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Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

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Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#21

Post by kaba0 »

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…

That’s quite an attitude when talking about free software. Also, as have been said plenty of times, Gnome is opinionated very much. And it is not the usual stacked wm, after using it for a time, I’ve never ever wanted to minimize something.

Of course it won’t be everyone’s thing, feel free to use the thousand other wm’s out there, that can minimize for you...

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#22

Post by pjmlp »

An aging travel netbook that I have with XFCE is going to be the last one with GNU/Linux natively installed, when it dies it is going to be only macOS/Windows devices around here.

Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#23

Post by forgotpwd16 »

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…

Unity made a better utilization of widescreen displays by having taskbar (dock; called launcher) moved to left but retaining notification indicators in a top panel which also functioned as integrated menu and title bar for maximized applications. (Meaning no vertical space was wasted.) The dash was also arguably more useful than the start menu. You had one single utility which looked for both programs to run and files. Also closely related to Dash, Unity offered HUD which was a way to search through menus and change system options. (HUD was similar to Humanized Enso.)

It's interesting to compare with a default XFCE4. You have a quick launcher which is pointlessly distinct from the taskbar, taskbar is at top wasting vertical space, and also maximized windows have their title and menu bar wasting even more.

Also what you mean with _traditionally designed desktop_? Unity takes inspiration from Mac OS (dock, global menu) which had a desktop-oriented metaphor and predates any popular desktop environment.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#24

Post by kaba0 »

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 feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.

> Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar

Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example.

> The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results.

It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel.

> Desktop scaling

Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#25

Post by KozmoNau7 »

pjmlp wrote: post #22

An aging travel netbook that I have with XFCE is going to be the last one with GNU/Linux natively installed, when it dies it is going to be only macOS/Windows devices around here. Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.

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 Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated).

Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there.

I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE.

[1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#26

Post by ldng »

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 Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base.

See, user too can be very opinionated ;-)

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#27

Post by pjmlp »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #25
pjmlp wrote: post #22

An aging travel netbook that I have with XFCE is going to be the last one with GNU/Linux natively installed, when it dies it is going to be only macOS/Windows devices around here. Now even manually editing XML ui files by hand is considered a best practice in GNOME, with Glade being considered not welcomed. Great ideas we have there.

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.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#28

Post by alex_duf »

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…

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.

Re: Gnome 40 – The anti-desktop desktop

#30

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

I'd be really interested in a detailed review of Gnome by someone who actually wants this model of interaction. I, for one, do not care about it so have no slightest inclination to bash Gnome or, to be honest, even try it by this point. But I don't mind to read why it's great for someone else. If you want classic desktop, there's always LXQT, MATE, XFCE, OpenBox, JWM or even KDE.
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