Not a ton of substance to this post, and the author comes off as kind of a jerk – the “anti-woke, heterodox” bit on the about page doesn’t help with that either. I remember when GNOME 2 came out and people complained about exactly the same things they’re complaining about now, empty statements about “trying too hard to be like a Mac” included.
It’s too bad, because there are some legitimate complaints to be made, and I say that as someone who’s had a generally okay time on GNOME for 20 years now. The way their bug queue is handled seems like a mess to me, it’s inexcusable that it took this long to add a thumbnail view to the filepicker. I also don’t love that there seems to be a hard dependency on systemd, not because I have an issue with systemd (systemd is similar to GNOME in the sense that most complaints about it seem ill-informed to me) but because that seems like it would make it quite a bit harder to port to other OSes.
it’s inexcusable that it took this long to add a thumbnail view to the filepicker.
While I am sympathetic to your view in general, and feel similar as a gnome user, I believe phrases like “inexcusable” are a bit much, considering that free software devs don’t owe us anything.
I’m very happy with GNOME 3, I do not see any issues with it.
That being said, attacking an author for personal beliefs (whatever “anti-woke, heterodox” means) is an attack ad hominem, and I think it should have no place in a discussion about GNOME 3.
Give me a break, the author makes it clear throughout his blog that those beliefs play a big part in his low opinion of GNOME, so it’s perfectly relevant to bring up here.
I’m happy to give you a break, everyone deserves a break.
I think we must agree to disagree here. I have taken the liberty to summon ChatGPT as the ultimate judge and asked him to summarize the article, and further judge if he agrees with the idea that you have expressed. He too was not able to find any evidence for how the author’s personal beliefs play a big part in his low opinion of GNOME:
The author expresses frustration over GNOME’s continued issues a decade after GNOME 3’s initial release. He argue that the primary problem with GNOME is its disregard for users’ needs and developers’ resistance to admitting mistakes. The author further criticizes the developers’ belief that they know better than users, leading to a disconnect and loss of trust. The author highlights GNOME’s loss of popularity and market share to other desktop environments like KDE, attributing it to the mistakes made with GNOME 3. The author is passionate in their argument and provides several examples to support their claims, effectively illustrating the issues they believe plague GNOME.
The author does not explicitly mention his personal beliefs, such as being anti-woke or heterodox, in the blog post. The focus of the post is primarily on the technical and user-experience-related aspects of GNOME and how its developers have handled issues, rather than the author’s personal beliefs. The author’s low opinion of GNOME is mainly based on the perceived disregard for users’ needs, developers’ resistance to admitting mistakes, and the belief that developers know better than users.
I’m happy to reconsider this ruling if you can present any evidence to back up your claims.
I’m a pretty happy Gnome 3 user, not because of the aesthetics but because it simply works, gets out of the way and keeps out of the way. There are plenty of alternatives for people to choose from so I don’t know why anyone needs to rail against any in particular. The graph in the post virtually proves the point: people have more choice than ever.
Exactly. I ‘noped’ out of Gnome 3 as soon as I found there’s no “minimize” button without futzing around with tweaks or extensions or whatever. And alt+tab did something I really, really didn’t want. But I didn’t go on a long-term rant about how There Is Something Wrong On The Internet[1]. I just changed my DM to one of the many that allowed me to have the paradigm that I was used to.
Agreed. I tried GNOME 3, didn’t like it (especially the taskbar/drawer/titlebars) after a couple months and just moved on since I have that option in the Linux and BSD ecosystems. First back to a mixture of Openbox+piecemeal XFCE bits, then to xmonad/sway, and now occasionally using KDE Plasma depending on who or what the device is for (it used to be heavyweight and ugly, but now it’s neither).
I was a happy Gnome 3 user, but then I got really annoyed by the ordering and scale of icons in the gnome-shell top panel. I found out how trying to consistently order them sucks (even with an extension), their scale couldn’t be modified, there isn’t some kind of overflow menu, and it was just so ugly it triggered my OCD in a way that made me move to XFCE. So then, I find out about CSD (client-side decorations) and how they forced other DE/WMs into having ugly-as-sin mismatching borders. Also a lot more customisation in XFCE than I remembered, in ways more useful than Gnome. The only thing I miss is some of the settings menu, like bluetooth, and gnome-keychain.
One of my biggest complaints about GNOME actually lies in GTK, which I’m stuck using even in other applications: they insist that the app developer should dictate the theming of an application, not the end user. GTK+2 got this right. Early GTK+3 kinda sorta could mostly be told how to behave. Then Adwaita became The Gospel From On High and then libadwaita became a thing and then libhandy became a thing and now we have GTK+4 which Will Look, Feel, And Behave Exactly How We Tell You It Will, Why Would You Even Ask?
