This article was written 5-days after Gnome 40s official release.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
>>It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
It absolutely does not, and this authors complaint is mirrored in every other review of Gnome 40. The aforementioned functionality was either removed or the extensions that provided said functionality are broken.
The common denominator and undeniable truth with every iteration of Gnome over the last x-years is inherent functionality is neutered and burdened by extension devs.
We are either talking about something different, or I don’t know. If you press Super or swipe 3 fingers up you get the preview of every app on every desktop. On the picture in the article, the author has no window open (as apparent from the dock not having any “open” icons)
Would you like a screenshot of it, because that is what I see precisely in front of me?
And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Or a dock, the one GNOME already implements in its Activities screen.
> and has been the case since Gnome 3 (without extensions), so I don’t see how is it relevant under gnome 40.
The author never said otherwise, their whole point was to explain, that moving the dock from the left, which is in close range to the hot corner and button to activate the Activities screen, to the bottom, means that you now have to move the mouse a much larger distance if you want to access the dock with the mouse. And since GNOME doesn't support an auto-hiding dock at the bottom, there's no way around that when you use the mouse.
I mean I'm just rephrasing what the author already wrote, because I think they made their point pretty clear to begin with.
> And why would I want to waste vertical space for that, when I can do a really short movement to see them all, in a better digestible form, because humans are better at remembering the position of something
Every other modern and popular desktop on this planet supports auto-hiding docks/panels and nobody asks GNOME to force an always visible dock on you.
Well ... I switched to KDE, so not really bugged by it any more.
What he wrote is factually correct (about extra click/gesture/keypress/...), and complaint of many people.
Responsive design and Tablet were the rage and going to replace every other computer. Fast-forward, has was predictable, it did not. Gnome needs to go back to the drawing board and revise assumptions made 10 years ago. And, no, keyboard shortcut do not compensate bad design.
If Gnome is niche on the desktop, it is non-existent on touch devices. The project needs to get over that and start to cater to it's actual user base.
See, user too can be very opinionated ;-)
Some years ago, I was myself a "really opinionated user" and well ... Linux doesn't lack of mature opinionated DE : you can do barely anything you want with XFCE, MATE and KDE.
Also, I really don't understand this "touchscreen oriented Gnome". There is nothing in Gnome that is meant to be used in touch mode. Gnome ergonomics are totally built around the Super key (and now, touchpad gestures) once you get this, you understand all the gnome _desktop_ paradigm.
It's really inspired by OSX where every workflow action can be done with touchpad gestures and keyboard (without moving the pointer, which is only useful inside applications). Once you get this paradigm, there is no way to go back.
I really think also that Gnome was betting for better touchpad support on linux years and years ago, but it looks like we had to wait for Wayland to have something decent.
I don't minimise Windows, I love the launcher, the keyboard shortcuts make so much more sense than osx, and it's not the sluggish monster everyone seems to think it is.
« They owe you nothing » totally apply in this context. Even if you were a donator (which there are few probability you are).
It is true that some defaults are annoying and lots of configuration options are missing in GUI programs but it is still possible to configure basically everything using gsettings or gnome extensions (which I prefer over KDE style config).
I do not like some gnome apps (i.e. nautilus or gedit) but there are alternatives so no big problem there.
You missed the point. They meant there's no always-on-display taskbar.
>It can be set in Tweaks
>Gnome Tweaks
Probably, but should you "need a SEPARATE application" (as they say) to set something that should be default? That you can configure those things using third-party software doesn't take away from the point the author is making, and if anything enhances it since some should've been the default.
> Gnome doesn't show you the overview of your open apps or any application shortcuts on its desktop. You need to open Activities - an extra mouse click - before they are shown
It does, that is like the core feature of gnome. Maybe his/her version was buggy, but it did work even in the Fedora beta version I tried.
> Worse, as I outlined a dozen times over in multiple Fedora reviews, Firefox cannot be minimized, at all, with or without the titlebar
Wanting to minimize windows is great and all, but Gnome is a very opinionated software. Where on earth would a minimized window go? It has no tray by default. Minimized windows reappear in overview, so they clutter the screen just as much. Gnome is different is hardly a valid criticism. Feel free to use something else where minimized windows is part of the workflow. I doubt many would bring up lack of minimized windows on a tiling wm for example.
> The fonts still use the Grayscale hinting rather than subpixel (LCD); the latter offers far better results.
It can be set in Tweaks (I do agree that more settings should be exposed, but that’s another problem), which the author must be aware of as it was used for other things. Also, grayscale is the safe fallback, as not every screen would benefit from subpixel.
> Desktop scaling
Gnome Tweaks. Maybe looking around before writing an article would have been great.. It does work well under Wayland but is not enabled by default due to XServer apps becoming blurry on fractional scaling (since X has no such concept, it gets rendered at 2X and is then downscaled).