Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah. And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems.

If the user doesn't need to administer things themselves, then not exposing ways of administration in the GUI means less ways for the user to hurt themselves. Or rather to do something not so smart and then need tech support to fix it. Can't accidently hide your panel, if you actually cannot hide your panel at all.

I have no problem with one of the many desktop environments specializing in that, but the Linux desktop is mainly controlled by companies who then develop and set GNOME as default on their distros, which are also used by people who do need to administer their PC.

Ubuntu and Fedora have GNOME as default. Debian, too, which doesn't really have an opinion, but it's what they've always used and it's stable. Arch and Gentoo don't have an opinion at all, for obvious reasons.

openSUSE is still holding against, but SUSE uses GNOME in SLED, too, and has been spreading a sort of "We like all desktop environments in *SUSE-land"-mentality, which makes me feel like they're wanting to swap out KDE here, too, at some point.

But yeah, if you haven't yet, do yourself and the Linux desktop a favor and give KDE a fair try. Or pretty much anything else than GNOME.

I'm not saying it's impossible for you to like GNOME better, but there's so many desktop environments out there that are developed from users for users, which are actually objectively better than GNOME in so many categories. Even the most lightweight of desktop environments like LXDE/LXQt often have more features than GNOME.

And KDE is what you get when you take this feature per resource usage ratio of these lightweight environments and then multiply it by the resources that a modern system can easily provide. If you ever wanted to have all of the features and options that a desktop OS could have, KDE comes far too close to that. It's the flagship experience for power users (not the type that only ever wants to see a terminal).

As far as I know, Gnome 2 is the last example of a Linux desktop environment that underwent professional usability testing (on regular people and power users) before shipping.

Personally, these days, I prefer minimalist WM’s and CLI administration tools for stuff like WiFi, but all the newer heavy DE’s I’ve tried have obvious (to me) usability regressions vs gnome 2.

It is funny how little usability testing is done on desktop environments these days (I also wonder if Microsoft bothered with Win 8, or if apple is with iOS these days cough podcasts cough).

I've been very, very impressed with the MATE desktop. It's actually GNOME 2, carefully upgraded to GTK 3, then with a sensible set of improvements. It's available on most distributions, but the lead developer is also the lead for Ubuntu MATE.

Also I think the general idea that options == bad started in the Gnome 2 era.

not sure what you mean by 'professional', but KDE is still there chugging along (and IIRC default by suse, which is basically the 'red hat' of europe..)

Unfortunately not, no. They use GNOME as well, with some customizations: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/desktop/features/usabili...

As much as KDE is better than GNOME in almost every way (opinion: mine), this is the one use-case that GNOME is built for. For use in centrally administered environments where the user is not really supposed to touch anything. Which is the primary use-case for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (or other enterprise desktop distros, too).

openSUSE is still on KDE and I'm really hoping that SUSE doesn't violently take that over to make it their GNOME vessel. openSUSE's primary use-case is for home-users, who do need to administer their PC, and it's sort of a power user distro anyways (YaST, btrfs+Snapper, not Ubuntu), so KDE is perfect for that.

Does Gnome really have a niche there? I know of three places with large Linux deployments (as in hundreds of stations). None of them use Gnome -- its interaction model is so weird and foreign that getting people who aren't Linux/FOSS enthusiasts to use it difficult, painful and frustrating for everyone, users included.

All three are SuSE shops, actually. All three run KDE; one of them is more relaxed when it comes to software engineers so a couple of folks run Cinnamon, but that's about it.

The unsettling phenomenon is that most non-techie users don't need something super smart and intuitive, they want something like Windows, because that's what they've used so far to get their work done and they see no reason to learn something new.

If it's different, but approachable, they'll adjust (perhaps that's the value in customizable DEs like KDE; you can start with something that everyone's comfortable with, then they can tweak it to make it "better"). But if it's radically different and you need someone to explain them exactly why it's better and how they've been using computers wrong this whole time, that doesn't work in the real world.

So for most people it would be a "Windows 7"-esque GUI.

