As the one who works simultaneously with macOS and Linux, I would be happy to see some unification. I'm not speaking about visual differences or look-n-feel of the apps, but common tasks like desktop switching or window switching - things you do hundreds times a day. Those IMO should involve as little brain as possible and rely on muscle memory.
I want to be able to set Super+C/V to copy/paste in Linux, including the terminals rather than different key configurations depending on the context. Is this now available in Gnome?
GNOME has, unfortunately, been on this train before macOS was; when Big Sur came out there were many threads on other sites pointing out how strange it was that macOS seemed to be taking after GNOME 3.
if the Pop!_Shell extensions get made mainline in addition to the changes here, I will probably go from disliking/tolerating vanilla GNOME to possibly daily driving.
What's with the change over to these '40' style naming schemes? I absolutely detest it if it's not done for a real reason.
Firstly, without major versions it does not single anything to end users and end developers. Is '40' still mostly compatible with the gnome 3.x.x API? Is there a major divergence between 40 and 41? Is 41 and 40 a total rewrite?
3.x.x works and there's a reason why. It conveys a lot of information quickly and is well understood.
reducing things down to a single number is meaningless and clearly branding drivel. I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.
Actually this numbering scheme conveys to me, intuitively, that changes are more gradual and hints at backwards compatibility. If there's no major/minor/patch semantics I just assume versions are small incremental additions. I could be wrong but that's what the browser versioning schemes have instilled in me.
Improve existing stuff, add new stuff. That can be done with backwards compatibility if you have a well defined API. I haven't looked at Gnome's API in years so I'm not sure what's its state, but one shining example for this is Redis which is backwards compatible to 11 years ago.
Another great and more relevant example is browsers.
> if you do want to have a breaking new version, what exactly do you do?
You change the name. Like "Raku" instead of "Perl6". Once you've reached a certain level of stability and usage, any substantial breaking change is going to inevitably result in a fork, so embracing that up front is going to result in a much better experience.
Yeah, I like Rich Hickey’s critique of semantic versioning. Major version changes just overload the name and cause confusion: if you must break compatibility, fork and rename.
You change the name of the software, like consoles? The next big Gnome version could then be called Gnome 360 followed by Gnome 1, Gnome 64 or Gnome 3.11 for work groups.
To me it communicates no commitment to backwards compatibility, i.e. no semantic versioning. This might be enforceable if one is Apple, but doesn't sound good for an open-source platform.
An insignificant breaking change is still a breaking change; and over time they build up. This may explain why so many developers have been unhappy with GTK3.
As far as I understand "40" is just short for "3.40.0". The expectation is that they will remain compatible with the 3.x.x series for a long time, so the 3 is somewhat redundant. This release contains more UI changes than usual, but it is very far away from the change from gnome 2 to 3.
And when Gtk4 inevitably happens, or the gnome-shell toolkit is changed again, breaking about all the gnome-shell extensions, we'll just call it Gnome X.
Gtk4 already happened. Not sure if Gnome apps to it, however, but I'm pretty sure they'll just break extensions as they've always done. Most use internal APIs AFAIK after all, so they're designed to break.
Gnome shell doesn’t even use Gtk, or at least not for drawing and such. If it’s there, it’s completely abstracted away in their JavaScript layer. And yeah, most extensions broke from 3.38-40 already anyway.
Software/package version numbers are just a marketing name. It's the ABI version number on the library (e.g. libgtk4.so.1 vs libgtk4.so.0) that needs to be changed if functions or parameters to functions in the original ABI in the older libgtk4.so.0 library are modified or deleted. It's very common to have two libraries of the same name being used side-by-side with some applications compiled against a newer ABI, and other applications compiled against an older ABI.
The problem with Gnome development is that library ABIs are just one of many interfaces used. There are also GSettings/dconf interfaces, D-Bus interfaces, file formats, etc on top of the usual conflicts in package dependencies (e.g. two packages wanting to write two different unversioned files to disk).
Your question is valid (and I have the same one) but this is about as uncharitable a thing to say as you can, especially without providing evidence/examples:
> I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.
The Gnome project has done an enormous amount to push the open source and free desktop forward. The least we can do is not impute sinister motives to them. What do they stand to gain from "obfuscat[ing]" their version number when their code is all open source?
I strongly disagree: the gnome project and the systemd mess are both severely damaging Linux. The good thing, though, is that KDE Plasma seems to have recovered nicely from the KDE 3->4 mess.
I'm not trying to argue, I'm surprised and legitimately interested at your comment and would really like to understand where you're coming from.
Are you a current Linux desktop user? How long have you been? What distros do you use?
If Gnome had just paused or become what MATE is today, would we be better off? If you were suddenly emperor of the Gnome Foundation, what would you direct them to do?
I’ve been using Linux on the desktop since Mandrake 7. I mostly use Debian these days (ever since Ubuntu switched from Gnome 2 to Unity). For a while I just used tiling window managers (xmonad, stumpwm) because I couldn’t make Gnome 3+ work for me. Recently I tried Plasma again and I’ve mostly settled on that being good enough. At this point, I have no confidence in most of the people involved in the Linux desktop initiatives: I’d probably fund MATE and maybe even the Trinity Desktop environment: the best Linux desktop setup I ever had was KDE 3 apps on Gnome 2
That's not a modern problem and it's not something the developers did. If you have N apps and M themes, you have to test N × M combinations. This is an impossibly large number on any platform that allows users to make their own apps and themes.
