GNOME devs want the users to use drag and drop instead of the file pciker, in th...

smoldesu · on June 17, 2022

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 "Xorg is outdated and should be removed, everyone port everything over to Wayland!"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 "AppIndicator is outdated and should be removed, if anyone uses it (see: everyone), they can impliment it themselves!"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 "Native packaging is outdated and should be removed, Flatpak is the future now!"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 "Having a proper library of native widgets is outdated and should be removed, so we're replacing it with Libadwaita!"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...

llllllllllll9 · on June 17, 2022

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.

staindk · on June 17, 2022

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.)

marcosdumay · on June 17, 2022

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.

carlhjerpe · on June 17, 2022

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

phkahler · on June 17, 2022

>> 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).