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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

> Can I rearrange visual elements so my desktop is similar to how it has been in gnome 2, mate and xfce for the last 20 years?

Gnome 3 has been out for over 10 years (12, to be exact). At this point if they change the UI there would be people like you saying "can I get back how it has been for 10 years?".

I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals. Personally I started using Gnome 1, then moved to KDE3 when Gnome 2 was released, then moved to Unity with Ubuntu and now Gnome 3/40, Ubuntu flavor as well. I also used XFCE for a year or so at some point. I just need a month or so to get used and configure it a way I feel natural, and that's it.

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This.

I can obviously only speak for myself, but over the years I've tried a lot of different desktop environments and window managers (http://www.xwinman.org/ was a favorite when I was getting started with Linux back in the mid 90'ies).

Nowadays I use a pretty out of the box gnome (well, with whatever bastardizations Ubuntu has done to vanilla Gnome, with the unity-like sidebar etc.). I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry (e.g. I have a networkmanager applet to configure my VPN, works out of the box, no need to fuzz around with making various scripts or manual editing of config files. Screw that, I have actual work to do as well.), and it seems gnome & ubuntu have been pretty good at delivering. I don't care that my current desktop works differently than my old favorites fvwm or olvwm. I save more time by having my muscle memory get used to current keybindings and my eyes get used to the current look, than desperately trying to make gnome in 2023 look and behave like fvwm in 1995 (or whatever arbitrary snapshot in time one takes as the bestest ever and anything which is different is crap).

> I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry

This is precisely why I install Xfce and just get on with my life.

I would suggest looking into fedora workstation. I switched from Ubuntu around fedora 35 and have not looked back. Stock gnome, integrates into flathub easily. Dnf and apt are similar enough.

> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals.

It's often bad. Poorly-motivated, poorly-conceived, and poorly-executed.

Some of us have watched non-pros suffer through this stuff. It's much, much worse for them. I've come to believe you better have a goddamn great reason to modify UI, these days, and that a complete overhaul or redesign is almost never justifiable.

I’m not asking anyone to change the Gnome UI. That seems an uncharitable misreading of my question TBH.

I’m asking, honestly and in response to encouragement to give it another try, whether it is now changeable, and can support the way I work relatively simply. If the answer is ‘no’ (or worse “you’re doing it wrong”) then I won’t.

Gnome tries to force their defaults as much as possible but I do have Telegram or Slack sitting in the "tray bar" near the top-right corner of the screen.

And sorry if I misinterpreted you.

That seems like a genuine improvement from way back when, having a visual indicator for slack messages is definitely one of my major needs. Not that slack was on the radar back then, but at the time I was annoyed that Pidgin (which I also needed for work) wasn't allowed to have a tray icon.

I could live without most of the rest of the things that are sitting in my top right right now. Discord and skype are nice-to-haves but not work related so strictly optional.

> Pidgin (which I also needed for work) wasn't allowed to have a tray icon

Telepathy was but -- I still am annoyed about this more than a decade later -- it wasn't allowed to actually indicate whether you had new messages or not, just that you had some notification from some app somewhere, and you had to drill down through your notifications to see it. It was just annoying, like when Gnome decided it would be hilarious to allow a laptop to not sleep when closed but only for 30 seconds.

I have no idea why the Gnome devs chose to die on this hill.

Why ? If I absolutely love the current Gnome UI they will just change shit in next 5 years for no good reason whatsoever

I'm just interested really - I was burned by the changeover from 2-3 and haven't really looked back since. I'm not looking to change either, my needs are met. But I can change my opinion of the state of the thing if it seems like improvements have been made.

By the sounds of it, that's a resounding 'maybe'.

I was like that in GNOME 1.2/2.0 times, tried probably every DM/WM that was packaged for Debian.

Then realized the thing I do is "switch between a bunch of full screen apps (especially when we have terminal emulators with tabs and tiles builtin)" and "move them from one screen to another screen".

So I sit down, tuned i3 to my liking and never looked back. And now first order of retrievability of most apps is caps lock (rebinded to super) + 1-8/F1-F8, and second order is rofi doing search by window name via alt+tab.

Some rules make sure same app always land on same virtual desktop so I just have my stuff in autostart and it lands in right place every time

> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals.

This is easy to explain.

UI changes always bring pain to established users. There is no way around this. Users will accept the change if the benefits of it exceed the pain it brings.

IT professionals spend a great deal more time interacting with the desktop than most users, so they become "established users" more quickly and rely on UI patterns more strongly. So when the UI changes, it hurts that much more. The benefit of the change has to be that much greater to compensate.

> I don't really understand how we can have a so strong resistance to UI changes among IT professionals

There isn't as much resistance when it's a good change

Then issue is that gnome 2 was actually good. Gnome 3 was not.

For me it was the other way round (Gnome 2 made me switch to KDE3) so... who is right?

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