It's a lot easier for everyone if the app developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved themes, or if the theme developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved apps.
Glad to see another person here aware of Trinity. I'm an active user. KDE3 just nailed the balance of power user + FOSS. Kmail3, Kdiff3, Kpdf, all these tools work wonderfully, intergrate well with Konqueror, the desktop usage is really quite enjoyable
Yeah I also want to use a system for servers where critical functionality depends on goddamn bash scripts that will regularly break. I also enjoy hunting down bugs in each distro that does things just a tiny bit differently...
Central design is somewhat restrictive but a bazaar style of development for everything will only result in chaos. The kernel itself has become pretty much cathedral at this point, and not having a central init system (which is quite good, I don’t see the blind hate towards it which is usually never justified on technical merit) would have set back whole of linux by many years.
As much as I dislike that Red Hat has a specific role in the linux desktop case, they do sponsor important work.
I don’t necessarily like sysvinit: systemd is just a monster slowly gobbling up all sorts of functionality that’s not directly related to “initializing the system”.
Initializing a system is a very complex problem.
And that systemd gobbles up unrelated things is simply FUD. Systemd is both an init system and a group of many related projects. So it’s a bit like saying plasma is all-encompassing because they have a desktop env and also a pdf viewer file manager etc. They are just under the same name, not mandatory, similarly to many systemd programs.
Agreed it’s very shallow backwards logic that will only cause issues when an actual Gnome 4.0 is released. The irrationality will have to be fought similar to Iphone by using “Gnome 3.40” when discussing it.
I just want to mention, if you feel there's some excessive padding and it's a waste of space (especially vertically), I suggest you take a look at a compact theme at GNOME Look.
Currently, not all themes work properly with GTK 4, but they will eventually get there. Personally, I use the Mojave-gtk-theme. It wastes no space and is beautifully designed.
yeah, that is one of the things I do after a fresh install. I am using Nextwaita from gnome-looks. It changes very little from the vanilla gnome, except for a slighter grey color scheme and less padding.
I dunno which it is, but the typography/font rendering is just jarring in these screens. I imagine there's a bunch of hacking you can do to make it look crisper/aligned but no way I'd have time for that.
Topmost bar still consists of lots of unused space with clock in the center — a design decision surely copied from old mobile phones. Too much of screen space is wasted, in the most "expensive" area, where "Rule of the infinite edges" of Fitts's law applies.
And what would you put there? I do like some sway/i3-like bar with many stats, but I don’t miss that on gnome, it is sort of a feel-good thing there for me.
I think I'm missing something... Where is the taskbar? Do you need that "overview" animation each time you want to bring an application to focus? And where are the menus of the focused application?
The menus should be in the hamburger menu on the top right of each window. A time waster and a recent fad coming from small screen devices.
I can't answer your other questions. Not only I don't have GNOME 40 but I greatly tweaked Ubuntu 20' GNOME to disable all animations, remove the launcher, move the top bar to the bottom, use those very same horizontal virtual desktops they introduced in 40 (hurrah) and add an old Windows like taskbar. It feels much more productive than the default settings.
I gave a try to KDE for a couple of months in 2014 and didn't like it. I felt I was clicking twice as much as in GNOME to accomplish the same thing. Furthermore I liked the look of GNOME more than KDE's.
I kept using GNOME fallback
(or flashback?) until 2018 because it worked as I like. I knew there were GNOME shell extensions to suit my needs by then so I switched to GNOME shell with Ubuntu 18.04.
I never researched KDE so I don't know what became of it. A total change of DE is a big thing and could take a lot of time.
No, that's not at all what I mean. I prefer no animations and no hidden things at all!
I prefer a taskbar at the bottom with one button per window in it, so that I can have an overview of which windows are open, which document each has, and quickly switch to it with mouse (when not using alt+tab to switch between recent windows).
What I do not want is to have to activate something, or have some animation, first, before seeing what I want to navigate to.
Sorry if it wasn't clear (not a native speaker), I agree completely with all your points. I also don't want hidden things or animations each time I want to focus on another app. It was an open question, I'm wondering if anyone using Gnome 40 can answer? Also, just hovering over the Unity taskbar and scrolling with the mousewheel to cycle between windows is fantastic, I miss that a lot on Windows!
If you have an app that is hidden under other windows, you have to use the overview or alt+tab to bring it to the front.
However, often we don't need to do that because GNOME encourages us to spread our windows over several workspaces. The animation for switching workspaces is practically instantaneous.
I guess that's why we have options. I like Gnome. It's by far my favorite DE. I don't want my screen cluttered up with stuff. I know what I've got running, and finding anything is really easy: Super + type whatever I'm thinking, and presto, it's there.
> Super + type whatever I'm thinking, and presto, it's there.
I often have several windows of the same application open at the same time (particularly browser and terminal). When I want to switch from say the IDE to the _right_ browser window, how do I do that in Gnome? (I use Workspace Matrix[0] as I'm a visual type, and that works for me, but perhaps there's a better way?)
Alt+` (key above tab on most keyboards) should allow you to switch between windows of the same application. So you do alt+tab till you get to your browser, then alt+` to pick the right browser window.
Alt+Tab is usually bound to "Switch applications", which means all of the target application's windows come to the front, possibly sending every other application window out of view.
