This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in.
I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1].
I always had the same issue, even with the file explorer that I'm using currently (Thunar, XFCE's file browser). I never really looked for a solution, I kept changing the view (go from list view to to icons view) in order to find some empty space to right-click on.
Your comment and seeing that there are bug reports about it prompted me to think more than 5 seconds about this usability annoyance. I found a cool shortcut on Thunar: holding the control key + right click anywhere (including on a file) will bring up the right-click menu, from where I can create a new folder, paste, open in the terminal...
That's XFCE's Thunar solution to this problem. It was just not easily discoverable, but it's a good enough solution according to me, as I don't mind using the keyboard. Maybe it's the same on Gnome's File or Nautilus or other file explorers softwares, I don't know.
Edit: looking at it more closely, in Thunar the ctrl+right-click will show the "create new folder" option only if no file is selected. Otherwise it shows the contextual menu of the selection (hence the create new folder would not appear). So basically we have to unselect the files ... by clicking on an empty area (so back to square one) ... or we have to know about another keyboard shortcut (the "Escape" key) to clear the current selection before doing the ctrl+righ-click. Not ideal either.
Yes, sure. Although if multiple files or folders are selected, it's probably easier to just press the Escape key once instead of searching for each selected objects in the folder to unselect them one by one. What I was looking for was a reproducible way to make this right click menu appear. The sequence Escape+ctrl+righclick is a way to do that, it always work, wherever the cursor is, and no matter if the folder has many files or not. No need to look actively for a couple of empty pixels anymore or to think "What do I have to unselect before I can right-click to get a different contextual menu?".
I've noticed a similar thing on some web pages. For example BBC news where the link for a story is its whole tile/rectangle area, the obvious link text, any picture, and a large amount of white space. It's only relatively thin gaps between tiles that are inert background to click on.
I can see this making sense for a touch-first design and I can appreciate that focus for BBC news website, however focusing back on software like gnome it seems that similar aims crept in trying to make it serve multiple input methods at the same time and how you could have variations on the UI for touch or mouse (and you could also make assumptions about the screen and viewing setup and what's appropriate)
I often try to open a new Terminal window in my current folder like that. Which often is impossible for the same reason. So I navigate up, until I find a folder that is not full, open the Terminal there, and ‚cd‘ down to the folder i wanted…
You can click on the three dot menu at the right of the path, there is an option to open a terminal. You can also switch to icon view and right-click between icons to open a terminal. You can also go to parent folder, right click the folder you were before and open it in a terminal.
Many workarounds but I agree it’s not really good UI.
Yea, there currently isn't exactly any way for selecting what application is considered a terminal other than hardcoding a list (which IIRC gnome-shell does). There is an open MR on xdg-specs[1] to address this, which seems to have stalled
I find this debatable from a UI/UX perspective. I think that the designers made the right choice here, because a context menu should show actions which can be applied to the object I right clicked on. "New Document" isn't really some function of a file or folder icon. Even worse: when I right click on a folder, should the "New Document" menu item create a new doc in the current folder? Or in the one I clicked on?
It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.
Nah, no different from 'Create Row Below' or some such. Hunting for white space to click in order to act on the directory is like hunting for the borders in a spreadsheet or table to click in order to add a new row
Interesting opinion. I think it would be so much less confusing to have only one menu. The easiest for power-users and newcomers alike would be to put on the top of this unique right-click menu the folder-level options (create new folder, open terminal here, paste here, ...), and the selection-specific options bellow. This way it would be predictable and we can build habits (muscle memory).
But you're right it's debatable. A matter of preference. I guess I'm just in the camp of "more explicit is better than implicit". And I'm willing to pay the verbosity cost (having a longer menu in this case). The alternative seems like a complex decision tree to me: Am I in list-view? Yes. Is my folder full of files? Yes. What menu do I need, depending on the task I want to accomplish? I want to create a new folder. Ah, so I have to find some empty pixels to conjure the menu with that option...
> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.
In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.
It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.
As cocoto pointed out in one of the child comments, you can click the three dots left of the search button, that one always works. I found out about it today.
left side of the list has a small column with a blank space... sure it requires mouse movement if you are not close with your pointer
i would love the empty area right click menu despite if we clicked on a file, like Blender shows all options for Vertex/Edge/Faces (each right click menu arranged horizontally) if you have all of them selected on Select Mode when editing objects
Finder's design is extremely similar to GNOME Files! And so the inherent downsides of the design language are present in Finder too, such as it being harder to drag windows around or click to activate windows.
But macOS does avoid most of the UI papercuts the author points out. It's not perfect, but let's go through the list.
- View Options: Finder has a similar-looking icon that does the same thing. But in Finder, the little arrows on the right of an icon are always part of the same button as the icon itself. Finder doesn't use split buttons in the way the author complains about.
- Help: The macOS User Guide explains all the icons and what they do. But you don't actually need to go that far, because macOS has a feature where if you click Help and start typing, it will show menu items (from any menu) that match what you typed. In this case, if you start typing "list", it will show the "as List" menu item, which achieves what the author wants. (I guess I should point out that macOS does have a menu bar at the top of the screen, and all the actions you can take by clicking icons can also be taken through the menu bar.)
- Tooltips: Finder doesn't have tooltips for the locations on the left pane, only for the icons in the toolbar. Even there they take a while to appear.
- Navigation: I'd ding Finder here because there is no location bar at all (only an 'open by path' dialog that's kind of buried). Even going to the parent directory is not exposed in a particularly obvious way. Still, at least Finder doesn't have something that looks editable but isn't.
- Scrolling: macOS has hidden scrollbars by default, but they stay at the right of the window. They don't jump to the left like the author is complaining about.
The finder in what you linked was nigh-unusable for me. My impressions:
- Where is the ability to easily split/tab for side-by-side directory comparison?
- Every directory is opened in a new window, which makes everything even more jarring
- (Do I just not know how to operate the window manager?)
- Is the not grid-aligned icon position saved? This seems like a long-term usability nightmare.
- How can I create something other than a directory?
- Where is the location bar?
Then again, I'm not familiar with old OR new macOS, so I might have a similar first experience with the new finder.
What I found nice is the UI/UX consistency. Modern systems don't really have that anymore, with all the accumulated partial UI overhauls and different UI libraries.
The macOS/OSX Finder really isn't an example of good UX. It always felt like a half-assed and unloved port from NeXTStep which then was quickly abandondend.
In general, Apple has lost its UI mojo in the last decade or so, macOS shouldn't be used anymore as an example of a good desktop UI.
Apple also has a thick Human Interface Guidelines document from.. ‘97 or ‘03, I can’t remember. But it’s great.
Funnily enough, if you use it as a yardstick to measure the current macOS by, macOS is full of violations of that HIG.
Pulling back to the article: I wonder what desktop the writer uses, because KDE is absolutely chock full with idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies. Especially because KDE application development is much less top-down than Gnome, so each applications feels completely different which leads to having to “learn” each application separately. Absolutely horrible UX.
Hard disagree. I'd rather have some small inconsitencies (nothing consequential anyway in my KDE experience) than having all applications consisetently unusable due to top down decisions to remove and hide features as is the case with Gnome.
In my opinion, OS X Finder is the most defective file browser of them all.
It always makes me laugh when some people believe the marketing of Apple saying that their OS is the most ergonomic when it is totally not the case.
Things like creating a new folder is a nightmare, if you are in the kind of a tree view and try to create a folder or paste a file, it will end up in the top parent folder.
When you sort by recent date it does not make any sense: you have files from the most recent to the oldest, but for a given day, like the last day or week, they are ordered in the opposite way (oldest to newest).
There are hundreds of other stupid decisions like that.
In the same way, who had this brillant (ie stupid) idea that the enter key will edit the file name name instead of opening it? Using a major keyboard key for an operation that you rarely do!
Finder is most advanced and most extensible. I make it work like Nautilus or Dolphin or Thunar. It’s super extensible. What Finder can do, Nautilus combined with Nemo, Thunar and Dolphin can’t do.
And macOS finder has one of the pathetic designs in similar to Apple simplicity but its supposed to be used for other way. Taking inspiration from that design is shooting yourself and half baking it is like making sure you screw in both ways
Oh GNOME, hiding "Power off" option under additional submenu, that user wouldn't accidentally click it, and then putting "Format" right next to "Safely remove drive" in Files.
Well not on Mac, and I don't have anything with GNOME at hand. But that's besides the point: 1. it's not obvious (no other random part of the window can be used in the same way), 2. it's too many things in too little space (cognitive load, applies to Mac as well), 3. you have to be mindful about accidentally clicking instead of dragging (most non-Apple trackpads are simply bad), 4. it's ambiguous what's gonna happen for any UI element that could respond to drags (address bar, seekbar, etc).
I have similar problems telling which parts of the window can be used to drag them around on a Mac. There's a secret feature that allows you to hold Cmd+Ctrl to drag the window by clicking (almost) anywhere, but every release of macOS breaks it for yet another app.
Same kind of thing exists on Windows - for eg USB mass storage devices, ‘Eject’ and ‘Format’ are listes next to each other in the menu…
One is harmless - the other potentially destructive
My favorite UX is when on Windows you mount a drive of unknown partition type (e.g. ext4) there is a popup suggesting to format it with "confirm" selected by default.
That's very dumb indeed, and no way to disable properly, I think (had to use a script that watches for the window with this same prompt texts and autoclose it to avoid catastrophic results)
Unfair. Format is followed by ... which implies it opens a dialog. That dialog starts a 2 steps process, the last one being a warning in red telling you it will destroy every data permanently.
There is no way you can accidentally format a device.
Also, people who want a quick way to poweroff can change the behavior of the power button to ... poweroff instead of suspend.
Users are generally used to closing dialogs without fully reading them, especially dialogs they did not expect because they wanted to eject the drive because they want to leave now and are already running late.
I don't think anyone would hit next then that red format button instead of the cancel button by mistake and if she does that person really deserve her data to be destroyed.
