I don't get why "Linux on desktop" people feel the need to continually reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is, just to be novel or different. This goes back to things like KDE3/KDE4 and Canonical's Unity.
What is wrong with a more traditionally designed desktop metaphor such as how it's implemented in XFCE4 or LXDE?
As a baseline for comparison I've used very nearly every linux or BSD based GUI desktop (on top of xfree86 or xorg) that has existed in the past 20 years, since the earliest days of KDE2 and Gnome. And I'm presently using a fairly normal XFCE4 setup.
I'm not even so much complaining about GNOME, which these days has actually reverted to something much closer to a classical desktop metaphor that is equally suitable for technical users and noobs...
But every other group of people with a new GUI idea that thinks "Nope, we're gonna reinvent the wheel and make a new weird GUI just because". Linux on desktop is already what, 1% to a max of 2% of desktop market share world wide? And then you have people building weird stuff on top of xorg or wayland that is used by one percent of that one percent just for the sake of being different.
If it's intended and promoted for technically sophisticated users to play around with? Sure, great idea I suppose, the more the merrier. But so many of these concepts are pushed as a "better, easier to use, more user friendly for noobs" GUI, when in fact all it does is split the market and confuse the end user. In particular I'm thinking of the various efforts that have been made to clone the MacOS user interface, including the Dock.
I should note that my opinion above also applies to Windows 8/8.1, which was clearly a misstep, as evidenced by Microsoft returning to a much more classic desktop environment design for Windows 10. At least they acknowledged what went wrong and backed away from it.
My mum, sister and dad represent my noob test group. All of them had no issues when i converted them to gnome 3. In my opinion it actually is a more user friendly desktop and it worked for them. Only my dad is used to windows at all, so the other two dont weight every desktop against win95
Of course anyone here is welcome to dedicate their life to crafting the perfect windows 9x style desktop experience. I would wager that there's actually less interest in such an experience than GNOME complaints would have us believe.
Not sure why you're throwing KDE into this. I've been using it for almost a decade now. It's stayed fairly consistent, offers the familiar desktop, panel and launcher style interface, is fully customizable in just about every way. Doesn't hide anything from you, doesn't make things obtuse or opaque. Never tried to force some mobile interface on you. It's pretty much the opposite of GNOME in every way.
Did you see or use KDE4 when it was new? KDE4 was a radical departure from the earlier design, which looked like a mimicry of Windows Vista for "reasons".
Compared to Gnome 3/40 or Windows 8 or even Windows 10, Windows Vista was positively sensible. Its problem was hardware requirements that were hard to meet at the time.
By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.
Yeah i did. That 'look' makes not much of a difference when you can customize every single aspect of the desktop environment. My desktop looks and functions identically now to the way it looked and functioned in KDE3 and KDE4, apart from some small improvements and changes I've made over the years.
The problem with newer versions of GNOME is, you get what they give you and you better like it cause that's all she wrote.
Personally i am done with the win95 approach of desktop. What i want is a desktop that does not get into my way but is able to present me with whatever i want a few keystrokes away. Gnome 3 did a really great job in that.
i3 has been quite stable for several years and doesn't seem to be changing. Perhaps the problem is that you're trying to follow the latest UX fads instead of staying with something stable, not to mention clearly superior.
But of course, Gnome is the default in many Linuxes so I understand how easy it is to just flow with it.
Unity made a better utilization of widescreen displays by having taskbar (dock; called launcher) moved to left but retaining notification indicators in a top panel which also functioned as integrated menu and title bar for maximized applications. (Meaning no vertical space was wasted.) The dash was also arguably more useful than the start menu. You had one single utility which looked for both programs to run and files. Also closely related to Dash, Unity offered HUD which was a way to search through menus and change system options. (HUD was similar to Humanized Enso.)
It's interesting to compare with a default XFCE4. You have a quick launcher which is pointlessly distinct from the taskbar, taskbar is at top wasting vertical space, and also maximized windows have their title and menu bar wasting even more.
Also what you mean with _traditionally designed desktop_? Unity takes inspiration from Mac OS (dock, global menu) which had a desktop-oriented metaphor and predates any popular desktop environment.
