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I had a bad feeling the comments section would be filled with dorky, off-base rerun complaints and whining about UX and the "oh it's all mobile design" tropes that has barely been true for years.
Imagine anyone working on GNOME stuff reading this! There have been leaps and strides in making Gnome stuff stable and work out of the box. I remember using Linux 5 or so years ago, and if I wanted to do GUI configuration of X/Y/Z, almost all the time it was some random app that someone just uploads to sourcefourge, with random likelihood of working. Now I have basically all the coverage I need just from out of the box Gnome stuff (I'd love for pavu-control to get brought in but...)
So much stuff just works. Someone needs to do an indiegogo about the file picker, but it _also_ basically works, and the design of gnome stuff in general has transitioned well to widescreen monitors etc.
Not to mention insanely neat stuff like the Gnome Builder [0], even if that doesn't affect my day-to-day.
Y'all are ungrateful, and really discounting how well stuff works now compared to how it used to (Yes, even in Gnome 2!). Gnome's been great to me
I do not recognize any of the difficulties you mention. I was a Gnome 2 user since 2.4, 2.6, right up until the end. Around 2.10 things stabilized, wel before 2010. I loved it, and I still like Gnome 2's fork. I tried to like 3, but unfortunately I don't see how the mobile-criticism isn't valid, or how it made things easier or better. I wasn't and am not someone who tweaks and tunes, but Gnome 3 was too much simplification, for me.
I can imagine it's tough to read if you're a Gnome committer, but I would hope the points raised are seen (although evidence seems to indicate it isn't), not the fact that there is criticism.
The way I see it, Gnome now is a bit of an anti-gui: it seems to be in retreat of actually providing GUI for doing things. This may be what some people want, mobile guis are the same (and I protest that too), but whereas before I had the impression Gnome was big enough to suit different sorts, now it seems those who don't like the narrower goal Gnome has set for itself just need to move on. And I have, in a great reversal of history, KDE actually feels like the modern Gnome 2 that never was (I disliked KDE 3 and 4 with a passion).
I don't think modern Gnome is the right DE to be the default in nearly every distro, because it has become so opinionated. There are other DEs that to me seem better suited to that role.
Then again, I couldn't tell you why Android-iOS (I barely see any difference) is what it is, so maybe I'm just old, different or some sort of UI-minority.
>Then again, I couldn't tell you why Android-iOS (I barely see any difference) is what it is
Because you're trying to analyze the technology rather than the social/power structure wielding it.
For what it's worth as a person who just uses Linux as a development platform and does not want to tinker and wants something that works out of the box and feels as polished as Windows or macos, gnome by far comes closest and I'm very happy with it.
These days I can just run the latest Fedora release and it simply works.
Gnome is great. It’s easily m favorite desktop environment (including vs OSX and Windows). It works. It is consistent (unlike most other Linux DEs). Its UI gets out of my way. Its keyboard-driven workflow is quite nice. I’m a fan.
I’m running Fedora 34, and my only complaint is the clean-start memory usage of which Gnome is a big part, but unnecessary Fedora services also take their fair share.
> Its UI gets out of my way.
If you want the UI to get out of your way, why are you using a desktop environment instead of just a window manager?
Before the CORBA->DBus rewrite, the AT-SPI and related projects (read: the GNOME Accessibility infrastructure) was really looking promising. The Sun Accessibility office did great work to make GNOME a useable platform for people with disabilities and developers working on accessibility. The sudden death of the sun accessibility office combined with a big rewrite of the communication infrastructure pretty much set us back for some years. GNOME Accessibility is short on developer staff really actively working on the topic, and those which have managed to persist over the years are almost burnt out.
When GNOME is apparently growing right now, it would be great to divert some of the new resources towards more accessibility development. When GNOME started to support accessibility back around 2003, it was leading the way. It was the first toolkit to do so on FLOSS platforms, and this was even before commercial vendors have started to include accessibility by default. These days, all commercial vendors of desktop and mobile OSes have accessibility built-in by default. Which shows that GNOME was on the right track starting early. It would be great if management could acknowledge that this is an important topic which needs more work to achieve excellent results.
Diverting funds and attention into "Accessibility infrastructure", sounds like it fits very well with what Robert McQueen explains to be an important goal of GNOME foundation:
> try to do more in the world and bring the benefits of GNOME to more people. We want to take our message of trusted, affordable and accessible computing to the wider world.
Reminder that gnome has a donations page: https://www.gnome.org/donate/
I'll be donating today because gnome has been my favorite DE for the last few years and the changes they made to gnome 40 are awesome.
I will not be donating for the foreseeable future, because Gnome has repeatedly shown contempt towards their software's userbase by ignoring their feedback and releasing software that has poor quality and usability.
