Gnome Turns 25
hpjansson.org
hpjansson.org
The closest modern desktop environment to Gnome 2 is KDE’s Plasma. It’s easy to use out of the box and doesn’t require any configuration (unless you want to do that kind of thing, and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+).
1. Not every feature is equally useful
2. No one is using the feature, and so maintaining it is a waste of time
3. Sometimes developers discover a better way to implement a feature
4. Some features can turn out to be just harmful and misleading
5. There is no one available who wants to maintain the feature and so it slowly deteriorates and breaks over time, and must be removed to prevent further breakage
And so on. If you program in your day job, I bet you can think of a few other valid reasons you have removed a feature at work, too. GNOME has not done anything out of the ordinary here, and it is incorrect to describe it this way. If you believe they have taken specific actions that were hostile towards you, then you should say what those actions are. But the mere act of changing or removing a feature that you happened to use is not a display of hostility, it is just the normal development process working as intended.
>and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+
This is incorrect, Gnome 3+ can be configured with shell extensions.
I wish they would drop more features that I don't like. I have a 55" monitor, so I dont use workspaces. I also dont need every window to shrink and move about when I want to bring up the launcher. Also, drop the hiding the launcher feature.
In the other direction I would like the application menu back ;-)
Otherwise I'm still mostly content with it.
I'd argue that it's not necessarily user hostile. You can definitely do it in a way that is user hostile however.
I used to change the window decorations to something smaller than the default, because I like having more of my screen real estate available for actual content rather than useless UI padding. The current iterations of Gnome are unusable to me, when Gnome was visually appealing and highly usable 20 years ago. Window transitions and icon docks have done nothing to improve usability, and bigger borders are not better borders.
Thankfully other desktops have far better feature retention rates.
Writing everything in JS was a weird decision. I remember for the first few releases, having to constantly restart the shell because the JS engine leaked so badly. You could watch RSS grow indefinitely everytime you moused over the top left corner.
It's a lot better now, usable with a few extensions...but I still think what a waste it was tossing 2 like they did. Extensions are an OK idea, but because they're mostly JS and CSS, there doesn't seem to be much safety there. It's very common for them to break each release because of some obscure attribute change.
It's perfectly reasonable to prefer KDE because you like Plasma or it has the functionality you need. It's a nice desktop environment with a lot of functionality so I can see why it appeals to many people. What I don't get is why so many people feel the need to diminish open source projects they don't even use.
What is your end goal with a comment like this? Are you just expressing your opinion so that no one forgets that many people do not like Gnome 3? Are you hoping to better understand why the Gnome community has a different development philosophy than the KDE community? Are you trying to convince someone of something?
That being said I do have to give them some respect for XDG-desktop-portal, which has made my main complaint (gnome's filepicker being bad and non-optional for even basic software like firefox) no longer an issue.
> politely interjecting with the occasional "we don't like gnome"
From my perspective these comments seem neither polite nor occasional, and they result in Gnome threads devolving into partisan arguments rather than technical discussions. Of course Gnome isn't the only lightning rod -- posts that mention Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, US national politics, systemd, etc also seem to inspire an inordinate number of posts that are argumentative and off-topic.
It's mostly just disappointing. I was honestly hoping for a discussion about what kind of people contribute to a large open source project instead of rehashing the endless circular debate about whether the Gnome Community is user hostile or not.
As it is, most of the points made in this thread could have been made in any prior thread with "Gnome" in the title. And they will probably be made again in subsequent Gnome threads, like some kind of Sisyphusian performance art.
I would say that it is not reasonable. I have been seeing these type of "we don't like this" comments for around 20 years ever since GNOME 2. They have done nothing but incite more flame wars, making the developers even less likely to want to engage with any constructive comments that might be underneath. Please find a more productive way to contribute, either by volunteering to pick up some of the development load yourself, by forking the project, or by contributing to something completely different. That is how you get things done in open source. Making the same drive-by complaints repeatedly is not a way to change anyone's mind.