There's nothing wrong with XFCE or LXDE, if that's what you like then use them. But I don't understand why such users always feel the need to criticize gnome, not for it's actual issues but because they don't like its paradigm. I for one couldn't be happier that they decided to "reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is". I find its paradigm intuitive and efficient.
It was the application of better concepts from both OSX and Windows. That was it strength. Top menu (better mouse usability), HUD (better keyboard usability), grid virtual desktops (better visual muscle memory), and so on. Nothing there was new or unique. But it was more ergonomic than the alternatives now.
I still miss the HUD, and the reason I use Gnome is support for autorotation, and other hardware features. And the fact that Unity now is a dead end.
It seems you did not use Unity, and you were part of the group of people who caused its demise by endlessly complaining.
Is the three finger swipe a "gesture"? I'm guessing a decent amount of older hardware does not recognise a three finger swipe. So workspace browsing would be broken ootb for these users.
Nothing would be "broken". If you have a multitouch trackpad you can use A, if you have a mouse you can use B, if you have just a keyboard you can use C, if you have just a touchscreen you can use D,...
Same confusion years ago with the login screen. No, you don't have to swype. You can or you can press any key, just like on any PC ever.
Basic stuff like minimizing a window does not work (with Firefox). Great job Gnome 40 team. I wonder truly also, why does anyone develop Gnome and why does Gnome get picked to be the default environment for Ubuntu still.
I wish Linux -developers would see the way of unifying their powers finally, but no, desktop year of Linux 2025 still probably means not having basic UI stuff figured out, while macOS and Windows troddle on to have at least a working and figured out base environment which to build actual features upon.
Also, the naming .. Gnome, Gimp. Who likes to use software with these names ? :P
That’s quite an attitude when talking about free software.
Also, as have been said plenty of times, Gnome is opinionated very much. And it is not the usual stacked wm, after using it for a time, I’ve never ever wanted to minimize something.
Of course it won’t be everyone’s thing, feel free to use the thousand other wm’s out there, that can minimize for you...
Firefox doesn't have a minimise option because it implements its own title bar. You can disable that in firefox prefs. Or the native menu is accessible with win key + (right?) click. I wouldn't know exactly because I've never once felt the need to minimise a window in gnome 3+.
People develop and use gnome because it works well and they like it.
Please stop putting action/choice buttons (Ok, Cancel, Yes, No, etc.) on windows title bars!
There has been a reason why they were placed at the bottom: I grab a window by its title bar and if needed I can arrange it through the closest controls over there that should be only the buttons to act on the window itself and not the contents, then I read the contents and while doing so my focus moves towards the window lower side, so that when I'm done I can take a choice through the closest controls I can find there which are the ones acting on the content of the window.
You think title bars waste too much space? Well sometimes I do too, but placing controls on them is a solution that creates new problems; just make them thinner, but please stop breaking decades of functional UI design with this nonsense.
I know that, the problem is having to move the attention back to the upper part of the window after having read its contents: it's counter intuitive as I have to move my eyes up to down to read, then up again to take an action.
What you're describing doesn't match the GNOME HIG. Buttons should actually be on the bottom for dialogs that require you to read through and then make a choice: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/dialogs.html.en
The buttons should only placed in the headers for other dialogs that require more explicit actions before the dialog can be dismissed, such as the file selection dialog.
An aging travel netbook that I have with XFCE is going to be the last one with GNU/Linux natively installed, when it dies it is going to be only macOS/Windows devices around here.
Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.
Gnome has been on this UI course for years. Personally I can't stand it, it breaks a lot of sensible UI conventions and assumes either trackpad or a touchscreen, perhaps they think everyone is on a laptop all the time.
Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether?
Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated).
Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there.
I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE.
[1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.
Because for better or worse, Gtk is considered the GNU/Linux UI toolkit, so it means while one might use KDE, every cross platform framework (with Qt's exception) sees Gtk as the "native" GNU/Linux UI toolkit.
Sadly Qt 5, due to the Qt Company pushing FOSS "freeloaders" on to bleeding edge and unstable versions of Qt 6[0], is becoming less and less viable for non-commercial, cross-platform app development.
Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1]
The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9).
The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come.
Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3].
Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise.
GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess.
It's not about money. There are plenty of FOSS non-profit software projects that want to be able to distribute their apps and not have to deal with all this fragmentation.
If you develop a QML app and want it to compile and run properly on all distros out there you need to code use a very low common denominator version of Qt and the associated QML components (versioning for which is only checked at runtime).
Have been using desktop Linux for almost 2 decades, My last 2 workplaces have been Linux desktop centric. Helped deploy quite a few Linux workstations.
I don't know many people that use Gnome.
Most use either KDE or some tiling WM (or some custom fork of Gnome2/3 that looks nothing like default gnome).
When Ubuntu dropped unity, some people went to gnome, some stayed but at least in my circles most bounced off.
The situation with Glade is not because of malicious intent, please don't assume bad faith. No GTK developers are happy that Glade has basically been deprecated in GTK4, it was a necessity due to technical reasons. Note that it's only GTK4 that it doesn't work for, Glade is still a reasonable choice for GTK3 applications.
There is a replacement for GTK4 being developed, it turns out starting from scratch for the new builder format is easier than trying to refactor everything in Glade.
I don’t understand this shitting on open source software. Criticism would be okay, but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
> Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar
Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example.
> The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results.
It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel.
> Desktop scaling
Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).
You don't understand ? I don't know, maybe a decade of not listening to its actual user instead of pouring ton of work for fantasied ones ?
Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design.
If Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base.
Or, the angry crowd who doesn't use it stops criticising an opinionated desktop, and leave the users who happen to agree with said opinions use that desktop. I love gnome the way it is.
I don't minimise Windows, I love the launcher, the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx, and it's not the sluggish monster everyone seems to think it is.
>the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx
I was happy to see someone is happy with gnome, but the shortcuts argument makes me think you are trolling
the valid criticism of opinionated gnome desktop is that gnome is being redesigned right now with no particular reason, just highly opinionated developers feel like it. That's weird from a gnome user perspective(the one that agreed with previous iteration of opinionated work flow).
Well, that's the project of those "highly opinionated developers". They work for free, and they really sleep well if you prefer to install XFCE or create a fork of the previous iterations of Gnome.
Gnome Foundation rises lots of money from both companies and individuals and there are gnome developers working full-time or part-time and being paid to do it, so this old argument "this is free software, they work for free in their spare time, they owe you nothing" doesn't apply in this context.
I use gnome on desktop and I liked it. Keyboard shortcuts are the most important way to control desktop for me, I do not care if it is hard to control using mouse. I do not need hierarchic program menu, start button and lots of configuration dialogs.
It is true that some defaults are annoying and lots of configuration options are missing in GUI programs but it is still possible to configure basically everything using gsettings or gnome extensions (which I prefer over KDE style config).
I do not like some gnome apps (i.e. nautilus or gedit) but there are alternatives so no big problem there.
Maybe, since Gnome is a Free software, the Gnome developers team does not owe anything to anyone ? I really like Gnome choices, but if I change my mind on a future update, who am I to rant against a project that works "for free"?
Some years ago, I was myself a "really opinionated user" and well ... Linux doesn't lack of mature opinionated DE : you can do barely anything you want with XFCE, MATE and KDE.
Also, I really don't understand this "touchscreen oriented Gnome". There is nothing in Gnome that is meant to be used in touch mode. Gnome ergonomics are totally built around the Super key (and now, touchpad gestures) once you get this, you understand all the gnome _desktop_ paradigm.
It's really inspired by OSX where every workflow action can be done with touchpad gestures and keyboard (without moving the pointer, which is only useful inside applications). Once you get this paradigm, there is no way to go back.
I really think also that Gnome was betting for better touchpad support on linux years and years ago, but it looks like we had to wait for Wayland to have something decent.
They were not "betting for better touchpad" but for tablet. I remember clearly arguments being made about GNOME 3 being targeted at tablet at the time when I was on the mailing-lists.
> .....but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith.
This article was written 5-days after Gnome 40s official release.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
>>It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40. The aforementioned functionality was either removed or the extensions that provided said functionality are broken.
