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Help Improve Gnome

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46 pointsblueant77 comments

I used to use GNOME for many years, mostly because it was the default on Ubuntu. Now it's one of my least favorite desktops, I'll use almost anything else. I got frustrated at the seemingly random, user-hostile, backwards-incompatible changes from one version to the next. From my rough memory:

* The desktop icons and click-and-drag shortcuts got removed a few years ago. This is a GUI workflow that I've been using on Windows, MacOS, Atari OS, Amiga OS, going back to the 1980s. Gone.

* They somehow obscured the sleep (or was it the shutdown) button in one version, so that I couldn't find it anymore. I think I had to search the internets for this basic functionality.

* I think one version of Ubuntu GNOME obscured the login screen. I installed it, saw no login screen, clicked everywhere, but nothing happened. Just stared at a desktop wallpaper. If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

* I think there is still no image preview in their file explorer. I don't know, I don't use it anymore.

These days, I use Ubuntu MATE or Mint MATE, and occasionally drop into Mint Cinnamon to check if they squashed enough little UI bugs for me to use as daily driver. (For example, in the latest Mint Cinnamon, I set my Terminal to 161 columns. But Cinnamon would open the window at Full Screen instead. Oops, back to Mint MATE.)

> I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

Forced swipes are one of the most disgusting feature ever; they are always configured with some kind of inertial threshold so that you need to do the exact movement the designer expected.

On touchscreen they are even worse as sometimes if you are holding the device in an unusual way or have a cover that slightly blocks the side of the screen the "correct" movement can be impossible.

Apparently Windows 10 briefly experimented with forcing them for the login (click, enter, and any other key would do nothing), but it has not happened in a while.

Lockscreen clicks are also incredibly annoying. I'm left handed and often use my mouse left handed with the clicks swapped. If you do this in software on something like Windows/MacOS then it uses the "default" click setup even if you're logged in and the only user on the system. So I will sit there and right click while it's looking for a left click because that's the "default". It's incredibly dumb. Most Linux DEs/login managers are like this too although you have more control over the software so it's possible to swap at boot at a lower level. I've given up swapping clicks in software and now buy more expensive mice that have the option in hardware.

There is never* a good reason not to have Enter do the reasonable thing when there is only one possible action

* hyperbolic but I cannot think of one beside "let's force our user to discover this new nifty flow they would never use otherwise"

> If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

I think the answer is that windows 10 does it, so it must be copied.

It's a paradigm which makes a fair amount of sense on a touchscreen: it's an easy motion and it acts as a screen against accidental presses if the screen gets turned on in your bag or pocket. Translating it to a mouse makes no sense, and it probably only works that way because touch events are being turned into pointer events. In practice what should happen is a mouse click (but not a touch event) should move onto the lockscreen, or this screen should be skipped entirely if the device does not have a touchscreen or is a laptop with a touchscreen which is covered when it's in a bag.

> I think one version of Ubuntu GNOME obscured the login screen. I installed it, saw no login screen, clicked everywhere, but nothing happened. Just stared at a desktop wallpaper. If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

You can press any key to go past that screen.

Would you believe that it took me 1-2 years to figure that out? I swiped that little arrow awkwardly with my mouse for 1-2 years, before I accidentally hit a key to get that login screen. I think the issue was that I'm sitting in front of a graphical user interface, which to me means using a mouse. It never occurred to me that I had to hit a key on a keyboard to get a login screen on a graphical user interface.

I think that's when I cursed at GNOME, blew it away, and installed MATE.

Now imagine yourself sending anonymous tracking data to Gnome: "wow, this user is so happy with the swipe-up login screen, he didn't use the any-key bypass for two years! This is a 100% cool feature". And with you, 500 users like you.

Meanwhile, the 10-20 users frustrated and asking in their forums to remove the feature are ignored, because anonymous data tells another story.

its not funny because it's true. the mcnamara fallacy is alive and well

What's hard to believe is that you muscled through it for 1-2 years before jumping ship to MATE :) But yes, that painful experience of helplessly clicking everywhere on the login screen for a really long time like a moron is seared into my memory.