Was happy to read this, as I've often imagined doing this myself (i.e. thoroughly hashing out commentary on a bunch of nits in a GUI that annoy me and I'm convinced should be better).
I agree that ctrl+L is a weird shortcut in a vacuum, but it's one I've known for 15 years, originally from using browsers. And it always makes me happy that Windows and Gnome (and Nautilus, which isn't the gnome default but is still present) all share it, which is nice for old/power-users.
(but actually, on re-read, the complaint may not be with the shortcut at all, and purely with the "no other way")
There's something in the room (I think it's an elephant), but not mentioned in the post, which is that the current Gnome UI is very Windows 11-like, while screwing up a lot of the details (hover-text, location bar being clickable).
(After using Gnome with 14.04 and 20.04, I had stability issues in 22.04 and am now happily on XFCE; long-term stability ftw)
And for how long has it had this "broken" behaviour for? When Microsoft introduced a similar path bar in Explorer (in Vista or 7, don't remember), it had the double functionality right from the beginning. The fact that Gnome Files didn't is frankly baffling.
I don't think it was "broken", it was just a dumb design choice. But I don't know why people like to whine about an issue that was already fixed either.
I might have made this mistake via confusion from my more recent use of XFCE then. (I've never bothered trying to change my file manager; let alone learn the name, except that I needed to launch nautilus from command line, years ago and so have /that/ name learned)
Maybe the arrogance is the worst feature of GNOME approach. They make this studies and constantly repeat how focused are they on usability that when an individual finds it not usable (not in that words) it's double frustating cause is like GNOME saying: "our average users are happy so you must to be handicaped"
In my experience the prototypical response is closer to an assertive "this was not made for you, you are part of a tiny minority of users who always have been catered to anyway" - if you were actually "handicapped", making the UI work for you would be a higher priority on political grounds.
In fact, it is sometimes entertaining to imagine that somewhere in the depths of the GNOME cult compound, they keep a single individual, who is legally blind, physically incapable of using a keyboard, simultaneously belongs to all demographic groups that are traditionally underrepresented among computer users, and has in fact never used a computer themselves but was shown a few things on an iPhone by their Gen Alpha great grandnephew. All these factors combine to turn this person (affectionately referred to as Mother Gnome by those in the know) into a utility monster of UI design, so that it becomes an absolute moral imperative to design things to appeal to them, at whatever expense it takes.
No shame in needing accommodations even if you're not handicapped.
Accessibility is about making the UI usable for everyone - that happens to include handicapped people (who often do require specific accommodations, such as reduced animations, TTS, zoom, color filters...), but that also includes power users (who e.g. need to do some specific task often enough, that they might benefit from the UI being scriptable), people who sometimes need to use a computer late at night (automatic dark mode), people who need to stay focused on a specific set of tasks (do not disturb with per-app notification filtering that syncs across devices), etc etc etc.
It's this "oh it's for the handicapped" mindset that makes UIs unusable for everyone.
I totally agree, but if I proudly state my website is AA and you are blind and cannot navigate and read content, wouldn't it feel double embarrasing that if just another site with no AA stamp?
Yes, that's what they claim. But then imagine someone having to use Gnome with just one functional arm for some time. It's going to be a horrible experience due to long mouse travel distances, options buried in hamburger menus or missing from the UI interface completely and keyboard-focused UI in general. Not to mention the eye-straining app switching mechanism in the form of activities overview.
> It's worth mentioning that I agree that the modern design paradigm probably is friendly to beginner users in many ways. But at some point, people stop being beginners. People who use computers several hours per day, performing a wide variety of tasks in many different programs, should also be taken in to account when designing software. As such, my critique comes from the point of what's usually called a "power user". It's also worth considering that the more an interface hides, the less it offers by way of opportunities for a user to grow and learn.
After that I find it a bit rich to complain that one has to use a keyboard shortcut (even as others have said that's even incorrect), especially for a function that requires using the keyboard anyway.
I also find the arguments about no up button and the list view unconvincing. The list button was immediately obvious to me from the screenshot (and I don't use gnome or any filemanager) and I actually appreciate a window that does not put lost of buttons that present duplicate functionality everywhere (and it's harder to hit? What argument is that, by his own admission he's been using computers for 35 years, but can't use a mouse to hit a path?).
This really just reads like one of the typical rants where someone become somewhat proficient with some system, now considers themselves a "power user" and expects everything else to work exactly the same. The same people often complain that terminals break with "standard shortcuts" because they can't copy with ctrl-C...
The basics: you are not your users. Just because it’s easy for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy for others. That is the entire basis of usability work. I cannot believe how resistant the tech community, like above, is to the very basics of human cognition.
It’s your comment that’s the rant. OP has actual data from decades of research they are applying.
Thankyou. I’ve been using computers for 35 years (I grew up using xtree to navigate folders on DOS). It would never have occurred to me that both sides of that view options dropdown do different things. Perhaps it’s intuitive for others, but I’ve never seen that before in my life.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that I hate almost all novel interaction patterns in user interfaces. UI components and flows should stick as close to common patterns / system defaults as possible - and no, your app, whatever it is, is not an exception
Exactly. The traditional design language is that an arrow besides a button indicates that the button will show a drop-down when pressed (traditionally without a line separating the two), or that clicking on the button will do the default action while clicking on the arrow will show all the actions (traditionally with a thin line separating the two).
Reusing that design language but making the button and the arrow two completely different buttons with their own actions sets wrong expectations for no good reason.
One problem I see of "usability professionals" here and elsewhere is how arguments go little beyond:
1. "you are not the users" - certainly when talking about many apps like a file explorer any user is a user - not all users.
2. "Disheartened by tech community dismissal of basic human cognition" and "decades of research" without actually citing and ideally elaborating on research that many times is targetting very narrow scopes.
1. Users have plenty of individual characteristics. If even ordinarily capable user’s can’t deduce what button does what, forget people with disbilities. It’s obvious you need to usability test this stuff. Gnome has neglected their basic duties.
2. Human-Computer Interaction is a scientific field within Computer Science, and this is stuff from any 101 course. Do we really need to cite belief in gravity each time just because self-appointed ”developers” haven’t done the work of learning the basics?
What data does he have? OP wrote a basic opinion-piece on what they dislike. It’s just as valuable as the parent commenter’s opinion, so we can only say that one user found some feature hard to find. There is no ultimate design, and striving for 100% of users knowing everything immediately is just unrealistic.
If we are at opinions, I really dislike this absolutely tone-deaf attacking of GNOME that is always happening under these threads. There is criticism, and there is blind hate. There is definitely places to improve, though, but the style of writing matters.
> There is definitely places to improve, though, but the style of writing matters.
And which kind of "style of writing" would tell them that their GUI sucks big time and they should not reinvent the wheel and should not copy Microsoft and Apple ?
I enjoy GNOME and would prefer a gtk4/libadwaita based UI for e.g. FreeCAD. I brought this up as a counter example to the frequent negativity in GNOME related discussions.
1. *Consistency and Standards*
Claim: "The 'View Options' dropdown didn't contain view options, but rather sort options, and I didn't realize it was a split button with two completely different functions."
Violation: This breaks Consistency and Standards. The user expects consistent terminology and functionality, but the dropdown name doesn't match what it actually does, leading to confusion.
2. *Visibility of System Status*
Claim: "Hidden scroll bars... hides information not only about what I can do with the GUI itself, but also about where I'm currently positioned."
Violation: Violates Visibility of System Status. Hidden scrollbars prevent the user from knowing their position in the list or file system, making it difficult to navigate.
3. *User Control and Freedom*
Claim: "I miss a button for going one level up, to the parent directory. There are buttons for going back and forward in the navigation history, but that's not the same thing."
Violation: Violates User Control and Freedom. Not having an obvious way to go up a directory removes essential control, forcing users to rely on less intuitive navigation methods.
4. *Recognition Rather Than Recall*
Claim: "It seems this editing mode can only be activated using a keyboard shortcut, Ctrl-L, which isn’t immediately apparent—or, to be frank, very logical."
Violation: Violates Recognition Rather than Recall. The user should not need to remember specific keyboard shortcuts to access common functionality. The UI should present these options visibly.
5. *Error Prevention*
Claim: "Moving windows by clicking on icons that already have a specific function feels unintuitive and introduces an unnecessary risk of misclicking."
Violation: Violates Error Prevention. The user can easily move the window unintentionally when trying to interact with icons, which increases the chance of errors.
6. *Help and Documentation*
Claim: "Searching and then browsing the built-in help for 'list view' didn’t actually help me find out how to enable the list view."
Violation: Violates Help and Documentation. The help system fails to guide users to solutions for basic tasks, which defeats its purpose.
7. *Aesthetic and Minimalist Design*
Claim: "Tooltips are either misleading, or comically uninformative and thus annoyingly distracting."
Violation: Violates Aesthetic and Minimalist Design. Tooltips should convey useful information without being intrusive. Redundant and irrelevant tooltips clutter the interface.
8. *Flexibility and Efficiency of Use*
Claim: "In Gnome Files, we’re instead given a handful of features scattered across the UI. Hidden features (accessible solely through keyboard shortcuts) can only be learned by browsing what is best described as a non-interactive menu."
Violation: Violates Flexibility and Efficiency of Use. Hidden shortcuts reduce the efficiency for experienced users and make the interface less discoverable.
9. *Match Between System and the Real World*
Claim: "Menu names and their contents are confusing, with 'View Options' actually being sort options."
Violation: Violates Match Between System and the Real World. The system should use terminology and design elements that align with user expectations, but here the names contradict their function.
10. *Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors*
Claim: "Context-clicking in the top part of the window gives spurious and unpredictable results."
Violation: Violates Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors. Inconsistent behavior in the context-click menus makes it difficult for users to understand or recover from unexpected results.
Something like this would have been a better post than the linked one, but even this is not necessarily objective on each count - and design has a fundamentally subjective, human element based on our collective experience with every kind of interface, ever, which is affected by experience/culture, everything.
E.g. in your list: there is no “dropdown name”, it’s a misidentified element by the post writer. Add to it that he is not using standard configuration, which is just not how any “test” should be conducted. Like, you are not testing cars with flat tires either.
