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Comment by nextos | Hacker News Reader

I don't use Gnome since the days of version 2, which was really nice and friendly. But I was impressed by how well the latest iteration works in a tablet.

That's a great advantage, because it's the same UI as a desktop. Plus, they have made sure all core applications work well using a touch UI.

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It's funny to hear that now.

Most people I knew back then used Linux on desktop. When Gnome 3 started to be a thing, I don't recall anyone that even had access to a touchscreen device.

And suddenly you had to use touch gestures with mouse, your plugins were gone, menu items were almost gone, you lost possibility to have ANY way to display status. They did all-in on notifications instead. So if you got new mail there was a brief notification and puff... Any indication of pending tasks were gone. No plugin with animation, no tray icon that changed color. No way of telling that your jabber client has something new.

I clearly recall how weird it was to forget to reply because for a second you were focused on writing in another window.

Who could, did migrate to anything else before any workarounds to those issues popped up (like unofficial tray, MATE).

It felt so out of touch back then. The only time I felt that confused were later on windows server when they decided in some editions to cut almost all UI and you had to do that swipe gesture from edge of the screen to show app list. Good luck on multimonitor setup, with a mouse, on RDP connection.

"And suddenly you had to use touch gestures with mouse, .."

I have used Gnome 3 since it was available in Fedora and I have never used any mouse touch gestures.

Nobody uses tablet laptops in tablet mode because generally speaking it sucks. Using a touch screen to type sucks and sucks so much worse than your phone because its bigger and more awkward.

Holding it in tablet mode is garbage because of size and weight. As soon as you have it propped up you might as well use the keyboard. It joins using a stylus for a phone and touch screen all in ones in the list of neat but completely useless features.

I use them primarily for movies/TV.

From the article's summary:

> Some common features are only accessible - and discoverable - through keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts listing is non-interactive, modal, and incurs a substantial mental context switch.

He's just wrong though. Clicking anywhere on the bar immediately turns on the edit for me (and has for years).

So either debian is turning on some odd defaults (maybe? It's been a long time since I used debian with a DE).

Or... (and this is my guess) he mucked around running commands he didn't understand trying to fix his "solid color desktop" issue and broke it himeself. I'm very suspicious of the lack of anti-aliasing in his screenshots as well.

> Clicking anywhere on the bar immediately turns on the edit for me (and has for years).

Either you aren't using gnome files or you somehow enabled that feature yourself because click to edit was released earlier this year.

EDIT: Click to edit mentioned as a new feature of gnome version released this year: https://release.gnome.org/46/

This part was about the location bar, I believe. For what it’s worth, on my machine (with Files 46.2) clicking on the name of the current directory or on empty space to the right of it in the location bar does turn it into a text box. (I always use Ctrl-L in practice so I had to actually go and check. It might be that clicking did not work in earlier versions?..)

That's something natural, touch interfaces need to be simpler. I didn't miss any normal functionality without access to a keyboard.

Not my experience:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41481555

Yes! Gnome 2 was great. I miss those days. The whole Gnome is a disappointment now. The GTK-4 doesn't even have the traditional menu and menubar widgets. I don't know what the Gimp people and the Inkscape people are going to do.

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.PopoverMenuBar.html

Both GtkMenu and GtkMenuBar are gone in GTK 4. Now threre is GtkPopoverMenu and GtkPopoverMenuBar. The GtkPopoverMenu is not a drop-in replacement for GtkMenu.

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/using-gtkpopovermenu-as-a-gtkm...

Mate is a nice option if you want Gnome 2 but don't want to live in the past. It's very pleasant.

Yes, Mate is indeed a decent desktop for people who like GNOME 2. But GTK people are removing features left and right. I don't know how Mate is going to cope with that.

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