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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

#671

Post by uncledave »

1_player wrote: post #601
invsblduck wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bought a Mac now. I’m too old for the fight. I said the same a decade ago. As of last week, I'm back on X11... chipping away at configs for hours and hours and hours. But I have libnotify popups now. :D

And if it goes like it did for me, that smile will turn upside down in a month and you'll format your Linux partition and move to WSL2 on Windows even if you haven't used it in 20 years. That's it, I'm done. At least now I only have to put up with a slightly dated and crufty interface but I can use my PC to full potential - gaming AND work AND working bluetooth. Crazy huh? In my case, I also managed to notice that my…

Yeah I've got a hefty PC here too running Windows. WSL2 is wonderful until you get your first Hyper-V bugcheck, filesystem corruption or weird ass network issue to debug. It's really not very good. I used it from day one and WSL1 before that which was even more horrible (NT impedance mismatch was obvious)

The compromise for me before migrating to Mac was using Windows on the desktop with Ubuntu VMs in Virtualbox. I had whole clusters running on my desktop.

Windows 10 is fairly decent on most hardware I have found. If they finished off all the little quality issues, had a decently integrated mobile ecosystem and stopped all the telemetry bullshit I'd be there now. I had some hope back in 2015ish when I was full time windows desktop dev with WP handset etc. Alas the world moved on so I dug the old Unix hat out.

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

#672

Post by InfiniteRand »

ubercow13 wrote: post #227
formerly_proven wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's likely the fault of the GVFS and other virtual-fs-on-top-of-kernel-VFS layers. Gtk seems to be slower than others (such as KIO/KDE), but all of them are pretty slow. E.g. the KDE file picker takes about a second or so to finish listing the contents of my home directory (though it is usable while it is doing so, unlike the Gtk dialog), where the Gtk takes quite a bit longer (perhaps on the order of 3-5 seconds)…

KIO is pretty fast I think. Dolphin is insanely fast at least - if you list a large directory almost everything that can't be loaded instantly is loaded asynchronously and streamed in to the UI after the UI becomes responsive. I think the KDE file picker is using other code altogether, I'm not sure why it's so much slower. GIO is horribly slow and makes everything that uses it next to useless, eg [1] [1] https://gith…

Interesting explanation at the end of the bug report:

The slowness is only caused by the GIO's G_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_STANDARD_CONTENT_TYPE and g_file_info_get_content_type. Wherever they are used, there will be a slowdown because the contents of files, that lack extensions, should be read for finding their mimetypes. Almost all the time is taken by that; the other operations are done pretty fast — particularly, the Qt GUI takes no time in comparison.

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

#673

Post by uncledave »

bmn__ wrote: post #638
uncledave wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one really really really pissed me off because it’s a task I expect to do tens of times a day. Also it has some serious focus loss issues in that space where you’ll have to tab or click something again. I must have installed a Linux distribution 100 times with the intent of using it as a desktop and lasted less than a day every time. I’ve been doing it since 1998. Literally something that horrible punches me in…

Run `kcmshell5 kwinoptions` or System Settings → section Workspace → item Window Management → subitem Window Behaviour → tab Focus. You are not allowed to complain about "Linux" when your beef is really about Gnome.

If I use KDE I'm still subjected to GTK and Freedesktop for stuff I use which is where all the bugs live. But then I have more inconsistencies between Qt and GTK so in fixing it that way I now have two problems.

Linux itself is fine. It's the layers of shit smeared on top that are not.

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

#674

Post by cycloptic »

sergeykish wrote: post #669
circularfoyers wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry if it was not clear, by take it in another direction I generally mean find funding, get hired by someone else to work on it, or start another company to work on it if there is enough of a business opportunity there. It's very hard to make significant changes to a large codebase without a team of people.

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

#675

Post by danShumway »

> This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and haven’t been popularly adopted.

I'm at least somewhat with the author in general, but this is a case of "grass is always greener" syndrome. I made a full switch to Linux from Windows in no small part because of issues just like this, I got tired of OneNote completely breaking on my Surface. Even on much more polished operating systems -- Mac's window snapping is still inexplicably awful for, as far as I can tell, no reason at all except that Apple refuses to copy the simple model that both Windows and Gnome adopted. We tolerate it. I purchased a 3rd-party program to replicate the functionality, and it sometimes works.

