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Comment by albertzeyer | Hacker News Reader

You will find lots of such examples of a feature which you personally find very important and wonder why such a simple thing is not supported yet. I guess everyone has such examples. And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows.

For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration is still not implemented. I implemented it a while ago for Xorg, which is outdated now, and also the maintainer was not happy with my approach. It's now a long outstanding proposal for libinput, https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/7 / https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/405 (original bug report from 2010: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29905).

Anyway, I guess there are actually not too much people caring about this feature. And the intersection of those who do and those who have enough free time and knowledge to implement this is just empty.

Btw, I don't quite understand the comment about KDE. It sounds like the the author claims that KDE lacks other relevant features. But comparing Gnome vs KDE, it is quite clear that KDE has much more features. This is never a complaint I heard about KDE.

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At least enough people care that its become a meme in some tech communities.

https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

> there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

Don't know that I agree there.

I actually really like GNOME's workflow on laptop, especially with Pop OS's extensions.

I disliked KDE 3 & 4, however KDE 5 is great. Plasma Desktop is impressive and pleasant to use.

Yep. I’ve been a long time GNOME user and I switched to KDE Plasma when I upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. I don’t think I’m looking back.

In the early-2000s like many other people I was attracted to the Crystal[1] theme/icon pack, but it did not take long for it to start looking tacky to me. I feel like KDE never really abandoned this kind of look-and-feel until Plasma was released, which is very clean and pleasant. It has discarded cartoon-ish icons and has sharper lines and colours which are nicer to look at. I am a big fan!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everaldo_Coelho#Crystal

My personal opinion is that KDE is less polished, more bloated (in terms of features and options), and slower than GNOME.

Did you try it recently? That was also the stigma of KDE 4.x. 5 is snappy and bloated is probably the wrong word to featureful. I just can't stand gnome exactly due to the opposite: bare bones, missing features, lack of integration and mainly lack of standardized ux.

Add that Gnome it's painful slow and uses more resources that KDE.

Plasma Desktop uses about the same amount of resources as XFCE.

> more bloated (in terms of features and options)

that might be subjectively correct to a lot of people, but I find that they are usually set to sane defaults and a lot is disabled by default. Also, I would like to emphasis that the choice of disto kinda matters here as they sometimes change defaults.

I think this may have been true in the past, but KDE 5 is nowhere near as bloated as KDE once was. (And they've also made huge strides in consistency and a sane UI experience.)

I've tested comparing Gnome/KDE on old hardware (eg, 2 GB of RAM and CPUs built for power conservation), and subjectively I found KDE to be a lot snappier (Gnome Shell always choked for me when hitting Activities) and, after a few hours of uptime, found it used less memory than Gnome. On the same box, it even gave Xfce a run for its money, which was surprising.

Although, when it comes to peddling Linux to other people, I'm hesistant to install KDE for anyone because it's a bit too configurable. I'm always afraid of getting asked for help because of someone accidentally messed up their UI and losing their taskbar or something like that. KDE's came a long way in recent years, but that "you can configure everything" core will always probably be there. And on the flip-side, if I install Gnome, people often find it outlandish and barebones...

If you use it with every basic extension, like Kubuntu's default setup, then it's really bloated (Akonadi and MySQL is a dependency for KMail), but thankfully it's highly modular and enough fast for my taste.

I’ve not used Kubuntu in years but there was a time when it was consistently running 50% slower than every other KDE orientated distro (and some distros that were DE agnostic too).

I think Kubuntu did more harm than good for people’s perception of KDE.

Akonadi supports at least four DB engines. To combat bloat, select the SQLite dependency instead of MariaDB/MySQL.

I wish there was the option of not installing Akonadi, but apparently it's not possible any more to run sticky notes and feed reader without it.

Good joke.

That was my opinion as well until about 4 month ago when I actually seriously tried an up to date KDE for the first time in years. Turns out I was completely wrong.

> KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

I have nothing against KDE, but come on. Many of us really do prefer GNOME despite its perceived deficiencies. This is just a matter of personal preference.

Nothing against options, but having distros with a default on Gnome just seems wrong, defaults are supposed to be good and complete.

Wish somebody would tell that to the Emacs maintainers.

I'll never understand this. It's like people who swear by xfce. Both are borderline unusable to me, but gnome certainly isn't in that category, despite its bugs.

