I'm a bit lost on what OP is complaining about. I agree that GNOME has tons of flaws, and they make some design choices that are questionable, but the 3-button titlebar click sending the window to the back of the Z-stack and being able to copy two things at once (one via clipboard, one via middle-clicking) works fine for me on GNOME 3.36.
Am I missing something? Or maybe GNOME 40 screwed things up?
I couldn't agree more. They have their HIG and their Adwaita design language, but the end result somehow is still subjectively off-putting for me personally, visual-wise and usage-wise. They need their Steve Jobs.
They would never have it because nobody would work with them.
It's an OSS projects with the most abrasive, and socially inept people around, seemingly gathered together on purpose. GNOME had few hundred active contributors on its peak, now down to at most 20-30 people.
The proliferation of *Kits is very much an intentional policy by RedHat to pull the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" scheme, except when they do the extinguish thing, the remaining people have no other option, but to move to RedHat's platform.
Were you answering to my comment? Anyways, I don't believe that Gnome nowadays is an open project de facto -- AFAIK most of the contributors are Red Hat/IBM employees for whom it's a job.
I can't honestly say this is how OSS projects die (I just don't know) but there does seem to be a correlation between corporate support and low PR acceptance. I know I'm put off by all the anti-contributor corpo-CLA nonsense that's permeated the OSS world and I'm guessing I'm not the only one.
> It's an OSS projects with the most abrasive, and socially inept people around, seemingly gathered together on purpose.
You are repeating unsubstantiated claims and accusations.
> The proliferation of *Kits is very much an intentional policy by RedHat to pull the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" scheme, except when they do the extinguish thing, the remaining people have no other option, but to move to RedHat's platform.
And this is just conspiratorial. Really, this is not contributing anything to the discussion.
Nope, I’m a huge fan. There are a couple annoyances (like not having minimize/maximize buttons by default), but they’re all easily remedied with gnome tweak tool or extensions.
I’ll admit that I was a little worried when I started seeing screenshots of libadwaita and gnome 42, heading down the path of flat-everything, but in practice, the experience has been nice on both Arch and Fedora 36.
Out of the box I can’t get used to it. I tried fedora 36 for 2 weeks with Gnome and ended up switching to KDE Plasma.
I’m constantly trying to find extensions to simplify simple tasks or make it usable and it’s frustrating. Tons of extensions are old and broken and don’t work anymore.
Visually I don’t like KDE Out of the box but I don’t need to install anything.
I tried Gnome for the last year or so and finally got fed up with how opinionated it was, and switched to KDE. But KDE was too janky -- you can customize it to perfection but if things don't work it's not perfection. So I'm back to Cinnamon.
I like gnome, and been using it for years. It's been a bit of an adjustment at first, but after I used it for a couple weeks I got hooked up. Every next version is better in some way, and Gnome 40+ is not an exception. It might be that devs are not entirely consistent, but considering how much I paid for it, I still got quite a deal
Its the least worst desktop environment on Linux.
Its usually pretty fine out of the box on a 12" laptop, but on a desktop machine with multiple monitors, a bevy of extensions are mandatory to make it as quick & efficient as a desktop UI should be.
Dash to dock to make application switching pretty much instant, hiding the dock away in the overview only ever makes sense when you're screen real-estate constrained (12" laptop)
Tiling Assistant, this lets you define custom window snapping zones, its most helpful when you have a mix of landscape/portrait displays and you need more flexibility than the built-in behaviour offers.
DDterm, this one isn't essential, but its convenient to have a terminal shade ready to go. On my ThinkPads I'd bind this to the ThinkVantage key to quickly get a terminal up.
I used to muck around with themes and icon sets years ago, but Adwaita is pretty inoffensive these days, and dark mode is not an afterthought now.
If you like DDterm you may be interested in Tilix, which is designed for Gnome. It also has a dropdown terminal shade as well as regular windowed terminals, and you can drag and drop your sessions between then.
I used to use Guake as my shade but it's a lot more convenient to have a unified solution for regular and dropdown terminals.
