Comment by probably_wrong
8 hours ago
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.
When you familiarise yourself with macOS, you arrive at the conclusion that GNOME is indeed not a cheap copy of Mac, it is something worse: a miserable attempt at copying its ideas. There are many examples, but from the top of my head and clicking around:
- Window title bars - Menu bars: removed while copying macOS, but no global menu either. If only it was like macOS! - Symbolic icon craze - Autohiding a context menu after 0.5 seconds of holding the button (since GTK 3) - The top right area in GNOME's Hell - The "Apps" view in GNOME's Hell, which also has a Dock wannabe - Nautilus is basically Finder - Nowadays animations that you can't turn off
Most of the damage to GNOME has been done in version 3. I've converted away from anything GTK 4 because I can't stand it anymore.
Though I admit that it's cohesive and if you expect very little, it kind of works. Also there's probably nothing better for touch screens.
On dialogs: I don't think it's fair to say "it's GTK, not Gnome" when a. the behavior started happening with Gnome 3, b. it doesn't happen in Mate, and c. GTK is maintained by the GNOME Project. Behavior, BTW, that (AFAIK) was exclusive until then to MacOS.
On categories: I don't think the Debian people had a big input into how the menu was supposed to look like. I'm willing to bet that it's the default seeing as, again, it's also the default in MacOS.
But on the main topic: I believe that good design should be invisible, and Gnome 3 was the absolute opposite of that. Take Firefox mobile: one day they asked me if I wanted to try the new layout with the navigation bar on the bottom, I said yes, and I never looked back because it made my life SO MUCH easier. In contrast, Gnome's Wikipedia page has an entire section titled "criticism" detailing entire distros that dropped it and successful forks that kept the old behavior. I therefore feel strongly against the idea that it was "well thought out", or more precisely, I think it may he been "well thought out" but not "well tested with the actual users".