Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simion314 | Hacker News Reader

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The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME).

The bad architecture of the GNOME shell does not give me trust in the competence of the GNOME shell team (maybe they fix parts of it in GHOME4), the poor GTK story is also a bad point, arrogant developers, designers and community is also a bad point. Last time I checked they did not have real usability/UX studies except of some super old student homework projects so they imposed their concepts without real data to back it, so IMO without GNOME beeing the default on most distributions it would not have the share it has.

But if you like it then is great, I don't want to switch anyone to some better DE, I just want to explain that the reason I dislike the project is not about the padding or the GUI look and feel, on short I dislike the project because of their philosophy and bad developers/designers attitude and bad architecture.

"The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME)."

I don't understand any of these comments. There is actually a real design process that happens in GNOME. It's not just removing things because they think users are idiots. We can talk about issues in the process but I don't think your characterizations are fully correct here.

When it comes to things like the system tray and decorations and such, I don't know what you mean by imposing. If you build apps for KDE then you are going to build them "the KDE way" using KDE APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. If you build apps for iPhone then you are going to build them "the iPhone way" using iOS APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. And so on. So I don't understand why you could single GNOME out for this. If you don't like their way, they you can go build an app for KDE or iOS or whatever. I can't see how anyone is being forced to change anything to support GNOME.

Qt apps actually integrate great with plenty of hosts. VLC, Krita, Kate, Kdenlive, etc. work great on Gnome & XFCE & Cinnamon & LXDE & Mate and on Windows and Mac too, and of course on KDE. Maybe not native great but still great (in a world of Electron apps, I no longer expect apps to integrate native great). Gnome apps look bad anywhere other than Gnome. They look bad even on other GTK based DEs like Mate or Cinnamon.

Really? I don't mind how GNOME apps look on KDE. I agree it doesn't look or feel "native" but I find them to be just as usable as they would be if they were used in GNOME. But in any case Qt is intended as a cross-platform toolkit. GTK is not really intended to be that, it is its own thing.

Edit: Actually part of the problem might be your theme. In XFCE/KDE/etc you probably want to disable the theming for GNOME apps and just use Adwaita, in my experience GTK themes have never really worked well with GNOME apps for various technical reasons. However I think in the coming years libadwaita will improve the situation.

GTK used to be intended as a cross platform toolkit.

Or at least before it became the Gnome ToolKit and it was still the Gimp ToolKit. /s

I've never heard that, I don't think GTK has ever been intended as that. It has been intended to be portable to other platforms, but even when it was only GIMP using it, it was intended as a Linux/Unix first type thing.

I agree, though it's worth noting that GTK apps (particularly GTK2/3+, not necessarily GTK4/libadwaita) tend to behave and look pretty normal on any desktop that enforces a native-looking stylesheet. GNOME apps, however, do tend to look quite alien, even on their own desktop many times. Not quite sure what the disconnect is there.

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