I would like to thank the Gnome community for this release! I can't wait to upgrade to Fedora 34 to use it.
I use Mac OS daily on my work computer and Gnome daily on my personal computer. Yes, I know there are a lot of Linux open source applications that are not very polished, but the quality in Gnome and its core applications is extremely high. There are even some things that Gnome does better than Mac OS.
Now, you might not like Gnome and that's perfectly fine. Fortunately, Linux is the land of choice and there is an alternative for every person. It baffles me to come here and read so much negativity! Come on! this is a big milestone for a community that has been working a lot to bring you something of quality for free! They have been doing this for decades already and they have put a lot of effort and love into this. How many open source projects fail to abandonment after just a few months?
Why is it that so many people in internet communities such as HN can't take a minute to appreciate the effort and instead the only thing that they are motivated to do is to nit-pick something and trash. Criticism is always welcome, there are even some appropriate channels to do it, but seriously why is this the only thing that you are able to say about a community driven product? Why is there only space for negativity? Why not a small "thanks" or "I liked that feature" before your criticism? They are bringing this thing for you for free, why can't you at least say something nice?
GNOME is the default desktop for nearly every major Linux distribution. It's the desktop that nearly everyone experiences if they decide to give Linux a try. As such its shortcomings are much more apparent than for something like, say, Xfce that you have to go out of your way to experience.
My frustrations with GNOME are not about polish, they're about reliability. Users don't care about polish when they update their OS and suddenly wifi doesn't work. I sincerely hope GNOME is more reliable now than it was in the past.
It is the default because it is deemed the most feature-complete and stable. Unfortunately not being too stable is all-around true of linux desktop (though I really like the recent trend with wayland - many previously hacky parts just work now!)
To your general point (why attack the project): GNOME has a reputation (IMO deserved) for aggressively not caring about the opinions of users or outside projects (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795901). So at some point it comes to "GNOME hates everyone else, so everyone else hates GNOME".
I think concluding that "everyone" hates GNOME is hyperbole when people who like GNOME are less likely to post about it than someone who has a problem with it and that regular users who make up the majority are not ones who frequent these types of forums or are ones commenting on the issue tracker about this.
I think the only way to properly understand the topic would be to do surveys across different demographics, which I believe GNOME has done. It might feel like GNOME are ignoring "everyone" when everyone is the subset of it's users (or not of it's users) who frequent the same forums you do.
Companies that charge you for their distribution are only charging for support. not really the distro, for this reason if you have a UI that shits itself on every corner it does not look good and ends up costing you more time and money, that's why it's largely driven by them.
This comment made me feel a bit guilty. Yes it is truly very easy to judge and forget that people work to deliver a useful tool for free. Thanks Gnome!
Specifically, I want to be able to click around on directories to choose where to save a file, type the file name, then press enter. This should save the file, not filter the directory listing.
Also, I don’t want it to default to overwriting some file I saved last week.
No. I actually went to GNOME's IRC network the other day to talk to them about gtkfilechooser's multiple problems. Yours, and then the lack of text input for typing or pasting file paths. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/938 . They said they have no one assigned to gtkfilechooser bugs and none will be addressed.
I was able to download the debian source for a couple gtk applications (ie, gedit/pluma) and apply community sourced patches to them to get back the text/file path entry box. But there's no way I am going to be able to fix Gtk itself. And fixing every application on my system by compiling from source and making new debian packages, well, I might as well linux from scratch.
This has been going on for a long time now and is to be expected. My real problem is that they completely remove existing functionality from UI without giving the users who relied on it any alternative.
I searched PopOs! repos and I couldn't find where they maintained their Gtk-3.0 patches or code. It didn't look to me like they altered Gtk-3.0 itself at all and likely just altered individual applications.
Fixing the GtkFileChooser is not the main problem, it is getting your patches merged. Someone from the Gtk team needs to review them and put their stamp of approval on them. But the Gtk team are RedHat employees and they prioritize whatever the company wants them to prioritize. And if the company doesn't want them to prioritize the GtkFileChooser, your patches will languish on their bug tracker. If you are lucky, you'll get a message two years after you uploaded them asking you to rebase them to HEAD because the code base has changed to much that your patches can't be merged without them being significantly reworked.
And now everybody should look for a text from 2003 written by jwz mentioning the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model" and slowly read it again, then think how much time passed since.
Most Gnome developers, I suppose, are on RedHat payroll and are not teenage.
They are busy working on various things, this is certain, and these things are apparently more important for them. Like, well, GTK4.
I suppose most Red Hat customers are corporate, and when they ask for featureful Linux desktop, they likely mean playing nice with corporate systems. This is why Evince is such a good PDF viewer, compared to a lot of others; it can even fill in forms. This is why the file chooser without image preview is fine as is for corporate use, because I suppose that 0% of graphic designers choose a Linux machine in a corporate setting.
> Most Gnome developers, I suppose, are on RedHat payroll and are not teenage.
jwz was not talking about the age, he was talking about the issue of ignoring bugs to the point where they reach decades old, and often even then persist and go unfixed. Some bugs live multiple decades, across three different issue trackers, having to be reopened each time.
The fun fact is that he wrote this in 2003, about the GNOME developers. Not much has changed in 20 years, it seems.
