Comment by shadowgovt
4 years ago
> First of all, how do developers so casually ignore this issue?
GNOME has never struck me as a project interested in implementating polish work. Polish work is disproportionately hard (it sometimes upends your understanding of the problem, forcing you to rethink your core structures, which impacts other features. In short, polish work has a tendency to explode).
> Second of all, how do users so casually ignore this issue?
GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers. Those who couldn't take it stopped using GNOME.
> GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers.
Wasn't the whole spiel of Gnome 3 that it was all about "UIXP" and perfection on defaults, sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? That's effectively all about interfaces that do very little, but do it very well - i.e. they are super-polished, if less featureful.
It is true, though, that a lot of people stopped using GNOME. In fact, despite Ubuntu and RedHat effectively pumping users into the ecosystem for years, most Linux folks I know use either KDE or boutique DEs.
I don't know enough about GNOME's history, but I wonder if the people making those promises fell into the trap of believing that a more polished desktop environment would be one with cleaner code, and when they said super-polished they meant clean abstractions.
A super-polished UI (in the sense of "well-rounded, meets expectations, minimizes user surprise, behaves predictably") has messy abstractions because humans are messy. I've never met one that looked good on the outside and didn't have ugly snaggy bits on the inside to get all that good-lookingness to actually work in the corner cases. Perhaps GNOME has fallen into the trap of sacrificing features for purity of form. If they're saying things like "We'll have thumbnails when someone can figure out how to do it cleanly" they've fallen into that trap.
> sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary?
Scratch "if necessary". Power users have privilege, so deliberately throwing them curveballs for the sake of equitable outcomes seems to be the GNOME way.
I want to downvote this for being outrageously cynical and mean-spirited, but also I'm afraid it could actually be true
Thumbnails are not polish. They’re an essential feature of working with images.
The devil's advocate response is "How essential could they be? We went decades without 'em."
I don't think it's the right answer, but it's an answer that works (GNOME continues to be the dominant Linux desktop environment in spite of lacking that feature).
Completely realizing you aren't actually making the "devil's advocate response," but I think the response to that is "We went for a millennia without electricity, too."
Just because we went without something, doesn't mean we should accept life without it at this point.
GNOME has enjoyed the status of being basically usable, if not particularly good, throughout its history.
I still remember KDE going through what felt like years of being unusably broken during its clumsy transition from 3 to 4. That's a lot of the desktop Linux experience, really - everything constantly in flux, never quite usable. I don't blame anyone for this, it's hard to get stuff done without someone paying a team to do it, but it's really unfortunate.
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If Apple or Microsoft had something like this "misfeature" in their OS, they could and likely would lose sales.
GNOME has no customers and can't lose sales, therefore they don't have to care at all.
> If Apple or Microsoft had something like this "misfeature" in their OS, they could and likely would lose sales.
I disagree. Microsoft and Apple[1] had both had immense blunders that users hated, yet those users still paid money for the blunders.
At least with Gnome, people switched.
[1] I've used almost all the Window Managers and Desktop environments since 1995, I've used Windows since 1995. The current apple GUI is more painful to figure out than I had expected when I started using it last year. It's easily one of the least intuitive environments that I've come across, and watching non-tech users struggle with it reinforces my point.
Sure - not everyone will stop using it, but some will, and that's lost sales. Even if it can't be quantified, the concept can be "sold" to some executive and get the problem fixed.
I mean, GNOME is the default on several commercially supported distributions. Redhat is the largest contributor. Granted, a lot of those commercially supported distributions are for customers who don't care about GUI uses but Ubuntu and RHEL/Fedora have a decent number of workstation users. KDE/Plasma have much less commercial support (AFAIK) and are probably closer to what you're saying, but at least to my tastes manage to be much more sensible.
But does anyone buy those - the very term "commercially supported" implies it's being marketed toward companies (think: enterprise) and everyone knows enterprise software is the most user-friendly ever invented (oh wait, the users are the purchasers).
Yet GNOME is the most polished Linux Desktop Environment.
It's easy to polish something that doesn't have many visible parts.