Sometimes a more direct approach is to use the action "Switch windows" by assigning it a shortcut Keyboard settings.
This might be just a matter of what I've gotten used to, but I have the "Activities" view (which shows previews of open windows, as well as the dock-like thing for launching applications) bound to the super/windows key which is nearly always very easily accessible.
If I'm switching windows and I'm not alt-tabbing, I usually just hit the super key and select the window from the thumbnails/previews.
I don't find that to be unproductive, but then, I haven't really been even trying to change the basics of my desktop or experimenting much in a while, so it might be that I've just settled for it to some extent.
If I had to first move the mouse to one location in order to get a list of windows, and then again to another location to select the window I want, I don't think that would work at all. But with a very easily accessible keyboard shortcut for the first part it does.
Let's hope it actually reads the available combinations from ~/.XCompose. I am pretty sure that this was not the case (at least at some point in the past).
GNOME 3.38 allows adding custom sequences using the .Xcompose file. The only thing that doesn't work are include directives. I'd imagine it will be the same with GNOME 40.
If you are a Romance language speaker you get tired of the local layout fast, specially for programming.
A lot of people use the US+compose key for accents/ñ.
You can only install this on windows in a VM (like Virtual Box). You also can't install it directly, you would need a Linux distribution as well. It would be easier to wait until Ubuntu or Fedora releases a new version which contains this version of GNOME. Desktop Environments on Linux are basically GUI themes.
Not only are they GUI themes, some desktop environments come packaged with different utility software. (e.g. Gnome comes with GTK-based utility software like Gedit, and KDE comes with KDE-based utility software like Kwrite.
It is possible to mitigate some of that inconvenience by using a theme where everything is scaled up (and there are tools to generate them), but there will be still GTK 2 software that looks bad.
Specifically, I want to be able to click around on directories to choose where to save a file, type the file name, then press enter. This should save the file, not filter the directory listing.
Also, I don’t want it to default to overwriting some file I saved last week.
I also want them to just make it so I can right click and create a new empty file. Linux is file based right? If I right click on a opened folder I want to create a file.
No. I actually went to GNOME's IRC network the other day to talk to them about gtkfilechooser's multiple problems. Yours, and then the lack of text input for typing or pasting file paths. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938 . They said they have no one assigned to gtkfilechooser bugs and none will be addressed.
I was able to download the debian source for a couple gtk applications (ie, gedit/pluma) and apply community sourced patches to them to get back the text/file path entry box. But there's no way I am going to be able to fix Gtk itself. And fixing every application on my system by compiling from source and making new debian packages, well, I might as well linux from scratch.
I searched PopOs! repos and I couldn't find where they maintained their Gtk-3.0 patches or code. It didn't look to me like they altered Gtk-3.0 itself at all and likely just altered individual applications.
Fixing the GtkFileChooser is not the main problem, it is getting your patches merged. Someone from the Gtk team needs to review them and put their stamp of approval on them. But the Gtk team are RedHat employees and they prioritize whatever the company wants them to prioritize. And if the company doesn't want them to prioritize the GtkFileChooser, your patches will languish on their bug tracker. If you are lucky, you'll get a message two years after you uploaded them asking you to rebase them to HEAD because the code base has changed to much that your patches can't be merged without them being significantly reworked.
And now everybody should look for a text from 2003 written by jwz mentioning the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model" and slowly read it again, then think how much time passed since.
Most Gnome developers, I suppose, are on RedHat payroll and are not teenage.
They are busy working on various things, this is certain, and these things are apparently more important for them. Like, well, GTK4.
I suppose most Red Hat customers are corporate, and when they ask for featureful Linux desktop, they likely mean playing nice with corporate systems. This is why Evince is such a good PDF viewer, compared to a lot of others; it can even fill in forms. This is why the file chooser without image preview is fine as is for corporate use, because I suppose that 0% of graphic designers choose a Linux machine in a corporate setting.
> Most Gnome developers, I suppose, are on RedHat payroll and are not teenage.
jwz was not talking about the age, he was talking about the issue of ignoring bugs to the point where they reach decades old, and often even then persist and go unfixed. Some bugs live multiple decades, across three different issue trackers, having to be reopened each time.
The fun fact is that he wrote this in 2003, about the GNOME developers. Not much has changed in 20 years, it seems.
This article has so little substance that I wish people would stop re-posting it. It adds nothing to the discussion. Like yeah, there are bug reports that haven't been addressed. Developers come and go and sometimes have to leave before they get to work out all the bugs in their feature(s). It happens. Every big open source project is like that. The bug tracker is open so that anyone can submit bug reports. The downside is that it tends to fill up with unsolicited bug reports that don't get responses. The upside is that anyone in or outside the project can volunteer to fix any of those bugs. I don't see JWZ stepping up to triage random bugs in GNOME, probably because he knows it's a thankless job with no pay that he wouldn't enjoy.
> I don't see JWZ stepping up to triage random bugs in GNOME, probably because he knows it's a thankless job with no pay that he wouldn't enjoy.
Thing about it is, it's the responsibility of the GNOME project. It's the responsibility of the developers that sign up to it. Each time GNOME has been improved, old problems still persist. It says something about a project and the integrity of the developers when they claim to increase usability and yet do not bother with longstanding problems.
The root of the problem is a certain mindset to development. One that is numerous and yet flawed.
"Move fast, break things! No time to fix them we have other concerns like- checks notes- revising every system menu to look slightly different. Hell yeah!! Wooh!"