Which feature(s) exactly do you miss on XFCE that makes it unusable in comparision to GNOME?

Didn't mean to pick on xfce, I haven't used it in a couple years to be fair. But when I did, it just didn't fit my workflow that well. For example, I'm used to pressing command+space and getting system-wide search for all files and apps. This is basically the default behavior on gnome, I just needed to remap the shortcut. I also often move desktops and the "activities" view makes that really simple.

Xfce is stable, lightning fast, and best of all, its users never have to learn a new interface layout every other year.

I find KDE to be pretty ugly.

For instance, margins and paddings seem to be all over the place [1]. At least Gnome gets that part right.

[1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Notifications

If you don't like the defaults, there are thousands of 3rd party themes that are directly listed and installable from KDE's theme preference pane.

Do any of them solve the problem?

No.

That page looks kinda out dated, and "contains some ideas how to improve the Plasma notification system". So a lot of that is mocks and not real screenshots.

Yes, this page is full of mockups created years ago.

Agreed. It occupies some weird uncanny valley of design that is hard to pin point.

Absolutely. It feels like they're getting there (VDG is working on it and shown some results), but they're just a few years away.

... it has been feeling like that for the few years I've been following it.

"This page assumes the status quo as of Plasma 5.7". Plasma is now on version 5.20 so the page you linked has some pretty old examples. The KDE folks are working pretty diligently to clean stuff like this up as they find it. Nate Graham's weekly blog documents this and other updates to the project.

https://pointieststick.com/

I personally like KDE and it's Breeze Dark theme a lot.

Small half-joke: Only two words into the front page post I already hit a UX issue! (and a UI inconsistency)

> This week (KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten...)

I then instinctively went on to the top of the article to check on the date, to get an idea of when was "this week" for the author... but there is no date. Oh, well :-)

Opening the post itself (instead of reading from the main page) does indeed change the UI and it now happens to show the date.

Loved the irony...

This all shows that even for people dedicated to it, getting UI/UX right is hard.

Nate is not a web developer and is just using a default wordpress theme.

Totally understandable. The theme developer, however, could have strived for a bit more consistency on its default settings...

KDE, to me, looks like someone designed it to be a touch interface.

Everything is so LARGE and padding between elements is YUGE. The tech is cool and everything seems to work fine, but something about the UI just grates me.

... Did you misspell GNOME here?

Also, KDE is the most customizable DE of them all, and it has the most powerful features of them all (by far). Given that, all these "but it looks kinda bad!" comments sound insane. It's like choosing a push mower over a motorized because you like the finish on the handle.

>KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

IMO, one aspect where Gnome excels is its tight integration of alternative input methods. I remember it being controversial that Gnome blessed ibus over alternative engines, but as a result, setting up CJK input is simple and foolproof. Although I prefer KDE in every other way, I have never managed to get ibus working correctly in that environment.

CJK input magically working easily and reliably in Gnome is the pretty much the only reason I use it over KDE. And setting it up doesn't require following a wiki, using the commandline and/or having to edit obscure config files or messing around with weird GUI settings apps.

I have nothing against KDE by any means (I love it, and also really appreciate their initatives like KDEnlive, etc.), but I don't think I've ever gotten Japanese/Chinese input to work in it before. Maybe once, but then I gave up on finding a sane way to easily cycle between the different input types (eg, WinKey+Space).

I remember finding what worked was quite of a hassle in KDE, but once I chose fcitx over ibus I've had little issues with CJK input.

I think that's very much personal preference. I tried KDE a few months ago and I couldn't stick with it; it is slower than Gnome in a lot of ways, it's (to my eyes) much more cluttered, and has lags at annoying places. For example, I tend to hit the windows key and start typing to launch things, but under KDE there's enough lag before the menu opens that it doesn't catch my first few keypresses.

This. I get periodically frustrated with Gnome and give KDE a go and always end up going back to Gnome within a couple of weeks. I want to like it, I want it to work but Gnome (on my setup) is more responsive and that is more important than all of the other deficiencies of Gnome.

I'm on a 3 year old laptop, and I tried several times to get a keystroke to be dropped after I hit the windows key and I couldn't get it to happen.

I use windows-key and start typing to launch things all the time, and after reading your comment at first I thought I might have developed a habit to pause, but nope. I wonder what the difference is.

