I used to complain a lot about Gnome and the big changes they made. I still don't love some of their decisions, but it has become simple to use for the masses, and I consider that a win for Desktop Linux adoption.
And yes, I'm aware that I can change a lot of Gnome with Gnome Tweak Tool and various extensions. But the fact that I have to install a third party tool, a browser extension, and then some extensions off a random website to get the same functionality that other desktop environments (such as KDE, MacOS and Windows) include by default is an absolute indictment of Gnome's design philosophy.
Instead of chasing after users who have never heard of Gnome, and barely know about Linux, Gnome should have focused on improving the experience existing users. They still can. A good start would be taking all the settings that Gnome Tweak Tool exposes and bringing them back into the main settings UI, so that I don't have swap between two settings applications, with no rhyme or reason dictating how settings are split between the two. Also, please give me the ability to hide the clock (like I can do in Windows 10) without having to install some random extension [1] to do so.
[1]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1110/hide-clock/
The Gnome people seem to seriously just go around removing options because deleting working code used by actual humans makes them feel more powerful: they think they know better than sometimes decades of prior design or tons of existing projects (including Linux itself at times).
They think of themselves as Apple, sure: but they have neither the true vertical control of everything Apple does to pull off Apple's most "courageous" battles nor the distribution bottlenecks Apple can wield when they are being their most evil.
They do it because open source projects don't have infinite resources to maintain infinite options forever. You can complain about it all you want, but 25 years of history shows that just because something was being used by humans doesn't mean that volunteers are going to magically show up to maintain that option for eternity. I'm sure if you've been working in this field for a while then you've deleted some unfortunate code in your day job and had to convince users to do things a better way. So why single out GNOME for this?
I have very little patience for the, "It's open source and maintained by volunteers," argument when other projects which are equally open source and maintained by fewer volunteers somehow manage to deliver more functionality.
The rest of your comment is dangerously close to toxic entitlement. You don't get to say you have no patience. Or rather, you can say it, but it's completely meaningless for you to do so unless you were trying to antagonize some volunteers. Avoid that line of thinking. These are all volunteers who can spend their time as they want.
Tbh there's no excuse, especially when GNOME devs REMOVE features that are already there that have no maintenance cost for no reason (https://discourse.gnome.org/t/icon-view-sizes-in-nautilus-43...).
Did you bother to read that whole thread? The developer gives a long explanation with the reasons: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/icon-view-sizes-in-nautilus-43...
Maybe if Gnome didn't have so much "modern tech", (like DBus, for example) the Gnome devs wouldn't be so overworked.
Really, that's what gets me. It's not as if the world moved on and Gnome just didn't keep up. No. Gnome 2 was actually better than Gnome 3. The Gnome devs removed features for what, as far as I can tell, were purely aesthetic reasons.
Put another way, whenever we see Microsoft or Apple dumbing down their operating systems, do we not criticize them for unnecessarily making life more difficult for their users? Why should we give Gnome a free pass for doing exactly the same thing?
It has? I use gnome bits daily and it's a mess of inconsistent and zero-ux-background-so-i-came-up-with-my-own paradigms.
There's no reason why the gterminal, for example, should replace the top most item in the right click menu with hex/oct representation of a number you happen to have selected, or every gnome app keeping affordances in "fun" new places:
Compare gedit vs gnome-weather vs gnote vs gcontacts - sometimes there's a hamburger menu, other times there's contextual stuff under an icon, or a button, or a button with a contextual menu. Variety is the spice of life, right?
If you're crushing it usability, you certainly can gloat about my way or the highway type of philosophy, but gnome is in no danger of that.
I like it. It's useful during programming and it never gets in the way of anything. If you're going minimalist, why even use the right click menu at all?
> Compare gedit vs gnome-weather vs gnote vs gcontacts - sometimes there's a hamburger menu, other times there's contextual stuff under an icon, or a button, or a button with a contextual menu. Variety is the spice of life, right?
Most options with descriptions are behind the kebab menu on every app, quick controls are icon buttons. It all looks pretty consistent to me. gedit's open/save buttons are a bit weird, I suppose, but if that's all then I don't see the problem, really.
You'll find inconsistencies like these on every OS. KDE has its fair share of wonkiness as well if you switch. Even Windows, the most popular operating system in the world, has a range of hamburger menu icons and placements.
Was it not before? is it actually now? have the masses noticed?
The real Linux DE for the masses is ChromeOS, but people don't usually bucket it with the others. And that is Google's way or the highway.
Even at my job where gurus are managing our workstations full-time, Linux users randomly had to all switch desktop environments cause of X dependency getting too old, and the new one partially broke compatibility with our remote desktop. It's not a perfectly layered cake.
I also don't believe that people's use cases are really so different that there need to be so multiple widely-used Linux DEs. I'd get it if there were GNOME for almost everyone then other niche DEs for the rest. Again, so many people with a variety of use cases have managed ok with the basically unchanging Windows UI for decades.
Is that thanks to their decisions, or despite their decisions?
Some of us have actual work to get done and don't want to play the role of UI designer. I trust that the Gnome people put the work in and get something that's mostly right.
The only people using desktop Linux these days are Linux fans, or software developers who need it for work.
Maybe RH has a bunch of institutional customers I'm completely unaware of, but as far as I can tell, the Gnome devs seem to be trying to build a GUI aimed at mythological users: non-technical users they somehow think are going to switch to Linux Real Soon Now if only they can entice them with their holy ultra-simplified GUI. The real world doesn't work this way.