This has been going on for a long time now and is to be expected. My real problem is that they completely remove existing functionality from UI without giving the users who relied on it any alternative.
Probably they will deprecate it soon, and gnome apps will randomly open a file for you. Just to be easier to use. A file picker dialog can confuse the user.
Well, given that that's what macOS Big Sur has done, it's a dead cert. You no longer get a file picker dialog by default when saving, but a place where you can type a name and a label that says where saving will happen.
Where do you see that? I tried hitting cmd+s in Safari, Terminal, and Pages and got a normal macOS file-save dialog in all three cases. Looks more or less the same as it has for quite a while. I haven't touched anything related to file save settings (I probably should, as I'd like the arrow-down-to-browse-files to always be expanded, and I know there's a setting for that somewhere, just haven't bothered to yet).
I think they complain about the fact that the file dialog is collapsed by default, going to some length to hide the browse functionality (Apple probably wants you to save everything in Documents and be done with it).
I've lurked on HN for more than a decade but created an account to concur with this comment. Accidentally filtering for folders (who even wants this) instead of typing a filename is truly awful and affects me daily. I would bail on gnome for this issue alone if I didn't have to use it on a work machine.
Does anyone know of an issue in their tracker with an official stance on it?
>I would bail on gnome for this issue alone if I didn't have to use it on a work machine.
Both Google Chrome and Firefox use GTK's file picker (at least when "saving link as..." at least on Fedora 34 Prerelease) so what would you do for a web browser?
If your environment has a xdg portal port (KDE does), you can use the relevant portal. Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 , and then firefox uses the native file picker.
Because of the release of GNOME $next, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME $prev, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME $next, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks...
Kind of interesting and surprising that Gnome has gradually moved from a traditional Windows desktop look to a more macOS style with gestures and exposé included.
Interestingly, if you take a look at old screenshots of Gnome 2.x, GTK apps have had more "mac like" layout/distribution/whitespace of controls within application windows for a very long time, even if the Gnome itself took more after Win9x in other aspects (like having a taskbar).
By contrast KDE/Qt has always had a stronger Win9x feel through and through.
I was brought up on Gnome but after using Cinnamon, it's hard to go back. Better applets, better window management, easier default keyboard shortcuts. Little slower, though.
I was a bit sceptical, but I have to say that the horizontal workspaces work pretty well. Working with GNOME 40 is both efficient and aesthetically pleasing. And as a side note performance is much better too on Fedora 34.
AFAIK, most DEs place virtual desktops horizontally or in a grid, and I'm actually not aware of any other DEs that dynamically add new desktops as you use them rather than statically defining them up front.
MacOS’s fundamental look has a pretty consistent chain all the way back to NextOS in the 90s. The Dock, the dot indicator, and many other core pieces are visible in versions of MacOS which predate the launch of webOS. MacOS borrows some bits from webOS as well, but the fundamental Dock layout is right out of NextStep.
It’s been like this since Gnome 3 was released in 2011. This is why I've always been confused by people who say Linux has an “ugly, inconsistent, unprofessional” UI - to me this looks and feels better than Windows.
Gnome is just one part of the story - the gnome shell was always decent looking and had good themes.
But the apps and the ecosystem really is ugly, messy and inconsistent. For example if you look at the controls you got with GTK out of the box in GTK3 era (when I last tried to build something with it) I remember huge paddings, unintuitive UX (the GTK file picker is the worst I've used) and poor layout controls. Go check out an app like https://inkscape.org and compare it to something like Illustrator or Gnome to Photoshop. The messy jumbled stacks of options with huge icons and paddings instead of being condensed and easy to use - most of it stems from GTK controls being bad.
Now this is all with a huge disclaimer that I haven't used a Linux desktop in over 5 years at this point, maybe things got better but I doubt it - I still use Inkscape for example from time to time and Gimp on OSX and putting the non-native issues aside the apps look terrible on their own because of what I already said.
Unfortunately, it feels like everything is turning into what Linux was 10 years ago. MacOS is better, but the increasing dominance of Electron and Java apps which bring their own UIs into whatever eco-system they encounter is very frustrating. If you are stuck running MS apps on the Mac, they are their own micro-cosm as well.
This was always the case: MS Office used its own widgets since about 1995 on both platforms; Adobe has their own UI controls, and even Apple used custom/dark themes and controls for their pro apps since about forever.
The current state of Apple App Store app is just the cherry on the top.
I don’t use Adobe, so for me, the big culprit has always been MS Office and I’ve been able to mostly avoid it for years. I’m looking more at Slack, VSCode, and other “Essential” apps which have displaced Mac Native tools like BBEdit and if you squint hard, Adium.
I don't think it's inconsistency that bothers me in this case - I don't really care if an app isn't using the same kind of widget design as long it's functional (I spend most of my days in apps that are entirely non-native and I'm fine with them).
The problem is more with GTK design which is crap for 80% of PC applications with dense control layouts, the high padding touch style widgets it offers out of the box work for low density stuff not complex editors).
Even non-native OSX apps integrate into OS in a predictable manner (use toolbar, shortcuts, native file dialogs, etc.)
Looking and feeling better than Windows is a low bar. Or at least it was a low bar in the Gnome 3.0 days.
I was mostly stricken with how much many of the features they are highlighting look straight out of stuff which was unveiled in MacOS about 5+ years ago. Extensive gesture support being a biggie.