My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-tray disappear if you move the cursor outside of them. Maybe pro gamers can manage to keep the cursor in every time, but for me I often take 2 or 3 tries to click on something.

> My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-tray disappear if you move the cursor outside of them.

This looks like a bug or you changed the default setting, just to be sure in System Setting -> Window Management -> Window Behavior -> is the Window Activation Policy set to click to focus?

Ohhhhh. Of course I changed it to focus follows mouse because that's the One True Way(tm) of managing window focus. So I'm guessing that when the popup loses focus, it disappears. Thanks for solving that mystery. I'll ponder whether it's worth it to make the disappearing have a lag, conditional on the window activation policy.

Stay tuned - it seems KDE's home menu will get a major overhaul.

"This week Plasma also saw a new Kickoff menu that is a complete rewrite, which is also coming with Plasma 5.21. There have also been many bug fixes, performance improvements, and other ongoing UI refinements."

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-KWin...

KDE or MATE, really.

The default DE should be "sane and boring". I think the one that best fits this description at the moment is MATE.

Elementary is also working on a way to default most apps to a better file picker:

https://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/gs86hj/thumbn...

https://medium.com/elementaryos/a-new-native-file-chooser-19...

I was happy KDE user for very long time - first 3.x, then 4 (even with all those glitches and bugs at the very beginning). Then I had 7-8 years break off Linux and last year decided to install it on my new desktop machine.

Went with Plasma first - did not go well. I simply cannot get comfortable with it and general look and feel is not working for me (I prefer defaults and I avoid much tweaking and any 3rd party customization). I settled on Cinnamon, but it was close tie with GNOME which was actually quite refreshing experience for me.

So, to each his own, but I just do not see KDE as "the sanest" default.

3.x/4.x was the golden age for KDE. I never felt home with Plasma.

I've never understood why so many distros make gnome the default DE. There are much better and friendly ones, some of them forks and some written from scratch.

> https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

> Debunking: lInUx Is JuSt A kErNeL

Ah yes, countering a meme with another meme. Good one.

While you're here and know a thing or two about libinput: it's completely unusable for me, and the only reason I'm able to work at all is that the old synaptics package (on which libinput is based as a clean rewrite as I understand) still works. The reason is that libinput doesn't support sensitivity; I still remember the physical pain of hard-pressing the touchpad when my current notebook was new, and in particular the moment when I looked at the notebook and just stopped doing anything at all on it in conditioned anticipation of a frustrating experience. Also, kinetic scroll doesn't seem to work, amplifying the issue.

I noticed Ubuntu have switched to KDE (or, alternatively, LXDE) as DE for their "Studio" variant. I'm guessing that's mostly because the minimal window decorations for resizing etc makes gnome hard to use, and Studio is for large notebooks or desktops anyway. I think the exercise of patience that was resizing windows on gnome2 has slightly improved, but I'm still speechless as to the loss of the global menu to be replaced by ... a centered clock accompanied by a minimal dot that I found out to display notifications after a while, and nothing else.

I mean I'm glad that F/OSS for desktops still exists at all, but gnome3 is really just a big regression for no reason at all, and I'm starting to get a bit concerned where gnome is heading. It's not that we have a wealth of new desktop apps anyway. Maybe Ubuntu is testing the waters to switch to KDE as well.

Disclainer: KDE dev so take my opinion with a pinch of salt :p

The decision by the Ubuntu Studio variants was made by the Ubuntu Studio developers and not by Canonical. The developers are also maintaining Fedora Jam with KDE installed by default too. Unfortunately all the big commercial distros are using GNOME as default DE because RedHat is providing the commercial support for GNOME already and it's easier for them to just make the same choice. So I don't think Ubuntu will switch to KDE anytime soo, even if GNOME developers don't like Ubuntu and make their opinion very public.

For those interested on why artists like Plasma so much, David Revoy made a nice summary: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article783/kubuntu-linux-20-04-fo....

>> For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration is still not implemented.

This came up recently with SolveSpace. Two developers spent an amazing amount of time getting scroll wheel zoom right. Discussion here: https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/pull/825

Love these guys, they give a crap about usability. BTW next release soon - after a bit more polish. Polish take time and work, but do you really care about the software if you don't spend some time unclogging the toilet?