I think a lot of this disagreement could be cleared up by using “hallway usability testing”. The test is simple: Grab the next 6-8 people who walk past your desk and say “hey do you have 5 minutes to test the usability of something?”. Ask them to do a series of actions with the application (change to a list view, go up one level in the directory hierarchy, etc). Take note of what they find easy and what they struggle to do.
I suspect that I would struggle in many of the same points as the author. I suspect many other people would as well.
If you think this UI is good, do you want to make an objective claim? Do you think 8/8 people who walk past would figure out that split drop down button? It is very easy to test.
Yes this stuff is subjective. But rules and principles fall out pretty naturally from just asking people to try out your interfaces.
Please get to know how comprehensively the heuristics have been condensed into that short list from a much longer list of ovservations and decades of research.
To take into account the remaining subjectivity, there is usability testing. Most findings start to repeat themselves after 5 representative test subjects. But if you don’t test at all, you’re just shooting in the dark, as may have been with this gnome design.
I would have clicked the down arrow that’s attached to the list icon to get the list options.
It wouldn’t even occur to me that the icon could be a toggle (both because it is not rendered as one, and because I’d expect more than two view options).
It does have a hover effect though. Design is always about discoverability. If you have seen something similar, you will try to apply that solution. If you haven’t, you try different stuff and see what happens.
You don't need a keyboard to use a text field. You could be pasting a path.
Or using some assistive technology like dictation. Or be using a phone where there's a way to type but no way to press ctrl (althouth the UI on a phone should be judged along other lines).
> The same people often complain that terminals break with "standard shortcuts" because they can't copy with ctrl-C...
It does break with standard shortcuts. And worse, there's absolutely no consistency between terminal applications on which shortcuts to use. It's a mess, and complaints are warrented.
Ctrl-C sending a SIGINT to the program running in the terminal is the standard shortcut. Woe to the terminal arrogant enough to assume their precious copy/paste is more important.
Now, Super-C vs Ctrl-Shift-C (across the UI), we can argue about.
The more important thing isn't "their precious", but "user precious", where terminal is just from of a million apps that copy on Ctrl-C, so there is no woe, but praise, to any terminal app that reflects this basic fact and doesn't subvert user expectations
I guess we have very different sets of users in mind, then.
Ctrl-C (and Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-V and many other standard command-line shortcuts) have been around for longer than many of those users have been alive, and are part of POSIX standard.
The proof is in the pudding, though. I haven't seen any terminal apps that actually do what you praise (by default, as you can always remap the shortcuts to your heart content - to each their poison).
> I haven't seen any terminal apps that actually do what you praise
Micro editor, Emacs with CUA-mode.
Very few TUIs respect Ctrl-C. Note how it doesn’t quit your shell, for example. It’s more that it’s bound to something already, and there is no common concept of a clipboard between terminal applications anyway.
Asking the terminal itself to copy on Ctrl-C, and send Ctrl-C on Ctrl-Shift-C, is usually uncomplicated. If that’s something the user wants. We allow all sorts.
Not really, all the same users, you just place way too much faith in the defaults. Case in point: your second point. Though your pudding is stale: bad defaults are a common scourge of software, so the fact that something is default means nothing positive on its own
How do you find out what that keyboard shortcut is?
I only found out when reading a similar article as the OP many years ago that complained about the removal of the textbox.
Otherwise I never would've known it is possible to activate the path textbox with a keyboard shortcut.
A UI needs to be both easy to use and discoverable. If "power users" have trouble discovering where the features they need are, why do we think the rest of the UI is easy to use/discoverable for everyone else?
(Although TBH I rarely use UI, and normally just use the terminal, except when upgrading the firmware of my keyboard, in which case I use Jade's file manager).
> The list button was immediately obvious to me from the screenshot
It was immediately obvious to the author as well -- it was the first thing they clicked on! Or rather, they clicked in the little arrow next to it, that looked like it was part of the same button. When it brought up something entirely unrelated, they very reasonably assumed that it wasn't what they were looking for.
If I type <ctrl>-s filename <enter>, then I expect the current file to be saved with filename (perhaps with an extension appended).
The gtk-2 behavior was to start searching the list of files/directories when you type filename, then select whatever is highlighted when you press enter.
Anyway, I’m not going to install gnome to find out.
It’s not surprising the file browser is as bad as described in the article. After all, jwz’s cadt (cascade of attention deficit teenagers) model of software engineering was meant to explain the behavior of the gnome project.
It still seems to search for files/directories when entering the file name but it doesn't select the first file, it saves with the filename you entered. So it was fixed.
I don't get the obsession with "clean" UIs, nor how hiding everything and replacing it with tons of whitespace and nondescript icons can be "calming". It's sterile and unwelcoming like an empty house or unused workshop.
If you like dense UIs with lots of options, you're better served using KDE or friends. I love that a less cluttered option exists, I don't understand why all DEs should behave the same.
It isn't about GNOME apps. Their UI actually stands in the way and require fiddling.
In GNOME Clocks:
- You cannot set the name for a timer when creating iy. You need to set the time and start it first, then either pause and reset it or wait for completion. And only then the text field for timer's name appear.
- Timer sound is just a single bell that's easy to miss when you are busy with something like cooking. No repeats, no additional dialogs or highlights. Just a single notification and timer resets.
Nautilus (Files):
- Does not focus a file/folder for keyboard navigation after entering a folder using keyboard navigation (arrow keys and Enter). Maybe I'm missing something,but that's my experience with resorting to mouse or pressing Tab.
- "Open in Terminal" opens folders only in GNOME's default terminal. There's no way in GNOME Settings to set the default application for terminal either.
GNOME Weather:
- The width of hourly weather graph/chart is limited. Even if you have a big monitor and will maximize it, you will have to scroll horizontally to see the further than ~10 hours.
Right, but UI is just the interface the user interfaces with to do stuff. Less buttons means you can do less stuff, necessarily.
Nautilus (or gnome-files, whatever it's called now) can't do a quarter of the stuff Dolphin can.
For some use cases and some users that's fine. For others... not so much. I mean, imagine if you took out 80% of the buttons in photoshop. Could a pro still edit a photo? Probably not. But the UI will be clean.
The worst part of GNOME, files included, is the gtkfilechooserwidget.c, in both gtk3 and gtk4, having a bug which errors out and pops up if you paste a file path into a file->open dialog. Gtk devs say the filechooser code is so spaghetti no one wants to work on it to make filename-entry location-mode work by default again. And I agree, I tried for a year on and off to patch it myself in gtk 3.22 and 3.24 and I could only ever fix it for the first launch of File->Open for a given process. Subsequent Opens would error out again.
GNOME UI, and now Gtk since 2014, is not written with people who use the keyboard in mind. That's it's biggest UI weakness.
File Chooser gripes, I get. It's one of many pain points of GNOME, and one that's haunted GNOME for ages.
But GNOME is highly (primarily even) keyboard-driven. The meme since 3.0 is that it's built for touch first, but nobody who's said that has ever used GNOME on a touch device, it is a nightmare. GNOME's primary controls are through keyboard shortcuts or the occasional broad mouse gesture that has a faster keyboard alternative.
These complaints aren't invalid, but I do wonder how many users actually get tripped up on these things. If you want a list view, clicking on the icon that looks like a list isn't a crazy thing to do. I agree the dropdown behaviour is a bit strange.
Equally, it's accepted that a bunch of today's Gnome apps have title bars with controls inside them. I don't think it's that jarring that if you don't click on a control accurately and then start dragging the mouse, you're going to move the window.
The sort of mental process the author related to find that list view was pretty much the same I went through, so at least there's two people. But, as they said and the author quoted, "Our software is built to be usable by everyone. We care deeply about user experience."
Though there are already TONS of critiques to GNOME (hell, even I have written some stuff about them here) and so much has been said about it that saying something else seems like a waste of time in my humble opinion. Its devs won't change their mind because they have a laser-sharp vision of what they want to achieve. Its users won't change their mind because they like it and feel at home using it. We the people that don't (or no longer) like it won't change our minds either because it can feel really strange, confusing and even limiting.
It's been more than 10 years since they went to that route but they will do little to nothing about that because, as the author correctly asserted, "it's also a project that's very vocal - opinionated, as the saying goes - about how to do things." So either you like the GNOME way of doing things or you just can go somewhere else. Which, again, it's a bit contradictory taking in account their "Our software is built to be usable by everyone" motto.
I think one day it will be a sword they fall on as fewer people become interested in working with such aggressive position, the developers will look elsewhere instead of wait for GNOME to implement something or be reasonable.
The worst part about controls inside the titlebar is things like Firefox and Chromium which implement their own decorations and window design with the tabs ending up in 95% of your draggable titlebar area, so you often end up moving the tab instead of moving the window. I'm not sure who will blink first with the lousy design situation, but the users are paying the price. (Honestly browsers just need to change this...Gnome is most people's default and they've shown themselves to be pretty damned stubborn)
i gave up entirely and went with xmonad. normally window placement is automatic and predictable, but if I really want to resize something, it's Super+Right Drag.
this is anecdotal, but I just asked three non-techie friends who never seen GNOME before to change my Nautilus app to list view. Neither of them needed more than 5 seconds to do it.
I was looking at what they were doing, and they were not clicking on all the toolbar buttons. They clicked on correct button, except one of them that first clicked on the dropdown next to it, and then on the button. My point is that even non-technical users, without any prior knowledge of the GNOME design language, don't seem to actually find it difficult to figure this out.
You may have a uncommon idea of non-technical people. Such folks don’t know what a list view even is, and would have to have it explained. Not to mention a filesystem.
Yes—we can see it's a suboptimal design on its face.[1] Bunch of repetitive dots and lines, with misleading clues. Not everyone is going to respond to it the same way of course. Some folks don't bother with clues.
The main point is that this problem has been solved already, better and in the past, by products delivered to tens of millions of seats. Merely copying prior art would have sufficed.