The hate is practically a meme at this point. It makes me wonder what people need a desktop environment to do. Most of the criticism seems to be that it's not Windows or macOS
I find they just remove features/make things harder or more annoying than they used to be. It's pretty obvious how to enter a specific path in Dolphin, Windows Explorer, Thunar, etc. In Nautilus you need a key combination. Gedit used to be great but they tucked 95% of features away for no reason, chopped out desktop icons for no reason, ditto title bars, minimize buttons etc. Different is not necessarily bad but it doesn't feel like anything is really better or easier to use with a bunch of features chopped out or hidden.
When Gnome 3 was introduced, they not only changed everything, without any way to get it functioning anything like how people were used to, but they also made it more or less impossible for Gnome 2 and 3 to reside on the same box. Overnight a system upgrade massively broke workflows with no way to go back.
Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly.
This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.
I think it could be actually directed to GTK rather than to Gnome itself.
Gnome lately assumes everyone uses it on a mobile platform touch screen; fine, there are many desktop environments so I'll use a different one, but when this assumption comes from GTK now Houston we have a problem since a huge number of Linux desktop applications use it.
I don't have anything against Gnome and actually sorta liked it on tablets, but the way GTK devs ignore every standard drives me absolutely insane. They made a sudden paradigm shift so that a plethora of desktop apps today compile with a GUI library that wants to be run on mobile. Sorry, that is not the way to go: want to add mobile functionality? Great! I fully support it, but please don't enforce it. What about a flag to be #defined at compile time and used only if the app code completely honors it?
I hope somebody will create a patch or something to undo that behavior.
You're not. I really like Gnome and how it gets out of my way.
Most of the time complaints about Gnome boil down to "It's not behaving the way I think it should" and that - to me - is not a valid criticism.
People love to hate and Gnome is very prominent, so it is going to get hate and heat.
Let's take the linked article for example. What's its main topic? "Windows management".
You know what? It's 2022 and I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows.
>I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows.
What do you mean? Like GNOME will remove the concept of windows and you will have only 1 window maximum?
Do you use Slack or email? How do you get notifications without a System Tray?
Or you use a distro that restored some of the features back since GNOME is targeting only people that use only GNOME apps and it seems only 1 window at a time.
I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware for their shit quality and missing features, but you won't see me browsing GNOME forums or reddits to hate on them, they are getting enough hate from people that loved them just a few years back and loved when feature were removed until their favorite shit was removed and then they finally understood that the GNOME community devs and designers are not nice, just a bunch of big ego dudes pretending to be smart developers or genius designers and UX experts.
For me dislike is not the same as hate, it produces different feelings.
About System Tray, I mean GNOME refused to implement the standards and created their own cooler system , maybe they changed their minds , I see you have or had to use an extension https://github.com/Rickycezar/gnome-shell-slack-integration.
Btw I mean not only the message popup but a way to just glance at the Tray area and see you missed a notification or that you have unread emails in Thunderbird.
If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
I'm sorry, this was not a very productive reply and I do regret the tone in which I answered. Mea culpa.
> For me dislike is not the same as hate, it produces different feelings.
Fair enough.
> If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great
I get notifications for Thunderbird, Firefox, Teams and other applications. I don't know if any of them have extra code to supply notifications for Gnome, but I don't use extensions or compatibility plugins.
> I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
I'm very happy with the way notifications work in Gnome. The system tray was a burning heap of trash and every applications was trying to dump their icon in it to have extra screen space. I'm not sorry it's gone.
You did not answer if there is a way for you to know that you have unread messages, with a Tray I can just look and see if I have unread stuff on Slack, or an unread email or maybe updates pending. And yes I can remove the System Tray if I don't like it for some reason or I can hide some of the apps in it. Long time ago when I was working on cross platform desktop apps the toolkit Qt,Net or Adobe AIR would handle the Tray for me, and the menus , I did not had to write specific code for Windows,Mac and Linux. What GNOME devs did is ask app develoeprs to screw the standards and write GNOME specific code, even GTK devs got rude answers from GNOME devs, this days GTK is GNOME only toolkit from GNOME POV.
I like it a lot. In my personal computer, I have Fedora 36 with Gnome 42. The “Awesome Tiles” extension makes it great. I prefer it than the new Mac my employer gave me.
I used to use extensions but now I don’t bother and find the stock experience great. Also none of the extensions were maintained properly so they would break on new releases and when they have bugs it causes gnome to freeze.