> the maintainer was not happy with my approach

This is the absolute CORE of the problem with open-source software. Someone becomes the "maintainer" of a project, often through no skill of their own (they just showed up at the right time), which effectively makes them BDFL with infinite veto power. Hard-forks of popular projects are politically unpopular (for good reason), so that isn't an option. Instead, the whole world of software that relies on a package is broken or fixed at the whim of one dude.

> This is the absolute CORE of the problem with open-source software. Someone becomes the "maintainer" of a project, often through no skill of their own

That’s a bit unnuanced, isn’t it?

Nobody randomly becomes the maintainer of a big/popular project without having a history of contributing. They were the ones willing to pick up the task of doing free labour for everyone after the last guy didn’t want the job anymore.

As maintainer of a project, their job is to try to respond to bugs, maintain it, improve it and keep it working. All for free.

If somebody submits a low quality or low effort patch which goes against the projects conventions or general strategies or patterns which will over time increase the maintainer’s burden, he is under no obligation to accept that patch.

On the contrary, whoever submits the patch is the one who wants to benefit from all that time invested into the project so far, for his own good. I think it’s absolutely fair to expect/demand that they are also willing to put up some effort when they send in patches and receive feedback.

I love Linux desktop but miss these creature comforts too. For me, my biggest input issue is the lack of customisation around trackpad deadzones, i.e. the 15% or so deadzone on the left and right of the trackpad. My trackpad is exactly in the center of my laptop but my palm is usually offset slightly to the left. This means my first interaction with the trackpad often happens in this deadzone area on the left-hand side of the trackpad, so no input gets registered until I lift my finger and "enter" it more towards the center.

There are a huge variety of laptops with different size trackpads, different positions, varying levels of palm rejection etc but there's zero customisability around this seemingly simple behaviour.

My Windows dualboot has no such issue and macOS of course (using a MacBook) works fantastically without this limitations.

Sounds like a libinput bug.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libinput/

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/touchpad...

I'd file a bug though, and see if whatever's wrong can be fixed for every trackpad of that same make/model.

Thanks for the links, particularly the second one. It looks like something I may have experimented with before but I'll try again. It could be that my touchpad does not support ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR (Dell XPS 2-in-1 2019).

My "issue" is described as expected behaviour in this documentation: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/palm-det... (the "A" event).

I've never noticed such issue, quick search shows that one has to start on edge and movement in vertical direction [1]. Vanilla edges are 8% of the width on each side [2]. There was a proposal to add configuration option [3], rejected — they've tried this route before, it was impossible to test.

Fortunately source is there and it is easy to patch (try to set 0%). That's quite common, for example there are several patched libinput on AUR [5].

Does your hardware has firmware palm detection mechanism? Current bug [6] (Palm exclusion zones are not worth it on some hardware).

[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/palm-det...

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/blob/f2ba...

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/19...

[4] http://who-t.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-libinput-doesnt-have-l...

[5] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=libinput

[6] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/43...

Thanks for your detailed reply. Unfortunately the Microsoft Precision Touchpad on my Dell XPS 2-in-1 2019 (Wacom HID 48EE Finger) does not support ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR; it's worth mentioning however that Windows works perfectly and palm rejection seems to work on a hardware/firmware level (no output when running "libinput debug-events" and moving a palm) making libinput restrictions unnecessary and most definitely unwanted.

The touchpad is about 7 fingers in width and the palm exclusion zones are a little more than one finger on each side; this is roughly 30% of the trackpad, or 15% each side, certainly bigger than 8% and even that would be too much.

Additionally, although the documentation does state that rejections should only happen for a vertical like movement, it also happens for a completely horizontal one.

Sounds extremely strange. You should fill an issue.

My Dell Latitude E7440 follows description and I believe same is true for most of the users. I have to start movement at least diagonally, once it catches further direction does not matter.

It produces no output when running `libinput debug-events`. I've recompiled my version with 0% just to check.