In other words: GNOME and GTK’s developers have managed to turn a very sizeable chunk of the Linux desktop into the exact thing I never want: an Apple-esque pile of restrictions and pre-made decisions that take inordinate work to change (if possible at all).
I once eagerly awaited something like FOX or FLTK to take over the non-QT desktop app space, and instead, we’ve gotten Electron and the things like it (Tauri, whatever) or just straight up web interfaces which violate all of the above rules and then some.
In other-other words: Linux on the desktop keeps taking a few steps forward, and so many steps back. Perhaps thankfully, though, many of those steps back probably only matter to those of us who have been using it for ages…
On the other hand, the Qt side of the Linux desktop has all the features and finally has reached a level of usability that has started to surpass even gnome.
Mostly for, but not the way GNOME and Apple do it: sane and accessible defaults that can be overridden with no interference from the desktop environment is my ideal. By all means, let Adwaita be the default theme and have it be responsive to desktop, tablet, mobile, etc. I’m even fine with a framework that mandates responsive design be accounted for in custom themes. But if I want to make my entire desktop environment look like Windows Vista, I should (and used to!) be free to do so, and there should not be a single application in the desktop environment that dares to tell me I’m wrong for trying to do so. Most GNOME/GTK ecosystem apps nowadays will simply balk at that level of customization (or at the very least, it becomes significantly harder to pull off than it once was) - or their developers will (https://stopthemingmy.app/)
Does no one else remember the period when everyone was going to be using tablets and similar devices and we had to redesign the desktop environments for that? My memory is that we got Windows 8’s UI and GNOME 3 from that push.
You say that as if it were misguided. Almost everyone does use oversized smartphones and/or tablets and many, many people own no other devices of any kind.
I happen to agree with a few of his observations about GNOME: there’s an air of arrogance to some of the developers involved, and they really don’t seem to have correctly identified their customers (per the product adoption model, I’d bet the vast majority of GNOME users are innovators, not even early adopters).
But, from another article of his:
The mathematical fact is that USA’s actions caused Russia’s [invasion of Ukraine]
… so I have to say I wouldn’t be keen to share a room with him either.
He could be right about the arrogance of GNOME devs but he’s also the worst possible messenger, given his own arrogant and harassing behavior in the bug reports.
In fact, when I argued that users should be allowed to vote in bugzilla, I got permanently banned with no explanation.
If you really got no explanation, here it is: You went, and told someone else you wanted voting rights over their life. In this case: what they program on, but this isn’t ok! Not ever! It’s wrong to bully people, and you should be ashamed of doing wrong things.
In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I’d reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:
Lest anyone think this was a one-off, look at what happened in 2021:
“Since this week there are finally no open tickets in GNOME Bugzilla left. All were either migrated to GNOME GitLab or mass-closed over the last weeks by Bart or me. When mass-closing, an explanatory comment was added (example) to allow contributors to understand why we closed their ticket.”
In my web browser I now save files to just one folder, then move them with a file manager (PCManFM) that lets me navigate folders by typing the start of their names on my keyboard. The GTK3 file chooser still does have one hidden way of doing this (by pressing /) but it’s really cumbersome and you lose your filename.
I’m very scared of the GIMP’s GTK3 port. The UI is already very interaction heavy for my most common use case (open a bunch of photos, crop, resize, adjust levels, export as JPEG to a different folder, close), I expect this will only make it worse.
The direction of Gnome has been really sad for more than 10 years. Gnome 2 was amazing. GTK2 themes were and still are awesome.
In my web browser I now save files to just one folder, then move them with a file manager (PCManFM) that lets me navigate folders by typing the start of their names on my keyboard.
You can force your browser to use XDG Desktop Portals and then you can force it to use the Qt portal. The KDE file picker for example is relatively close to what GTK2 used to have (and significantly more powerful nowadays)
“Every but me is wrong” as a blog theme (jeez some of his other posts are truely cringworthy), cherry-picked vignettes to “prove I’m right and being oppressed by The Man”, predictably minimal actionable content and incel dog whistles to signal who his ‘audience’ is.
This is the guy who comes to your house party and starts looking for a fight after his first beer and is passed out in a pool of his own vomit after the 3rd.
I flagged your comment as “off-topic”. Because I believe discussing whether the available flags are dumb or not in a comment thread about GNOME is well and truly off-topic.
Not a ton of substance to this post, and the author comes off as kind of a jerk – the “anti-woke, heterodox” bit on the about page doesn’t help with that either. I remember when GNOME 2 came out and people complained about exactly the same things they’re complaining about now, empty statements about “trying too hard to be like a Mac” included.
