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Fedora 28 Workstation: See What's New

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12 pointslinuxscoop4 comments

Gosh, I feel sorry looking at the GNOME power setting panel. It's just as bare-bones as it can get (3:30). When I look at that, it does not suggest "simplicity" and "just works" to me, it just sucks.

In comparison, the KDE power setting menu... is powerful [1]. The "even when an external monitor is connected" is a wonderful option, so when I uncheck it, I can close the lid of my laptop without my laptop going to sleep.

1: https://i.imgur.com/dg0NU0K.png

The condescension is a bit pointless. Gnome (like Apple) tries to make good default choices with minimum configurability. KDE, apparently, makes the wrong default choices but allows maximum configurability.

I usually prefer the former, because I think configuring software is a total waste of time. An obvious sweet spot would be good defaults and minimum configuration clutter, but with an escape hatch to all configuration options. Gnome kinda allows that too (through gconf et al), but with associated risks.

This would be great if GNOME actually had sane defaults. Unfortunately GNOME is full of terrible defaults that it makes you jump through hoops (gconf, tweak tool, extensions) to change.

Like the total absence of a dock/taskbar. Not having minimize/maximize buttons on windows. The weird half-assed global menu thing. The terrible default status icon drawer that sits in the lower left of the screen in spite of an almost entirely empty upper panel. Not being able to right click with the corner of a touchpad. The annoyingly slow animation to bring up the application list. The moronic 'Other Locations' pane in the file manager that adds an extra click to get to anything not in your home directory and is completely impossible to configure without changing the source code. It is possible to configure the lid close sleep behavior, but again it's in the tweak tool.

Trying to remember which settings are in settings vs tweak tool is annoying, exactly like the Windows 10 settings/control panel mess. Would it kill them to replace tweak tool with an 'enable advanced options' toggle in settings? Managing extensions is also a process that the GNOME devs seem to have made deliberately obtuse and annoying to discourage anyone from actually doing it. And they keep breaking the API with new releases and failing to document the changes, making it a giant pain in the ass to maintain extensions and leaving a bunch of old broken extensions on the official extension site.

I complain but only because I like the other aspects of GNOME enough to actually use it.

>This would be great if GNOME actually had sane defaults. Unfortunately GNOME is full of terrible defaults that it makes you jump through hoops (gconf, tweak tool, extensions) to change.

This is pretty much why I use Mac OS now instead of something like Gnome. They're clearly trying to get there, though.

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