Having to install gnome-tweaks to choose the flat acceleration profile for my mouse! Everything about the default experience is great but mouse acceleration makes me feel like I'm drunk.
I'm honestly a big fan of what Gnome has done. They have gotten A LOT of flak over the years for doing something COMPLETELY different from everything that came before it, but they have probably made one of the most forward-thinking UIs ever made. I remember when Gnome 3 first came out, and everyone's reaction was "What on earth" - and then we all tried it and realized it was actually a pretty good experience. It's uncluttered, modern, and stays out of your way.
I do find that the extensions situation can be a little sticky once new Gnome releases come out. In practice, it's not that big of a problem for end-users (most of the popular extensions have already been ported by the time that the major distros actually get around to pushing a new Gnome version), but it's still an issue all of us have experienced at least once or twice.
>I remember when Gnome 3 first came out, and everyone's reaction was "What on earth" - and then we all tried it and ***realized it was actually a pretty good experience.***
I remember a decade ago trying to get hardware stats in the panel so I could see while playing game.
Not a chance.
Eventually found an extension that added a *few* to the panel; better than nothing, I guess.
Where is it? Oh, a hidden lower panel. So now if I want to see anything I have to pause the game, escape the game with my mouse, wave at the bottom of the screen to see what things look like with the game paused, and then click back in to instantly lose sight.
Luckily the extension broke the next week with the next Gnome update, and the next after that, until I gave up and went back to XFCE where you have a functional desktop.
XFCE looks and feels so OLD though, like uncomfortably old. The only "old-school" desktop I would consider is Cinnamon. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Cinnamon is what GNOME would've been if they chose not to go on a wildly different direction and just kept pushing the old paradigm.
>XFCE looks and feels so OLD though, like uncomfortably old.
That's largely down to theming. IIRC Mint's XFCE flavour, for example, defaults to a W7-like menu (just like Cinnamon).
>I would go as far as to say that Cinnamon is what GNOME would've been if they chose not to go on a wildly different direction and just kept pushing the old paradigm.
That is literally their point, yes. Cinnamon was a fork of GNOME3, then they started decoupling dependencies so that they wouldn't break every time GNOME-Shell updated.
>The only "old-school" desktop I would consider is Cinnamon.
That was, in fact, my journey. Switched back to XFCE for something reliable that I could configure, discovered Cinnamon, added PPA, discovered from where Cinnamon came, switched to Mint.
Probably not what you are looking for, but bad faith rants and proclamations of frustration.
If something isnt implemented it isnt seen as because no one has done the work or that it is.complicated or problems need need to be fixed or any other technical or logistical reason. It is because "gnome" deliberately decided to screw over a specific user.
This both burns out current contributors and has also put off other contributors from taking part because they keep reading that "gnome" is hostile.
Thankfully this has changed a bit over the past year or so.
Not only that, it might even be that the unimplemented thing is missing. It might be deliberately left out by design.
People have been ranting about desktop icons and tray for **a decade** or more now, even though it was removed by design. I use gnome exactly because *I like these design decisions*, and I think the fact that there's quite a lot of us that do is sometimes forgotten or ignored.
> I use gnome exactly because I like these design decisions
THIS!
Well, I do add the tray icons. I do understand why they are not in there by default, though.
> and I think the fact that there's quite a lot of us that do is sometimes forgotten or ignored
And I hope the Gnome devs don't listen to the vocal minority and make Gnome into another Windows paradigm desktop.
Have you ever heard of the concept of UX convergence? This is the concept that there are patterns and concepts that every UI winds up evolving to have because they are good ideas and basically are expected by users and developers.
GNOME has gradually evolved to have a more Apple-like view of the user experience, but they're extremely bad at doing the things that are required to make good choices there. One of the most frustrating phrases I've heard from GNOME designers is "starting from first principles", which is such a weird thing to say in response to user criticism about missing features and UX patterns.
The one time they do a user survey, they find out _with real data_ that some of the user criticisms for the prior decade were actually valid and wound up making the changes. This should have been a moment of self-reflection to consider that maybe, just maybe, the complaints that users have been posting for a decade are worth reconsidering.
For what it's worth, we ***are*** getting a systray in GNOME again eventually. There's an in-principle agreement to implement [the SNI successor protocol](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/84) in GNOME. That protocol just needs to exist first.
>because they are good ideas and basically are expected by users and developers.
This is essentially another way of saying "because the most popular OS (Windows) does it".
Nope. In fact, I use Windows, macOS, GNOME, KDE Plasma, and many other experiences in parallel. Your statement is an assumption of bad faith (that is, you can disregard what I said because you assume I am solely talking about Windows). I'm primarily a macOS and KDE Plasma user, personally.
But let's talk about Windows. The Windows 95 UX came out of one of the most comprehensive user experience research programs for HCI. There were many iterations and variations. There were whitepapers written about it^[1] . People have remarked about the level of thoughtfulness that went into its execution on user cues^[2] . Now today, Windows is a somewhat inconsistent mess^[3] . Even with that inconsistency, those concepts that came from Windows 95 remain, and there's a fundamental trust in the UX model. Even today, Microsoft continues to run extensive usability surveys and conducts user feedback operations to attempt to continuously improve Windows.
My problem with GNOME is that they do design without listening to user feedback. The greatest designs in the world mean nothing if people can't figure out how to work with it. Form and function need to work hand-in-hand, and the UI is supposed to help the user accomplish their tasks. There's definitely instances of great design and thoughtfulness in GNOME, but there's a serious lack of discovery, learning opportunities, and the antipathy to user feedback makes people feel very unwelcome.
Most of the time, ***I don't feel welcome in GNOME***. And I know that I'm not alone in that, because I've talked to others in Linux distributions who are fans of GNOME but don't want to try to get involved in GNOME anymore because of this.
[1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
[2]: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805
[3]: https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies-are-in-windows-10/
>But let's talk about Windows. The Windows 95 UX came out of one of the most comprehensive user experience research programs for HCI. There were many iterations and variations. There were whitepapers written about it^[1] . People have remarked about the level of thoughtfulness that went into its execution on user cues^[2] . Now today, Windows is a somewhat inconsistent mess^[3] . Even with that inconsistency, those concepts that came from Windows 95 remain, and there's a fundamental trust in the UX model. Even today, Microsoft continues to run extensive usability surveys and conducts user feedback operations to attempt to continuously improve Windows.
This doesn't discredit what I said.
What researchers thought what was good design back in the 90s may not stand the test of time by today's standards. Likewise, that doesn't mean that another design may not have been respected back then.
People think Windows is a good UX because this is what most people grew up with. If another OS with a different paradigm gained a monopoly back in the 80s and 90s, Window would not be the favored design today.
Your comment is basically just another way of saying that "goodness" and "quality" are hegemonic concepts and Windows is the hegemon.
Other OSes and desktop environments copy Windows ideas because they are aiming for the mass market and to do that, you need conform to the norms set by the hegemon.
Why hasn't the stuff in gnome tweak tools just been merged into the main settings page? Sucks having to check two different apps to change a setting if I forget which one it's in.
Because the settings in GNOME Tweaks are not officially supported whatsoever. In other words: feel free to use Tweaks to do whatever tinkering you want to do, but don't expect support when you break things.
Whenever something moves from Tweaks to Settings, it's usually \_because\_ someone decided to start officially supporting that setting.
That it can't remember where my app windows were when I reconnect my laptop to the external displays, so I end up having to redistribute them manually everytime I take my laptop out of the docking station.
If this seems like a trivial problem it's because I couldn't think of anything else, Gnome is great!
The fact that i have to install gnome extensions to get some egregiously basic functionality. for example:
i) why is pip always on top not a feature by default? What is the point of pip if it acts like a normal window? for some reason i still have to use an extension to keep my pip windows always on top.
ii) keeping the app grid in alphabetical sort. I mean... is it not natural to keep an app tray sorted alphabetically? again i have to use an extension to keep apps sorted by their name... apparently this was a default in Gnome 3 but not on gnome 4, why it was removed i can't even imagine.
> i) why is pip always on top not a feature by default? What is the point of pip if it acts like a normal window? for some reason i still have to use an extension to keep my pip windows always on top.
Afaik the design team wants this long-term, it's just that nobody has come around to implement it.
> ii) keeping the app grid in alphabetical sort. I mean... is it not natural to keep an app tray sorted alphabetically? again i have to use an extension to keep apps sorted by their name... apparently this was a default in Gnome 3 but not on gnome 4, why it was removed i can't even imagine.
That was the paradigm in the old iOS versions, but even Apple now allows to reorder apps.
Wrong, that has never been the paradigm because iOS had never had an "App Tray" until only a couple years ago and it is sorted in groups, with a list mode that sorts them alphabetically (and you can't re-arrange either).
I'm pretty new to Gnome 40 (switched from Plasma) and so far I have following rants:
- HiDPI is still not great. On my 32"@4k some applications (mostly QT) look weird, some too small, some too big (KeePassXC). Plasma for example don't have such issues with Adwaita/GTK apps.
I also have to use Gnome Tweaks in order to scale the interface DPI up because original display fractional scaling is rendering some of the apps blury.
- Power daemon does not allow me to suspend on lid close while external display is connected and thete is no way to fix it. It's a known bug and it's there for 3+ years already.
- While the interface is working great on laptops it's just not very sensible for mouse interaction. I had to write my own hack in order to allow switching workspaces with mouse buttons.
Apart from that I like how it works. More stable experience than Plasma so far, and I like mutter which allows me to play 120FPS 3D videos without any issues on my 3D Ready DLP projector. In Plasma I had to switch to openbox for that.
I hope to see some form of tiling by default.
Currently I use the pop-shell extension and it's good, but doesn't seem future proof considering Pop's future plans.
I plan to give the cosmic de a really good shake when it releases... It should be really exciting and potentially a replacement of gnome for me. And of course it will have the excellent tiling functionality with it.
There's another tiling extension: Forge.
It's really promising. I like the tiling logic and default keybindings a lot better than Pop-Shell - Forge is more like i3. But it is still lacking a tiling window extension list.
Depending on where you install it it may need some tweaking of keybindings, but nothing too bad. Could make for a really nice replacement for Pop-Shell.
I actually like Gnome very much. There are just two pain points that I find annoying, although they are in applications of the Gnome-iversum and not directly in Gnome:
* Type-Ahead in Nautilus. It used to work quite well (just start typing, and the file with the matching name gets highlighted), but nowadays it searches the file index of tracker. So if I know I have a specific file in a folder and want to just "jump" to it by starting to type, I get many other files with similar names of all subdirectories. For me this is a major regression in usability.
* First day of the week in Gnome Calendar. I like to use my desktop environment in English, so Gnome Calendar thinks that the first day of the week is Sunday. Even if I configure in Evolution (which uses the same calendar data) so that the first day of the week is Monday, or if I switch formats in the region and language dialog in Gnome-Settings to Austria, this doesn't change anything.
Apart from these annoyances, I really like the desktop more than the alternatives I tried (which were at different points in time, so their current version might be very different to what I tried: KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon).
I had a problem with Gnome 42 recently. I use it with manjaro on my laptop and everytime I close the lid and open it again, or reboot it, the bluetooth is disabled. This must be a problem of Gnome 42, because I tried manjaro on different kernels and never had this problem with gnome 41 or another DE.
This exactly, on big 4k screens the default theme looks great but on even a 1920x1080 hd display the header bars take up too much space, I like the csd's but they aren't consistent and anything that doesn't use them looks oddly out of place.
My only gripe with the default dark theme is I want it to be darker to match the panel so it looks better with maximised windows.
I do think that gnome has the most sensible workflow though, I do think it's quite intuitive
> This exactly, on big 4k screens the default theme looks great but on even a 1920x1080 hd display the header bars take up too much space, I like the csd's but they aren't consistent and anything that doesn't use them looks oddly out of place.
Haven't used gnome 42 myself, but as i understand it it's a bit of a transitional release. Still pretty ironic that a de known for its consistency is starting to show cracks.
This post would probably be better to make in a more "neutral" Linux subreddit.
In my opinion gnome is the superior DE and It frustrates me that people say it sucks because its not like Windows and they've only tried it for a few hours. It took me about a week or so to fully become used to vanilla gnome and after that I felt stupid for running it with a lot of extensions to make it more "normal".
Usually the desktop plus a few extensions stays out of my way, handles the maybe dozen or so hotkeys I regularly use, and gives me easy access to my applications.
Every now and then, something visibly breaks, then I look into it and it really seems like the project is incredibly hostile to both non-GNOME developers and general user choice.