A more drastic example, my proprietary router won't let me set a custom DNS server at the router level. It has an option to do so, but it doesn't do anything, and this is an open bug that people complained about for years that was just... ignored. And eventually they pushed a fix for it that broke everyone's routers and required manual rollback.

If something isn't a showstopper, sometimes it just gets ignored in general. Has nothing to do with whether or not it's free software, and everything to do with whether or not somebody somewhere cares enough to fix it.

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

#676

Post by 1_player »

uncledave wrote: post #671
1_player wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if it goes like it did for me, that smile will turn upside down in a month and you'll format your Linux partition and move to WSL2 on Windows even if you haven't used it in 20 years. That's it, I'm done. At least now I only have to put up with a slightly dated and crufty interface but I can use my PC to full potential - gaming AND work AND working bluetooth. Crazy huh? In my case, I also managed to notice that my…

Yeah I've got a hefty PC here too running Windows. WSL2 is wonderful until you get your first Hyper-V bugcheck, filesystem corruption or weird ass network issue to debug. It's really not very good. I used it from day one and WSL1 before that which was even more horrible (NT impedance mismatch was obvious) The compromise for me before migrating to Mac was using Windows on the desktop with Ubuntu VMs in Virtualbox. I h…

Mac is great, I would use it full time if Jobs and Apple hadn't decided gaming is for kids. It's my hobby, especially now that I'm locked home, and being unable to play the latest PC game is an unacceptable compromise for me. No, a console is not what I'm looking for.

So in that case, Windows is the best compromise. And while I'm still in the proprietary world, I'm outside the walled garden.

In any case, I haven't hit any WSL2 bug or corruption in these 6 months (nor blue screen), so fingers crossed.

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

#677

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

bsdubernerd wrote: post #140
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #40

OSS is not designed to solve user problems, it's designed to solve developer problems. Therefore it will always suck compared to a commercial product developed for users. Good product design solves users' problems. ( And usually there's somebody who will get fired if they wait indefinitely to solve it)

As a dev I still have to interact with the file picker a huge number of times in a single day. The GTK file picker is perhaps one of the worst offenders that's irritating devs, power-users and plain regular users. Patches get dismissed. I don't know where the problem is. It's as if the GNOME team had a vision, but didn't actually try to see how this vision plays out using the tools they're making.

> I don't know where the problem is.

The problem is nobody's gonna get fired for not solving the problem in GNOME. Nobody is accountable, and nobody has to cooperate on and solve the user's problem. One person can be a blocker for 10 years and nobody can do anything about it.

The second thing Leadership is useful for is forcing people to do the right thing. That seems to be missing here.

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

#678

Post by j1elo »

ognarb wrote: post #613
j1elo wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small half-joke: Only two words into the front page post I already hit a UX issue! (and a UI inconsistency) > This week (KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten...) I then instinctively went on to the top of the article to check on the date, to get an idea of when was "this week" for the author... but there is no date. Oh, well :-) Opening the post itself (instead of reading from the main page) does inde…

Nate is not a web developer and is just using a default wordpress theme.

Totally understandable. The theme developer, however, could have strived for a bit more consistency on its default settings...

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

#679

Post by johannes1234321 »

trissylegs wrote: post #517
johannes1234321 wrote: post #52

Gnome uses Gtk; Gtk is the Gimp Toolkit. It was created for an image editing program. In a way funny that their file picker is missing such an feature one would expect in an image editing program these days. (From scrolling offer the discussion I can in parts see the architectural constraints they have and can image they have other priorities ...)

If you notice the dependcies: https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/gimp/ GIMP still runs GTK 2. The version from ~10 years ago.

According to Wikipedia[1] GtkFileChooser is from 2.4 in 2004. So that was designed more than 16 years ago. Not sure when Windows got the feature, but previews could have been thinkable then and machines powerful enough to handle it with some usable threshold.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK

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

#680

Post by swiley »

jdright wrote: post #156
swebs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least enough people care that its become a meme in some tech communities. https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme

Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop" issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.

I've never understood why so many distros make gnome the default DE. There are much better and friendly ones, some of them forks and some written from scratch.
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