>If only to encourage new projects to use a toolkit that isn't so closely tied to the gnome experience.
This is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If the desire is to improve the toolkit, then you want to encourage more outside contributors to join and bring it in a direction they like, not push them away.
The particularly awful disease the Gnome project has is the "rewrite everything" disease. No software project can retain features if they do large rewrites from scratch every major release. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to keep rewriting the toolkit every few years. The end result is that features the developers personally don't care for don't get implemented in the new release. That is why so many of us that once used Gnome are pissed off and have had to write off the project.
Then perhaps you can see how developers of a desktop also do not have time to listen to every person arguing for every feature, or to maintain every possible feature that ever gets suggested, or even to maintain the current feature set indefinitely without removing something at some point.
>The particularly awful disease the Gnome project has is the "rewrite everything" disease. No software project can retain features if they do large rewrites from scratch every major release.
You are confusing refactoring with rewriting. Very few parts of it have been rewritten from scratch. Refactoring things isn't a "disease". Refactors are actually necessary to keep the project in working order and to pay off technical debt so you can actually have a chance to implement new features while retaining older ones.
>The end result is that features the developers personally don't care for don't get implemented in the new release.
This is the same as any project. If there are no developers to maintain the feature then it stagnates and eventually gets cut. It makes no sense to be pissed off at this one particular project about this, every project is bound to do it eventually. If your company ever went through layoffs then you can probably name some times you have had to do this at work.
Like there is no alternative that does what GNOME does. It’s GNOME and forks of GNOME, a chasm, then KDE, another chasm, and then the DIY DEs/WMs dejour.
I gave up on Plasma. I still use kwin and several KDE applications, like Dolphin, but now I use those with LxQT instead of Plasma. It doesn't look as stylish, but it seems to be rock solid. Plus I still get all the nice compositing effects and configurability of kwin.
Very much in agreement.If my unix* history is correct, even the apple design copied(or let's say "was influenced") a lot from the gnome 2 UI.
I feel that I am very efficient using it, more so than when I was using tilling window managers (wmii, i3, dwm, etc.).
Gnome is just an incredible piece of software that works out of the box. Try it.
Gnome/GTK is the only software I can think of, which slowly but surely reduced the end-user efficiency.
One starts working one day, and finds out that mnemonics (menu shortcuts) have been disabled. Another day, the file manager side-by-side panel has been removed. Another day, a convenient filemanager shortcut (new folder) has been forgotten in the transition to a new version (and nobody cares). Another day, and the file search has been replaced with an incredibly slow, and buggy search. Another day, and one finds that tiling capabilities of the terminal are severely limited because the devs are hostile to APIs that would allow such functionality (see Tilix debate). Files sorting in the file manager? Overrated¹. And let's not get into the Gnome branding debate².
In the FOSS land, I find Gnome/GTK to be the most user-hostile approach to design I've ever experienced. The statement "I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry" says pretty much everything about the project(s) attitude².
¹: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355152
²: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
In general, going to developers with a list of demands for patches to revert is not going to be helpful, it is much more likely that behavior is seen as hostile, coming from a user. It would be more useful to ask them why they have removed those features, figure out what their goal is, and then discuss it so you can reach consensus.
>because the devs are hostile to APIs that would allow such functionality
This one is blatantly incorrect, see this twitter thread from a GNOME developer: https://twitter.com/tobias_bernard/status/145743855381055898...
What I referred to with "tiling capabilities" in:
> tiling capabilities of the terminal are severely limited because the devs are hostile to APIs that would allow such functionality (see Tilix debate)
is actually the keyboard navigation/selection support in the terminal.
There has been debate between the terminal maintaner(s) and the GNOME VTE maintainer, and lead to nothing.
Without providing any technical information, the twit means nothing, and IMO, in the context of the GNOME devs culture, it's just another, typical, "F* you".
The is a reference to the debate [in the Tilix bug tracker](https://github.com/gnunn1/tilix/issues/1305), but regarding the debate itself, I don't have it handy.
