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

jayfax.neocities.org

411–420 of 756 posts

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

#411
post #69

Someone created a fix for this 3 years ago. The Gnome maintainers refuse to add it for whatever reason. https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk

Gnome is notoriously terrible for not accepting patches outside of redhat employees. I tried adding a patch to gnome in the 00s and the number of hoops they expected me to jump through along with the tone made me never install their de again.

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

#412
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

My personal opinion is that KDE is less polished, more bloated (in terms of features and options), and slower than GNOME.

I think this may have been true in the past, but KDE 5 is nowhere near as bloated as KDE once was. (And they've also made huge strides in consistency and a sane UI experience.)

I've tested comparing Gnome/KDE on old hardware (eg, 2 GB of RAM and CPUs built for power conservation), and subjectively I found KDE to be a lot snappier (Gnome Shell always choked for me when hitting Activities) and, after a few hours of uptime, found it used less memory than Gnome. On the same box, it even gave Xfce a run for its money, which was surprising.

Although, when it comes to peddling Linux to other people, I'm hesistant to install KDE for anyone because it's a bit too configurable. I'm always afraid of getting asked for help because of someone accidentally messed up their UI and losing their taskbar or something like that. KDE's came a long way in recent years, but that "you can configure everything" core will always probably be there. And on the flip-side, if I install Gnome, people often find it outlandish and barebones...

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. As you can see, this is by design.

This is in my experience emblematic of GNOME in general. I've shaken the dust off my sandals and don't use anything gnome-y if I can avoid it. Here's the thing that convinced me, a while back: https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske... I'm sure there's people here who are long-time contributors and/or supporters. Just ignore me, I'm not your target audience. ... I'm really not sure who your targe…

> I'm really not sure who your target audience is, though.

We should ask Havoc Pennington about this, he must have names for all the personas that he came up with, after reading "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum": https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-Dece...

I actually have a copy of the book, and it is indeed a good book. The problem is that it somehow empowers GNOME developers to keep creating/maintaining/rewriting broken software, all in the name of "usability".

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

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

> KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome. I have nothing against KDE, but come on. Many of us really do prefer GNOME despite its perceived deficiencies. This is just a matter of personal preference.

I'll never understand this. It's like people who swear by xfce. Both are borderline unusable to me, but gnome certainly isn't in that category, despite its bugs.

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

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(in the context of consumer computing) The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant for so long you either have to a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate users or b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple). Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms…

The article is an essay written upside down. The thesis is that there was no quality competition to windows and that's why it is dominant. This is plainly incorrect. The era when Windows gained total dominance was when everyone was getting daily or weekly bsods. It is a deep and complex topic and it wasn't 'heres a bug I don't like'. Microsoft had a monopoly on the sneakernet: file formats like xls, doc, and the like…

I don't disagree with anything you've just said. I think I'm just focusing on the present and future, while you are talking about how we got here.

I find it much easier these days to get people to consider trying a non-Windows environment but it never goes well because of these small issues.

Of course people expect things to behave in certain ways because Microsoft had an anti-competitive monopoly and most people learned about computing using their platform.

It's an unfair, shitty situation.

But the point remains that desktop GNU/Linux has a lot of these little UX bugs, and we're not even paying attention to them. The experience isn't as smooth as Windows because we don't have dedicated UI/UX designers thinking over these issues and trying to come up with cohesive solutions.

When's the last time a new consumer-facing UX paradigm that 'just worked' came out of the open-source world? Apple churns them out, oftentimes created from scratch, and it extends to their physical hardware design (ie the ipod scroll wheel was amazing for its time, airpods are a joy to use).

The open source world makes amazing things but the UX quality _is_ a major issue in the uptake of new users today.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only response to that is apps that aren’t made to be good macOS citizens wouldn’t even vaguely register on my radar as ‘native’, even if they link against Cocoa. ‘Native’ on Apple platforms isn’t just a technical description, it’s also about UI and, more importantly, UX. Of course, Apple are starting to muddy the waters with UIKit for Mac — but even then, the fact that iOS apps can now run ‘natively’ on macOS goes…

> My only response to that is apps that aren’t made to be good macOS citizens wouldn’t even vaguely register on my radar as ‘native’, even if they link against Cocoa. Sure. But two things: 1) I wasn't saying that an app that use nib-less techniques couldn't do the right thing - it could. It could appear totally native if someone just does the work. 2) There are several pro creativity apps (Logic, Mainstage being the…

I agree on those points. Especially on the first: when people put in the hard work, those pay dividends — but often mean those apps lag behind when Apple does breaking changes (which must happen at least every 3 or 4 years).

Apple’s Pro-apps are very alien. I expect that’s because they appeal to an audience that spends almost all their time in them, not moving much between a whole bunch of apps.

Lastly: Nothing’s ever as non-native as a GTK app. :D Qt and Wx apps do an infinitely better job than any GTK app I’ve seen for macOS, even if I don’t think they come very close aside from tapping into Cocoa’s control drawing.

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

#417
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

I think that's very much personal preference. I tried KDE a few months ago and I couldn't stick with it; it is slower than Gnome in a lot of ways, it's (to my eyes) much more cluttered, and has lags at annoying places. For example, I tend to hit the windows key and start typing to launch things, but under KDE there's enough lag before the menu opens that it doesn't catch my first few keypresses.

This. I get periodically frustrated with Gnome and give KDE a go and always end up going back to Gnome within a couple of weeks. I want to like it, I want it to work but Gnome (on my setup) is more responsive and that is more important than all of the other deficiencies of Gnome.

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

#418

On macOS, when you drag a file into an Open or Save panel, the panel’s current directory switches to the dragged file’s containing directory and highlights that dragged file. On Windows, when you drag a file into an Open or Save panel, the dragged file is moved from its original location to the panel’s current directory. It is a destructive action! That may be one little thing but it’s part of a whole number of reaso…

Having switched from Mac OS to Windows a year ago, this specific thing had annoyed me to no end, and there are no good ways to replicate that behaviour (believe me, I’ve looked!) What I currently use is Listary, which automatically switches open/save modals to the last used Explorer window location. However, I’d rather switch to something that offers this functionality exclusively. You can also see this AHK script wh…

Good to know that there are some things out there, though. A few glasses of ice water in Hell, so to speak.

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

#419
post #27

There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken. Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there for several years now: 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of files on a smb3 mount) 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it) 3. Wait for the whole list to load Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the list gets automatical…

The gnome file picker is so bad that I will pretty much always load files by drag and droping files into the application from a file browser!
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