A Brief History of Gnome [pdf]

I'm conflicted about GNOME. I like it and it is my favorite desktop environment for Linux. They really did some novel things with the window management and the application launcher in GNOME Shell. I'm looking forward to trying all the work that went into containers, Nautilus, GNOME Builder, and so on. GNOME was always the "simpler" desktop. Some may say it is "dumbed down", but in general the choices made were pretty good and you could fall back to the command line if you needed to do something more involved. So this was never a big problem for me.

However, I really don't like that there is so much "churn" in the GNOME/Gtk world. To me, the height of the Linux Desktop was around ~2009 (I think), with the final years of Gtk2. Everything was crisp, polished, stable. Only recently has Gnome3 caught up in polishedness, IMO.

Also, they lost a lot of features over time. Just a few random ones:

- Theming (in the core UI). This shouldn't be a second class citizen in gnome-tweak-tool, it should be in the main UI and the theming interface should be stable. Customization was always a major draw for Linux Desktops.

- Little things like menu icons.

- As a low-level example: Bonobo! I only learned of this when it was already deprecated. This was a component model very close to Windows' COM. You could create components in-process and in separate processes, or use it for IPC. It was used for the old GNOME panel applets for example. I perfectly understand why it was removed, it was quite complicated and badly documented, and had little concrete value for apps. But it was also misunderstood and parts were quite elegant.

If I had two wishes for GNOME, they would be:

- A new, "crisper" and more compact theme. It's hard to define, but crisp UIs were the Windows Classic theme, the Shiki Gtk theme, macOS. Non-crisp ones are many Qt themes, Motif, most web apps. Its about looking consistent, professional, having depth, clear affordances, looking physical, and not wasting space.

- Stable versions receiving feature updates. This was awesome in the Gtk2 era, you develop something with Gtk 2.14, and years later in 2.28 it still works, but with new themes and UI features. You have to keep a bit of ballast for a few releases, but it makes it a lot easier for both developers and users.

* the main apps menu

* the widget to lock screen, log out, shutdown.

* tabs along the top (or bottom) showing open windows

* the widget with the workspace switcher, clock, and network/printing/whatever status indicator

Last time I looked at Gnome 3, it tried to be like MS's "Cortana" thing where it wanted me to search for everything I wanted, or else have me find things by "most recently used". I want none of that. Xfce has it right. The desktop doesn't need to be reinvented.

1) How do I configure my system to power down when I hit the power switch? (Hint: w/out patching and building Gnome.) A corollary of this question, I suppose, is why does a system function depend on a desktop which requires a login?

2) How does one run a CLI command on login or resume from suspend? The real question is why do I have to execute a `synclient` command to configure tap to click, two finger scrolling and three finger tap to insert?

3) How do I adjust the width of the borders around windows? What I really need is wider grab areas because grabbing the edge/corner of a window with the default theme is nearly impossible. I'm not sure if that is a result of crappy drivers or hardware. I wind up choosing a theme by trial and error to find one with larger grab areas.

I like, in general, Gnome3 but issues like these really bug me. They make me wonder if I should just bite the bullet and switch to something else.

Gnome is going an interesting direction nowadays. The team managed to invent a desktop environment that is very easy to use, looks good, and is novel – that is to say, not a direct copy of Windows or OS X conventions.

It’s very different from previous versions but there’s always MATE and the likes for that.

One downside about current Gnome for me is that it seems to eat screen space. Looking at the old screenshots it strikes me how compact it is. I feel the same about classic Windows apps versus Windows Store apps. For example, compare Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs with the new Settings version.

It is unfortunate that they changed the aesthetic so much with GNOME 3, particularly making it more minimalist. I prefer the prevailing toolbar aesthetic in GNOME 2 of icons with text, and the less integrated desktop management scheme at a high level in comparison respect to the Shell. Even if the old toolbar style wasted space and the new desktop scheme provides more power, they destroyed the configurable simplicity of GNOME 2 in favor of minimalism. In addition, you have to respect the history of a product's UI if you wish to retain users who want to stay comfortable in the software they use.

I honestly miss KDE 3.5