fixed either and that nobody is supposed to complain because the developers' code of conduct states that they always mean well by definition. 4. Another user sheds light on the backstory by pretty much proving this was done on purpose (contradicting Mueller). To which a third developer responds indignantly that the "official" workaround for this issue is sufficient and that the user should head over to the corresponding wiki page and improve the workaround description. He then closes again with a statement about how all devs are well-meaning (just for the added cognitive dissonance I suppose). What takes the cake: from reading their description, the suggested "workaround" seems to make the whole window transparent, including the terminal text.
  • Glyptodon 13y ago
    Gnome has always been this way. It's kind of sad, but if it was that way in 2006 and 2008 and 2010 it's hardly surprising that it's still that way in 2013. :/ In general, Gnome tends to make decisions internally and then refuse to communicate what's behind said decisions to the broader community. That said, I don't think I agree with the people who seem to think of transparent terminals as massively important feature, though I do find them nice.
    • Udo 13y ago
      I'm with you. I'm not a Gnome user, nor is my terminal background (semi-)transparent. I just thought this was a great window into the attitude among the project's developers.
    • 13y ago
• Aardwolf 13y ago
  How about forking it?
  • JamesMcMinn 13y ago
    Forking doesn't fix the issue at hand here, which is the lack of communication between Gnome developers and everyone else.
    • watt 13y ago
      The fork provides way forward for the rest of us, while Gnome developers rapidly make themselves irrelevant.
  • fosap 13y ago
    http://mate-desktop.org/ http://mate-desktop.org/ is a GNOME fork.
• ultim8k 13y ago
  Is it me or linux desktop was better 5 years ago? The ui was always inconsistent and ugly (e.g. Gnome icons are a joke), but it was fast and had some cool features the competition implemented years later. Now its behind the competition, terribly slow and still inconsistent and ugly. Sorry devs, I don't mean to understate your work, but sometimes criticism is needed to help evolution and improvement.
  • jamesbritt 13y ago
    "[L]inux desktop" is not a single thing. There are many different desktop options. What ships with the default Ubuntu is but one of them. For example, I'm using the Trinity version of KDE 3.5. Works great for me.
  • kunai 13y ago
    I agree that current UIs are inconsistent and ugly, but I would argue against that ~2005-2008 UIs were inconsistent and ugly. The Gnome icons were cartoonish, yes, but they were consistent AND informative. If you remember using Ubuntu 8.04 (perhaps the greatest Ubuntu release of all time), you'll remember it being VERY consistent, fast, and excellent all-around. I loved it so much, that out of nostalgia I had to VirtualBox it just to bring back the memories. Really, it was OS perfection. No other operating system comes close to the intuition, the pure ease that 8.04 had.
    • keithpeter 13y ago
      Oddly enough, I still have the Hardy Heron wallpaper on my current Debian Wheezy xfce4 based desktop. CentOS 5.9 is a close analogue and CentOS 6.4 can be themed appropriately. Interface Design Reflection: Go and watch a string quartet playing. Reflect on the 'usability' of a couple of violins, a viola and a cello. Heidegger may have had a point.
    • arjie 13y ago
      I agree. The Tron-esque modern UIs look like they come from some Android theme from XDA. Earlier Gnome revisions were good looking, with colour cues, and a sort of homogeneity.
• c-a 13y ago
  To quote the maintainer in another bug. --- The reason is that these settings make no sense. Why should a terminal be transparent, or have an image behind everything, but the same not apply to, say, gedit, or firefox, or evolution?
  • digisign 13y ago
    Terminals have only text, sometimes lots of empty space, never images. The transperency makes it look nice and people (that care to enable it) happy.
  • j-kidd 13y ago
    That's the problem with self-proclaimed usability experts. They see the word "consistency" and think to themselves "Oooooh, I shall make everything consistent". This is why in Gnome, all tab bars are on top, including in the terminal. Consistency for the sake of consistency.