I love Gnome as well. I think partly because I only use three windowed programs on Linux - emacs, Firefox, console, and okay occasionally music. I really appreciate the nice eye candy and polish - especially for the music app
The only things that have significantly bugged me are the lack of a background app area by default and how they hide path editing in the file browser behind Ctrl + L.
I’m with you. Gnome feels like the least janky Linux DE to me.
Contrary to the author, I see a lot of the design decisions in Gnome as careful and deliberate. They want the OS to disappear in service of whatever app you have in front of you. And I think they succeed, mostly. But that’s a sensibility that’s not going to work for every user or every task.
At this point, Gnome is more opinionated than even macOS or Windows. It’s going to put off some.
I spent so much time getting used to Unity and then ubuntu got soft and switched. Still salty.
But yeah it works, I generally don't tweak anything and force myself to learn and love the defaults so upgrades have less friction.
2015: Tried gnome3 on Fedora on my laptop. Hated it. I liked unity more, but I persisted with gnome anyway (because I had better things to worry about than DE), and eventually didn't mind at all. Used plenty of extensions to make life easier.
(I hoped between distros for no good reason, but used gnome in all of them).
2018: PopOS came out with their own style of gnome which IMO looked better. Switched to using that on my personal machine. I also stopped using extensions; only a couple of tweaks.
2020: Had to use XFCE on a desktop machine because I needed my machine to use as little resources for itself. I grew to like it eventually.
2022: Tried Fedora 36 with gnome 42, and I like the way gnome has improved. I now use it in the stock version, with absolutely no extensions or tweaks or anything. It just works (or rather, I adapted to what it provides).
Some random thoughts:
* My baseline criteria for liking a DE is: it should NOT remind me of Windows (the reason for that is a story for another day). This means Cinnamon and KDE are out, though they're pretty cool nevertheless.
* Gnome used to be a resource hog. This was really the only problem I had with it. After using XCFE for a while at work I had made up my mind to switch to it the next time I hop distro, but then newest gnome seems to have got resource usage under control again (or am I imagining it?).
Xfce is great, I can make it look the way I want by dragging a few things around and setting up a few things, then it stays out of my way. It doesn't try to tell me how to work, I love it.
I never used the “collapse to title bar” functionality. If you don’t need a window right now, why keep it visible on the desktop? And I am quite happy with Gnome, and I enjoy the empty desktop in particular (I tend to clutter it on all other desktop managers).
I use the title bars for a few niche things, keeping a window on multiple desktops, keeping it above others, telling it to disable the compositor so 3D effects are more efficient, moving from one desktop to another, killing stuck windows...
I think they are incompetent and seemingly ignorant as well (which appears to be the thrust of this article), but "They don't know how to use this obscure thing that the overwhelming majority of users will never do so they removed the capability" isn't arguing for either incompetence or ignorance, really. It's just saying you aren't the target audience, which is true.
No, it's not. It's more coding work in the short term, sure, but every feature that exists is one that has to be maintained. This is obvious in code written in a professional context, but people seem to think that open source is somehow exempt from this rule.
If the feature uses shared internal apis, then that code has to be refactored if you need to make changes to those apis. If you need to update versions of dependencies, then the feature needs to be updated too.
If there are bugs, at a minimum you have to do something with the bug reports for those features. Even ignoring the report has overhead in the form of extra bug reports that you never intend to fix. Marking them as "won't fix" means you have to figure out a solution for dealing with the backlash from the reporter.
Then you get to the PRs from people who want to improve the feature but don't know the project well enough to really be of help. You have to either reject the PRs outright or carefully walk them through how to make them acceptable.
The minimal-work way to keep a feature around is to ignore all PRs and all bug reports for that feature. Any other approach is extra overhead. But taking that approach is still in many ways worse than stripping the feature out entirely, because you're left with a feature that only sort of works some of the time, it makes your code more resistant to change than if it were gone, and you're building up a backlog of reports and PRs you never intend to fix.
Have you never had a cross-cutting feature to change ? A new field on a core struct that needs updating everywhere ? Well consider that everything is ten times worse on an old codebase like Gnome, coupled with insane amounts of tech debts and unwanted interactions because that is the unfortunate destiny of UIs.
Removing a feature might be a bit of work now, but if it avoids hours of headaches later, that's absolutely worth it.
