Gnome Mess Is Not an Accident

The fact that on KDE you&#x27;re able to achieve a consistent look across Qt and GTK2&#x2F;3 apps ootb, but not on GNOME, should tell you a lot.<p>And then GTK4 comes along, and you basically can&#x27;t make it look consistent. Not even their titlebars, since they&#x27;re now CSD.<p>All of this is sad, I genuinely think GNOME has something good in there. I try every new release. And, there is a pretty good work flow there. But, I always hit some sort of a wall, impeding my enjoyment. For example:<p>- The inability to drag and drop files from the file roller to nautilus (as said on the article)<p>- Alt-tabbing groups apps and requires you to use your mouse or the <i>arrow keys</i> (of all things) to specify which window to change to<p>- Full screen video still leads to strange frame pacing and&#x2F;or tearing (due to unredirect fullscreen windows)<p>- Still no good way to interact with background apps that use a tray icon by default (I know they now allow background apps to be interacted with, via the power menu, but it&#x27;s simply a worse experience. Also, app developers need to account for this and develop this feature specifically for GNOME, instead of just doing it the standard way everyone else does it)<p>- Touchpad multi-touch gestures aren&#x27;t supported in X11, even though other projects (Touchégg) demonstrated that it&#x27;s possible<p>- Having to search for a newly installed app 2 times before it appearing in your apps list (Xfce, KDE, Cinnamon work the first time. Is it that difficult to refresh the cached apps list?)<p>You can always install extensions to make the experience better, but they almost always need to be updated to account for new releases that have breaking changes.<p>(Edit: formatting)

Gnome after version 1, definitely after version 2 is a symptom of the &quot;software is never done&quot; fallacy. After building a solid, performant and working desktop environment, instead of leaving it alone and start making other applications, they decided to just keep doing stuff.. and how do you continue improving something that&#x27;s already finished ? You don&#x27;t, because it&#x27;s f*cking done! So what&#x27;s else to do than just randomly screw with things. This is also seen in Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Windows operating systems.<p>I switched to Mate when they made the first major screwup, but eventually Mate got bloated too for no good reason, back to XFCE, but they also can&#x27;t keep their hands off of it.<p>So here I am in i3, which is not really what I&#x27;d prefer, but at least they don&#x27;t seem to have the same itch to constantly change stuff just to change it.<p>Here&#x27;s how software _SHOULD_ work: Develop it until it&#x27;s _DONE_ and _STOP_. Now, you ONLY submit code that makes it run faster and use less memory. Otherwise, just stop, move on and make something else.

&gt; &gt; I understand that this is not your use case, but it doesn&#x27;t apply to everybody, right? Please notice that this is not a feature request, but a regression report. Something in 1.17.1 broke a useful feature, but no changelog explaining why has been provided (AFAIK), and when someone reports an issue you close it because you don&#x27;t agree with the use case.<p>&gt; &gt; This issue can be replicated using pkexec. And, yes, I know about admin:&#x2F;&#x2F;, but it doesn&#x27;t address many use cases that have been working for years. For example, when in an admin instance of nautilus if the user:<p>&gt; &gt; opens a terminal from inside it, this terminal won&#x27;t be loaded in admin mode wants to execute a pkexec operation it will ask for super user password again &gt; &gt; right clicks on a left panel folder and select to open a new tab&#x2F;window it will not be loaded in admin mode believe me, there are many more examples<p>&gt; &gt; I appreciate your work and I understand the time constraints. I&#x27;m also an open source developer and have been contributing to many projects -- actually, that&#x27;s the reason why I&#x27;m reporting this since I don&#x27;t use this project. Not sure if you guys see this, but it seems this behavior of yours is one of the reasons why so many people get sad about GNOME and its side projects. As Linus Torvalds once said, the whole we know best thing can be toxic.<p>&gt; &gt; No hard feelings. I hope you understand :)<p>&gt; This comment was marked as abuse<p>Hilarious.

This article sums up what I have been complaining about for nearly a decade.<p>Yes, it&#x27;s the GNOME mentality &#x2F; disease, that has been metastasizing to other areas of the Linux ecosystem such as Freedesktop.org.<p>The same arrogance can be seen in systemd developers as well (another freedesktop.org &#x2F; Red Hat project).

I&#x27;m often the first to attack Gnome for doing something counter-user but on TFA&#x27;s opening charge…<p>&gt; the most limited and bloated desktop environment<p>… I struggle because for all its developer-instigated limitations, Gnome <i>performs really well</i>. Usually that translates to Mutter is really good at getting out of the way of the rendering pipeline, but to users it means the same thing.<p>It also gets a ton of community support to resurrect a lot of the butchered features through extensions. The JS API is pretty decent and as it improves —and we stop expecting Gnome to look after anything but itself— that Gnome could be the most flexible desktop.<p>They do a lot of things wrong at Gnome —stemming from a plethora of individuals having too much unchecked design power— but the display server stuff isn&#x27;t bad at all.