The common denominator and undeniable truth with every iteration of Gnome over the last x-years is inherent functionality is neutered and burdened by extension devs.
> It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40.
We are either talking about something different, or I don’t know.
If you press Super or swipe 3 fingers up you get the preview of every app on every desktop. On the picture in the article, the author has no window open (as apparent from the dock not having any “open” icons)
That's precisely what the author wrote, you just replaced "an extra mouse click" with "press Super or swipe 3 fingers up", hence the additional step to display all running applications still remains with your solution.
I don't need a screenshot, I have it running here. By default GNOME does not display all running applications on the desktop, you always have to do an extra step (mouse click, hot corner, key press, swipe) and activate the Activities screen, which is not necessary on basically any other desktop system, and that is precisely what the author complained about.
That’s called not having a taskbar, and has been the case since Gnome 3 (without extensions), so I don’t see how is it relevant under gnome 40.
And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Or a dock, the one GNOME already implements in its Activities screen.
> and has been the case since Gnome 3 (without extensions), so I don’t see how is it relevant under gnome 40.
The author never said otherwise, their whole point was to explain, that moving the dock from the left, which is in close range to the hot corner and button to activate the Activities screen, to the bottom, means that you now have to move the mouse a much larger distance if you want to access the dock with the mouse. And since GNOME doesn't support an auto-hiding dock at the bottom, there's no way around that when you use the mouse.
I mean I'm just rephrasing what the author already wrote, because I think they made their point pretty clear to begin with.
> And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Every other modern and popular desktop on this planet supports auto-hiding docks/panels and nobody asks GNOME to force an always visible dock on you.
If the author has no windows open and isn't on the overview that's because the author chose to not be on the overview. GNOME boots into the overview now
You missed the point. They meant there's no always-on-display taskbar.
>It can be set in Tweaks
>Gnome Tweaks
Probably, but should you "need a SEPARATE application" (as they say) to set something that should be default? That you can configure those things using third-party software doesn't take away from the point the author is making, and if anything enhances it since some should've been the default.
It should not be the default; it's a waste of scarce horizontal pixels on something you may not need to use all the time. Alt+Tab is sufficient for seeing which Windows are open, and switching among them.
I gave up on Gnome, there are many things that I had to tweak to have productive environment, and I don't like to be part of experiments(Gnome 40) on my machines. I simply moved to i3/sway, best decision ever.
I like i3/sway on small screens, but on my large 4k screen all the windows are too big, too much white space. For me, the tiling paradigm does not work with big monitors. Linux on the whole doesn't work well with 4K. I don't know what the solution is, I just want 150% UI scaling like windows.
I'm using i3 with 4k monitors, just set Xft.dpi: 163 in Xresources and that's it. Depending on your applications, you may need to tweak some individually, for example Spotify can be adjusted via cli argument. There's one con, you can't have mixed HiDPI and non-HiDPI displays.
For sway it's much easier, you can have DPI scaling per monitor, but XWayland apps are blurry, so I'm waiting for all my apps to be updated to Wayland. There's experimental sway/wlroots branch with proper XWayland scaling, but I don't have easy way to install it.
I'd be really interested in a detailed review of Gnome by someone who actually wants this model of interaction. I, for one, do not care about it so have no slightest inclination to bash Gnome or, to be honest, even try it by this point. But I don't mind to read why it's great for someone else. If you want classic desktop, there's always LXQT, MATE, XFCE, OpenBox, JWM or even KDE.
This article honestly just feels like a symptom of a larger issue of how Linux is being handled for general desktop usage.
And I know that this is Hacker News and there will be thousands of people screaming "but it works on my machine"... It doesn't work for the vast majority of other peoples' machines. So much that having a cheap smartphone often provides a more functional environment for the average user.
Ha, it seems phosh for the librem 5 might have pushed too many changes upstream to gnome. FWIW those paradigms seem to work great in the mobile context.
I'm a happy Gnome user since Gnome 2 was released and I like the mobile-like style of Gnome and other desktops, but I agree with almost all criticism directed to Gnome 40 and Gnome in general.
