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I just hit printscreen and save, I think you may be confusing your familiarity with a system with user friendliness.

For comparison, MacOS doesn't have a printscreen key, it's command-shift-3 or command-shift-4. Much more confusing to newcomers in my experience.

Spectacle used to just let you automatically save with no confirmation dialog, then they changed that a year or so ago. Maybe it's still possible to configure it but I was less than happy to have my default changed.

It's a bit slow for me, in my experience. Sometimes doesn't want to copy the image to the clipboard. Saving is also wonky. Really wish I just had sharex on Linux

What Photo app are you referring to? On Debian Trixie, I just get the screenshot app, Spectacle. It shows the screenshot it just took, tells me where it’s been saved, lets me do stuff with it, and lets me take another one. It could do with a facelift, but it’s fairly clear, really. I wonder if they changed it later or if the distribution you used deviated from the defaults.

I believe they changed the app since Trixie was released (Trixie has KDE 6.3, the changes were in 6.4) and buried a lot of the really common settings behind menus. E.g. you might want to take a screenshot on a delay, and that's now hidden behind a menu whereas they used to surface the most common features on a panel.

I'm on Debian bookworm, and a screenshot is one Meta-Shift-S -- I just highlight the region I want to capture, and I get a dialog prompting me to (with one click) copy to clipboard, save to file, or annotate. There's a handful of out-of-the-way options as well, depending on what exactly you want to do. What's --- so abominable about that?

OK, do me a favor and switch over to Gnome and try there. You'll see what I am talking about.

If Gnome made their screenshot feature an app then it would be possible to just use it on any other desktop too, as is usually a strength of Linux. And it would then also be possible to add it to Gnome's dock, which wasn't doable last time I checked.

Why does it need a dialog? Just save the file AND copy it to clipboard. If user wants to annotate they can paste or go get the file.

you can assign a shortcut to do just that?

I would be very annoyed if every screenshot I took was saved. I often take dozens of screenshots per day, and I save one maybe once a month. That means my screenshots folder only has meaningful entries. If everything was saved, I'd have to clean it up all the time.

There might be a small misunderstanding regarding the "dialog". Once you've selected an area you're shown the outlines & can still modify them, and the buttons (Accept (for further editing in Spectacle), Save, Save As, Copy, Export) are shown below those outlines.

This approach seems objectively superior to your suggestion.

The meaningful entries get named for later searching while the rest are kept as my computer's little photo journal or something. Comes in handy a few times a year.

> I often take dozens of screenshots per day, and I save one maybe once a month

Sounds borderline implausible. If anything, that's not a typical user user case by far.

> Sounds borderline implausible.

Okay? Weird comment.

> If anything, that's not a typical user user case by far.

The scale may not be typical, but the pattern (many more screenshots copied to clipboard than saved as a file) is something I see across all kinds of users around me, be they technical or even very much non-technical.

Let's not turn the defaults into "The Homer", okay? Allowing the user to choose their preferred action in the same step as allowing them to change the outline doesn't make things unnecessarily confusing, doesn't add unnecessary clicks, or anything else.

It does. If you paste (to slack, email, whatever) after taking a screenshot on Gnome, you will attach your screenshot. It is also saved on ~/Pictures/Screenshots.

That's the beauty of it, it just works.

I don't get how this can lead to confusion. You can hit PrintScr, draw a rectangle and hit save, or enter "screenshot" into the bottom left menu, rectangle, save. There you can also see the common options with shortcuts for "Full Screen" etc, at least on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I would assume that is the default behaviour.

The nice thing about Linux is that there’s a DE or WM for everyone. Personally I can’t imagine running a whole desktop environment when all I want is to draw some windows and a status bar. But, to each their own!

I really like KDE plasma, it's the best DE out there once configured to mimick Gnome 2 / Mate, but I agree with you on screenshots! Also, Konsole required much configuration to be not way too busy.

Other than that I don't have too many complaints.

