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Gnome is better macOS than macOS

andreyor.st

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Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#31

Post by amluto »

nik736 wrote: post #7

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

I would much prefer if MacOS got rid of the global menu. I've contemplated it for literally decades, and my opinion has only gotten stronger.

1. Sometimes a program has no open windows. Understanding when its menu shows up in the menu bar is confusing at best. Explaining to another user "oh, you are in [such and such program already] even though there's nothing there -- click File then Open" is silly.

2. Sometimes a program has two or more open windows. Sure, File/New makes sense in this context, but anything that acts on the current window is not visually linked to the window and is thus confusing.

3. With the advent of multiple monitors, global menus are even worse. Which monitor should they live on? Always primary? Both? There is no right answer.

4. Old-fashioned title bars tell me which window belongs to which program. Global menus try, but only if I'm sure which window's menu is currently displayed, and it does not let me identify a non-selected window without interrupting myself to select it.

5. Opening a menu that's part of a non-current window takes one click. With global menus, it's two clicks.

6. One might imagine that they conserve screen real estate, which is maybe slightly true in our brave new world of notched viewports, but it's barely true and is avoidable. And Apple doesn't seem to care about efficient use of screen real estate anyway.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#32

Post by dijit »

al_borland wrote: post #18
nik736 wrote: post #7

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

I went looking for a file manager with miller column on Linux once. It seems to be an extremely rare feature. With how popular column view is in Finder, I don’t understand how it hasn’t made its way to other platforms as a commonplace feature.

I had the exact same journey as you, I even very nearly install GNUStep because the file manager had miller columns.

I even started to think that perhaps Apple has an active patent on it or something.

(this happened with the Genie Lamp minimise effect on Compiz/Beryl- why it needed to have at minimum 3 "waves" before it minimised the window; though you could obviously patch it out).

FWIW I found Ranger (TUI) and Pantheon (ElementaryOS) that supports it, if you're still looking.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#33

Post by bigyabai »

al_borland wrote: post #18
nik736 wrote: post #7

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

I went looking for a file manager with miller column on Linux once. It seems to be an extremely rare feature. With how popular column view is in Finder, I don’t understand how it hasn’t made its way to other platforms as a commonplace feature.

This one has it: https://github.com/elementary/files

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#34

Post by sparky4pro »

amelius wrote: post #11
nik736 wrote: post #7

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

I like that Unity puts the global menu on the side. This makes more sense with all the wide-screens that we have nowadays. A huge oversight in MacOS, if you ask me.

On macOS only the dock can be moved to the side. The application menu (left) and the statusbar menu (right) will always be on top of the screen. Which makes sense to me.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#35

Post by bigyabai »

m-hodges wrote: post #29
mycall wrote: post #6

People don't use macOS for its window shell but for it's familiarity, ecosystem and underlying technology. There are plenty of windowing upgrades from third-party vendors that improve on it.

The number one thing keeping me on macOS is Universal Clipboard with my iPhone. I copy+paste URLs, 2FA codes, and images between devices all day long.

This is my favorite feature of KDE Connect on Linux.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#36

Post by commandar »

hexbin010 wrote: post #5

I don't know why Gnome et al switched to imitating MacOS – adopting a dock (as a default), ditching an app window tray as on Windows, when the potential Windows-convert market is much larger than Mac. The Dock can be really jarring for Windows users - they are coming from an OS literally called windows, and the windows are hidden from view. It also eats vertical space with those huge icons, which is precious given th…

>It also eats vertical space with those huge icons, which is precious given the current popular screen dimensions.

This is one Windows gets wrong too, in fairness.

W11 killed the ability to move the taskbar to the left/right side of the screen. That's a real pain on ultrawide displays where you have absolutely miles of horizontal real estate and relatively limited vertical space.

Fortunately, ExplorerPatcher exists and can restore the functionality.

https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher/

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#37

Post by t_mahmood »

al_borland wrote: post #18
nik736 wrote: post #7

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

I went looking for a file manager with miller column on Linux once. It seems to be an extremely rare feature. With how popular column view is in Finder, I don’t understand how it hasn’t made its way to other platforms as a commonplace feature.

If you are okay with terminal based one's, Yazi: [https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi/] is pretty nice.

Yes, I would love that in Nautilus, but I'm not very depended on GUI for managing files, so not a big deal for me.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#38

Post by zb3 »

GNOME is underfunded - bugs are not fixed for years, PRs are not reviewed for months. It might look more shiny on the surface, but once you realize something doesn't work - you're on your own.

See for example this: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/4051

Nobody is assigned to fix these.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#39

Post by dandiep »

amluto wrote: post #31
nik736 wrote: post #7

What I am missing with Gnome is the global menu I have with macOS. It's just my preferred way of working. This is also what I liked about Unity. Gnome seems to follow the same direction as Windows. Additionally miller columns in Finder are just awesome and I don't have them with Nautilus. Those two things are honestly dealbreakers for me.

I would much prefer if MacOS got rid of the global menu. I've contemplated it for literally decades, and my opinion has only gotten stronger. 1. Sometimes a program has no open windows. Understanding when its menu shows up in the menu bar is confusing at best. Explaining to another user "oh, you are in [such and such program already] even though there's nothing there -- click File then Open" is silly. 2. Sometimes a…

100% agree. Will never understand the love for the global menu bar, it makes no sense.

Re: Gnome is better macOS than macOS

#40

Post by bsnnkv »

It's very sad that none of these Linux DEs expose APIs for customization in anything other than JavaScript - I would love to be able to build on Gnome or KDE with something equivalent to windows-rs or objc2
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