I think the GNOME designers are incompetent
liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org
liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org
But this isn't even necessarily a sign of delusion or incompetence. It's plausible that the GNOME devs know it's a bad idea, but they have to do it anyway, because without the possibility of mainstream popularity there's no good reason for IBM to continue funding it.
it seems that ui designers have been trying to combine these interfaces for over a decade, i'm convinced it's a fools errand and that all it produces are things that make too many compromises for anyone to truly be happy.
everyone keeps trying it, yet apple stays far away, the fact that they are ui forward and won't go near it should say something.
Apple can achieve this because they’ve made extremely profitable ecosystems on both the desktop and mobile (although both appear to be heading towards a race to the bottom).
Linux has no such luxury. The vast majority of apps on Linux would simply never work on Mobile because no one would bother creating a mobile app for Linux, because of the chicken and egg problem created by the non existent market share for Linux phones.
they would never work on mobile because they are fundamentally different computing paradigms with very different use cases.
breaking the desktop is not going to fix the situation on mobile.
I absolutely need the Ubuntu modifications to it. I really think they removed too much, but the basic design and workflow of "Hit Super to get to the organisation view" is excellent IMO.
Yeah I really think they shot themself in the foot with making the happy path too narrow. Almost everyone will hit some minor usability thing like that and that has contributed to the negative impression.
And there are just not enough power user options in the settings, even with Gnome Tweak tools.
If the industry clearly did know how to render a website in the normal way and at the same time afford accurate link visiting with touch input, I would have more faith that vectoring GNOME the way it has been vectored was going to be successful.
Is this not what pinch-and-zoom is for?
So it is not about people using mobile touch screens or even about popularity.
It's pushed by Red Hat who has disproportionate control over the development of Linux. Same reason everyone had to switch to systemd.
I haven't seen much change between 41 and 42, which is fine since everything is already working great.
Contrary to the author, I see a lot of the design decisions in Gnome as careful and deliberate. They want the OS to disappear in service of whatever app you have in front of you. And I think they succeed, mostly. But that’s a sensibility that’s not going to work for every user or every task.
At this point, Gnome is more opinionated than even macOS or Windows. It’s going to put off some.
I’ll admit that I was a little worried when I started seeing screenshots of libadwaita and gnome 42, heading down the path of flat-everything, but in practice, the experience has been nice on both Arch and Fedora 36.
Tiling Assistant, this lets you define custom window snapping zones, its most helpful when you have a mix of landscape/portrait displays and you need more flexibility than the built-in behaviour offers.
DDterm, this one isn't essential, but its convenient to have a terminal shade ready to go. On my ThinkPads I'd bind this to the ThinkVantage key to quickly get a terminal up.
I used to muck around with themes and icon sets years ago, but Adwaita is pretty inoffensive these days, and dark mode is not an afterthought now.
I used to use Guake as my shade but it's a lot more convenient to have a unified solution for regular and dropdown terminals.
2015: Tried gnome3 on Fedora on my laptop. Hated it. I liked unity more, but I persisted with gnome anyway (because I had better things to worry about than DE), and eventually didn't mind at all. Used plenty of extensions to make life easier.
(I hoped between distros for no good reason, but used gnome in all of them).
2018: PopOS came out with their own style of gnome which IMO looked better. Switched to using that on my personal machine. I also stopped using extensions; only a couple of tweaks.
2020: Had to use XFCE on a desktop machine because I needed my machine to use as little resources for itself. I grew to like it eventually.
2022: Tried Fedora 36 with gnome 42, and I like the way gnome has improved. I now use it in the stock version, with absolutely no extensions or tweaks or anything. It just works (or rather, I adapted to what it provides).
Some random thoughts:
* My baseline criteria for liking a DE is: it should NOT remind me of Windows (the reason for that is a story for another day). This means Cinnamon and KDE are out, though they're pretty cool nevertheless.
* Gnome used to be a resource hog. This was really the only problem I had with it. After using XCFE for a while at work I had made up my mind to switch to it the next time I hop distro, but then newest gnome seems to have got resource usage under control again (or am I imagining it?).