Yea gnome gets a lot of hate, but I've been using it as a daily driver for a few years and I have a slick, productive workflow with minimal customization. It's free software, it looks nice, and every release is a nice improvement.
I have the feeling it also happened the other way around as well. When Gnome 3 came out the big buttons and huge whitespace seemed ridiculous, especially with Big Sur MacOS looks very similar.
Also curious about this. It's doubtful. Given the growing number of people coming from Apple it would be great if the DEs provided an option in settings to default to using ctrl or cmd. DEs already make similar accommodations for users coming from Windows. For instance, in KDE you can press Win+E (Explorer) and get the file manager.
Was looking for when this GNOME version will be integrated to Ubuntu to check them out, it will not land in the next Ubuntu version.
> Ubuntu 21.04 will NOT include GNOME 40. Bew Ubuntu releases typically include the newest GNOME release but this time it won’t. Why? Well, GNOME 40 features bold design changes that Ubuntu devs feel they need more time to ‘adapt’ to. [1]
Overall I like the refresh, but for me the real UX test is when you use it for a week/month. Will have to wait!
It's interesting to see the focus on these desktop management features. I've been a long time macOS user and have never found "Launchpad", "Mission Control / Expose", or "multiple Desktops" useful in practice. I just use multiple monitors with everything I need on them in the same workspace. Do you guys actually use these features? I find the contextual switching distracting.
I used MacOS for years, out of your list the only feature I ever really used was "multiple desktops". I would group apps roughly by function (email and messaging was on one desktop, the code editor was on another). I definitely wasn't pushing the boundaries and never used more than three desktops.
In my opinion, your skepticism about the general appeal of these features seems reasonable. I would expect the average laptop owner uses these rarely if ever. People who spend a lot of time with their machine may use only one or two, I bet. Spotlight in particular seems to be eating Launchpad's lunch.
KDE user, but I do the same thing in any WM. I use multiple desktops more than I use the task switcher bar. I find a spatial arrangement of related windows much more practical to maintain. Multiple monitors don't scale beyond 2 or 3.
When on MacOS I really enjoy full screen apps with multi-finger virtual desktop switch. My workflow usually limited to one full screen browser and one full screen terminal window (with tmux inside).
I have three monitors, and recently started using multiple desktops. I can hit Meta+{1,2,3,4} to go between them or Meta+Tab on KDE. It's amazing.
If my main desktop has tons of windows open, and the panel is crowded as heck with browser, file manager, text editor, and terminal windows (all of which can occupy all of your monitors when you're doing a given thing because there's that many of them), it's overwhelming. It's like browser tabs piling up out of control, except the tabs are also windows you have to maximize and minimize. Dedicating multiple desktop to multiple task (main, tinkering, work, etc.) is so much better.
I don’t personally use Launchpad but I can definitely imagine it’s useful for some. While it obviously took its design from iOS, it’s also a throwback to At Ease[1], which I definitely saw used widely when it was available.
And I no longer use Mission Control/Expose, but I certainly did find it useful on smaller screens (I now use a comically large 43” 4k@1x).
Same with multiple desktops, and I’ve seen it used on nearly every screenshare I’ve been on this past year.
My workflow now is probably more fussy than it could be, but I pretty much just use cmd-~ and cmd-` now.
Edit to add: I think it also depends quite a bit on input device. Seeing others mention trackpad gestures, I remember finding Mission Control/multiple desktops much more useful when I primarily used my MBP on my lap.
>I just use multiple monitors with everything I need on them in the same workspace.
Well, many of us use a single monitor or a laptop to get work done. Thus multiple workspaces make more sense.
Virual workspaces have been in Unix/Linux/X-Windows since the 90s (or even before) anyway.
>Do you guys actually use these features? I find the contextual switching distracting.
Yep.
Why would it be more distracting than looking to another monitor (and thus having to physically turn your gaze/neck as opposed to a single keyboard shortcut)?
For me, the purpose of multiple desktops is to reduce distration. Instead of many things visible to you all the time (in one or more monitors) and competing for your attention, you can have several things open, but only focus to one at a time, separate them by work, or program type, or workflow step, etc.
I’ve been using Macs full time for almost a decade now.
I never use Launchpad, but Mission Control is the main way I switch between applications. I find it convenient that it’s bound (not sure if by default) to the “four fingers towards the screen” gesture on the trackpad.
I use multiple desktops constantly, it’s the main way I organize my work. I also find them convenient to switch between since they’re mapped to the sideways flick four fingers gesture. I guess using virtual desktops is something I was doing before I started using Macs anyway.
I keep most of my apps full screen which I guess fits this workflow better. Before I used Macs I was using tiling window managers on Linux such as AwesomeWM and XMonad, so I had some resistance to using full screen a lot, but somehow I adapted. My terminal is still tiled and it’s what matters the most.
Not using Launchpad nor multiple desktops (like you, I find two monitors are enough), but exposé mapped on hot corners is very useful, to either switch to an invisible app, or access the desktop. A quick mouse move to the top-right (with mouse acceleration, you don't need the movement to be long, just fast), and there you go.
It's funny, because as a MacOS user I pretty much never use multiple desktops, although I used it a lot in GNOME 2, because of how obvious it was that there was something in another desktop[1]. I think it really help multiple desktops feel more "grounded in space", like another monitor.