• There are the kind that want more "power" exposed through the GUI, with administration happening through the same interface as regular usage. This culminates in things like Windows Server administration via snap-ins. This is traditionally what a "power user" refers to.

• There are the kind that want to treat their PC or mobile device as, effectively, single-node enterprise systems, with administration happening through alternative interfaces that were designed specifically for administration, usually of large clusters of systems. These are the folks who are at home with Windows Group Policy Objects; Linux config files; MDM profiles on mobile; etc. Basically, sysadmins who happen to be administering their home network. These also get called "power users", though maybe "hobbyists" (that hobby being https://reddit.com/r/homelab/ building) might be more apropos.

Most modern OSes seem to be moving away from supporting the first kind of "power user", seemingly because features that support that use-case are also "sharp edges" where less-knowledgeable users can hurt themselves.

But modern OSes are exposing ever-more configuration functionality to the second kind of "power user." Windows now lets you do more things through PowerShell commands than you ever could through the Control Panel. macOS has always left the more arcane functionality to the terminal, creating POSIX-ish tools like diskutil(8), defaults(8), scutil(8), lsregister(8), etc. And Linux, underneath, is still just glued together 99% via editable plaintext files (the newest iteration being systemd unit files.)

As "the second kind of power user", I like using GNOME just fine. (It's actually a little bit "more powerful" for me than macOS is, even, because I'm also the third kind of power user: a developer willing to tweak the GNOME source to get what I want. ;)

They are removing the ability to have a Nautilus backed set of Desktop icons, with the intention of replacing this with something built in a more standard way for the rest of Gnome (which I think means web technologies?). As I understand it this not about removing desktop icons, it is about replacing unmaintained legacy code with more a modern alternative. I don't think the alternative is ready yet, but that's not to say that the direction they want to go is not having the feature.

In both OS X and Windows your desktop is just a folder with a background set to icon grid view. From right clicking to dragging, the UX is and should be identical to the file manager. So it makes sense to have that part of the UI handled by the program that's already a file browser.

Now a developer is going to recreate all of the features provided by Nautilus in a JavaScript and CSS extension. Any differences will make a janky experience for the end user.

Same thing with notification centers: another thing that both Mac and Windows added assuming it would be just as vital on the desktop as it was on phones. AFAICT they see very little use; I can't remember the last time I opened the notification center on either the Macs or PCs I use.

Not that new developments on the desktop aren't welcome, but widgets aren't it. Not every innovation that works on mobile can or should be brought to the desktop.

Certainly I use the PC one enough that I have the keyboard shortcut memorized and use it a bunch (Win+A). Interestingly, I find I often need it most in games, as the Windows version of the Xbox Guide, the Game Guide Bar, (even with the improvements in the recent April release), doesn't make it as easy to interact with things like Party Chat and Game Invite notifications as the Xbox Guide does on the Xbox One (where the Guide doubles as the Notification Center).

When I worked at a Linux distro (endlessos.com) they had modified Gnome to have a universal search bar on the desktop. It was targeted at a different group of users than me, but it seemed to make sense based on that group.

Hopefully Gnome does sufficient user testing to deliver a useful experience to some significant group.

Note that Active Desktop and ActiveX were not really related beyond being MS-powered internet technologies.

Honestly, I never use the desktop for anything so getting rid of it isn't a big deal to me. Could you explain what kind of things you use it for? What's so bad about viewing the desktop through a window?

So the desktop is a transition area, easily accessible, where I can put all the file I need for the task at hand right now. It's also the place I see everyday when logging it, so I can review what needs to be filed, and what need to be deleted. Clean desktop every morning, clean mind.

And it would fit their design philosophy to permanently remove it, which has been moving away from the concept of files as a whole. Instead, you're supposed to launch the app that does what you're trying to do and then open the file that you want to edit through that.

Another feature removal that has shown this direction, is the removal of the option to create an empty file from the context menu in the file manager.

Again, instead open the app that creates the type of file that you want and then create the new file in there.