This article has so little substance that I wish people would stop re-posting it. It adds nothing to the discussion. Like yeah, there are bug reports that haven't been addressed. Developers come and go and sometimes have to leave before they get to work out all the bugs in their feature(s). It happens. Every big open source project is like that. The bug tracker is open so that anyone can submit bug reports. The downside is that it tends to fill up with unsolicited bug reports that don't get responses. The upside is that anyone in or outside the project can volunteer to fix any of those bugs. I don't see JWZ stepping up to triage random bugs in GNOME, probably because he knows it's a thankless job with no pay that he wouldn't enjoy.
> I don't see JWZ stepping up to triage random bugs in GNOME, probably because he knows it's a thankless job with no pay that he wouldn't enjoy.
Thing about it is, it's the responsibility of the GNOME project. It's the responsibility of the developers that sign up to it. Each time GNOME has been improved, old problems still persist. It says something about a project and the integrity of the developers when they claim to increase usability and yet do not bother with longstanding problems.
The root of the problem is a certain mindset to development. One that is numerous and yet flawed.
"Move fast, break things! No time to fix them we have other concerns like- checks notes- revising every system menu to look slightly different. Hell yeah!! Wooh!"
I've lurked on HN for more than a decade but created an account to concur with this comment. Accidentally filtering for folders (who even wants this) instead of typing a filename is truly awful and affects me daily. I would bail on gnome for this issue alone if I didn't have to use it on a work machine.
Does anyone know of an issue in their tracker with an official stance on it?
Because of the release of GNOME $next, and the lack of interest in maintainership of GNOME $prev, the gnome-core product is being closed. If you feel your bug is still of relevance to GNOME $next, please reopen it and refile it against a more appropriate component. Thanks...
>I would bail on gnome for this issue alone if I didn't have to use it on a work machine.
Both Google Chrome and Firefox use GTK's file picker (at least when "saving link as..." at least on Fedora 34 Prerelease) so what would you do for a web browser?
If your environment has a xdg portal port (KDE does), you can use the relevant portal. Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 , and then firefox uses the native file picker.
Probably they will deprecate it soon, and gnome apps will randomly open a file for you. Just to be easier to use. A file picker dialog can confuse the user.
Well, given that that's what macOS Big Sur has done, it's a dead cert. You no longer get a file picker dialog by default when saving, but a place where you can type a name and a label that says where saving will happen.
Where do you see that? I tried hitting cmd+s in Safari, Terminal, and Pages and got a normal macOS file-save dialog in all three cases. Looks more or less the same as it has for quite a while. I haven't touched anything related to file save settings (I probably should, as I'd like the arrow-down-to-browse-files to always be expanded, and I know there's a setting for that somewhere, just haven't bothered to yet).
I think they complain about the fact that the file dialog is collapsed by default, going to some length to hide the browse functionality (Apple probably wants you to save everything in Documents and be done with it).
I also want them to just make it so I can right click and create a new empty file. Linux is file based right? If I right click on a opened folder I want to create a file.
Also an issue for me, it does nothing for the already abysmal photography/image editing workflow. I try to use Qt programs where I can or xdg-desktop-portal where it's supported but some programs like Gimp still don't support it.
Yes, "It's FOSS, go fork it" and all that malarkey.
Painting with broad strokes: MacOS and others make money on things being polished, consistent and understandable. They don't get to use their hacker blinders and say "Who needs a GUI for that" or act like Firefox and rearrange the UI every six months.
Thus, often times, the usability of OSes with a financial incentive for broad accessibility will be the most polished.
Ubuntu for a period wanted to break into the desktop OS market. They focused on polish and went so far as to create their own desktop environment (and display server)! They didn't fully succeed, but the point stands: There are many people outside the hacker community who are not going to write their own DE, who nevertheless hold the valid (and often, IMO, correct) opinion that Linux UIs blow more often than Windows/Mac.
PS: This isn't an argument about rights and obligations; I'm not saying randomGnomeDev123 has some moral obligation to do as randomUser345 asks. Just don't confuse "lack of obligation" with "being right".
And this feature is in PopOS 20.04 which iirc is a GNOME desktop, so someone did care enough about this and created a polished desktop environment with it.
Ah yes, System76, that other company that is trying to make money on hardware and creating a competitive advantage with a polished UX. Thank you for providing my case with evidence.
I'm annoyed but not annoyed enough to learn proper Glib C for so I can fix it. I can probably make it work if I tried, but my attempts would never get accepted back into the code base because of the terrible mess I'd turn the code into.
This issue is one of the things that a normal, non-technical user would run into if they'd ever try Linux. If the file picker can't even get feature parity with Windows XP's, you're not attracting a lot of growth.
I'm fine with waiting for someone to eventually fix it in Gnome 8 or 9, but this is a real usability issue that indicates an entire area of the framework can use some work.
I wish things worked worked like that. That users could actually tell you exactly what would make their lives easier. Even more: that they would go ahead and implement those things themselves!
Good software design encompasses listening to and talking with users, and actually discovering what they need, where their pain points are, etc. They won't tell you explicitly.
Apart from being a software developer, i'm also a user of course. I use GNOME every day, and even though i'm affected by this, i haven't found the time, patience and dedication to actually go and try to fix it. I understand that the GNOME developers might not have the time either. But it's not like this issue does not exist, or that it's not important.