* XFCE is a good no-bullshit DE.
* I don't care too much about DEs anymore.
The hate is practically a meme at this point. It makes me wonder what people need a desktop environment to do. Most of the criticism seems to be that it's not Windows or macOS
I’m constantly trying to find extensions to simplify simple tasks or make it usable and it’s frustrating. Tons of extensions are old and broken and don’t work anymore.
Visually I don’t like KDE Out of the box but I don’t need to install anything.
Most of the time complaints about Gnome boil down to "It's not behaving the way I think it should" and that - to me - is not a valid criticism.
People love to hate and Gnome is very prominent, so it is going to get hate and heat.
Let's take the linked article for example. What's its main topic? "Windows management".
You know what? It's 2022 and I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows.
But hater's gonna hate - what'cha gonna do?
What do you mean? Like GNOME will remove the concept of windows and you will have only 1 window maximum?
Do you use Slack or email? How do you get notifications without a System Tray? Or you use a distro that restored some of the features back since GNOME is targeting only people that use only GNOME apps and it seems only 1 window at a time.
I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware for their shit quality and missing features, but you won't see me browsing GNOME forums or reddits to hate on them, they are getting enough hate from people that loved them just a few years back and loved when feature were removed until their favorite shit was removed and then they finally understood that the GNOME community devs and designers are not nice, just a bunch of big ego dudes pretending to be smart developers or genius designers and UX experts.
What are you even taking about?
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications
> I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware ...
So... hater's gonna hate?
About System Tray, I mean GNOME refused to implement the standards and created their own cooler system , maybe they changed their minds , I see you have or had to use an extension https://github.com/Rickycezar/gnome-shell-slack-integration.
Btw I mean not only the message popup but a way to just glance at the Tray area and see you missed a notification or that you have unread emails in Thunderbird.
If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
> For me dislike is not the same as hate, it produces different feelings.
Fair enough.
> If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great
I get notifications for Thunderbird, Firefox, Teams and other applications. I don't know if any of them have extra code to supply notifications for Gnome, but I don't use extensions or compatibility plugins.
> I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
I'm very happy with the way notifications work in Gnome. The system tray was a burning heap of trash and every applications was trying to dump their icon in it to have extra screen space. I'm not sorry it's gone.
I get it, not it's not for everyone. But the amount of bad press it gets is hard to understand.
I like Gnome but without extensions I find it borderline unusable on my desktop.
It provides a base DE for OSes to customize and provide a complete package for end users.
Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly.
This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.
GNOME 3 and 4x aren't just "different". They are simply bad. GNOME 2 was different, and it was amazing. I remember letting my mother using my computer in the late '00s and even though she was absolutely terrible with computers she figured out how to use GNOME 2 in like, 20 minutes. Applications? Click on applications. Where is the download directory? Just click on Places.
Sadly GNOME isn't alone in this trend though, no one except KDE Plasma gives a damn about UX anymore.
Maybe this is just because I've been using MATE and before that Gnome 2 for more than 15 years now, but over the years, I have come to believe this is a value in itself. It's why Windows 8 made me pretty mad - the good old desktop of Windows 95 - Windows 7 was not perfect, but I have spent enough time using it I no longer needed to think about how this thing or that thing worked, it was almost muscle-memory.
When I wake up in the middle of the night and need to visit the bathroom, I can navigate my apartment without turning the light on. I feel that desktop environments are similar - familiarity beats clever design hands down, so I prefer small, incremental changes to "re-inventing" things.
I hope this being on HN doesn’t make more people believe that communicating like this is a good way to get attention.
If the feature uses shared internal apis, then that code has to be refactored if you need to make changes to those apis. If you need to update versions of dependencies, then the feature needs to be updated too.
If there are bugs, at a minimum you have to do something with the bug reports for those features. Even ignoring the report has overhead in the form of extra bug reports that you never intend to fix. Marking them as "won't fix" means you have to figure out a solution for dealing with the backlash from the reporter.
Then you get to the PRs from people who want to improve the feature but don't know the project well enough to really be of help. You have to either reject the PRs outright or carefully walk them through how to make them acceptable.