I just remember that at around the time 3 dropped, Mint (with default desktops Cinnamon and MATE) took the top of the list on distrowatch, and that's when I made the switch from Ubuntu.

I'm with you. Over the years Gnome pushed me away with the ambitious but undesired UX.

It reminded me of M$ forcing Windows 8 tiles.

I'm just happy that linux gives me plenty of options for distros and desktops. I've never even considered gnome a problem because I just don't use it.

I have the opposite sentiment.

Gnome enabled me to finally switch to linux on a tablet pc (cant justify owning a desktop, and got tired of laptop ergonomics). It started to come together in the past year or so between gnome 40 and adwaita.

I do think some of the moee familiar desktop paradigm extensions (dash to dock) should be enabled by default though.

Why is GNOME like GNOME?

https://ometer.com/free-software-ui.html

I recommend to read this! You will understand a lot about GNOME. They learned a lesson to keep things simple for the user. But the reason for five clocks is probably, that neither provides the important preferences for a lot users.

Ubuntu

Please don't think that Ubuntu is using GNOME. It is a massively patched and themed version of GNOME, mixing package versions of current and older versions. And more important, for many years Ubuntu used Unity as UI and and own Login-Manager. Canonical is always doing something alone outside of community.

The good news

    * Canonical helps GNOME since some years again and it has an positive effect,   lots of performance improvements.
    * GNOME is keyboard centric! I select applications windows by typing the application name. Why search if GNOME can find it?
    * Luckliy GNOME removed the entire failed desktop metaphor from Microsoft Windows (arranging and searching icons you never see and never use because a windows is in front of it).
    * And the SystemTray (Microsoft tries to hide it since Windows XP). Either your a silent daemon or an application with an CLI, TUI or GUI.
    * GNOME is incredible friendly to new users which doesn't expect things already in a specific way.
    * They learned a lot and re-added features. Like the awesome file type-and-find in Nautilus.

The bad news

GNOME tends to remove features and options before an appropriate replacement is ready. The often assume what users need based on their personal usage, which is not identical. Known examples are the removal of transparency from the terminal (patches available!) or the hidden setting to avoid suspend on LID-CLOSE. As noted already above, it looks like they learned somewhat and keep improving :)

Without Canonical's improvements GNOME is even more painful to use.

> The desktop icons and click-and-drag shortcuts got removed a few years ago. This is a GUI workflow that I've been using on Windows, MacOS, Atari OS, Amiga OS, going back to the 1980s. Gone.

Gnome hasn't had desktop icons for 11 years. I think you must've been using a third party plugin.

Desktop icons were removed from Nautilus about 4 years ago: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests/46

Well, they were disabled in the first version of GNOME 3 (2011) and you had to jump through hoops to re-enable them. I think from that it's clear they're not intended to be used.

I wonder. What are your thoughts on KDE plasma?

I used KDE back in the 2004-2007 time frame then switched to GNOME. Back then, I think GNOME was similar enough to KDE that I hardly noticed much difference. I haven't used KDE since then, but I take it for a spin every 2 years just to see what's going on:

* Ubuntu KDE (Kubuntu 22.04) is one of the few Ubuntu flavors (I think Lubuntu was the other one) that would not automatically scale the font for my 2560x1440 14" screen. So I literally could not read anything in the Installer. I had to peer through a magnifying glass to make it through the installer. Even after logging in, the fonts were so small, I had to keep using the magnifying glass to find the Display (or Monitors?) control panel to set that 175% or 200% option (or was it the 1600x900 screen size option).

* Some (most?) of the various desktop icons seem to be specified in raw pixels. For example, the task bar at the bottom was set to some pixel size which was impossible to read on my laptop screen.