• xyproto 13y ago
  I like it XD
• eblet 13y ago
  GNOME has been plagued with terrible maintainers and even worse management that doesn't get rid of them immediately, leading to a drastic erosion of the brand value it acquired during GNOME 2. In any sensible project Mr Christian Persch would be stripped of all his commit privileges immediately, but in GNOME there is no such oversight. The root issue is probably that most GNOME people are employed by Red Hat, but Red Hat doesn't really care about the consumer desktop GNOME is targeted for because they focus on servers and enterprise. As a result, these guys are paid to work on GNOME and thus have plenty of time to influence it, but are left without any management, which results in these guys directing the project according to their own whims, with total disregard for users. Over time, this culture eventually influenced even people like Persch which appear to be independent maintainers.
  • keithpeter 13y ago
    "The root issue is probably that most GNOME people are employed by Red Hat, but Red Hat doesn't really care about the consumer desktop GNOME is targeted for because they focus on servers and enterprise." Well, thanks to Redhat for paying the wages because we need developers working on desktops. In my experience, corporate clients are conservative (blue shirt, suit, pocket protectors). Many corporate clients will license Redhat servers and perhaps use CentOS on the clients. Can you imagine how a demonstration of Gnome 3.x would go with those kinds of people? I suspect xfce4 will be available as an option in RHEL 7.
• kunai 13y ago
  While I don't personally think that terminal transparency is a big deal (just switch to Xfce Terminal if you want it), the attitude of the developers is rude and uninformative. You don't have to be completely ingratiating; just say "This feature was removed because of [reason], if you do not like this decision, comment on [place to comment]. That's it. A "No." is unacceptable.
• btilly 13y ago
  Here is my theory/perspective. I, and a lot of people, are willing to spend time configuring the environment until it fits like a glove. When we have to upgrade, what we want is for that to just continue to work, but with bugs fixed. In practice we wind up having to reconfigure to get back to the same state as before. And this makes us want to avoid upgrading. This also makes people who care not be involved in development - after all our environments are as we want them to be, and we want that to get out of our way so that we continue to work. So developers never hear from us unless something breaks. And then we're upset. When an upgrade means getting rid of the way that we are used to working, we get unhappy. Therefore people who develop desktops do not like people like me. I can understand that. But I still do not appreciate the arrogance and condescension that I see coming from desktop developers towards people like me. I personally have no idea why people get involved with developing desktops. It is not something that interests me. It is clear when I read what they say that they do not want anything resembling what I want. My ideal desktop almost used to be fvwm2 - maximum real estate, multiple screens, no "helpful (mis)features" that I didn't want. The only missing feature on my wishlist is to have multiple monitors, with the monitors cycling independently through screens. But many years back Debian integrated their version of fvwm2 into Gnome, and things stopped working properly. (This was long enough ago that I no longer remember what broke - just that it did break.) I developed a dislike of the Gnome project back then, which I've never seen anything to dissuade me from.
  • pekk 13y ago
    No affiliation with Gnome or any desktop project here, so don't blame them if you disagree with me. The people complaining when they're upset do not necessarily represent everybody. Actually the people who are so vocal as to post the same bug 8 times and tar the project on Hacker News with lots of misrepresentations of what happened are probably not the most helpful to the community. Let those determine the direction of a project and you will continuously add features without any technical direction until it becomes bloated, a nightmare to fix or extend, and the only tastes served are this one bitter, vocal minority that becomes your entire community. Maybe you should buy a commercial OS and try complaining to the salesmen, see how much they will charge you to ensure that arbitrary custom feature X ends up in the next release.
• digisign 13y ago
  Disgusting. Linux desktops are lacking as it is, the destruction of mature features has it moving backwards... and now weaker than Windows 95.
• Taranis 13y ago
  No is a fine answer, if an explanation accompanies it. I am surprised GNOME still has a user base really.