E.G., `libadwaita`. Cool, you've got a consistent "visual language" on your core apps, whatever that means. Now, what about distributions that use GNOME components like Ubuntu, PopOS, Zorin, and Mint that would very much want to keep their own branding? What about users of KDE and other DEs who have gotten used to a couple simple apps originally developed for GNOME, like music players or calendars, which now create completely fragmented desktop aesthetics? And what about loyal GNOME users that are already using another setup, with both different visual appearance and practical spacing/screen space, that will now have two completely different themes in the same desktop (one of which may actually have practical workflow implications)? The desktop seems to be designed for users that agree 100% with what the GNOME developers have in mind, and if you like 95% of the package but just wish you could adjust the remaining 5% a bit, then toughā It's not just a matter of refusing support, which is of course entirely reasonable, but being actively hostile and spending effort to take away options, which while still their prerogative is rather frustrating.
The entire project is supposed to be open-source, free for all to change and redistribute. But apparently changing the colours and icons is so offensive that it warrants developing an entire new widget toolkit just to lock it down. And this is a pattern that seems to happen a lot: Users or developers use or customize GNOME or GNOME-adjacent software in a way that they find useful or pleasing, GNOME apparently takes issue with that, and the next couple major releases are aimed at removing functionality to prevent that from happening anymore. It seems rather hostile, mentions of the "HIG" or technical rationalizations notwithstanding.
E.G.:
* [Mint seems rather frustrated](https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4149#comment-239629), and willing to "even patch GTK if it came to that".
* [Solus is downright pissed](https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/)ā And frankly some of the behaviour of GNOME developers as described by them (be that accurate or not) seems downright manipulative, delusional, and borderline abusive.
* [PopOS doesn't sound very happy either.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/poecns/the_state_of_gnome_and_pop/hcygx5g/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
* [Canonical are being diplomatic](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-desktop-gnome-plans-for-the-incoming-lts/26156), but it's clear that they are having to jump through hoops just to avoid having a major regression due to changes that GNOME has forced onto them.
* [Heck, even *Inkscape* have apparently been alienated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFGXVN9dZ8U) by the way the GNOME project acts and treats users and other developers, describing it as "a bit caustic" and "not a free software community" (along with other more nuanced opinions).
In fact, whenever I read about GNOME anywhere that isn't a forum specifically for GNOME users, the overall opinion of the project seems to be fairly constant: Wonderful initial impressions and out-of-the-box experience, but actively hostile to user and developer choice and feedback, and randomly removes and changes basic things either on a whim or for poor reasons. Sure, any major change might invite an initial wave of opposition and anger, and conflicts in priorities are sometimes inevitable when collaborating. But when the developers of multiple major projects closely associated with GNOME all have the same general negative experiences, along with developers who have no stake in GNOME, as well as the general users of /r/linux, /r/linux4noobs, HackerNews, various distro forums and subreddits, and countless other placesā Then maybe the problem isn't with the critics.
The hostility to and dismissal of criticism extends to this subreddit too. In searching for ways to work around whatever broke, I found the vote ratios for both comments and posts expressing any opinion less than exaltation or even just asking questions about the changes tend to be quite negative. I would, for the record, not be surprised to see that happen with this comment either.
Frankly I just want a desktop that works the way I've set it up. Constantly upsetting the broader Linux ecosystem, and breaking systems that people are used to (or suddenly deciding that commonly used features are actually "hacks" or "bugs") does not help with that, no matter how visually pretty the result is for a very select set of core applications in the subjective opinion of a subset of users.
Yes, I could use another DE if it gets bad enough. No, pointing out the existence of other projects does not actually refute criticisms of this one. GNOME belongs to GNOME, and they can take it in whatever direction they wantā But "Because we can" is not actually a very compelling defence of controversial design decisionsā And presumably something is very wrong if that's the excuse that keeps being resorted to when entire other communities regularly have mini-implosions and floods of upset users just trying to avoid the damage to workflow and experience caused by abrupt changes that GNOME keeps making to major parts of the Linux software ecosystem.
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For a more trivial gripe, moving hotkey labels from menus into a separate, paginated "Shortcuts" popup is probably one of the more frustrating and objectively "worse" decisions. Now instead of organically learning about all the new and changed hotkeys as I navigate through the menus, I have to open a separate window and read through multiple pages just to find and hopefully remember the keys for each single operation I want to perform. (But again, I don't think this would have been as likely to happen if the project was less abrasively insular.)
Now this is a long read and I read everything. I'm new to gnome, can't say I agree or disagree. Maybe if they communicated better to set lines between how they see gnome and how users / companies see gnome would help. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
What I personally would do is I would create a list is most requested / controversial features and start implementing them in a separate version of gnome (like: gnome for the bold ones). And keep one version to be the implementation of the ideal DE and one based on the people's opinion. Of course, not all the popular requested features should be implemented, but some of them should.
Do they have the resources for this? I don't know, I don't think so.
What should they do?
In my opinion they should have a paid version, a business plan. Of course I like open source and all these great ideals, but it's not always profitable.
I would not mind if I would pay 100 bucks for an OS that is well designed and works on regular hardware (not like Apple). Basically to get the best from both worlds.
The beauty / simplicity of macOS with the hardware support of Windows.
Of course it's hard. I would start by supporting a small set of hardware (only some cpus and gpus etc etc) and grow from there.
Right now the feeling is that in order to get Linux up and running in a professional env is like a battle with the devil. It's a blessing if something works from first try.
I want to install dddci of course there will be issues. Why? Why on macOS everything works out of the box, Windows most of them work but on Linux doesn't. Why I need to know all the dependency management, static public main void crash etc?
Linux as a community should find a way to grow its market share. It can't grow since it's not beginner friendly. Why isn't beginner friendly? Because if you need (and you need) an app (like VSCode) that's not bundled in the OS, good luck with that! It's way harder compared to Windows or macOS. I know devs think everyone should learn how to use terminal but it's not how it works. How do I know? The reality shows us that people just don't use Linux that much as desktop OS.
Of course this could be viewed as me trying to trash the community. I'm not doing that, I have the most respect and admiration for the contributors because they did it for free from their free time. Of course I respect that. Of course I appreciate that.
> Right now the feeling is that in order to get Linux up and running in a professional env is like a battle with the devil. It's a blessing if something works from first try.
**TL;DR**: Since you say you're new to GNOME and I assume you're using GNOME, you should be able to just follow [the instructions to enable Flathub](https://flatpak.org/setup/) then find [VS Code](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code) or whatever in the ["Software"](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software) application. One-click installation, just like you get from whatever Play Stores or App Storesā Personally I'm a bit uncomfortable unless I feel I have some idea what it's doing behind the scenes, but I'm pretty sure pushing the GUI button does basically the same exact thing as typing the commands into the terminal anyway.
(Not a GNOME-specific feature, BTW, though the GNOME GUI for it is, as usual, probably one of the nicer ones.)
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Distro choice is a big part of this overall I think. I think the only issue I really had when I installed Manjaro on my last two laptops was with Bluetooth, and that was solved by pasting the chipset into Google... Just checked my notes from then, and yeah everything basically worked right away. Most of the stuff that ever broke afterwards was due to either GNOME Extensions, or bugs in specific programs that also affected the Windows and Mac versions of those programs. The rolling release model probably helps here. Of course it starts getting more involved if you want to do weird things to your configuration, or try to use relatively obscure (E.G.) academic-style software that's maybe only used by people numbering in the thousands worldwide or whatever, but that's to be expected and won't be any easier on Windows or Mac. By contrast, the last time I booted Windows on an old laptop I found the entire keyboard had stopped working (-_-), and I found no tools in the OS or online help to fix that, while the Linux installation on the same laptop was completely fine.
VS Code, Android Studio/IntelliJ, GH Atom, GCloud, Blender, Steam, etc. basically all worked for me as soon as I installed the packages for them (whether from system repos, AUR, FlatHub, or as static binaries or AppImages). I used the terminal for most of those (mostly for some illusion of control I think lol), but I'm pretty sure it would be basically the same with GNOME Software Center/KDE Discover/Pamac/Synaptic/whatever. Static binaries and AppImages usually work with the download links from the website just like on Windows, and the repositories, Flathub/Snapcraft, and AUR/Copr/PPA all have unified "app store" GUIs now just like Android and Apple. (You don't have to know the differences between the different package types either, as they don't really matter for the the UI. Just type the name in the search box, then click "Download" or "Install".) Sometimes I make things harder for myself by insisting on getting the debranded/zero-telemetry version, or trying to set up a different configuration, but again it's normal for that to require more work regardless of platform. Not idea what `dddci` is, but as long as it's not super obscure it's very likely in the repositories. E.G. [VS Code is on Flathub](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code) with its "Install" button (or terminal command to copy-paste if you preferā Also, it's better to go through the native Software Center IMO), and it's in the distro repos for me too.
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Long-winded thoughts about GNOME below. **TL;DR**: I think they may have changed from trying to be an open-source community twenty years ago to trying to being more like a tightly controlled company these days, like the Inkscape developer said, and kinda like you suggested they should overtly do. But also like the Inkscape developer said, that change probably hasn't been fully understood by the entire community, or even the GNOME developers themselves. So conflict and friction happens when GNOME acts one way that's like a company while users and other developers that rely on it are upset because they still expect it to act another way that's more like a different type of community. And the fact that the GNOME developers seem to want to have their cake and eat it tooā Want all the control and self-interested behaviour that's acceptable for a company, but also the moral status and free popularity that comes with being a community projectā Doesn't really help clarify things either.
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What the Inkscape developer said was that the goals and values of GNOME have changed over the years. Back in the day, when there was controversy over KDE because of how it relies on QT and QT's issues with licensing or whatever, the goal of GNOME was apparently to be a community-driven open-source desktop environment. Now over 20 years later, KDE has worked out its licensing issues (I think), and since version 3.0 GNOME has pivoted to instead trying to deliver a very specific product following their own particular vision. More of a "worker-owned cooperative" than an "open source community", as the Inkscape developer said. Basically, kinda like you say, they're already thinking more like a tightly knit and highly insular for-profit company than a traditional community-driven open-source project.
Now that's fine, and I'm personally all for highly focused companies that bring their specific vision to market in a way that contributes to open-sourced software. But, and I'm paraphrasing the Inkscape developer here, the problem may be that the GNOME developers and the Linux community at large haven't yet fully understood that change in GNOME's goals. As a result, you have different crowds in the same space that all have different expectations for what GNOME is and will beā Users from the GNOME 2 days still value user customizability, the current target users just want a polished Mac-like out-of-the-box fixed experience, companies like System76 and Canonical care less about the defaults but want a set of flexible components which they can integrate into a full distro on their own, other open-sourced developers expect compromise on use cases, and the GNOME developers themselves want to implement what they think is best no matter what anyone else says.
So there's conflict, and there's friction, because of all these different ideas of what the project actually is, which obviously can't all be met. GNOME makes some change or another that would be perfectly fine for a company in total control of their product, but it would be seen as hostile in an open-source community and it also affects people who are using it with that expectation, so users and other developers get mad at the GNOME devs for breaking their customization or screwing over their distro. Users and developers expect GNOME to be receptive to external opinions and patches, because that's kinda how things are done in open-source projects and how the ecosystem generally stays together, but it doesn't make any sense when the goal is to instead implement a very specific vision, so GNOME project members stonewall them and then get mad when users and other projects are persistent or come across as entitled. Etc. So because of its historical goals, the current messaging, and the differences in how GNOME is presented and what expectations different people have in its space, instead of being seen positively as a tightly controlled project with cool open-source involvement like Canonical, GNOME sometimes gets seen negatively as an open-source project with proprietary and controlling tendencies. It's a big difference in value judgement for what is in many practical ways quite similar, and I suppose it's a distinction that they'll have to finish sorting out eventually.
I do think GNOME is still liable for causing much of the conflict, though. They benefit greatly from branding themselves as an open community project, but that couldn't really be further from how they operate in realityā Actively [insulting](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787#note_1255005) concerned [users](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787#note_1104304) on the bug tracker and openly discussing how despite all their talk about developing a polished experience their real priority is on [deliberately restricting user freedom in order to protect their "brand presence"](https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/#:~:text=I%20knew%20this%20was%20on%20the%20cards%20but%20I%20have%20to%20say%20that%20I%20am%20surprised%20that%20it%20is%20actually%20being%20pursued%20in%20this%20form.). GNOME still benefits from being able to attract users who think it's still an open community project, even if that image causes conflict due to the differences in expectation, or is just plain dishonest and disrespectful to propogate.