I am absolutely certain they're headed in the right direction, but even some minimal Usability Testing would give them tremendous amount information on all the low-hanging fruit they could fix/optimize and substantially improve the on-boarding for newcomers.

What are you talking about, spectacle is everything I want in a screenshot tool and I do not want it to be any other way. If you want something that just takes a picture then you might as well go back to 2012.

You can just change the screenshot program you use, it's a keyboard shortcut. Flexibility and customisation is the best reason to use Linux after all.

Except that's exactly my point. You come to that DE, you don't want to modify and optimize every single nook and cranny. I mean sure, some do, but this is a vast minority. If Linux is to become truly popular desktop, it needs DEs like Gnome, aiming at those who are just fine with all the defaults curated for them.

Does Gnome have Desktop icons again by default? Because if not then no, it's not fine for people moving from Windows or Mac.

Or system tray icons or application menus. I have used GNOME since forever, but it became barely usable. You can bring back most functionality with extensions, but they are very buggy.

Or minimize and maximize buttons, which are BY FAR one of the most "basic" features desktop users expect?

What you're talking here is what I mentioned: Gnome maybe goes too far with removing some functionality, but I personally haven't used desktop icons in like 10 years and, based on current macOS trend, neither does Apple bet on it. But I am talking about overcluttering and overcomplicating UX, not oversimplifying it. Both things can be true and my KDE complaints are about the former, because I was responding to someone else praising it.

Your whataboutism doesn't invalidate my critique.

I think you are correct to state that KDE can still improve in a lot of ways. Although I personally find the new screenshot tools to be great: I now use them a lot more than I used to, especially to annotate things.

I was responding to your belief that somehow Gnome is better or that "Gnome just works exactly like you'd expect it to," as you stated. My point is that it does not. And you might not find Desktop icons useful, but I (and millions of other people!) use them every day and have for decades. I could drag and drop icons on the desktop of my family's first computer, a Mac that ran System 7 in the early 1990s. And then our Windows 95 box. And then Windows 98, and 2000, and XP, and a laptop that ran Vista. And then that laptop running Ubuntu with Gnome 2, and then Ubuntu Unity, and then Gnome 3... until Gnome decided, nope, sorry!

> If Linux is to become truly popular desktop, it needs DEs like Gnome

Linux has a DE like GNOME. How many DEs like GNOME does it need?

Yeah, and more DEs like GNOME will just take devs away from GNOME, and GNOME will regress. There aren't tons of avilable open-source devs who have the skill necessary to create a DE.

There's a lot of "we need this" "we need that" in the open-source world. But when you look at all the limitations objectively, we've already reached the highest point we can achieve.

That's just reduction to absurd. I clearly meant their approach to UX and usability. Are you gonna argue only one DE in Linux is to take serious approach to it?

So you chose the outstanding screenshot utility to highlight the problems with KDE Plasma interface? Really? Why not something like this?: https://files.catbox.moe/uvxbea.png

You realize I specifically talk about UX here? Surely you do understand what that means?

I just don't share your point of view. I think KDE Plasma screenshot utility has a decent UX. You just press Print Screen key and then either press Enter to capture the whole screen or drag your mouse to select a region and then confirm with Enter. It then opens your capture in a small window where you can save it or discard it. All extra buttons have icons that are clear and easy to understand on first glance and functionality they provide is useful and belongs in a screenshot utility. It's pretty decent.

Edit: Since we're talking about UX what do you think about Gnomes window management? If more than one window is open and one of them is maximized you need two clicks to bring the other one to the top. Every single time. Gnome user is pretty much expected to learn keyboard shortcuts to overcome the terrible UX. Most just install addons that bring back basic UI elements but the addon API is not stable and most addons usually need an update between Gnome versions which wears out developers which results in the Gnome addon repo being full of abandonware. I used Gnome as my DE for approximately a year before I realized that all the time spent trying to wrangle that stupid fisher price DE into any resemblance of functionality would be better spent on something more productive.