Did I like Gnome 40? Hell, yeah! Is it suck? Hell, yeah!
It sucks because, again, it disrupts my workflow, a little less than Gnome 3, but yet is a redesign with no good reason except the taste of Gnome devs.
Of course they can do whatever they want, but it is disrespectful with users that invested their time not only using but promoting Gnome and its ecosystem.
I have a keyboard-centric workflow and yet it is really annoying how much clicks I need when I use the mouse because despite having keyboard shortcuts there are a lot of stuff in Gnome hidden in menus, buttons and dialogs with no shortcuts at all.
People say the criticism is from people that don't use or don't like Gnome, but it is not true. Gnome users have a lot of criticism but Gnome devs don't care about it. Even developers that build apps using GTK and Gnome have criticism but, again, Gnome devs don't care.
I think Gnome 40 is a good time for both Gnome devs and Gnome users learn how to receive these criticism, from both people inside and outside Gnome community.
I wonder whether UX tests are performed during the development of Gnome. A big number of the design decisions seeming arbitrary. Overall there is very little usability progress since Gnome 3 appeared.
Gnome has long been my favorite desktop, but they never managed to trim Gnome for usability and efficiency. Instead their followed a weird concept of minimalism and a pointless touch oriented (as if anyone would use it on a smart phone!) UI.
As much as I like the idea of Linux as my primary desktop OS, I've given up.
In the future I see Windows macOS and ChromeOS but no Linux on classical computers (not smartphones and tablets).
It turns out that my Manjaro is already running Gnome 40. Honestly, I didn't even notice when this upgrade took place, but now I finally get why the icons have changed! :D
Gnome may not be perfect, but as a DE it provides enough features, flexibility, simplicity and visual appearance. In the end, it's not the DE you're working with, you just need it for setting up your system, running your apps, window management, etc. Best is when you just forget about having it and Gnome is okay with that regards.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadWhat is wrong with a more traditionally designed desktop metaphor such as how it's implemented in XFCE4 or LXDE?
As a baseline for comparison I've used very nearly every linux or BSD based GUI desktop (on top of xfree86 or xorg) that has existed in the past 20 years, since the earliest days of KDE2 and Gnome. And I'm presently using a fairly normal XFCE4 setup.
We get it, you want the classic desktop paradigm. Nothing wrong with that, but that ship has sailed years ago with regards to GNOME.
And why shouldn't people implementing GNOME for free have fun and experiment. Nobody wants to implement windows 95 for fun.
But every other group of people with a new GUI idea that thinks "Nope, we're gonna reinvent the wheel and make a new weird GUI just because". Linux on desktop is already what, 1% to a max of 2% of desktop market share world wide? And then you have people building weird stuff on top of xorg or wayland that is used by one percent of that one percent just for the sake of being different.
If it's intended and promoted for technically sophisticated users to play around with? Sure, great idea I suppose, the more the merrier. But so many of these concepts are pushed as a "better, easier to use, more user friendly for noobs" GUI, when in fact all it does is split the market and confuse the end user. In particular I'm thinking of the various efforts that have been made to clone the MacOS user interface, including the Dock.
I should note that my opinion above also applies to Windows 8/8.1, which was clearly a misstep, as evidenced by Microsoft returning to a much more classic desktop environment design for Windows 10. At least they acknowledged what went wrong and backed away from it.
Sort of like a GUI version of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsFzc0wAtFs
That might be the tragedy of IT: unlike, say, traditional japanese joinery, traditional computing is not (yet?) a thing, and it really should be.
By 4.10 or so KDE 4 had matured to KDE 3 level and this hasn't changed with Plasma 5.
The problem with newer versions of GNOME is, you get what they give you and you better like it cause that's all she wrote.
But of course, Gnome is the default in many Linuxes so I understand how easy it is to just flow with it.
It's interesting to compare with a default XFCE4. You have a quick launcher which is pointlessly distinct from the taskbar, taskbar is at top wasting vertical space, and also maximized windows have their title and menu bar wasting even more.
Also what you mean with _traditionally designed desktop_? Unity takes inspiration from Mac OS (dock, global menu) which had a desktop-oriented metaphor and predates any popular desktop environment.
