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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

It seems like none of the dumb GNOME warts were plastered over.

There's still the idiotic, screen-taking-over activities menu (because, yknow, it should take 3840x2160 pixels to show a fucking app launcher. Did nobody learn from Windows 8? The GNOME devs are officially more hard-headed than Microsoft - an achievement of some note)

There's still the swipe-to-unlock desktop

There's the default Apple scrolling behavior

The author said it best:

I spend every day in a state of permanent quixotic hope that eventually humanity will comes to its senses and realize that computers and mobile devices are different kinds of technology with different purposes and different usage patterns.

Seriously, GNOME is a touch UI. The large buttons, the swipe mechanics, everything. Except nobody uses GNOME on the mobile devices it appears to be made for!

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GNOME is what you get when you build a team for political reasons instead of hiring good developers and designers.

To make it good you'd have to exchange the whole team first. It's LXDE for me from here on out.

KDE is sane these days, and separates mobile and desktop UIs too!

They took a few too many gulps of the flat design kool-aid for my taste, but at least KDE hasn't forgotten who its users are or what kind of devices those users are installing it on.

I'm very unfamiliar with gnome as an organization. What are the political reasons you're referencing?

>The GNOME Foundation has run into cash flow problems [...] got into this situation through its Outreach Program for Women [...] "The Outreach Program for Women (OPW) helps women (cis and trans) and genderqueer get involved in free and open source software."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY2Mjc

You chose to leave out that OPW was an internship program that GNOME managed on behalf of a number of organizations, that they simply fell behind on sending out invoices and collecting late payments, and that this took place 4-5 years ago. How does any of that show that GNOME has compromised technical hiring for political reasons?

You are blaming problems with Ubuntu 18.4 on a project to encourage diversity from 2013?

And apart from the 5 years since: it seems the problems were administrative, having nothing to do with the actual content of the program?

Any other problems in your life that’d easily go away if only these women weren’t meddling?

Really, GNOME's problem is the low quality of their software and poor responsiveness to user feedback and needs, not inane social initiatives. So long as Red Hat is one of their primary sponsors, it's not going anywhere.

You're saying their software is poor quality* because they employ... Women?

* Your opinion, not mine.

That is a deliberate mischaracterization of the OP's comment. It in no way implies that the software is poor because of women.

The outreach program is political, and is rather discriminatory and sexist.

Targeted programs to increase diversity are not sexist, in the same way that taking a bank robber’s loot and giving it back is not theft.

Your analogy makes no sense to me. When evaluating applicants, the only metrics used should be how well the applicant can do his or her job.

Giving applicants preference for having some blessed sex or political leanings is generally a recipe for disaster.

To explain: certain groups are underrepresented in sought-after professions, at colleges, etc. It is rather widely agreed that this is a result of historical injustices, such as racist or sexist policies and habits not allowing women or non-whites to study at colleges, or get certain jobs.

That is the bank robbery: these groups were robbed of opportunity.

The remedial measures are programs such as the one discussed here, or affirmative action for college admission.

That is "taking the money from the robber, and giving it back to the bank".

The analogy is that the last action does fit your everyday definition of something bad: you are not supposed to take a bag of money from someone against their will. You are not supposed to make employment or acceptance decicions based on sex or race.

Yet, quite obviously, it's stupid to look at those actions in isolation. You have to zoom out, and you'll see: it wasn't his money in the beginning.

That's the analogy, just in case your ignorance was genuine.

If a program deliberately excludes one sex, is it not sexist?

Targeted programs to increase diversity are not sexist, in the same way that taking a bank robber’s loot and giving it back is not theft.

"taking a bank robber’s loot and giving it back is not theft."

I mean, that is technically theft. It's just very obviously justified theft in response to a previous theft (assuming you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it is in fact the bank robber from whom you're taking the money).

It's not. Here's the definition from wikipedia: " theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission with the intent to deprive the lawful owner of it"

...but that's really not the point here, is it?

No, it's not the point at all. I just like going off on these sorts of weird tangents :)

Curiously, Wiktionary has a different definition: "The act of stealing property". "Property" in turn has a lot of different definitions, the first being "Something that is owned". Relevantly, neither definition specifies by whom the property is owned; as long as it's someone's property, stealing it is technically "theft" under this sort of broad definition.

Merriam-Webster seems to agree more with you than it does with me ("[...] the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" / "an unlawful taking [...] of property"), while Dictionary.com seems to be similarly vague ("the act of stealing", though this is lumped in with "the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another" and "larceny").

>There's the default Apple scrolling behavior

Everyone has preferences, but the "apple" behavior makes so much sense. It's the first thing I change when I install a laptop OS.

I use the default scroll direction (down is down, up is up) with mouse wheels, but invert it for touchpads. It just feels more correct; with the wheel, it feels like the bottom of the wheel is the thing moving the page up, while with the touchpad it feels like it should be moving the page directly.

Works almost perfectly. The only problem is the Slack desktop app (which inexplicably ignores the settings for literally every other Linux desktop app and fails to invert my touchpad scrolling).

Meanwhile, I can't stand that way. For me, that means having to think about it and switch direction depending on which one I'm using (which happens several times a day at work, depends on if my laptop is docked or not).

I prefer it where if I want to scroll down, I just drag my finger down, regardless of whether it's on the touchpad or the mouse.

Think of the scrollwheel as sitting above the screen. When you roll the wheel down, the bottom of the wheel is going up, moving the screen up.

The touchpad IS the screen, so to speak, so moving the finger up would move the screen down.

That's how I visualize it. YMMV

> There's still the idiotic, screen-taking-over activities menu (because, yknow, it should take 3840x2160 pixels to show a fucking app launcher. Did nobody learn from Windows 8?

Launchpad on the Mac takes over the full screen too and I never hear anyone gripe about that.

Except Launchpad is entirely optional and not default for anything beyond being in the dock on new accounts.

GNOME, meanwhile, binds that thing to a top-left hot corner as well as the meta key, and it's the main way to search for stuff (meta key, start typing), and it's the only way to switch workspaces.

Of course, you can install a bunch of addons to work around some of this, but we're talking about sane defaults. GNOMEs are not.

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