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Comment by willtim | Hacker News Reader

Windows definitely needs improving. I tried the Gnome 40 desktop recently and it's much more polished, consistent and refined.

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Does the file chooser show thumbnails yet?

Yep, shows thumbnails for pictures, videos, pdfs etc. More formats than Windows in fact. Windows has been standing still, the rest of the world hasn't.

EDIT: I used "Files", not the file picker.

Thumbnail preview is a _massive_ attack surface. All those RCEs in JPEGs, MP4s, PDFs etc are now potentially immediately executed upon displaying the file. No thanks.

You’re going to want to look at those pictures if you have them or do you just collect file names?

See, the nice thing about Linux is that you can always disable what you don't like. You're never just helplessly subject to the whims of the developers.

So turn it off if it worries you. Keep in mind thumbnail rendering is sandboxed[0]. It's Linux, the reason I like it is that it doesn't try to prevent you from doing whatever you want.

[0] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-desktop/-/blob/master/R...

Lol. Although, at least for open source, by the time a hacker has an exploit prepared, someone will have rewritten the code.

What do you do between opening the file manager and opening the image/video itself that verifies it doesn’t have any RCE exploits that other people aren’t doing?

I am using GNOME 40 and I just opened a file picker in Totem, the official video player. I did not find a way to switch the file picker from "Details" mode (one line per file, with size/type columns and a very very small thumbnail) to a "grid thumbnail" mode where they would be recognizable. The related bug is still open at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233, so I don't think this has been fixed.

Ah yes I used "Files" and not the file picker. I guess the file picker is part of GTK and therefore cannot use the rest of the gnome infrastructure?

The reason does not matter. It really is truly, absolutely irrelevant.

If Windows has issues with paths longer than 260 chars (only PARTIALLY fixed since Windows 10, v1607), I do not care that NTFS actually has no problem and supports 32,767 Unicode characters and the actual problem is the Windows API (and since v1607, apps that have not been updated to support the new behaviour). It is an example of a bug/limitation/lack-of-polish of Windows. The internal details are irrelevant.

Gnome has a lot more of these issues(thumbnails being one of the most visible and annoying ones) than Windows. Gnome (any ver) is not more polished than Windows.

I agree that the reason does not matter and is irrelevant to the end-user. I was just speculating as to why they have not "just fixed it". However, I disagree that Windows is more polished. Windows is made up of a mixture of UI frameworks/controls/apps, some going back decades. Much of this legacy is poorly integrated and even basic things like drag-and-drop doesn't work consistently. At least Gnome is consistent and they have a vision.

If there are issues you'd like to see fixed, the best way to get those dealt with would be to contribute.

I would very much like to see the file chooser/ open and save dialog in GTK fixed because it affects a lot of software even if one is not using Gnome. It affects Firefox on Linux on all DEs, it even affects Gimp on Windows. I am not a GTK/C/Vala programmer though.

I would like for gnome apps to behave better when opened on DEs other than Gnome.

Other than that, I don't really care about Gnome. I use Plasma on Linux.

Well, if you want some changes made, you would have to define what you mean by "fixed" and come up with some concrete steps to do that, and then implement those steps, or find a person who can do them for you.

If the app uses GtkFileChooserNative, it can likely already be configured to use an external file dialog, with some caveats: https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/a5cxwk/firefox_v64_can...

You sure about that? I see the bug is still open:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233

This is not about thumbnails in the file manager but about the file chooser (open/save dialog).

I believe the following post is still relevant:

https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...

At least KDE does this properly:

https://www.ubuntubuzz.com/2021/04/comparison-of-file-choose...

KDE looks really good too, but I mostly prefer the minimalism/simplicity/aesthetic of Gnome.

It will until you upgrade your Ubuntu version and you open it up to find a message that "your file manager is deprecated. use this crappy fork with fewer features instead", only to have it abandoned after a few years because the devs for the fork got butthurt.

I'm so glad I ditched Linux. Got tired of losing features because of people's egos, and being told ffmpeg was deprecated when it really wasn't became the final straw.

Is that relevant to Gnome? It's used the same file manager "Nautilus" for years. Apple and Microsoft are also quite capable of killing software projects.

How long have you been using Gnome for? I'd been a while for me, but back when I was using Linux it seemed like Nautilus was frequently dropping features for things I didn't care about.

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/gnom...

