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

Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

dedoimedo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#31

Post by dymax78 »

kaba0 wrote: post #24

I don’t understand this shitting on open source software. Criticism would be okay, but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith. > Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown It does, that is like the core featur…

> .....but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith.

This article was written 5-days after Gnome 40s official release.

> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown

>>It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.

It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40. The aforementioned functionality was either removed or the extensions that provided said functionality are broken.

The common denominator and undeniable truth with every iteration of Gnome over the last x-years is inherent functionality is neutered and burdened by extension devs.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#32

Post by robobob »

alex_duf wrote: post #28
ldng wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand ? I don't know, maybe a decade of not listening to its actual user instead of pouring ton of work for fantasied ones ? Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design. If G…

Or, the angry crowd who doesn't use it stops criticising an opinionated desktop, and leave the users who happen to agree with said opinions use that desktop. I love gnome the way it is. I don't minimise Windows, I love the launcher, the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx, and it's not the sluggish monster everyone seems to think it is.

>the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx I was happy to see someone is happy with gnome, but the shortcuts argument makes me think you are trolling

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#33

Post by kaba0 »

dymax78 wrote: post #31
kaba0 wrote: post #24

I don’t understand this shitting on open source software. Criticism would be okay, but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith. > Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown It does, that is like the core featur…

> .....but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith. This article was written 5-days after Gnome 40s official release. > Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown >>It does, that is like the core feature of gno…

> It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40.

We are either talking about something different, or I don’t know. If you press Super or swipe 3 fingers up you get the preview of every app on every desktop. On the picture in the article, the author has no window open (as apparent from the dock not having any “open” icons)

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#34

Post by nly »

pjmlp wrote: post #27
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome has been on this UI course for years. Personally I can't stand it, it breaks a lot of sensible UI conventions and assumes either trackpad or a touchscreen, perhaps they think everyone is on a laptop all the time. Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether? Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest…

Because for better or worse, Gtk is considered the GNU/Linux UI toolkit, so it means while one might use KDE, every cross platform framework (with Qt's exception) sees Gtk as the "native" GNU/Linux UI toolkit.

Sadly Qt 5, due to the Qt Company pushing FOSS "freeloaders" on to bleeding edge and unstable versions of Qt 6[0], is becoming less and less viable for non-commercial, cross-platform app development.

Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1]

The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9).

The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come.

Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3].

Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise.

GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...

[1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...

[2] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-A...

[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#35

Post by KozmoNau7 »

pjmlp wrote: post #27
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome has been on this UI course for years. Personally I can't stand it, it breaks a lot of sensible UI conventions and assumes either trackpad or a touchscreen, perhaps they think everyone is on a laptop all the time. Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether? Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest…

Because for better or worse, Gtk is considered the GNU/Linux UI toolkit, so it means while one might use KDE, every cross platform framework (with Qt's exception) sees Gtk as the "native" GNU/Linux UI toolkit.

And I use GTK applications just fine on my KDE desktop. The DE you use does not dictate which applications you run.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#36

Post by baxuz »

This article honestly just feels like a symptom of a larger issue of how Linux is being handled for general desktop usage.

And I know that this is Hacker News and there will be thousands of people screaming "but it works on my machine"... It doesn't work for the vast majority of other peoples' machines. So much that having a cheap smartphone often provides a more functional environment for the average user.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#37

Post by kubav »

ldng wrote: post #26
kaba0 wrote: post #24

I don’t understand this shitting on open source software. Criticism would be okay, but a click-bait article with some easily debunked falsities on a not even released version, just seems to be in bad faith. > Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown It does, that is like the core featur…

You don't understand ? I don't know, maybe a decade of not listening to its actual user instead of pouring ton of work for fantasied ones ? Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design. If G…

I use gnome on desktop and I liked it. Keyboard shortcuts are the most important way to control desktop for me, I do not care if it is hard to control using mouse. I do not need hierarchic program menu, start button and lots of configuration dialogs.

It is true that some defaults are annoying and lots of configuration options are missing in GUI programs but it is still possible to configure basically everything using gsettings or gnome extensions (which I prefer over KDE style config).

I do not like some gnome apps (i.e. nautilus or gedit) but there are alternatives so no big problem there.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#38

Post by seniorivn »

alex_duf wrote: post #28
ldng wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand ? I don't know, maybe a decade of not listening to its actual user instead of pouring ton of work for fantasied ones ? Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design. If G…

Or, the angry crowd who doesn't use it stops criticising an opinionated desktop, and leave the users who happen to agree with said opinions use that desktop. I love gnome the way it is. I don't minimise Windows, I love the launcher, the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx, and it's not the sluggish monster everyone seems to think it is.

the valid criticism of opinionated gnome desktop is that gnome is being redesigned right now with no particular reason, just highly opinionated developers feel like it. That's weird from a gnome user perspective(the one that agreed with previous iteration of opinionated work flow).

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#39

Post by jamienicol »

walrus01 wrote: post #2

I don't get why "Linux on desktop" people feel the need to continually reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is, just to be novel or different. This goes back to things like KDE3/KDE4 and Canonical's Unity. What is wrong with a more traditionally designed desktop metaphor such as how it's implemented in XFCE4 or LXDE? As a baseline for comparison I've used very nearly every linux or BSD based GUI desktop (on top…

There's nothing wrong with XFCE or LXDE, if that's what you like then use them. But I don't understand why such users always feel the need to criticize gnome, not for it's actual issues but because they don't like its paradigm. I for one couldn't be happier that they decided to "reinvent the concept of what a desktop GUI is". I find its paradigm intuitive and efficient.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#40

Post by jamienicol »

inDigiNeous wrote: post #12

Basic stuff like minimizing a window does not work (with Firefox). Great job Gnome 40 team. I wonder truly also, why does anyone develop Gnome and why does Gnome get picked to be the default environment for Ubuntu still. I wish Linux -developers would see the way of unifying their powers finally, but no, desktop year of Linux 2025 still probably means not having basic UI stuff figured out, while macOS and Windows tro…

Firefox doesn't have a minimise option because it implements its own title bar. You can disable that in firefox prefs. Or the native menu is accessible with win key + (right?) click. I wouldn't know exactly because I've never once felt the need to minimise a window in gnome 3+.

People develop and use gnome because it works well and they like it.

Post reply on HN