Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

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Well, because I'm having to install third party pieces which may or may not break stuff, may or may not be supported for long, may or may not break on the next update, in order to achieve a base level of configurability which it seems like DE designers don't want you to have in the first place.

Maybe they fixed things in the last few years, I have no idea, but last time I had to use Gnome 3 it broke existing DE muscle memory of using all sorts of environments across all sorts of platforms, and made it hard to discover how to change anything. Having to then install third party pieces to achieve minor change is not something I feel is an adequate replacement, particularly coming from systems where easy, built-in configurability comes as standard.

Again, if that all sounds fine to you, more power to you. To me it's an opinionated DE that tries its best to push its own ideas of usage on the user, and hides any/all options behind an API rather than exposing them to the user by default.

Why would I bother with such a DE when I can find one that supports what I want to do out of the box?

>having to install third party pieces which may or may not break stuff, may or may not be supported for long, may or may not break on the next update

Right, so that is a problem, but it's a different problem from lack of configurability. Those things are being addressed in other ways such as with the extension rebooted initiative: https://blogs.gnome.org/sri/2020/09/16/the-gnome-extensions-...

You're making a distinction of "third party" here but I don't understand why that really matters for configurability, for example it's no different from installing an unoffical XFCE panel applet, or using a third party file manager, etc. In the gnome shell, the extension API is built-in and standard. That is the configurability. If you're asking for specific panel settings to be included by default, that really isn't possible in a way that would please everyone -- you can look at the sheer number of panel extensions there are to see why that is the case. Again someone could make one to make it look and act exactly like XFCE's panel, but that would just be yet another option. Does that explain it? It's not really possible for the shell to act the way you're asking.

I support you using XFCE if that's what you want, but if you're asking for changes to be made in Gnome, those could probably not be made without causing much worse breakage. If you're not asking for that, then never mind, I misunderstood :)

> Right, so that is a problem, but it's a different problem from lack of configurability

Lack of out of the box configurability, lack of ease of discovery of configurability, lack of dependability on third party pieces (which may be essential to my workflow, that third party widget in Xfce isn't).

That initiative looks like a good move, I don't mean to disparage that.

> In the gnome shell, the extension API is built-in and standard. That is the configurability.

And that's not a good mechanism for me, as discussed.

> If you're asking for specific panel settings to be included by default

Yes, that's specifically my preference, for a system the user can configure, easily/out of the box, without relying on third parties to patch some really simple stuff back in.

> It's not really possible for the shell to act the way you're asking.

I'm not asking the shell to act any particular way, nor am I asking for changes in Gnome. I have had no real interest in Gnome since the 2->3 transition and this approach is part of that.

>Yes, that's specifically my preference, for a system the user can configure, easily/out of the box, without relying on third parties to patch some really simple stuff back in.

I personally would describe that approach as actually more lacking in configurability, because with that you're limited to only the built-in settings. In my opinion all those could be improved with further improvements the extension system. In general I also see the line between "third party" as being blurry in these open source projects, because any random person can contribute something. But in the end, you deserve to use something that is to your preference.

>I'm not asking the shell to act any particular way, nor am I asking for changes in Gnome.

Sorry, I guess I'm confused as to why you'd be talking about technical issues with GNOME, if it's been totally irrelevant to your interests for the last 10 years, and you don't even use it. If you're not interested to give constructive feedback or try to fix the issues, or try to describe different ways of achieving your workflow, then I would say I'm not really interested to discuss complaints about these things.

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