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

jayfax.neocities.org

501–510 of 756 posts

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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

> The experience isn't as smooth as Windows

What is smooth in Windows 10?

The GUI is a chaos in every conceivable way. Have you used it in mixed-dpi fractional scaling setting lately? Even the builtin software is plagued with legacy apps that are unable to scale well and are aesthetically alien to the modern platform. Font sizes range from ridiculously small (file explorer) to ridiculously large (Edge location bar) and there is no font scaling factor that fits them all... that is when they even honor it. Most third-party apps look ancient. Installers are often blurry and unreadable. All Qt 5.x apps show scaling problems also, this is acknowledged as an important issue in Qt bug tracker. The task view (Win-Tab) has many visual glitches: it often flickers and reaccommodates itself after the initial rendering, it's not even smooth.

Some of these problems are often attributed to their compromise to maintain backwards compatibility. Well, it's just the oposite, they are mostly the result of the schism they themselves created with Windows 8 and UWP (that not even Microsoft uses for their important apps). Now they are trying to fix it with XAML Islands, WinUI 3, Project Reunion and whatnot, they throw so many names that nobody really knows what is the platform they are developing to.

There is nothing smooth in Windows 10. There are some great ideas and implementations lost in a rage of hubris and incompetence that started ten years ago and it's yet to see how much damage control they manage to do now.

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

#502
On a tangential note: the author knows how to write.

The first few paragraphs of "rant" on his toilets are just brilliant. I wasn't sure I was going to read the whole thing, but after reading these, I decided that this blog post deserved my time.

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

#503
post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of fixing old problems that the entire community agrees with wild consensus, they insist on spending time creating new problems. Perhaps we should stop whining and start fixing them. And then if the developers refuse to accept things people have been wanting for well over a decade then we can fork it and simply abandon them like any other archaic unusable thing of the past. We've all asked very politely long…

You can fork code, but neither a development, support nor maintenance process. The truth is that there is no fork, Neo.

So someone implements all the features that a massive number of people want, people use it, but then you think there will be no interest in maintaining it?

Sorry, I don't buy that.

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

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks use this fact to place ads in such way that when you want to click something by the time your finger taps the screen there is an ad underneath. So annoying.

Indeed. An even more nefarious Dark Pattern [1] if the have a listener on the "mouse down" event and use it as the trigger. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

That's not even a dark pattern, that's eqvuivalent to the link pointing to the ad all along =/

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

#505
If you think about it it is even worse. For UX the file picker should be the same software as the OS file browser, not a rewrite. So staying in the example, he actually has two additional functioning toilets on the other levels, but unfortunately the room where they are in does not have a door but 4 solid brick walls.

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

#506
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you use it with every basic extension, like Kubuntu's default setup, then it's really bloated (Akonadi and MySQL is a dependency for KMail), but thankfully it's highly modular and enough fast for my taste.

I’ve not used Kubuntu in years but there was a time when it was consistently running 50% slower than every other KDE orientated distro (and some distros that were DE agnostic too).

I think Kubuntu did more harm than good for people’s perception of KDE.

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

#507

The file pickers in general in Linux are just dreadful. Wouldn't companies who release commercial products on Linux contribute to it by assigning a team to overhaul this? It's unbelievable that it seems okay to them to leverage "free" OS that people wrote sacrificing time with their families often after work into the night, without giving anything back. It especially looks bad when companies make billions off of thes…

I don't think it's a contributor problem, I think it's maintainers who don't approve of the changes necessary to make something work. In this case Gnome and KDE teams need to work together to fix this, and they're insular and will never cooperate.

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

#508
post #299

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…

There was a paragraph in that article that made me think of something >”But engineers (like everyone) see the world through their lens. Engineers look at code all day. And when they see two pieces of code doing roughly the same thing, they immediately think about ways they could eliminate the wasted effort by combining them into one piece of code that performs both functions”. I shudder when thinking of all the times…

In software there is the distinction between visually DRY and functionally DRY.

The latter should be collapsed, but might not be duplicate code at all. Automated code analyzers will often not even see these.

And the former must be kept duplicate. Unless you can make it functionally duplicate too. Automated code analyzers will often flag these wrong.

Don't get me wrong: I love automated analysis in a CI or my workflow. But it is not binary like a linter: pass or fail. It requires context and interpretation; I see e.g. CodeClimate as suggestions, not laws.

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

#509

The reason people use Windows is: - Because it comes preinstalled in their computers. - Because that is what schools and workplaces use. - Because MS Office is the de-facto office suite (although now you have Google Docs, LibreOffice, FreeOffice, etc) - Because most games are released for Windows. All these reasons are pretty sad.

Personally I use Windows because I like the OS model, and the GUI, and the workflows.

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

#510

I've had a thought in the back of my mind to write a replacement/alternative for the GTK file picker for years. I've probably spent at least a day total using it throughout my life, so it would make sense to spend a few days on it to help myself and others. To improve it I would remove several features I don't need, add features I would use, and repair subtle but important workflow issues such as key commands and wid…

> the likelihood of me actually diving into this is low

I was all the time thinking of this since "I've had a thought in the back of my mind to write a replacement".

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