It was the application of better concepts from both OSX and Windows. That was it strength. Top menu (better mouse usability), HUD (better keyboard usability), grid virtual desktops (better visual muscle memory), and so on. Nothing there was new or unique. But it was more ergonomic than the alternatives now.
I still miss the HUD, and the reason I use Gnome is support for autorotation, and other hardware features. And the fact that Unity now is a dead end.
It seems you did not use Unity, and you were part of the group of people who caused its demise by endlessly complaining.
So far (from articles like yours):
- Dash to dock broken
- Extension management (FLATPACK?) broken
1. https://forty.gnome.org/
Same confusion years ago with the login screen. No, you don't have to swype. You can or you can press any key, just like on any PC ever.
I wish Linux -developers would see the way of unifying their powers finally, but no, desktop year of Linux 2025 still probably means not having basic UI stuff figured out, while macOS and Windows troddle on to have at least a working and figured out base environment which to build actual features upon.
Also, the naming .. Gnome, Gimp. Who likes to use software with these names ? :P
Of course it won’t be everyone’s thing, feel free to use the thousand other wm’s out there, that can minimize for you...
People develop and use gnome because it works well and they like it.
Works fine for me on GNOME 40. Couldnt say why it didnt work for the blog author.
You think title bars waste too much space? Well sometimes I do too, but placing controls on them is a solution that creates new problems; just make them thinner, but please stop breaking decades of functional UI design with this nonsense.
So if I full screen a file picker dialog, the action buttons get hidden too.
The buttons should only placed in the headers for other dialogs that require more explicit actions before the dialog can be dismissed, such as the file selection dialog.
Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.
Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether?
Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated).
Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there.
I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE.
[1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.
Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1]
The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9).
The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come.
Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3].
Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise.
GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...
[1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...
[2] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-A...
[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/
Too many people expect to be paid for their work, while not giving anything to upstream only entitlement of what should be provided as free beer.
For those there is GPL license for Qt.
If you develop a QML app and want it to compile and run properly on all distros out there you need to code use a very low common denominator version of Qt and the associated QML components (versioning for which is only checked at runtime).
Have been using desktop Linux for almost 2 decades, My last 2 workplaces have been Linux desktop centric. Helped deploy quite a few Linux workstations.
I don't know many people that use Gnome.
Most use either KDE or some tiling WM (or some custom fork of Gnome2/3 that looks nothing like default gnome).
When Ubuntu dropped unity, some people went to gnome, some stayed but at least in my circles most bounced off.
On the cloud deployments it doesn't matter as they are accessible via ssh and cloud shells, and X Windows servers can be mapped to single windows.
Most of the people that I know that use Linux desktop are developers, and they generally don't use Gnome.
On servers sure its RedHat or CentOs or Ubuntu/Debian
But desktops are Ubuntu variants, then Fedora. Don't know anyone that uses RH or CenOS desktops.
There is a replacement for GTK4 being developed, it turns out starting from scratch for the new builder format is easier than trying to refactor everything in Glade.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
> Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar
Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example.
> The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results.
It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel.
> Desktop scaling
Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).
Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design.
If Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base.
See, user too can be very opinionated ;-)
I don't minimise Windows, I love the launcher, the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx, and it's not the sluggish monster everyone seems to think it is.
« They owe you nothing » totally apply in this context. Even if you were a donator (which there are few probability you are).
It is true that some defaults are annoying and lots of configuration options are missing in GUI programs but it is still possible to configure basically everything using gsettings or gnome extensions (which I prefer over KDE style config).
I do not like some gnome apps (i.e. nautilus or gedit) but there are alternatives so no big problem there.
Some years ago, I was myself a "really opinionated user" and well ... Linux doesn't lack of mature opinionated DE : you can do barely anything you want with XFCE, MATE and KDE.
Also, I really don't understand this "touchscreen oriented Gnome". There is nothing in Gnome that is meant to be used in touch mode. Gnome ergonomics are totally built around the Super key (and now, touchpad gestures) once you get this, you understand all the gnome _desktop_ paradigm.
