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

jayfax.neocities.org

651–660 of 756 posts

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

#651
post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MATE's based on GTK, so it inherits all the GTK "features", last but not least, the v3 file chooser, which lost along the way the create new folder key binding, and the quick search by prefix (which now has to be inconveniently performed on the address bar). Additionally, programs may rely on different GTK versions, which also makes things confusing. For example, Visual Studio Code and Firefox use GTK3. edit: extende…

Oh darn. I don't have a problem on my UbuntuMATE, but realised I'm still on 18.04. At least caja seems sane?

Caja retains all the features of Gnome 2's Nautilus and gained a few more.

I actually like background textures for my file manager, so i'm happy this stayed.

But there is also tabbed and two pane view which got axed from Nautilus too.

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

#652
In KDE, when browsing a list of files in Dolphin(KDE File Explorer), you can’t really select the entire row, you can only select the file if you click on the label which doesn’t span the entire row, there is no wide row setting and it’s really annoying, this is also marked as no-fix.

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

#653
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…

Even worse is when you know the exact file name that you want to open, and the interface fights against you writing it! For example I want to open /tmp/a.png, but there's thousands of files on /tmp and the cursor disappears while "loading" them, and and some characters of the file name are lost, or typed on different parts of the interface.

This is why if you're smart, you hide that behind a short timer to pick up the pause. Tuning it just right can be a pain, but hooking natural behavior as an indicator of needing assistance increases the UI bandwidth in terms of signaling. It's the little details.

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

#654
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…

KDE user here, so cannot comment on this case exactly, but in my experience the default "Windows" of Windows and Mac are also terrible.

Try to split a window pane on Windows, or right-click and create a file in Mac. In either, try to open an SFTP folder as if it is local, or integrate Git status icons into finder (all easy to do on KDE and Gnome). Good Luck.

The number of copy+paste bugs and QuickLook hanging issues on Mac is not even funny.

Just look at all the enhancers like Norton Commander and Path Finder, and you can see that even calling the OS Windows didn't make MS put too much effort into their windows.

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

#655
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…

Picking directories has been pretty broken forever as well. Say you start in ~/Downloads/foo and want to store the file in ~/Downloads, then navigating up will have "foo" selected, with usually no blank space to un-select (so you'd need to do ctrl+click or something to that tune); clicking "Save" (or whatever) will then descend into that directory instead of saving, so just using the mouse, or not using any shortcuts…

Actually, I think the intended usage in this situation is to click on the filename field, then press Save (or Enter/Return). Which is still terrible discoverability, but at least it's theoretically possible?

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

#656

As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if their BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying! They refuse since over a decade to implement some generic way to open the file-picker native to the running DE. They force their garbage usability on everybody, even people that would prefer not to use "anything Gnome". Same issue with CSDs, by the way. Like I said: They can have their broken stuff a…

> As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if their BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying!

KDE has own sins as well - they removed ability of running Dolphin as root giving some vague arguments about security and users protection, while other DE allows running their file managers with highest rights without any walkarounds nor weird acrobatics. I've seen some Plasma addons restoring this feature but it seems it doesn't work on my Manjaro at all.

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

#657
post #645

624 comments further on HN, on top of a 1280 word essay about why GNOME has no thumbnails... And unfortunately this will change nothing, because of the immense amount of protectionism and self righteousness of these idealistic projects. I wish it was different, but with so many stakeholders it's really hard to reach a decision.

GNOME team seems to be busy for years on the goal of baking out some weird hybrid of macOS, iOS and own solutions that tries to be so far away from classic desktop paradigm as much it's possible so I'm not surprised at all that this issue is still not resolved.

At least they managed to tame their DE to be not a resources hungry hog.

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

#658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the event says "open the currently selected file", not "open this file because it is the selected one". If the event is processed asynchronously w.r.t. other events which can modify the selection, you can get buggy behaviour. I don't find such a design that surprising. If you like simplicity, you would be tempted to go for it, because it doesn't involve duplicating data (namely, the selected filepath) between…

This is a great example of where OOP and FP necessarily part ways.

That’s a cool idea, how so?

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

#660
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.

Akonadi supports at least four DB engines. To combat bloat, select the SQLite dependency instead of MariaDB/MySQL.

I wish there was the option of not installing Akonadi, but apparently it's not possible any more to run sticky notes and feed reader without it.

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