Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jayfax.neocities.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 756 posts

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

#681

Post by ziftface »

alekq wrote: post #491
ziftface wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which feature(s) exactly do you miss on XFCE that makes it unusable in comparision to GNOME?

Didn't mean to pick on xfce, I haven't used it in a couple years to be fair. But when I did, it just didn't fit my workflow that well. For example, I'm used to pressing command+space and getting system-wide search for all files and apps. This is basically the default behavior on gnome, I just needed to remap the shortcut. I also often move desktops and the "activities" view makes that really simple.

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

#682

Post by scaramanga »

stretchcat wrote: post #585
scaramanga wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians These developers do not wield power over anyone and they are not filing lawsuits. They are developing code, either as their job, or as volunteers. And in either…

What I'm talking about really has nothing to do with power. Maybe the examples I chose suggested that power dynamics are relevant to my point, but I think they aren't, so here is another example without one: Should an architect refrain from judging Frank Lloyd Wright just because they never worked together? I think certainly not. That seems completely backwards to me. Anybody is entitled to have an opinion on Frank L…

Are you talking about judging his contributions and significance to architecture or his worth as a person?

I get that the two things have some overlap and aren't cleanly divisible. What we do is a major part of who we are.

But I mean, it's one thing to say "I think it [his architecture] is awful", or even "I think his architecture had a negative impact on people/society/cherished values/whatever" but quite another to say "I think he sought the ruination of everything good and decent because he was a demented and feeble mind." Because, yes, I do think the last one would only be appropriate if you actually knew something about the guy...

Edit: And yeah, of course, I'm not trying to censor anyone's opinions. Of course you can _have_ the opinion, you can even express it. I just think that it's not what engaging in productive/civil discourse looks like and, depending on the venue, people may call that out or whatever.

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

#683

Post by Spivak »

wander_homer wrote: post #486
Spivak wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually fix that! Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in your environment and then basically all your GTK apps will use the platform file picker.

No, the GTK application needs to explicitly add support for that feature, by using the newer GtkFileChooserNative API, introduced in GTK 3.20, instead of the older and more extensive GtkFileChooser API. In my experience it's still a complete hit and miss whether a GTK application supports native dialogs and of course you actually might loose some features with it, since the new API doesn't support everything of the o…

I wouldn't really expect that the new API will ever be able to support all the features of the old one simply because the dbus API it farms out to has to be generic across all toolkits / DEs.

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

#684

Post by Spivak »

type0 wrote: post #271
therealmarv wrote: post #23

GNOME is in general terrible for everything with image related work (last tested on Ubuntu 20.04). In the past I thought finder on macOS is terrible (it's still the worst piece of macOS and I don't like it) but GNOME files aka Nautilus tops it for sure (also because of space wasting issues). XFCE and KDE both do a better job than GNOME in this regard. And also Windows Explorer was and is much much better in this area…

GNOME files is a horrific dump, it is one of the few things that make GNOME unusable out of the box

I mean it's definitely not for power-users but I think it's a pretty nice basic file manager. I've never really wanted for something more powerful than Nautilus but less powerful than a terminal.

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

#685

Post by chmod775 »

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs... It's such a shame, because fixing most of these small bugs is far less work than building new features. Nobody wants to put the work in though... Nobody has the overarching vision of a consistent UX that just works out of the box without oddities, quirks and workarounds.

Oh but people did put in the work[0]. The problem is that gnome maintainers are hostile towards anyone from outside their little bubble wanting to get in some patches.

[0]: https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk

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

#686

Post by uncledave »

1_player wrote: post #676
uncledave wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've got a hefty PC here too running Windows. WSL2 is wonderful until you get your first Hyper-V bugcheck, filesystem corruption or weird ass network issue to debug. It's really not very good. I used it from day one and WSL1 before that which was even more horrible (NT impedance mismatch was obvious) The compromise for me before migrating to Mac was using Windows on the desktop with Ubuntu VMs in Virtualbox. I h…

Mac is great, I would use it full time if Jobs and Apple hadn't decided gaming is for kids. It's my hobby, especially now that I'm locked home, and being unable to play the latest PC game is an unacceptable compromise for me. No, a console is not what I'm looking for. So in that case, Windows is the best compromise. And while I'm still in the proprietary world, I'm outside the walled garden. In any case, I haven't hi…

Yes I keep my PC for games as well.

I wish you continued fortune with WSL2.

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

#687

Post by yyx »

rubycon22 wrote: post #305

This is the one problem that torments me every time I am reminded of it. Just today, once again, I tried doing the hack to make programs use the kdialog instead of the GTK filepicker. kdialog works, however none of the thumbnails are showing! Only the icons showing the filetype. I don't use a desktop environment, only a tiling window manager, so that's probably it. But what pains me is as much as I search, I don't kn…

Why don't you use DE? You can change window manager.

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

#688

Post by awill »

What's the root of the problem here? In other words, why has an important usability bug been ignored for years?

Is the problem that Gnome is mostly funded by Redhat, and Redhat mostly focuses on enterprise usecases, as that's how they make money?

I remember years ago Ubuntu had their 100 papercuts initiative, which seems like exactly the sort of initiative to fix a bunch of smaller desktop usability items that enterprises might ignore.

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

#690

Post by bsdubernerd »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #677
bsdubernerd wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a dev I still have to interact with the file picker a huge number of times in a single day. The GTK file picker is perhaps one of the worst offenders that's irritating devs, power-users and plain regular users. Patches get dismissed. I don't know where the problem is. It's as if the GNOME team had a vision, but didn't actually try to see how this vision plays out using the tools they're making.

> I don't know where the problem is. The problem is nobody's gonna get fired for not solving the problem in GNOME. Nobody is accountable, and nobody has to cooperate on and solve the user's problem. One person can be a blocker for 10 years and nobody can do anything about it. The second thing Leadership is useful for is forcing people to do the right thing. That seems to be missing here.

I'm not convinced. Leadership is somehow preventing these fixes to be merged with "design decisions".
Post reply on HN