Comment by probably_wrong
9 hours ago
For me it was a major revelation when it was pointed out that, for someone who doesn't want his desktop changed, I did install all sorts of crazy things when I was starting with Linux (Compiz plugins, anyone?). And while Gnome 3 pushed me into Mate, it wasn't because it was different but rather because it was bad. So I'm excited about someone trying something new, particularly someone who realizes that the Desktop is not a tablet.
Here's an idea that I believe I read in HN as "the original purpose of the desktop": add a Desktop Manager that manages which icons are on your desktop and makes it easy to switch.
The desktop is kind of weird, in the sense that it's prime real estate but, at the same time, there's an expectation that you shouldn't put too much stuff there, and then it ends up cluttered anyway. I think it's worth trying a stronger separation between "Desktop" and any other regular folder, emphasizing that the Desktop is where you place links to the files you need right now, but with a mechanism to clear it completely (without losing data) and another to switch which icons you see right now, kind of like browser tab groups. That way, when you're working on a project you place the files you need on the desktop and when you're done you clean it up.
The Desktop isn't prime real estate when you are actually using your computer and have windows covering it. Then it becomes cumbersome to access anything on it, even with a one click show desktop button.
Having the desktop not also be a file dump by default and instead a space for mostly useless widgets was one of the few good things KDE 4 did.
Key issue driving any conversation about desktop environments; so many people have vastly different workflows and expectations for their computer.
Personally, I keep my desktop absolutely sterile, usually some geometric patterned background, and that's it. Autohiding taskbar, no shortcuts, etc. It keeps me from having the "stepping into another room" effect when I sit down at my computer, which I'm very prone to. That means I can hit win/option/spotlight depending on the comp and launch the program I sat down to get into, without thinking "Oh yeah, I meant to edit that excel file..." and going on a 30 minute tangent.
I agree, GNOME 3 and all the subsequent versions are so bad. They made GNOME into a glorified tablet environment, but I'm using a desktop, not a tablet, for a reason.
I'm still mad at GNOME developers for ruining such a good desktop environment.
Luckily, Linux Mint managed to create a good environment that is as pleasant as using GNOME 2.
it's not bad, you don't like it.
And you don't want to adapt.
Just watched a video of a guy ranting on Gnome 3 14 years ago, the reasons are just wtf, mentioning things I almost never used in my life.
I also had issues, but just learned to get over it and now my workflow is excellent while requiring only minimal customization.
I bought a tablet to use with Krita and settled on Manjaro because Ubuntu had so many tablet issues. Everything I tried is especially bad with 4k touchscreen/pen. I started with KDE, then Gnome but DE really didn't matter because they're all so terrible - it's now for watching videos or travel only.
How is gnome bad? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825642
There's no point in answering this question, either you get it or you don't. If you get it you get it. If you don't it's because the way you want to use your desktop fits exactly into the design decisions of GNOME and you can't even imagine somebody wanting different features. It can't even be chalked up to an extreme lack of imagination because there is a plethora of desktop environments that do things differently from GNOME that you could look up to figure out why one might think GNOME is bad.
1 reply →
Go to gnome.org, scroll down to "Developer Platform" and look at the title bar of the screenshot there. If you see a clean interface, then no reason other people give you will help.
But, if you do see the arrows there and think - why are there so many arrows and dots? It looks like bad UX. They you can see the issues others are talking about.
4 replies →
I left Gnome 3 for Mate early on and I never looked back, but here are the issues I remember.
First, dialogs could not be dragged to the side. It took me less than one day to realize that, when it comes to naming a file, I need to look at the document to remember, for instance, the name of the institution I'm writing to. If I can't move the Save dialog then I have to cancel, find the name, remember it, and start the save process again, at which point I also lost the folder I had navigated to.
Showing app icons without categories is useless to me because sometimes I don't know what the app is called, only what it does. I know I have a webcam app and I know it should be under Video, but I have no idea what it's called. Gnome's flat hierarchy makes it harder for me to find what I'm looking for.
Removing the individual window menus and the icons for minimizing and maximizing kills the muscle memory I've built over the last 30 years - same reason why I hate that the X button on Mac doesn't really close the program.
But on the topic of Mac, that's for me the main problem: that Gnome 3 wanted to be MacOS and copied their ideas regardless of whether they make sense to their users. I know the things I mentioned above may sound small but those are constant papercuts that remind me every 5 minutes that I didn't use to have so many papercuts. I can't imagine that anyone did a proper usability test before dropping what, to me, were breaking changes.
There were other factors like the attitude of "this is how it is now so take it or leave it", but the whole process led me to realize that I don't want to think about my window manager and that, if I'm thinking about it, then it's getting in my way of doing actual work.
1 reply →
I remember in the old days the desktop was like a starting point. You'd open the drive that had the program you wanted to use, double click it. Or a little later you could double click the document you wanted to edit and the relevant application would start up automatically and open the doc.
Now I never see my desktop. A handful of apps, primarily Chrome, are permanently open in front of it. The computer is always on, if I reboot then the previous state more or less restores automatically.
So the desktop itself is not really prime real estate any more. It's more of an abstract idea, the layer underneath all the useful bits. The windows have taken over.
On macOS the desktop path is where screenshots go... so mostly I just have a litter of 100s of screenshots there.
Communicating at work seems to involve taking lots of screenshots.
Usually these are files I don't really care to keep around, I just need it in the moment so I can add it to a message in Slack, Teams, Jira, Github etc.
So it feels like this primitive could maybe be built into the OS in a more developed way than just screen area -> file, so that you could access it directly from apps (in a consistent way - as an OS feature) and avoid generating junk files.
On old Macs you could drag files and folders on the desktop, work from there, and then put them back where they belonged with a single command, one by one or all at once. Applications used file IDs to refer to them, so all references kept working (not only with the desktop, but with all moves and renames). But old Macs had a different filesystem; modern filesystems are probably not fit for that.
On very old Macs, the files did not actually move! Just a flag on file metadata. IIRC, it was System 7 that introduced the Desktop folder.
Modern macOS still lets you keep editing a file even if it's moved somewhere else, I think because file editing is done with the actual file ID rather than its bare location on the filesystem.
Windows, on other hand, prevents you from doing this in my experience.
Correct. It's not so much "modern macOS" though, it's a feature of APFS[1].
[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/29/explainer-deduplication/
The Amiga Workbench was semi-spatial in that you could snapshot icons in place so their locations would persist, but you could also drag and drop icons everywhere without saving their location and it'd reset next time.
My current desktop works like that. It's not quite what you're describing, but it's a couple of minor iterations away to allow multiple different snapshots.
> The desktop is kind of weird, in the sense that it's prime real estate but, at the same time, there's an expectation that you shouldn't put too much stuff there,
If we go further into the metaphor of a desktop, there would be sections for tools and sections for pending work. The inkwell versus the blotter, if you will.
But then, well, what difference is there between a designated permanent zone of the desktop for non-tools, versus a regular window showing some contents of a folder, which the user has chosen to position above an empty area?
Persistence. If you're going to have a physical metaphor, don't throw out one of the most useful features of the thing you're emulating.
When I was on Windows there was point in time when I use Stardock's Fences, around or between 2010-2014.
Pretty nice product as I recall, lots of features to make the "Desktop" more or less dynamic. Pretty soon after I stopped using the "Desktop" entirely.
[] https://www.stardock.com/products/fences/