* The KDE UI paradigm seemed familiar, like Windows XP or Windows 7. But the enormous number of configuration options seemed overwhelming for someone who doesn't use KDE all the time.

I normally spend most of my time in the Terminal window and the Firefox browser. I actually don't do a lot of stuff in the graphical desktop. So I want my desktop to be functional but stay mostly out of my way and not require too much configuring and maintenance. KDE always seemed a bit too high maintenance for me.

Hmm i've had bad experiences with kubuntu too back when I tried it. More so than any other distro commonly utilising kde at least. Configs seemed broken by default or just weird.

I dare say it's not properly maintained.

KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon seem like great desktop environments and potentially better implementations of the "Windows-style" (i.e. Windows 95 through Windows 7) desktop environment than Windows these days. I'm glad they exist even if I don't personally use them.

But I'm also glad that the GNOME folks have decided to chart a different path even when that results in the occasional (or not-so-occasional) design misstep. Trying new approaches and making mistakes is the only way to create something new. And in a world where KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon exist, turning GNOME into yet another Windows-style desktop environment for Linux seems like a colossal waste of effort.

Having said that, it is puzzling to me why so many Linux distributions have chosen GNOME as their default shell instead of one of the more conservative desktop environments. Possibly Red Hat's influence?

Red Hat only pays people to work on GTK4, which GNOME's desktop has switched too. All the other DEs still use GTK3, which they broke (2014-2015) and froze broken, never to be fixed.

GNOME by far the most supported and mature desktop environment for Linux. KDE et al might look and feel better, but you have annoyances like bad multi monitor support, bad dock support, etc... So while I agree with many feeling others have expressed, I'm happy to use a distro that ships a DE that just works.

It can be. Then again, if you're using an Nvidia machine you'll be treated to random segfaults on GNOME regardless of which driver you use. The reason for this is simply because they never wrote a proper Mutter backend for Nvidia, which doesn't really confer "just works" to me.

That's unfortunate, we could use healthy competition between desktop environments.

With respect to distros picking a conservative default, it does look like Red Hat Enterprise Linux ships with GNOME Classic by default, so perhaps that's one way to address that point.

> But I'm also glad that the GNOME folks have decided to chart a different path even when that results in the occasional (or not-so-occasional) design misstep

I would agree with this if GNOME also didn't treat their own technologies as an all-or-nothing scenario. One of the biggest problems I have is that GNOME is genuinely incapable of admitting when they're wrong; to a lesser extent with stuff like implementing EGLStream in GBM, and to a larger extent things like ignoring tickets because they don't fit their personal agenda. I'd argue that GNOME's development philosophy is what's holding back technologies like Wayland, Flatpak and even PipeWire. Their refusal to make modest concessions in the name of usability end up whittling down their desktop environment to little more than an iPad. They're welcome to design whatever they want, but forcing everyone else to jump through their hoops and threatening downstream vendors is simply not a good look.

Is there an example you have in mind where they were objectively wrong and did not admit it?

In the examples I've seen their decisions generally seem reasonable and well-considered, even in cases where I disagreed with the outcome. The most I can say is that it might benefit some contributors to consider tone and messaging a little.

With respect to closing tickets, unless someone is paying for the work I generally close feature requests that aren't compatible with a project's vision. Focusing is about saying "no" and building every feature every user requests eventually results in a bloated, unmaintainable project.

Finally, with respect to downstream vendors and projects that incorporate pieces of the GNOME shell into their own software the GNOME team has made it pretty clear that (for better or worse) their focus is their own desktop environment. Asking contributors if they're willing to do additional work to support outside projects is reasonable, but demanding that they do so is not a good look.

I can think of one specific case. At some point, it all of a sudden wasn't possibly to disable cursor blinking in gnome-terminal anymore.

It's fixed now, but it took years and absolutely no admission that perhaps they didn't handle it very well.

The entire story is outlined here. https://geoff.greer.fm/2016/08/26/gnome-terminal-cursor-blin...

