Hacker News Reader

Comment by lovedaddy | Hacker News Reader

I just don't get GTK / Gnome decisions anymore. Font rendering is one part, but my personal hate is the stupid over padded default theme. Coupled with the fact they are making it as painful as they can get away with whilst still saying they support custom themes.

Until they cut back on the bloated, padded default, no one is going to take gnome / gtk seriously as a productive desktop env. There is countless studies showing more scrolling or less information presented in all sorts (like finance, programming, creative writing etc), leads to more mistakes.

But yet, this is the default theme (gtk4) next to a custom one (Mojave-dark). Pointer (mouse precision) is increasing, why on earth would I need such a bloated UX.

https://gregloscombe-01.s3.eu-gb.cloud-object-storage.appdom...

View on HN

It seemed to start around the GNOME 3 time when they were "simplifying" apps by removing all useful UI elements and hiding them in a hamburger menu that you couldn't access with the keyboard, ensuring you spent 80% of your time waving the mouse cursor around waiting for submenus to appear.

And since then it has got worse and worse. Thank goodness for Mate!

I don't understand how it could get like this. KDE3.5 and GNOME2 suddenly look amazing compared to the modern UI. Bonkers. It's like they don't try using their computer for a day.

Anymore? Gnome/GTK has been like this for a long, long time. The relentless taking away of options, choices, the ridiculous "everything mobile UI" drive, that's been going on for YEARS.

I used to use gnome-terminal, the last bit of gnome in my workflow. Then some genius decided to remove the --title argument to it, and you could no longer change the window title text. Somebody actually put in the work to remove that super basic feature.

No gnome for me, never again. It is a worthless project.

> The relentless taking away of options, choices, the ridiculous "everything mobile UI" drive, that's been going on for YEARS.

At this point, damn near to 20 years now, I'd say.

I've always found it bizarre that GNOME basically hid complexity away from users in a way that makes no sense. It often requires extensive workarounds or patching.

As someone who uses stock GNOME on Fedora with only minor theme tweaks on most of my devices - speak for yourself! On my touchscreen laptop the large buttons are welcome, and when scaled down on a 4K display it doesn’t matter that much. On my desktop I do use arc-theme however, so I see where you’re coming from.

I think GTK3 was the sweet spot. I used GNOME 3 for a while on the desktop and it was really nice once you tossed some extensions in (and replaced the ugly Adwaita colorscheme). Then I updated to GNOME 40 and felt physical repulsion, so I moved to Plasma, probably for good. I'd love to explore the timeline where the maintainers didn't axe a ton of features/support and instead focused on doing their own thing really well. Now all we have is a lame Mac clone, and they can't even deny it anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com