Yeah, I’m not necessarily saying anything in particular is better. I just wish OSS creators would be a little more thoughtful with design before building empires on something.
Is there any way to style GNOME 42 to look more like GNOME 41? For me 41 was one of the best desktop UIs I’ve used and I’m not a fan of the new flat design of 42, light mode looks really nice but I find it really difficult to distinguish between UI elements in dark mode.
I don't think they're incompetent. I think they're operating under the assumption that GNOME is going to be popular. The majority of people primarily or exclusively use mobile touchscreen UIs, so mainstream popularity requires that everything be dumbed down to suit touchscreens. In reality, this will most likely just drive away the users who prefer more powerful UIs without giving the mobile users any compelling reason to switch.
But this isn't even necessarily a sign of delusion or incompetence. It's plausible that the GNOME devs know it's a bad idea, but they have to do it anyway, because without the possibility of mainstream popularity there's no good reason for IBM to continue funding it.
If its made for mainstream popularity, then why has it become the most common default DE among distro when linux is still not mainstream? Even use for poweruser distros.
Disproportionate in what sense? In terms of funding? Users? Red Hat has some of the most popular distributions and backs more open source devs than anyone else.
But it's not really touch focused the way I use it. It's more text focused. I never start a program by touching/clicking, I hit Super and type the name. Same for settings.
I absolutely need the Ubuntu modifications to it. I really think they removed too much, but the basic design and workflow of "Hit Super to get to the organisation view" is excellent IMO.
While hitting Super is great they also for some bizarre reason make it ONLY work with left Super. This is fine for laptops which only have a left Super typically but it's really weird on desktop keyboards which typically have two. By default my Kinesis Advantage only has a right Super key so when I first started using GNOME after a long while I thought it was another random thing they removed for no reason. Nope, just doesn't work with right Super keys for some reason. Fortunately I can remap my right Super key to a left super key but I really don't feel like I should have to and not all desktop boards can remap it in the first place.
Yeah I really think they shot themself in the foot with making the happy path too narrow. Almost everyone will hit some minor usability thing like that and that has contributed to the negative impression.
And there are just not enough power user options in the settings, even with Gnome Tweak tools.
you can build a separate mobile optimized ui, and a separate desktop optimized ui, that both share a design language and conceptual approach, without using the exact same ui for both use cases.
it seems that ui designers have been trying to combine these interfaces for over a decade, i'm convinced it's a fools errand and that all it produces are things that make too many compromises for anyone to truly be happy.
everyone keeps trying it, yet apple stays far away, the fact that they are ui forward and won't go near it should say something.
Does MacOS support all the little tricks here that the article mentions Gnome is missing? Apparently they only support middle-button pasting within the terminal. And I seriously doubt they support the "scroll on title bar" trick. So if we are to take Apple's UX decisions as an example to follow, then it would seem like Gnome was correct in ditching these small tricks.
And you simply increase the work for 3rd party developers to create multiple apps for multiple platforms.
Apple can achieve this because they’ve made extremely profitable ecosystems on both the desktop and mobile (although both appear to be heading towards a race to the bottom).
Linux has no such luxury. The vast majority of apps on Linux would simply never work on Mobile because no one would bother creating a mobile app for Linux, because of the chicken and egg problem created by the non existent market share for Linux phones.
> The vast majority of apps on Linux would simply never work on Mobile because no one would bother creating a mobile app for Linux, because of the chicken and egg problem created by the non existent market share for Linux phones.
they would never work on mobile because they are fundamentally different computing paradigms with very different use cases.
breaking the desktop is not going to fix the situation on mobile.
It remains to be demonstrated that the industry knows that much about touch screen UI's. For example, "mobile" Safari requires me to touch the links on this website with my fingertip. I routinely have trouble on this site getting to the discussion when I want to or getting to the discussed site when I want to because those links are close together and Safari doesn't try to improve that situation.
If the industry clearly did know how to render a website in the normal way and at the same time afford accurate link visiting with touch input, I would have more faith that vectoring GNOME the way it has been vectored was going to be successful.
> For example, "mobile" Safari requires me to touch the links on this website with my fingertip. I routinely have trouble on this site getting to the discussion when I want to or getting to the discussed site when I want to because those links are close together and Safari doesn't try to improve that situation.