In MacOS, other desktops feel like a background thing that it's easy to forget (kind of like having a process running on another `screen` session).
If it's meant to be distraction-free then why the panel? In traditional WMs it could show running apps or the application menu you would use somewhat actively, now it only shows the clock (which I find useful but unnecessary - not worth dedicating an entire panel) and some indicators I certainly don't need to see all the time. The whole dash is also an additional entity of questionable value - I never felt like I need a full-screen launcher nor a full-screen workspace switcher.
on some of the rolling distributions (suse tumbleweed, arch, fedora rawhide) it's probably in the repos soon. Technically I guess you can go to gitlab and try to build it from source but I think that's pretty adventurous and likely going to break stuff
One of the best things about macOS is how well integrated the touchpad is with the desktop environment. As in, I can do the four-finger swipe to move between workspaces, and if I drag it slowly and halfway, then yank back, the animation will follow my movements exactly.
Seems Gnome now has a bunch of those features. Are there any touchpads for which it's this well integrated and works? Or is it the same that it's always been: there's some kind of binary "gesture" recognizer that is then executed with a pretty animation?
This is one of the biggest things keeping me on macOS at the moment.
I believe it depends on libinput which is a heroic one-man project.
It can’t possibly be good on every device ever created, but it is pretty good I would say. Four-finger swipe up down works on gnome 3 already and it is a smooth motion, not a binary recognized thingy fortunately.
IMHO, no. I give GNOME a re-assessment every time there's a new Ubuntu release, and it seldom takes more than an hour or so (if that) to find a reason why I'm glad my work boxes run Xfce and my home ones run Unity.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] thread[1]: https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
So sad...
if the Pop!_Shell extensions get made mainline in addition to the changes here, I will probably go from disliking/tolerating vanilla GNOME to possibly daily driving.
Firstly, without major versions it does not single anything to end users and end developers. Is '40' still mostly compatible with the gnome 3.x.x API? Is there a major divergence between 40 and 41? Is 41 and 40 a total rewrite?
3.x.x works and there's a reason why. It conveys a lot of information quickly and is well understood.
reducing things down to a single number is meaningless and clearly branding drivel. I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.
Yawn
Another great and more relevant example is browsers.
You change the name. Like "Raku" instead of "Perl6". Once you've reached a certain level of stability and usage, any substantial breaking change is going to inevitably result in a fork, so embracing that up front is going to result in a much better experience.
To me it communicates no commitment to backwards compatibility, i.e. no semantic versioning. This might be enforceable if one is Apple, but doesn't sound good for an open-source platform.
That may not sound like much of a promise, but it is. Applications written for GNOME 2.x won't run under 3.x.
x would increment on the removal of a feature
y would increment on the addition or change of a feature
z would increment on a bug fix
And they definitely did break from 3.0 to 4.0 as I experienced by simply trying to get a sample application from the docs running, and failed to.
This is so frustrating! They never stop! I don't care for any of the new features, I just want things to continue working!
dnf repoquery --whatdepends gtk4-0:4.1.2-1.fc35.x86_64
breeze-gtk-gtk4-0:5.21.3-1.fc35.noarch fcitx5-gtk4-0:5.0.4-1.fc35.x86_64 gnome-chess-0:40~alpha-1.fc35.x86_64 gnome-extensions-app-0:40.0~rc-1.fc35.x86_64 gnome-shell-0:40.0-1.fc35.x86_64 gtk4-devel-0:4.1.2-1.fc35.x86_64 ibus-gtk4-0:1.5.24-3.fc35.x86_64
dnf repoquery --whatdepends gtk3-0:3.24.27-1.fc35.x86_64
... everything else (100's of packages)
Software/package version numbers are just a marketing name. It's the ABI version number on the library (e.g. libgtk4.so.1 vs libgtk4.so.0) that needs to be changed if functions or parameters to functions in the original ABI in the older libgtk4.so.0 library are modified or deleted. It's very common to have two libraries of the same name being used side-by-side with some applications compiled against a newer ABI, and other applications compiled against an older ABI.
The problem with Gnome development is that library ABIs are just one of many interfaces used. There are also GSettings/dconf interfaces, D-Bus interfaces, file formats, etc on top of the usual conflicts in package dependencies (e.g. two packages wanting to write two different unversioned files to disk).
> I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.
The Gnome project has done an enormous amount to push the open source and free desktop forward. The least we can do is not impute sinister motives to them. What do they stand to gain from "obfuscat[ing]" their version number when their code is all open source?
Are you a current Linux desktop user? How long have you been? What distros do you use?
If Gnome had just paused or become what MATE is today, would we be better off? If you were suddenly emperor of the Gnome Foundation, what would you direct them to do?
It's a lot easier for everyone if the app developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved themes, or if the theme developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved apps.
Central design is somewhat restrictive but a bazaar style of development for everything will only result in chaos. The kernel itself has become pretty much cathedral at this point, and not having a central init system (which is quite good, I don’t see the blind hate towards it which is usually never justified on technical merit) would have set back whole of linux by many years.
As much as I dislike that Red Hat has a specific role in the linux desktop case, they do sponsor important work.
Currently, not all themes work properly with GTK 4, but they will eventually get there. Personally, I use the Mojave-gtk-theme. It wastes no space and is beautifully designed.
[edited for grammar]
Canonical, could you please make the Ubuntu font really-SIL-free, so that Cantarell can be taken behind the barn and shot? Pretty please?
