Comment by reddalo
7 hours ago
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.
> and you can't even imagine somebody wanting different features
You may want to read that sentence again, and change the subjects around. Maybe it's gnome doing stuff differently that you can't accept because it's not win 98?
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.
what an amazing example. We have on one window title bar:
- a "+"
- a down-arrow which presumably opens some sort of menu
- a hamburger menu (why is this different to the down arrow?)
- a "..." menu (err, isn't this the same as the hamburger menu and/or the down arrow?)
- A "hammer" icon next to the word "fetching". Because... Hammer Time! Also, yeah we use a hammer to fetch things. I think that's something we can all get behind.
- another two down-arrows. One probably opens out options for the "hammer" bar. The other...?
- an up and down arrow. Maybe this actually changes the options for the "hammer/fetching" bar.
- A search magnifying glass (no search field curiously).
- A cross.
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So you have a problem with a particular GTK application? Wow.
How about actually talking about the topic at hand, which is the gnome shell and its UX?
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.
> First, dialogs could not be dragged to the side
It's GTK, not gnome and I agree it's not the most logical behavior, but I don't think it's all that relevant to the general workflow the gnome-shell provides.
> App icon without categories
Folders are a native feature of gnome-shell, it's on your distro for not using it.
> Maximize, minimize
Getting used to something is surely a strong effect, but I don't think it's a fair criticism in and of itself, otherwise every change would be unequivocally bad. See my broader reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49829080
I really don't think gnome copied too much stuff from mac, especially that I like gnome and pretty much dislike Mac. Gnome people have a pretty well thought out design and workflow idea, so this criticism doesn't fly. I can accept that you may not like that design idea, but it's definitely not a cheap, no thought copy of Mac.
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