Responding with, "I found some non-techies who didn't have a problem" is not a direct response to the idea that the design could be improved. Folks can persevere and ultimately succeed through poor designs... in fact we all do it every day.
Some of us would like to use products that are a little more thoughtful than the bare minimum attainable-through-perseverance functionality, however.
>If you're a power-user that likes having many toolbars, don't use gnome, there are other amazing DEs made for you
The problem is that Gnome has infected GTK to the point that it's really hard to avoid all their (imo) poor design choices (like lack of menu bars, hidden scrollbars, dialog dismiss buttons on top right) if you're using a GTK based DE like XFCE.
I would say that it seems like Apple has somewhat abandoned MacOS and is instead fully focusing on iOS.
For me personally Gnome UI and UX is cleaner and simpler than MacOS. At the same time there are awesome community extensions that can fine tune Gnome behavior in ways MacOS users can only dream about.
I have used Gnome 2 before and while I was a bit skeptical at the launch of Gnome 3, I have embraced their approach and Gnome is currently my favorite DE by far.
I really wanted to like KDE because they implemented some technical features (fractional scaling, VRR, tearing support) years before Gnome, but it's too bloated and outdated for my liking. I rather live without some of those Wayland features that KDE support than loose the clean and less distracting looks and workflow of Gnome.
Gnome made a hard decision by going this direction and lost some users along the way, but I think that in the long term it has been worth it and has pushed Linux desktop further.
How much do you know about MacOS ? Mac is more customisable than Gnome. I gather best 100 gnome extensions and still find mac more customisable as in mac everything is app including extensions. And there are gazzilions of apps in mac. And 100 extensions/apps on mac works amazing, on gnome even 25 extensions causing trouble and interfering with each other. So I throw back your at word at you. “Gnome can only dream about the way mac users can customise”.
This doesn’t happen over night though. You need to drive deep.
Been using MacOS for 12 years as well and I still dislike it.
On my Arch development machine I have about 30 Gnome extensions that play nicely together.
I have also developed extensions on Gnome and I can certainly do much more extending than MacOS allows. Developer documentation for Gnome is bad, but if you dig in the code, you can make anything happen and the community is quite helpful if you are stuck and out of ideas.
Workspace navigation, window management between workspaces and on workspaces is a lot nicer and certainly more advanced on Gnome.
On Gnome, extensions integrate into the control center directly, while on MacOS everything is a separate paid app that has different UI/UX. And once you have too many of those helper apps in the top bar on MacOS, they disappear between the notch on newer Macbooks. You simply can not access them anymore, they are permanently hidden until you close other apps to make space, which is just ridiculous.
And try extending the top menu or dock on MacOS. It is not possible in a nice way. I have tried and paid for many tools on MacOS and it still is bad. You simply have to accept the defaults if you want to have a good time. And those defaults are counter productive for me personally.
Nope. Just like shell you can inject javascript into anything on mac. Every app is scriptable by AppleScript or javascript by default. App developer has the option to make it more scriptable. Mac has a perfect api for that and that is why it works well even with hundreds of extensions.
And No need for helper as in the top bar. They are meant to run as service. ICE can hide those in a smart way anyway. Which is a super cool free app. App boring-notch transforms notch into dynamic island. I never used any paid app in my life on mac. But I do donate.
And nope. Extending dock is super easy with tools like BetterTouchTool even for novice. That is why there are hundreds of dock apps. On a whim I made dock behave like dock-to-dash by injecting only 20 line of code. https://objectstack.github.io/images/Dock-To-Dash-Mac.gif
It will hide/unhide from dock.
Gnome is counter productive not Mac. As I said you need to dive deep. People use Mac when they want to get their works done or Windows to play games. Gnome is just part-time-play-thing. Linux simply doesn’t work on desktop.
I switched to Nemo after I got tired of Nautilus moving all the buttons for no particular reason every Gnome release, but a few versions ago they had a pattern that was genuinely good: a dropdown next to the current directory in the navigation bar, with everything you can do in the current directory (paste, create directory, open terminal, etc.). This was really neat, traditionally you have to access those by right-clicking some whitespace in the list/grid view, but in the list view there is only a narrow band of empty space to right-click, usually you accidentally click a file. So this was a genuine innovation in UI design. Unfortunately they since removed it again.
> This was really neat, traditionally you have to access those by right-clicking some whitespace in the list/grid view, but in the list view there is only a narrow band of empty space to right-click, usually you accidentally click a file. So this was a genuine innovation in UI design. Unfortunately they since removed it again.
Wait, no? It hasn’t. I’m looking at a fresh build from the main branch right now. The menu doesn’t have Paste in it in this version, which might be what you’re referring to, but I don’t think it was ever there. (Alas, copy and paste UIs are sad). But otherwise it is very much there. And arguably better because the other big menu has moved somewhere else :) If you’re finding it’s completely gone, um, what distro are you using so I can quietly judge them?
Yeah those others are in the triple dots menu, but paste is gone. Maybe I’m hallucinating that it was ever there, but I notice that I miss it which would be weird if it was never there in the first place.
A personal annoyance with Gnome Files is that every time a file is deleted it shows an annoying toast over the tabs notifying you about the files being deleted.
I don't use Gnome since the days of version 2, which was really nice and friendly. But I was impressed by how well the latest iteration works in a tablet.
That's a great advantage, because it's the same UI as a desktop. Plus, they have made sure all core applications work well using a touch UI.
Most people I knew back then used Linux on desktop. When Gnome 3 started to be a thing, I don't recall anyone that even had access to a touchscreen device.
And suddenly you had to use touch gestures with mouse, your plugins were gone, menu items were almost gone, you lost possibility to have ANY way to display status. They did all-in on notifications instead. So if you got new mail there was a brief notification and puff... Any indication of pending tasks were gone. No plugin with animation, no tray icon that changed color. No way of telling that your jabber client has something new.
I clearly recall how weird it was to forget to reply because for a second you were focused on writing in another window.
Who could, did migrate to anything else before any workarounds to those issues popped up (like unofficial tray, MATE).
It felt so out of touch back then. The only time I felt that confused were later on windows server when they decided in some editions to cut almost all UI and you had to do that swipe gesture from edge of the screen to show app list. Good luck on multimonitor setup, with a mouse, on RDP connection.
Nobody uses tablet laptops in tablet mode because generally speaking it sucks. Using a touch screen to type sucks and sucks so much worse than your phone because its bigger and more awkward.
Holding it in tablet mode is garbage because of size and weight. As soon as you have it propped up you might as well use the keyboard. It joins using a stylus for a phone and touch screen all in ones in the list of neat but completely useless features.
> Some common features are only accessible - and discoverable - through keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts listing is non-interactive, modal, and incurs a substantial mental context switch.
He's just wrong though. Clicking anywhere on the bar immediately turns on the edit for me (and has for years).
So either debian is turning on some odd defaults (maybe? It's been a long time since I used debian with a DE).
Or... (and this is my guess) he mucked around running commands he didn't understand trying to fix his "solid color desktop" issue and broke it himeself. I'm very suspicious of the lack of anti-aliasing in his screenshots as well.
This part was about the location bar, I believe. For what it’s worth, on my machine (with Files 46.2) clicking on the name of the current directory or on empty space to the right of it in the location bar does turn it into a text box. (I always use Ctrl-L in practice so I had to actually go and check. It might be that clicking did not work in earlier versions?..)
Yes! Gnome 2 was great. I miss those days. The whole Gnome is a disappointment now. The GTK-4 doesn't even have the traditional menu and menubar widgets. I don't know what the Gimp people and the Inkscape people are going to do.
Both GtkMenu and GtkMenuBar are gone in GTK 4. Now threre is GtkPopoverMenu and GtkPopoverMenuBar. The GtkPopoverMenu is not a drop-in replacement for GtkMenu.
Yes, Mate is indeed a decent desktop for people who like GNOME 2. But GTK people are removing features left and right. I don't know how Mate is going to cope with that.
As a GNOME user, I kinda understand what they want to achieve, but they are seriously short on resources, so there is really little substance to all the rosy aspirations. They are also very oppinionated, which then turns away a lot of liberal developers that just want to scratch their own itches.
As for file manager usability, I grew up with Norton commander and pretty much gave up on ever seeing power user addressed file manager. It's fine for simple office type stuff that I bother few times a month on my Linux system but that's basically it.
When I have any more elaborate needs I fall back to plain old terminal with something like git or maybe even midnight commander, because that's what's getting the job done.
What I find really sad is, that they have like a million bindings to every programming language there is (including one that they made up) and I have no idea how they want to maintain that codebase. The basic API still looks somewhat antiquated and disjointed, but now it's in JavaScript and Vala. So even the more OCD type developers that would accept the design language constraints are frustrated that it looks so sad under the hood.
But I mean, I get it. Building a consistent desktop environment with a clean design language is hard and especially expensive. I'm impressed by what GNOME actually manages to get done with the few resources that they have. Is it anywhere close to being consistent and complete. I don't think so.
But than again, I mostly just use the desktop environment to open Chrome and the terminal, so for me it's perfectly fine.
>What I find really sad is, that they have like a million bindings to every programming language there is (including one that they made up) and I have no idea how they want to maintain that codebase.
I believe that's to do with gobject introspection (see *). From what I understand they mostly generate bindings through gir files. It's actually really cool what they've pulled off with it.
Always a reminder for people who are frustrated with the state of Gnome... I've found KDE to be _very good_ for people who want to see options up and center. In a way KDE is definitely more Windows-like and Gnome more Mac-like in its approaches, and you can see this very directly with the screenshotter tools packed into the various environments.
Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
(Full disclosure: I donate to both and apprecaite them both existing)
The key is that KDE offers such easy and flexible customization by default. In my case with the taskbar like Windows7 with non-grouped open programs and so on. One just have to right-click on the taskbar, set, and done, because the options are available, those configuration options exist, they cared about making it easy to use and to get.
In the same way, I think Dolphin v24 should be seen as a starting point for the minimal features and easy customization included by default that a file browser needs.
> Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
I think the problem looks more like Gnome is trying to target only tactile pads with very basic needs? not desktop users with keyboards and mouse.