And if i, and many people who see this as an issue and could potentially fix it, don't do it, then how can we expect that non-technical users would?
I have tried to teach my mother how to copy files between devices countless times in Windows. It's not an easy task for someone who hasn't grown using a computer. I'd love to advocate for more people to use Linux, but i won't, because each little thing like not being able to see the image whumbnails when picking files can be a road-blocker for non-technical people, and add up quickly.
Not at all? This is FOSS. If this was a critical issue that blocked people from using the software, or aggravated a developer enough, then someone would go fix it or be paid to fix it.
Developers don't have an obligation to implement every feature request. Clearly this is a nothingburger
Hrm, I don't think so. It's probably more a matter of people that are accustomed to Gnome having accepted and/or habituated to the fact that it doesn't display thumbnails in the file manager. The same folks may have devised clever work arounds (opening the filesystem in a browser for example) or otherwise solved the problem in a way that it's not an impediment.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores a huge cohort of potential adopters that would be stopped dead in their tracks at this issue. I think about scenarios where I might introduce an older family member to a Linux desktop for all the benefits it would bring (low cost, stable, secure, etc), and then how it would feel having to explain that they can't easily preview a photo when navigating the filesystem (like I was making excuses for a platform with a gaping hole).
In any system, it's heard to measure losses from things you don't have. A business might get that feedback from prospects that don't close, etc ("you don't have widget X, so we won't sign"), but it's harder to measure those feedback loops in the FOSS word. In short, I think not having this is a big deal, and folks that won't admit to that probably aren't considering a bunch of adoption that can't/won't happen until the issue is fixed.
That's the way it is when you depend on volunteers, they work on things when they feel like it. A solution would be to pay for a company-supported distro. Some were mentioned in other comments here.
Or alternative: Gnome devs are OK with missing basic functionality and a broken experience for 2 decades on, otherwise one of them would have gone and implemented it.
If you look at the report time, this has been a known issue since 2004. This suggests the Devs have been ignoring or kicking the can down the road for over 15 years.
This is a dead meme. Boring and annoying specially to the Gnome developers. I have used Gnome for many years now. Never have this been an issue. If you look at the issue tracker[1], they are open to pull requests to add the thumbnail, we just need one person who cares about this feature!
There are many other issues with Gnome that actually is their decision and it is a problem. This specific one is a GTK issue. But for example their decision on window decoration in wayland is just wrong and makes the whole environment look weird[2].
Various patches have existed for at least a decade but every time they're proposed some issue is found and they're not merged so the goal posts shift from 'just write your own patch' to 'just become a Gnome maintainer' with no guarantees that you'll get the assistance you need to implement the feature or whether it'll even be merged, and fair enough, the Gnome team really don't owe anybody anything, but in that case getting annoyed that the community keeps referencing a 17 year old issue is just a natural part of the exchange.
The problem is that poor quality isn't the reason why they refuse. While not related to the file picker, I personally offered to port an important part of GTK3 to GTK4 (status icon support) and one of the maintainers told me flat out that he would not merge my work because "it was no longer in line with the direction GNOME is heading".
I suspect the real reason behind their refusal is purely subjective, unfortunately.
That's not subjective. When they merge code like that and then you disappear, they're now stuck budgeting time to maintain that API for years. They can't be expected to do that work when no maintainers care enough and no GNOME apps are even going to use that API (Status icons were removed from the GNOME HIG years ago)
If you don't want to go through the trouble of becoming a committed long-term GTK maintainer yourself just to get this in, why not maintain that particular feature as a separate library?
That seems excessively dismissive; it's hardly a dead meme while the issue remains open, boring only to the GNOME developers who have decided that little things like what users want is irrelevant, annoying only because it's been a decade with zero attempt at a solution. It's nice that you never use this feature, but unhelpful to others who do. And yes, it's terribly generous of them to be willing to consider merging a fix if someone else does the work.
But, you know, that's how it works: the problem doesn't get fixed unless someone both a) cares, and b) can do something about it. Why would a developer who isn't getting paid do work they don't care about? If you're interested, maybe you can finally be the person who cares and does the work.
Giving something away for free doesn't mean that no one can criticize it. It's a severe shortcoming, it's been there for over a decade, and no obligated to fix it but that doesn't mean anybody is obligated to stop complaining about it either.
It may be time to look elsewhere if the complaints are unanswered for more than a decade; they're probably being directed towards the wrong people. That's an obligation you may want to hold yourself to, if you value your own time and don't want to spend another decade repeating yourself to those who won't listen.
It kind of depends: I don't use GNOME, but AFAIK both Chrom(ium) and Firefox use GTK and so use the broken file dialog regardless. "Go use something else" is a valid suggestion, but only when you can use something else.
> we just need one person who cares about this feature
Uh no. There have been at least 3 separate attempts at implementing this. One of them actually lives as a fork on github, and it works. None of them have been merged. The gtk devs don't care.
What's with the change over to these '40' style naming schemes? I absolutely detest it if it's not done for a real reason.
Firstly, without major versions it does not single anything to end users and end developers. Is '40' still mostly compatible with the gnome 3.x.x API? Is there a major divergence between 40 and 41? Is 41 and 40 a total rewrite?
3.x.x works and there's a reason why. It conveys a lot of information quickly and is well understood.
reducing things down to a single number is meaningless and clearly branding drivel. I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.