That's not a productive approach; it would make the GNOME devs slaves of popularity contests.
These are not my words. They're the words of a GNOME member¹
> as a question was there any kind of community review
No, maintainers are not meant to become slaves of popularity contests.
Something @GNOME NEEDS to realize is that Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and others are NOT
going to stop theming. What we will do instead is replace GNOME components
entirely if it becomes too costly to apply our style to them. Come up with a
way forward for custom styles, or lose users.
I actually had a link where a GNOME dev was urging Debian (or Ubuntu, can't remember) to revert a patch that restored terminal transparency (or something like that). Could you help me finding it?
Here's an interesting reply from Christian Persch²:
> 1. Open gnome terminal
> 2. Go to Edit -> Profile Preferences
> Actual result: Background configuration tab is missing.
> It was present in 3.6 version, please return it back.
No.
Regarding this:
This one is blatantly incorrect, see this twitter thread from a GNOME developer: https://twitter.com/tobias_bernard/status/145743855381055898...
¹: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695371#c35
²: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=698544
⁴: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5690689
³: https://web.archive.org/web/20210901171117/https://twitter.c...
Curious what you mean by "maintaining these frankenstein configurations", and what you were trying to do. Was the WM under heavy development with user breaking changes or something?
I can't argue with your experience, but I've only touched my StumpWM config a handful of times in the last 10 years or so, usually to add a new defcommand or keyboard shortcut.
1. Laptop screen brightness 2. Wifi setup 3. Application launcher 4. External monitor/projector configurations for presentations
etc.
Some people might argue this part of the unix principle to have separate tools that do one job well but frankly I don't care about the unix principle as long-time emacs user (the anti-thesis of unix). The end result was a frankenstein thing: random tools glued together to emulate a basic desktop experience.
In the end, I am running most of the normal services a GNOME desktop would be running, but without using the GNOME shell, and that has worked very well.
Every one of those things worked out of the box for me the last time I installed (which, admittedly, was via Manjaro, so a fair amount of config came from them). Even prior to that when I rolled an i3 setup by hand, external displays was the only troublesome bit.
Shall install vim and be happy or shall we explore the entire environment of plugins and pick the 50 we like best after trying 150 then install Emacs then find our 50 favorite addons there.
Which then translates to bugs here and there, inconsistency and may other problems.
And while Gnome is a pain in the *s sometimes because they remove features, it's still better than the alternatives to me.
On the one hand, the benefit of customizing a system for yourself should be obvious.
On the other hand, adapting yourself to a system also means adapting to other people. This allows improving the shared understanding of how computers should be used:
- Designs can push users to more efficient workflows.
- New features, use-cases and apps can be developed based on shared assumptions.
- Other developers can integrate with or expand on the existing designs. eg: MacOS launchers [1] build on various system features.
In IntelliJ, I regularly discover new functionality that I wouldn't even know existed had I used a text editor with extensions.
Customise your system too much, and you cut yourself off from this "conversation". Perhaps this is why some users still live in heavily customised terminal environments, despite massive improvements to GUIs [2].
[1] Raycast, Alfred, Launchbar [2] https://capiche.com/e/consumer-dev-tools-command-palette
I acknowledge that some people like crafting their own computing environment[1], and it can be really interesting and rewarding , but some people like to work on other things, or simply lose interest in fiddling indefinitely with config files and all (like I have).
For the latter, there's Gnome.
Why are you using the verb "claim" if not to throw doubt over op's word ?
> When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me",
I call that putting words in people's mouth.
That's me.
I have tried every major DE, and something or the other is not right with all of them!
I used to use gnome with a lot of customizations.
Over the past couple of years I decided to adapt my workflow and muscle memory to what's provided by default. Works well for me now, even though it was a little awkward at first.
I'm currently using gnome with no customizations.
I'm not claiming gnome is the best DE or anything.
I also really like XFCE btw.
And imho dynamic tiling is the wrong approach. Automatic rearrangement of windows never works well in real situations that just don't fit a small selection of fixed layouts. Not sure why static tilers are so rare, but Gnome offers static tiling and is very polished, so I guess that's why I like it.