It’s too bad, because there are some legitimate complaints to be made, and I say that as someone who’s had a generally okay time on GNOME for 20 years now. The way their bug queue is handled seems like a mess to me, it’s inexcusable that it took this long to add a thumbnail view to the filepicker. I also don’t love that there seems to be a hard dependency on systemd, not because I have an issue with systemd (systemd is similar to GNOME in the sense that most complaints about it seem ill-informed to me) but because that seems like it would make it quite a bit harder to port to other OSes.
While I am sympathetic to your view in general, and feel similar as a gnome user, I believe phrases like “inexcusable” are a bit much, considering that free software devs don’t owe us anything.
I’m very happy with GNOME 3, I do not see any issues with it.
That being said, attacking an author for personal beliefs (whatever “anti-woke, heterodox” means) is an attack ad hominem, and I think it should have no place in a discussion about GNOME 3.
Give me a break, the author makes it clear throughout his blog that those beliefs play a big part in his low opinion of GNOME, so it’s perfectly relevant to bring up here.
I’m happy to give you a break, everyone deserves a break.
I think we must agree to disagree here. I have taken the liberty to summon ChatGPT as the ultimate judge and asked him to summarize the article, and further judge if he agrees with the idea that you have expressed. He too was not able to find any evidence for how the author’s personal beliefs play a big part in his low opinion of GNOME:
I’m happy to reconsider this ruling if you can present any evidence to back up your claims.
I’m a pretty happy Gnome 3 user, not because of the aesthetics but because it simply works, gets out of the way and keeps out of the way. There are plenty of alternatives for people to choose from so I don’t know why anyone needs to rail against any in particular. The graph in the post virtually proves the point: people have more choice than ever.
Exactly. I ‘noped’ out of Gnome 3 as soon as I found there’s no “minimize” button without futzing around with tweaks or extensions or whatever. And alt+tab did something I really, really didn’t want. But I didn’t go on a long-term rant about how There Is Something Wrong On The Internet[1]. I just changed my DM to one of the many that allowed me to have the paradigm that I was used to.
This is a feature, not a bug.
[1] https://xkcd.com/386/
Agreed. I tried GNOME 3, didn’t like it (especially the taskbar/drawer/titlebars) after a couple months and just moved on since I have that option in the Linux and BSD ecosystems. First back to a mixture of Openbox+piecemeal XFCE bits, then to xmonad/sway, and now occasionally using KDE Plasma depending on who or what the device is for (it used to be heavyweight and ugly, but now it’s neither).
I was a happy Gnome 3 user, but then I got really annoyed by the ordering and scale of icons in the gnome-shell top panel. I found out how trying to consistently order them sucks (even with an extension), their scale couldn’t be modified, there isn’t some kind of overflow menu, and it was just so ugly it triggered my OCD in a way that made me move to XFCE. So then, I find out about CSD (client-side decorations) and how they forced other DE/WMs into having ugly-as-sin mismatching borders. Also a lot more customisation in XFCE than I remembered, in ways more useful than Gnome. The only thing I miss is some of the settings menu, like bluetooth, and gnome-keychain.
One of my biggest complaints about GNOME actually lies in GTK, which I’m stuck using even in other applications: they insist that the app developer should dictate the theming of an application, not the end user. GTK+2 got this right. Early GTK+3 kinda sorta could mostly be told how to behave. Then Adwaita became The Gospel From On High and then libadwaita became a thing and then libhandy became a thing and now we have GTK+4 which Will Look, Feel, And Behave Exactly How We Tell You It Will, Why Would You Even Ask?
In other words: GNOME and GTK’s developers have managed to turn a very sizeable chunk of the Linux desktop into the exact thing I never want: an Apple-esque pile of restrictions and pre-made decisions that take inordinate work to change (if possible at all).
I once eagerly awaited something like FOX or FLTK to take over the non-QT desktop app space, and instead, we’ve gotten Electron and the things like it (Tauri, whatever) or just straight up web interfaces which violate all of the above rules and then some.
In other-other words: Linux on the desktop keeps taking a few steps forward, and so many steps back. Perhaps thankfully, though, many of those steps back probably only matter to those of us who have been using it for ages…
On the other hand, the Qt side of the Linux desktop has all the features and finally has reached a level of usability that has started to surpass even gnome.
I can’t tell from your comment if you are in favour of platforms having a HIG or against it.
Mostly for, but not the way GNOME and Apple do it: sane and accessible defaults that can be overridden with no interference from the desktop environment is my ideal. By all means, let Adwaita be the default theme and have it be responsive to desktop, tablet, mobile, etc. I’m even fine with a framework that mandates responsive design be accounted for in custom themes. But if I want to make my entire desktop environment look like Windows Vista, I should (and used to!) be free to do so, and there should not be a single application in the desktop environment that dares to tell me I’m wrong for trying to do so. Most GNOME/GTK ecosystem apps nowadays will simply balk at that level of customization (or at the very least, it becomes significantly harder to pull off than it once was) - or their developers will (https://stopthemingmy.app/)
Does no one else remember the period when everyone was going to be using tablets and similar devices and we had to redesign the desktop environments for that? My memory is that we got Windows 8’s UI and GNOME 3 from that push.