Gnome may be different now, but they were part of a pattern in the GNU/Linux community that ultimately caused me to leave it. I knew I couldn't rely on either Gnome or distros themselves because they seemed to have no problem changing things out from underneath you, and more often than not it seemed like those things were done as a form of self promotion.

This wasn't a one off thing. This was the Linux world for a good number of years, in my experience. Anyone who used Ubuntu or Debian from 2008 to around 2013 might remember the forks that happened because DEs up and decided that they knew better than their own users.

Not specifically about Gnome, but I brought up FFmpeg (or rather libav) as another example of the bullshit of Linux. Some devs decided that they didn't like the architecture of FFmpeg and wanted it to be organized to their liking, so they forked it into Libav/avconv, which was inferior to FFmpeg but the people who run the Debian repositories were convinced that Libav was the future so they replaced FFmpeg with an alias to avconv that had a totally misleading deprecation message that was basically a lie.

So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Gnome one day decided to get rid of thumbnails and not provide an option to turn them back on. Yes, I am bitter from the latter years of my Linux usage. Somehow macOS can update and upgrade its versions without causing me to question whether aspects of the UI I rely upon will spontaneously disappear or gaslight me into thinking I shouldn't be using those things anymore.

I've been using i3 up until recently. I'm trying out Gnome because it works out-of-the-box and e.g. Sway does not. Yes the software churn is rather worrying. I hope they learn from the mistakes.

The thing that irks me more than churn is not providing pathways forward. It's like, if you're going to get rid of bookmarks, then either give me an add-on that brings them back or give me time to adjust to not having bookmarks. Gnome used to be one of the worst at communicating their intentions. You never knew what you were going to get if you were going to upgrade Gnome. But I come from the philosophy of frontend JavaScript development where everything is announced, has a deprecation warnings, features extracted into libraries, and so forth. The people who work on GNU/Linux related development come off as very arrogant in their decision making, even if they aren't intending to be arrogant.

Just so people are aware, I understand that things could have changed in the last 9 years. However, those kind of user experiences can permanently ruin the reputation of OSS projects.

You are perceiving arrogance where there is none. These are volunteer-driven projects, for better or worse the deal has always been "take it or leave it," or fork it if that's what you prefer. If there is something you want extracted into a library, just go and extract it and make the library. Of course if you choose to abandon it entirely then it's going to be a total crapshoot if it improves the way you want it to.

This attitude results in the only possible answer being "leave it". Nobody has time to fix it in any nontrivial way who isn't being paid to do it, and if you're being paid, it's not volunteer work and you're supposed to pull your weight.

RedHat is not a volunteer project and it ate half of Linux. Volunteer projects in fact tend to be the more stable and polished parts of it.

I'm not sure what you mean, the paid people are still volunteering. They don't really have to spend company time upstreaming anything, they could technically keep all their patches in a private fork, but the company allows them to upstream things because it makes the most sense. You also don't have to leave it, you can also make a private fork too, and work on it slowly, if it makes the most sense to you.

These complaints about Red Hat are what make no sense to me, if you believe they are "eating Linux" for the worse then I would advise you to produce a version of Linux with all of the Red Hat commits removed, and see for yourself if it's more stable and polished. It may not be, because you would likely also be removing a lot of the bug fixes they upstream.

They kept Nautilus but have absolutely gutted it over time removing things like split panes. I think it actually had more features in GNOME 3.00 than today. I was one of the weirdos that loved GNOME 3.00 at release but I felt they've taken more steps back than forward chasing who knows what.

Immediately pressed ctrl+o when I read this. Went to "Images" folder. Yes, thumbnails are there.

Does it still crash every 15 minutes because that is what it did for me when I tried Fedora 34?

Well Fedora is bleeding edge, RedHat's equivalent to Windows insider builds. Try Ubuntu LTS or Debian.

Ubuntu doesn't ship with Gnome 40.

You have to choose between stability and the latest/greatest. You cannot have both. Not even Apple users get both.

Do multiple displays actually work yet?

ie. Can you plug-in laptop to two displays, arrange windows, and then disconnect and reconnect and have the windows in the same place?

Multiple displays definitely work, but I had to check regarding your question about screen arrangement. That works.

Gnome version 3.38.3 Ubuntu 20.10 Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen rigged to a Dell thunderbolt dock Monitor 1 from dock via hdmi Monitor 2 from dock via displayport

This is madness!

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