[1] https://rsms.me/inter/
I have no idea how you can productively work that way
The reason for getting 4K monitors is not to have less stuff that can make you productive visible
KDE 3.5 was the top of OSS desktops, in my opinion
I can't answer your other questions. Not only I don't have GNOME 40 but I greatly tweaked Ubuntu 20' GNOME to disable all animations, remove the launcher, move the top bar to the bottom, use those very same horizontal virtual desktops they introduced in 40 (hurrah) and add an old Windows like taskbar. It feels much more productive than the default settings.
I like Gnome default, but KDE does most of what you described by default too.
I kept using GNOME fallback (or flashback?) until 2018 because it worked as I like. I knew there were GNOME shell extensions to suit my needs by then so I switched to GNOME shell with Ubuntu 18.04.
I never researched KDE so I don't know what became of it. A total change of DE is a big thing and could take a lot of time.
I prefer a taskbar at the bottom with one button per window in it, so that I can have an overview of which windows are open, which document each has, and quickly switch to it with mouse (when not using alt+tab to switch between recent windows).
What I do not want is to have to activate something, or have some animation, first, before seeing what I want to navigate to.
However, often we don't need to do that because GNOME encourages us to spread our windows over several workspaces. The animation for switching workspaces is practically instantaneous.
I often have several windows of the same application open at the same time (particularly browser and terminal). When I want to switch from say the IDE to the _right_ browser window, how do I do that in Gnome? (I use Workspace Matrix[0] as I'm a visual type, and that works for me, but perhaps there's a better way?)
Sometimes a more direct approach is to use the action "Switch windows" by assigning it a shortcut Keyboard settings.
If I'm switching windows and I'm not alt-tabbing, I usually just hit the super key and select the window from the thumbnails/previews.
I don't find that to be unproductive, but then, I haven't really been even trying to change the basics of my desktop or experimenting much in a while, so it might be that I've just settled for it to some extent.
If I had to first move the mouse to one location in order to get a list of windows, and then again to another location to select the window I want, I don't think that would work at all. But with a very easily accessible keyboard shortcut for the first part it does.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/collections/windowsthe...
http://litestep.net/
No idea if they still work.
IIRC even KDE plasma worked. But these days there are a few KDE apps on the microsoft store or on kde.org.
Even if you could install that on windows (compiling everythong with cygwin?), it wouldn't really be windows, mind you.
It is possible to mitigate some of that inconvenience by using a theme where everything is scaled up (and there are tools to generate them), but there will be still GTK 2 software that looks bad.
[1] https://mate-desktop.org/
Specifically, I want to be able to click around on directories to choose where to save a file, type the file name, then press enter. This should save the file, not filter the directory listing.
Also, I don’t want it to default to overwriting some file I saved last week.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding.
The workaround is that I must remember to hit Alt+N to focus on the filename box before typing. Usually I forget though.
I was able to download the debian source for a couple gtk applications (ie, gedit/pluma) and apply community sourced patches to them to get back the text/file path entry box. But there's no way I am going to be able to fix Gtk itself. And fixing every application on my system by compiling from source and making new debian packages, well, I might as well linux from scratch.
I'd be willing to donate a good chunk of money just to support "basic UX" improvements to FOSS software and toolkits like Gtk.
Should we start a "Fix the Gtk file chooser" Gofundme?
Probably redesigning the entire interface. "For your convenience".
UI designers are probably limited and there is just a lot of drama about the filechooser so it's easy to find other things to work on.
They are busy working on various things, this is certain, and these things are apparently more important for them. Like, well, GTK4.
I suppose most Red Hat customers are corporate, and when they ask for featureful Linux desktop, they likely mean playing nice with corporate systems. This is why Evince is such a good PDF viewer, compared to a lot of others; it can even fill in forms. This is why the file chooser without image preview is fine as is for corporate use, because I suppose that 0% of graphic designers choose a Linux machine in a corporate setting.
jwz was not talking about the age, he was talking about the issue of ignoring bugs to the point where they reach decades old, and often even then persist and go unfixed. Some bugs live multiple decades, across three different issue trackers, having to be reopened each time.
The fun fact is that he wrote this in 2003, about the GNOME developers. Not much has changed in 20 years, it seems.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Thing about it is, it's the responsibility of the GNOME project. It's the responsibility of the developers that sign up to it. Each time GNOME has been improved, old problems still persist. It says something about a project and the integrity of the developers when they claim to increase usability and yet do not bother with longstanding problems.
The root of the problem is a certain mindset to development. One that is numerous and yet flawed.
"Move fast, break things! No time to fix them we have other concerns like- checks notes- revising every system menu to look slightly different. Hell yeah!! Wooh!"
The save dialog can be expanded by default by tweaking it though: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos...
Does anyone know of an issue in their tracker with an official stance on it?
Both Google Chrome and Firefox use GTK's file picker (at least when "saving link as..." at least on Fedora 34 Prerelease) so what would you do for a web browser?
If your environment has a xdg portal port (KDE does), you can use the relevant portal. Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 , and then firefox uses the native file picker.
Because of the release of GNOME $next, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME $prev, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME $next, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks...
[1] adapted from: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
By contrast KDE/Qt has always had a stronger Win9x feel through and through.