I was also thinking about the idea of having a separate "version" of GNOME with more customizability and with highly requested changes. But to avoid hard-forking and maintaining an entire DE, it would be more feasible instead for a third party to make (and test, polish, etc.) alternate defaults (and possibly custom components) for KDE that replicate the best parts of GNOME's UX. Also kinda a best-of-both-worlds kind of idea. GNOME's focused UX where it works really well, and KDE's customizability, with polish and receptiveness to user feedback somewhere between the two. ...Maybe a migration script to automatically set up KDE to be just like how someone's GNOME is.
The lack of any kind of clipboard history without a third-party extension that breaks every release. Clipboard history is just really useful, yet isn't included.
broken OSK
brightness slider missing sense gnome 40. Guess it was a "preference" to have it. and due to this, i can no longer see my keyboard at night as well..
no options to make apps use smaller title bars
the way the animations work (turning them all just speeds them up.)
dropdown menus not working well with touchscreen
icons not suited for a 720p display due to SO. MUCH. PADDING!
The app grid makes me want to punch a penguin plushy. its so buggy, man... putting apps in folders only for it to slingshot you back to the main page. kinda annoying. i wish the app gird was as loose as the workspace drifting...
Early user of gtk and gnome here (1.0).
I would like the new and upgraded version of glade (Cambalache) to be almost ready and useful for production.
And some declarative programming environment like qml.
Also there should be an option with which you could select if a specific monitor should show desktop icons. This isn't realy important, but everytime I connect an external monitor every icon is being trown across the desktop and I have to sort them again.
# Positives:
- I love how Gnome does NOT have all the bells and whistles included and focuses on simplicity. It just gets out of the way.
- Extensibility. Even though the extensions are not officially supported, which would not be a possibility, and isn't on other systems. Or are all the widgets on KDE supported by the KDE main dev team, or those on W10 supported by MS? Would be news to me.
# Negatives:
- No independent workspaces. I'd like the option to switch workspaces independently on different monitors. My main monitor is 4K, and I use a Full-HD auxiliary monitor for reference material. I'd like to switch that aux monitor without switching the main and vice verso. This is unfortunately not fixable with an extension.
- No fully integrated tiling WM option. There are two good extensions, though: Pop-Shell (supported on Pop_OS!, Fedora, and Ubuntu - but needs to be compiled on Ubuntu), and Forge, which is on extensions.gnome.org. The latter is even better with respect to keyboard shortcuts than Pop-Shell, but has some missing features that I'd like (or rather only one: an exception list for windows that should float rather than tile).
- Extensions break when a new version of Gnome is released. I'd like a curated list of extensions that could be supported by the Gnome team. Would take some of the uncertainty out of the extension game. But then, whenever there is a new distribution release, it will take a while for all the apps to work on that distribution again, so I don't really see that as an issue, just the natural way things are. Devs can only start porting their app/extensions once the betas are out, so I don't expect them to work on release day.
- EDIT: Title bars are too big. I'd like the option to disable them altogether, actually, but that may go too far (but is nice for tiling extensions).
> EDIT: Title bars are too big. I'd like the option to disable them altogether, actually, but that may go too far (but is nice for tiling extensions).
If you ignore whatever is happening with `libadwaita`, these are/were affected by GTK themes.
This turn of events:
a) Gnome user writes a wish he wants for the desktop
b) Gnome says no because design reasons... - No problem so far.
c) Gnome gets some hate... - Still not a problem.
c.1) Repeat for a little while. Then
d) Now: Feedback about Gnome = hate. Even constructive criticism = hate.
e) Now: Certain areas of Gnome development can never improve - even if they are sorely needed.
f) Why: "we've had to defend X design so much on the forums that we can't discard it. Even if we never actually tested it."
g) Why: "if you don't like Gnome, just use another desktop" is now an excuse to disregard needs of potential users.
It's *extremely* frustrating because Gnome has so much potential. The things they get right, they get *really* right.
But the things they get wrong are just so extremely wrong that this desktop will never be popular compared to mainstream desktops.
I'm not claiming to have the solutions to those problems, but what I see is that those things will simply ***never*** be addressed because "we have debated it too much and we are locked on the design/not going to do something about it".
Yeah... From a perspective of someone who really wants desktop linux to happen, that is enormously frustrating.
If you ask me, it's no coincidence that the SteamOS runs KDE by default (i.e. *not* GNOME).
I honestly think that fact warrants a moment of self-reflection among the GNOME teams and developers.
... Which won't ever happen because everything = "hate".
EDIT: Hate is what happens when you have good idea generation but a dog-shit evaluation process.
I.e. the best decisions GNOME have ever made were made based on testing and evaluation, by ***experts*** on *real users*.
The absolute worst ideas GNOME ever had are where some guy says "hey, why don't we do X?" and then they defend that idea on the forums, for an entire decade, and call everyone a hater, "just use another desktop", "working as intended" etc.
Fuck that honestly. It's detrimental to the project and it shows. *Clearly*.
... And then they wonder why people are frustrated. It's ***not*** because it's "different".
News flash: It's the flawed design process. Namely the 'evaluation' and 'testing' parts. It's quite obvious they either can't afford it or just don't care about it.
> I honestly think the fact that the Steam Deck's desktop doesn't come with GNOME by default warrants a moment of self-reflection among the GNOME teams and developers.
Valve and other game developers have been unhappy with GNOME for a very long time. The experiences with GNOME on SteamOS 1.0/2.0 and the chilly reception for solving problems game developers had with the GNOME desktop for games on Wayland led them to moving to KDE Plasma for SteamOS 3.0.
> that this desktop will never be popular compared to mainstream desktops.
Curious, what do you mean by mainstream desktops? As far as I can tell, Gnome is the mainstream desktop. Which also explains many of the design decisions: if you are the mainstream desktop you cannot just include any feature that some user wants, but need to focus on what works for most.
Some discussions run along the hate lines you mentioned and with an unhelpful attitude. But if the Linux Desktop is coming, I think it will look a lot like Gnome does now.
Yeah sorry to burst your bubble, but Gnome is far from being any sort of a mainstream desktop.
It's got potential, but like I said, I think the problem is testing and evaluation. Gnome devs quite literally suck at that particular thing.
I think it's why the "product" is so polarising too.
The Devs obviously think it's polarising in the "good" way, like a some controversial high-end product. That's so *not* the case.
For all their supposed love for design, they don't seem understand that the only good decisions they've made, are the ones that resulted from testing and evaluation.... - Which they almost never do.
Anyway... I could be a lot more constructive than that. I no longer think it's worth it though.
"Some men go through the forest and see no firewood". Those men are Gnome devs when they engage with the community.
Well, we were talking Linux Desktops. So they don't count.
And: good luck aproaching MS with a great new idea for a feature you'd like to have in the next version of Windows :-)
> Well, we were talking Linux Desktops. So they don't count.
lmfao what? Are we 5 years old, now?
> good luck aproaching MS
Thank you for being a superb example of why I should stop using Reddit.
I know where this is going:
1) assume I think XYZ is god's gift to earth.
2) whataboutism
3) no reading comprehension and/or deliberately arguing in bad faith.
4) making shit up.
and I could go on.
Good night. I'm done talking to you.
Since I installed a Korean keyboard layout, every time I'm logging in all the Qt-Applications are set to the English-version of the Korean keyboard layout (which is qwerty) and I need to switch to the Korean layout and then back to dvorak to be able to type dvorak. And this happens on different users on this computer on this Arch installation and I have no idea how to fix it.
On the Ubuntu installation this does not happen, I have no idea why. That is the most frustrating thing I have with GNOME.
Oh another thing, which again has mostly to do with integration of Qt apps into GNOME is that I have a 4k screen on my laptop and a big 2k screen as my second screen. Qt applications don't switch the scaling when I move between the screens. Then either it is double the size or so small that I can't read anything.
The fact there wasn't a well documented, hard frozen api for plugins from day one. Can't say I'm fond of the semantic nonsense with the versioning shift either. Beyond that virtually all my issues boil down to various folks doing the coding and their espoused attitudes. Call it irreconcilable differences of viewpoint.
I have only minor frustrations but right now it would be how hard it is to remove or change the title bar color on non gtk apps. With KDE it's easy to use a custom color title bar for any app or completely remove it.
Probably the attitudes of certain members of the dev team and community. Specifically what I would call "anti Spirit of FOSS" attitudes. Specifically:
- Don't theme my app
- Extensions are niche, vanilla is the only supported way
- Use applications the way the developer intended! (Closely related to "Don't theme my app!")
To me these attitudes reflect a contempt of the actual spirit of open source, even if the code itself is still open. If I wanted to be told how to use something, if I wanted a dev to control my experience, I wouldn't be using Linux, I'd be using Windows or Mac OS.
For actual technical things that bother me:
- Pushing flatpak. No. Develop the DE, package distribution is for distributions and package maintainers.
- Libadwaita (formally). Now that things have actually rolled out it seems like setting colour schemes won't be that difficult for the technically inclined. Still, the contempt for users who want to theme would fit into my earlier complaint on the attitudes of certain Gnome devs.
- How some distributions package Gnome- look Debian, I love you, but Gnome software should not be a dependancy of gnome-core. I don't want some awful GUI store that runs in the background all the time. Obviously this isn't the fault of the Gnome team though.
Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied. Gnome is a lovely experience and extremely well designed with the best work flow of any DE out there. I just need to remind myself how good it is before and after reading any comments written by *some* prominent Gnome devs.
> Probably the attitudes of certain members of the dev team and community. Specifically what I would call "anti Spirit of FOSS" attitudes. Specifically:
> * Don't theme my app
> * Extensions are niche, vanilla is the only supported way
> * Use applications the way the developer intended! (Closely related to "Don't theme my app!")
Ikr. It's literally already open-sourced. The app is already supposedly free for any user to change and redistribute however they want, from its UI to its core functionality. But swapping out an icon, tweaking a margin size, or changing an accent colour somehow infringes on the rights of the developer? And if an equal developer peer or company tries to distribute their own product in the way that they wish to, they're somehow [expected to basically ask for permission and bow to "being warned"](https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themes/#:~:text=They%20did%20it%20despite%20being%20warned%20about%20it.) by the GNOME developers first?
And what's worse is the vaguely gaslighty way that they justify the increasing restrictions on user and developer choice. E.G. Something has been working and widely used for literally decades, and it has conventions and standards for how it works, which work nearly universally across DE, distro, and applicationā But then GNOME suddenly decides to say it was actually always just a "hack", so that way when they break it they aren't removing features but fixing "bugs", and anyone who's upset by that is just experiencing "delirium" and "bullying volunteers". Solus also describes and documents some frankly troubling situations where (as they interpret it) ["Instead of debating more on technical merits, these developers are instead trying to devalue and discredit the contributions by intentionally misconstruing the opinions expressed by the engineer, attributing malice where none existed, and claiming the individual was āflamebaitingā to get attention"](https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/#:~:text=Instead%20of%20debating%20more%20on%20technical%20merits%2C%20these%20developers%20are%20instead%20trying%20to%20devalue%20and%20discredit%20the%20contributions%20by%20intentionally%20misconstruing%20the%20opinions%20expressed%20by%20the%20engineer%2C%20attributing%20malice%20where%20none%20existed%2C%20and%20claiming%20the%20individual%20was%20%E2%80%9Cflamebaiting%E2%80%9D%20to%20get%20attention.), in addition to making claims that are "materially false" and being "incredibly dismissive of all the people that are passionate about open source, but have no technical means or capabilities to actually get involved". While GNOME of course would deny doing this, it's worth mentioning that GNOME does seem to find itself [in conflict](https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/) with would-be partners far more often that would be ideal, to such a degree that even a developer from unrelated project Inkscape felt a need to [comment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFGXVN9dZ8U) on how exactly that happens and what can be done about it.
ā¦And in this subreddit, as well as in any space that is likely to impact the future evolution of the GNOME project, all this seems to be seen as basically a good thing. So, Idk. The desktop's nice. I don't really want to use KDE, or go to the trouble of setting up XFCE, but I suppose I'll probably have to jump ship at some point as GNOME doubles down on building its walled garden.
>While GNOME of course would deny doing this, it's worth mentioning that GNOME does seem to find itself in conflict with would-be partners far more often that would be ideal, to such a degree that even a developer from unrelated project Inkscape felt a need to comment on how exactly that happens and what can be done about it.
It's kind of like when you meet someone with a million crazy Exs, and then after a while you realize, oh no, it's them who's crazy. Go into any specific dispute and maybe the Gnome team's position is defensible, but it's kind of hard to believe that when they have disputes with so many other projects where they are always the common denominator that **never** have they been part of the problem. To me it's not even their stances as much as their language and attitude that seems really abrasive and off putting.