            /* palm edges are 8% of the width on each side */
    -       mm.x = min(8, width * 0.00);
    +       mm.x = min(8, width * 0.08);
            edges = evdev_device_mm_to_units(device, &mm);
            tp->palm.left_edge = edges.x;
     
    -       mm.x = width - min(8, width * 0.00);
    +       mm.x = width - min(8, width * 0.08);
            edges = evdev_device_mm_to_units(device, &mm);
            tp->palm.right_edge = edges.x;

Disabled. I like how it is easy Arch allows such experiments:

    $ yay -G libinput
    $ cd libinput
    $ makepkg -so
    ==> Verifying source file signatures with gpg...
        libinput-1.16.4.tar.xz ... FAILED (unknown public key E23B7E70B467F0BF)
    ==> ERROR: One or more PGP signatures could not be verified!
    $ gpg --recv-key E23B7E70B467F0BF
    $ makepkg -so
    $ vim src/libinput-1.16.4/src/evdev-mt-touchpad.c 
    $ makepkg -fei

Wow, I didn't know how easy to do these things in arch. You made my day!

Thanks for updating your answer with your diff. Arch really looks great in how easy it was to try that. I'm running Ubuntu and have experience compiling custom kernels so this should be slightly easier to try, thanks once again for such a great reply.

Ultimately, I would prefer that this kind of feature is configurable in userland. Wayland's documentation page mentions that "Data from touchpads showed that almost all palm events during tying on a Lenovo T440 happened in the left-most and right-most 5% of the touchpad. The T440 series has one of the largest touchpads", and this may have been true several years ago, but it's quite common now to have larger and wider form-factor touchpads.

> I love Linux desktop

Which "Linux" desktop are you referring to?

I answered generically because my comment was about a libinput "issue" which affects all distributions and desktop environments. (Queue 2021 is the year of linux desktop).

Personally, I see this change as a regression from the highly configurable synaptics driver.

As you've asked, distribution wise I typically run an Ubuntu LTS with Gnome 3 but rolling releases such as Manjaro and lightweight DE like XFCE are also very nice.

On macOS, I install https://github.com/emreyolcu/discrete-scroll to disable scroll acceleration, because I find it annoying, and macOS has no config option to disable it.

Hey at least it's possible. System Preferences-level config has a cognitive cost, it's ok by me to move 1% or fewer level stuff to plugins. My example is that I want the scroll direction reversed when I have my trackball plugged in, but not on the trackpad, and there's a helper app called Scroll Reverser which does the trick.

Alas, my white whale is focus-follows-mouse, and I just... can't have it. Not worth abandoning the Mac over, not for me, but.. arrgh.

How does "focus follows mouse" work? If I'm understanding; your desktop is a collection of various sizes windows, maybe overlapping and stacking. If your mouse goes off the side of the one you're focusing, it will auto focus the one you're now hovering over. Won't this lead to accidents where you'll have a larger window suddenly gain focus, with no way to see the old one and re-focus it? Seems easy to make a mistake.

This maybe would be solved by a window manager that enforces never allowing windows to stack depthwise? Which OSX doesn't have of course. Just size-and-position-hotkey workarounds

Nope, what you're describing is a mistake in focus-follows-mouse, one which has been made more than once.

In real, XWin-style focus-follows-mouse, the window you mouse over gets the focus, but, isn't pulled to the front. If you click, it gets the front and the focus.

I use Moom, a semi-tile snap-style window wrangler, and a widescreen with three panels. What I want to do is just slide the cursor over and start typing, but I have to remember to click, and often enough I just don't.

The One True Wiki has a nice discussion of the subject: https://wiki.c2.com/?FocusFollowsMouse

I remember setting some reasonable “raise timeout” and it worked well for me. For one use case, I had a workflow with two full-height overlapping windows (vim, xterm) and little mouse shifts toggled them up/focused.

Alt-tab didn’t work because its mru usually gets spoiled by other (browser) windows. If only there was a setting that fixed alt-tab mru into a stack. Alt-tab-tab to switch to app which started second may be much better than mru for some workflows, because you can always predict what it does with certainty of 1.

I actually have it set to not raise even on click; I often want to click just one thing in a window that is behind other windows. Moving a window brings it to front and I bind windows-click-drag to move a window. That lets me raise any window I like.

same. i don't raise on click. this is incredibly useful when a smaller window is in the foreground--and perhaps a window underneath is maximized--and i just need to select/copy something from the background real quick. the main task i am working on is in the foreground, and i don't want its window to immediately vanish from my sight because it's mentally and visually disruptive (in fact, i usually don't want to blast every other window out of sight when the maximized window raises either). i will easily raise the background window when i need to (in a variety of ways, depending upon whether i am currently using keyboard or mouse); meanwhile, i can lazily focus it and interact with it while all my windows stay put. it's very calming.