This is very unfortunate, with capital letters, because if Gnome had preserved the features instead of cropping and going the pads-only route, they would have avoided the obvious result, a split in resources and developers (Mate and Homologous continuations of Gnome v2), which even ended up with two kinds of distros under Gnome. A division in resources (disaster/catastrophe).
> Definitely worth it for people frustrated at Gnome's cleanliness-to-a-fault.
For me it's not that. I don't mind white space, and I don't mind flat design. It's simply that Gnome is too 'chaotic'. If Gnome would simply copy macOS instead of trying to invent their own UI paradigms it would mostly be fine (not that macOS is perfect though, it has been regressing massively too in the last decade, and some things never were great - most notably the OSX Finder).
But yeah, on my Linux laptop I switched to KDE a couple of months ago and it's great. Also much snappier than Gnome.
Just to offer a different point of view, I see it as the opposite. I like a lot of things the KDE community is doing and I think it's particularly good at power user oriented apps like Krita and Kdenlive, which may be the best open-source tools in their respective areas and which don't really fit in the modern Gnome framework. As a desktop environment, however, I feel KDE is too visually chaotic to be usable. This post [1] illustrates some problems, but the lack of design cohesion permeates KDE and cannot be fixed without a long concerted effort. I imagine it's never been a priority because most users can shrug these inconsistencies off as something inconsequential, but for me (and I don't believe I'm alone in this) they're instantly noticeable and distracting eyesores.
Gnome has its own problems, but it is very visually consistent and clean, especially as of late when most of the standard apps are moved to GTK4/libadwaita. The GP's comparison of KDE being closer in spirit to Windows while Gnome to Mac is spot on IMO.
I don’t like most of what gnome did to its UI over the years, as I use titlebars, scrollbars, and menus heavily.
But I consoled myself with the idea that at least it was done to make it more friendly for touch devices—that I didn’t happen need at the time on my PCs.
Guess what? Fast forward a decade. Just got a new linux tablet and come to find out gnome is often shitty and unusable there too. Menus tiny, often keyboard only interfaces! Phosh is decent but none of the video players have a UI in the ballpark of Netflix/Android. All the touch targets are TINY, no tap in the center to play/pause, no tap on sides to skip either. Often have state bugs where the UI won’t hide after an interaction. Won’t stay full screen.
I had to install a new file manager named Portfolio that was actually touch friendly.
Making things round is not enough.
So much was lost and we didn’t even get a good touch interface out of the bargain! And their broken interfaces have infected mate, xfce, cinnamon as well.
Finder is way better than Windows Explorer. Explorer suffers from a myriad of bugs like constantly re-caching thumbnails, lag when opening folders (since Windows 11) and TWO context menus. No bulk rename, search is way too slow and annoying. Also, can't delete words from the file name with CTRL + Backspace, it inserts some hidden character instead. Also the whole OS hangs while an external hard drive spins up, which doesn't happen on macOS.
In Finder you could always drag and drop a file to move it. (In certain cases I forget the details of, holding Command is necessary to move instead of copy, as indicated by the cursor.)
Since about 8 years ago, you can also move a file via the keyboard by selecting the file, hitting Command-C to Copy, navigating to the new folder, and hitting Option-Command-V to Move the pasted file. This doesn’t match Windows’s Cut/Paste workflow, but I think Copy makes more sense as a first step. For consistency with Cut elsewhere, one would expect Cut to delete the file until it is pasted, but on Windows it doesn’t.
Finder windows are resizeable in the same way as all other macOS windows. In older versions you had to drag the drag handle in the bottom right. For a while now, you can drag on any window border, when the cursor turns into a double arrow. You can also click or Option-click the green window button to make the window full-screen or zoom it to show all contents.
Yes it does. You can use the mouse, or shortcuts cmd-c, followed by cmd-option-v. And what on earth do you mean “Nor you can resize the window.” Nonsense. You’ve clearly never been within 6 feet of a Mac!
> My personal conclusion is that if this is the result of inventing "something better from first principles"
But it just isn't, for example, which first principle mandate that buttons look confusingly similar to a list so that an experienced user can't find a list view?
It's just "marketing speak" the author is right to call out, but seems like getting a bit hung up on: I mean, why would you expect some list of thoughts on design achieve this
> But shouldn't this new design paradigm produce something better?
Great UX review!
Author mentions “designers and developers”, I get the suspicion that there’s no designer involved. At least no UX designer.
Do open source projects, even most notable like this one, ever employ UX designers?
From experience trying to contribute UX expertise to open source, I always end up finding out that the developer considers it their reward to have freedom to make UI decisions and shape UI fit their personal taste.
I try to demonstrate and make prototypes and compelling examples and arguments, but since usually the UX problem we trying to fix is in something that’s already implemented, there’s little will to make those changes, when there’s 100s of issues that can be worked on in that time.
And yes, I end up learning WXwidgets or whatever programming framework used, in order to contribute the UXUI changes, knowing that pull request may not ever be accepted for reasons that’s again someone’s personal taste overrules UX.
There is a misguided culture of treating UX decisions like programming algorithms decisions: as long it’s possible to get user from A to B, developer allowed to play around and invent different ways and optimisations.
You can’t treat UX is such way. UX is a different skill set. To take a Car analogy, it’s letting engine designer make decisions about car body and aerodynamics. Mechanic would design every car as F1 because obviously to them it’s the fastest car and easy for them to use with 80 buttons on steering wheel. And then you see the their F1 car design and it’s “Homer” car.
As someone totally out of the loop, what’s the status of font rendering in Gnome? The screenshots don’t look any better than 20 years ago, a jarring difference to what I‘m used to from macOS.
I use Gnome on multiple PCs and my first thought was they use a bitmap font or a 720p screen because everything looks off. The screenshots are not representative of how Gnome's font rendering looks like with a font like Inter & HiDPI.
Font rendering on Linux has been fixed for >10 years but the OP has obviously forgot to update his font configuration or has turned off anti-aliasing and hinting for the legacy look and feel. :)
It's been a solved problem for years, but some of the better rendering methods in FreeType are/were patent encumbered, and so it comes down to what each distro's lawyers are comfortable with.
Gnome's out of the box font choices don't help either. Cantarell renders terribly on anything but high DPI displays.
Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I must add COSMIC here, as most comparisons seem to occur between GNOME and KDE. I've used the former for years, but slowly realized that needing to use various extensions to achieve a usable desktop is just plain wrong.
Then I switched to KDE Plasma for a year or two, and it also felt off a bit, partly due to the overwhelming number of options with often odd defaults. Fonts were awesome though, and so was Dolphin compared to Nautilus.
Finally, the week the alpha was released, I installed the COSMIC version of Pop, and never looked back. Why? Because it has the correct amount of desktop-related settings for me (and hopefully many others as well).
These settings are:
- dock or panel or both?
- place them anywhere
- populate them however you want
In this sense, GNOME is too strict and inflexible. Plasma, on the other hand, lets me create the look I'm used to without adding extensions, but also feels "wobbly." This wobbliness comes from the overwhelming amount of tickboxes, radio buttons and whatelse almost calling for interaction to change stuff. COSMIC fixed my problems of the duopoly and feels stable enough for daily use even in its alpha state.
Gnome File’s is like 25 years behind Mac’s Finder. When Finder can now rename your screenshots based on content with the help of apple ai(!! Yup no more IMG_0027.jpg), Gnome is still struggling with basic navigation. Linux on desktop simply doesn’t work.
One thing I can't stand with Ubuntu is the panel position at the top. 90% of users will be browsing the web. If I'm on reddit for example, I will literally have at minimum 3 browser bars (tabs, toolbar, reddit enhancement suite) but also the panel. Consider we read top to bottom, the panel shouldn't be at top since it is almost never being used or read. It should default to the bottom but at the very least you should have the option to move it where you want without having to install a 3rd party extension.
As consider that because monitors are typically 16:9 there is so much extra horizontal space compared to vertical. Personally on KDE I have my app panel on the right then hide browser tabs with some css and have Tree Style Tabs on the right as well. It frees up so much of the limited vertical space, it's refreshing.
I 100% agree. It's weird. I Use 'Dash to Panel's GNOME extension, and to me that should be the default.
From there I really like how GNOME merges the app bar with maxize minimize close with the title etc. At least most applications.
In no particular order, running arch with gnome and trying to reproduce the author's complaints:
- List view and view options buttons, while combined, have a visually distinct hover state, highlighting each half of the button on hover, and making it very obvious (at least to me, as a 35 year old power user) that they are different. (you can see this in his screenshots). Perhaps the author has visual issues and contrast is an issue? If so - agreed, perhaps my largest complaint with gnome is that contrast is low by default in the light view.
- Author complains that the recent and starred sections in the left nav have tooltips that are duplicative. No argument... except... he conveniently leaves out that for the vast majority of the default items (Downloads, Documents, Home, Music, Videos, etc) it shows the exact system path of that shortcut.
Compared to the shenannigans that MSFT is playing with things like onedrive - it's delightful that the system paths are displayed there. I am never confused by where a shortcut actually lives. The only duplicative items are items that don't have a path (they are internal groupings in files, like recent)
- I simply cannot reproduce not being able to get the path bar in edit state by clicking. I'm on a different distro - so maybe this is a debian thing? Single click or tap on the path display always opens the text editor for me. No shortcuts required.
- Shortcuts lists the keyboard shortcut for shortcuts for me in the dropdown menu. I have honestly never cared to check for it before, so maybe this is a valid complaint about an older version still in debian?
- He's completely right: Search in the files shortcuts menu sucks. It misses a lot of keywords that it shouldn't.
- For the scrollbar... come on man, at least try the thing that is easy. Yes - the scrollbar visually enlarges when you mouse over it, and yes - this leaves your mouse visually pointing at some new padding. That padding works for scrolling just fine (seriously - just complete the action you were intending, it works...) So he is very incorrect with this "meaning that my mouse pointer is now pointing at... nothing. Thanks, Gnomebama." It's pointing at the scrollbar and it works just fine.