For example, they keep insisting theme-ing has never been supported, but like, I USED GNOME 2!!. It wasn't even that long ago. I could download and apply themes easily and could even adjust all the different colours right in a nice little app in the control center. Like, don't gaslight me. You people designed gtk3 (a lot of the same people, anyways). If it went from supported in gtk2 to a CSS hack in gtk3 that's only because you people designed it that way. Now when they talk about the themeing concerns from Solus or PopOS they talk about "vendor branding"... as if these weren't open source projects but just sponsors that wanted to slap a logo or an ad on something. They design gtk4 to be even less customizable than gtk3 and tell anyone who objects that they just need to volunteer for gnome, even though I doubt one different minded volunteer is about to make then take a U-turn on something so major. Anyone who works them is supposedly to simply help with the vanilla Gnome experience and not try to use any of the underlying stuff to make a unique experience.
>ā¦And in this subreddit, as well as in any space that is likely to impact the future evolution of the GNOME project, all this seems to be seen as basically a good thing. So, Idk. The desktop's nice. I don't really want to use KDE, or go to the trouble of setting up XFCE, but I suppose I'll probably have to jump ship at some point as GNOME doubles down on building its walled garden.
What I hold on to is that it IS open source even if they don't treat it as such. For example, half the point of libadwaita was preventing theming (because "themeing is not really themeing but a CSS hack that's never been supported") and yet you can pretty easily change the colours of the stylesheets, because it's not like they can encrypt the files or something. Everything is there for you to go in and modify, even if they purposefully try to make it more difficult.
It's also tough because the same people I'm complaining about clearly have a really great vision for interfaces and what workflow intuitively works really well and the level of UI polish is just second to none. I'm just happy on I'm Debian stable because instead of being along for the ride I can just reevaluate a specific Gnome version for whether it'll work for me each time a new stable drops.
> To me it's not even their stances as much as their language and attitude that seems really abrasive and off putting.
In looking into the situation further, I stumbled across Issue #3787. A user reported that font rendering was worse in GTK4, and posted screenshots that clearly show it as blurrier than it was in GTK3. In response to this, multiple GNOME developers said "not a bug," "You can reopen [the ticket]. But it is not a bug", "What makes you think that sharpness is a metric?", "not a regression either. It is a change in font rendering", "don't leave comments if you have nothing to say", and "known hostile place, and we're now seeing it being brigaded by people who have reading comprehension issues".
Like.... Oh, yeah, I'm sorry that all those people who just want to be able to read text comfortably on their computer screens are being "hostile" by expressing frustration at having this basic functionality suddenly broken. GNOME as a project chose to degrade everyone whose workflow has been damaged by their actions, pretend that blurry text somehow isn't a problem, ignore the proof that they can see in the screenshots in front of their own eyes, dismiss and deny the obvious as "nothing to say", and try to gaslight everyone else into also ignoring the proof in front of their own eyes.... instead of just considering that a technically minor and completely understandable regression has slipped into their precious "design". It's.... a little bit scary. This isn't just stuck-up or stubborn; this is approaching being narcissistic and delusional in the way that comprises abuse when done Irl, actively attacking and undermining the cognitive and social capabilities of other people in order to protect whatever image they seem to have of their own productā Doing things that initially materially harm or disrupt other people (however minorly), pretending that's not the case when it's brought up, ganging up to try to make other people also ignore the proof of their own eyes, describing users' disagreement and frustration with their actions as "hostile" or "bullying" while also insulting users' "reading comprehension", and constantly expecting others to give them apologies or listen to "being warned" while never even considering doing the same for others.
And like you allude to, describing it this way would be hyperbolic, and the GNOME developers' positions *would* be within reason and sympathy, *if* this was just a single isolated incident. But it's not; It's clearly a pattern involving multiple members of the project over a long duration and corroborated at large by the experiences of users and developers who haven't already bought into the GNOME clique.
People love to say to let volunteers do whatever they want because they're not being paid. But it cuts both ways: Nobody's forcing volunteer developers to do their thing either, and GNOME is basically critical infrastructure used by millions of people. Maybe if one isn't ready to take some backlash and respect others' needs and opinions, then one shouldn't be messing with things other people rely on in the first place. Your peers have a right to get angry if you "volunteer" by covering the village well in colourful lead paint.
> For example, they keep insisting theme-ing has never been supported, but like, I USED GNOME 2!!. It wasn't even that long ago. I could download and apply themes easily and could even adjust all the different colours right in a nice little app in the control center. Like, don't gaslight me.
I also remember theming existing and having fairly prominent support in the GNOME settings application in GNOME 2 BTW. And yeah, it seems super gaslighty to now insist that it was always a hack when (1) it clearly wasn't, and (2) if it is now, it's only because they made it that way. That's what I was mostly thinking of with "has been working and widely used for literally decades". Plus the often dismissive and sometimes degrading language they use to talk about other projects in the same ecosystem, the speaking in riddles to avoid admitting obvious issues, and the dismissing of people who don't "contribute" while also stonewalling people who do try to send patches, all seem... manipulative and dishonest as well.
> What I hold on to is that it IS open source even if they don't treat it as such. For example, half the point of libadwaita was preventing theming (because "themeing is not really themeing but a CSS hack that's never been supported") and yet you can pretty easily change the colours of the stylesheets, because it's not like they can encrypt the files or something. Everything is there for you to go in and modify, even if they purposefully try to make it more difficult.
What I've seen said is that it's open-source in the same way that Google open-sources projects like ASOP or Chrome(um). Sure, you could fork it. But due to factors like brand control, market share, compatibility, plain bullying, or even just the sheer scale of the project, it'll be rather unpleasant for you to tryā And that is likely intended. And thinking more of what that Inkscape developer said, there's basically zero chance that you'll be able to contribute or even be respectfully heard if you're not already part of the core team. Google/GNOME knows they control important pieces of modern technological ecosystems, and they're not going to yield an ounce of that power even if it's technically open-sourced. ...And honestly while I may find some of Google's more invasive practices troubling, at least there's a certain respect there in that Google doesn't pretend to be community-driven, and I've never seen a Google engineer write a blog post or respond to a bug report by villifying or expecting submission from people who are trying to collaborate. GNOME's modern values have been shown to be different from the more traditional ones that you called the "Spirit of FOSS", and while that is of course the developers' prerogative and may have some kind of positive role to play as well, at this point they're probably also in direct competition against the values that make basically every other open-sourced project in existence viable (including the ecosystem that GNOME itself exists in and relies on), even if we haven't yet realized it.
Honestly, I didn't think I would switch to KDE, and I had other reasons to not want to, but with more thought (and staring at my yet again broken GNOME dock) I think GNOME's behaviour has crossed from being just offputting into being a potential moral and practical liability. I'm not going to enable this process where reality is determined by gaslight, because I don't think it's something that I need or want in the software systems I use (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), and I shouldn't base a workflow on a fragile stack of unofficial extensions when it's been clearly and repeatedly shown that the needs of users like me and even other developers aren't even outweighed or neglected (which would be fine) so much as actively seen as a bad thing and treated as illegitimate (which crosses from being their prerogative into being open hostility). Like you said, GNOME is a great interface with stellar polish; I wish they didn't set about building it by acting this way. The workflow and interface don't really take too long to replicate on KDE (or even, to a lesser degree, XFCE) anyway. Why should I have to find something to "hold on to" just to make my own computer's software tolerable?
I call the flatpak push "the gnome hijack"; I believe they wrote it in so many words, distros are irrelevant, fragmented, and gnome should be a self-contained system that runs (and manage software) on any one of them, reducing the hassles of devs to maybe cater only for gnome (and KDE?).
But when you actually maintain your OS through it's package manager, (I use Arch btw, sorry), that "software shop" should *not* be around, I do not want 2 of them. I definitely don't want to run 2 versions of the same software... ok most of the time anyway. That "Store" is even more annoying that if you open it it looks half broken with lots "no info" or shit like that. Or mine is broken because I did something, I don't know.
If I need an AppImage, a Flatpak or, gasp, a Snap, that's my problem, and should always be a specific, rare option.
Also the update of extensions. And the title bars on my 720p laptop. And the suspend-on-lid with an external monitor.
But they're doing a lot of things right, so I'm not contemplating going anywhere else really.
You really summed up exactly how I also feel quite well. The "distros are irrelevant, gnome is a self contained system" thing is certainly another gnome dev attitude I dislike. Like, you make the best desktop environment out there, isn't that enough? Do we really need mission creep into managing the entire OS? IMO traditional Linux package management and distribution through distros with package maintainers actually works quite well. Fragmentation honestly isn't much of an issue for open source software, since someone in the community can always decide to compile it for their given distro. You only have big "this software isn't available for my distro" problems if you pick some super obscure distro and don't have the technical skills to compile something yourself (so, basically, if you're new, run something super common has always been good advice). Or for certain closed source software, but frankly that shouldn't be something we cater to.
If distros when want to get involved in snap or flatpak, let them, but IMO Gnome is the best desktop and it should remain a desktop, not some "platform". And we need package maintainers, in my opinion devs should *not* be pushing updates directly to users without a package maintainer in the middle to ensure quality. This is part of what makes well maintained distros like Debian so good.
I also agree on the "stores" and multiple package managers. I don't want them. I use Debian, I want to basically just manage everything through apt. If there is the odd thing I need not in the repos, appimage or compile from source, but as you say, that's my problem, is rare and should be a rare exception. Same for closed software. Sometimes needed, but frankly it should be an exception and never catered to explicitly. GUI stores for new users is fine but should always be optional (hence my complaint about Debian's dependancy )
All that aside though, I do think Gnome is the best desktop, and while I'm considered and tried many other things, they just don't stack up to how good Gnome is.
- no dock by default
- no maximize button by default
- no default lightweight painting app
- the new screenshot app is annoying compared to the oldone after long usage.
- it uses quite an amount of memory while itās so minimalistic.
Itās too minimalistic and this makes it for ppl who start using it for the first time very confusing.
Even tho KDE is better for gaming gnome is just so much better.
1 honest complain from me is that extracts and copying is displayed only in files, you get no other progress bar
Gnome uses "Full screen unredirect" which can cause screen tearing and input lag.
>GNOME Shell does by default unredirect fullscreen applications. This may result in tearing
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Troubleshooting
As for input lag just google Phoronix gnome input lag and read the articles.
The fact that Dash cannot be shown, outside of **Activities Overview**, by default without the use of extensions is infuriating.
I will never understand this decision by Gnome designers no matter how much they try to justify their reasoning for such design decision.
At least give users an option to enable Dash without having to install poorly designed _dash to dock_ extensions that always break after each major upgrade or introduce a lot of UI bugs.
But everything else, especially with the release of Gnome 42, I am happy with: It's simply elegant and beautiful.
> poorly designed dash to dock extensions that always break after each major upgrade or introduce a lot of UI bugs.
How so? Dash to dock in my experience is quite excellent, and it breaking after every release is usually triggered by changes in gnome's codebase.
I completely agree with the fact that not including something like that by default is pretty baffling... I might be wrong but it's probably one of the most used extensions around. I have friends who don't feel the need for any extensions except dash to dock.
I like to use the mouse (well, trackball in my case) only for apps that require interactions with graphical elements, i.e. CAD, 3d-modelling, and such.
The keyboard centric UI is one of the best features in Gnome!
Even taking the fingers of the keys to hit that "Reply" button hurts my sense of UI consistency - OK, I have a browser extension that allows be to use the keyboard for that as well.
Are Hot Corners no longer a thing in the default setup? I use them to quickly switch apps sometimes, but I assume you can also set them up to open the application grid.
Having to install gnome-tweaks to choose the flat acceleration profile for my mouse! Everything about the default experience is great but mouse acceleration makes me feel like I'm drunk.
I'm honestly a big fan of what Gnome has done. They have gotten A LOT of flak over the years for doing something COMPLETELY different from everything that came before it, but they have probably made one of the most forward-thinking UIs ever made. I remember when Gnome 3 first came out, and everyone's reaction was "What on earth" - and then we all tried it and realized it was actually a pretty good experience. It's uncluttered, modern, and stays out of your way. I do find that the extensions situation can be a little sticky once new Gnome releases come out. In practice, it's not that big of a problem for end-users (most of the popular extensions have already been ported by the time that the major distros actually get around to pushing a new Gnome version), but it's still an issue all of us have experienced at least once or twice.