> And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows.

If anyone wonders, here are three from Mac last I used it:

- fn took the place of ctrl on the laptop (but not the full keyboard). Unlike on Dell and Lenovo who also has this problem it could not be remapped neither at boot nor in the OS.

- CMD - tab forced me to think ahead of time if I want to change to the last application or the last window of the same application. I.e. switching between two Safari instances takes a different key combination than switching between Safari and IntelliJ.

- modifier keys worked differently between applications, e.g. selecting to the end of a word was either ctrl-shift, alt-shift or CMD-shift depending on application.

> CMD - tab forced me to think ahead of time if I want to change to the last application or the last window of the same application. I.e. switching between two Safari instances takes a different key combination than switching between Safari and IntelliJ.

That’s a feature, not a bug. I personally hate having to tab through a million browser windows to find the application I need, or having to tab through unrelated applications when looking for a browser window, which is what I have to put up with when using Windows.

It is a feature which replace another feature (stack based switching). It broke my flow multiple times a day for three years until I got a Windows machine again. I guess we are just differently wired, the idea of stopping to consider which shortcurt to use was neither natural nor possible for me at that age (around 30).

KDE does this perfectly however. It defaults to Windows/classic Gnome 2 behaviour but can easily be configured however one wants it.

It's not a feature for anyone used to standard alt+tab (and ctrl+tab). Often I wish switching between tabs was on first level too.

I don't appreciate the Mac/Gnome way.

“Standard” is just your habit built on another operating system. macOS has a fundamentally different application and window model, which is also why there’s a consistent application menu bar across all applications and windows, not what each app decides to invent or not invent for itself within the window.

macOS has more consistent keyboard shortcuts than Windows.[1] Some cross platform apps do their own thing.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

Things that annoy me on mac: - there's no volume mixer (each app having an individual volume slider) - no window snapping (before I bought BetterTouchTool, which includes window snapping, I had windows everywhere and it was just a mess) - column view in Finder is nice, it would be really useful to pick a new "root" folder for the viewer, or to move one directory up from the "root"

Things that annoy me on windows: - No tabs in explorer. Imagine having a web browser that didn't have tabs, that's how bad this is. - No preview in explorer. Mac has this awesome feature where you press space and it gives a quick overview of most files (not only images but also pdfs, .docx, ...). - No column view. Column view makes it much easier to navigate across directories, and back and forth between subdirectories of a root directory.

I use both and really miss the spacebar Quicklook on Windows, I found this 3rd party app that adds it https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook and works better than I expected.

First, I fully agree: this is not a bug, it's a missing feature. Second, I may be a minority here, but I actually don't mind this feature missing at all. I however do (or did) mind Windows putting its "thumbs.db" files all over the place, so that's the first thing I deactivate when installing it (along with enabling "show hidden files" and "show extension for known file types").

- "Welcome to the new GNOME car. It's totally free!".

- "Looks great. But there are no mirrors. Isn't that dangerous?"

- "Yeah, but that's not a bug, it's a missing feature. Besides, we don't like mirrors because in all cars they need to be cleaned all the time."

- "Really? Apparently the KDE cars also have mirrors but different technology, and they don't need to be cleaned at all. Also, what's the difference between a bug or missing feature if a lot of people complain about it?"

- "Oh yeah. But honestly we really don't like that people have to clean their mirrors, so we prefer not to have them."

Looks like we disagree on what's a bug and what's a feature in a file picker. But the mirrors on a car are mandated by law, so the equivalent for that would be a missing Cancel button (which forces you to always open a file). If I had to pick a car part equivalent to the file thumbnails, it would probably be seat heating or a built-in navigation system - it's nice to have (for some, others never use it), but you can use the car without problems if it's broken or not installed.

I'm not saying that it's not a nice feature to have, but it's also definitely non-trivial - it's not only thumbnails for images, if you do that people will also demand thumbnails for videos (including, of course, all ancient formats), PDF files, Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents, HTML pages etc. etc. etc.

