There are many ways the file picker is broken, but, anecdotally, this is not one of them on my system.
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
381–390 of 756 posts
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frankly I find the whole blog post silly. All OSes/software have trade offs. It's just a question of what is important to you. I'm primarily an Ubuntu user but I have one Windows machine. There are things in Windows that just flabbergast me that people put up with. And Windows users can easily say the same thing about most Linux variants.
IMO it's perfectly valid criticism in its lambasting of the bug itself as well as its vintage. When I want to upload a screenshot, photo or video to an email, an IM, a web page etc., I really do not want to send the wrong one.
It absolutely is valid criticism. It was more the snarky "and therefore commercial software is better than free software" stuff that rubbed me the wrong way.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#383There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the thesis is as follows: "This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else." The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga…
OEM bundling and Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior explains part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors.
OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make money from development tools.
BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft.
I don’t think I can be in a room with five people without getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed—it appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn’t have much of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some ways it was seen as more of a “toy” than its competitors.
DEC’s business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s. Making good processors isn’t enough, it turns out.
Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows.
> This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop.
To be clear, I’m not saying that that isn’t the main reason—just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did a ton of things right. They made new operating systems that consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as possible for developers.
Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#384There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the thesis is as follows: "This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted. It’s little things like this that add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it’s a stretch to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it’s legit because there isn’t anything else." The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga…
(in the context of consumer computing)
The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant for so long you either have to
a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate users
or
b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple).
Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms, but it takes a long time, and users are unforgiving.
GNU/Linux is fantastic for power users, but the moment a 'normal' user has to edit a text config file, or open a terminal, we've lost them. When they try to do something that they're use to doing (see thumbnails of their files when choosing them) and it's not possible, GNU/Linux stops being a valid alternative.
> I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`
You're uncharitably trivialising the author's point. A common user task is selecting an image file from your device (to upload/edit/share). A user will often have many images in a folder and they want to quickly select the one they're thinking of.
There is an almost universally accepted solution (or 'best practice') to this problem, which is rendering each image visually so that the user can select the correct one at a glance (either as a thumbnail view in a file picker, or a literal grid of images as in iOS). GNOME and Gtk have not implemented this widely accepted (in fact, expected) behaviour, despite it being raised as an issue nearly 17 years ago.
Instead you (and others) argue points like "well they should rename and manage their files", "it's just an extra click", "it's not that important or else it would exist already", "its just one inconvenient thing, get over it". And there are conversations to have around those points, but at the end of the day people are going to have a negative experience with the product because "it can't even render thumbnails".
And the point is that this _isn't_ an isolated issue. Every project has something like this (Apple and Microsoft still have these issues), but we're particularly bad at addressing the issue, or even admitting it exists.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#385Reminds me of a different story involving Bill Gates, toilets, and user interface design: https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfis... "At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following: “Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t c…
Funny you'd post that in here because MacOS sucks at this and Windows does a great job. In fact arguably the engineering mind worked great there. The file open dialog in Windows is just a repurposed Windows Explorer view which means you can access all the things you can from explorer when opening and saving including things like unzipping a zip file, renaming some existing file that's in the way (like file.txt -> file-old.txt and then saving the current file as file.txt), moving files (create a folder "old", drag file.txt info old, save the new file as file.txt where the old file.txt was.
Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app
And of course you can set the icon size in Windows file dialogs, something you can't do in MacOS file open/save dialog
So in this case, thank god the engineering mindset won out in Windows, at least for this particular feature. Whatever UX designer on MacOS decided to neuter the file dialogs failed UX class apparently and chose based on some random airfairy idea then users actually getting work done.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even worse is when you know the exact file name that you want to open, and the interface fights against you writing it! For example I want to open /tmp/a.png, but there's thousands of files on /tmp and the cursor disappears while "loading" them, and and some characters of the file name are lost, or typed on different parts of the interface.
Or when you have the full path name already and want to paste it in to GtkFileChooser. It turns out this is possible, but you'd never know it from the UI.
Thank you for that hint! I always thought it wasn't possible, so I didn't even try typing.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#387> This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted
Free OSs have been doing very well. The ultimate reason I 100% switched to Free OSs was because I couldn't stand software crashing at random points in time anymore. With Windows (especially 98 like in the article) anything can crash, during boot, Explorer, Word, the Desktop, and in the past it did. Maybe part of the reason Free OSs did better at this is that they did solve things differently and didn't implement every single feature. That said, Free OSs offer other features: focus follows mouse, configurable window behavior, virtual screens etc. I think this is why I will never be able to use Windows again because it feels just too constrained.
Nowadays I use macOS for Desktop though but only because they make such nice hardware. It's only a question of time until I either install Linux or get a new Laptop with Linux.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
>trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be hostile towards any specific developers for any specific project, I will have to decline to get involved wit…
It's not a conspiracy theory. GNOME 2 was a project of 100+ developers. TOPAZ was a half-baked tablet UI tech demo from a dozen Red Hat employed devs, later dropping to 7-9 regularly active ones. Tell me what is more to explain about this?
I personally don't know the full history; you might consider looking for some old blog posts or politely contacting a GNOME developer for an explanation of the history. From what I understand, the run up to mobile was a major source of funding for GNOME 2 from several mobile companies, and that's where all the developers came from, but most of those companies were not able to keep up and failed to iOS/Android. So the funding dried up and Red Hat was one of the few companies that happened to survive because of their other business. That's what I've heard but you should talk to more people who were actually involved in the project back then if you want a more complete answer. (Please assume good faith and don't be hostile, we're all friends here, these are just developers trying to pay the bills like the rest of us)
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#389There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken. Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there for several years now: 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of files on a smb3 mount) 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it) 3. Wait for the whole list to load Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the list gets automatical…
Right. So typical bug of redrawing selection once the list is rendered. On the plus side it should be an easy fix?
Given that we've seen multiple examples in both TFA and other comments in the discussion here pointing to simple bugs that have A) been open for 10+ years and/or B) locked and closed as WONTFIX, I don't know if that "plus side" is valid here.
Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
#390There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken. Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there for several years now: 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of files on a smb3 mount) 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it) 3. Wait for the whole list to load Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the list gets automatical…
Even worse is when you know the exact file name that you want to open, and the interface fights against you writing it! For example I want to open /tmp/a.png, but there's thousands of files on /tmp and the cursor disappears while "loading" them, and and some characters of the file name are lost, or typed on different parts of the interface.
Oh my god I had excised this from my memory.
So many times I would go to a folder, start typing the name of a file/sub folder that I knew was there and it was like “nope! Let’s instead search whatever default directory instead. Apparently this behaviour is by design and alternatives won’t be considered. (This was when I was using Ubuntu 18/19?) at some point they changed a bunch of default things in the UI interface (including getting rid of what I considered was the far superior previous lock screen manager).