We remember. We’re trying to forget.
You say that as if it were misguided. Almost everyone does use oversized smartphones and/or tablets and many, many people own no other devices of any kind.
I just do not like this persons style of writing.
I don’t think I’d want to be in the same room as this person.
I happen to agree with a few of his observations about GNOME: there’s an air of arrogance to some of the developers involved, and they really don’t seem to have correctly identified their customers (per the product adoption model, I’d bet the vast majority of GNOME users are innovators, not even early adopters).
But, from another article of his:
… so I have to say I wouldn’t be keen to share a room with him either.
He could be right about the arrogance of GNOME devs but he’s also the worst possible messenger, given his own arrogant and harassing behavior in the bug reports.
Also, he blames the USA for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He’s either unhinged or a Putin supporter.
It’s the former, check his reddit profile.
Linus agrees!. This guy has been trolling FOSS communities for years.
Someone named Felipe Contreras being notoriously argumentative is some primo nominative determinism.
Going waaaaay off topic, now, but have you seen this?
Nominative determinism in hospital medicine, by Drs. Limb, Limb, Limb, and Limb.
Except Spanish “contreras” seems to be a false friend to English “contrary”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contreras
If you really got no explanation, here it is: You went, and told someone else you wanted voting rights over their life. In this case: what they program on, but this isn’t ok! Not ever! It’s wrong to bully people, and you should be ashamed of doing wrong things.
I’m surprised he didn’t reference this issue:
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Lest anyone think this was a one-off, look at what happened in 2021:
This is the second time in as many weeks that I’ve wanted to report a story for having gross and obnoxious advertising. I wish that was an option.
I use the GTK2 builds of software when available rather than GTK3 because the file chooser is much easier and nicer to use. https://halestrom.net/darksleep/blog/028_ui_gripes/
In my web browser I now save files to just one folder, then move them with a file manager (PCManFM) that lets me navigate folders by typing the start of their names on my keyboard. The GTK3 file chooser still does have one hidden way of doing this (by pressing /) but it’s really cumbersome and you lose your filename.
I’m very scared of the GIMP’s GTK3 port. The UI is already very interaction heavy for my most common use case (open a bunch of photos, crop, resize, adjust levels, export as JPEG to a different folder, close), I expect this will only make it worse.
The direction of Gnome has been really sad for more than 10 years. Gnome 2 was amazing. GTK2 themes were and still are awesome.
You can force your browser to use XDG Desktop Portals and then you can force it to use the Qt portal. The KDE file picker for example is relatively close to what GTK2 used to have (and significantly more powerful nowadays)
How is this done? I have the portal installed but I have no idea how to configure it in Firefox.
Instructions are under “KDE integration” at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox
I also had to install some kde icons.
Thanks a lot
Ho ho ho thankyou :) The KDE file picker lets me navigate properly with the keyboard, this is much nicer.
Instructions are under “KDE integration” at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox
“Every but me is wrong” as a blog theme (jeez some of his other posts are truely cringworthy), cherry-picked vignettes to “prove I’m right and being oppressed by The Man”, predictably minimal actionable content and incel dog whistles to signal who his ‘audience’ is.
This is the guy who comes to your house party and starts looking for a fight after his first beer and is passed out in a pool of his own vomit after the 3rd.
It’s a shame to say so many true things in a so unpleasant way that many (most?) people just want to disagree…
It is possible to criticize facts and decisions without judging people.
Sadly this comment applies to the post but also to some comments in this thread…
I wish I hadn’t read that. It provided no useful information and was poorly written, to boot.
This title is wrong. I’m not mad at GNOME. I do not care about GNOME.
I made a statement of fact “GNOME sucks”. You made disagree, but it still can be true.
The truth of the statement has absolutely nothing to do with me or my feelings. GNOME still sucks.
The title was edited by a mod:
< https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=pushcx&what%5Bstories%5D=stories>, timestamp 2023-04-27 07:57 -0500
[Comment removed by moderator pushcx: Troll returning after warning.]
You might have to accept that this site isn’t for you:
https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=%28All%29&what%5Bcomments%5D=comments
Whelp looks like this user was banned after racking up negative 49 karma within 13 hours of being invited, which has to be some sort of record.
The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long, one supposes.
negative 49 karma!
[Comment removed by author]
I flagged your comment as “off-topic”. Because I believe discussing whether the available flags are dumb or not in a comment thread about GNOME is well and truly off-topic.
Not having such a flag is worse. Try reading Phoronix’s story comments someday. :/