Hacker News Reader

Comment by gf000 | Hacker News Reader

> First, dialogs could not be dragged to the side

It's GTK, not gnome and I agree it's not the most logical behavior, but I don't think it's all that relevant to the general workflow the gnome-shell provides.

> App icon without categories

Folders are a native feature of gnome-shell, it's on your distro for not using it.

> Maximize, minimize

Getting used to something is surely a strong effect, but I don't think it's a fair criticism in and of itself, otherwise every change would be unequivocally bad. See my broader reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49829080

I really don't think gnome copied too much stuff from mac, especially that I like gnome and pretty much dislike Mac. Gnome people have a pretty well thought out design and workflow idea, so this criticism doesn't fly. I can accept that you may not like that design idea, but it's definitely not a cheap, no thought copy of Mac.

View on HN

On dialogs: I don't think it's fair to say "it's GTK, not Gnome" when a. the behavior started happening with Gnome 3, b. it doesn't happen in Mate, and c. GTK is maintained by the GNOME Project. Behavior, BTW, that (AFAIK) was exclusive until then to MacOS.

On categories: I don't think the Debian people had a big input into how the menu was supposed to look like. I'm willing to bet that it's the default seeing as, again, it's also the default in MacOS.

But on the main topic: I believe that good design should be invisible, and Gnome 3 was the absolute opposite of that. Take Firefox mobile: one day they asked me if I wanted to try the new layout with the navigation bar on the bottom, I said yes, and I never looked back because it made my life SO MUCH easier. In contrast, Gnome's Wikipedia page has an entire section titled "criticism" detailing entire distros that dropped it and successful forks that kept the old behavior. I therefore feel strongly against the idea that it was "well thought out", or more precisely, I think it may he been "well thought out" but not "well tested with the actual users".

When you familiarise yourself with macOS, you arrive at the conclusion that GNOME is indeed not a cheap copy of Mac, it is something worse: a miserable attempt at copying its ideas. There are many examples, but from the top of my head and clicking around:

- Window title bars - Menu bars: removed while copying macOS, but no global menu either. If only it was like macOS! - Symbolic icon craze - Autohiding a context menu after 0.5 seconds of holding the button (since GTK 3) - The top right area in GNOME's Hell - The "Apps" view in GNOME's Hell, which also has a Dock wannabe - Nautilus is basically Finder - Nowadays animations that you can't turn off

Most of the damage to GNOME has been done in version 3. I've converted away from anything GTK 4 because I can't stand it anymore.

Though I admit that it's cohesive and if you expect very little, it kind of works. Also there's probably nothing better for touch screens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com