Seems the answer is in that last link of yours:

>Nautilus had have a feature called “the desktop” which adds icons on the background of the user workspace, similar to Windows.[..] if you look you will see that the desktop is composed by more than 10.000 lines of code

That's a big mess and I finally understand why opening nautilus on i3wm always completely messes the desktop up. Using the file manager as a hack to build a desktop is a bad abstraction and I can understand why it they'd want to rebuild it.

Smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks are incredibly popular and lack a desktop. ChromeOS is the most similar to GNOME here, in that it has a desktop wallpaper but you cannot create anything there.

Either the setup is too limitating : trying to do anything multi task on a phone OS is excuciating, you can't have your 3D rendering software/IDE/veracrypt/... installed in chrome OS, you don't have enough hard drive space,

Or on the other end of the spectrum, I even got friends who are minimalistic, they have no windows decoration, all is keyboard based, with an arch and dvorak layout, doing everything in VIM. Well in the end, they are slower, because they have to keep so many things in their head to do the most basic thing. Like 70 keyboard shorcut (on 3 different keyboard in case they are not on their perfect seup) layout and the position/index of their windows and names of files to just edit + switch. You can literally see them think before every action that requires context switching, which is brain power that they don't use for fixing the problem. And by the way, they spend a lot of time taking care of that setup, despite the fact they advertise it as rock solid.

Are you suggesting that Ubuntu should follow smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks in not providing the user a way to access the local file system?

Really? I've never heard anything but non-intuitive ramblings from UI design people. None of them seem to ever actually use computers. Rather, they dream up use cases based on contrived scenarios. I want one thing: The icon is where it was yesterday. Gnome, unity all the others have one job: Let me launch the program I need and get the F out of my way. UI stability is why I years ago abandoned the chaos of Ubuntu for the stability of Mint.

Windows XP got it right. Start button->office->word. Start button -> Email. Most everything after that is fluff.

I'd say Windows 95 in this context. XP was the first stable version of Windows (yes, the first one deserved to be called Windows 1.0), but the Start menu was working well in Windows 95/98/ME, too.

That is a philosophy DEs should have, but (if you'd like suggestions) which XFCE most cleanly follows.

Other examples of missing stuff: - Complex shortcuts: you can't set keyA and also keyA+keyB as shortcuts work on keyPress rather than keyRelease. So no SuperKey and also SuperKey+L/D/R and such. - Easy window resize: the dragging thing is exactly 1 pixel wide. Gotta use Alt+Right-click to resize.

But you get used to XFCE's tiny quirks, it really gets like heaven after some work.

Incidentally, I'm part of the silent majority that enjoys Gnome and loves the emphasis on clean simplicity. No, it's not perfect, but it's moving in the right direction.

(Oh wait, but actually companies make money by making software into experience, so I guess that's where the overall trend comes from.)

Isn’t this, quite literally, what Gnome Shell Extensions are?

https://extensions.gnome.org/

-using the website to install extensions requires both a browser extension and installing chrome-gnome-shell, not installed by default by most distros

-UI to configure extensions is in Tweak Tool, again not installed by default in most distros and full of the things GNOME people don't really want you to touch but will begrudgingly allow

-the second most popular extension is an improved UI for managing extensions

-the API is poorly documented and new releases always break tons of extensions

I'd forgotten this! Very frustrating when you're used to using this to switch to a file in that directory. I also missed split-screen functionality, and the inability to right click and fire up a terminal from that location. Oh, and also looks like they've dropped being able to double-click on an executable .sh file to run it.

Luckily none of this bothers me as there is Caja.

> I'd forgotten this! Very frustrating when you're used to using this to switch to a file in that directory.

I agree, but FWIW you can press Ctrl-L to focus the address bar, which allows you to enter a relative path, e.g. name of a file/directory in the current directory.

(or just use this overlay if you run Gentoo)

I'll try to keep it up to date.

(or the Nemo file browser, which also retained split-window functionality)

It's such a weird decision, as searching recursively something is a rare task, so having a dedicated button would be fine. While going to a file/folder in the current dir is pretty much the basic interaction with a file manager.

I don't get their reasoning there.

If somebody knows of any trick to get the old behavior back (even patching the damn nautilus), I'll take it. I'll probably upgrade in a few month and I'll need it badly.