• ParadisoShlee 13y ago
  Sit down and let me tell you a story about Gnome of old - a very happy little linux desktop with a bunch of happy users. For nearly ten years I was a gnome user and there were many like me who looked at their DE and smiled because it was good. but as time progressed, the desktop ecosystem got stale and most of the other DEs were unchanged in any noticeable way for more than ten years because people were happy enough.... then people started talking and decided that this year or next was the YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP and something had to change to make it so. So the gnome developers had a plan. "Linux needs a desktop for all of these people who don't use linux". We need to build something for the non-users.... and the other developers looked at each other and agreed. "YES! Let's throw away our current user base and focus on the users we don't have". The developers were very happy with themselves. We can focus on tablets and touch... everything can be round and safe and nobody will be able to change anything because they will simply love our environment so much. and since that sad day, the gnome developers pretended that nobody actually uses gnome and everybody who did were less than human. They waited for the billions of people on the planet that would really really love using gnome once they find it. So I left.. Classic gnome developers and their little man syndrome.
• laureny 13y ago
  > Persch was very devious with this one. He hid the removal among very unrelated changes (gtk to gsettings switch) and spread the rmeoval across more than one commit. Such that you cannot easily revert it. What is wrong with these people?
• Jonanin 13y ago
  A friend of mine works on gnome, and I asked him about it. The actual explanation for this is a lot more reasonable: "Him: OK, I figured out what happened. It wasn't ideal in terms of commits. So, we have an old configuration system GConf, and we replaced it with our new one, GSettings, for N reasons. GSettings was missing a feature for gnome-terminal to implement, so it went without GSettings for a long time, until the 3.8 cycle, when we ported it over with a workaround. The port wasn't 100% complete, so it landed with the intention of adding feature parity, like with terminal transparency support. However, after asking our team, we decided it wasn't worth it keeping the support code around for terminal transparency, and dropped it. It's an unfortunate thing that happened where the reasoning wasn't relayed entirely in commit messages, and you're right -- it was dropped in a seemingly unrelated commit. But that's after intentions changed -- a broken port to new tech with the intention to fix it, then that changed, and thus it got dropped under the guise of "Remove dead code" me: fair enough. so the only wrongdoing really was persch's response. Him: Yeah. So, it turns out that he was just tired. That was the 7th or 8th bug report about it, and he didn't feel like explaining it again."
  • farmdawgnation 13y ago
    So, the moral of this story is "communicate clearly the first time or you're going to end up having to communicate clearly about seven or eight times." That said, I don't understand why he felt he had to keep explaining it. He could have just copied and pasted the answer or closed the bug as a duplicate of the original one that reported the bug. In the original he could have posted a kind explanation about it, and linked to it from the duplicates that followed. I understand what it's like to get tired and short tempered. I used to moderate an online community primarily of middle schoolers and high schoolers. But ultimately, you end up hurting the community you're supporting more by not doing things The Right Way™ the first time around. You hurt it even further when you fail to acknowledge that you're tired, short tempered, and should probably just go to bed and deal with it in the morning. Maybe I just expect adults to behave like adults, but "he didn't feel like explaining it again" doesn't float with me as a valid justification for how he handled the issue. It would have taken a comment and a link to deal with it the correct way. Live and learn, sure, but the attitude reflected in his response appears (to me, at least, with my limited visibility) to be reflective of a systemic attitude surrounding GNOME development. And that's no good.
• aristidb 13y ago
  Because mentioning that it's Gnome 3.7 is so much less important than the bug number. (The original submission title did include some editorializing perhaps, but at least the reader had a chance of knowing that it was about Gnome 3.)
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  The good thing about FOSS is that the developers own the code. The bad thing about FOSS is that the developers own the product.
• jaseemabid 13y ago
  This is not the first time gnome developers are doing this. The project is in a state where they just don't listen to the community and keep on doing really bad things. Its not surprising that the whole gnome 3 is a huge failure. Here is an example. Quite some time back they removed the tree view[1] and nautilus extra panes[2]. Reason? it is not good on touch screens! So what about all the developers on normal laptops? I dont see a good future for the gnome project with all this rude behaviour. PS: I wrote a longer blog about this sometime back. http://jaseemabid.github.io/07-11-2012/thoughts-on-gnome-3.html http://jaseemabid.github.io/07-11-2012/thoughts-on-gnome-3.h... 1. https://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=ef467c8775392d0f0feb0e38f7a80f2d41719d84 https://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=ef467c87753... 2. https://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=b8d5b4a7bcf47ed34a6343c95bcc3b079255c0a0 https://git.gnome.org/browse/nautilus/commit/?id=b8d5b4a7bcf...