Actually this numbering scheme conveys to me, intuitively, that changes are more gradual and hints at backwards compatibility. If there's no major/minor/patch semantics I just assume versions are small incremental additions. I could be wrong but that's what the browser versioning schemes have instilled in me.
To me it communicates no commitment to backwards compatibility, i.e. no semantic versioning. This might be enforceable if one is Apple, but doesn't sound good for an open-source platform.
An insignificant breaking change is still a breaking change; and over time they build up. This may explain why so many developers have been unhappy with GTK3.
> if you do want to have a breaking new version, what exactly do you do?
You change the name. Like "Raku" instead of "Perl6". Once you've reached a certain level of stability and usage, any substantial breaking change is going to inevitably result in a fork, so embracing that up front is going to result in a much better experience.
Yeah, I like Rich Hickey’s critique of semantic versioning. Major version changes just overload the name and cause confusion: if you must break compatibility, fork and rename.
You change the name of the software, like consoles? The next big Gnome version could then be called Gnome 360 followed by Gnome 1, Gnome 64 or Gnome 3.11 for work groups.
Improve existing stuff, add new stuff. That can be done with backwards compatibility if you have a well defined API. I haven't looked at Gnome's API in years so I'm not sure what's its state, but one shining example for this is Redis which is backwards compatible to 11 years ago.
Another great and more relevant example is browsers.
As far as I understand "40" is just short for "3.40.0". The expectation is that they will remain compatible with the 3.x.x series for a long time, so the 3 is somewhat redundant. This release contains more UI changes than usual, but it is very far away from the change from gnome 2 to 3.
And when Gtk4 inevitably happens, or the gnome-shell toolkit is changed again, breaking about all the gnome-shell extensions, we'll just call it Gnome X.
Gtk4 already happened. Not sure if Gnome apps to it, however, but I'm pretty sure they'll just break extensions as they've always done. Most use internal APIs AFAIK after all, so they're designed to break.
Software/package version numbers are just a marketing name. It's the ABI version number on the library (e.g. libgtk4.so.1 vs libgtk4.so.0) that needs to be changed if functions or parameters to functions in the original ABI in the older libgtk4.so.0 library are modified or deleted. It's very common to have two libraries of the same name being used side-by-side with some applications compiled against a newer ABI, and other applications compiled against an older ABI.
The problem with Gnome development is that library ABIs are just one of many interfaces used. There are also GSettings/dconf interfaces, D-Bus interfaces, file formats, etc on top of the usual conflicts in package dependencies (e.g. two packages wanting to write two different unversioned files to disk).
Gnome shell doesn’t even use Gtk, or at least not for drawing and such. If it’s there, it’s completely abstracted away in their JavaScript layer. And yeah, most extensions broke from 3.38-40 already anyway.
Your question is valid (and I have the same one) but this is about as uncharitable a thing to say as you can, especially without providing evidence/examples:
> I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.
The Gnome project has done an enormous amount to push the open source and free desktop forward. The least we can do is not impute sinister motives to them. What do they stand to gain from "obfuscat[ing]" their version number when their code is all open source?
I strongly disagree: the gnome project and the systemd mess are both severely damaging Linux. The good thing, though, is that KDE Plasma seems to have recovered nicely from the KDE 3->4 mess.
Yeah I also want to use a system for servers where critical functionality depends on goddamn bash scripts that will regularly break. I also enjoy hunting down bugs in each distro that does things just a tiny bit differently...
Central design is somewhat restrictive but a bazaar style of development for everything will only result in chaos. The kernel itself has become pretty much cathedral at this point, and not having a central init system (which is quite good, I don’t see the blind hate towards it which is usually never justified on technical merit) would have set back whole of linux by many years.
As much as I dislike that Red Hat has a specific role in the linux desktop case, they do sponsor important work.
I don’t necessarily like sysvinit: systemd is just a monster slowly gobbling up all sorts of functionality that’s not directly related to “initializing the system”.
Initializing a system is a very complex problem.
And that systemd gobbles up unrelated things is simply FUD. Systemd is both an init system and a group of many related projects. So it’s a bit like saying plasma is all-encompassing because they have a desktop env and also a pdf viewer file manager etc. They are just under the same name, not mandatory, similarly to many systemd programs.
I'm not trying to argue, I'm surprised and legitimately interested at your comment and would really like to understand where you're coming from.
Are you a current Linux desktop user? How long have you been? What distros do you use?
If Gnome had just paused or become what MATE is today, would we be better off? If you were suddenly emperor of the Gnome Foundation, what would you direct them to do?
I’ve been using Linux on the desktop since Mandrake 7. I mostly use Debian these days (ever since Ubuntu switched from Gnome 2 to Unity). For a while I just used tiling window managers (xmonad, stumpwm) because I couldn’t make Gnome 3+ work for me. Recently I tried Plasma again and I’ve mostly settled on that being good enough. At this point, I have no confidence in most of the people involved in the Linux desktop initiatives: I’d probably fund MATE and maybe even the Trinity Desktop environment: the best Linux desktop setup I ever had was KDE 3 apps on Gnome 2
Glad to see another person here aware of Trinity. I'm an active user. KDE3 just nailed the balance of power user + FOSS. Kmail3, Kdiff3, Kpdf, all these tools work wonderfully, intergrate well with Konqueror, the desktop usage is really quite enjoyable
That's not a modern problem and it's not something the developers did. If you have N apps and M themes, you have to test N × M combinations. This is an impossibly large number on any platform that allows users to make their own apps and themes.
