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Comment by llllllllllll9 | Hacker News Reader

i installed a new debian box for work and i forgot to choose xfce4 so went with the default. gnome 3. i tried. i tried so hard to get used to it. for 2 horrible months i tried.

i only need a terminal, emacs, browser, thunderbird, the occasional screenshot and it was still horrific.

to be clear it was only the usability that was a nightmare. i experienced no bugs. it's solid. but wow it is unusable.

please, please, please someone at gnome headquarters ... can you make it usable? look at win10, win11, macos, kde, chromeos they all work fine. can't you do something like that? i believe you have the best software stack out there, and you're throwing it away with that frightful design.

this is tragic.

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This is purely my impression and not something I could prove, but it feels like Gnome wanted to have an out-of-the-box Mac-like experience, while not really understanding while people like using Macs. "You don't have a million configuration options on a Mac, so neither should we!" doesn't account for Apple having whole departments working on UI things, choosing sane defaults, etc. People don't like macOS because it doesn't give them options, but because it tried to make good decisions and patterns so that they won't need to tweak everything.

I know lots of people don't like Macs because they're not super tweakable, and that's fine. It's still my impression that Gnome is aiming for that target, while not quite understanding why a lot of people do like Macs.

100% my impression as well.

and you're right. macos is fine from a usability point of view. everything in gnome UI feels like they started strong, stayed strong, and then gave up half way ... (so many examples there's no point listing them anymore) and yeah put the clock in the middle of the bar while we're at it too.

and yet, you feel the potential no? no bugs whatsoever for me.

back to xfce4. clunky, but consistent. some bugs. it's ok.

For sure. It's so close to being amazing, which makes it all the more frustrating.

No idea what problems you encountered, but I find Gnome to be a joy to use. It was such a relief after years on Windows. Gnome Boxes is such a smooth experience compared to VirtualBox. Maximizing content area by putting UI elements in the title bar is also something I appreciate.

The problem is that nobody puts the right elements in the titlebar. It has just become a place where they improperly put "SAVE" for dialog boxes, when there was plenty of room in the dialog to begin with. It's kind of just become a dumping ground to put the shit that everybody doesn't want to deal with. It's like the hamburger menu, it might have some benefits, but now everybody just throws all the shit in there that they don't wanna deal with. Why would you fill out a form going down the list, and then have your save button all the way at the top of the window? Why bother trying to make a good, intuitive UI, when you can just make a giant heap of shit and put all your leftover stuff there? And then to top it off, now I can't move the fucking window, because the titlebar is full of trash.

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