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GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

jayfax.neocities.org

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Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#661

Post by rob74 »

xeyownt wrote: post #629
rob74 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I fully agree: this is not a bug, it's a missing feature. Second, I may be a minority here, but I actually don't mind this feature missing at all. I however do (or did) mind Windows putting its "thumbs.db" files all over the place, so that's the first thing I deactivate when installing it (along with enabling "show hidden files" and "show extension for known file types").

- "Welcome to the new GNOME car. It's totally free!". - "Looks great. But there are no mirrors. Isn't that dangerous?" - "Yeah, but that's not a bug, it's a missing feature. Besides, we don't like mirrors because in all cars they need to be cleaned all the time." - "Really? Apparently the KDE cars also have mirrors but different technology, and they don't need to be cleaned at all. Also, what's the difference between…

Looks like we disagree on what's a bug and what's a feature in a file picker. But the mirrors on a car are mandated by law, so the equivalent for that would be a missing Cancel button (which forces you to always open a file). If I had to pick a car part equivalent to the file thumbnails, it would probably be seat heating or a built-in navigation system - it's nice to have (for some, others never use it), but you can use the car without problems if it's broken or not installed.

I'm not saying that it's not a nice feature to have, but it's also definitely non-trivial - it's not only thumbnails for images, if you do that people will also demand thumbnails for videos (including, of course, all ancient formats), PDF files, Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents, HTML pages etc. etc. etc.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#662

Post by akerro »

hedora wrote: post #29

This has somehow gotten worse in recent years. When saving, it used to be you could use the mouse to navigate to a directory, then type the desired filename, and press enter. Now, typing the filename initiates a contextual search within the current directory. Clicking in the filename textbox and starting to type doesn’t work either. You have to highlight the base (not the extension or “.”) of the filename. At that po…

>This has somehow gotten worse in recent years

I used to contribute bugfixes to Gnome2 in months before Gnome 3 was released. I observed product plan for Gnome 3 and was joking Gnome 3 will be just a red button that farts.

So many functionalities removed, slower response time, regressions and defects everywhere, broken user experience worse than what Window 10 gave us later. I moved to XFCE and then to Plasma.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#663

Post by salawat »

eitland wrote: post #477
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they are not random at all. I haven't dug into it, but I've seen similar behavior here, and my impression is that Firefox stores an association between some or all of the URL host component and the most-recently-save-to location. If you saved something from http://foo.bar.com/ to /whatever in the past, future visits-and-saves to *.bar.com (or maybe just foo.bar.com) will use /whatever as the default locatio…

The joys of modern ux where everything is supposed to be so intuitive that no manual, help file or getting started guide is needed. To achieve this features and configuration options are removed left and right. Now we have half the software, no manual and often it still confuses users :-) Edit: and I don't have a good, inexpensive solution to it.

>Now we have half the software, no manual and often it still confuses users :-)

I was going through the contents of a storage unit and came across one of those old digital executive day planner things from the 80's, still bundled with the manual.

I cannot describe the sudden surge of childlike happiness. I loved reading about how to use things as a kid, and the little fold out pamphlets giving you a roadmap into efficiently using a device/software filled me with many hours of happiness and confidence as a child.

I now do my best to WTFM (Write The Frigging Manual) where I work. It's amazing how quick something can be picked up with a little bit of guidance.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#664

Post by akerro »

wruza wrote: post #465
kristopolous wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of fixing old problems that the entire community agrees with wild consensus, they insist on spending time creating new problems. Perhaps we should stop whining and start fixing them. And then if the developers refuse to accept things people have been wanting for well over a decade then we can fork it and simply abandon them like any other archaic unusable thing of the past. We've all asked very politely long…

You can fork code, but neither a development, support nor maintenance process. The truth is that there is no fork, Neo.

Like Mint failed to fork Ubuntu? Or Ubuntu failed to fork Debian? Or LibreOffice failed to fork OpenOffice? MariaDB MySQL?

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#665

Post by Hitton »

therealmarv wrote: post #23

GNOME is in general terrible for everything with image related work (last tested on Ubuntu 20.04). In the past I thought finder on macOS is terrible (it's still the worst piece of macOS and I don't like it) but GNOME files aka Nautilus tops it for sure (also because of space wasting issues). XFCE and KDE both do a better job than GNOME in this regard. And also Windows Explorer was and is much much better in this area…

In this particular case XFCE isn't any better than GNOME. Even though it does have thumbnails, they are so small that they are not usable.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#666

Post by cycloptic »

int_19h wrote: post #442
cycloptic wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them, you can work in the direction of your choosing. AFAIK there are numerous forks of GNOME over the years that are still going.

The problem is that GNOME is not just a DE. By virtue of being a project that's used by RedHat and Ubuntu, it's the closest thing to the standard DE that desktop Linux has at the moment. Worse yet, its developers consciously make design decisions that make it hard to write applications that play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it - their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a platform , and their main…

I'm not sure what you expect can be done about that. Every desktop is going to have its own set of features and APIs that other desktops don't. That's what they mean by "platform." Should e.g. KDE developers spend less time working on their own features and start contributing more to GNOME, to make GNOME apps work better in KDE, and vice versa? Maybe, but they would have to take the initiative to do it.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#667

Post by salawat »

seltzered_ wrote: post #56

Reminds 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…

If it's any comfort, had it been me, you'd have gotten a promotion on the spot. Toolmaking requires a delicate balance between realism, and sytemic abstraction. You have to simultaneously keep the view of system-as-world and end-tool-in-the-world firmly in mind simultaneously. Sadly, with programming, it can be very difficult to keep oneself from getting bewitched by overall system complexity in ways that end up having an adverse effect on the usability of the tool itself.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#668

Post by cycloptic »

sergeykish wrote: post #604
baybal2 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was a story recently, On the Graying of Gnome, comment by boudewijnrempt [1]: > The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous. > And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Win…

Thank you, I figured there was a blog or comment somewhere with more info.

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#669

Post by sergeykish »

circularfoyers wrote: post #471
cycloptic wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding. If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.

I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well. I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisi…

I think people believe Linux is community driven project, while in reality it is strongly corporate backed. Just look at kernel contributions [1]. I think same applies to most of the infrastructure, someone works on FreeType, Cairo, Pango, etc.

In such case disjoint between users and developers is even further. I am professional developer, yet I have zero contributions to my framework and just a few contributions to libraries. After 10 years my contributions to Linux community limited to bug reports, few patches and manuals.

In reality there is not enough community support to maintain existing systems. "Freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired" by individual is overrated, that's TempleOS.

EDITED: Some bragging about making a difference

There are a lot of projects with less corporate influence. No systemd on BSD, but hardware support is not as good. Generic distributions is something that works for most of the users. There are a lot of niche distributions and projects (Void Linux runit!). Current state is just a reflection of users priorities.

[1] https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

Re: GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked

#670

Post by cycloptic »

circularfoyers wrote: post #471
cycloptic wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding. If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.

I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well. I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisi…

I just don't want our community to turn to conspiracy theorizing and conjecture. We can do better.
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