A lot of environments have a function to relocate the focused window to a predefined portion of the screen. For example left and right half. This makes it a stacking environment with limited tiling features.
I used to tile terminal windows but now do everything in tmux. I spend 95% of my day in either browser or terminal.
It's tried and true desktop paradigm which gets the job done. Vanilla GNOME is very inefficient and extensions are just lipstick on a pig.
I use the app that is not showing proper app icon but instead generic icon, found some bug/discussion somewhere, basically KDE developers won't workaround when app has bad metadata despite every other DE doing it.
Sometimes notifications don't pop up when app receiving notifications is opened, only when it's minimized in system tray, also works fine in every other DE I used.
I mean it is kind of sad, but educational - you get the project without clear goal, with zero consistency, without any regard to backward compatibility - and after 25 years you end up effectively with a mediocre window manager and a bunch of programs with wildly inconsistent UIs (which predictably break next time your UI toolkit goes from 2.4.8 to 2.4.9 making a migration to the new minor release a multi-year saga which invariably loses features that worked before)...
Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)...
To blame rms of all people for what you've described demonstrates a lack of understanding his scope of influence and participation in gnome especially in this era.
I can get behind blaming rms for gcc's missed opportunities, ultimately ceding its dominant position to clang/llvm. He clearly overplayed his hand there.
But when it comes to gnome I recall little more than mailing list bickering over gnome being a GNU project or not and what the G in GNOME stands for. Perhaps my memory is failing here, but it feels crediting rms with anything more than wasting a bit of gnome devs time and frustration would be overstating it. Not that any FOSS devs need more of that with how entitled and obnoxious users already can be, but they tend to have developed thick enough skin to ignore rms's aspy silliness.
Can you provide any examples to the contrary?
Also don't forget we're talking about an era where C++ was still largely despised for being a terrible and poorly supported language. The folks working on gtk/gnome were going to be living in C regardless of what fell out of rms.
That said, I have a Framework laptop for my personal use (my company gives us Mac devices), and they say Fedora has the best driver support. Since I’ll be evaluating a new distro, I’m also considering taking another serious look at KDE after a long time using Ubuntu’s Unity and Gnome. Concretely, what would I gain, and what might I lose?
[0] Gnome launcher: https://imgur.com/l422pxK
[1] Unity launcher: https://imgur.com/sfw76Et
These days, the only real changes I tend to make are installing oh-my-zsh (thereby outsourcing the low-level tweaks to someone else) and Sublime with a handful of plugins (does that count?).
Gnome was faster to get started with but KDE felt deeper. KDEs UI is denser, which imo makes it feel less “modern” but both KDE and Gnome are usable.
Best thing you can do is to spin up a VM and try it out yourself! Everyone’s different.
As this shows, there's a lot of corporate contributions to the codebase. For better or (mostly) worse -- that means the project will likely have much more of a "proprietary-like" mentality than perhaps what we think of when we say Free/Open Source.
This plays out, right? The thing people don't like about Gnome frequently boils down to backward-breakage and not being able to meaningfully contribute.
And yet, Gnome enjoys a lot of popularity in the space that affects the "Linux" ecosystem, and I think the way they do things messes it up. This is why, for now, I am explicitly anti-Gnome. I hope it changes, or I hope it gets less popular.
GNOME is quite decent in its current form and the most user-friendly desktop out there at the moment. People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.
Ideally I'd be using something like Sway, but I can't be bothered to spend time on making things work the way they need to. GNOME gives me everything out of the box and doesn't get in my way. KDE is much more customizable, but less friendly on the eyes. Windows is probably OK if you're used to Windows (I'm clearly not). I have to use macOS at work and it's just a worse version of GNOME - bad defaults, weird design choices, less features, minimal customizability.
> People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.
The way it handles virtual desktops with multiple monitors out of the box poorly thought out. With 3 monitors having changing workspaces only effect the primary monitor is very poor user experience. that leaves virtually pun intended without the affordance of virtual desktops at all.
