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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

As a long-time GNOME user, I support this sentiment entirely. What a disaster. It keeps getting worse too. Now you can barely even tell foreground from background windows thanks to this Adwaita bullshit. First they removed all the features, now they're removing all of the visual information.

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Same, I've using GNOME for a long time and haven't switched yet out of laziness and being busy with other things, but the next time I have to upgrade my laptop I'm giving KDE a spin, I'm tired of GNOME replacing useful features with... nothing.

They deprecate something and replace it with an app that looks sleek because it has no buttons, and it has no buttons because it has none of the features that I use. And this has happened with the file browser, the image browser, the pdf browser, the text editor... I've lost count. GNOME is seriously worse to use now than it was 15 years ago. At this point I'm not sure what they have left to butcher, but every new version they seem to surprise me with something new they found to mess with.

It's not just worse. It's MUCH worse. I'm in the same boat. I want to change but I don't know what to and haven't had the energy to put into that yet. This desktop is dead though and they're just beating it's dead corpse at this point. I've tried KDE a few times and it was just too disorganized for me, so I might just do something simpler like awesome or one of those tiling things and add in what I want. I used to just use openbox. There must be something equally simple for Wayland.

Gnome isn't dead - it looks more consistent, and in my experience, is running smoothet and cleaner than it ever has (including gnome2 days). It's fine that it's not for you, but comments like this are insane, and not healthy. It's 2025, we don't need to I sult software we don't want to use - just don't use it.

(And, threatening to move back to something like openbox, because gnome is too simple and degraded, is extra hilarious)

What GNOME was is completely dead. All of that flexibility and all of those features are gone. This thing here is something else wearing it's dead corpse.

> consistent

Ah yes, very consistent with two entirely different sets of window borders (GTK3 and Adwaita).

By contrast, I find kde/plasma much more confusing for window borders. I see kvantum, dekorator, breeze forks, something called "klassy," etc. I appreciate gnome's ability to sometimes cut the legacy cord.

It’s far from dead. Take a look at the gnome circle apps as a demonstration of how many good applications are being written for gnome these days.

I believe a large part of this is due to the fact that to use QT you are still stuck with either C++ or Python, whereas there are a ton of gnome apps being written in JS and Rust now.

These are pretty small apps. "Binary" converts numbers between bases. Wonderful.

Meanwhile, more than a few large applications have switched away from GTK to Qt including Wireshark, Openshot, and now Audacity. How many large apps have switched the other way?

> QT you are still stuck with either C++ or Python,

... most Qt apps use QML / QtQuick which is based on ES7 ?

>JS

Where's Vala?

I finally took the plunge and upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 on my work laptop. With that come all the gnome package updates and such.

I reboot, load up my session, and a little while after need to grab a couple files from a zip archive. I double-click it in Nautilus, nothing happens. I give it a couple more clicks before I suspect something broke, right click it, and see "Extract" as... the default cursor action...?

I go back up and see five fresh copies of the folder that was inside the zip. I delete them all, go back to the file itself, right click, open with > file-roller. I try and drag'n'drop the couple files I need: doesn't work, for some reason. Great, they've broken drag and drop, too.

I look it up, stumble on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4, 7 years old issue -- I can already tell this is gonna be a joy; scroll down some, see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4#note_1..., and audibly groan.

> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?

Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!

But, oh well, looks like file-roller is unmaintained and outside of core Gnome scope now. Nautilus' zip capabilities are enough, they say! Why would a user want to inspect the contents of a zip archive before wanting to extract it, or god forbid select specific files, after all? Definitely not worth keeping as a core OS/DE feature.

And the PR on file-roller that fixes this on wayland with... a custom fuse virtual filesystem?! has been untouched for the past 2 years, never to be merged.

I'm moving to KDE, thank you very much.

"> is drag and drop extraction from Nautilus (or other file managers) really that important?

Why, yes it is! It's even worse if you go and _break_ drag'n'drop support on X11! I'm not even using Wayland!"

It is apparently not important enough for anyone to actually work on it. But maybe it is for you?

Yep. This and a million other features just keep evaporating. Every few months we get a new downgrade.

To be fair to gnome, most modern software has moved this way.

It's bad and I hate it, but at least it's not surprising.

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