It's a lot easier for everyone if the app developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved themes, or if the theme developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved apps.
Agreed it’s very shallow backwards logic that will only cause issues when an actual Gnome 4.0 is released. The irrationality will have to be fought similar to Iphone by using “Gnome 3.40” when discussing it.
Yea gnome gets a lot of hate, but I've been using it as a daily driver for a few years and I have a slick, productive workflow with minimal customization. It's free software, it looks nice, and every release is a nice improvement.
I have the feeling it also happened the other way around as well. When Gnome 3 came out the big buttons and huge whitespace seemed ridiculous, especially with Big Sur MacOS looks very similar.
It’s been like this since Gnome 3 was released in 2011. This is why I've always been confused by people who say Linux has an “ugly, inconsistent, unprofessional” UI - to me this looks and feels better than Windows.
Gnome is just one part of the story - the gnome shell was always decent looking and had good themes.
But the apps and the ecosystem really is ugly, messy and inconsistent. For example if you look at the controls you got with GTK out of the box in GTK3 era (when I last tried to build something with it) I remember huge paddings, unintuitive UX (the GTK file picker is the worst I've used) and poor layout controls. Go check out an app like https://inkscape.org and compare it to something like Illustrator or Gnome to Photoshop. The messy jumbled stacks of options with huge icons and paddings instead of being condensed and easy to use - most of it stems from GTK controls being bad.
Now this is all with a huge disclaimer that I haven't used a Linux desktop in over 5 years at this point, maybe things got better but I doubt it - I still use Inkscape for example from time to time and Gimp on OSX and putting the non-native issues aside the apps look terrible on their own because of what I already said.
Unfortunately, it feels like everything is turning into what Linux was 10 years ago. MacOS is better, but the increasing dominance of Electron and Java apps which bring their own UIs into whatever eco-system they encounter is very frustrating. If you are stuck running MS apps on the Mac, they are their own micro-cosm as well.
This was always the case: MS Office used its own widgets since about 1995 on both platforms; Adobe has their own UI controls, and even Apple used custom/dark themes and controls for their pro apps since about forever.
The current state of Apple App Store app is just the cherry on the top.
I don’t use Adobe, so for me, the big culprit has always been MS Office and I’ve been able to mostly avoid it for years. I’m looking more at Slack, VSCode, and other “Essential” apps which have displaced Mac Native tools like BBEdit and if you squint hard, Adium.
I don't think it's inconsistency that bothers me in this case - I don't really care if an app isn't using the same kind of widget design as long it's functional (I spend most of my days in apps that are entirely non-native and I'm fine with them).
The problem is more with GTK design which is crap for 80% of PC applications with dense control layouts, the high padding touch style widgets it offers out of the box work for low density stuff not complex editors).
Even non-native OSX apps integrate into OS in a predictable manner (use toolbar, shortcuts, native file dialogs, etc.)
Looking and feeling better than Windows is a low bar. Or at least it was a low bar in the Gnome 3.0 days.
I was mostly stricken with how much many of the features they are highlighting look straight out of stuff which was unveiled in MacOS about 5+ years ago. Extensive gesture support being a biggie.
MacOS’s fundamental look has a pretty consistent chain all the way back to NextOS in the 90s. The Dock, the dot indicator, and many other core pieces are visible in versions of MacOS which predate the launch of webOS. MacOS borrows some bits from webOS as well, but the fundamental Dock layout is right out of NextStep.
Topmost bar still consists of lots of unused space with clock in the center — a design decision surely copied from old mobile phones. Too much of screen space is wasted, in the most "expensive" area, where "Rule of the infinite edges" of Fitts's law applies.
And what would you put there? I do like some sway/i3-like bar with many stats, but I don’t miss that on gnome, it is sort of a feel-good thing there for me.
Can they add a toggle that switches between these "fat" top window bars and "skinny" top window bars? Basically strip out about 90% of the extra padding from buttons and bars and compress the UI down to what OS 10.6/7/8 use. Otherwise I always have to tack on a theme just to fix this one issue.
Realistically, how many people are using Gnome on touch screen displays? Personally I always use it on a laptop so 90% of their touch screen optimizations, like bloated bars, end up wasting screen real estate.
Gnome and GTK are heavily opinionated towards client side decorations. That means the fat borders are part of the application, not necessarily of the desktop manager.
You can make your own themes pretty easily though, if you want to change the theme. There's some quite-good-but-not-quite-there macOS themes that aren't too bad, especially with the top menu bars that Ubuntu used to have.
You're right, but in practice this means that the gigantic buttons are part of the application, not part of the desktop manager itself. Even if Gnome 40 tried to remove the touch-friendly buttons, it'd be up to the applications themselves to actually make the interface work like that.
The buttons and styles are a choice by the developers of the applications. Often, they follow the Gnome design language (which is good, because that's how most of the Gnome ecosystem delivers a unified experience), but very often they also make their own decisions about where the buttons go and what size they are. It's possible to change a lot of this with custom themes, but changing the size of components often breaks applications or layout because the developer did not intend the size to be changed.