Most of the issues pointed out in part 1 of this series of articles were resolved by part 2 and many of the ones in part 2 were resolved by part 3.<p>But the fundamental problem with the rant is that it doesn’t attempt to understand what Gnome is.<p>Gnome is not intended to be a final end user DE. There’s a reason the Gnome devs have absolutely refused to release an distro (besides one intended only for Gnome testing and development). It’s because Gnome is intended to provide a baseline DE that can be used by several distros allowing them to build on top of it, select sensible defaults for their distro, be able to distinguish their distro DE from Gnome and other Gnome based distros, while still providing great familiarity to users across Linux distros.<p>So, for example, Canonical could create Unity, and System77 PopOS! which are both based off Gnome, provide significant differentiation, but at the same time a user going from PopOS! to Unity to vanilla Gnome and any other path would barely miss a beat (other than the added features missing altogether).<p>Further, Gnome’s focus for the past several years, which was much overdue (and something most other DEs haven’t even attempted) has been on creating a bunch of cohesive apps based on a single modern framework (GTK 4+ in the case of Gnome). Much effort has been spent rewriting apps in GTK4 and&#x2F;or creating new app replacements even if they might be under featured for now, because if a distro feels the features in the previous app was more important it can continue using it.<p>This isn’t to say there aren’t a bunch of problems with Gnome, much like there are a bunch of problems with both closed and open projects of all sorts. However, any criticism will be more useful if you understand what Gnome actually is before criticizing it for being something it isn’t.

I tracked some issues raised when Zoom was trying to get screenshare working with Gnome and Wayland. It was pretty clear the Gnome devs had no interest in UX feedback for video-conferencing apps. And people wonder why those apps suck on Linux.

&gt;Simply opening a folder with 40 images in Files (nautilus) takes 4.6 seconds to load all thumbnails, while in thunar (Xfce 4.18) the same thumbnails load in 2.6 seconds. This is a local file browsing experience on a real machine (not VM):<p>Neither of these speeds are acceptable for 2023, 40 images should feel instant. On MacOs folders with 100s of images don’t even visibly load in you open it and the thumbs are there.

This is what happens when you have UI implementors who reject the last 20 years of UI progress.

GNOME has an interesting progress history.<p>- Initially, Miguel De Icaza started GNOME in 1997, he also created the Gnumeric spreadsheet for GNOME, and when .NET was released, he together with Nat Friedman (CEO and Co-Founder of Github), started Helix Code which later become Ximian&#x2F;Xamarin and Mono. Miguel De Icaza abandoned GNOME even before 2013, and finally left Linux in 2013.<p>- Several default apps in GNOME were written in C# Mono, namely F-Spot and Tomboy Notes.<p>- Nat Friedman also created the Beagle Desktop, which is a search-and-indexing tool for GNOME back in 2006.<p>- Ximian Desktop developed the Evolution Groupware Suite, to allow GNOME to be used in office environments. Evolution had become GNOME&#x27;s standard email client.<p>- Eric Sink, which led the SpyGlass browser team that licensed the Mosaic browser, which had become the codebase for Internet Explorer, developed AbiWord, which is GNOME&#x27;s standard word-processor.<p>- In 1999, Andy Hertzfeld from Apple together with other Apple engineers, started Eazel, which created the Nautilus File Manager, which is had become the standard file manager for GNOME.<p>- Novell Desktop introduces the Compiz compositor in 1999, also SLED10 has a new GNOME Main Menu, which become a standard menu for SuSE.<p>- Novell also spearheaded the Tango Desktop project, which provides theming consistency for GNOME and it&#x27;s apps. Later, Tango Desktop was adopted by other projects as well.<p>- RedHat developed the NetworkManager layer, also, Robert Love from Xamarin (Now Google) contributed heavily to the project. NetworkManager, makes it easier to configure and switch WIFI networks in Gnome.<p>Several underlying tech that build GNOME comes from:<p>- GTK+ toolkit, that is the basis GNOME comes from GIMP Image Editor.<p>- GNOME has several WM throughout the years, starting with Sawfish, then MetaCity and then Mutter.<p>- Ubuntu having invested heavily on Compiz, tries to keep Compiz and GNOME 3, AFAIR, they have initially opposed the GNOME 3 direction of using Mutter and several GNOME 3 design principles, hence they have developed the Unity Desktop. I am not sure what mainline contribution that comes out from Unity, as I didn&#x27;t follow after Unity.<p>GNOME was actually a fun project, several changes had happened to GNOME, but IMHO, it&#x27;s a masterpiece out of orchestrated chaos.

never been happier in my life since i stopped caring about gnome, i wrote a couple of gnome extensions to make it usable (for me) and having to deal with all the breakages was really getting on my nerves.. switched to use i3 with a bunch of shell&#x2F;python scripts and can go on with my life

I agree Gnome could use more polish and customizability. But it is my favorite desktop by far. His opiniated design is both a blessing and a curse, but like Apple, I accept the tradeoff: the UX is too good compared to the other players.<p>Product management is hard, and even harder in an open source realm.

Yes, there are some things to fix and make it better, it is impossible? I don´t think so. I&#x27;ve found GNOME to be simple and cleaner than other DEs, yes, you can go full tiled or even no DE at all, its a personal decision and its great that you have the change to do it.<p>But hey, if you paid for that product and is not working, you should get your money back.<p>Maybe getting people to agree with you in a more constructive way can have a better response than ranting around (ranting is an old trend, we should stop doing it).

I used to be a GNOME fanboy during the early GNOME vs KDE stuff, dabbled in Gtkmm, even wrote a couple of articles about it as kind of advocacy.<p>Even if I not a big C fan, the moment they decided JavaScript was a great way to program basic functionally, which had to get as 3rd party extensions, I was out.<p>First Unity, tried GNOME again after Ubuntu dropped Unity only to realise things have hardly changed, afterwards happily in XFCE.<p>Although, the way Gtk application development is going, with Glade&#x27;s deprecation, with a Web based tool as replacement, still WIP, isn&#x27;t much better either.

I like when people whine on the internet, but do not do anything to improve. Go ahead and help them. It&#x27;s an open source project in which everyone can participate.