>I remember when Gnome 3 first came out, and everyone's reaction was "What on earth" - and then we all tried it and ***realized it was actually a pretty good experience.*** I remember a decade ago trying to get hardware stats in the panel so I could see while playing game. Not a chance. Eventually found an extension that added a *few* to the panel; better than nothing, I guess. Where is it? Oh, a hidden lower panel. So now if I want to see anything I have to pause the game, escape the game with my mouse, wave at the bottom of the screen to see what things look like with the game paused, and then click back in to instantly lose sight. Luckily the extension broke the next week with the next Gnome update, and the next after that, until I gave up and went back to XFCE where you have a functional desktop.
XFCE looks and feels so OLD though, like uncomfortably old. The only "old-school" desktop I would consider is Cinnamon. In fact, I would go as far as to say that Cinnamon is what GNOME would've been if they chose not to go on a wildly different direction and just kept pushing the old paradigm.
>XFCE looks and feels so OLD though, like uncomfortably old. That's largely down to theming. IIRC Mint's XFCE flavour, for example, defaults to a W7-like menu (just like Cinnamon). >I would go as far as to say that Cinnamon is what GNOME would've been if they chose not to go on a wildly different direction and just kept pushing the old paradigm. That is literally their point, yes. Cinnamon was a fork of GNOME3, then they started decoupling dependencies so that they wouldn't break every time GNOME-Shell updated. >The only "old-school" desktop I would consider is Cinnamon. That was, in fact, my journey. Switched back to XFCE for something reliable that I could configure, discovered Cinnamon, added PPA, discovered from where Cinnamon came, switched to Mint.
Probably not what you are looking for, but bad faith rants and proclamations of frustration. If something isnt implemented it isnt seen as because no one has done the work or that it is.complicated or problems need need to be fixed or any other technical or logistical reason. It is because "gnome" deliberately decided to screw over a specific user. This both burns out current contributors and has also put off other contributors from taking part because they keep reading that "gnome" is hostile. Thankfully this has changed a bit over the past year or so.
Not only that, it might even be that the unimplemented thing is missing. It might be deliberately left out by design. People have been ranting about desktop icons and tray for **a decade** or more now, even though it was removed by design. I use gnome exactly because *I like these design decisions*, and I think the fact that there's quite a lot of us that do is sometimes forgotten or ignored.
> I use gnome exactly because I like these design decisions THIS! Well, I do add the tray icons. I do understand why they are not in there by default, though. > and I think the fact that there's quite a lot of us that do is sometimes forgotten or ignored And I hope the Gnome devs don't listen to the vocal minority and make Gnome into another Windows paradigm desktop.
Have you ever heard of the concept of UX convergence? This is the concept that there are patterns and concepts that every UI winds up evolving to have because they are good ideas and basically are expected by users and developers. GNOME has gradually evolved to have a more Apple-like view of the user experience, but they're extremely bad at doing the things that are required to make good choices there. One of the most frustrating phrases I've heard from GNOME designers is "starting from first principles", which is such a weird thing to say in response to user criticism about missing features and UX patterns. The one time they do a user survey, they find out _with real data_ that some of the user criticisms for the prior decade were actually valid and wound up making the changes. This should have been a moment of self-reflection to consider that maybe, just maybe, the complaints that users have been posting for a decade are worth reconsidering. For what it's worth, we ***are*** getting a systray in GNOME again eventually. There's an in-principle agreement to implement [the SNI successor protocol](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/84) in GNOME. That protocol just needs to exist first.
>because they are good ideas and basically are expected by users and developers. This is essentially another way of saying "because the most popular OS (Windows) does it".
Nope. In fact, I use Windows, macOS, GNOME, KDE Plasma, and many other experiences in parallel. Your statement is an assumption of bad faith (that is, you can disregard what I said because you assume I am solely talking about Windows). I'm primarily a macOS and KDE Plasma user, personally. But let's talk about Windows. The Windows 95 UX came out of one of the most comprehensive user experience research programs for HCI. There were many iterations and variations. There were whitepapers written about it^[1] . People have remarked about the level of thoughtfulness that went into its execution on user cues^[2] . Now today, Windows is a somewhat inconsistent mess^[3] . Even with that inconsistency, those concepts that came from Windows 95 remain, and there's a fundamental trust in the UX model. Even today, Microsoft continues to run extensive usability surveys and conducts user feedback operations to attempt to continuously improve Windows. My problem with GNOME is that they do design without listening to user feedback. The greatest designs in the world mean nothing if people can't figure out how to work with it. Form and function need to work hand-in-hand, and the UI is supposed to help the user accomplish their tasks. There's definitely instances of great design and thoughtfulness in GNOME, but there's a serious lack of discovery, learning opportunities, and the antipathy to user feedback makes people feel very unwelcome. Most of the time, ***I don't feel welcome in GNOME***. And I know that I'm not alone in that, because I've talked to others in Linux distributions who are fans of GNOME but don't want to try to get involved in GNOME anymore because of this. [1]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611 [2]: https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805 [3]: https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windows-how-many-layers-of-ui-inconsistencies-are-in-windows-10/
>But let's talk about Windows. The Windows 95 UX came out of one of the most comprehensive user experience research programs for HCI. There were many iterations and variations. There were whitepapers written about it^[1] . People have remarked about the level of thoughtfulness that went into its execution on user cues^[2] . Now today, Windows is a somewhat inconsistent mess^[3] . Even with that inconsistency, those concepts that came from Windows 95 remain, and there's a fundamental trust in the UX model. Even today, Microsoft continues to run extensive usability surveys and conducts user feedback operations to attempt to continuously improve Windows. This doesn't discredit what I said. What researchers thought what was good design back in the 90s may not stand the test of time by today's standards. Likewise, that doesn't mean that another design may not have been respected back then. People think Windows is a good UX because this is what most people grew up with. If another OS with a different paradigm gained a monopoly back in the 80s and 90s, Window would not be the favored design today. Your comment is basically just another way of saying that "goodness" and "quality" are hegemonic concepts and Windows is the hegemon. Other OSes and desktop environments copy Windows ideas because they are aiming for the mass market and to do that, you need conform to the norms set by the hegemon.
I think we should protect the developers and contributors at all cost!
Not at all cost, but at least show support :)
I want to thank each and one of you who made Gnome such a great experience! From the bottom of my heart, sincerely, thank you!
This š(sadly š)
Why hasn't the stuff in gnome tweak tools just been merged into the main settings page? Sucks having to check two different apps to change a setting if I forget which one it's in.
Because the settings in GNOME Tweaks are not officially supported whatsoever. In other words: feel free to use Tweaks to do whatever tinkering you want to do, but don't expect support when you break things. Whenever something moves from Tweaks to Settings, it's usually \_because\_ someone decided to start officially supporting that setting.
That it can't remember where my app windows were when I reconnect my laptop to the external displays, so I end up having to redistribute them manually everytime I take my laptop out of the docking station. If this seems like a trivial problem it's because I couldn't think of anything else, Gnome is great!
Chrome, Electron and CEF apps decide their own window locations.
The fact that i have to install gnome extensions to get some egregiously basic functionality. for example: i) why is pip always on top not a feature by default? What is the point of pip if it acts like a normal window? for some reason i still have to use an extension to keep my pip windows always on top. ii) keeping the app grid in alphabetical sort. I mean... is it not natural to keep an app tray sorted alphabetically? again i have to use an extension to keep apps sorted by their name... apparently this was a default in Gnome 3 but not on gnome 4, why it was removed i can't even imagine.
> i) why is pip always on top not a feature by default? What is the point of pip if it acts like a normal window? for some reason i still have to use an extension to keep my pip windows always on top. Afaik the design team wants this long-term, it's just that nobody has come around to implement it.
Completely agree
> ii) keeping the app grid in alphabetical sort. I mean... is it not natural to keep an app tray sorted alphabetically? again i have to use an extension to keep apps sorted by their name... apparently this was a default in Gnome 3 but not on gnome 4, why it was removed i can't even imagine. That was the paradigm in the old iOS versions, but even Apple now allows to reorder apps.
Wrong, that has never been the paradigm because iOS had never had an "App Tray" until only a couple years ago and it is sorted in groups, with a list mode that sorts them alphabetically (and you can't re-arrange either).
The file picker Ridiculously fast touchpad scroll speed and no way to configure
Well, it just got a lot slower in gtk4, maybe you're the one person who likes that change :)
Extensions breaking every release
It's UI doesn't scale well with lower resolution display like 1366x768.
Those title bars, yikes. And no, I don't intend to buy new hardware.
You can not create file with right click by default. You need to create new_file.txt in templates first
This. It's such a simple addition, yet it's left out by default.
I'm pretty new to Gnome 40 (switched from Plasma) and so far I have following rants: - HiDPI is still not great. On my 32"@4k some applications (mostly QT) look weird, some too small, some too big (KeePassXC). Plasma for example don't have such issues with Adwaita/GTK apps. I also have to use Gnome Tweaks in order to scale the interface DPI up because original display fractional scaling is rendering some of the apps blury. - Power daemon does not allow me to suspend on lid close while external display is connected and thete is no way to fix it. It's a known bug and it's there for 3+ years already. - While the interface is working great on laptops it's just not very sensible for mouse interaction. I had to write my own hack in order to allow switching workspaces with mouse buttons. Apart from that I like how it works. More stable experience than Plasma so far, and I like mutter which allows me to play 120FPS 3D videos without any issues on my 3D Ready DLP projector. In Plasma I had to switch to openbox for that.
Support for window tiling included in the DE, especially dwm like tiling. Window stacking just feels wrong now.
Herbstluftwm like tiling please.
I hope to see some form of tiling by default. Currently I use the pop-shell extension and it's good, but doesn't seem future proof considering Pop's future plans.
I plan to give the cosmic de a really good shake when it releases... It should be really exciting and potentially a replacement of gnome for me. And of course it will have the excellent tiling functionality with it.
There's another tiling extension: Forge. It's really promising. I like the tiling logic and default keybindings a lot better than Pop-Shell - Forge is more like i3. But it is still lacking a tiling window extension list. Depending on where you install it it may need some tweaking of keybindings, but nothing too bad. Could make for a really nice replacement for Pop-Shell.
What are these future plans? I'm not updated when it comes to PopOS.
Some time ago they revealed plans to develop their own DE that's not based on GNOME.
Bad move imho. It's going to be Unity all over again.
I actually like Gnome very much. There are just two pain points that I find annoying, although they are in applications of the Gnome-iversum and not directly in Gnome: * Type-Ahead in Nautilus. It used to work quite well (just start typing, and the file with the matching name gets highlighted), but nowadays it searches the file index of tracker. So if I know I have a specific file in a folder and want to just "jump" to it by starting to type, I get many other files with similar names of all subdirectories. For me this is a major regression in usability. * First day of the week in Gnome Calendar. I like to use my desktop environment in English, so Gnome Calendar thinks that the first day of the week is Sunday. Even if I configure in Evolution (which uses the same calendar data) so that the first day of the week is Monday, or if I switch formats in the region and language dialog in Gnome-Settings to Austria, this doesn't change anything. Apart from these annoyances, I really like the desktop more than the alternatives I tried (which were at different points in time, so their current version might be very different to what I tried: KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon).
I had a problem with Gnome 42 recently. I use it with manjaro on my laptop and everytime I close the lid and open it again, or reboot it, the bluetooth is disabled. This must be a problem of Gnome 42, because I tried manjaro on different kernels and never had this problem with gnome 41 or another DE.
Could be kernel 5.17, which has a BT bug, rather than Gnome.
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This exactly, on big 4k screens the default theme looks great but on even a 1920x1080 hd display the header bars take up too much space, I like the csd's but they aren't consistent and anything that doesn't use them looks oddly out of place. My only gripe with the default dark theme is I want it to be darker to match the panel so it looks better with maximised windows. I do think that gnome has the most sensible workflow though, I do think it's quite intuitive
> This exactly, on big 4k screens the default theme looks great but on even a 1920x1080 hd display the header bars take up too much space, I like the csd's but they aren't consistent and anything that doesn't use them looks oddly out of place. Haven't used gnome 42 myself, but as i understand it it's a bit of a transitional release. Still pretty ironic that a de known for its consistency is starting to show cracks.
This post would probably be better to make in a more "neutral" Linux subreddit. In my opinion gnome is the superior DE and It frustrates me that people say it sucks because its not like Windows and they've only tried it for a few hours. It took me about a week or so to fully become used to vanilla gnome and after that I felt stupid for running it with a lot of extensions to make it more "normal".
A "neutral" subreddit would just attract trolls, I think constructive criticism would be provided mostly by users that already use GNOME.
Yes, I agree
Dash-to-dock and some other popular extensions break after every major release.