I personally enjoy the look and feel of Gnome and I don't have any problems with the UI, but in the end my experience is dictated by the people behind the application. There are plenty of application on my system that don't follow the design language of my desktop environment, and if the Gnome design team redesigns their preferred UI, applications will have a mishmash of styles for at least a few years until things have stabilized.
Had the decorations been server side, then all that needed to happen was a quick change to the theme and maybe to the rendering components and the theme would've switched.
This might be just a matter of what I've gotten used to, but I have the "Activities" view (which shows previews of open windows, as well as the dock-like thing for launching applications) bound to the super/windows key which is nearly always very easily accessible.
If I'm switching windows and I'm not alt-tabbing, I usually just hit the super key and select the window from the thumbnails/previews.
I don't find that to be unproductive, but then, I haven't really been even trying to change the basics of my desktop or experimenting much in a while, so it might be that I've just settled for it to some extent.
If I had to first move the mouse to one location in order to get a list of windows, and then again to another location to select the window I want, I don't think that would work at all. But with a very easily accessible keyboard shortcut for the first part it does.
I guess that's why we have options. I like Gnome. It's by far my favorite DE. I don't want my screen cluttered up with stuff. I know what I've got running, and finding anything is really easy: Super + type whatever I'm thinking, and presto, it's there.
> Super + type whatever I'm thinking, and presto, it's there.
I often have several windows of the same application open at the same time (particularly browser and terminal). When I want to switch from say the IDE to the _right_ browser window, how do I do that in Gnome? (I use Workspace Matrix[0] as I'm a visual type, and that works for me, but perhaps there's a better way?)
Alt+` (key above tab on most keyboards) should allow you to switch between windows of the same application. So you do alt+tab till you get to your browser, then alt+` to pick the right browser window.
Alt+Tab is usually bound to "Switch applications", which means all of the target application's windows come to the front, possibly sending every other application window out of view.
Sometimes a more direct approach is to use the action "Switch windows" by assigning it a shortcut Keyboard settings.
I think I'm missing something... Where is the taskbar? Do you need that "overview" animation each time you want to bring an application to focus? And where are the menus of the focused application?
No, that's not at all what I mean. I prefer no animations and no hidden things at all!
I prefer a taskbar at the bottom with one button per window in it, so that I can have an overview of which windows are open, which document each has, and quickly switch to it with mouse (when not using alt+tab to switch between recent windows).
What I do not want is to have to activate something, or have some animation, first, before seeing what I want to navigate to.
Sorry if it wasn't clear (not a native speaker), I agree completely with all your points. I also don't want hidden things or animations each time I want to focus on another app. It was an open question, I'm wondering if anyone using Gnome 40 can answer? Also, just hovering over the Unity taskbar and scrolling with the mousewheel to cycle between windows is fantastic, I miss that a lot on Windows!
The menus should be in the hamburger menu on the top right of each window. A time waster and a recent fad coming from small screen devices.
I can't answer your other questions. Not only I don't have GNOME 40 but I greatly tweaked Ubuntu 20' GNOME to disable all animations, remove the launcher, move the top bar to the bottom, use those very same horizontal virtual desktops they introduced in 40 (hurrah) and add an old Windows like taskbar. It feels much more productive than the default settings.
I gave a try to KDE for a couple of months in 2014 and didn't like it. I felt I was clicking twice as much as in GNOME to accomplish the same thing. Furthermore I liked the look of GNOME more than KDE's.
I kept using GNOME fallback
(or flashback?) until 2018 because it worked as I like. I knew there were GNOME shell extensions to suit my needs by then so I switched to GNOME shell with Ubuntu 18.04.
I never researched KDE so I don't know what became of it. A total change of DE is a big thing and could take a lot of time.
If you have an app that is hidden under other windows, you have to use the overview or alt+tab to bring it to the front.
However, often we don't need to do that because GNOME encourages us to spread our windows over several workspaces. The animation for switching workspaces is practically instantaneous.
Was looking for when this GNOME version will be integrated to Ubuntu to check them out, it will not land in the next Ubuntu version.
> Ubuntu 21.04 will NOT include GNOME 40. Bew Ubuntu releases typically include the newest GNOME release but this time it won’t. Why? Well, GNOME 40 features bold design changes that Ubuntu devs feel they need more time to ‘adapt’ to. [1]
Overall I like the refresh, but for me the real UX test is when you use it for a week/month. Will have to wait!
Let's hope it actually reads the available combinations from ~/.XCompose. I am pretty sure that this was not the case (at least at some point in the past).
GNOME 3.38 allows adding custom sequences using the .Xcompose file. The only thing that doesn't work are include directives. I'd imagine it will be the same with GNOME 40.
If you are a Romance language speaker you get tired of the local layout fast, specially for programming.
A lot of people use the US+compose key for accents/ñ.
I installed the Fedora 34 Beta yesterday, and I am really impressed. I thought the move to a horizontal workspace from years of using the vertical one would be a big change but it really feels quite a lot better. Everything is also just snappier, more responsive and smoother overall - probably in no small part due to GTK4 being hardware accelerated now.
Overall system performance is fantastic so far with Fedora 34, super excited to keep tinkering with it.
Great work by the Gnome Team, and I'm super excited for the future of Gnome!
