I don't use Gnome since the days of version 2, which was really nice and friendly. But I was impressed by how well the latest iteration works in a tablet. That's a great advantage, because it's the same UI as a desktop. Plus, they have made sure all core applications work well using a touch UI.
Yes! Gnome 2 was great. I miss those days. The whole Gnome is a disappointment now. The GTK-4 doesn't even have the traditional menu and menubar widgets. I don't know what the Gimp people and the Inkscape people are going to do.
Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
171–180 of 293 posts
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
You do realize that you can use any kind of file manager from GNOME, right? It’s just a program, just as Dolphin, which you can easily install instead. Changing DE for that is just dumb, imo.
Defaults and first impressions matter though. As much as I think the matter of a personal computer you can make your own is worth fighting for, when a new user lands in the DE and doesn't have a great experience it's not a good solution to then say something along the lines of "go and explore N alternatives or dig through their configurations to find one that suits you" for each aspect of the DE they're going to be r…
Nautilus is a fine file manager for browsing to your downloads and documents folder which I think is really all it cares to be. We're on HN so the user-stories are getting twisted.
I use GNOME as my daily driver and really like it— yeah some of their apps are shit, and some designs they made in the DE are questionable at best. But that's true of everything, any software beyond hello world will have annoyances. KDE is riddled with them like swiss cheese at a gun range which is why I think it's so funny people say they're happy with it as an alternative. You're clearly fine with bad design (KDE has some of the most famously terribly designed apps) and bugs. You just have strong opinions on what form the missteps take. And I get it KDE is a DE made for and by old-school Linux users.
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#173This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in. I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1]. [0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/…
As cocoto pointed out in one of the child comments, you can click the three dots left of the search button, that one always works. I found out about it today.
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#174This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in. I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1]. [0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/…
There is actually a small gap between the list items where you can right click.
You can tell you're on the gap when no item is highlighted.
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#175Was happy to read this, as I've often imagined doing this myself (i.e. thoroughly hashing out commentary on a bunch of nits in a GUI that annoy me and I'm convinced should be better). I agree that ctrl+L is a weird shortcut in a vacuum, but it's one I've known for 15 years, originally from using browsers. And it always makes me happy that Windows and Gnome (and Nautilus, which isn't the gnome default but is still pre…
Nautilus and "Files" are the same.
I might have made this mistake via confusion from my more recent use of XFCE then. (I've never bothered trying to change my file manager; let alone learn the name, except that I needed to launch nautilus from command line, years ago and so have /that/ name learned)
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#176This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in. I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1]. [0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/…
As cocoto pointed out in one of the child comments, you can click the three dots left of the search button, that one always works. I found out about it today.
almost on cue, i think they removed that functionality from the latest version
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#177I get it that gnome is nowadays an experimental desktop environment, that tries a lot of new approaches. I just don't understand why many distributions use it as their default DE.
I am fairly sure the people behind Gnome don't actually really know what they're doing when it comes to HID and Ux.
Gnome terminal for example will offset the right click contextual menu with a new line of bin/hex/oct representation of a number that you happen to have selected. By default, no it can't be disabled. Good luck with the muscle memory to hit the contextual menu items now that everything is shifted down.
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#178In no particular order, running arch with gnome and trying to reproduce the author's complaints: - List view and view options buttons, while combined, have a visually distinct hover state, highlighting each half of the button on hover, and making it very obvious (at least to me, as a 35 year old power user) that they are different. (you can see this in his screenshots). Perhaps the author has visual issues and contra…
> List view and view options buttons, while combined, That's it. You could've stopped here. They are combined . It's a button with a dropdown indicator. The user expects this to be a single control for a single set of features. Not two distinct controls for completely unrelated functionality that you have to pixel-hunt for
> that you have to pixel-hunt for
Fitts law? Never heard of it, but I didn't go law school.
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#179I wish folks critiquing GNOME would go after any app other than Nautilus. It's just not a great showcase of the best they have to offer. I would certainly hope no one judges the macOS desktop by Finder because the review probably wouldn't be favorable. If you're going to judge the design system Text Editor, Terminal, Videos, Epiphany, Music would all be better choices. I can't say I know anyone who likes GNOME who wo…
Files: everybody use a file manager. Terminal: possibly everybody on HN use a terminal app. Videos and Music have much better alternatives, eg VLC. I maybe end up using them when double clicking on some files, but I'm unsure. I do use eog, the image viewer. Epiphany... is that the email client?
My main gripe with Nautilus is the UI to rename files. Instead of renaming in place like any other file manager I remember, they open a popup and rename in there
Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination
#180As a GNOME user, I kinda understand what they want to achieve, but they are seriously short on resources, so there is really little substance to all the rosy aspirations. They are also very oppinionated, which then turns away a lot of liberal developers that just want to scratch their own itches. As for file manager usability, I grew up with Norton commander and pretty much gave up on ever seeing power user addressed…
>What I find really sad is, that they have like a million bindings to every programming language there is (including one that they made up) and I have no idea how they want to maintain that codebase.
I believe that's to do with gobject introspection (see *). From what I understand they mostly generate bindings through gir files. It's actually really cool what they've pulled off with it.
* https://viruta.org/the-magic-of-gobject-introspection.html