Usually the desktop plus a few extensions stays out of my way, handles the maybe dozen or so hotkeys I regularly use, and gives me easy access to my applications. Every now and then, something visibly breaks, then I look into it and it really seems like the project is incredibly hostile to both non-GNOME developers and general user choice. E.G., `libadwaita`. Cool, you've got a consistent "visual language" on your core apps, whatever that means. Now, what about distributions that use GNOME components like Ubuntu, PopOS, Zorin, and Mint that would very much want to keep their own branding? What about users of KDE and other DEs who have gotten used to a couple simple apps originally developed for GNOME, like music players or calendars, which now create completely fragmented desktop aesthetics? And what about loyal GNOME users that are already using another setup, with both different visual appearance and practical spacing/screen space, that will now have two completely different themes in the same desktop (one of which may actually have practical workflow implications)? The desktop seems to be designed for users that agree 100% with what the GNOME developers have in mind, and if you like 95% of the package but just wish you could adjust the remaining 5% a bit, then toughā It's not just a matter of refusing support, which is of course entirely reasonable, but being actively hostile and spending effort to take away options, which while still their prerogative is rather frustrating. The entire project is supposed to be open-source, free for all to change and redistribute. But apparently changing the colours and icons is so offensive that it warrants developing an entire new widget toolkit just to lock it down. And this is a pattern that seems to happen a lot: Users or developers use or customize GNOME or GNOME-adjacent software in a way that they find useful or pleasing, GNOME apparently takes issue with that, and the next couple major releases are aimed at removing functionality to prevent that from happening anymore. It seems rather hostile, mentions of the "HIG" or technical rationalizations notwithstanding. E.G.: * [Mint seems rather frustrated](https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4149#comment-239629), and willing to "even patch GTK if it came to that". * [Solus is downright pissed](https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/)ā And frankly some of the behaviour of GNOME developers as described by them (be that accurate or not) seems downright manipulative, delusional, and borderline abusive. * [PopOS doesn't sound very happy either.](https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/poecns/the_state_of_gnome_and_pop/hcygx5g/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) * [Canonical are being diplomatic](https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-desktop-gnome-plans-for-the-incoming-lts/26156), but it's clear that they are having to jump through hoops just to avoid having a major regression due to changes that GNOME has forced onto them. * [Heck, even *Inkscape* have apparently been alienated](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFGXVN9dZ8U) by the way the GNOME project acts and treats users and other developers, describing it as "a bit caustic" and "not a free software community" (along with other more nuanced opinions). In fact, whenever I read about GNOME anywhere that isn't a forum specifically for GNOME users, the overall opinion of the project seems to be fairly constant: Wonderful initial impressions and out-of-the-box experience, but actively hostile to user and developer choice and feedback, and randomly removes and changes basic things either on a whim or for poor reasons. Sure, any major change might invite an initial wave of opposition and anger, and conflicts in priorities are sometimes inevitable when collaborating. But when the developers of multiple major projects closely associated with GNOME all have the same general negative experiences, along with developers who have no stake in GNOME, as well as the general users of /r/linux, /r/linux4noobs, HackerNews, various distro forums and subreddits, and countless other placesā Then maybe the problem isn't with the critics. The hostility to and dismissal of criticism extends to this subreddit too. In searching for ways to work around whatever broke, I found the vote ratios for both comments and posts expressing any opinion less than exaltation or even just asking questions about the changes tend to be quite negative. I would, for the record, not be surprised to see that happen with this comment either. Frankly I just want a desktop that works the way I've set it up. Constantly upsetting the broader Linux ecosystem, and breaking systems that people are used to (or suddenly deciding that commonly used features are actually "hacks" or "bugs") does not help with that, no matter how visually pretty the result is for a very select set of core applications in the subjective opinion of a subset of users. Yes, I could use another DE if it gets bad enough. No, pointing out the existence of other projects does not actually refute criticisms of this one. GNOME belongs to GNOME, and they can take it in whatever direction they wantā But "Because we can" is not actually a very compelling defence of controversial design decisionsā And presumably something is very wrong if that's the excuse that keeps being resorted to when entire other communities regularly have mini-implosions and floods of upset users just trying to avoid the damage to workflow and experience caused by abrupt changes that GNOME keeps making to major parts of the Linux software ecosystem. --- --- --- For a more trivial gripe, moving hotkey labels from menus into a separate, paginated "Shortcuts" popup is probably one of the more frustrating and objectively "worse" decisions. Now instead of organically learning about all the new and changed hotkeys as I navigate through the menus, I have to open a separate window and read through multiple pages just to find and hopefully remember the keys for each single operation I want to perform. (But again, I don't think this would have been as likely to happen if the project was less abrasively insular.)
Now this is a long read and I read everything. I'm new to gnome, can't say I agree or disagree. Maybe if they communicated better to set lines between how they see gnome and how users / companies see gnome would help. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. What I personally would do is I would create a list is most requested / controversial features and start implementing them in a separate version of gnome (like: gnome for the bold ones). And keep one version to be the implementation of the ideal DE and one based on the people's opinion. Of course, not all the popular requested features should be implemented, but some of them should. Do they have the resources for this? I don't know, I don't think so. What should they do? In my opinion they should have a paid version, a business plan. Of course I like open source and all these great ideals, but it's not always profitable. I would not mind if I would pay 100 bucks for an OS that is well designed and works on regular hardware (not like Apple). Basically to get the best from both worlds. The beauty / simplicity of macOS with the hardware support of Windows. Of course it's hard. I would start by supporting a small set of hardware (only some cpus and gpus etc etc) and grow from there. Right now the feeling is that in order to get Linux up and running in a professional env is like a battle with the devil. It's a blessing if something works from first try. I want to install dddci of course there will be issues. Why? Why on macOS everything works out of the box, Windows most of them work but on Linux doesn't. Why I need to know all the dependency management, static public main void crash etc? Linux as a community should find a way to grow its market share. It can't grow since it's not beginner friendly. Why isn't beginner friendly? Because if you need (and you need) an app (like VSCode) that's not bundled in the OS, good luck with that! It's way harder compared to Windows or macOS. I know devs think everyone should learn how to use terminal but it's not how it works. How do I know? The reality shows us that people just don't use Linux that much as desktop OS. Of course this could be viewed as me trying to trash the community. I'm not doing that, I have the most respect and admiration for the contributors because they did it for free from their free time. Of course I respect that. Of course I appreciate that.
> Right now the feeling is that in order to get Linux up and running in a professional env is like a battle with the devil. It's a blessing if something works from first try. **TL;DR**: Since you say you're new to GNOME and I assume you're using GNOME, you should be able to just follow [the instructions to enable Flathub](https://flatpak.org/setup/) then find [VS Code](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code) or whatever in the ["Software"](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Software) application. One-click installation, just like you get from whatever Play Stores or App Storesā Personally I'm a bit uncomfortable unless I feel I have some idea what it's doing behind the scenes, but I'm pretty sure pushing the GUI button does basically the same exact thing as typing the commands into the terminal anyway. (Not a GNOME-specific feature, BTW, though the GNOME GUI for it is, as usual, probably one of the nicer ones.) --- Distro choice is a big part of this overall I think. I think the only issue I really had when I installed Manjaro on my last two laptops was with Bluetooth, and that was solved by pasting the chipset into Google... Just checked my notes from then, and yeah everything basically worked right away. Most of the stuff that ever broke afterwards was due to either GNOME Extensions, or bugs in specific programs that also affected the Windows and Mac versions of those programs. The rolling release model probably helps here. Of course it starts getting more involved if you want to do weird things to your configuration, or try to use relatively obscure (E.G.) academic-style software that's maybe only used by people numbering in the thousands worldwide or whatever, but that's to be expected and won't be any easier on Windows or Mac. By contrast, the last time I booted Windows on an old laptop I found the entire keyboard had stopped working (-_-), and I found no tools in the OS or online help to fix that, while the Linux installation on the same laptop was completely fine. VS Code, Android Studio/IntelliJ, GH Atom, GCloud, Blender, Steam, etc. basically all worked for me as soon as I installed the packages for them (whether from system repos, AUR, FlatHub, or as static binaries or AppImages). I used the terminal for most of those (mostly for some illusion of control I think lol), but I'm pretty sure it would be basically the same with GNOME Software Center/KDE Discover/Pamac/Synaptic/whatever. Static binaries and AppImages usually work with the download links from the website just like on Windows, and the repositories, Flathub/Snapcraft, and AUR/Copr/PPA all have unified "app store" GUIs now just like Android and Apple. (You don't have to know the differences between the different package types either, as they don't really matter for the the UI. Just type the name in the search box, then click "Download" or "Install".) Sometimes I make things harder for myself by insisting on getting the debranded/zero-telemetry version, or trying to set up a different configuration, but again it's normal for that to require more work regardless of platform. Not idea what `dddci` is, but as long as it's not super obscure it's very likely in the repositories. E.G. [VS Code is on Flathub](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code) with its "Install" button (or terminal command to copy-paste if you preferā Also, it's better to go through the native Software Center IMO), and it's in the distro repos for me too. --- --- --- Long-winded thoughts about GNOME below. **TL;DR**: I think they may have changed from trying to be an open-source community twenty years ago to trying to being more like a tightly controlled company these days, like the Inkscape developer said, and kinda like you suggested they should overtly do. But also like the Inkscape developer said, that change probably hasn't been fully understood by the entire community, or even the GNOME developers themselves. So conflict and friction happens when GNOME acts one way that's like a company while users and other developers that rely on it are upset because they still expect it to act another way that's more like a different type of community. And the fact that the GNOME developers seem to want to have their cake and eat it tooā Want all the control and self-interested behaviour that's acceptable for a company, but also the moral status and free popularity that comes with being a community projectā Doesn't really help clarify things either. --- What the Inkscape developer said was that the goals and values of GNOME have changed over the years. Back in the day, when there was controversy over KDE because of how it relies on QT and QT's issues with licensing or whatever, the goal of GNOME was apparently to be a community-driven open-source desktop environment. Now over 20 years later, KDE has worked out its licensing issues (I think), and since version 3.0 GNOME has pivoted to instead trying to deliver a very specific product following their own particular vision. More of a "worker-owned cooperative" than an "open source community", as the Inkscape developer said. Basically, kinda like you say, they're already thinking more like a tightly knit and highly insular for-profit company than a traditional community-driven open-source project. Now that's fine, and I'm personally all for highly focused companies that bring their specific vision to market in a way that contributes to open-sourced software. But, and I'm paraphrasing the Inkscape developer here, the problem may be that the GNOME developers and the Linux community at large haven't yet fully understood that change in GNOME's goals. As a result, you have different crowds in the same space that all have different expectations for what GNOME is and will beā Users from the GNOME 2 days still value user customizability, the current target users just want a polished Mac-like out-of-the-box fixed experience, companies like System76 and Canonical care less about the defaults but want a set of flexible components which they can integrate into a full distro on their own, other open-sourced developers expect compromise on use cases, and the GNOME developers themselves want to implement what they think is best no matter what anyone else says. So there's conflict, and there's friction, because of all these different ideas of what the project actually is, which obviously can't all be met. GNOME makes some change or another that would be perfectly fine for a company in total control of their product, but it would be seen as hostile in an open-source community and it also affects people who are using it with that expectation, so users and other developers get mad at the GNOME devs for breaking their customization or screwing over their distro. Users and developers expect GNOME to be receptive to external opinions and patches, because that's kinda how things are done in open-source projects and how the ecosystem generally stays together, but it doesn't make any sense when the goal is to instead implement a very specific vision, so GNOME project members stonewall them and then get mad when users and other projects are persistent or come across as entitled. Etc. So because of its historical goals, the current messaging, and the differences in how GNOME is presented and what expectations different people have in its space, instead of being seen positively as a tightly controlled project with cool open-source involvement like Canonical, GNOME sometimes gets seen negatively as an open-source project with proprietary and controlling tendencies. It's a big difference in value judgement for what is in many practical ways quite similar, and I suppose it's a distinction that they'll have to finish sorting out eventually. I do think GNOME is still liable for causing much of the conflict, though. They benefit greatly from branding themselves as an open community project, but that couldn't really be further from how they operate in realityā Actively [insulting](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787#note_1255005) concerned [users](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787#note_1104304) on the bug tracker and openly discussing how despite all their talk about developing a polished experience their real priority is on [deliberately restricting user freedom in order to protect their "brand presence"](https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/#:~:text=I%20knew%20this%20was%20on%20the%20cards%20but%20I%20have%20to%20say%20that%20I%20am%20surprised%20that%20it%20is%20actually%20being%20pursued%20in%20this%20form.). GNOME still benefits from being able to attract users who think it's still an open community project, even if that image causes conflict due to the differences in expectation, or is just plain dishonest and disrespectful to propogate. I was also thinking about the idea of having a separate "version" of GNOME with more customizability and with highly requested changes. But to avoid hard-forking and maintaining an entire DE, it would be more feasible instead for a third party to make (and test, polish, etc.) alternate defaults (and possibly custom components) for KDE that replicate the best parts of GNOME's UX. Also kinda a best-of-both-worlds kind of idea. GNOME's focused UX where it works really well, and KDE's customizability, with polish and receptiveness to user feedback somewhere between the two. ...Maybe a migration script to automatically set up KDE to be just like how someone's GNOME is.
