GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked • Hacker News Board

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

#751

Post by OkGoDoIt » Wed, Jan 13, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

fartcannon wrote: post #490

formerly_proven wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Window's UI is not really an upgrade though. All the fake roots (why the heck is the Desktop the root) and the forced broken navigation therein, the removal of up so you have to navigate everything like webpages, treating some folders like databases and others with duplicate names like standard folders, hiding extensions, and the 'My Computer' naming madness. KDE is the best desktop experience available.

It’s even worse in MacOS. No matter how much I try to use Mac, I am always so disoriented by the filesystem and the “Finder” (filesystem browsing interface).

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

#752

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #743

getitstraight wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux Puttering is not only a talentless programmer, he's a horrible, evil, wicked person, who in a just world should be beaten to death with a claw hammer, or thrown out of the nearest airlock. This little bastard knows EXACTLY what he is doing to Linux. You are of course free to make some smart fuck remark in response to this, or "report" the post to the local Gestapo, or whatever other fuck-ass action strikes your…

We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, no matter how strongly you feel about something or someone. We're trying for something else here because it's the only way to keep the site interesting. From some of your other comments I gather that you've been around this material for a long time and you know a lot about it. Why not share some of what you know, so others can lear…

[deleted]

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

#753

Post by youdontlisten » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #743

getitstraight wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux Puttering is not only a talentless programmer, he's a horrible, evil, wicked person, who in a just world should be beaten to death with a claw hammer, or thrown out of the nearest airlock. This little bastard knows EXACTLY what he is doing to Linux. You are of course free to make some smart fuck remark in response to this, or "report" the post to the local Gestapo, or whatever other fuck-ass action strikes your…

We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, no matter how strongly you feel about something or someone. We're trying for something else here because it's the only way to keep the site interesting. From some of your other comments I gather that you've been around this material for a long time and you know a lot about it. Why not share some of what you know, so others can lear…

[dead]

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

#754

Post by cycloptic » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #740

cycloptic wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you expect can be done about that. Every desktop is going to have its own set of features and APIs that other desktops don't. That's what they mean by "platform." Should e.g. KDE developers spend less time working on their own features and start contributing more to GNOME, to make GNOME apps work better in KDE, and vice versa? Maybe, but they would have to take the initiative to do it.

Having unique features is fine, of course. It's when GNOME goes out of its way to make it impossible for DE-agnostic apps to "do the right thing" for ideological reasons, when every other DE supports some kind of lowest common denominator. Here's one famous historical example: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately ..…

I don't see how that is an example of ideological reasons, or how that contradicts what I said. It seems like exactly what I was saying -- GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own separate APIs for things. I've seen that issue posted here and on reddit so many times and I never understood why anyone considers it any more significant than all the other times a random open source project removed a deprecated API or did an incompatible version bump. Yes, I get it, it's frustrating when upstream is a moving target, but that's exactly what he's saying. You can choose to follow the moving target or you can target a platform that moves slower.

And because I have to keep saying this, that is a non-issue now anyway. XFCE supports the new app indicator protocol, and since Ubuntu dropped unity their support for it is available as a standard GNOME extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-supp...

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

#755

Post by bborud » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

berkes wrote: post #508

bborud wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think we talk about slightly different abstraction levels.

I wasn't thinking of the things a compiler will tend to optimize. It was more the times when I have tried to do too much with some higher level abstraction and suddenly you find that the abstraction isn't a good fit for everything you need to do inside it and that you may even be writing code that becomes very awkward (hard to understand, "abuses" the abstraction, or just very slow).

These things tend to hit in the "oh shit" phase when you have enthusiastically convinced yourself (and your team members) that this is the way to do it, you have written a lot of code where the abstraction still fits and then you stumble upon the cases where it doesn't fit and things get awkward.

DRY is a good principle, but duplication of code that does nearly the same thing may have significantly lower cognitive overhead, be easier to maintain and easier to evolve in some cases. (The trick is to silence that little OCD voice in your head when you come across those cases).

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

#756

Post by int_19h » Sun, Jan 17, 2021, 8:48 AM UTC

cycloptic wrote: post #754

int_19h wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having unique features is fine, of course. It's when GNOME goes out of its way to make it impossible for DE-agnostic apps to "do the right thing" for ideological reasons, when every other DE supports some kind of lowest common denominator. Here's one famous historical example: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately ..…

I don't see how that is an example of ideological reasons, or how that contradicts what I said. It seems like exactly what I was saying -- GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own separate APIs for things. I've seen that issue posted here and on reddit so many times and I never understood why anyone considers it any more significant than all the other times a random open source project removed a deprecated API or di…

Others strive to have APIs that are either compatible across DEs, or there is a way for a DE-agnostic app to feautre-detect and use it when it's available. GNOME is the only project that simply doesn't care about DE-agnostic apps, and ends up making their life more difficult than anybody else. The app indicator issue is brought up time and again, because the comments on it from the GNOME developers make their attitude crystal clear. That this particular issue has been resolved since then is not important - there have been more since, and there will inevitably be more in the future, since, again - they do not care.

If you sincerely believe that it's okay to have a single DE be a self-contained app platform with no interop, that's up to you - but do understand that this is a very debatable premise, and people who don't agree with it have very good reasons to be annoyed with GNOME.