- how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed)
- GNOME won't start (an extension incompatibility can make the DE crash)
- lag when some animation happens
- how can I make the theme to use less padding (some devs are considering removing theming support completely )
This are complaints for actual GNOME users that update to latest version and have unpleasantness surprises.
Fedora's default gnome is completely unusable.
It's like if GNOME developers wake up in the morning and wonder: "how can we prevent our users from doing their jobs today? What useful feature can we drop this month? What fully functional application can we replace with a half-assed 200 LOCs one?"
I am not surprised though: has anyone tried learning gtk programming recently? Unless you learn to use the C library first (and before that, the GObjext library), it's nearly impossible. There's, for example, a nice python 3 tutorial and it covers the basics nicely. However it fails completely to answer the question "how do I continue on my own from here?".
The most important issue however is that it's been like this for years and GNOME developers don't even acknowledge this. GNOME 3 is so bad that people took the effort to revive, update and keep using GNOME 2 in the form of Mate Desktop. And Mate Desktop is a major player in the DE space.
I've been using Fedora's default gnome for years and never, ever had issues with it nor have I ever felt the need to figure out how one even goes about changing the defaults --well, other than the last update where they totally borked the touchpad to make it more applesque or something and I had to fix that so I could actually use the damn thing.
Though they do seem to like to remove things a lot, the footer at the bottom of the file window thingie comes to mind as it annoys me the most since the "modal popup file info" covers up the filenames often, but mostly I find the changes to be trivial.
So, yeah, once in a while they get a hair up their ass and do something wonky but on the whole I'm a happy gnome user.
Whatever issues other people conflict with, they are by definition already known to be no problem for you. It's either things you don't want or care about, and so never tried to do, and you wouldn't think it was important when descibed, or it's things that work fine for you, by your happy good luck of not having whatever combination of configs or hardware or usage pattern or sunspots etc where it fails.
I don't blame you for wondering. It's just that I think it's almost automatically impossible to answer the question and have any other result than you say "oh, that's all?" It's even fine for you to have that reaction, it's just that, what's the point if there is no possible other reaction? That's what I mean by meaningless question.
If you are happy in a Prius, because it does everything you want, then what do you care if I say it can't drive over curbs or be pop-started?
It's like when anyone else asks why you run linux instead of windows or mac, or why you root your android phone. Whatever you tell them, none of them ever thinks it adds up or makes any sense.
What am I missing on Windows? "On linux you can do whatever you want." But what else would I want to do? "Anything. I have no idea. Probably nothing by the sound of it."
If you are using terminals a lot you should try Konsole, see how customizable it is(tabs, you can have multiple profiles, set a profile per tab) the app is made to help you do your job better, same with Dolphin. Gnome apps are optimized for an ideal new users, a user that is so "special" that power options will make his brain collapse, the apps are made by designers and not by user feedback.
But I do recall serious difficulty getting konsole to look like anything but an eyesore.
There's not just the Mate Desktop. Look at Budgie, built atop GTK3, and it's pretty nice and usable and uses the old paradigms of GTK2.
On the one hand choice is good, but on the other hand it would be nice if the Linux ecosystem were less fragmented. I feel like a lot of the blame for this fragmentation lies with both technical and design issues in Gnome 3.
I remember that they used to "achieve" stability by not updating (apt pinning) important packages like kernel, xorg etc and did strange stuff like copying deb packages from ubuntu/debian verbatim into their repos.
Edit: I wouldnt touch Mint with a 10ft pole. Seems like they still have no sec advisaries, still ship a remix of debian/ubuntu packages and so on:
2013:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140214063150/https://lists.ubu...
2016:
Yes, markedly.
They basically follow the latest Ubuntu LTS closely, and I get the latest Firefox etc. a couple of days after the official release.
I'm still considering KDE Neon, but that's mostly a personal preference for KDE.
It has been even more "it just works" than Mint, which is already stupendously easy to install.
Nowadays it seems Gtk and GNOME documentation lacks updates and is full of broken links.
I remember trying Mate in the past, but I also remember I had issues running GTK3 software and I didn't feel motivated enough to dig for a solution. What I wanted was a hassle-free DE, and XFCE was the one for me.
Cheers to XFCE team!!