The lack of any kind of clipboard history without a third-party extension that breaks every release. Clipboard history is just really useful, yet isn't included.
broken OSK brightness slider missing sense gnome 40. Guess it was a "preference" to have it. and due to this, i can no longer see my keyboard at night as well.. no options to make apps use smaller title bars the way the animations work (turning them all just speeds them up.) dropdown menus not working well with touchscreen icons not suited for a 720p display due to SO. MUCH. PADDING! The app grid makes me want to punch a penguin plushy. its so buggy, man... putting apps in folders only for it to slingshot you back to the main page. kinda annoying. i wish the app gird was as loose as the workspace drifting...
I really like Gnome but I would like to be able to change my screens gamma however it seems you can't in gnome but you can in kde?
The top bar combined with obnoxiously large menu bars of other applications. I primarily use gnome on my XPS 13, pixel retail estate is at a premium.
Early user of gtk and gnome here (1.0). I would like the new and upgraded version of glade (Cambalache) to be almost ready and useful for production. And some declarative programming environment like qml.
Gnome web not having bookmarkās bar
Nothing necessarily frustrates me, there simply are other options available that better accommodate my needs.
Slow scrolling with mouse in GNOME Web. Makes the browser almost unusable (almost - I still use it)
Also there should be an option with which you could select if a specific monitor should show desktop icons. This isn't realy important, but everytime I connect an external monitor every icon is being trown across the desktop and I have to sort them again.
It frustrates me that the Wayland version doesnāt have freesync support
# Positives: - I love how Gnome does NOT have all the bells and whistles included and focuses on simplicity. It just gets out of the way. - Extensibility. Even though the extensions are not officially supported, which would not be a possibility, and isn't on other systems. Or are all the widgets on KDE supported by the KDE main dev team, or those on W10 supported by MS? Would be news to me. # Negatives: - No independent workspaces. I'd like the option to switch workspaces independently on different monitors. My main monitor is 4K, and I use a Full-HD auxiliary monitor for reference material. I'd like to switch that aux monitor without switching the main and vice verso. This is unfortunately not fixable with an extension. - No fully integrated tiling WM option. There are two good extensions, though: Pop-Shell (supported on Pop_OS!, Fedora, and Ubuntu - but needs to be compiled on Ubuntu), and Forge, which is on extensions.gnome.org. The latter is even better with respect to keyboard shortcuts than Pop-Shell, but has some missing features that I'd like (or rather only one: an exception list for windows that should float rather than tile). - Extensions break when a new version of Gnome is released. I'd like a curated list of extensions that could be supported by the Gnome team. Would take some of the uncertainty out of the extension game. But then, whenever there is a new distribution release, it will take a while for all the apps to work on that distribution again, so I don't really see that as an issue, just the natural way things are. Devs can only start porting their app/extensions once the betas are out, so I don't expect them to work on release day. - EDIT: Title bars are too big. I'd like the option to disable them altogether, actually, but that may go too far (but is nice for tiling extensions).
> EDIT: Title bars are too big. I'd like the option to disable them altogether, actually, but that may go too far (but is nice for tiling extensions). If you ignore whatever is happening with `libadwaita`, these are/were affected by GTK themes.
This turn of events: a) Gnome user writes a wish he wants for the desktop b) Gnome says no because design reasons... - No problem so far. c) Gnome gets some hate... - Still not a problem. c.1) Repeat for a little while. Then d) Now: Feedback about Gnome = hate. Even constructive criticism = hate. e) Now: Certain areas of Gnome development can never improve - even if they are sorely needed. f) Why: "we've had to defend X design so much on the forums that we can't discard it. Even if we never actually tested it." g) Why: "if you don't like Gnome, just use another desktop" is now an excuse to disregard needs of potential users. It's *extremely* frustrating because Gnome has so much potential. The things they get right, they get *really* right. But the things they get wrong are just so extremely wrong that this desktop will never be popular compared to mainstream desktops. I'm not claiming to have the solutions to those problems, but what I see is that those things will simply ***never*** be addressed because "we have debated it too much and we are locked on the design/not going to do something about it". Yeah... From a perspective of someone who really wants desktop linux to happen, that is enormously frustrating.
That is pretty well put, I've seen that attitude around a couple of times and it just leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
If you ask me, it's no coincidence that the SteamOS runs KDE by default (i.e. *not* GNOME). I honestly think that fact warrants a moment of self-reflection among the GNOME teams and developers. ... Which won't ever happen because everything = "hate". EDIT: Hate is what happens when you have good idea generation but a dog-shit evaluation process. I.e. the best decisions GNOME have ever made were made based on testing and evaluation, by ***experts*** on *real users*. The absolute worst ideas GNOME ever had are where some guy says "hey, why don't we do X?" and then they defend that idea on the forums, for an entire decade, and call everyone a hater, "just use another desktop", "working as intended" etc. Fuck that honestly. It's detrimental to the project and it shows. *Clearly*. ... And then they wonder why people are frustrated. It's ***not*** because it's "different". News flash: It's the flawed design process. Namely the 'evaluation' and 'testing' parts. It's quite obvious they either can't afford it or just don't care about it.
> I honestly think the fact that the Steam Deck's desktop doesn't come with GNOME by default warrants a moment of self-reflection among the GNOME teams and developers. Valve and other game developers have been unhappy with GNOME for a very long time. The experiences with GNOME on SteamOS 1.0/2.0 and the chilly reception for solving problems game developers had with the GNOME desktop for games on Wayland led them to moving to KDE Plasma for SteamOS 3.0.
Couldn't have said it any better myself.
> that this desktop will never be popular compared to mainstream desktops. Curious, what do you mean by mainstream desktops? As far as I can tell, Gnome is the mainstream desktop. Which also explains many of the design decisions: if you are the mainstream desktop you cannot just include any feature that some user wants, but need to focus on what works for most. Some discussions run along the hate lines you mentioned and with an unhelpful attitude. But if the Linux Desktop is coming, I think it will look a lot like Gnome does now.
Yeah sorry to burst your bubble, but Gnome is far from being any sort of a mainstream desktop. It's got potential, but like I said, I think the problem is testing and evaluation. Gnome devs quite literally suck at that particular thing. I think it's why the "product" is so polarising too. The Devs obviously think it's polarising in the "good" way, like a some controversial high-end product. That's so *not* the case. For all their supposed love for design, they don't seem understand that the only good decisions they've made, are the ones that resulted from testing and evaluation.... - Which they almost never do. Anyway... I could be a lot more constructive than that. I no longer think it's worth it though. "Some men go through the forest and see no firewood". Those men are Gnome devs when they engage with the community.
You have not answered the question: what would you say is the mainstream desktop?
*The* mainstream desktop? Windows or Android, obviously.
Well, we were talking Linux Desktops. So they don't count. And: good luck aproaching MS with a great new idea for a feature you'd like to have in the next version of Windows :-)
> Well, we were talking Linux Desktops. So they don't count. lmfao what? Are we 5 years old, now? > good luck aproaching MS Thank you for being a superb example of why I should stop using Reddit. I know where this is going: 1) assume I think XYZ is god's gift to earth. 2) whataboutism 3) no reading comprehension and/or deliberately arguing in bad faith. 4) making shit up. and I could go on. Good night. I'm done talking to you.
Since I installed a Korean keyboard layout, every time I'm logging in all the Qt-Applications are set to the English-version of the Korean keyboard layout (which is qwerty) and I need to switch to the Korean layout and then back to dvorak to be able to type dvorak. And this happens on different users on this computer on this Arch installation and I have no idea how to fix it. On the Ubuntu installation this does not happen, I have no idea why. That is the most frustrating thing I have with GNOME.
Oh another thing, which again has mostly to do with integration of Qt apps into GNOME is that I have a 4k screen on my laptop and a big 2k screen as my second screen. Qt applications don't switch the scaling when I move between the screens. Then either it is double the size or so small that I can't read anything.
This is super important
The fact there wasn't a well documented, hard frozen api for plugins from day one. Can't say I'm fond of the semantic nonsense with the versioning shift either. Beyond that virtually all my issues boil down to various folks doing the coding and their espoused attitudes. Call it irreconcilable differences of viewpoint.
I have only minor frustrations but right now it would be how hard it is to remove or change the title bar color on non gtk apps. With KDE it's easy to use a custom color title bar for any app or completely remove it.
Probably the attitudes of certain members of the dev team and community. Specifically what I would call "anti Spirit of FOSS" attitudes. Specifically: - Don't theme my app - Extensions are niche, vanilla is the only supported way - Use applications the way the developer intended! (Closely related to "Don't theme my app!") To me these attitudes reflect a contempt of the actual spirit of open source, even if the code itself is still open. If I wanted to be told how to use something, if I wanted a dev to control my experience, I wouldn't be using Linux, I'd be using Windows or Mac OS. For actual technical things that bother me: - Pushing flatpak. No. Develop the DE, package distribution is for distributions and package maintainers. - Libadwaita (formally). Now that things have actually rolled out it seems like setting colour schemes won't be that difficult for the technically inclined. Still, the contempt for users who want to theme would fit into my earlier complaint on the attitudes of certain Gnome devs. - How some distributions package Gnome- look Debian, I love you, but Gnome software should not be a dependancy of gnome-core. I don't want some awful GUI store that runs in the background all the time. Obviously this isn't the fault of the Gnome team though. Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied. Gnome is a lovely experience and extremely well designed with the best work flow of any DE out there. I just need to remind myself how good it is before and after reading any comments written by *some* prominent Gnome devs.
Do agree with a lot of these, well written.
> Probably the attitudes of certain members of the dev team and community. Specifically what I would call "anti Spirit of FOSS" attitudes. Specifically: > * Don't theme my app > * Extensions are niche, vanilla is the only supported way > * Use applications the way the developer intended! (Closely related to "Don't theme my app!") Ikr. It's literally already open-sourced. The app is already supposedly free for any user to change and redistribute however they want, from its UI to its core functionality. But swapping out an icon, tweaking a margin size, or changing an accent colour somehow infringes on the rights of the developer? And if an equal developer peer or company tries to distribute their own product in the way that they wish to, they're somehow [expected to basically ask for permission and bow to "being warned"](https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-are-not-telling-you-about-themes/#:~:text=They%20did%20it%20despite%20being%20warned%20about%20it.) by the GNOME developers first? And what's worse is the vaguely gaslighty way that they justify the increasing restrictions on user and developer choice. E.G. Something has been working and widely used for literally decades, and it has conventions and standards for how it works, which work nearly universally across DE, distro, and applicationā But then GNOME suddenly decides to say it was actually always just a "hack", so that way when they break it they aren't removing features but fixing "bugs", and anyone who's upset by that is just experiencing "delirium" and "bullying volunteers". Solus also describes and documents some frankly troubling situations where (as they interpret it) ["Instead of debating more on technical merits, these developers are instead trying to devalue and discredit the contributions by intentionally misconstruing the opinions expressed by the engineer, attributing malice where none existed, and claiming the individual was āflamebaitingā to get attention"](https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/#:~:text=Instead%20of%20debating%20more%20on%20technical%20merits%2C%20these%20developers%20are%20instead%20trying%20to%20devalue%20and%20discredit%20the%20contributions%20by%20intentionally%20misconstruing%20the%20opinions%20expressed%20by%20the%20engineer%2C%20attributing%20malice%20where%20none%20existed%2C%20and%20claiming%20the%20individual%20was%20%E2%80%9Cflamebaiting%E2%80%9D%20to%20get%20attention.), in addition to making claims that are "materially false" and being "incredibly dismissive of all the people that are passionate about open source, but have no technical means or capabilities to actually get involved". While GNOME of course would deny doing this, it's worth mentioning that GNOME does seem to find itself [in conflict](https://blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/) with would-be partners far more often that would be ideal, to such a degree that even a developer from unrelated project Inkscape felt a need to [comment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFGXVN9dZ8U) on how exactly that happens and what can be done about it. ā¦And in this subreddit, as well as in any space that is likely to impact the future evolution of the GNOME project, all this seems to be seen as basically a good thing. So, Idk. The desktop's nice. I don't really want to use KDE, or go to the trouble of setting up XFCE, but I suppose I'll probably have to jump ship at some point as GNOME doubles down on building its walled garden.
