[osoba]

Regarding that GNOME update, do GNOME developers just don't have any competence in UX design? That screencast is suggesting you need to click the activities button in the top left corner to be able to reveal a nav panel that's all the way at the bottom.

Similarly, right now, in current versions, in the file selection interface the Select button is in one corner of the window and Cancel all the way in the other.

Or the annoying unnecessary dialogue when you uncompress from an archive (no I don't want an app-blocking notification that the file extracted successfully).

[wazoox]

> That screencast is suggesting you need to click the activities button in the top left corner to be able to reveal a nav panel that's all the way at the bottom.

That's already the default way it works, and it's perfectly insufferable. AFAIK almost everyone uses an extension or another that makes the panel a permanent or auto-hiding dock, like any other reasonable desktop OS.

I can't see any drastic change, actually. Apparently the main difference is that the panel is visible at login, instead of being hidden (therefore stumping new users that can only see an empty desktop and nothing else).

[jmnicolas]

To me since Gnome 3, it feels like Gnome devs are covering their hears with their hands and shouting loudly to be sure they don't hear their users.

Why would they change though? There are no consequences.

[not_knuth]

pojntfx also already pointed to some great resources to understand their reasoning.

Also, it's a FOSS project. Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved. Just try and be kind when you make suggestions. Or, even better, contribute yourself: https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/

[wazoox]

> Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved.

Unfortunately that's not how the Gnome project has been run. Even back in Gnome 2.x times. There's a famous very funny jwz blog post about this (that I won't link because of some well known reasons).

[not_knuth]

I'm afraid I'm the kind of naive person that believes in the best intention of people and have not read that blog post. So I will have to be provided with a link to better understand and judge for myself.

[alexdw_mgzi]

If you link to that particular blog from HackerNews, he checks the referer and serves you up a nasty message instead of the blog post. So, instead of providing a direct link, search for JWZ, GNOME and CADT.

[not_knuth]

Can someone explain to me why I'm getting downvoted for this? Maybe the phrasing was a bit strange, but I just wanted to understand...

[turminal]

The problem is they weren't really kind towards people with suggestions in the past.

[not_knuth]

I've heard this many times before, but have never made the experience myself. Can you please share a link to examples?

I'm just trying to understand where this bad reputation for gnome comes from.

[traverseda]

That gnome doesn't really listen to end user feedback? I think this is a pretty great example: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244

Patches are available for type-ahead, in particular the gtk-mushrooms fork. If open source is about "scratching your own itch" gnome is making it really hard for developers to do that. There was discussion of burying that features somewhere deep in the gnome registry, all kinds of options, but it's clear that pull requests are not welcome, even if the option is buried deep in some config file somewhere and is only accessible to power users.

That seems to be the case a lot of the time when outsiders try to solve their own problems with a pull request. There's just no room for compromise or for solving your own problems.

[nightski]

Wow that thread was infuriating and I don't even use GNOME. What a tone deaf response from the dev.

[cycloptic]

That's only one example and the issue was closed specifically because it conflicts with their UX designs created by a professional designer: https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/tree/mast...

As a point of comparison, you may want to look through all the other merge requests that actually do get accepted, the majority of them do: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests?sta...

[not_knuth]

I was only referring to the fact that Gnome developers get such a bad rap for being unfriendly, as the GGP stated.

The link was an interesting read eitherway and I can absolutely understand where the frustration comes from. The users' comments just flew over the developers' heads. Nonetheless it looks more like a breakdown in communication than willfully ignoring with deceitful intentions on the part of the developers in my opinion.

[turminal]

I'm sorry I can't find the link but I remember reading a discussion on a freedesktop gitlab issue tracker in which some developers of other wayland desktops wanted to standarize a wayland protocol extension that everyone but Gnome already used. A Gnome dev showed up and told everyone this is not needed because the problem at hand is solved with dbus in Gnome. Everyone told him that the extension is already widely adopted (not to mention dbus was Linux only at the time and solving this with dbus would cut off any BSD users from that feature). The response was basically 'the only adoption that matters is Gnome adoption and Gnome did not adopt this, so it's irrelevant'.

[cycloptic]

>dbus was Linux only at the time and solving this with dbus would cut off any BSD users from that feature

I'm sorry but this has never been true during the development of wayland. A quick search shows dbus has been in freebsd since 2004, before wayland even existed: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/devel/dbus/Makefile?vi...

The problem with creating additional wayland-only solutions is that they tend to need good, strong implementations in the toolkits first for it to really make sense over a dbus implementation that already exists. (The wayland api is not particularly friendly for application programmers) The person advocating for the protocol is usually the one who has to implement that.

[pojntfx]

The reasoning behind the GNOME UX is described in their HIGs and is quite similar to iOS, with it's pros and cons: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/. GNOME 40 is also developed openly and a lot of live coding is going on right now (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2OhXheV-cw), so if users have UX suggestions there are many ways to contribute and get your ideas out there. You can now also try out the newest GNOME nightlies with GNOME OS, available here or through the "+" button in GNOME Boxes: https://os.gnome.org/

[turminal]

> GNOME 40 is also developed openly and a lot of live coding is going on right now (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2OhXheV-cw), so if users have UX suggestions there are many ways to contribute and get your ideas out there.

Gnome always struck me as a project that doesn't really listen to anyone and just follows their agenda irregardless of how damaging it is to the community.

I find it hard to believe they started listening to the community, but if it's true then I'm really glad they did.

[swiley]

TL;DR: Gnome devs think phones have superior UI design.