The gnome devs have built something almost exactly how I want. If the gnome devs listened to most of the feedback I see on HN, I would no longer like the DE.
Consider that different users have different preferences. I have tried almost all of the DE/WMs and have found gnome to be the most stable/best looking/best defaults.
What projects do you donate to?
A good reasoning. But rather negative in tone of voice.
Gnome is not for you; good! Because there's lot's of choice: POPos, Mint, KDE, LXDE, iwm, and so forth and so on. This is what OSS en Linux is all about: choices! freedom!
Why not use one of the alternatives that fits your requirements better and praise that alternative?
same, setting up a recurring donation.
I have a lot of qualms about a lot of stuff, but I feel like there is a lot of great payoff for GNOME to continue being able to maintain/improve stuff, especially as its my daily driver.
(I know this is anathema to a lot of people but I would gladly support something like Canonical having an OSS fund that it pushed patreon-style on its desktop OS, though to be honest I don't know what the admin costs for something like that would be)
Can you expand on what you like about Gnome 40? I recently upgraded to Fedora 34 and hence have Gnome 40 installed, but I haven't really explored much.
It might sound a little silly but in the expanded mode where all windows are shown, the desktop wallpapers have a huge border radius on them and it makes me happy every time I see it. I have also had non GNOME using coworkers comment on this detail as well as how the windows sit slightly outside of the wallpaper in this mode. I also remember seeing a number of minor UI tweaks around the place but I have forgotten which ones as they just look normal now.
I would like to see a focus on making linux desktops secure. Just because we are usually running non-evil code, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t process evil data that can easily exploit the numerous bugs (especially with the everything in C mentality) found in open-source software. And frankly, flatpak is not a good direction (especially written in C), it is no solution to the dependency hell problem, nor to proper sandboxing.
A new userspace should be built similar to Android with proper capability-based sandboxes.
I don't want this, I wouldn't use this. I guess I'm just not optimistic enough to see this work:
Flatpak, snap, etc don't work as they just try to make the current desktop philosophy secure, without the application and the rest of the OS really being aware of it. Android and ios have been designed to offer native features for fine grained access control and isolation. For a desktop os, you need the same, from the ground up, and every app needs to be tailored to this. You'll start with a desert and tumbleweed.
This will never work, because it's simply too late: The web. A Chromebook pretty much does all the isolation you want on a different level, and is enough for the vast majority of people. I know you can now list a thousand things you cannot do in a browser and whatnot, but consider that the folks here on HN are a very rare breed.
And again, as you even said, for such a hypothetical sndboxing desktop os, user space needs to be rebuilt in large parts from scratch. Not in a hundred years. There so many things that are still lacking on the linux desktop today that this would at best be yet another experimental toy OS with no real world usability.
For me it's simply two separate, physical machines, one for online banking and sensitive stuff, the other for dev work, games, goofing off, and one or two android devices for other random crap. That's my sandboxing.
It would be a hard change, especially with the die-hard love for C, but I don’t think that it would be impossible to make it possible, with a backward compatible escape hatch.
Also, Linux user space is not famous for being binary backwards compatible, and everything being source available, I think with a clever abstraction it could potentially work.
> And again, as you even said, for such a hypothetical sndboxing desktop os, user space needs to be rebuilt in large parts from scratch. Not in a hundred years. There so many things that are still lacking on the linux desktop today that this would at best be yet another experimental toy OS with no real world usability.
From the several toe dips I did with Linux desktop over the years, 99.9% of all user-space GUI programs will not be missed by more than 5000 hardcore fans anyway.
Rust, Zig, Nim, D -- all fine languages, and all gradually travel to having a proper UI toolkit (or solid bindings to the existing ones, more often).
I happen to believe that when the solid foundation gets created we'll see an explosion of high-quality Linux desktop programs. But various problems with Qt and GTK are preventing it (licenses included)... for now.
Whilst I agree that more security would be great, and a capability based sandbox for applications would be cool, this is not something that Gnome can do on it's own. There should be a inter-project initiative to get this to work, as ideally this should be done at the kernel and userspace level and be DE agnostic. Flatpak kind of could do that, but I'm skeptical for now.
On the other hand, maybe Gnome should copy qubes or everyone should just make qubes ready for everyday use.
Of course it should not be desktop-dependent, but it should be very well integrated into the DE, because it is the trusted party that can manage most of these permissions.
As for Qubes, it is cool, but I don’t think that such a massive performance degradation/requirement is feasible. Also, I’m not sure how great it is from an everyday usability point of view. If the user will rather run everything in a single vm, because it doesn’t work otherwise, we are back to where we are now.
