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Gnome 40

forty.gnome.org

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Re: Gnome 40

#201

Post by hda2 »

TingPing wrote: post #189
nerdponx wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purely out of curiosity, what else is the Gtk team currently working on? People have been complaining about the file chooser for years. I'd be willing to donate a good chunk of money just to support "basic UX" improvements to FOSS software and toolkits like Gtk. Should we start a "Fix the Gtk file chooser" Gofundme?

The GTK team is like 3 people. GTK4 worked on improved cross-platform support, effecient gpu rendering, documentation, sandbox integration, etc. UI designers are probably limited and there is just a lot of drama about the filechooser so it's easy to find other things to work on.

The patches already exist. In fact, PopOs! already has this feature merged.

Re: Gnome 40

#202

Post by ogre_codes »

go561192 wrote: post #104
reader_mode wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome is just one part of the story - the gnome shell was always decent looking and had good themes. But the apps and the ecosystem really is ugly, messy and inconsistent. For example if you look at the controls you got with GTK out of the box in GTK3 era (when I last tried to build something with it) I remember huge paddings, unintuitive UX (the GTK file picker is the worst I've used) and poor layout controls. Go ch…

Maybe you might break the 5 yrs gap with KDE Neon? :) https://neon.kde.org/

Gnome looks a bit like you got stuck in an alternative reality where MacOS evolved slightly differently.

KDE looks like you got stuck in an alternative reality and Windows 7 evolved differently. (And Windows 8/10 never happened)

I never really cared for the Windows UI.

Re: Gnome 40

#203

Post by circularfoyers »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #122
ceronman wrote: post #111

I would like to thank the Gnome community for this release! I can't wait to upgrade to Fedora 34 to use it. I use Mac OS daily on my work computer and Gnome daily on my personal computer. Yes, I know there are a lot of Linux open source applications that are not very polished, but the quality in Gnome and its core applications is extremely high. There are even some things that Gnome does better than Mac OS. Now, you…

Is GNOME as a community project? My reading of https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom... is that it is driven largely by Red Hat and to some degree other companies. To your general point (why attack the project): GNOME has a reputation (IMO deserved) for aggressively not caring about the opinions of users or outside projects (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795901 ). So at some point…

I think concluding that "everyone" hates GNOME is hyperbole when people who like GNOME are less likely to post about it than someone who has a problem with it and that regular users who make up the majority are not ones who frequent these types of forums or are ones commenting on the issue tracker about this.

I think the only way to properly understand the topic would be to do surveys across different demographics, which I believe GNOME has done. It might feel like GNOME are ignoring "everyone" when everyone is the subset of it's users (or not of it's users) who frequent the same forums you do.

Re: Gnome 40

#204

Post by locke78 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #173
hctaw wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all? This is FOSS. If this was a critical issue that blocked people from using the software, or aggravated a developer enough, then someone would go fix it or be paid to fix it. Developers don't have an obligation to implement every feature request. Clearly this is a nothingburger

> This is FOSS. If this was a critical issue that blocked people from using the software, or aggravated a developer enough Ah, there it is. It hasn't aggravated a developer enough, so it is a non-issue. And people wonder why the Linux Desktop is unpopular.

That's the way it is when you depend on volunteers, they work on things when they feel like it. A solution would be to pay for a company-supported distro. Some were mentioned in other comments here.

Re: Gnome 40

#205

Post by locke78 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #176
JasonFruit wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, you know, that's how it works: the problem doesn't get fixed unless someone both a) cares, and b) can do something about it. Why would a developer who isn't getting paid do work they don't care about? If you're interested, maybe you can finally be the person who cares and does the work.

Giving something away for free doesn't mean that no one can criticize it. It's a severe shortcoming, it's been there for over a decade, and no obligated to fix it but that doesn't mean anybody is obligated to stop complaining about it either.

It may be time to look elsewhere if the complaints are unanswered for more than a decade; they're probably being directed towards the wrong people. That's an obligation you may want to hold yourself to, if you value your own time and don't want to spend another decade repeating yourself to those who won't listen.

Re: Gnome 40

#206

Post by locke78 »

hda2 wrote: post #199
TingPing wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintainer refuses to merge bad work, shame on them?

If it was really bad work, then of course not. The problem is that poor quality isn't the reason why they refuse. While not related to the file picker, I personally offered to port an important part of GTK3 to GTK4 (status icon support) and one of the maintainers told me flat out that he would not merge my work because "it was no longer in line with the direction GNOME is heading". I suspect the real reason behind th…

That's not subjective. When they merge code like that and then you disappear, they're now stuck budgeting time to maintain that API for years. They can't be expected to do that work when no maintainers care enough and no GNOME apps are even going to use that API (Status icons were removed from the GNOME HIG years ago)

If you don't want to go through the trouble of becoming a committed long-term GTK maintainer yourself just to get this in, why not maintain that particular feature as a separate library?

Re: Gnome 40

#207

Post by locke78 »

mixedCase wrote: post #195
BearOso wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome shell doesn’t even use Gtk, or at least not for drawing and such. If it’s there, it’s completely abstracted away in their JavaScript layer. And yeah, most extensions broke from 3.38-40 already anyway.

I'm almost sure they do use it, through GJS. And those are the official JS bindings to Gtk. And they definitely did break from 3.0 to 4.0 as I experienced by simply trying to get a sample application from the docs running, and failed to.

GNOME Shell doesn't use GTK at all. It uses a different internal toolkit called St.

Re: Gnome 40

#208

Post by JasonFruit »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #176
JasonFruit wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, you know, that's how it works: the problem doesn't get fixed unless someone both a) cares, and b) can do something about it. Why would a developer who isn't getting paid do work they don't care about? If you're interested, maybe you can finally be the person who cares and does the work.

Giving something away for free doesn't mean that no one can criticize it. It's a severe shortcoming, it's been there for over a decade, and no obligated to fix it but that doesn't mean anybody is obligated to stop complaining about it either.

Entirely true, which is why I never said they couldn't complain — just that it won't be fixed until there's a developer who cares enough.

Re: Gnome 40

#209

Post by locke78 »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #159
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Linux on the desktop since Mandrake 7. I mostly use Debian these days (ever since Ubuntu switched from Gnome 2 to Unity). For a while I just used tiling window managers (xmonad, stumpwm) because I couldn’t make Gnome 3+ work for me. Recently I tried Plasma again and I’ve mostly settled on that being good enough. At this point, I have no confidence in most of the people involved in the Linux desktop in…

This page is a good example of everything I dislike about modern Linux desktop developers: https://stopthemingmy.app/

That's not a modern problem and it's not something the developers did. If you have N apps and M themes, you have to test N × M combinations. This is an impossibly large number on any platform that allows users to make their own apps and themes.

It's a lot easier for everyone if the app developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved themes, or if the theme developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved apps.

Re: Gnome 40

#210

Post by Qub3d »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #198
ndiddy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several submitted patches that add this functionality on the bug report but Gnome developers have not merged them. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&

Maybe they were just trying to get a stable 40.0 and will add in 40.1 ?

If you look at the report time, this has been a known issue since 2004. This suggests the Devs have been ignoring or kicking the can down the road for over 15 years.
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