> I think there is still no image preview in their file explorer. I don't know, I don't use it anymore.

Not in list view, but it's there (obviously) in icons view. It's always there in the file picker.

I'm a little torn here. I want the file explorer window to be as small as possible and I don't need the preview most of the times. However I'd like to have a preview when exploring a folder of picture, and the list view is always better than the icon view (sort, names, density, etc). I guess that a toolbar button to add the space for the preview on demand could be a nice to have feature.

back in the day gnome files had image previews for the icon in the list view -- it was handy and got me by with the lack of image previews in the filepicker. but they recently took them out :/ iirc one of the devs said they couldnt make out the 16px icons on their screen anyway, and poof.. its easy to rag on gnome for some of this stuff but i really love it for the most part. i love that it's minimal and out of my way. anyway. thanks gnome team. let the haters hate

Asking for help by submitting your data, instead of contributing or actually having any deliberate influence over the project, is a bit on the nose for a desktop environment so famous for its "my way or the highway" approach.

Same. I thought they open sourced something.

> The goal of this tool is to help improve GNOME, by providing data that can inform design decisions, [...]

I suppose that collecting data about Gnome configurations will provide data just marginally useful to inform design decisions.

Anecdotal point: last month I installed Debian+Gnome on my father's new laptop. He's a retiree, and not a all a techie. He wasn't thrilled with the textless icons on the left but thought that even if he could not get used to tell them apart, he could always rely on their hover info. But he really wanted a direct access to the handful of documents he regularly opens (mostly texts). Of course, he needed links/bookmarks that showed the name of the files. I couldn't find a way to do this with the default Gnome. I tried for an hour to make it work with an extension supposed to enable desktop icons, but failed (extension broken with Gnome4?). I installed Mate instead of Gnome, and that's it. My conclusion: Gnome is too simple, it lacks features even for old noobs, and even more for power users.

I don't know how anybody gets on without text.

I see coworkers who have a default Windows 10 setup, with the titles of windows hidden. They'll have 10+ Chrome windows open, 5+ spreadsheets, and then each Chrome window has 20 tabs in it.

And despite all that, they still don't think to do "Open Link in New Tab", and they lose track of where they are in our web app. Maybe I should add breadcrumb nav.

And of course, window management is rare. Maximize everything, even terminals.

Maybe people really do have fundamentally different brains from each other. Maybe they memorize the positions of the icons and get by. I have to have text, and I bookmark and close tabs aggressively to keep it all clean.

> Maybe people really do have fundamentally different brains from each other

I think this is a big thing. People have vastly different approaches to interacting with a UI, especially one they use everyday, and it's foolish to think there's a good one-size-fits-all approach. See this article for a good example of bad data-driven thinking of this sort which can happen in a field we can objectively measure (or the 80/20 rule, where 80% of users only use 20% of features in a product. Problem being they all use a different 20% of features):

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

No need for a tool, it is quite easy.

Stop using JavaScript all over the place, use compiled languages.

Don't outsource basic features to extensions, or third party tools.

Bring basic stuff like thumbnails and desktop folders back.

Basically

1. Don't remove stuff people use

2. Don't add stuff nobody wants

3. Don't assume everyone is using a tablet.

> Stop using JavaScript all over the place, use compiled languages.

This is one of the things I like about GNOME. There is something to be said about a tech stack that's accessible and easy enough to use.

Yes, that's one thing they got right. More developer accessibility got them more popularity, although it'd be hard for me to quantify it but I definitely see that as one of the factors.

Compiled languages are accessible.

Gnome removing desktop icons was amazing. Stopping average users from hurting themselves is a good thing, especially when they're still there for the advanced users that are dumb enough to still want them

If the point of the Linux desktop is more choices then I'd say Gnome is kinda against that philosophy. They're the Apple of the Linux world and not in a very good way either.

If only, at least macOS has a proper desktop framework.

They managed to remove me from their user base.

