GNOME’s stance on user customization has been “users can do whatever they feel like using 3rd party tools like Gradience or entirely custom CSS, but if you’re a distro maker then only use the Approved Ways™ to customize things”
Now, I have zero clue if that solves anything (it very likely doesn’t), but it’s actually more than most people give them credit for.
I’d say “go join in on the issue tracker and tell GNOME about this” but hearing from some people who tried that before you I’m not too hopeful that would do much of a difference. All I know is that complaining here isn’t going to solve anything.
GNOME’s stance on user customization is: we don’t give a shit about having basic desktop functionality because its hard to implement and you may use 3rd party stuff that will never be as good or as integrated as something implemented on the DE.
That’s not really fair. GNOME has been working on LibAdwaita and GTK4 for quite some while to actually have stable and usable tools to make the missing functionalities happen. And they been adding these in a really good rate in the last 2 releases. Until now we really just didn’t had the tools to implement a lot of stuff.
If you look across to KDE land, and not to bash on them I love KDE, they’ve been much quicker to introduce features but then also spent many releases fixing bugs and sometimes completely re-implementing those features to work properly.
Hmm… isn’t that the same thing they told us when GTK3 was made? That they had to do a major rewrite in order to move forward and implement all the things people were requesting…
KDE can be fast and all but they seem to lack some common sense when it comes to design, you’ve, for instance, inconsistent spacing across DE elements.
People bash the GNOME team for being too strickt with their design rules and implementations but honestly, I like that they have at least a central vision that they are trying to implement. I don’t agree with all of them but so far, all in all, I like the direction GNOME has taken since switching to GTK3 and update 40. Things haven’t been fast for sure, the road was bumpy and it took some time and several revisions but the fact that such a comperatably tiny team, a lot of them working on this in their spare time, managed to make something that I can honest to God say is a comparable replacement to the Windows or iOS user interfaces is remarkable.
And Wayland also threw a wrench into everything and required several rewrites to old protocols but we are really getting some long awaited features like the task bar icons are being actively worked on, a lot of window UI enhancements with LibAdwaita, HDR, fractional scaling and more.
I can honest to God say is a comparable replacement to the Windows
No it isn’t, you can’t say that when it lacks desktop icons. Look I’m happy and thankful for their efforts but Linux is all about customization, if they don’t want desktop icons cause it goes against their view they can still have a checkbox to enable them. They had this in the past and then removed it.
I think there is a disconnect in what you call a feature and what is a design decision. GNOME consciously deviated from the “desktop” paradigm. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or everyone has to like it but this is what they did. I’m not trying to nitpick here but I think it’s important to see what is actually happening here, desktop icons are not being worked on not because they hate the users and are lazy in implementing things but because there is no traditional desktop. The overall GNOME UI is not made along this line of implementation, instead it has the activities view. Again, I’m not saying you have to like this and maybe it’s a dumb way to make a UI, idk, but criticizing it for not having desktop icons is like criticizing MacOS for not having a start menu. It’s just not made that way.
I think quite a big problem with KDE that they are also trying to break away from is making the UI resemble too much of Windows. New users then will expect things to behave exactly like Windows when it just can’t. That doesn’t mean that there are missing features necesserally but that things are implemented differently and the uninitiated user should know that from a first glance.
Overall I get the sentiment. GNOME is different and needs getting used to and does not fit all workflows out of the box. It has missing features that I wish would be implemented but overall I like the direction they took. It’s new, different and after a couple of weeks of adjusting I really gotten to like it. I don’t really miss desktop icons because I haven’t used them in Windows anyway, I personally like to launch my programs from the start menu/app launcher.
GNOME always has looked like a cheap copy of macOS. Until version 3.28 they had the desktop icons and later on they also decided to hide the “dash” under the “activities” menu. I call this “a feature” because it was effectively something that existed and was removed.
KDE that they are also trying to break away from is making the UI resemble too much of Windows.
Well they don’t need, Microsoft itself seems to be more than happy to obliterate the start menu and so on on… Windows 8, now Windows 11… you know that old saying Microsoft does a good version of windows and always makes a very bad one right after.
The think with the desktop as Microsoft and Apple are doing it is that it people are familiar with them, they’ve years of UI/UX research of development and they’re the most effective way of designing a desktop. What GNOME is pushing for here, as you said, is some kind of half hassled DE that takes a few ideas from crippled mobile OSes that ironically have some kind of desktop icons (iOS and Android home screens). Unfortunately for them GNOME has close to zero expression in the mobile market and even if it did the rest of their UI isn’t designed to be workable on a touch screen.
I’ve been using GNOME with a touchscreen folding laptop and it’s been pretty comfy. I honestly like GNOME’s implementation of optimizing the UI for touch input more than Windows 10’s half assed approach. I tried Windows 11 but don’t have much experience with it to comment on that.
But I wouldn’t say that making an OS UI is a solved problem. Microsoft for example with it’s billions of dollars of R&D routinely messes up as you mentioned, still can’t get rid of old holdovers from Windows 7 and just generally degrading it’s UX with every new version.
GNOME surely has a lot more common with MacOS but I wouldn’t say that’s bad thing. Apple is the industry leader in seamless UX design after all. For it being a cheap knock-off, I let everyone to decide that but it is quite literally free. Doesn’t get much cheaper than that 😅
I’ve been famoboying a lot for GNOME in this thread but I really think there is a lot of room for improvements. I guess I’m just more optimistic about the project, especially after the last couple of releases.