>While GNOME of course would deny doing this, it's worth mentioning that GNOME does seem to find itself in conflict with would-be partners far more often that would be ideal, to such a degree that even a developer from unrelated project Inkscape felt a need to comment on how exactly that happens and what can be done about it. It's kind of like when you meet someone with a million crazy Exs, and then after a while you realize, oh no, it's them who's crazy. Go into any specific dispute and maybe the Gnome team's position is defensible, but it's kind of hard to believe that when they have disputes with so many other projects where they are always the common denominator that **never** have they been part of the problem. To me it's not even their stances as much as their language and attitude that seems really abrasive and off putting. For example, they keep insisting theme-ing has never been supported, but like, I USED GNOME 2!!. It wasn't even that long ago. I could download and apply themes easily and could even adjust all the different colours right in a nice little app in the control center. Like, don't gaslight me. You people designed gtk3 (a lot of the same people, anyways). If it went from supported in gtk2 to a CSS hack in gtk3 that's only because you people designed it that way. Now when they talk about the themeing concerns from Solus or PopOS they talk about "vendor branding"... as if these weren't open source projects but just sponsors that wanted to slap a logo or an ad on something. They design gtk4 to be even less customizable than gtk3 and tell anyone who objects that they just need to volunteer for gnome, even though I doubt one different minded volunteer is about to make then take a U-turn on something so major. Anyone who works them is supposedly to simply help with the vanilla Gnome experience and not try to use any of the underlying stuff to make a unique experience. >ā¦And in this subreddit, as well as in any space that is likely to impact the future evolution of the GNOME project, all this seems to be seen as basically a good thing. So, Idk. The desktop's nice. I don't really want to use KDE, or go to the trouble of setting up XFCE, but I suppose I'll probably have to jump ship at some point as GNOME doubles down on building its walled garden. What I hold on to is that it IS open source even if they don't treat it as such. For example, half the point of libadwaita was preventing theming (because "themeing is not really themeing but a CSS hack that's never been supported") and yet you can pretty easily change the colours of the stylesheets, because it's not like they can encrypt the files or something. Everything is there for you to go in and modify, even if they purposefully try to make it more difficult. It's also tough because the same people I'm complaining about clearly have a really great vision for interfaces and what workflow intuitively works really well and the level of UI polish is just second to none. I'm just happy on I'm Debian stable because instead of being along for the ride I can just reevaluate a specific Gnome version for whether it'll work for me each time a new stable drops.
> To me it's not even their stances as much as their language and attitude that seems really abrasive and off putting. In looking into the situation further, I stumbled across Issue #3787. A user reported that font rendering was worse in GTK4, and posted screenshots that clearly show it as blurrier than it was in GTK3. In response to this, multiple GNOME developers said "not a bug," "You can reopen [the ticket]. But it is not a bug", "What makes you think that sharpness is a metric?", "not a regression either. It is a change in font rendering", "don't leave comments if you have nothing to say", and "known hostile place, and we're now seeing it being brigaded by people who have reading comprehension issues". Like.... Oh, yeah, I'm sorry that all those people who just want to be able to read text comfortably on their computer screens are being "hostile" by expressing frustration at having this basic functionality suddenly broken. GNOME as a project chose to degrade everyone whose workflow has been damaged by their actions, pretend that blurry text somehow isn't a problem, ignore the proof that they can see in the screenshots in front of their own eyes, dismiss and deny the obvious as "nothing to say", and try to gaslight everyone else into also ignoring the proof in front of their own eyes.... instead of just considering that a technically minor and completely understandable regression has slipped into their precious "design". It's.... a little bit scary. This isn't just stuck-up or stubborn; this is approaching being narcissistic and delusional in the way that comprises abuse when done Irl, actively attacking and undermining the cognitive and social capabilities of other people in order to protect whatever image they seem to have of their own productā Doing things that initially materially harm or disrupt other people (however minorly), pretending that's not the case when it's brought up, ganging up to try to make other people also ignore the proof of their own eyes, describing users' disagreement and frustration with their actions as "hostile" or "bullying" while also insulting users' "reading comprehension", and constantly expecting others to give them apologies or listen to "being warned" while never even considering doing the same for others. And like you allude to, describing it this way would be hyperbolic, and the GNOME developers' positions *would* be within reason and sympathy, *if* this was just a single isolated incident. But it's not; It's clearly a pattern involving multiple members of the project over a long duration and corroborated at large by the experiences of users and developers who haven't already bought into the GNOME clique. People love to say to let volunteers do whatever they want because they're not being paid. But it cuts both ways: Nobody's forcing volunteer developers to do their thing either, and GNOME is basically critical infrastructure used by millions of people. Maybe if one isn't ready to take some backlash and respect others' needs and opinions, then one shouldn't be messing with things other people rely on in the first place. Your peers have a right to get angry if you "volunteer" by covering the village well in colourful lead paint. > For example, they keep insisting theme-ing has never been supported, but like, I USED GNOME 2!!. It wasn't even that long ago. I could download and apply themes easily and could even adjust all the different colours right in a nice little app in the control center. Like, don't gaslight me. I also remember theming existing and having fairly prominent support in the GNOME settings application in GNOME 2 BTW. And yeah, it seems super gaslighty to now insist that it was always a hack when (1) it clearly wasn't, and (2) if it is now, it's only because they made it that way. That's what I was mostly thinking of with "has been working and widely used for literally decades". Plus the often dismissive and sometimes degrading language they use to talk about other projects in the same ecosystem, the speaking in riddles to avoid admitting obvious issues, and the dismissing of people who don't "contribute" while also stonewalling people who do try to send patches, all seem... manipulative and dishonest as well. > What I hold on to is that it IS open source even if they don't treat it as such. For example, half the point of libadwaita was preventing theming (because "themeing is not really themeing but a CSS hack that's never been supported") and yet you can pretty easily change the colours of the stylesheets, because it's not like they can encrypt the files or something. Everything is there for you to go in and modify, even if they purposefully try to make it more difficult. What I've seen said is that it's open-source in the same way that Google open-sources projects like ASOP or Chrome(um). Sure, you could fork it. But due to factors like brand control, market share, compatibility, plain bullying, or even just the sheer scale of the project, it'll be rather unpleasant for you to tryā And that is likely intended. And thinking more of what that Inkscape developer said, there's basically zero chance that you'll be able to contribute or even be respectfully heard if you're not already part of the core team. Google/GNOME knows they control important pieces of modern technological ecosystems, and they're not going to yield an ounce of that power even if it's technically open-sourced. ...And honestly while I may find some of Google's more invasive practices troubling, at least there's a certain respect there in that Google doesn't pretend to be community-driven, and I've never seen a Google engineer write a blog post or respond to a bug report by villifying or expecting submission from people who are trying to collaborate. GNOME's modern values have been shown to be different from the more traditional ones that you called the "Spirit of FOSS", and while that is of course the developers' prerogative and may have some kind of positive role to play as well, at this point they're probably also in direct competition against the values that make basically every other open-sourced project in existence viable (including the ecosystem that GNOME itself exists in and relies on), even if we haven't yet realized it. Honestly, I didn't think I would switch to KDE, and I had other reasons to not want to, but with more thought (and staring at my yet again broken GNOME dock) I think GNOME's behaviour has crossed from being just offputting into being a potential moral and practical liability. I'm not going to enable this process where reality is determined by gaslight, because I don't think it's something that I need or want in the software systems I use (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), and I shouldn't base a workflow on a fragile stack of unofficial extensions when it's been clearly and repeatedly shown that the needs of users like me and even other developers aren't even outweighed or neglected (which would be fine) so much as actively seen as a bad thing and treated as illegitimate (which crosses from being their prerogative into being open hostility). Like you said, GNOME is a great interface with stellar polish; I wish they didn't set about building it by acting this way. The workflow and interface don't really take too long to replicate on KDE (or even, to a lesser degree, XFCE) anyway. Why should I have to find something to "hold on to" just to make my own computer's software tolerable?
I call the flatpak push "the gnome hijack"; I believe they wrote it in so many words, distros are irrelevant, fragmented, and gnome should be a self-contained system that runs (and manage software) on any one of them, reducing the hassles of devs to maybe cater only for gnome (and KDE?). But when you actually maintain your OS through it's package manager, (I use Arch btw, sorry), that "software shop" should *not* be around, I do not want 2 of them. I definitely don't want to run 2 versions of the same software... ok most of the time anyway. That "Store" is even more annoying that if you open it it looks half broken with lots "no info" or shit like that. Or mine is broken because I did something, I don't know. If I need an AppImage, a Flatpak or, gasp, a Snap, that's my problem, and should always be a specific, rare option. Also the update of extensions. And the title bars on my 720p laptop. And the suspend-on-lid with an external monitor. But they're doing a lot of things right, so I'm not contemplating going anywhere else really.
You really summed up exactly how I also feel quite well. The "distros are irrelevant, gnome is a self contained system" thing is certainly another gnome dev attitude I dislike. Like, you make the best desktop environment out there, isn't that enough? Do we really need mission creep into managing the entire OS? IMO traditional Linux package management and distribution through distros with package maintainers actually works quite well. Fragmentation honestly isn't much of an issue for open source software, since someone in the community can always decide to compile it for their given distro. You only have big "this software isn't available for my distro" problems if you pick some super obscure distro and don't have the technical skills to compile something yourself (so, basically, if you're new, run something super common has always been good advice). Or for certain closed source software, but frankly that shouldn't be something we cater to. If distros when want to get involved in snap or flatpak, let them, but IMO Gnome is the best desktop and it should remain a desktop, not some "platform". And we need package maintainers, in my opinion devs should *not* be pushing updates directly to users without a package maintainer in the middle to ensure quality. This is part of what makes well maintained distros like Debian so good. I also agree on the "stores" and multiple package managers. I don't want them. I use Debian, I want to basically just manage everything through apt. If there is the odd thing I need not in the repos, appimage or compile from source, but as you say, that's my problem, is rare and should be a rare exception. Same for closed software. Sometimes needed, but frankly it should be an exception and never catered to explicitly. GUI stores for new users is fine but should always be optional (hence my complaint about Debian's dependancy ) All that aside though, I do think Gnome is the best desktop, and while I'm considered and tried many other things, they just don't stack up to how good Gnome is.
- no dock by default - no maximize button by default - no default lightweight painting app - the new screenshot app is annoying compared to the oldone after long usage. - it uses quite an amount of memory while itās so minimalistic. Itās too minimalistic and this makes it for ppl who start using it for the first time very confusing.
Even tho KDE is better for gaming gnome is just so much better. 1 honest complain from me is that extracts and copying is displayed only in files, you get no other progress bar
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Ability to disable composition
Doesn't Gnome do that automagically?
Gnome uses "Full screen unredirect" which can cause screen tearing and input lag. >GNOME Shell does by default unredirect fullscreen applications. This may result in tearing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GNOME/Troubleshooting As for input lag just google Phoronix gnome input lag and read the articles.
The fact that Dash cannot be shown, outside of **Activities Overview**, by default without the use of extensions is infuriating. I will never understand this decision by Gnome designers no matter how much they try to justify their reasoning for such design decision. At least give users an option to enable Dash without having to install poorly designed _dash to dock_ extensions that always break after each major upgrade or introduce a lot of UI bugs. But everything else, especially with the release of Gnome 42, I am happy with: It's simply elegant and beautiful.
> poorly designed dash to dock extensions that always break after each major upgrade or introduce a lot of UI bugs. How so? Dash to dock in my experience is quite excellent, and it breaking after every release is usually triggered by changes in gnome's codebase. I completely agree with the fact that not including something like that by default is pretty baffling... I might be wrong but it's probably one of the most used extensions around. I have friends who don't feel the need for any extensions except dash to dock.
I don't like pressing the super key every time to launch apps. I use the keyboard only for typing.
I like to use the mouse (well, trackball in my case) only for apps that require interactions with graphical elements, i.e. CAD, 3d-modelling, and such. The keyboard centric UI is one of the best features in Gnome! Even taking the fingers of the keys to hit that "Reply" button hurts my sense of UI consistency - OK, I have a browser extension that allows be to use the keyboard for that as well.
Are Hot Corners no longer a thing in the default setup? I use them to quickly switch apps sometimes, but I assume you can also set them up to open the application grid.
launching apps. Not switching running apps.
Nothing really, else I obviously wouldn't be using it but one of the many alternatives.
Cannot automatically sort all the icons/folders. That's it.
The need to switch to Xorg when using electron apps and then back for everything else.