Once upon a time I used to advocate for GNOME, including an article about Gtkmm on the The C/C++ User's Journal.

Now I just use XFCE on the surviving Linux netbook I still own.

What is the rationale behind removing desktop icons ?

GNOME 3+ is confusing and difficult to use. Many of the design decisions are strange and break GUI conventions that have been around for decades. I have tried to understand and use GNOME 3+, but it is utterly frustrating and does not work for me.

I have to use GNOME 3+ at work because RHEL is the blessed Linux distribution and IT does not allow EPEL / third-party package repos that are not strictly required for business purposes.

RHEL 8 removed all desktop environment choices except GNOME 3, so every day is frustrating. I would rather have a Windows desktop and just SSH into a RHEL machine, so I don't have to use the GNOME GUI, but IT does not have extra computers to hand out.

My experience is pretty much the same. This is nothing new, too, since I have been using Gnome on and off since about 20 years ago. From confusing UI dialogs or elements, to the continuous reduction of changeable settings (and replacement of those by some dubious defaults), almost everything makes me think that even Windows 11 has a better UI/UX than Gnome

On my personal laptop I switched from Xfce to KDE a while ago and never looked back. The experience is just so much better IMHO

I've recently moved to GNOME on Fedora 36, and I just wish they stopped being hostile to themeing.

No, Adwaita is not pretty. No, I don't want to use the default window decorations. And I most certainly do not want to have to install extensions to have a decent dock, proper top bar applets, etc.

I have no idea where GNOME gets its UX expertise, but they are well off the mark where it regards what people expect from a normal desktop experience these days.

Well, question of taste. I use Fedora 36 with Gnome precisely because I like the provided vanilla experience. I enjoy its simplicity, minimalism and it is nice looking enough for me for not having to spend time on tuning anything.

Mine now looks mostly like this, so that I don't have to re-learn UI conventions: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/02/2130

It looks good, however, it is not for me. On that specific example, I dislike the idea of the window buttons on the left as well as the dock. I find much productive to press the window key and type the app I want to open as I do on Gnome. I used to be a big fan of KDE back in the day and spend plenty of time installing desktop and icon themes, but nowadays I like to stick to "out of the box" experiences and I apply this to everything in computing, from the distro I use, to tmux, vim, web browser etc.

This looks exactly like MacOS though. If you like the ux/ui of MacOS that's fine, but I still don't see any reason why you say gnome devs are off the mark in terms of UX. For the record, I prefer keeping the dock out of view and pulling it up with the super key

I guess it's quite subjective because...I love the default theme

Gnome: What? You wanna press Super key every time you wanna access the dock or manage windows? Got it, here you go!

I wanted to help, but this tool doesn't collect any useful data IMO. Just queries the distribution, installed apps and the default browser. Full list here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/vstanek/gnome-info-collect/#client-...

I don't see how this would actually help improve the parts of GNOME that need improvement.

It collects plenty of useful information for directing effort. Plenty of Gnome's online account information stuff gets analysed and the installed extension are queried.

If the Gnome devs see that a particular extension is installed often (i.e. GsConnect, a sound output chooser that's actually useful, etc.) then they might build that feature into the system directly so users don't need extensions any more.

I'm sure they can collect more information if they want to but I don't know if that information would actually be useful to the Gnome team at this point. I'm guessing they're looking for very specific things to optimize for (i.e. Flatpak support, hardware support, extensions everyone uses to compensate for missing features).

It does seem focused on apps and extensions, but they can already get that data for the latter from the extensions portal (both popularity and actual installs). And the installed app stat is questionable, because it doesn't include any usage information.

I just think they could have gone way broader with the set of reported data, and the people willing to help wouldn't mind.

Sound input finally got useful in GNOME 43

> sudo snap install --classic gnome-info-collect

I was tempted to install it but it's a snap on Ubuntu. I don't really like that Canonical is pushing snap so much. Hopefully it will go the way of Unity but it will take too long for me. I'm considering to switch to a different distribution, Debian derived.