The android design from a usability perspective is garbage that has been made over with enough money and effort to be semi acceptable in the same fashion as a garbage truck would be able to fly if you attached enough rockets to it.
If the Linux desktop started with a design just as good I don't think I would live long enough to see it rendered acceptable.
> A new userspace should be built similar to Android
Why do poeple always forget that Plan9 exists? The Android way is the wrong way to do it.
Slightly joking: https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR
(EDIT: I'd not propose to actually rewrite existing infra in Rust, but at least flatpack 3.0 or whatever the next version would be, would benefit from this)
Improving UX, including usability testing with actual users, should be a top priority. Today Gnome has some pointless mobile-device-like UI concepts that don't make much sense on a desktop (like "swipe" away the start screen to be able to log-in). Then there are way too much ridicoulus limitation in the UI. In certain aspects Gnome was better 10 years ago.
That “swipe” will happen just by starting typing/pressing any button — so I think it is exactly a good example of convergent UX.
It is exactly my gripe with windows where you have to separately press one key just so to make the locker locker disappear.
I submitted a few patches but got turned of having to deal with Vala and C. Tooling and docs feel ancient compared to whats available in .Net/Java/js etc.
Thats said I really admire how ambitious they tried to be and all the stuff they have managed to produce with such few resources.
OT: what a jump in time this is https://ramcq.net/2005/03/ Interesting really to read and see how some things have changed and others not.
Is this the correct link? It does not seem to do anything with gnome.
Maybe they finally support server side decorations
Or a way to turn off vsynch/change the compositor. I've found nvidia drivers have their own vsynch, and gnome adds some on top of it, netting a microstuttery experience. May be wrong, but I find xfce without compositing to perform better.
You can find a link to their IRS filings here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/435...
Hm, no mention of free software? Just open source?
I know it's the same software, but the way it's referred to gives me pause.
Yeah, the whole article reads very...coroprate-y.
I'm not sure if I'm happy with it, but I haven't used Gnome in multiple years, so my opinion doesn't really matter here. I do however, wish that Gnome foundation remains healthy. Having competition is always good, even in FLOSS.
> The goal is to find projects and funding that allow us to both invest in the GNOME community and find new ways for FOSS to benefit people who aren’t already in our community.
The statement of their specific goal for the future refers to FOSS.
Given that the mission statement of Gnome is explicitly "to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software." I'm not sure why it would.
Open source as defined by the OSI is literally identical to free software as defined by the FSF.
And no, open source does not include things like unreal engine which you can view the source but not use freely. This is called Source Available software.
Next steps? How about:
1. Break GNOME's hard dependency on systemd. I don't mean refuse to use it, just don't force people to have to do so.
2. Fix that damn file picker dialog we've been groaning about for 20 years. Specifically, put the full path in an editable textbox. I'm not kidding! This step alone would be sooo much of a usability improvement for me!
I don't mind if you guys take a year-long hiatus and just do those two things.
The way I mostly deal with the open filepicker is just drag and drop a file in there. In Windows, this tries to copy the file to the location, which is an insane thing for a filepicker to do: in gtk, this just shows the file and selects it.
Most file managers have better facilities to find and manage files, so you can paste the path into it or use a command like `rox -s (paste)` to get the file you want. It also works if you drag and drop a folder in it to switch to the folder.
Improving the filepicker to make it work for everyone is a fool's errand. Much better off making it integrate with filemanagers adequately.
As for the systemd dependency, I think this is firmly a case where the only way to change their minds is to make the changes yourself, maintain a rebase fork[1] for several years, and show that the demand is there and the complexity is worth it. Considering the major Linux distributions default to systemd and it has a variety of features not included in traditional init, I can understand why they wouldn't want to do it unless it was proven to be valuable in advance.
[1] Do not give it a different name: it's just "the gnome fork that takes full advantage of systemd when it's present but does not require it". Do not increase or decrease its scope: no fixing filepickers or adding traditional menubars. Either of those will cause Gnome to say "It's a different product" rather than "it proves the demand for non-systemd" amongst gnome users.
You can use CTRL+l to edit the full path in the file picker dialog.
But I agree with your point, it could be improved. My personal gripe with the file picker is that backspace does not go to the parent directory anymore.
I don’t think they hard-depend on systemd.
See https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GNOME/GNOME_Without_systemd/Gen...
> 2. Fix that damn file picker dialog we've been groaning about for 20 years.
Hell, yes, please.
Doesn't Ubuntu's logind shim solve the first point already?
The GNOME Project manged to finally do away with the prejudice that Open Source means bad UX. Great job!
In the specific case of my mom and a few other neighbors, it's the KDE project that did just that, well over a decade ago. But i agree with your point that GNOME design is really nice.