It's really inspired by OSX where every workflow action can be done with touchpad gestures and keyboard (without moving the pointer, which is only useful inside applications). Once you get this paradigm, there is no way to go back.
I really think also that Gnome was betting for better touchpad support on linux years and years ago, but it looks like we had to wait for Wayland to have something decent.
This article was written 5-days after Gnome 40s official release.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
>>It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40. The aforementioned functionality was either removed or the extensions that provided said functionality are broken.
The common denominator and undeniable truth with every iteration of Gnome over the last x-years is inherent functionality is neutered and burdened by extension devs.
We are either talking about something different, or I don’t know. If you press Super or swipe 3 fingers up you get the preview of every app on every desktop. On the picture in the article, the author has no window open (as apparent from the dock not having any “open” icons)
Would you like a screenshot of it, because that is what I see precisely in front of me?
And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Or a dock, the one GNOME already implements in its Activities screen.
> and has been the case since Gnome 3 (without extensions), so I don’t see how is it relevant under gnome 40.
The author never said otherwise, their whole point was to explain, that moving the dock from the left, which is in close range to the hot corner and button to activate the Activities screen, to the bottom, means that you now have to move the mouse a much larger distance if you want to access the dock with the mouse. And since GNOME doesn't support an auto-hiding dock at the bottom, there's no way around that when you use the mouse.
I mean I'm just rephrasing what the author already wrote, because I think they made their point pretty clear to begin with.
> And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Every other modern and popular desktop on this planet supports auto-hiding docks/panels and nobody asks GNOME to force an always visible dock on you.
Well ... I switched to KDE, so not really bugged by it any more.
What he wrote is factually correct (about extra click/gesture/keypress/...), and complaint of many people.
You missed the point. They meant there's no always-on-display taskbar.
>It can be set in Tweaks
>Gnome Tweaks
Probably, but should you "need a SEPARATE application" (as they say) to set something that should be default? That you can configure those things using third-party software doesn't take away from the point the author is making, and if anything enhances it since some should've been the default.
I've since tried to move away from all of this starting with Gnome back in 2000/2001 (think I first went to xfce before switching to tiling WMs)
For sway it's much easier, you can have DPI scaling per monitor, but XWayland apps are blurry, so I'm waiting for all my apps to be updated to Wayland. There's experimental sway/wlroots branch with proper XWayland scaling, but I don't have easy way to install it.
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/Design
And I know that this is Hacker News and there will be thousands of people screaming "but it works on my machine"... It doesn't work for the vast majority of other peoples' machines. So much that having a cheap smartphone often provides a more functional environment for the average user.
Did I like Gnome 40? Hell, yeah! Is it suck? Hell, yeah!
It sucks because, again, it disrupts my workflow, a little less than Gnome 3, but yet is a redesign with no good reason except the taste of Gnome devs.
Of course they can do whatever they want, but it is disrespectful with users that invested their time not only using but promoting Gnome and its ecosystem.
I have a keyboard-centric workflow and yet it is really annoying how much clicks I need when I use the mouse because despite having keyboard shortcuts there are a lot of stuff in Gnome hidden in menus, buttons and dialogs with no shortcuts at all.
People say the criticism is from people that don't use or don't like Gnome, but it is not true. Gnome users have a lot of criticism but Gnome devs don't care about it. Even developers that build apps using GTK and Gnome have criticism but, again, Gnome devs don't care.
I think Gnome 40 is a good time for both Gnome devs and Gnome users learn how to receive these criticism, from both people inside and outside Gnome community.
Gnome has long been my favorite desktop, but they never managed to trim Gnome for usability and efficiency. Instead their followed a weird concept of minimalism and a pointless touch oriented (as if anyone would use it on a smart phone!) UI.
As much as I like the idea of Linux as my primary desktop OS, I've given up.
In the future I see Windows macOS and ChromeOS but no Linux on classical computers (not smartphones and tablets).
Gnome may not be perfect, but as a DE it provides enough features, flexibility, simplicity and visual appearance. In the end, it's not the DE you're working with, you just need it for setting up your system, running your apps, window management, etc. Best is when you just forget about having it and Gnome is okay with that regards.