> Anyway, I guess there are actually not too much people caring about this feature

I do care about this feature just like the author and though I don't have any evidence supporting my thinking, I think nobody enjoys trawling through bunch of weirdly named files (which is typical of how downloaded image files get named by default) looking for that specific picture/icon. After the Gnome 3 debacle where they basically refused to listen to the users and even removed not-so-obscure features like tabbed windows in nautilus (which I noticed is back now), I just didn't have the confidence that raising a feature request would amount to much.

There's a quote that I think of in situations like this:

"Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi

That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx.

Now capitalism works, so apple and microsoft apply the money they make to hard/unsexy things like sleep-wake bug fixes and APIs and sane defaults.

But they also bake advertising into their codebase and leech data home to the mothership and prevent you from running all the programs you'd like.

So look at linux as an opportunity.

You can contribute all you want but it's not going to be enough to stop Pottering or RedHat from hijacking the project and breaking everything. I used to contribute but these days what's the point?

For more information on "Pottering", a random search produced this:

https://slated.org/the_poetterisation_of_gnu_linux

The more you know.

I've never heard of the term before, I wonder if it's the basis for "puttering" as in "puttering about the house"

EDIT: nope, it's more direct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering

a connection the article didn't make clear.

I was quoting the parent comment for misspelling "pottering" as "poettering" since I'd not encountered either term.

I'm not sure using someone's surname is such a great idea for this purpose. But I now at least understand why. Also their anger at the added complexity being done to Linux and surrounding structures including but not limited to systemd.

But these structures are still in flux. Even if it means a mess along the way.

That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx.

I'm not as sure with Macs (and the surrounding culture isn't really eager on such things anyway), but there's a long history of people modding Windows in various ways, that goes back to the DOS days. Of course your customisation is highly unlikely to make it back to MS, but things like WindowBlinds were extremely popular.

> There's a quote that I think of in situations like this:

> "Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi

Gandhi (spelled thus) never said that. What he did say (in an article about first-aid treatments for snakebites, weirdly enough), was this:

> We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

-- The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandi, vol. 13, p. 241 (http://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-literature/mahatm...)

Not quite as snappy, admittedly.

thanks for the clarification. (and apologies, I always put the h in the wrong place)

No probs, I managed to miss it out completely the second time I wrote his name. Muphry's Law[0] in action.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

> it is quite clear that KDE has much more features.

My guess is that the author prefers Gnome because yes, it has fewer features, but those feel more polished. KDE is powerful but some less frequently used features felt more like functional prototypes that were thrown somewhere into the nth level of the system settings.

Then again the last time I tried it Gnome had a lot of issues as well, so maybe I'm completely wrong nowadays.

There is a lot going on each week in KDE trying to improve the situation. Nate Graham is making a summary of the parts, he monitors: https://pointieststick.com/ There is definitely still quite a bit to improve but compared to 3 years ago, Plasma and KDE software has improved by a lot.

They pretty much had this nailed down in KDE 3.5, we're now 12 years later, how much longer will it take before current KDE will show any signs of being "finished"?

You can solve this in hardware with a mouse with a free-wheel. My Logitech G502 lets you click a button to swap modes from free-wheel to braked-wheel.

I tried a logitech mouse with that feature, mx anywhere 2s, but you lose the mousewheel middle-click as the wheel-mode switch is a physical switch and cannot be remapped.

Ended up taking it back for a refund and getting a g703 instead.

Interesting. The G502 has the middle-click on the scroll wheel and the wheel-mode is a separate one. Presumably like in your G703.

I don't think I have a wheel-mode option on my G703. I have a small button above the wheel which changes the pointer speed, but nothing I can see that puts the wheel into an accelerated more.

Honestly if the "2s Anywhere" had had the setup you described I would have kept it. Logitech tried to explain that middle slick was still there, on the button further back towards the palm rest, but it felt so unnatural and inconvenient. The 502 looks like a nice piece of kit.

This, lack of thumbnails, has annoyed me too, for years.

If you're used to GNOME, might I suggesting a fork? elementary OS has thumbnails for years: https://imgur.com/a/7JlJCnN

Is that a file picker, or just the file manager?

file manager

Why is there a metric ton of whitespace between the image and the label? Why doesn't anyone care about pleasant design in the Linux world? It's arguably the reason one would pick Elementary OS, yet this is the result.

> But comparing Gnome vs KDE, it is quite clear that KDE has much more features. This is never a complaint I heard about KDE.

Usability is not about how many features a program has. Usually more features make it harder to have good usability.

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