I guess I don't think of things that should work, when those things seem to be defeated so often. There are skills that apply to all websites, but there are skills that I may have tried when I got my first iPhone, but which I have forgotten because they are not universal.
This is an issue of HackerNews , not Safari or any browser. It’s not a website made for mobile in mind. It’s like being mad that a motorcycle can’t fit all the items a car can. It was not made with that use case.
just in the interest of hopefully working around your problem: hckrnews.com is my go-to for mobile (and desktop now, actually!), instead of news.ycombinator.com. I find the former much friendlier for mobile, like i.reddit.com instead of old.reddit.com
People complain about Gnome devs removing features they don't like or don't use since at least Gnome 2, long before Gnome 3 and its mobile-like interface.
So it is not about people using mobile touch screens or even about popularity.
Love how attacking GNOME devs who work in their free time gets top HN of the day. If you don’t like it, roll up your sleeves and submit a patch. If you can’t do that, go find another desktop.
I don't think patches will get accepted, they have their vision and won't listen to anyone: however, just fork it like MATE and Cinnamon have. I use both, depending on my mood. There are even others...
While I don’t like the hostile tone, “if you don’t like it, fork it / submit a patch” is equally unproductive, especially when it’s about the high level, direction of a project.
No, it's not. FOSS has come a long way since the bad old days of code being the only consideration. Now people expect that open-source projects have good stewardship of said code, and accept direction from the community, you know, the users. Unfortunately many corporate-sponsored projects have other goals, often detrimental to the community. Which would be fine, if you could just switch to something else, but good luck getting away from GNOME/GTK (unless you happen to like KDE, which isn't everyone's cup of tea).
>If you don’t like it, roll up your sleeves and submit a patch.
Please, does this argument ever work? Submitting a patch seems useless if it goes against the project's vision (or complexity thereof, see two following links for examples), it's just a waste of both parties time. Of course, they have their rights to decide so, and everybody else has theirs to complain about it, in my opinion.
I haven't used GNOME in more than a decade, and if I could, I'd never use a GTK application ever again either, for dealing with some of the annoyances and "easter eggs" goes against whatever intuition I've developed using desktop GUIs.
From the article it only seems to be because they didn't include features that other Windows Managers have.
GNOME is not Windows WM or macOS WM. There might be things that you are not used to, when you come from one of those worlds, but that doesn't make them wrong.
It would be wrong if the feature was there in the past and removed it without guiding the users (via UX) to an alternative.
IMHO the author shouldn't complain about the design choices of GNOME by comparing it to other WMs. There isn't a reference WM that everyone needs to stick to (thankfully!), so a missing feature compared to macOS / Windows is not a wrong thing.
Shit article with hidden agenda: shake confidence in GNOME, which is free and is becoming the defacto GUI on Linux distributions that matter (and loved by millions).
They are incompetent, but it's not (totally) their fault.
They were never exposed to the powerful and highly configurable classic Unix window managers and desktops, only Windows, Mac, and iOS. Yes, these old desktops all had their warts and configuration was not always a straightforward affair but they packed a lot of functionally into a small package.
It's like asking an otherwise experienced programmer to write an IDE when all they ever used was notepad.exe and a command-line compiler.
I'd like to put a huge "citation needed" on the claim that gnome designers have not been exposed to the classic window managers. Where did you get that information? How many of them is that confirmed for?
Gnome developers actually appear to look at Linux as an operating system and an ecosystem.
Linux development and use had become unimaginably complicated and fragmented.
Choice in Linux is a good thing, so I’m not against the fragmentation. At the same time, choice also means I should be able to choose an OS that keeps things simple for both devs and users.
And that’s what Gnome (and others such as the Fedora devs) appear to be aiming for.
Ubuntu used to play this role, but Canonical has built a consistent reputation of creating an alternative, splitting the community, and then abandoning it a few years down the road.
If you knew the GNOME project or any of its contributors over a long period of time, you'd know that this is absolute poppycock. If anything, the GNOME 2.0 approach was an allergic reaction to years of overcomplicated nerd software. Consider that, prior to 2.0, Enlightenment was once the official GNOME window manager.
Free and open source development is it's own thing. It's personal and the community is not that big. Criticism should be respectfully formulated and preferably constructive.
