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Help Improve Gnome

blogs.gnome.org

1–10 of 82 posts

Re: Help Improve Gnome

#2
Asking for help by submitting your data, instead of contributing or actually having any deliberate influence over the project, is a bit on the nose for a desktop environment so famous for its "my way or the highway" approach.

Re: Help Improve Gnome

#6

Asking for help by submitting your data, instead of contributing or actually having any deliberate influence over the project, is a bit on the nose for a desktop environment so famous for its "my way or the highway" approach.

Same. I thought they open sourced something.

Re: Help Improve Gnome

#7
> The goal of this tool is to help improve GNOME, by providing data that can inform design decisions, [...]

I suppose that collecting data about Gnome configurations will provide data just marginally useful to inform design decisions.

Anecdotal point: last month I installed Debian+Gnome on my father's new laptop. He's a retiree, and not a all a techie. He wasn't thrilled with the textless icons on the left but thought that even if he could not get used to tell them apart, he could always rely on their hover info. But he really wanted a direct access to the handful of documents he regularly opens (mostly texts). Of course, he needed links/bookmarks that showed the name of the files. I couldn't find a way to do this with the default Gnome. I tried for an hour to make it work with an extension supposed to enable desktop icons, but failed (extension broken with Gnome4?). I installed Mate instead of Gnome, and that's it. My conclusion: Gnome is too simple, it lacks features even for old noobs, and even more for power users.

Re: Help Improve Gnome

#8
In a world where almost all software companies keep pushing telemetry behind our backs, trying to grab as much information about us as they can. It's nice to see a project like Gnome doing the right thing making telemetry fully voluntary and anonymising the data completely.

We understand that software projects need telemetry to improve, but that's no excuse to sneakily steal information about us.

Well done Gnome!

Re: Help Improve Gnome

#9
No need for a tool, it is quite easy.

Stop using JavaScript all over the place, use compiled languages.

Don't outsource basic features to extensions, or third party tools.

Bring basic stuff like thumbnails and desktop folders back.

Re: Help Improve Gnome

#10
I used to use GNOME for many years, mostly because it was the default on Ubuntu. Now it's one of my least favorite desktops, I'll use almost anything else. I got frustrated at the seemingly random, user-hostile, backwards-incompatible changes from one version to the next. From my rough memory:

* The desktop icons and click-and-drag shortcuts got removed a few years ago. This is a GUI workflow that I've been using on Windows, MacOS, Atari OS, Amiga OS, going back to the 1980s. Gone.

* They somehow obscured the sleep (or was it the shutdown) button in one version, so that I couldn't find it anymore. I think I had to search the internets for this basic functionality.

* I think one version of Ubuntu GNOME obscured the login screen. I installed it, saw no login screen, clicked everywhere, but nothing happened. Just stared at a desktop wallpaper. If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?

* I think there is still no image preview in their file explorer. I don't know, I don't use it anymore.

These days, I use Ubuntu MATE or Mint MATE, and occasionally drop into Mint Cinnamon to check if they squashed enough little UI bugs for me to use as daily driver. (For example, in the latest Mint Cinnamon, I set my Terminal to 161 columns. But Cinnamon would open the window at Full Screen instead. Oops, back to Mint MATE.)

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