Hacker News Reader

Comment by vetinari | Hacker News Reader

Why? It is an emulation of a feature from other OS; why it should be indictment of Gnome? Gnome is perfectly usable without it. This widget is only for those, who are so used to windows-ism and cannot let it go.

Similarly, there is dash-to-dock extension, which emulates a feature from another popular OS. It is also indictment, that Gnome doesn't have macOS-like dock in the core? Is it an indictment of Windows shell, that is doesn't have such feature at all, neither in core nor in extension?

View on HN

Feature parity matters, especially if adoption is a goal. I'm not sure Gnome cares about adoption, but since they're on the back foot, and if they're wanting to increase adoption, it'd be in their best interests to have feature parity so that supporting Gnome does not require extra code to support entirely different UX paradigms.

I personally love Linux, love Gnome, and, when I'm not paid, I only use these platforms. However, it is incredibly difficult to justify spending time on workarounds, and it is emotionally painful to see the Gnome team dig in their heels. I can't blame them for wanting to do things the way they see fit, they are a volunteer organization after all, but seeing them be actively averse to adoption is difficult.

> actively averse to adoption

The Linux community has the weirdest gatekeeping. "We're not going to let you do that because it reminds us of proprietary software."

When the Start menu is nothing but advertisements and user data is forcibly uploaded to the cloud, Windows users will look up and shout "save us!" and the Linux community will look down and whisper "no".

Well, when windows users demand "windows, but gratis and without the annoyances", linux isn't it. You have to do some minor adjustment; just like you had to do with iPhone. It doesn't have task panel by default either.

Simplicity is feature on its own, you can't please everyone and you have other choices. Considering feature parity - I used small window managers in the past: Fvwm, Fluxbox, Pekwm... what made me eventually stick with Gnome was that It made things like Wifi, printing, mounting disk... seamless - on par with Windows. That is a lot more important for most users than customization, which can be overwhelming in environment like KDE (I haven't used it in years).

I agree, simplicity is cool. That is why I love to support platforms that are simple to support. Say, if you have a piece of software that has it’s main entrypoint be a status icon, it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult to support gnome, since different distros will ship with different versions of gnome, which support different versions of status icon plugins, which work differently and sometimes they dont even have the plugins in the repo. Suddenly a feature that just works turns into a 3 page ordeal in the user manual do deduce what plugin must they install where to make our app work.

If it is an ordeal, maybe you are doing something wrong?

Maybe your app sole entry point should not be a systray icon, especially, since users might not have systray at all (intentionally).

You will have similar issue with Android, and how it handles (persistent) notifications, background tasks and activities in foreground.

If it works everywhere except Gnome, requiring a custom solution on Gnome alone, it's definitely Gnome's fault. Gnome people have this weird ego thing where they expect the world to conform to them, even developers who are only including Linux support as a courteous afterthought to users. Anything Gnome does in a unique way adds friction for these developers, to the detriment of all Linux users.

> a feature from other OS

From virtually every other OS for the past 25 years. That is reason enough to support it.

Look at the issue from other way: if you want this feature, you have a virtually every other OS to choose from. Those, who specifically do not want this feature, do not have such a luxury. They can choose this environment.

It is hardly the primary reason for anyone to choose OS or environment. Most people are starting and getting used to other interfaces. Sometimes people are using multiple OSes at the same time. For all those people consistency matters, either for smoother learning curve or for productivity. Thus either Gnome remains a niche solution for a very small group of people or it expands market share by adopting UX patterns from mainstream.

This is really a non-factor, that has lim(0) impact on Gnome adoption.

Mac never emulated this windows feature and it never hurt its adoption. If anything, it helped, because it wasn't associated with annoyances that the new users were getting away from.

Btw, I'm also using windows/mac/(fedora,ubuntu,alma) at the same time. Bigger annoyance is changes between different versions of the same system (i.e. windows 10 -> windows 11) than difference between different systems.

Gnome has practically no learning curve. Everything you need is top left/right corner and win/esc key.

> Sometimes people are using multiple OSes at the same time. For all those people consistency matters

I don't understand this statement. They are using multiple OS', are they really struggling to switch between MacOS and Windows that much? If they are, then Gnome is going to be the least of their problems.

Let me explain then: Linux has plenty of options for desktop environment. As a long time Windows user, I don’t care much about their features, I need a job to be done. I will not try to adapt (even if it is easy) or figure out why Gnome is better, I will choose something familiar and good enough. Gnome lost me before I even tried to use it. I don’t have such choice on Mac, so I‘m forced to use MacOS UI and adapt, and that’s not trivial thing for someone who knows their primary OS well. Difference in UI paradigms is visible and does hurt the performance.

If you are wanting something familiar to Windows, a start button and task bar will be the least of your issues.

There is no desire to cater to Windows users because they move the target, "Oh you might have made this to be like Windows like we asked, but actually this is also not like Windows so I'll never use it anyway."

If you want the "feature" of not having this feature, you can disable it in most other DEs (certainly the Linux ones at least.). Gnome isn't doing anything clever by not having this widget as a first party option for users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com