I don't champion GNOME maybe but their work on usability is very important to me in real terms, it's a movement for a better user interface instead of just repeating old and broken patterns (like Yes/No dialog boxes.)
I set my dad up with Ubuntu & Gnome. He needs the A11y functions a lot and has. I complaints. He loves it and gets work done. I can’t thank the gnome devs enough for their easily accessible software.
Gnome works fine for me. I’m glad it was made. I was an i3 user for a long time. When I grew tired of configuring things like wifi, mounting USB drives automatically, and a dozen other little things, Gnome just worked.
What I think kind of sucks is this person is just talking shit because an open source project doesn’t do what they want it to do. Author, you are rude.
The author is mistaking the designers' competency with his own personal taste. I've never used the features he mentioned. I like GNOME 42, for what it's worth.
This is satire, right? Or at least, a mockery of a silly comment? How does this get its own submission?
None of the things the author describes are intuitive. I think Ubuntu and/or Pop_OS had a great thing where you can hold the Super/Win button and see a guide for which buttons do what. This is for keyboard not mouse, but the idea is the same.
I can understand frustration at non-power-users taking away gestures, but come on.
149 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadAm I missing something? Or maybe GNOME 40 screwed things up?
It's an OSS projects with the most abrasive, and socially inept people around, seemingly gathered together on purpose. GNOME had few hundred active contributors on its peak, now down to at most 20-30 people.
The proliferation of *Kits is very much an intentional policy by RedHat to pull the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" scheme, except when they do the extinguish thing, the remaining people have no other option, but to move to RedHat's platform.
You are repeating unsubstantiated claims and accusations.
> The proliferation of *Kits is very much an intentional policy by RedHat to pull the classical "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" scheme, except when they do the extinguish thing, the remaining people have no other option, but to move to RedHat's platform.
And this is just conspiratorial. Really, this is not contributing anything to the discussion.
I haven't seen much change between 41 and 42, which is fine since everything is already working great.
I’ll admit that I was a little worried when I started seeing screenshots of libadwaita and gnome 42, heading down the path of flat-everything, but in practice, the experience has been nice on both Arch and Fedora 36.
I’m constantly trying to find extensions to simplify simple tasks or make it usable and it’s frustrating. Tons of extensions are old and broken and don’t work anymore.
Visually I don’t like KDE Out of the box but I don’t need to install anything.
Tiling Assistant, this lets you define custom window snapping zones, its most helpful when you have a mix of landscape/portrait displays and you need more flexibility than the built-in behaviour offers.
DDterm, this one isn't essential, but its convenient to have a terminal shade ready to go. On my ThinkPads I'd bind this to the ThinkVantage key to quickly get a terminal up.
I used to muck around with themes and icon sets years ago, but Adwaita is pretty inoffensive these days, and dark mode is not an afterthought now.
I used to use Guake as my shade but it's a lot more convenient to have a unified solution for regular and dropdown terminals.
The hate is practically a meme at this point. It makes me wonder what people need a desktop environment to do. Most of the criticism seems to be that it's not Windows or macOS
I get it, not it's not for everyone. But the amount of bad press it gets is hard to understand.
Yes, it was the distros that chose to ship it like this, but the gnome folks also announced the Gnome 2 was deprecated and would receive no support, pretty much instantly.
This left a sour taste with a lot of folks. It looked like deliberate sabotage of what had been a nice, stable DE. Personally, at that point I switched to Xfce and I've never looked back. Gnome is about the last DE I would investigate if I did want to switch away, purely because of the history.
Most of the time complaints about Gnome boil down to "It's not behaving the way I think it should" and that - to me - is not a valid criticism.
People love to hate and Gnome is very prominent, so it is going to get hate and heat.
Let's take the linked article for example. What's its main topic? "Windows management".
You know what? It's 2022 and I don't want to play "Window manager" anymore. I want the UI to do that and you know what? Gnome does that for me. I got code to write and bugs to fix - I don't want to waste my time managing windows.
But hater's gonna hate - what'cha gonna do?
What do you mean? Like GNOME will remove the concept of windows and you will have only 1 window maximum?
Do you use Slack or email? How do you get notifications without a System Tray? Or you use a distro that restored some of the features back since GNOME is targeting only people that use only GNOME apps and it seems only 1 window at a time.