Wireshark changed from GTK to Qt https://blog.wireshark.org/2013/10/switching-to-qt/
Linus Torwald, a C fan and c++ hater , decided to port from GTK to Qt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0
If you make a simple GUI like for a python script GTK is enough
Thank you for posting this, it's nice to see that someone already had most of my feelings.
GNOME doesn't have this problem, so for all its problems, it works for me.
This page has some variables that let's you set some things and bypass kwin autodetection https://community.kde.org/KWin/Environment_Variables
I know it sucks that it does not work out of the box, at least you don't have Nvidia.
- How to create a shortcut for a command -> use the command line.
- Modify group permission in nautilus? -> No use the command line.
- Switching users -> bug, doesn't work half of the time
- Functionality is hidden in the window title bar (debatable)
- Window close button is too close to the logout button
Is Gnome so simple to use because you don't have any option to do something? :-p
The Ubuntu theme is especially bad:
- No window borders -> overlapping terminals become indistinguishable.
- Window title bars and top menu bar are almost indistinguishable...
In contrast, we used an KDE app in the demo and a couple of times we thought, can you configure xy? would simplify things. Yes! you can do xy. Is there a keyboard shortcut for xy? no but you can configure one, Great!
We are now at a point where KDE is vastly superior at this type of UI than Windows 10 is. They've been doing it for almost as long as MS (KDE 1.0 was released in 1998). The settings UIs alone are so vastly superior, it's kind of embarrassing for Microsoft.
So why has KDE stuck doggedly to this UI style? Because it works. MS spend countless millions and hours on UI research for Win95. It's a very pragmatic decision, and they've made progressions based on the original design, rather than throwing everything out the window and trying to re-invent the wheel, like the Gnome devs did.
As a result, KDE is focused, straight-forward and doesn't get in your way. It simply lets you get on with what you actually want to do. Yet it is also extremely flexible, perhaps even more so than famously customizable UIs like FVWM.
The problems czei002 mentioned are absolutely problems with Gnome. Some of them are specifically Ubuntu problems, but generally they are inherent to bad UI choices from the Gnome devs. Not being able to change permissions in Nautilus? User switching not working? Not being able to create shortcuts from the UI? These are all signs of a bad UI.
You can't even set focus to "follows mouse" without raising windows when clicking inside them. I want focus to follow the mouse, and I only want windows to raise if I click the frame or title bar. KDE lets me do this right in the settings UI, with just a couple of clicks. In Gnome (or Cinnamon), you have to alter gconf settings, akin to registry fiddling in Windows. That's not cool.
Quite disappointing to see it becoming unsupported by a major distro.
Yeah, I had to stop using Gnome when everyone was manhandled into Unity / Gnome 3. I have no idea what anyone was thinking.
I now use xubuntu, which doesn't seem to have suffered. XFCE beat out KDE on the strength of... similarity to Gnome 2. I like having the two bars.
You can add bars in KDE.
KDE is much better for me. No problems at all
More seriously, I dealt with this trying to run a Linux VM on a Surface Pro a couple of years ago. I don't remember which distro, but 100% and 200% were the only UI scale options.
Surface Pro's native scale in Windows is 150%, and the solution to match that in Linux ended up being to scale it to 200% and then set up xrandr to scale it back down to 75% of that.
Not exactly a clean way to handle it. I'm pretty sad to hear that's still the state of things.
Though they did eventually do a fractional scaling thing with 3x scaled down, which still feels clunky to me but at least you don't have to configure it yourself in two different places one of which is a command line.
Like, okay, make an easy mode the default. But allow for that complexity to exist without completely writing full extensions for basic functionality.
In other words, they're trying to copy Windows and Microsoft's aggressive feature removals from it? That's horrible, when for the longest time one of the biggest advantages of running desktop Linux was its easier and wider customisation.
There are many interesting informations around to get a picture of how they think; this article has interesting concepts:
https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti...
and this is the most relevant part:
I think one of the most important cases against applets (as they are currently defined
in GNOME) is that they are extremely detrimental to the Identity of the product or
platform. [...]
Let’s say that we are trying to define either a product or a product platform. I don’t
think it is possible to do this without some “brand” coherence. And it is arguably
impossible to do this effectively with such an ad-hoc/individually-customized design
identity.It is particularly perplexing since Windows before 8.x was far more customisable and themable, which probably lead to its success.