  • vidarh 13y ago
    Personally what annoyed me was the removal of spatial features in Nautilus. Fair enough, they were not that much used, but the amount of code needed was minimal and a similar amount of code required to strip it out could also easily have made it non-invasive. As it is, I use Nautilus rarely as most Linux file managers are still primitive compared to Amiga filemanagers ca. 1990, and Nautilus is far from the top of the bunch of Linux file managers, and so I resort to the shell most of the time, but to me that took away the one redeeming feature Nautilus had. Gnome developers seems to have been on a decade long ego-trip. Of course that's their right - it's their project, but they shouldn't be surprised that their decisions gets constantly questioned and criticised by people who started using Gnome based on totally different assumptions of where they'd be going. These days, gnome-terminal is pretty much the only Gnome app I regularly use left, and with apps like Terminology, and Ubuntu replacing more and more with their own stuff, there might soon not be much Gnome left for me (and at least I know Terminology won't strip the eye candy, coming from the Enlightenment rew).
• bryceneal 13y ago
  I can think of an open source project for a popular node.js debugger that has similar problems. https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector/issues?labels=&milestone=&page=1&state=closed https://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector/issues?labels=...
• rachelbythebay 13y ago
  I said "No." once, but it was in a code review, and there was a lot of context involved. It generated a pretty big backlash until I went to the trouble of explaining all of it. In retrospect, it worked out perfectly, because without the backlash, people might not have realized what had been going on. I was responsible for keeping a LAMP stack running which ran a bunch of tests written by various other people in the larger department. Usually the benchmark would be C++, and that would be kicked off by a shell script, and that shell script would be kicked off by a Python program. Obviously this is pretty crazy already, but this one guy found a way to make it worse. One day I noticed this machine was running out of disk space. It was also getting bogged down and was starting to swap since something was chewing CPU and memory. I found a benchmark program (one of the C++ binaries) running, and since it never shut down properly, it kept these giant log files open. Since they were still open, the log rotator couldn't reclaim the space. I filed a bug with the test owner: please make this test not leave these processes behind. He didn't seem to know how, so I just said that you should make sure you've stopped anything you started. He didn't know how to do that either and booked an appointment in my calendar to see me in person (yes, really). On that day, we chatted, and I told him that syscalls like fork() return the PID of what you started. You can just hang onto it and whack it later. If that process doesn't fork itself to become a daemon (which this one didn't), odds are it will be the value you want when the time comes. If it does fork or whatever, you might be able to get something done with process groups. I had to explain fork, kill, setpgrp, setsid and all of that to someone who was supposedly employed as a systems tester. A couple of days later, he sent me a proposal for a fix. It amounted to this: ps aux | grep bin_name | grep -v grep | awk ... | xargs kill -9 I should point out that this machine would usually run multiple instances of the same test on different machines at the same time. They'd all have the same bin_name, and they all ran as the same user. At best, the script would kill itself. If we weren't so lucky, it would also bring down anything else which happened to match "bin_name", even if it was completely unrelated. Even though I had shown him the low-level way to do the right thing, he fell back on this scripting monkey approach. I said that was unacceptable, and left him to figure it out. Months passed. I'm not exaggerating here. It was something like four months later when I heard back from him. He posted a comment to the (still living) code review asking if things were okay now. I loaded it up to see what he had done. Nothing had changed. It was the same "ps ... xargs kill -9" cruft he wrote originally. He didn't even try to change things. Maybe he was trying to sneak it past me and wanted to see if I'd forgotten, or didn't care, or what. Well, given that his question was "is this okay now", my answer to the review was just: "no.". I was no longer interested in elaborating and spoon-feeding him. He obviously didn't like this, because a few minutes later I had mails from both his boss and my boss saying how I needed to be more constructive and all of this. I wasn't about to take this lying down, so I found all of our old communications where I tried to teach him how to do his own job: job control stuff fork, kill, and the like. I mentioned all of the back and forth we had and the time I had taken to explain it in person. I even dug up the example code I had written to demonstrate exactly what a session leader or process group winds up doing in practice. I pasted all of this into the code review, making it public record for the entire company to see. The managers backed off and apologized to me. A couple of weeks later, he disappeared into some other department.