I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware for their shit quality and missing features, but you won't see me browsing GNOME forums or reddits to hate on them, they are getting enough hate from people that loved them just a few years back and loved when feature were removed until their favorite shit was removed and then they finally understood that the GNOME community devs and designers are not nice, just a bunch of big ego dudes pretending to be smart developers or genius designers and UX experts.
What are you even taking about?
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/Notifications
> I dislike GNOME the community for their attitude, and dislike their sotfware ...
So... hater's gonna hate?
About System Tray, I mean GNOME refused to implement the standards and created their own cooler system , maybe they changed their minds , I see you have or had to use an extension https://github.com/Rickycezar/gnome-shell-slack-integration.
Btw I mean not only the message popup but a way to just glance at the Tray area and see you missed a notification or that you have unread emails in Thunderbird.
If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
> For me dislike is not the same as hate, it produces different feelings.
Fair enough.
> If Sack,Thunderibird,Discord,Skype work by default with no extra extension or extra compatibility layer in GNOME then great
I get notifications for Thunderbird, Firefox, Teams and other applications. I don't know if any of them have extra code to supply notifications for Gnome, but I don't use extensions or compatibility plugins.
> I did not know that GNOME developers lost this battle with the users.
I'm very happy with the way notifications work in Gnome. The system tray was a burning heap of trash and every applications was trying to dump their icon in it to have extra screen space. I'm not sorry it's gone.
I like Gnome but without extensions I find it borderline unusable on my desktop.
It provides a base DE for OSes to customize and provide a complete package for end users.
Contrary to the author, I see a lot of the design decisions in Gnome as careful and deliberate. They want the OS to disappear in service of whatever app you have in front of you. And I think they succeed, mostly. But that’s a sensibility that’s not going to work for every user or every task.
At this point, Gnome is more opinionated than even macOS or Windows. It’s going to put off some.
2015: Tried gnome3 on Fedora on my laptop. Hated it. I liked unity more, but I persisted with gnome anyway (because I had better things to worry about than DE), and eventually didn't mind at all. Used plenty of extensions to make life easier.
(I hoped between distros for no good reason, but used gnome in all of them).
2018: PopOS came out with their own style of gnome which IMO looked better. Switched to using that on my personal machine. I also stopped using extensions; only a couple of tweaks.
2020: Had to use XFCE on a desktop machine because I needed my machine to use as little resources for itself. I grew to like it eventually.
2022: Tried Fedora 36 with gnome 42, and I like the way gnome has improved. I now use it in the stock version, with absolutely no extensions or tweaks or anything. It just works (or rather, I adapted to what it provides).
Some random thoughts:
* My baseline criteria for liking a DE is: it should NOT remind me of Windows (the reason for that is a story for another day). This means Cinnamon and KDE are out, though they're pretty cool nevertheless.
* Gnome used to be a resource hog. This was really the only problem I had with it. After using XCFE for a while at work I had made up my mind to switch to it the next time I hop distro, but then newest gnome seems to have got resource usage under control again (or am I imagining it?).
* XFCE is a good no-bullshit DE.
* I don't care too much about DEs anymore.
If the feature uses shared internal apis, then that code has to be refactored if you need to make changes to those apis. If you need to update versions of dependencies, then the feature needs to be updated too.
If there are bugs, at a minimum you have to do something with the bug reports for those features. Even ignoring the report has overhead in the form of extra bug reports that you never intend to fix. Marking them as "won't fix" means you have to figure out a solution for dealing with the backlash from the reporter.
Then you get to the PRs from people who want to improve the feature but don't know the project well enough to really be of help. You have to either reject the PRs outright or carefully walk them through how to make them acceptable.
The minimal-work way to keep a feature around is to ignore all PRs and all bug reports for that feature. Any other approach is extra overhead. But taking that approach is still in many ways worse than stripping the feature out entirely, because you're left with a feature that only sort of works some of the time, it makes your code more resistant to change than if it were gone, and you're building up a backlog of reports and PRs you never intend to fix.
Removing a feature might be a bit of work now, but if it avoids hours of headaches later, that's absolutely worth it.
I hope this being on HN doesn’t make more people believe that communicating like this is a good way to get attention.
One literally could not pick up a better example of something going in the wrong direction that simply accumulates more tech debt.