Better yet - don't ever click and drag the scrollbar to scroll. It's... not the done thing with the new kids these days. Use your fingers (gestures) or use the mousewheel. The scrollbar is a visual marker for progress and for quick jumps. I am also on team "Show me the scrollbars all the time!" but I understand the goal of returning real estate on limited viewports.
---
I have a TON of complaints about gnome, but these just feel... forced. Made worse by the fact the author admits he's run a bunch of customization in the console to fix his "solid color desktop" stuff first (I'm suspicious of whether he broke his own path bar... I use it all the time, and I don't ever remember it not just being a click away to edit, even 5+ years back).
This is the kind of thing I appreciate that the Gnome team mostly ignores.
- List view and view options buttons, while combined, have a visually distinct hover state, highlighting each half of the button on hover, and making it very obvious (at least to me, as a 35 year old power user) that they are different. (you can see this in his screenshots). Perhaps the author has visual issues and contrast is an issue? If so - agreed, perhaps my largest complaint with gnome is that contrast is low by default in the light view.
I would expect more than just two view options, and I would expect the down arrow to reveal all options. If you click on the arrow first, you might be confused if there are no view options there.
- Author complains that the recent and starred sections in the left nav have tooltips that are duplicative. No argument... except... he conveniently leaves out that for the vast majority of the default items (Downloads, Documents, Home, Music, Videos, etc) it shows the exact system path of that shortcut.
The author does mention this: "Granted, some of these tooltips show a full path, but honestly - if I've added something to this bar, I probably know what it is and where it's located."
> Compared to the shenannigans that MSFT is playing with things like onedrive - it's delightful that the system paths are displayed there. I am never confused by where a shortcut actually lives. The only duplicative items are items that don't have a path (they are internal groupings in files, like recent)
What shenanigans? OneDrive lives in ~/OneDrive on Windows, "~/OneDrive - Company" if using the business version. If your desktop is in OneDrive, you will learn its path once and remember it.
> - For the scrollbar... come on man, at least try the thing that is easy. Yes - the scrollbar visually enlarges when you mouse over it, and yes - this leaves your mouse visually pointing at some new padding. That padding works for scrolling just fine (seriously - just complete the action you were intending, it works...) So he is very incorrect with this "meaning that my mouse pointer is now pointing at... nothing. Thanks, Gnomebama." It's pointing at the scrollbar and it works just fine.
It is not at all obvious that the scrollbar can be manipulated when the mouse is on its right. This UI is entirely non-obvious and strange. Why not just make the scrollbar stay in place? Why does it have to move? What purpose does it have?
> List view and view options buttons, while combined,
That's it. You could've stopped here. They are combined. It's a button with a dropdown indicator. The user expects this to be a single control for a single set of features. Not two distinct controls for completely unrelated functionality that you have to pixel-hunt for
I mean, what user? Someone in his late sixties who grew up on Windows 3? Sure.
Someone in their twenties/thirties...? Coming from Mobile? Young teen?
I strongly suspect they all have different expectations then you. Two different hover tool tips and a distinct hover state difference on a control optimized for screen size is very much the standard there.
"Two things grouped together signify similar/same things" is age-independent
"View options should include settings for list/details view, not sorting options" is age-independent
"Control optimized for screen size".... on a desktop? It's not a mobile screen.
The fact is that "designers" and "developers" like you don't understand the problem and have trained a new generation of people to not expect anything to work as expected/natural/intuitive while throwing away decades of user interface and experience research.
What you are essentially saying is that you no longer feel like this is expected/natural/intuitive.
And that's a perfectly fine thing to say. I'm mid-30s and I still like sticking my credit card into the machine instead of tapping it. It feels comforting and normal. It's not the better experience, objectively, though.
The absolute same thing applies here. The button is clearly visually distinct halves. If you are not familiar with that paradigm, I understand that it feels unnatural. But given that the fucking tooltips on each half are literally "List view" and "View options" and the hover state is clearly identifying that the button is two parts... what exactly do you want here? The view options has the list setting RIGHT FUCKING THERE. Important enough it's literally at the top level to make it easier to switch, given that that's the thing you most often do with the button. It's objectively the better power user experience - changing views is only a single press, instead of multiple clicks.
You can certainly make some HID research complaints with modern designs, but this really isn't the one that's going to be a compelling example.
I couldn't agree more. The Gnome devs have a very long track record of imposing universally hated UI/UX design on people.
I'd wonder why KDE isn't more popular, but I'm pretty sure the main reason is that the Gnome devs also have way better aesthetic taste than the KDE devs. Gnome simply looks much nicer in screenshots. They understand spacing.
That and KDE had it's own major UI/UX fuck up with Plasma.
That's not completely true. They are hated by some users, loved by some.
For example, in general, I really like what gnome does. Desktop use is not something that is useful outside starting other apps, so I like its simplicity and the fact that it gets out of the way.
Default apps could use maybe a bit more features, but I generally don't find too much wrong with e.g. files. The only confusing thing for me is which hamburger to click when I want to create a new directory. So instead of guessing, I just right click the file list. One positive example in gnome is when you try to access e.g. smb:// shares in files and try to open a movie from the share... It works with no issues. But, kde with gazillion features does not support that.
(Opinion) KDE is not more popular since it's buggy as hell. At least it was. But not only that, their visuals are a disaster. Believe what you will, but visual consistency and attention to detail is what gnome has. They are not perfect, so there are some issues as OP points out, but they are on a different level from kde. KDE looks like it was frankensteined, while gnome it looks like it was designed. Think just login process and sddm, how many time it blinks?
KDE is proud to enable tinkering, and this is good - there are people that like to do that. Thinking back, this was when I was teenager. Now that I'm older, I want things well thought out, designed well that dont get in my way so I can do my work and not think about desktop. And this is gnome.
What I hate about gnome is JavaScript and python focus for apps. And now, suddenly we need a stupid app for everything.
> KDE is not more popular since it's buggy as hell. At least it was. But not only that, their visuals are a disaster
Could you give concrete examples of that? I've been using KDE daily for years and I really don't see what you're talking about for either of these two points (bugs and disaster visuals).
Disaster visuals are icons in e.g. dolphin, sidebar and toolbar, but in different ways.
Sidebar are only lines and I find that the overly simplistic shapes do not represent ideas well. Example: go back icon. Similar problems exist for toolbar icons. At some point I cannot conclude if the shape is a graphics glitch or an icon. These are the icons with some shape bottom right.
Another example is sidebar consistency: recently I noticed there are 3 distinct looks in sidebars in KDE. The most modern one (kirigami I guess) looks almost the same as gnome (I think system settings have it in the last version), so here they are improving.
Another example: their logo and Startup Animation.
Buggy things: setup with 2 monitors, then 4k monitors, a bunch of this didn't work well, I opened several bugs for these things. I moved to gnome which didn't have these problems, so I'm not sure how this is behaving now.
Changing something about plasmoids / taskbar used to crash my session, but don't remember wether I opened a bug for this. I like having it at the top, so moving it up would even be a problem. After the crash, it would be fine for a long time. Also generally reordering plasmoids on the taskbar itself would be buggy.
As I said - this is how it used to be. Did not use it as a main desktop for a while, I would try to see what is new in a VM, but always got shocked how bad the design is. They are trying to improve it, but for something to make sense, radical changes are needed. For example, there were some really nice proposals for logo change for plasma 6 and nobody jumped on it. Like any other bureaucratic organization they decided not to do anything.
> their visuals are a disaster. Believe what you will, but visual consistency and attention to detail is what gnome has. They are not perfect, so there are some issues as OP points out, but they are on a different level from kde. KDE looks like it was frankensteined, while gnome it looks like it was designed.
Yeah I totally agree with that. KDE has terrible aesthetics and great usability, Gnome has great aesthetics and terrible usability.
Random example: I've missed so many meetings because of Gnome's insane behaviour that touching a notification with your mouse even for one frame dismisses it. Combined with the grey-on-grey colour scheme that requires coding to change it's extremely easy to miss notifications.
I ended up hand editing the theme CSS to make notifications orange, and setting Google Calendar to give me a notification every minute 3 times before every meeting. Insane. I need to switch to KDE.
I would disagree that gnome has terrible usability. It has a very good one. Nobody's saying it is perfect, but I and many other people can use it without issues.
KDE has more features, so maybe *some* things are a bit easier. But everything else is way worse. Including lack of certain apps like a decent VM manager.
I feel sorry for kde, the community there is way friendlier and whatnot, but this Frankenstein approach is bad for serious use. Somebody defined a compromise like a solution which nobody is happy with and KDE feels exactly like that. People adjust how it looks and feels for that reason.
Gnome has a VM manager? I mean I feel like that's such a niche tool that doesn't need to be part of the desktop environment, unlike for example WiFi settings which Gnome provides a very very basic interface for but most of the options are hidden in some other random app that isn't installed by default (nm-connection-editor - took me a while to figure that out!).
(To be fair it's been so long since I used KDE I can't remember if its WiFi settings also has this issue.)
This was only an example. Boxes is no metric for anything, but having an app that works well in that Desktop is a good thing. There is nothing flike that or KDE. It's all for gnome. Point here being that KDE has a lack of apps.
If talking about more generic apps, gnome has better Multimedia Tools, Firefox uses gtk to better integrate with gnome...
The only thing/app kde has better is krita. Or is there something I'm missing that gnome doesn't do better? (Excluding files from this comparison)
I'm just wondering who is then target audience for KDE? Only artists that use krita? Or teenagers that like to mod stuff?
Regarding wifi, given only 'standard' use, you connect to wifi and that's it. Gnome offers a password entry and done. For advanced users I don't see an issue - they can figure it out (gnome connection editor has quite some advanced options). And also, I didn't use KDE on a real machine for a while.
>I'm just wondering who is then target audience for KDE? Only artists that use krita? Or teenagers that like to mod stuff?
