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

jayfax.neocities.org

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

#441

Post by seltzered_ »

gfxgirl wrote: post #385
seltzered_ wrote: post #56

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…

Funny you'd post that in here because MacOS sucks at this and Windows does a great job. In fact arguably the engineering mind worked great there. The file open dialog in Windows is just a repurposed Windows Explorer view which means you can access all the things you can from explorer when opening and saving including things like unzipping a zip file, renaming some existing file that's in the way (like file.txt -> fil…

- Re: file open dialog - repurposing Windows Explorer means that every time I want to open a file in an app in windows, I have to look for it, rather than just drag/drop from a window I likely already have open into the file open dialog (or from a quick-find launcher tool).

- "Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app" - I'm having trouble understanding what you mean here.

- Don't get me started on sizes for accessibility reasons, that was partly why I had to switch elder friends to a mac after watching them suffer on windows. Things may have improved over the past few years though.

- I really want to see Microsoft or the FOSS community figure these things out, I dip my toe in once in a while but I think there's an evolution in cultural/governance/funding needed. Maybe the popularity of videoconferencing may help the FOSS world actually see how people work rather than just posting pictures of 'screenshots' and battlestations.

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

#442

Post by int_19h »

cycloptic wrote: post #334
baybal2 wrote: post #255

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…

Please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them, you can work in the direction of your choosing. AFAIK there are numerous forks of GNOME over the years that are still going.

The problem is that GNOME is not just a DE. By virtue of being a project that's used by RedHat and Ubuntu, it's the closest thing to the standard DE that desktop Linux has at the moment.

Worse yet, its developers consciously make design decisions that make it hard to write applications that play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it - their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a platform, and their main interest is supporting "GNOME apps", even to the detriment of all the rest.

Between these two things, deficiencies in GNOME affect a lot of people who didn't necessarily choose to be affected.

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

#443

Post by lmm »

stretchcat wrote: post #350
baud147258 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point of controlling popular software by making everybody hate it? they'd be the only left able to offer (paid) support?

Does GNOME really bring in much paid support momey? In the past I have worked at a company that did have RHEL5 workstations with GNOME by default, but everybody I knew treated that as a joke and sshed into the workstations from their (Windows) Thinkpads or Macbooks. The desktop software on those workstations was unwanted and unused.

That sounds like the ideal situation for RedHat's business model.

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

#444

Post by int_19h »

jdright wrote: post #156
swebs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least enough people care that its become a meme in some tech communities. https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

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.

The default DE should be "sane and boring". I think the one that best fits this description at the moment is MATE.

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

#445

Post by lmm »

m463 wrote: post #436
albertzeyer wrote: post #16

You will find lots of such examples of a feature which you personally find very important and wonder why such a simple thing is not supported yet. I guess everyone has such examples. And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows. For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration is still not implemented. I implemented it a while ago for Xorg, which is outdated now, and also the maintainer w…

There's a quote that I think of in situations like this: "Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx. Now capitalism works, so apple and microsoft apply the money they make to hard/unsexy things like sleep-wake bug fixes and APIs and sane defaults. But they also bake advertising into their codebase and leech data home to the mothership and prevent you from…

You can contribute all you want but it's not going to be enough to stop Pottering or RedHat from hijacking the project and breaking everything. I used to contribute but these days what's the point?

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

#446

Post by int_19h »

seltzered_ wrote: post #441
gfxgirl wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you'd post that in here because MacOS sucks at this and Windows does a great job. In fact arguably the engineering mind worked great there. The file open dialog in Windows is just a repurposed Windows Explorer view which means you can access all the things you can from explorer when opening and saving including things like unzipping a zip file, renaming some existing file that's in the way (like file.txt -> fil…

- Re: file open dialog - repurposing Windows Explorer means that every time I want to open a file in an app in windows, I have to look for it, rather than just drag/drop from a window I likely already have open into the file open dialog (or from a quick-find launcher tool). - "Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is t…

Have you tried? A properly written Win32 app is supposed to handle drag-and-drop of files onto its window, and treat it as "Open". Try this in Notepad, for example.

That said, I'm not sure what this has to do with repurposing Windows Explorer? It uses the same widget to browse files, but the File Open window is not actually an Explorer window.

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

#447

Post by allenskd »

I'm not really surprised at all this is still an ongoing issue. And by far I think people that work on the so called Human Interface Guidelines need to get off whatever ideology/belief they fed themselves for the desktop environment to finally, you know, grow for actual humans rather than their egos. At times it feels more like a cred, like when elementary OS was released I read so many comments on how Apple nailed the UI.

From the site: >If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you, it’s because you’re used to mediocrity. If you think your experience all this time was normal, you’re completely mistaken—and it’s not least because you’re using a specific desktop environment that’s available only on Free operating systems that account for only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer usage anyways.

I like the author just sarcastically points it out, because I remember reading years ago the same on both GNOME and elementary OS subreddits "it's because people are used to mediocrity". Or, you know, maybe people find it super helpful to being able to see the images without extra steps so they can choose whatever they want.

And then it all just spirals down into:

"Have you tried X/Y/Z?" no? Sucks for you buddy I guess you are stuck with mediocre people making design decisions. But as crud as I put it, I might not be wrong.

That said, I have completely given up on all the nonsense someone would have to follow to file a enhancement report and discuss it just to be stuck on discussion for 10 years. There's just no time and energy for that, and at the end people would just ditch the desktop environment because it's just too much of a hassle to use.

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

#448

Post by int_19h »

seltzered_ wrote: post #56

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…

Reading this story from 2012 now, it aged... interestingly. It's basically complaining that this mentality:

> Concept reduction, consistency, skill portability, were all core to how to make a great UI. Why have 17 different ways to pop up (or drop down) a menu? Why have 17 different graphical treatments? With “one menu to rule them all,” users could learn how to use the menu once and then apply this knowledge anywhere they saw this affordance. That way, developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and users don’t need to relearn the wheel.

was taken too far, and argues for dialing it down a notch or two. But the industry did exactly that, and the resulting UX is worse than what we had in early 00s - and keeps getting worse every year.

So, perhaps Bill was right?

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

#450

Post by kccqzy »

int_19h wrote: post #446
seltzered_ wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Re: file open dialog - repurposing Windows Explorer means that every time I want to open a file in an app in windows, I have to look for it, rather than just drag/drop from a window I likely already have open into the file open dialog (or from a quick-find launcher tool). - "Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is t…

Have you tried? A properly written Win32 app is supposed to handle drag-and-drop of files onto its window, and treat it as "Open". Try this in Notepad, for example. That said, I'm not sure what this has to do with repurposing Windows Explorer? It uses the same widget to browse files, but the File Open window is not actually an Explorer window.

GP is talking about drag-and-drop of a folder into the file picker view, which results in the file picker navigating to that folder. Or drag-and-drop a file into the file picker view, which results in the file picker navigating to the enclosing folder and then selecting the file being dragged.

This is even more useful when saving files than opening files.

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