• anonymous 13y ago
  I think it's telling that even before clicking the link, I knew precisely what it was about, even though I haven't used Gnome in years and never knew the terminal ever gained or lost the ability to have a transparent background. Actually, compare and contrast with this bug report https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198175 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=198175 about a similar feature in kde's terminal.
• rjh29 13y ago
  If you want a workaround, install xfce4-terminal. It's a fork of GNOME terminal and retains all of the settings that GNOME removed, including background transparency. It also appears to be faster.
  • cmccabe 13y ago
    It's worth installing Xfce in general. It really ought to be the default desktop environment for Linux.
• D9u 13y ago
  There's a simple fix for this, and other, GNOME related issues... Get rid of GNOME! I can do as much, and be as productive, without using a specific DE, by setting up my GUI to use a simple tiling Window Manager (DWM) along with dmenu. Seriously, there are a myriad of Terminal Emulators available which are not desktop specific, and configuration is merely accomplished by editing a plain text file. Why is this crap even on the front page of HN?
  • bowyakka 13y ago
    Just wait, gnome is slowly removing features I think the plan for gnome 4.x is to simply not exist
• sublimit 13y ago
  Why was the title changed? It was much more descriptive of the appeal of the link (the developer's response). Now it looks like the bug report itself is the focus.
  • cpdean 13y ago
    Maybe someone at Gnome is a moderator here. A generic title about a bugzilla bug makes me less interested in clicking.
• cpdean 13y ago
  Why did the title of this link get changed? Now it's generic and doesn't highlight why this is a big deal. It's glossing over the most salient part of this narrative.
• virtualwhys 13y ago
  I've given Gnome 3 a fair shot despite the fail whale cries from community at large, but after a couple of months it's really starting to wear on me, particularly drag & drop support, which is straight up GONE, system-wide, ouch. On the plus side, Nautilus has become pointless as I've switched to Midnight Commander, a great FM. I do have background transparency set for gnome terminal, a nice touch, I quite like it. Currently hiding Gnome behind I3 WM, but it does creep up to the surface at times, like the odd mid-beer bomit (burp -vomit). Oh well, nothing is perfect on Linux, there must be some pain involved; otherwise it would be OSX where pain is replaced with happy spinning beach balls ;-)
• chumpalump 13y ago
  Several terminals are my IDE. The font and the transparent background are my theme. If you're staring at terminals for 4 to 8 hours-a-day a good combination of font, text colors, and background keep the text from floating away on your burned-in retina.
• gfodor 13y ago
  Meanwhile, Apple added improved terminal transparency support in Terminal.app in the last OS update which allows the user to control not only the transparency but also the blur. (I've found transparency goes from distracting to slick if you include blur.) I guess the question is why is it that GNOME developers are cutting features in the name of simplification when a company known for obsession with simplicity is adding those very same features?
• raverbashing 13y ago
  Thank you Gnome Next time I get into a discussion about how Gnome doesn't give a rat's ass about user experience, I'll just point to the article link. Here's (another) proof of that. And that's why switching to XFCE is the first thing I do in my Linux installations
• _ak 13y ago
  Well, Desktop on Linux has been shitty in the last 10 years, and it will be for the next 10 years, exactly because an attitude like that. 10 years ago, after faffing around for several years with Linux desktop environments, I simply decided to move on to OSX, and have been happy since then. Downvote me as much as you want, but some developers will never learn how malicious their attitude is to all of the OSS community.
• chris_wot 13y ago
  Funny. The Gnome guys got rid of desktop icons too... took me a while to find how to add it back with Gnome Tweak. Gnome developers are like that: they like to remove useful features.