I faced the same dilemma. I despise snap. I wanted something Debian based too, but I ended up biting the bullet and crossing over to Fedora Silverblue - it's different than the normal Fedora builds, in it's intentional design for Flatpaks + Podman being the core and minimizing system wide installations.

It worked really well for me, and somehow even better system support* than I had with Ubuntu, something I didn't think was possible.

* Better system support: as in 0 issues sleeping/waking from sleep, reading from fingerprint reader, connecting to bluetooth, switching sound output, connecting controllers, and switching between different multi monitor setups. I mean Ubuntu was great, miles better than my work provided Macbook Pro (that is a study in frustration), but the Fedora Silverblue installation ups the ante, pure gnome is also slightly better than Ubuntu's tweaks.

I found the UX of GNOME very inspiring. After a set of innovative changes around 2015 i switched to the i3 window manager, passed its learning curve and now i am a happy user of a stable, constant desktop experience for over 6 years now.

In a world where almost all software companies keep pushing telemetry behind our backs, trying to grab as much information about us as they can. It's nice to see a project like Gnome doing the right thing making telemetry fully voluntary and anonymising the data completely.

We understand that software projects need telemetry to improve, but that's no excuse to sneakily steal information about us.

Well done Gnome!

I appreciate that about VLC too, with its famous "Let VLC connect to the Internet?" first-run dialog.

Element I _think_ is also opt-in.

Also, for whoever is reading and might need to hear it, "Opted in by default" is called "opt-out".

That dialog is nice in intention but they should really simplify it.

<Button: Skip background network access ->

<Button: Use VLC with network access for media metadata ->

Eh. I'm reminded of Chris Rock's bit on "I take care of my kids!" Yeah, that's what you're supposed to do.

How about also playing nice in return when it comes to the actual product?

One big thing that gnome did wrong is empty top bar. So much space wasted. Should be task bar instead.

Which also doesn't work with system tray icons. (Although it's possible to install extensions which allow these).

The poor use of screen real estate doesn't do it for me: there's a large top panel displaying some system icons but a lot of empty space. On the large bottom panel you can at least select your active window like in the Windows 95 days. So that isn't so bad. You also can't drag these bars around the screen and I don't see any easy way to customize it.

It's like the message is: you're mostly using the terminal anyway and who cares, it's running in a vm. But your customer isn't going to complain and we're the defacto standard so leave us alone, you're welcome.

Sorry, I think it's too late. It may have become a good (albeit dumbed down and resource hungry) UI for tablets, but in the process you left out desktop/laptops PCs, and lots of people moved away because of this.

In the words of Bartleby the Scrivener... "I'd prefer not to..."

I've spent years fighting through many small cuts, many of which are focused around the opinionation of GNOME developers. Plenty of issues around the screenshot tools, the dumbing down of settings around wireless and/or networking configuration.

Personally I really like the GNOME UX. I was very skeptical when I tried it for the first time a year or so ago, but after a while of using it, it just started to make sense and really feels like a coherent system rather than the cobbled-together messes that most other Linux desktops (and Windows) are.

I love gnome. I don't understand why people prefer the win95 environment over everything but every desktop experience basically felt the same since then. Even Mac didn't feel intuitive at all to me.

Gnome however (I mean gnome, not whatever Ubuntu ships) removed all the unecessary things and made sure that whatever I need it's just a tab away. Nothing is intrusive or annoying, it's so out of your way that everything else I've tried the past years feels 'in your face' and constant diversion.

Done that already a week ago! I not familiar with Python but the code is terse and looks fine and the information the collect looks reasonable.

I read the headline and thought, is this a change of heart from the Gnome team, then I read the article. Yes, it was too good to be true.

No. Gnome does not deserve this help.

No one should "Help Gnome" because Gnome, too much, actively breaks backward (and perhaps "cross wm") compatibility.

Help the ones that play nice with others, instead.

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