Gnome 42 – The Nonsense Continues

I nearly fully disagree with this article. Yes, there are still some inconsistencies with GTK3 and GTK4+Libadwaita, but that is expected, if you update your toolkit from one major version to another.

But for example blanket looks a lot better now, the button of the slider is far more visible.

kgx is, compared to the old GNOME-Console a lot nicer to use. Already the changing colours to violet for SSH and red for root-access are already a really nice feature.

Sure there are maybe some bugs and/or leftovers from the GTK3-GTK4 transition, but same as above, it will be fixed sometime.

> GNOME is still coupled to dubious libraries, with no way to avoid them unless heavily patching the code:

GDM depends on systemd || And now we also have libadwaita

systemd is standard for linux. And libadwaita is well, an extension to GTK, the Toolkit for GNOME => Absolutely appropriate.

Sure the dependency on WebKitGtk and Evolution is not that good, but at least Webkitgtk is installed on every GNOME-Desktop for other things.

But calling it "dubious" is not that appropriate, as they always have a sense. A dubious dependency would be - imo -, if GNOME depended on Wine or Qt

> ...Nvidia drivers can be problematic,...

That's only the fault of Nvidia. If they would do the same as Intel and AMD, nobody would have problems with those drivers.

> clearly incomplete and, in a nutshell, meaningless

Maybe for the author, but a lot was done, the screenshot tool is soo nice to use, the applications often got better. (In my opinion at least)

I read this through to the end and appreciated the work on the before / after graphics, and that someone was cataloging the differences.

But can I gently suggest separating the opinion out from the facts? It gets tiring being told how to think about what's being described, that they're hopeless dummies. At the same time, eg, observations that there are build-time deps to large things few people want, are relevant.

As an exercise, you might try moving your opinion to a section at the end and limiting the rest of the article to neutrally reporting facts.

It's a shame that none of these "critical" reviews actually contain any well-researched criticism.

Confusing the wider shadow radius on windows with the bounds of the screenshot utility? Referring to Mobian as a for-profit company or implying PINE64 is driving libadwaita? Suggesting a library written in cross-platform C "carries code for other platforms"? Claiming GNOME is replacing Terminal with Console, when it has been explicitly communicated that is not the case? Stating a feature has been removed from Tweaks, when it has actually been moved into GNOME Settings?

It's difficult to find anything accurate in this article, other than the screenshots. The author's time would have been better spent researching the subject matter, especially if they are sincere about wanting to provide constructive criticism.

I think the author fundamentally misses the point of the changes made to Gnome. If anything the changes reassert what is the responsibility of the Gnome ecosystem, as well as provides a clear path on how app developers can properly target it without app developers will have to continually deal with the edge cases imposed by distro tweaks. This reassertion of what is the realm of the desktop environment is what has to happen before the Linux desktop can be taken seriously by both app developers and regular users.

It's been said before, you can't make an omelet without first breaking the eggs. Though the egg breaking might be unpalatable, the omelet is rather tasty.

I was surprised how great GNOME 42 looked.

I'm glad for the consistency provided by libadwaita and the GNOME HIG.

I don't theme. I hear GNOME are open to theming support being introduced, the right way.

Support for mobile Linux means I can use the same programs on my Librem 5 too!

I think Linux users are bound to critique every thing that makes Linux Desktop a better product.

> But can I gently suggest separating the opinion out from the facts? As an exercise, you might try moving your opinion to a section at the end and limiting the rest of the article to neutrally reporting facts.

Thanks for your kind words. :) I see what you mean, but I don't think there's such a thing as an unbiased text. What we chose to talk and focus is already biased. And that's OK. What seems odd, in my opinion, is pretending we're impartial when in fact we simply can't -- the press, for instance. It doesn't imply, as you said, that by being biased we're adding false information.

> Yes, there are still some inconsistencies with GTK3 and GTK4+Libadwaita, but that is expected, if you update your toolkit from one major version to another.

My main point with this article is criticizing a final release with all these issues. Worse than that: pretending it's a good product when in fact it's worse than previous versions in many objective ways.

> Sure there are maybe some bugs and/or leftovers from the GTK3-GTK4 transition, but same as above, it will be fixed sometime.

The fact that you accept that is exactly what I talked about in this other article: https://medium.com/@fulalas/how-bullshit-has-dominated-the-t...

> systemd is standard for linux

It's not standard. It's just the most popular because people are lazy and keep imitating each other. Although it seems fine to have systemd as an option, it's ridiculous to have it as a hard dependency.

> Webkitgtk is installed on every GNOME-Desktop for other things

Apart from distros that ship Epiphany browser, what else do distros use WebKit2Gtk for?

> But calling it "dubious" is not that appropriate, as they always have a sense.

It's dubious because it's a huge library that takes 1 hour to build and all this just for one silly feature. And again: there's no official way to simply not have it.

> GDM isn't coupled to systemd AFAIK

Just take a look at GDM meson build script and you'll see: systemd_dep = dependency('systemd') libsystemd_dep = dependency('libsystemd')

The fact that you're running it on a non-systemd distro is probably due to an unofficial patch (just like the one I applied in Slackware/Porteus).