What a spiteful thing to say, it's very difficult for me to believe you are asking this genuinely. Firstly, KDE has no such "lack of apps". The majority of GNOME applications are far inferior to DE-independent "apps", so much so one may wonder why effort is even being spent into developing such flawed and barely functioning toys. Ah, well, at least Books isn't maintained anymore because it was barely usable. KDE's audience is far broader, because it does not force you to follow a vague and poorly implemented design vision that is actively hostile to the user, has usable defaults and can be trivially customized to actually reflect a minimal design approach also. It is not surprising it's being shipped quite successful with every Steam Deck, for example.
The question was a bit assholish, because rant. Fair to call me on it.
Yes, I am aware that KDE audience is broader. Just remembered an additional good product from KDE: kdenlive.
Let me try to put it in a better way: most of the time I have seen Linux in the wild (let's say companies) was Ubuntu/gnome. Even tv shows. And I don't remember ever seeing kde (LiMux aside since it is dead now). I have read that it is sometimes used in some specific industries like chemistry for legacy reasons/apps. Not sure how the automotive industry fits here, but I know they for example use qt, not sure if this extends to kde.
Based on what I have seen and read (which is not all Industries of course), KDE has a significantly smaller user base.
In a non-professional setting, I have exclusively seen gnome.
Not sure how steamdeck fits here, depends on what valve took. Last I read was a compositor. Di they actually use whole desktop with plasmoids?
Can you give an example of de-independent apps that are superior? To be clear: when talking about fitting into a desktop and talking about gnome vs KDE, it comes down mostly to the toolkit. Some examples like vlc could be considered de-independent though even though they use qt
Don't get me wrong, I don't hate KDE project. Far from it. But what they do and what I think they should do differs.
What I completely disagree with is that UX of gnome is wrong. It is opinionated and a lot of us like this 'opinion'. Many people using Ubuntu don't change a thing. Does this fit usable defaults? If things are well thought out, why do I need to tinker with the desktop to launch firefox, office, copy files or consume multimedia? Because in the end - this is what it is about, productivity.
I don't get this hostility statement. They follow a vision - their vision. They offer it for free. And people are upset because they do not work on the vision of that (minor) group?
> Not sure how steamdeck fits here, depends on what valve took. Last I read was a compositor. Di they actually use whole desktop with plasmoids?
On Steam Deck when you log in you get sent into Steam's Big Picture Mode, but you can switch to desktop, which sends you to a fairly standard X11 Plasma 5 desktop.
> If things are well thought out, why do I need to tinker with the desktop [...]?
Indeed, if things are _well_ thought out, there's no need to tinker with the desktop...
But certain things about GNOME are not well thought out (or at least, not for my use case), so when the defaults don't match my needs (and I can't really change my needs), I need to be able to change the defaults. And if I can't change the defaults I have a problem. An example would be the GNOME clock: I often need to fill out forms with day of week, year, month, and day of month; and if I can't set the clock in the panel to show that information, then that's a need that's not being fulfilled.
KDE similarly has shortcomings, I definitely wouldn't call it perfect (in fact I'm currently using LXQt with the Awesome window manager because between GNOME, KDE, and Cosmic none of them ticked enough boxes for me to be able to use them full time), but for some people I can well imagine it fits their needs better than GNOME.
And the hostility that the GNOME projects faces, I believe, is a consequence of internet communication being non-conductive to mutual understanding. The members of the GNOME project who interact with outsiders appear more abrasive than they intend to be and because of that people take a similarly aggressive stance towards the GNOME project.
I dunno, I really like Cantata (which integrates perfectly with MPD, which has possibly the best music organisation) and Clementine, more than any other music player I've tried. For video I'm very fond of SMPlayer, which is a featureful frontend for MPV. Kdenlive is also really nice (although Davinci Resolve is better, to be fair).
> The only thing/app kde has better is krita.
Really? You're saying Gedit is better than Kate? I don't know about that, friend. Gedit was severely lacking in features last time I tried it. What's the GNOME equivalent to Umbrello anyway? What about the GNOME equivalent to Lokalize? There's just a bunch of KDE apps which I don't know if GNOME has an equivalent to (the opposite is also true, but I'm just challenging your statement).
> (Excluding files from this comparison)
Okay, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I use smplayer on windows, this is a good app. Does it run on Wayland? And does it have hardware acceleration for decoding? I had issues on Wayland (gnome) with it.
Cantata is abandoned.
Files I excluded because dolphin is better functionally. It wasn't excluded because I want to skew results in my favor, but because there is no discussion. One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares
> One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares
??? Of course you can.
Your comments sound like you installed KDE ontop of a distro that uses gnome by default, missing half the packages.
KIO exposes pretty much every possible protocol (including smb, dav, ftp/sftp/ssh, etc) to every KDE app, including Dolphin, Kate, Gwenview, Krita, Okular, etc.
If you're trying to open SMB files in Gnome apps, ofc, that's not gonna work.
Sounds like your problem was that while KDE supports SMB, your player does not.
While Gnome will use fuse to mount SMB into the actual file system, KDE built supports for protocol like SMB natively into their libraries.
The KDE approach has the advantage that you get native permissions and don't have to mount them into the filesystem, while the gnome approach has better backwards compatibility for third party apps.
That said, KDEs players as well as VLC should have worked. I'm using KDE with SMB daily.
I don't know, I love the way KDE looks and feels. It's very fast and it's quite beautiful. Breeze, to me, is a very aesthetically pleasing theme.
And I'm not just saying that. Since the move to breeze in 5.0 I've thought it was pretty. Since then it's only improved. I really like the icons too - they're vibrant, but not completely flat. I like bright colors, sharp lines, higher contrast.
I really, really don't see this Frankenstein approach viewpoint. To me every KDE app feels and functions like a KDE app. GTK apps stick out like a sore thumb in the desktop world. They have big buttons, nothing is labeled, the title bar is huge for some reason. You kinda just have to guess what clicking buttons does. KDE apps are more closely aligned with traditional desktop applications I've been familiar with since XP. I like that.
On a usability note, I think KDE is super good here too. I really like the apps, many I consider best-in-class.
Kate is really good, dolphin is the best file manager I've used, kdevelop is a fantastic ide. Even random things, like kinfocenter (the system information pop-up) are really, really good. Krunner is great, the new system monitor is the best I've ever used. The new application menu is perfect.
I really like the Gnome UX, so it can't be "universally hated". I'm gonna assume most devs and users like it as well (otherwise they would use and/or develop something else).
Having used Gnome for years, my favorite version was Gnome 3 in its early hated days, and a lot of what I liked disappeared. Gnome seems to be inconsistently changed. I would much prefer to just default to using MATE, though these days I use mostly KDE because the UI is consistent across its many apps.
A split button where a dropdown is not a superset of what is achievable by a button is, however, not common. It is a direct violation of user expectation.
I get it that gnome is nowadays an experimental desktop environment, that tries a lot of new approaches.
I just don't understand why many distributions use it as their default DE.
I am fairly sure the people behind Gnome don't actually really know what they're doing when it comes to HID and Ux.
Gnome terminal for example will offset the right click contextual menu with a new line of bin/hex/oct representation of a number that you happen to have selected. By default, no it can't be disabled.
Good luck with the muscle memory to hit the contextual menu items now that everything is shifted down.
When I was in the GNOME bubble, I too thought GNOME was the be-all and end-all of Linux DE usability, with everyone else being savages slapping together UIs without so much as a style guide. Perhaps at some point this may have been partially true.
Today, all major DEs are fine. Plasma did not crash once since 2019 for me and I think its UX is quite nice, in the case of Dolphin in particular visibly better than GNOME's. At the same time, GNOME had routine issues with extensions, semi-frequent crashes, and odd non-compliant bits like refusing to use tray icons, breaking apps that depend on them, and the last time I checked, scaling was a mess.
I do think the GNOME/libadwaita ecosystem is a fantastic achievement and agree with many of their ideas, but it would be dishonest to say all other DEs are inferior and don't deserve any consideration as a default.
Only KDE and Gnome offer proper Wayland support making them in my eyes the only truly modern DEs on your list. Out of these two, Gnome is the only one that doesn’t glitch constantly. It’s true that Plasma finally stopped krashing every time you look at it funny but it’s still a bloated, glitchy mess of a DE. You really can’t count on KDE to provide updates without introducing major bugs and stability issues as proven by recent Plasma 6 release. Believe me I hate Gnome for how poorly managed and anti user it is but at the same time I see no real alternatives.
I don't think this is true, I haven't gotten plasma crashes for a long time now. Even early into Plasma 5 it was stable.
Also bloat is so very debatable. You can't on one hand complain about Gnome being unusable and then turn around and say Plasma is bloated. Uh, that "bloat" is the difference between the two!
The difference between the two is that Gnome is at least trying to constantly deliver stable and high quality desktop experience. I don’t like the way Gnome works, I don’t like the way their organization is run but I like when my computer just works. I don’t have time to fuck around with buggy Plasma widgets. I was a Plasma 5 users for two years until 2022 and I still use it on my Steam Deck occasionally. My opinion is based on experience.
GNOME is well know for breaking often backwards compatibility, especially in regards to extension.
The only criteria which I'd thick next to de GNOME DE in consistency, would be: aversion to customization, opinionated, 80% done in perpetuity, and liberal use of space (low information density)
Still on the lookout for a reasonable FileChooserDialog replacement... Easily the worst part of GTK and a great candidate for its own dedicated article (hint hint :)). Supposedly it takes some LD_PRELOAD fudging to override it and while there is the linked previous work from KDE I'm not aware of anything else at this point. Anyone know of any recentish attempts? Would it be a good idea with a "libgtkfilepicker" which provides a more accessible API for implementations to interface with?
It used to be relatively easy to override the filechooser by forcing portal mode, but Gnome actually disabled that because people aren't supposed to use it.
But while they did remove that option, they didn't implement an option to do it properly. So now even though I use KDE, Firefox drops me in the shitty Gnome filechooser which is entirely useless.
(Luckily firefox ended up making that an option on their side instead: widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker)
TL;DR I agree with some opinions, I disagree with others. Few of the complaints were either very recently rectified, or seems to be just bugs because I can't reproduce or understand them.
