It makes sense to me. Developers work on a project (and most definitely open source developers) because they feel some friction with a system. Maybe it’s a task they want to automate, or a bug in some software they need to use. But either way — there must be some pain point that is causing them friction. This is what causes some program/feature to be written or updated or fixed.

If those developers have a perfectly good work around, then there is no pain point for them. It doesn’t matter if it is a pain point for their GUI-exclusive users. If they don’t feel the pain, it won’t be prioritized.[*]

This isn’t a criticism of Gnome per se, but rather a reality of time management. There is only so much time to go around, which means features and bugs get triaged. If none of the developers feel like this is enough of a pain to get into the quagmire that is the GtkFileChooser (?) widget, then it will not be touched.

[*] That is, of course unless they are being paid to do the work. If you are volunteering, then you get to choose what work to do. If you’re getting paid, the suddenly not working on the file chooser could become a pain point for the developer (as they might not get paid). Which is the major advantage commercial OSes have over their open source competition.

GNOME devs want the users to use drag and drop instead of the file pciker, in their mind file picker is outdated and should be removed, in their mind having thumbnails there is duplicating having thumbnails in the File manager.

I am joking but I think they considered removing tabs because you should use multiple windows and ENJOY the cool Window manager their designed to switch between windows.

You're joking, but this is literally the line of logic that GNOME's maintainers have used for the past ~5 years.

> "Xorg is outdated and should be removed, everyone port everything over to Wayland!"

> "AppIndicator is outdated and should be removed, if anyone uses it (see: everyone), they can impliment it themselves!"

> "Native packaging is outdated and should be removed, Flatpak is the future now!"

> "Having a proper library of native widgets is outdated and should be removed, so we're replacing it with Libadwaita!"

...and so on and so forth...

i find most (if not all) technical decisions of the gnome team sensible.

but that fucking design and UI paradigm? WTF! the whole thing is so jekyll and hyde it beggars belief.

Seeing no one complain about broken drag-and-drop functionality (in Gnome File Manager) in this thread has had me realise I must have a somewhat unique problem.

For the life of me I can't drag files out of File Manager into a program without a struggle.

This is an issue for drag-and-dropping e.g. images from FM -> Chrome (Jira stories / Gitlab comments / etc) or from FM -> Slack. Don't think I have tried much dragging into other programs.

What happens is either:

(~90%) nothing is dragged

(~7%) the file path is dragged and either causes an error or just pastes the path

(~3%) the actual file is dragged as expected

I've figured out some ways to improve the likelihood of the drag working - instead of just clicking and dragging the item, I first spin around in my chair twice, give a very specific exasperated sigh, and then use my arrow keys to select the file I want to drag and only then click and drag with my mouse. This works much more often - probably about 50% of the time.

Recently started always trying copy in FM -> paste in destination program and that generally works.

(I've had the issue for over a year, since the start of my OS install. Currently on latest Gnome (41? 42?) on Arch. Wayland. If someone sees this and has any ideas please let me know.)

From what I can see, Gnome users do not complain. They know what works and what doesn't, and deal with it.

Not seeing anybody complaining about some Gnome brokeness is perfectly normal.

You should give KDE a try, it's pretty frikkin good. The file manager defaults are a bit weird but it's OK.

>> GNOME devs want the users to use drag and drop instead of the file pciker...

That's funny. Just replace the file dialog with opening the file manager. Drag and Drop. Better yet, just modify the file manager to have an option to self-close after selecting a file and a way to pass that selection to the app (using MIME types would not allow the DE to get it to the correct app in all cases).

the impetuses are shrouded in mystery, what with the metaphorical GTK+, and the whatever it is the gnomers are doing over there. a graphical DE it is not, but it has "graphics".

sigh

it could be so awesome if a non-schizo designer got involved. it's frustrating really. so much potential, such thick window bars.

it is so stupid.

I recall heavily using gnome 2?/KDE 2? (indeed I had to test things on them for work) Circa 2005 and indeed when Sun heavily invested in gnome to make the "java desktop" on Solaris to add accessibility etc so they could win institutional contracts. Was perfectly on the way to being great.

Then the great childish "let's rewrite everything from scratch" for both Linux DEs happened. It was a decade? before KDE was remotely viable again.

The gnome/gtk Devs focusing on zero configuration options possibly the most rubbish redesign I've ever seen.

KDE/Plasma only became viable to me in the last 24 months. Felt like a POC

I felt kind of lost when Gnome 3 landed, but I discovered MATE, which forked off of Gnome 2. Gnome 2, IMHO, was the peak Unix desktop experience, and I felt so relieved to discover it does live on.

Gnome 3 confused (and continues to confuse) me to no end every time I tried it (which admittedly was not all that often. KDE 2 was cool, but I did not like KDE 3, although I do not remember why. I stopped paying much attention to KDE at that point. Xfce is nice, but not as nice as Gnome2/Mate.

My point is that due to lack of users it doesn't get better. I've modified gnome in the past to meet my requirements