It's interesting to see the focus on these desktop management features. I've been a long time macOS user and have never found "Launchpad", "Mission Control / Expose", or "multiple Desktops" useful in practice. I just use multiple monitors with everything I need on them in the same workspace. Do you guys actually use these features? I find the contextual switching distracting.
>I just use multiple monitors with everything I need on them in the same workspace.
Well, many of us use a single monitor or a laptop to get work done. Thus multiple workspaces make more sense.
Virual workspaces have been in Unix/Linux/X-Windows since the 90s (or even before) anyway.
>Do you guys actually use these features? I find the contextual switching distracting.
Yep.
Why would it be more distracting than looking to another monitor (and thus having to physically turn your gaze/neck as opposed to a single keyboard shortcut)?
For me, the purpose of multiple desktops is to reduce distration. Instead of many things visible to you all the time (in one or more monitors) and competing for your attention, you can have several things open, but only focus to one at a time, separate them by work, or program type, or workflow step, etc.
I have three monitors, and recently started using multiple desktops. I can hit Meta+{1,2,3,4} to go between them or Meta+Tab on KDE. It's amazing.
If my main desktop has tons of windows open, and the panel is crowded as heck with browser, file manager, text editor, and terminal windows (all of which can occupy all of your monitors when you're doing a given thing because there's that many of them), it's overwhelming. It's like browser tabs piling up out of control, except the tabs are also windows you have to maximize and minimize. Dedicating multiple desktop to multiple task (main, tinkering, work, etc.) is so much better.
I’ve been using Macs full time for almost a decade now.
I never use Launchpad, but Mission Control is the main way I switch between applications. I find it convenient that it’s bound (not sure if by default) to the “four fingers towards the screen” gesture on the trackpad.
I use multiple desktops constantly, it’s the main way I organize my work. I also find them convenient to switch between since they’re mapped to the sideways flick four fingers gesture. I guess using virtual desktops is something I was doing before I started using Macs anyway.
I keep most of my apps full screen which I guess fits this workflow better. Before I used Macs I was using tiling window managers on Linux such as AwesomeWM and XMonad, so I had some resistance to using full screen a lot, but somehow I adapted. My terminal is still tiled and it’s what matters the most.
It's funny, because as a MacOS user I pretty much never use multiple desktops, although I used it a lot in GNOME 2, because of how obvious it was that there was something in another desktop[1]. I think it really help multiple desktops feel more "grounded in space", like another monitor.
In MacOS, other desktops feel like a background thing that it's easy to forget (kind of like having a process running on another `screen` session).
I used MacOS for years, out of your list the only feature I ever really used was "multiple desktops". I would group apps roughly by function (email and messaging was on one desktop, the code editor was on another). I definitely wasn't pushing the boundaries and never used more than three desktops.
In my opinion, your skepticism about the general appeal of these features seems reasonable. I would expect the average laptop owner uses these rarely if ever. People who spend a lot of time with their machine may use only one or two, I bet. Spotlight in particular seems to be eating Launchpad's lunch.
I don’t personally use Launchpad but I can definitely imagine it’s useful for some. While it obviously took its design from iOS, it’s also a throwback to At Ease[1], which I definitely saw used widely when it was available.
And I no longer use Mission Control/Expose, but I certainly did find it useful on smaller screens (I now use a comically large 43” 4k@1x).
Same with multiple desktops, and I’ve seen it used on nearly every screenshare I’ve been on this past year.
My workflow now is probably more fussy than it could be, but I pretty much just use cmd-~ and cmd-` now.
Edit to add: I think it also depends quite a bit on input device. Seeing others mention trackpad gestures, I remember finding Mission Control/multiple desktops much more useful when I primarily used my MBP on my lap.
When on MacOS I really enjoy full screen apps with multi-finger virtual desktop switch. My workflow usually limited to one full screen browser and one full screen terminal window (with tmux inside).
Not using Launchpad nor multiple desktops (like you, I find two monitors are enough), but exposé mapped on hot corners is very useful, to either switch to an invisible app, or access the desktop. A quick mouse move to the top-right (with mouse acceleration, you don't need the movement to be long, just fast), and there you go.
KDE user, but I do the same thing in any WM. I use multiple desktops more than I use the task switcher bar. I find a spatial arrangement of related windows much more practical to maintain. Multiple monitors don't scale beyond 2 or 3.
if the Pop!_Shell extensions get made mainline in addition to the changes here, I will probably go from disliking/tolerating vanilla GNOME to possibly daily driving.
I was a bit sceptical, but I have to say that the horizontal workspaces work pretty well. Working with GNOME 40 is both efficient and aesthetically pleasing. And as a side note performance is much better too on Fedora 34.
AFAIK, most DEs place virtual desktops horizontally or in a grid, and I'm actually not aware of any other DEs that dynamically add new desktops as you use them rather than statically defining them up front.
Back in the GNOME 3 debut days, the joke was that GNOME 4 would be just a black screen, the ultimate result of removing superfluous options and features and making a system that is as easy to use as possible.
GNOME has, unfortunately, been on this train before macOS was; when Big Sur came out there were many threads on other sites pointing out how strange it was that macOS seemed to be taking after GNOME 3.
As the one who works simultaneously with macOS and Linux, I would be happy to see some unification. I'm not speaking about visual differences or look-n-feel of the apps, but common tasks like desktop switching or window switching - things you do hundreds times a day. Those IMO should involve as little brain as possible and rely on muscle memory.