There is a setting to expand virtual desktops to all monitors and now you no longer have to dig through something that looks like the windows registry to enable it which is indeed a nice upgrade but it misses the vastly superior third option of being able to independently switch each monitor.
An obvious affordance instead of digging through a settings menu would be a little iconic padlock beside a representation of the virtual desktop switcher that when unlocked enables you to manually switch a singular monitor or when by default locked allows the monitor to change with every other monitor.
Trivially enables not only all 3 possible workflows but allows one to discover this organically at the cost of a small amount of screen real estate.
This is a singular issue but their entire history is rife not merely with subjective differences in user preference but objectively bad design.
You mean like I spent 2 months with it and just found a list of weirdness and outright bugs?
Perhaps "historical gripe(s)" happen for a reason?
Certainly not. I suspect you aren't familiar with win, it has a lot of these although MS seems determined to wreck them.
I'm no MS shill, I wish they would DIAF, but I do find windows highly reliable and the UI was pretty good until they decided to fuck with it. By comparison I found gnome actively user hostile. Even small niceties that windows has are missing (eg one of very many, go up a folder in windows and the folder you were on will be the one selected, very handy). I would like to sit down with you and compare experiences, but ain't going to happen. Glad it works for you though.
And Gnome is far from a perfect desktop experience out of the box. Once you add a few plugins it’s pretty decent but out of the box. No. Just no.
But the productivity of linux is so far superior to windows. The only reason I subject myself to windows is games and old .net framework projects.
Do you work at Microsoft and have access to the internal bug tracker?
I'd agree if it weren't for the default keyboard shortcuts.
Like every app in existence uses ctrl+tab to switch between tabs, but GNOME's apps (like Files and Terminal) use ctrl+pgdown.
As far as I can tell CTRL-TAB for tab cycling is not very wide spread. KDE uses it, but that supports CTRL-PGUP/DOWN as well.
edit: And I'm not sure why CTRL-TAB even works in KDE because the default shortcuts to cycle through tabs are CTRL-PGUP/DOWN and CTRL-[/] (tested on KDE neon).
Is this really true now? If so, it's sad how far windows has fallen. It was very easy, almost pleasant to use Windows with no mouse, from 3.0 all the way through XP (which was the range of my regular windows use)
Wait, what?
Honestly this is the biggest barrier to adoption of you ask me. I can’t hand a windows user or a Mac user a gnome desktop (or any of the other Linux options) and just leave them to it.
I tend to recommend a mac these days for people. They just work.
I don't think the UI is the issue. I even think some DEs are better than both Mac and Windows on most topics. I don't like Gnome but it is okay I think, especially on Ubuntu. The rough edges are the issue, and above all, the incompatibility with Office (you might have to interact with people using it) and with the various domain-specific proprietary programs.
Windows also has - different - rough edges (and probably mac but I don't know it enough), but you'll find help online or from a nearby acquaintance.
But if I had to set up a computer for a complete newbie, that would be Linux. In any case I would have to help them, but on Linux there are just less disturbances, less risks, easier for them, the UI is better structured, everything is more predictable and since I'll need to help, I'll have better time with Linux.
The problem with Linux on the desktop is that all polish, quality and consistency is "soon" and has been for 20 years. No one wants to do the last 20% of the job when you can rewrite the interesting bits again for the 10th time.
Microsoft are the same now.
You can also tweak the desired font size to taste
I’m so sad at what IBM will eventually do to them.
It's not important who came first, I'm just expressing my surprise.
"More powerful"? What does that mean, in the context of DE?
E.g. Kate (text editor) has many advanced features not available in Gnome Text Editor.
For me the reduced feature-set of Gnome apps is what I want because I don't usually need them. I like the (imo) clean and easy UX of Gnome apps.
Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to setup a vertical bar and complain about them using a repeating 1x30px (don't remember the actual number) image for background, rendering the bar barely usable. Something MS nailed back with windows 95!