The minimal-work way to keep a feature around is to ignore all PRs and all bug reports for that feature. Any other approach is extra overhead. But taking that approach is still in many ways worse than stripping the feature out entirely, because you're left with a feature that only sort of works some of the time, it makes your code more resistant to change than if it were gone, and you're building up a backlog of reports and PRs you never intend to fix.
Removing a feature might be a bit of work now, but if it avoids hours of headaches later, that's absolutely worth it.
One literally could not pick up a better example of something going in the wrong direction that simply accumulates more tech debt.
I mean, people have called the GNOME team everything else, maybe it'll take stronger words to get a message across?
They were never exposed to the powerful and highly configurable classic Unix window managers and desktops, only Windows, Mac, and iOS. Yes, these old desktops all had their warts and configuration was not always a straightforward affair but they packed a lot of functionally into a small package.
It's like asking an otherwise experienced programmer to write an IDE when all they ever used was notepad.exe and a command-line compiler.
Linux development and use had become unimaginably complicated and fragmented.
Choice in Linux is a good thing, so I’m not against the fragmentation. At the same time, choice also means I should be able to choose an OS that keeps things simple for both devs and users.
And that’s what Gnome (and others such as the Fedora devs) appear to be aiming for.
Ubuntu used to play this role, but Canonical has built a consistent reputation of creating an alternative, splitting the community, and then abandoning it a few years down the road.
It's an OSS projects with the most abrasive, and socially inept people around, seemingly gathered together on purpose. GNOME had few hundred active contributors on its peak, now down to at most 20-30 people.
The proliferation of *Kits is very much an intentional policy by RedHat to pull the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" scheme, except when they do the extinguish thing, the remaining people have no other option, but to move to RedHat's platform.
You are repeating unsubstantiated claims and accusations.
> The proliferation of *Kits is very much an intentional policy by RedHat to pull the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" scheme, except when they do the extinguish thing, the remaining people have no other option, but to move to RedHat's platform.
And this is just conspiratorial. Really, this is not contributing anything to the discussion.
What I think kind of sucks is this person is just talking shit because an open source project doesn’t do what they want it to do. Author, you are rude.
Am I missing something? Or maybe GNOME 40 screwed things up?
I don't dislike it because it's just different and I don't want to learn -- I've used GNOME 2, GNOME 3, Unity, KDE, Openbox, the Windows DE, and the OSX/macOS DE for a year or more each. GNOME 3 and the macOS DE are the standout bad ones of the bunch, but macOS has the excuse of a long design history that it has been continually improving on, while GNOME 3 was a step backwards from what GNOME 2 was 10 years before its release.
GNOME tries to maximize the amount of screen space apps have available. This motivates a decision against permanently visible docks or taskbars. We do however want still want immediate access to essential status information like time, network connection and sound status. We also need some way to initiate and interaction with the shell. For now the Activities button/corner provides a solution that works reasonably well for touchscreen and mouse users. GNOME has (and I think for good reason. It has poor discoverability and many apps don't make good use of it.) abandoned the menubar so the top bar looks a bit underused. But making it more useful would increase it's size, which is a no no.
On Desktop Icons: They require you to close, minimize or move out the way any window. The favorites bar combined with the app grid seems superior in almost every way.
On the middle mouse button: That doesn't seem to be all that universal. Chrome e.g. closes a tab when middle clicking it. I've never heard of or used the middle mouse copying selected text. So this isn't something I miss. Developing a first party clipboard manager however could be a worthwhile undertaking for the GNOME team.
On CSD: So this windowshade thing apparently is an old Mac OS thing. I fail to see how it's better than minimizing windows. The lack of a minimizing button is indeed something I disagree with, but it is so easy to bring back that I don't mind. For me titlebars were always an ugly waste of space. I fully support getting rid of them.
On Action Buttons: I think putting them on top is a controversial but not totally unreasonable. It means that they are always in a predictable position and always visible. If you want the same with bottom buttons you need to a) introduce a bottom bar on the dialog, wasting space and b) make every dialog the same size. Having action buttons on the top of big modals is also something people are used to from mobile.
