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GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

jayfax.neocities.org

281–290 of 756 posts

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#281
post #143
post #11

Omg, this is insane, I now realize I automatically memorize the first 3 and last 3 parts of filenames I need in the picker... For screenshots I read the date very carefully and fear the day I upload a wrong one. I was going to the toilet with a plunger, not even realizing it. Btw, if you work on MacOS (which has been a while for me now), you get very used to hitting space everywhere to get previews. What a feature!

I don't understand the wrong screenshot fear. Can't you confirm it's the right one once you select it and see the preview to the right?

No, not at all. The article is about this precise problem: the file picker in Gnome does not show a preview of the selected file.

It’s truly absurd.

Edit: Folks, instead of downvoting, how about pointing out that I apparently have an additional bug going on in my desktop setup? This is exactly the problem with Gnome.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#282
Sometimes I wonder if I should just quit starting my own side projects and instead take one open-source project and just work to improve the quality. No new and shiny stuff, but boring bread and butter business.

For example, I like XMPP, but many clients seem to have quality issues. So I could start writing tests for them and therefore find and fix bugs?

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#283

Reminds me of a different story involving Bill Gates, toilets, and user interface design: https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfis... "At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following: “Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t c…

If a software developer would design a bathroom. eg. DRY (don't repeat yourself) mantra. Class Toilet extend Basin.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure if this is still the case as I haven’t used desktop Linux for about a year now, but what made this extra irritating is that the file name would be highlighted already! How on earth can selected text in an in-focus modal window not be the target of keyboard input?

For me this is really annoying as well, together with the stupid text input fields that may display a blinking cursor even when they're not focused. And Firefox has this weird issue that now and then a newly opened tab doesn't focus the address bar, forcing me to use the mouse to select it. And I still don't get this trend in some newer software to make tab switching via Ctrl-[Shift]-Tab feel like the lottery instead…

ctrl+pageup/pagedown switches to the next/previous tab in Firefox and Chrome and also works on Windows.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#285
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the wrong screenshot fear. Can't you confirm it's the right one once you select it and see the preview to the right?

No, not at all. The article is about this precise problem: the file picker in Gnome does not show a preview of the selected file. It’s truly absurd. Edit: Folks, instead of downvoting, how about pointing out that I apparently have an additional bug going on in my desktop setup? This is exactly the problem with Gnome.

I believe the article is about showing all the files as thumbnails at once, so you can select the file more quickly. The article shows once you've selected a file it shows a preview of it to the right.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free software development is not a democracy, and does not get driven by polls. Features and bugs are introduced by those who show up, within a community that works towards a shared goal. And it is exactly to let themselves yell that, they work hard to alienate few normal devs left in the project. I understood now that Gnome 3.0 was from the start Redhat's fully intentional attempt to appropriate the project, and i…

This sure seems accurate to me, from what I've personally observed, but I don't understand what motive they might have. What's the point of controlling popular software by making everybody hate it?

> What's the point of controlling popular software by making everybody hate it?

they'd be the only left able to offer (paid) support?

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#287
post #11

Omg, this is insane, I now realize I automatically memorize the first 3 and last 3 parts of filenames I need in the picker... For screenshots I read the date very carefully and fear the day I upload a wrong one. I was going to the toilet with a plunger, not even realizing it. Btw, if you work on MacOS (which has been a while for me now), you get very used to hitting space everywhere to get previews. What a feature!

I sort screenshots by date, upload topmost.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scary thing is we’ve moved on from there on other platforms because those problems were solved forever ago. I sit at my Mac desktop, press any key on my keyboard to wake the machine or tap the touchpad and I’m logged in. Being impressed with the very small changes is a symptom that there are lots of small problems. The most important change for me is I rarely if ever have to enter a password now while at the same…

...did you skip the part where you're wearing an Apple Watch? Because when the watch isn't on my wrist, I have to either enter my password or hit TouchID, waking up the computer gets me to the password dialog box. Which, to be fair, I can start typing the password directly because the cursor is in the correct place. And this is what you would want, if waking it up meant no authentication then J Random Badguy could in…

Also for the record, regarding uncledave's general principle:

> Being impressed with the very small changes is a symptom that there are lots of small problems.

This is directly contradicted by my use case on my XPS under Ubuntu 20.04. I no longer have "Gnu anxiety" on my laptop-- the overarching fear that the values for the next default behavior I run into were chosen at random by troglodytes.

Suspend/resume just works. I haven't fiddled with a single touchpad setting and it works the way you'd expect on a Chromebook. Camera works, audio is fine, battery life is decent, and so on.

I did get a tinge of anxiety when clicking the desktop scaling setting, but it seems to have worked perfectly so far.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#289

Hahaha this made me realize a workaround I use. I always drag and drop from Nautilus to upload. Hahaha oh man. Talk about being trained by inferior tooling.

Depending on the application there is not always that possibility available.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s a save panel? You mean a save dialog? Note that on windows there are at least 3 generations of save dialogs. Which one you see depends on which generation of the api is used. The most common one is the more modern which is basically just an explorer window. Dragging a file into an explorer window works that same regardless of whether it’s an open/save dialog or not. It’s a move/copy operation (depending on e.g…

Yes, a save panel is a save dialogue. It’s just Apple terminology. > I don’t quite get the point of dragging a file to a save dialog at all though? On macOS (since forever) and iOS (since 11), there is a heavy focus on drag. You should be able to drag anything from any app to any other app and something should happen. This is facilitated both by system-level frameworks (so that all apps can gain correct drag-handling…

Thanks for this great comment! As a non Mac person who has occasionally used a Mac, it makes perfect sense.

> The only thing I expect to act as an Explorer window is … an Explorer window.

One thing I wanted to add from my perspective (software engineer, use Linux and Windows): if I observed that the “save” button had created a literal Explorer window, then I think I would expect it to function as a Explorer window. I’m not surprised by that because I can recognize that Microsoft has taken the approach of implementing everything they can using Explorer. This gets back to what was discussed in the article actually!

Overall I think I prefer the approach Apple takes on this problem.

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