GNOME’s stance on user customization has been “users can do whatever they feel like using 3rd party tools like Gradience or entirely custom CSS, but if you’re a distro maker then only use the Approved Ways™ to customize things”
Now, I have zero clue if that solves anything (it very likely doesn’t), but it’s actually more than most people give them credit for.
I’d say “go join in on the issue tracker and tell GNOME about this” but hearing from some people who tried that before you I’m not too hopeful that would do much of a difference. All I know is that complaining here isn’t going to solve anything.
GNOME’s stance on user customization is: we don’t give a shit about having basic desktop functionality because its hard to implement and you may use 3rd party stuff that will never be as good or as integrated as something implemented on the DE.
That’s not really fair. GNOME has been working on LibAdwaita and GTK4 for quite some while to actually have stable and usable tools to make the missing functionalities happen. And they been adding these in a really good rate in the last 2 releases. Until now we really just didn’t had the tools to implement a lot of stuff.
If you look across to KDE land, and not to bash on them I love KDE, they’ve been much quicker to introduce features but then also spent many releases fixing bugs and sometimes completely re-implementing those features to work properly.
Hmm… isn’t that the same thing they told us when GTK3 was made? That they had to do a major rewrite in order to move forward and implement all the things people were requesting…
KDE can be fast and all but they seem to lack some common sense when it comes to design, you’ve, for instance, inconsistent spacing across DE elements.
People bash the GNOME team for being too strickt with their design rules and implementations but honestly, I like that they have at least a central vision that they are trying to implement. I don’t agree with all of them but so far, all in all, I like the direction GNOME has taken since switching to GTK3 and update 40. Things haven’t been fast for sure, the road was bumpy and it took some time and several revisions but the fact that such a comperatably tiny team, a lot of them working on this in their spare time, managed to make something that I can honest to God say is a comparable replacement to the Windows or iOS user interfaces is remarkable.
And Wayland also threw a wrench into everything and required several rewrites to old protocols but we are really getting some long awaited features like the task bar icons are being actively worked on, a lot of window UI enhancements with LibAdwaita, HDR, fractional scaling and more.
No it isn’t, you can’t say that when it lacks desktop icons. Look I’m happy and thankful for their efforts but Linux is all about customization, if they don’t want desktop icons cause it goes against their view they can still have a checkbox to enable them. They had this in the past and then removed it.
I think there is a disconnect in what you call a feature and what is a design decision. GNOME consciously deviated from the “desktop” paradigm. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or everyone has to like it but this is what they did. I’m not trying to nitpick here but I think it’s important to see what is actually happening here, desktop icons are not being worked on not because they hate the users and are lazy in implementing things but because there is no traditional desktop. The overall GNOME UI is not made along this line of implementation, instead it has the activities view. Again, I’m not saying you have to like this and maybe it’s a dumb way to make a UI, idk, but criticizing it for not having desktop icons is like criticizing MacOS for not having a start menu. It’s just not made that way.
I think quite a big problem with KDE that they are also trying to break away from is making the UI resemble too much of Windows. New users then will expect things to behave exactly like Windows when it just can’t. That doesn’t mean that there are missing features necesserally but that things are implemented differently and the uninitiated user should know that from a first glance.
Overall I get the sentiment. GNOME is different and needs getting used to and does not fit all workflows out of the box. It has missing features that I wish would be implemented but overall I like the direction they took. It’s new, different and after a couple of weeks of adjusting I really gotten to like it. I don’t really miss desktop icons because I haven’t used them in Windows anyway, I personally like to launch my programs from the start menu/app launcher.
GNOME always has looked like a cheap copy of macOS. Until version 3.28 they had the desktop icons and later on they also decided to hide the “dash” under the “activities” menu. I call this “a feature” because it was effectively something that existed and was removed.
Well they don’t need, Microsoft itself seems to be more than happy to obliterate the start menu and so on on… Windows 8, now Windows 11… you know that old saying Microsoft does a good version of windows and always makes a very bad one right after.
The think with the desktop as Microsoft and Apple are doing it is that it people are familiar with them, they’ve years of UI/UX research of development and they’re the most effective way of designing a desktop. What GNOME is pushing for here, as you said, is some kind of half hassled DE that takes a few ideas from crippled mobile OSes that ironically have some kind of desktop icons (iOS and Android home screens). Unfortunately for them GNOME has close to zero expression in the mobile market and even if it did the rest of their UI isn’t designed to be workable on a touch screen.
I’ve been using GNOME with a touchscreen folding laptop and it’s been pretty comfy. I honestly like GNOME’s implementation of optimizing the UI for touch input more than Windows 10’s half assed approach. I tried Windows 11 but don’t have much experience with it to comment on that.
But I wouldn’t say that making an OS UI is a solved problem. Microsoft for example with it’s billions of dollars of R&D routinely messes up as you mentioned, still can’t get rid of old holdovers from Windows 7 and just generally degrading it’s UX with every new version.
GNOME surely has a lot more common with MacOS but I wouldn’t say that’s bad thing. Apple is the industry leader in seamless UX design after all. For it being a cheap knock-off, I let everyone to decide that but it is quite literally free. Doesn’t get much cheaper than that 😅
I’ve been famoboying a lot for GNOME in this thread but I really think there is a lot of room for improvements. I guess I’m just more optimistic about the project, especially after the last couple of releases.