Gnome 3 is mostly fine but not before you reach for at least a couple of basic add-ons. I truly believe believe they are trolling people with the default behaviour of Gnome 3
I liked Canonical's Unity very much, although it's no longer the prettiest. I realized that last part due to the recent reboot
Sometimes I feel like I am the only person to setup a vertical bar and complain about them using a repeating 1x30px (don't remember the actual number) image for background, rendering the bar barely usable. Something MS nailed back with windows 95! »
Thank you for saying this, because I very often feel like I am a lone voice crying in the wilderness when I point this out.
« I liked Canonical's Unity very much, although it's no longer the prettiest. I realized that last part due to the recent reboot »
Also this.
This, though:
« Gnome 3 is mostly fine but not before you reach for at least a couple of basic add-ons. I truly believe believe they are trolling people with the default behaviour of Gnome 3 »
This, however, less so.
It is possible to give GNOME 3 a partial makeover into something better, with a lot of addons, some now getting very hard to find.
The snag is that addons are tied to that particular version of GNOME Shell, and thus inevitably, an OS update that updates the shell breaks your entire desktop.
The misplaced confidence of the GNOME team is such that they provide but do not embrace the addons scene, and so there is no support for a safe mode, for example, so that if your addons crash the desktop can recover.
I would guess that the dev team use it unmodified and do not test for such things.
"If you break it, you bought it." IOW: we didn't supply the extensions, so if they broke your desktop, it's not our problem.
WTF Gnome, why do you hate your own users so much
It's a free world. Move on to something else.
Recommend i3wm with Xfce apps.
Moreover, most users don't actually follow the discussions with the developers. They would not know about their philosophy. Also, this is not the only criterion when choosing software. And given how Gnome and GTK are (still) everywhere, I'd find it worth having this kind of things fixed even if I don't/didn't personally use the thing.
I don't think blaming the users is a solution.
I had major issues when I used Snap GUI apps. Like it was not clear where did the config file saved to or sometimes the file picker couldn't even detect my drives (due to sandboxing). It was doing its own thing regarding theming.
If Flatpak is anything like this, then it's not a viable solution.
In Flatpak, all the config files are saved to ~/.var/app/. The portal should be able to handle exposing a file from the host, but the app has to be built to use the portal correctly. You can have themes but you must install the flatpak package for them, pulling themes from the host environment is a security issue because technically themes are equivalent to doing code injection.
At least you can use `flatpak override` command to whitelist access to certain path.
In this case, the arch wiki was actively telling users to do things that could break their system. It was a debug flag that was only intended to be used by developers and causes a number of other side effects. So it is no surprise that they changed it. Technically it was not removed, it was only moved into a flag that is only available in debug builds.
I wish everyone would abandone GTK and instead switch to Qt, but as long as that hasn't happened yet, I'll have to use such environment variables to get GTK apps to look and work consistently on a Qt desktop.
It is not possible in open source to force everyone to use one toolkit, in my opinion you are wasting your time by wishing for that. There are dozens of toolkits to choose from and the number seems to be growing. The fragmentation has only gotten stronger over the last 25 years, if Qt was the clear winner the proliferation would have stopped long ago. Now there is pretty much no chance that you will be able to hack every toolkit to get all of them to look and work consistently. In particular, the way an app works is decided by the HIG it follows, not the theme. This is reflected in the entire design of the app, to change it requires redesigning the whole app. It cannot be changed just by setting some environment variables.
I don’t care about Gtk apps themselves, because I just don’t use any proper Gtk apps (I want my apps to be customizable, after all, and I build my own programs to be customizable too).
Why is it always Gnome developers and fans who hate any attempt to make Gnome apps look and feel more like other toolkits? No one expects Gnome apps to work 1:1 like Qt apps, but it feels like every step in the right direction is met with constant hate and objections.
10 years since the type-ahead find bug was opened on Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681871
(bug now moved to Gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1157)
7 years since a patch was provided to fix the issue.
Still waiting.