The lesson of backward compatibility is slowly getting lost across the whole industry.
I gave a try to KDE at the beginning of 2014. I used it for a few months but everything was painful: twice as many clicks to get things done than I used to in Gnome. It reminded me of Windows.
I installed Gnome Flashback and stayed there. I'm customizing Gnome Shell to look like the old Gnome 2 now. I have to sort out a couple of problems with the Nvidia driver (flickering unless I use a strange 40 Hz refresh rate) and I'll be there for the next few years on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. If there won't be themes anymore by then, I'll switch to something else because the Gnome developers and I have two really different ideas of the desktop. Ironically I'm closer to KDE but it was really unusable.
KDE Neon is a KDE-focused distribution, using Ubuntu LTS as its base, with a pleasingly minimal default install. Every Ubuntu PPA I've tried works just like on base Ubuntu. Similar to Linux Mint and others, it works as a live distro so you can check it out before you commit.
KDE4 made me switch away too (I chose Linux Mint), it simply felt too much like a transitional release cycle. KDE5 brought me back, big time.
Anyway, for consistency, I hope using the Brise theme and the corresponding icon set on gtk apps in KDE remains possible. Adwaita would probably not work really well on KDE apps.
More generally, theming gtk apps is needed for nice integration in many non gnome environment.
The fact that GNOME is less configurable does not mean that the Linux desktop is. Gnome is not compulsory, you can easily run whatever window manager or desktop environment you fancy, and still run--or not--Gnome programs.
That's a great way to encourage product teams to produce inadequate documentation.
- how to place files on the desktop
- how to configure virtual desktops in all directions
Does the JS engine even have a JIT?
Just wanted to provide some counter anecdata. I see a lot distaste for it but as an everyday user I've had no issues.
this is true for every software
> how I get tray icons working (tray icons were removed)
They explained the change, they have their reasons, they proposed alternatives to people who wanted to keep them around. What do you need more?
https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gno...
People just hate change (esp. change that requires them to change how their own stuff works to accomodate it—such as devs when their platform changes), regardless of whether the given makes for a more or less coherent experience; and regardless of whether the person complaining would have liked the system more or less if it was already like that in the first place.
Also is a bad excuse to ignore feedback, like you seen in latest release the developers are still moving thing around like the app menu, if a user would have complained about it an year ago you all would have defended Gnome design , now the devs said it was useless and not used and is a great design to remove it. The solution is to do more usability tests and not rely on what some "expert" thinks an UI should be.
Sometimes, the problem is simply that some users really are using your software wrong. Not compared to how you think they should be using it—compared to how everyone else is using it, and so (via usability tests) how you're building it to be used.
Or, to put that another way: https://xkcd.com/1172/
Before you rebut: I'm not saying that that's true in this case. (I'm not saying it's not, either; I don't know enough about this case to judge.) I'm just clarifying the reasoning behind the general principle. People hate change no matter how justified and evidence-based it is. So inevitably, in a project, there's going to be some number of bug/issues filed where the underlying motivation comes down to "the user wanted to whine because they had to learn something new." It's not an excuse to ignore all user-filed bugs/issues; it's just an argument against people who insist that 100% of user complaints should be taken seriously. There is a "malingering quotient"—a certain percentage of complaints (different for each project) that comes down to people trying to avoid the work of coping with change.
See also, the Lizardman quotient: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-...
The truth is one more more Gnome3 designers that had the vision on how Gnome should look, that branding should be non optional, they did not know what XFCE is.
That doesn't happen in the emacs subreddit.
Your argument is invalid.
As a user, KDE always felt like an annoying blinkenlight kitchensink where everything could be modified. Gnome started out a little bit like that (with config files) but settled into a mediocre but unsurprising and thus stable and useful environment.
Then I actually use it, and its a giant, sloppy mess. I always appreciate the gnome team's drive to simplify and reduce, after I try KDE (though I agree with many, in that they go too far sometimes).
It's tight, streamlined and has a pleasantly small base install that doesn't get in your way with badly chosen default apps.
People who are happy about the current primary/default environment don't often go out of their way to talk about it. People who are happy about a non-default environment, or who are not happy with the default environment, talk about it more. It's a form of selection bias.