I want to be able to set Super+C/V to copy/paste in Linux, including the terminals rather than different key configurations depending on the context. Is this now available in Gnome?
I just want to mention, if you feel there's some excessive padding and it's a waste of space (especially vertically), I suggest you take a look at a compact theme at GNOME Look.
Currently, not all themes work properly with GTK 4, but they will eventually get there. Personally, I use the Mojave-gtk-theme. It wastes no space and is beautifully designed.
yeah, that is one of the things I do after a fresh install. I am using Nextwaita from gnome-looks. It changes very little from the vanilla gnome, except for a slighter grey color scheme and less padding.
It is possible to mitigate some of that inconvenience by using a theme where everything is scaled up (and there are tools to generate them), but there will be still GTK 2 software that looks bad.
I dunno which it is, but the typography/font rendering is just jarring in these screens. I imagine there's a bunch of hacking you can do to make it look crisper/aligned but no way I'd have time for that.
If it's meant to be distraction-free then why the panel? In traditional WMs it could show running apps or the application menu you would use somewhat actively, now it only shows the clock (which I find useful but unnecessary - not worth dedicating an entire panel) and some indicators I certainly don't need to see all the time. The whole dash is also an additional entity of questionable value - I never felt like I need a full-screen launcher nor a full-screen workspace switcher.
Gnome really needs a way to restore windows after restart (especially Nautilus windows with tabs), otherwise using multiple workspaces becomes annoying as soon as Ubuntu performs an upgrade that requires you to restart. Mac OS handles this pretty well.
Well the nice thing is Ubuntu never forces you to restart (unless _you_ want to use a newer kernel). You can always press "later" until you are done with the work you are doing.
"Switch workspaces faster than ever with the handy new Super + Alt + Scroll shortcut." that's going to suck for left-handed mouse users as "super" tends to not be accessible with the non-mouse hand on most compact keyboards.
One of the best things about macOS is how well integrated the touchpad is with the desktop environment. As in, I can do the four-finger swipe to move between workspaces, and if I drag it slowly and halfway, then yank back, the animation will follow my movements exactly.
Seems Gnome now has a bunch of those features. Are there any touchpads for which it's this well integrated and works? Or is it the same that it's always been: there's some kind of binary "gesture" recognizer that is then executed with a pretty animation?
This is one of the biggest things keeping me on macOS at the moment.
I believe it depends on libinput which is a heroic one-man project.
It can’t possibly be good on every device ever created, but it is pretty good I would say. Four-finger swipe up down works on gnome 3 already and it is a smooth motion, not a binary recognized thingy fortunately.
Kind of interesting and surprising that Gnome has gradually moved from a traditional Windows desktop look to a more macOS style with gestures and exposé included.
Interestingly, if you take a look at old screenshots of Gnome 2.x, GTK apps have had more "mac like" layout/distribution/whitespace of controls within application windows for a very long time, even if the Gnome itself took more after Win9x in other aspects (like having a taskbar).
By contrast KDE/Qt has always had a stronger Win9x feel through and through.
IMHO, no. I give GNOME a re-assessment every time there's a new Ubuntu release, and it seldom takes more than an hour or so (if that) to find a reason why I'm glad my work boxes run Xfce and my home ones run Unity.
You can only install this on windows in a VM (like Virtual Box). You also can't install it directly, you would need a Linux distribution as well. It would be easier to wait until Ubuntu or Fedora releases a new version which contains this version of GNOME. Desktop Environments on Linux are basically GUI themes.
Not only are they GUI themes, some desktop environments come packaged with different utility software. (e.g. Gnome comes with GTK-based utility software like Gedit, and KDE comes with KDE-based utility software like Kwrite.
on some of the rolling distributions (suse tumbleweed, arch, fedora rawhide) it's probably in the repos soon. Technically I guess you can go to gitlab and try to build it from source but I think that's pretty adventurous and likely going to break stuff
Also curious about this. It's doubtful. Given the growing number of people coming from Apple it would be great if the DEs provided an option in settings to default to using ctrl or cmd. DEs already make similar accommodations for users coming from Windows. For instance, in KDE you can press Win+E (Explorer) and get the file manager.
I was brought up on Gnome but after using Cinnamon, it's hard to go back. Better applets, better window management, easier default keyboard shortcuts. Little slower, though.
I use Mac OS daily on my work computer and Gnome daily on my personal computer. Yes, I know there are a lot of Linux open source applications that are not very polished, but the quality in Gnome and its core applications is extremely high. There are even some things that Gnome does better than Mac OS.
Now, you might not like Gnome and that's perfectly fine. Fortunately, Linux is the land of choice and there is an alternative for every person. It baffles me to come here and read so much negativity! Come on! this is a big milestone for a community that has been working a lot to bring you something of quality for free! They have been doing this for decades already and they have put a lot of effort and love into this. How many open source projects fail to abandonment after just a few months?
Why is it that so many people in internet communities such as HN can't take a minute to appreciate the effort and instead the only thing that they are motivated to do is to nit-pick something and trash. Criticism is always welcome, there are even some appropriate channels to do it, but seriously why is this the only thing that you are able to say about a community driven product? Why is there only space for negativity? Why not a small "thanks" or "I liked that feature" before your criticism? They are bringing this thing for you for free, why can't you at least say something nice?