I mean, people have called the GNOME team everything else, maybe it'll take stronger words to get a message across?
But this isn't even necessarily a sign of delusion or incompetence. It's plausible that the GNOME devs know it's a bad idea, but they have to do it anyway, because without the possibility of mainstream popularity there's no good reason for IBM to continue funding it.
It's pushed by Red Hat who has disproportionate control over the development of Linux. Same reason everyone had to switch to systemd.
I absolutely need the Ubuntu modifications to it. I really think they removed too much, but the basic design and workflow of "Hit Super to get to the organisation view" is excellent IMO.
Yeah I really think they shot themself in the foot with making the happy path too narrow. Almost everyone will hit some minor usability thing like that and that has contributed to the negative impression.
And there are just not enough power user options in the settings, even with Gnome Tweak tools.
it seems that ui designers have been trying to combine these interfaces for over a decade, i'm convinced it's a fools errand and that all it produces are things that make too many compromises for anyone to truly be happy.
everyone keeps trying it, yet apple stays far away, the fact that they are ui forward and won't go near it should say something.
Apple can achieve this because they’ve made extremely profitable ecosystems on both the desktop and mobile (although both appear to be heading towards a race to the bottom).
Linux has no such luxury. The vast majority of apps on Linux would simply never work on Mobile because no one would bother creating a mobile app for Linux, because of the chicken and egg problem created by the non existent market share for Linux phones.
they would never work on mobile because they are fundamentally different computing paradigms with very different use cases.
breaking the desktop is not going to fix the situation on mobile.
If the industry clearly did know how to render a website in the normal way and at the same time afford accurate link visiting with touch input, I would have more faith that vectoring GNOME the way it has been vectored was going to be successful.
Is this not what pinch-and-zoom is for?
So it is not about people using mobile touch screens or even about popularity.
That's how FOSS software works.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/4q2sq8/around_what_t...
Please, does this argument ever work? Submitting a patch seems useless if it goes against the project's vision (or complexity thereof, see two following links for examples), it's just a waste of both parties time. Of course, they have their rights to decide so, and everybody else has theirs to complain about it, in my opinion.
. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=754302
. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233#note_505157
>If you can’t do that, go find another desktop.
I haven't used GNOME in more than a decade, and if I could, I'd never use a GTK application ever again either, for dealing with some of the annoyances and "easter eggs" goes against whatever intuition I've developed using desktop GUIs.
From the article it only seems to be because they didn't include features that other Windows Managers have.
GNOME is not Windows WM or macOS WM. There might be things that you are not used to, when you come from one of those worlds, but that doesn't make them wrong.
It would be wrong if the feature was there in the past and removed it without guiding the users (via UX) to an alternative.
IMHO the author shouldn't complain about the design choices of GNOME by comparing it to other WMs. There isn't a reference WM that everyone needs to stick to (thankfully!), so a missing feature compared to macOS / Windows is not a wrong thing.
They were never exposed to the powerful and highly configurable classic Unix window managers and desktops, only Windows, Mac, and iOS. Yes, these old desktops all had their warts and configuration was not always a straightforward affair but they packed a lot of functionally into a small package.
It's like asking an otherwise experienced programmer to write an IDE when all they ever used was notepad.exe and a command-line compiler.
Linux development and use had become unimaginably complicated and fragmented.
Choice in Linux is a good thing, so I’m not against the fragmentation. At the same time, choice also means I should be able to choose an OS that keeps things simple for both devs and users.
And that’s what Gnome (and others such as the Fedora devs) appear to be aiming for.
Ubuntu used to play this role, but Canonical has built a consistent reputation of creating an alternative, splitting the community, and then abandoning it a few years down the road.
I don't champion GNOME maybe but their work on usability is very important to me in real terms, it's a movement for a better user interface instead of just repeating old and broken patterns (like Yes/No dialog boxes.)
What I think kind of sucks is this person is just talking shit because an open source project doesn’t do what they want it to do. Author, you are rude.
None of the things the author describes are intuitive. I think Ubuntu and/or Pop_OS had a great thing where you can hold the Super/Win button and see a guide for which buttons do what. This is for keyboard not mouse, but the idea is the same.
I can understand frustration at non-power-users taking away gestures, but come on.