Have you ever used a unix system? Wow. This has been pretty standard in X windows across many platforms for decades.
Seriously? Anyone who designs a general purpose operating system based on that assumption probably shouldn’t be designing general purpose operating systems.
And that’s just the first one. The next complain is that middle clicking selected text allows copy pasting without using the clipboard. So apparently good design is having a clipboard but also not a clipboard.
Gnome designers may be incompetent (considering that nearly every OS is building on that, if they are, they are at least more competent than nearly everyone else in the Linux design world), but these are not signs of their incompetence.
The guys at Apple stuck to a 1 button mouse until about a decade ago. And here you’re calling designers incompetent because they’re not assuming users will know hot to middle click a title bar to send the window to the back.
I don't champion GNOME maybe but their work on usability is very important to me in real terms, it's a movement for a better user interface instead of just repeating old and broken patterns (like Yes/No dialog boxes.)
People complain about Gnome not because their mobile-like interface, but because Gnome devs always remove features people use.
They do this since Gnome 2 and even Linus Torvalds complaint about it multiple times.
They can do something good, but their are locked on many other aspects. As a result the formal Free project is not that free.
Beside that, yes Unity was a good desktop, something there when you want it, discrete otherwise. Gnome SHell in comparison suffer from secondary narcissism doing it best to be at the center of anything. But desktop concept is finished.
Modern desktops start with icons and than we realize how stupid is putting icons on screen that get continually covered by applications, modern desktops start with floating WM and then we realize how absurd is wasting time moving windows around instead of a simple flexible screen subdivision. Background prove their non-sense, menus prove their absurdity vs command-line/search&narrow tools, ... Essentially the desktop of the future is the classic document-centric desktop from Xerox workstations and LispM after them. We have timidly started such migration with web crapplications that are document-based even if the document is not ours nor easy to change by the end user. We have started calling Notebook UIs the most advanced desktop UIs etc. We have started with quicklaunchers and than "dash" concept, with "tagged" file management and so on. Probably 50-60-70 years after Xerox PARC pioneering works we will have rediscovered what they have implemented back then.
So far personally, the most modern desktop I know is Emacs/EXWM since I have a free tiling WM, I can manage my files with org-roam/org-mode/org-attach instead of a hierarchy of files and folder, I can link pretty anything and have anything integrated. Still not much GUI for the modern time, not like Pharo at least, but far more modern than anything else I've used so far... In a decade probably such modern desktop we will be kind-of mainstream...
Not on Windows. Not on OSX as far as I know. In fact, the only place where it happens is on a few obscure distros and on Gnome for a very short amount of time. Hiding such behavior behind something as little used as a middle mouse is asinine
>Select text, then middle-click elsewhere, and it copies it. No formatting, just text, and without going through the clipboard.
Yet more asinine things. Copy without formatting is a dumb idea and should be replaced by paste without formatting. Don't lose data the moment you copy. And bypassing the clipboard brings more trouble than good things. You know how else you can copy two things at the same time ? By looking inside of your damn clipboard history.
>But now, you can scroll up on a title bar, and it collapses into just the title bar. It's an alternative to minimisation, called the windowblind or windowshade effect.
Oh, great, more ways to wonder "how the fuck did my windows transform into this?" by binding this action to something as easily done as accidentally scrolling your mouse wheel.
The one thing I'll grant him is that client side decorations are... dubious at best. While they should be available if you want to do stupid things with your UI, there should be an easily accessible way to ask for simple "please do it for me" decorations that'll just pop in the buttons and be done. Potentially by making it a standard that window toolkits have to implement.
Should these options be available to be bound ? Yeah, sure. Make a simple config file to bind that and be done with it. But when 99% of the people will be confused by it, do not make it the default. This clown will be calling for the year of linux on the desktop then ask for "scroll on the titlebar to make it implode".
Meanwhile I like it, Gnome may not be perfect but to me it's the most polished modern Linux desktop environment. It might not support all kinds of middle mouse button features but works better with other input methods. When Gnome implemented touch gestures to smoothly scroll between virtual desktops, KDE had zero support for touchscreens iirc but supported pointless things like rotating desktop icons.