Note that this was a feature that Gnome used to have, but removed. Windows Explorer and macOS Finder both have the feature too.
Shouldn't that then be left to user choice? The attitude that there's only one true way to do things and that's the developers' way is what put me off Gnome.
In general, it is better to leave nothing to user choice, if you can get away with it. By using any developer's software, you are conceding that their way is the correct way to do things, otherwise why waste your time with that software? There is no software in existence that is able to do every possible thing that anyone would ever want to do.
It just feels smug and talked-down when someone comes along and sands over a reasonable amount of control and complexity that previously existed. I hate having my workflow disrupted because I like getting work done.
Would you argue that we should have no shell aliases? No BIOS and boot order? No desktop wallpaper? No ability to set homepages in the web browser? Etc etc.
The computer is like anything else I own and the more it responds to my wishes, the better. Small tweaks left to my discretion remind me of that, losing control piecemeal provokes disquietude. If it doesn't accommodate my needs then it feels less mine and for that reason I reject software that restricts my choices.
>Would you argue that we should have no shell aliases? No BIOS and boot order? No desktop wallpaper? No ability to set homepages in the web browser?
Those could be nice to have. I can say I do not actually need any of those things when I use my computer to write documents in a word processor. Do you see where I am going with this? Any "control" you want to have is completely up to what you are trying to do, if all I am trying to do is write my novel then all those other things can get in the way.
I'm glad there are people out there that do not follow this user-is-an-idiot philosophy and created essential software like Emacs, Vim, ranger file manager, and i3wm.
If I wanted to use software that works for most people and doesn't believe in allowing users to make choices, I'd use MacOS or Windows. I can't see a reason to use Linux or BSD in that case.
Thankfully, patches that fix this (along with some other bugs and anti-features) are actively maintained by community members, despite being ignored by the GNOME project.
If they hate it, they can stop. Work on a project that has a higher proportion of praise if they need to. Work on proprietary stuff.
edit: Trying to guilt-trip people into not having strong opinions is not going to accomplish anything, though.
Please stop, this is gatekeeping. What is even the point of open source if we are going to insist that only projects that reach a certain "proportion of praise" are allowed to exist? That would mean that only the projects that were already popular will succeed, and everything else will fail.
Gnome threads seem to bring out a lot of anti-Gnome commenters and I've never quite understood why so many people who dislike Gnome are nevertheless compelled to continue to talk about it.
1) It's not just Gnome that's affected, it's also the gtk3 FileChooserDialog, which is used by many applications (e.g. Firefox), independent of desktop environment.
2) I do actually want Gnome to succeed because I think it's healthy for the wider free software ecosystem to have a selection of high quality desktop environments available. I want to be able to recommend mainstream Linux distributions to friends without them getting tripped up by things that don't work the way they expect. I think the devs (or the HIG architects) have blundered in prioritising search over find and I want to see it corrected. I am remaining engaged by adding my voice to the growing chorus. If I disliked Gnome I'd walk away and let it stay broken.
I do not understand this. Firefox and those other apps are not beholden to GNOME, they can implement any file chooser they have an interest in implementing. If they have chosen the same one as GNOME then it is likely because they prioritize implementing with GNOME over other things, so you will have to accept that those applications are not as interested in bothering to be independent of desktop environment. Some applications will always be like this, for example Thunar is designed for XFCE and it does not fit in so well with Plasma.
>I think the devs (or the HIG architects) have blundered in prioritising search over find and I want to see it corrected.
It is not useful to say this without having some kind of larger justification for it. Just repeating this is an anecdote, it is not going to change minds. If you want another anecdote, I have never liked find, I found it worse than search in every way. If I keep pushing from this angle and telling you that I want to see your opinion corrected, would that convince you? I doubt it would.
It still feels a little odd to me though, because the initial blog post is an analysis of where Gnome's committers come from. I'm not sure how these bugs tie into that. Do you make a comment to draw attention to these issues whenever the terms "Gnome" or "GTK" show up in a thread? If so that seems like a lot of dedication to a desktop environment you don't even use.