Like on all the other desktops?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_OS
It looks like they’ve taken a lot of the best parts of MacOS and built something really nice atop it.
from Palm
MacOS’s fundamental look has a pretty consistent chain all the way back to NextOS in the 90s. The Dock, the dot indicator, and many other core pieces are visible in versions of MacOS which predate the launch of webOS. MacOS borrows some bits from webOS as well, but the fundamental Dock layout is right out of NextStep.
But the apps and the ecosystem really is ugly, messy and inconsistent. For example if you look at the controls you got with GTK out of the box in GTK3 era (when I last tried to build something with it) I remember huge paddings, unintuitive UX (the GTK file picker is the worst I've used) and poor layout controls. Go check out an app like https://inkscape.org and compare it to something like Illustrator or Gnome to Photoshop. The messy jumbled stacks of options with huge icons and paddings instead of being condensed and easy to use - most of it stems from GTK controls being bad.
Now this is all with a huge disclaimer that I haven't used a Linux desktop in over 5 years at this point, maybe things got better but I doubt it - I still use Inkscape for example from time to time and Gimp on OSX and putting the non-native issues aside the apps look terrible on their own because of what I already said.
The current state of Apple App Store app is just the cherry on the top.
The problem is more with GTK design which is crap for 80% of PC applications with dense control layouts, the high padding touch style widgets it offers out of the box work for low density stuff not complex editors).
Even non-native OSX apps integrate into OS in a predictable manner (use toolbar, shortcuts, native file dialogs, etc.)
https://neon.kde.org/
Nowdays I need to develop stuff that deploys to iOS so I'm kind of stuck on a mac.
KDE looks like you got stuck in an alternative reality and Windows 7 evolved differently. (And Windows 8/10 never happened)
I never really cared for the Windows UI.
I was mostly stricken with how much many of the features they are highlighting look straight out of stuff which was unveiled in MacOS about 5+ years ago. Extensive gesture support being a biggie.
Was looking for when this GNOME version will be integrated to Ubuntu to check them out, it will not land in the next Ubuntu version.
> Ubuntu 21.04 will NOT include GNOME 40. Bew Ubuntu releases typically include the newest GNOME release but this time it won’t. Why? Well, GNOME 40 features bold design changes that Ubuntu devs feel they need more time to ‘adapt’ to. [1]
Overall I like the refresh, but for me the real UX test is when you use it for a week/month. Will have to wait!
[1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/01/ubuntu-21-04-release-fea...
In my opinion, your skepticism about the general appeal of these features seems reasonable. I would expect the average laptop owner uses these rarely if ever. People who spend a lot of time with their machine may use only one or two, I bet. Spotlight in particular seems to be eating Launchpad's lunch.
If my main desktop has tons of windows open, and the panel is crowded as heck with browser, file manager, text editor, and terminal windows (all of which can occupy all of your monitors when you're doing a given thing because there's that many of them), it's overwhelming. It's like browser tabs piling up out of control, except the tabs are also windows you have to maximize and minimize. Dedicating multiple desktop to multiple task (main, tinkering, work, etc.) is so much better.
And I no longer use Mission Control/Expose, but I certainly did find it useful on smaller screens (I now use a comically large 43” 4k@1x).
Same with multiple desktops, and I’ve seen it used on nearly every screenshare I’ve been on this past year.
My workflow now is probably more fussy than it could be, but I pretty much just use cmd-~ and cmd-` now.
Edit to add: I think it also depends quite a bit on input device. Seeing others mention trackpad gestures, I remember finding Mission Control/multiple desktops much more useful when I primarily used my MBP on my lap.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease
Well, many of us use a single monitor or a laptop to get work done. Thus multiple workspaces make more sense.
Virual workspaces have been in Unix/Linux/X-Windows since the 90s (or even before) anyway.
>Do you guys actually use these features? I find the contextual switching distracting.
Yep.
Why would it be more distracting than looking to another monitor (and thus having to physically turn your gaze/neck as opposed to a single keyboard shortcut)?
For me, the purpose of multiple desktops is to reduce distration. Instead of many things visible to you all the time (in one or more monitors) and competing for your attention, you can have several things open, but only focus to one at a time, separate them by work, or program type, or workflow step, etc.
I never use Launchpad, but Mission Control is the main way I switch between applications. I find it convenient that it’s bound (not sure if by default) to the “four fingers towards the screen” gesture on the trackpad.
I use multiple desktops constantly, it’s the main way I organize my work. I also find them convenient to switch between since they’re mapped to the sideways flick four fingers gesture. I guess using virtual desktops is something I was doing before I started using Macs anyway.
I keep most of my apps full screen which I guess fits this workflow better. Before I used Macs I was using tiling window managers on Linux such as AwesomeWM and XMonad, so I had some resistance to using full screen a lot, but somehow I adapted. My terminal is still tiled and it’s what matters the most.
In MacOS, other desktops feel like a background thing that it's easy to forget (kind of like having a process running on another `screen` session).
1: The widget in the bottom right corner https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.32/figures/gnome...
Seems Gnome now has a bunch of those features. Are there any touchpads for which it's this well integrated and works? Or is it the same that it's always been: there's some kind of binary "gesture" recognizer that is then executed with a pretty animation?
This is one of the biggest things keeping me on macOS at the moment.
It can’t possibly be good on every device ever created, but it is pretty good I would say. Four-finger swipe up down works on gnome 3 already and it is a smooth motion, not a binary recognized thingy fortunately.