I'm puzzled how someone can get so worked up about a system component which can be switched out in less time than it took to write that rant.
To declare all the GNOME devs incompetent because they’ve probably decided it’s not worth the overhead of supporting some highly niche workflows seems a bit much.
Another fun fact: FVWM is still more or less actively developed: https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3
Just my anecdotal experience with Gnome is that it is probably one of the most handy desktop OS out there right now, I prefer using it much more than OSX for example (gnome copied plenty things from OSX but sometimes made them better in the process - you can actually differentiate between different browsers’ windows for one. It is also much smoother). So unless you dismiss my opinion (shared by plenty of other people) as useless, the Gnome team managed to create a useful environment for several people, making them more then competent.
Cudos to the team from here as well. It must be really tiring seeing all the negativity for their free work.
But I do like the "Chesterton's fence" analogy. GNOME is exactly that. They've rearranged things just to rearrange them, not based on research. Incompetence? Maybe. But I hesitate to call something so poorly-designed incompetence. I'm guessing GNOME has no actual designers, and the "designers" are just programmers who felt like they could do design, and so did.
It doesn't even support common X Windows stuff like shading windows without extensions, which obiously have to be written in JavaScript.
And the way the transition to Gtk4 has been managed isn't certainly the way to make the platform appealing to the developers used to the graphical tooling for Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms, or even KDE to stay on the Linux world.
None of the things the author describes are intuitive. I think Ubuntu and/or Pop_OS had a great thing where you can hold the Super/Win button and see a guide for which buttons do what. This is for keyboard not mouse, but the idea is the same.
I can understand frustration at non-power-users taking away gestures, but come on.
"That’s exactly the reverse of the gnome “we know better” mentality, and “We will force Corba/.NET down your throat whether you like it or not, and if you complain, you’re against progress, and cannot handle the change”."
Here's the distrowatch hits-per-day for past 6 months:
1. MX Linux 2946
2. EndeavourOS 2684
3. Mint 2242
4. Manjaro 1750
5. Pop!_OS 1385
6. Ubuntu 1331
7. Fedora 1159
8. Debian 1083
Ubuntu used to be much higher. I've used Xubuntu (#41), Mint, and now Pop!_OS which are all fine. For some reason I've always avoided KDE--though with the power of even modest computers now it can't really be considered very bloated.
> The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.
If you have more indicative data, please share.
I'm not obliged to produce additional data because the only point I was making is that your data is meaningless and shouldn't be used to indicate anything about Gnome or Ubuntu.
That's how FOSS software works.
Please, does this argument ever work? Submitting a patch seems useless if it goes against the project's vision (or complexity thereof, see two following links for examples), it's just a waste of both parties time. Of course, they have their rights to decide so, and everybody else has theirs to complain about it, in my opinion.
. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=754302
. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_505157
>If you can’t do that, go find another desktop.
I haven't used GNOME in more than a decade, and if I could, I'd never use a GTK application ever again either, for dealing with some of the annoyances and "easter eggs" goes against whatever intuition I've developed using desktop GUIs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/4q2sq8/around_what_t...
From the article it only seems to be because they didn't include features that other Windows Managers have.
GNOME is not Windows WM or macOS WM. There might be things that you are not used to, when you come from one of those worlds, but that doesn't make them wrong.
It would be wrong if the feature was there in the past and removed it without guiding the users (via UX) to an alternative.
IMHO the author shouldn't complain about the design choices of GNOME by comparing it to other WMs. There isn't a reference WM that everyone needs to stick to (thankfully!), so a missing feature compared to macOS / Windows is not a wrong thing.
so i live in a terminal, and whenever i need some desktop UI, i boot my macOS VM (with GPU passthrough)
whenever i need gaming, i boot the windows VM
gnome and red hat want the death of linux desktop, they want everyone instead to become a tablet/smartphone user
they sabotage desktop and held for hostage the entire linux community
it's really a shame to see more and more desktop app with CSD and these giant headers that needs multiple clicks and scroll
a sad era for linux..