Like all of us the author is busy opening a bank, insurance company, an Asian restaurant, an ebay replacement, a car factory and an adobe replacement. The google replacement is on the cards
Be real, when the article is a spray of incoherent criticism its irrelevant, constructive criticism good, ignoring feedback bad,
Have you ever actually looked to see how many file managers there are? Writing a new one is pointless; you can almost always find one that isn’t terrible. Personally I prefer Nemo to GNOME Files.
The author does not seem unreasonable with their critique. The response to any critique shouldn't have to be, "write your own software, if you don't like it!". You know, just as well as any of us, that writing software is hard. UI is also hard. It would be good to learn from any critique.
Sometimes you see these whiners doing their own perfect interfaces. They tend to be something born out of a threesome between an alien spaceship, TempleOS and Blender 1.x.
It's a derogative remark from republican demographics about Barrack Obama. "Thanks nobama" was a good way to identify yourself as a maga loving fool...
Glad to see someone go deep on this in a way that I've felt while using it but was unable to fully articulate why it's so bad.
Again, I'll keep saying it, I'm not the biggest Apple fan in the world, but however many Gnome devs in a trenchcoat will never equal a Steve Jobs and it's weird, borderline pathetic, for them to keep trying -- when all they end up doing is changing things for the sake of changing them.
I have actually had more problems with the Mac OS finder then I have the gnome one, and all of my problems stem from answering the question “how do I go up a directory from where I am?” Never bothered to figure out the actual right way. Might be easy. But hard to figure out
I'm with you. Modern macOS is... just not good for the basics right now. I have to use it for work, and I genuinely like Gnome more most of the time (files/settings/gestures/workspaces - all better on gnome).
Mac is doing what Windows is doing "The user is stupid and must not be allowed to understand what the computer is doing - we will guess what they want instead and show them that". Basic nav in finder is painful by default (100% agree about not being able to consistently move up).
It's also impossible for a new user of macOS to show hidden files without an online search. Iirc it's a non documented (in the UI) keyboard shortcut. Very discoverable.
I wish folks critiquing GNOME would go after any app other than Nautilus. It's just not a great showcase of the best they have to offer. I would certainly hope no one judges the macOS desktop by Finder because the review probably wouldn't be favorable. If you're going to judge the design system Text Editor, Terminal, Videos, Epiphany, Music would all be better choices. I can't say I know anyone who likes GNOME who would recommend Nautilus anything but the most basic usage.
But surely interacting with files is a key component of what people expect from a DE? If a DE can't handle that well, a well-designed 'Videos' app offers small consolation.
I can only speak for myself, but it was a Nautilus regression that was the final straw that got me to move to KDE. (And years before that, the rapidly regressing Finder was a key factor in getting me to finally move from Mac to Linux.) Very happy with KDE, though.
I feel like when the Videos app is well designed and the file manager isn't, that says a lot about the priorities of the team behind the DE. In Apple's case, this is understandable from a business perspective - they have cloud services to sell, and would much rather you forgot all about files. In Gnome's case, I've always found it kind of baffling. Apple's design follows Apple's business imperatives, and Gnome's design... also follows Apple's business imperatives, for some reason. Monkey see, monkey do?
Because we're critiquing the design, can you make nice-to-use apps following the GNOME human interface guidelines or is it rotten to the core? Is Nautilus fixable while staying within the "GNOME way?" And the answer is yes, there's plenty of examples. Elementary even makes a nice file manager following them https://github.com/elementary/files.
I'm not going to defend Nautilus or pretend it's good, I just don't care. I haven't used it in years. I do use the other GNOME apps and the DE and they're really good. GNOME's disinterest in Nautilus I think stems from my disinterest in it, what full-time Linux user uses a file manager?
You do realize that you can use any kind of file manager from GNOME, right? It’s just a program, just as Dolphin, which you can easily install instead. Changing DE for that is just dumb, imo.
Defaults and first impressions matter though. As much as I think the matter of a personal computer you can make your own is worth fighting for, when a new user lands in the DE and doesn't have a great experience it's not a good solution to then say something along the lines of "go and explore N alternatives or dig through their configurations to find one that suits you" for each aspect of the DE they're going to be regularly interacting with. As much as they will be regularly means to an end of whatever task they do on their machine, it's a large up-front burden.
Nautilus is a fine file manager for browsing to your downloads and documents folder which I think is really all it cares to be. We're on HN so the user-stories are getting twisted.
I use GNOME as my daily driver and really like it— yeah some of their apps are shit, and some designs they made in the DE are questionable at best. But that's true of everything, any software beyond hello world will have annoyances. KDE is riddled with them like swiss cheese at a gun range which is why I think it's so funny people say they're happy with it as an alternative. You're clearly fine with bad design (KDE has some of the most famously terribly designed apps) and bugs. You just have strong opinions on what form the missteps take. And I get it KDE is a DE made for and by old-school Linux users.
> KDE is riddled with them like swiss cheese at a gun range which is why I think it's so funny people say they're happy with it as an alternative. You're clearly fine with bad design (KDE has some of the most famously terribly designed apps) and bugs.
Are you basing this off recent experiences, or impressions from 2004? I feel like this kind of criticism is precisely what people used to say around that era, but it has been many years since I last heard anyone say that about KDE. There's fair criticism one could have of KDE, but that in particular sounds like a very dated take.
If you're hearing people say that they're happy with KDE as an alternative to Gnome, and you don't know why, maybe rather than assuming a bunch of things about them, go check out KDE? You can always spin up the latest Kubuntu in qemu.
It's not that simple. Using your DE's file manager means that the file picker dialog in most programs will take your settings into account, have your personal sidebar shortcuts, etc. While it's true that a file manager is a program like any other, the overall integration of your file manager with the rest of the system does especially matter, because it affects some aspects of almost every other programs.
To further expand on this: GNOME's inane vision for "minimalism"—that is nothing but an insult to the concept itself—spreads to any system regardless of one's DE whenever GTK programs are involved due to GtkFileChooser. There are ways to prevent being unable to use basic features that have existed for decades in any functional file picker, such as using the GDK_DEBUG flag (formerly GTK_USE_PORTAL), however people suggesting this approach to the countless affected have been called "clowns" before.
> You do realize that you can use any kind of file manager from GNOME, right?
I respectfully point you to re-read my comment, particularly the phrase 'final straw'. Or do you really think I daily drive Linux while having somehow failed to appreciate the concept of installable software?
> Changing DE for that is just dumb, imo.
Pretty unkind and unconstructive thing to say, IMHO. I think I'll manage to sleep soundly tonight, despite my DE choices having failed to impress a stranger on the Internet.
Files: everybody use a file manager. Terminal: possibly everybody on HN use a terminal app. Videos and Music have much better alternatives, eg VLC. I maybe end up using them when double clicking on some files, but I'm unsure. I do use eog, the image viewer. Epiphany... is that the email client?
My main gripe with Nautilus is the UI to rename files. Instead of renaming in place like any other file manager I remember, they open a popup and rename in there
Just to make clear to the Gnome developers: you've created by far the best desktop DE there is. I hope you don't get discouraged by the constant whining of a minority clamoring for some clunky ad-hoc 90's interfaces whose suckiness is just glossed over with nostalgia and incapability to learn new and more poweful ways of using computers.
I like the GNOME experience, but to say that it's a more powerful way to use computers is just plain wrong. The only reason I use KDE instead is the inability (or additional hoops) to configure GNOME. That starts at fractional scaling and ends with something as trivial as setting different time to suspend on battery or switching to suspend-then-hibernate.
It probably is enough for the vast majority of computer users. But the ones that aren't likely to run Linux to begin with.
If you want to configure Gnome, learn to read and write text files and use dconf/gsettings. And possibly write Gnome shell extensions.
Gnome though usually just works and has well thought out defaults, so you're usually just hampering yourself with changing them. For navigating the desktop and windows I rarely have to touch the keyboard, and it works so well I don't even have the need for a secondary or larger display.
KDE et all OTOH have tend to have poorly thought out defaults leading to inconsistent mess of an inteface littered with random configuration options. A big reason for this is likely the user community who like to be "power users" by clicking buttons and refusing to learn text configuration, let alone extensions. And the DE devs then give in to the users demanding a configuration option to select a specific cat picture as the menubar background.
You could've at least checked if the examples I listed are configurable via the mechanisms listed. Aside from fractional scaling (which was my example for "hoops"), they're not. You can replace suspend with suspend-then-hibernate by linking over the suspend systemd unit. But that's most definitely not a GNOME option and prevents you from suspending.
Not to mention the numerous settings that have appeared and disappeared over the years in GNOME, not just from the graphical configuration, but also from code.
I don't understand why you want an easy to use DE with intuitiveness and then are okay with hiding configuration away somewhere between the Arch Wiki and the GNOME source code.
But hey, I'm glad it works for you. Doesn't for me though, even though I wish it did!
I think a salient point is the reduction in hackability in modern open source interfaces, driven by reductive centralized developer-centric consolidation.
There's no right design ontology. Each user's need is unique, and the utter abandonment of principle over the past decade (I use GNOME 3 as the turning point) has been deleterious to the ethos that once defined Linux as the platform for those who prize ownership of their systems above closed, committee-design decision making over creating user-first interfaces.
I've returned to the BSDs in part because of it. My main system is, of course, Linux at its core, but I don't feel close to it like I did when I'd have a half dozen WMs and DEs installed, the sessions easily switchable by TTY for whatever workflow that required them.
GNOME 3 is a triumph of bureaucracy over stakeholders, developed antagonistically to the historical consideration of its users. It's a core product that satisfies no one completely, and can't, which I'm sure makes the lives of its developers easier as their stance on shutting down any dialog with users over the years has reinforced.
Perhaps someone could share how else the diversity of features of 2.32 vs 3 is a non-explanation after more than a decade, despite a pluritude of bug reports and feature requests for functionality that hasn't been replaced?
This isn't reddit. It's safe to express yourself here.
I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1].
[0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1150025
[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/3445