• lnanek2 13y ago
  I don't really know why anyone wants transparent terminals anyway. Don't they just make the text harder to read?
• ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Wow, and all it takes is one smart angry 'user' and blam! you've got a fork and yet another window system.
• wladimir 13y ago
  This is the final straw, I'm switching to KDE/Kubuntu in next release. Even if a transparent terminal is a weird thing to like, I like it, and have always used it. Taking it away just because you think it's useless is not acceptable to me. Really you can come with 1000's of arguments why it's non-productive, "just aesthetic", "not in web browsers either" and so on but I don't care. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. (as an aside I think it could be a interesting feature in web browsers to support window-level transparency. Use a background with partial transparency and render web content directly to the background. For example, for desktop widgets) We're in 2013 right with super-powerful GPUs of today (and even the crappy i945 in your old laptop) it shouldn't be too much to ask to do a small bit of composition. Sure, X's archaic architecture may be at fault, it may be tricky, but now there's Wayland, Android Surfaceflinger, ... Please don't go backward to better support archaic APIs. For me, open source is about choice and customization and possibilities, if I wanted a platform with a single vision I'd go for Apple.
  • vidarh 13y ago
    Frankly, I think Ubuntu will soon enough have so little of Gnome left in its standard version that you shouldn't worry too much about switching.
• oakaz 13y ago
  Yes, welcome to the reality. You can never talk about user friendliness, simplicity, aesthetic with Linux maintainers and their best friends. Their religion is robustness. And having a religion leads you believe that what your religion tells you is always more important than what other people would like. He probably has a good reason and doesn't want to explain that because you are not smart enough to listen him. Welcome to the Linux community. I use Arch Linux for 8 years and recently was advised to stop using Linux because I asked maintainers to not break things and listen their users. All they care is more robustness. It's their religion and you can't discuss about this with them.
• drill_sarge 13y ago
  For general Gnome3 stuff (I don't care much about the look of my terminal): I know they are trying to make it very easy to use for average useres (whatever this is) but why do I have no access at all to not even really "advanced" options directly from gnome? I need tweak tool for nearly everything. Where did the menu bar go in Nautilus 3.8? Why do I need to download a gnome extension to disable this hot spot in the upper left corner? same for window list. No minimize/maximize buttons, need tweak tool for it. I think the concept of gnome 3 is nice and worth a try but why are they trying to block users who are not absolute beginners? and even those beginners maybe want to change their window theme or have other icons.
• drbig 13y ago
  The point with terminal transparency is that people who use them a lot tend to look at them a lot, and having something more appealing than white-on-black is in many cases a necessity for their happiness and well-being. And we already have a 'simple' default terminal - xterm. We also have twm, but not many people seem to be using it daily either. Guess gnome's going there too.
• tripzilch 13y ago
  Aside from whether they were right to remove it and whether this was communicated properly or not, can anyone explain me what's so useful about having a transparent terminal? I agree that it looks pretty and sci-fi, which is a fine reason, but from the general backlash I get a feeling there's more to it than that. I personally always found semi-transparent terminals harder to read, and prefer a plain dark background (I've tried subtle textures, but found them to be more effort to get right over how much they improved visual style). I'm assuming it might be something about the ability to read what's behind the terminal window? But every time I encountered such a situation, the letters on the terminal were interfering with the info behind it (probably a browser), and even if I could make out what it said, a quick alt-tab switch back and forth was so much easier. The only real advantage I can think of might be the ability to roughly determine what application is running behind the terminal, or whether there is in fact an application running or not. Which is nice but most WMs have other ways of indicating that information (taskbar, etc).
  • tripzilch 13y ago
    Plucked a few reasons I found here and there in this discussion in case anyone's interested, turns out I may have underestimated the functionality of pretty & shiny! <btilly> "I've used that feature myself so that I'd be constantly looking at my daughter's happy face rather than the blank background of my many terminals. No utilitarian purpose? Perhaps. But a very real psychological one!" <towolf> "When I stare at opaque terminals all day I get severely perceptually understimulated to the point that I fear becoming an automaton."