[zxzax]

I find it pretty disappointing that these type of articles and the resulting comments like yours often can't seem to praise something like IceWM or AwesomeWM without also bashing GNOME or XFCE or something else because of "bloat." Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the whole point.

Also, your characterization of GNOME's rationale is totally wrong. The goal was never to make a desktop with no features, it was more to make a desktop that is streamlined towards certain functionality. If that's not for you, then use a desktop that's more streamlined towards what you want. There's plenty to choose from. What is the real problem?

Edit: I also want to address another common misconception that I see -- the GNOME Foundation does not direct development in a top down fashion and does not impose any rationale on the project. If some feature was removed, it was probably because an individual volunteer working on it decided that it wasn't worth spending time on that anymore, possibly because the need was better filled by a different project.

[jejones3141]

All I can say is that GNOME 3 seems to take Havoc Pennington's famous essay about as far as it can go, considering configurability a bug. I don't know exactly when it started, but it definitely came to my attention bigtime with the infamous gnome-screensaver.

Useful links: 1. https://ometer.com/preferences.html, the subset of Mr. P's original essay that the original contains a link to. 2. https://www.derstandard.at/story/1313024283546/gnome-designe..., an interview with Jon McCann.

[zxzax]

Yes, I would agree that a lot of GNOME developers still view that as a design goal. But not all do, and even so, having less configurability doesn't mean less features. If you ask me, practically speaking, what it has meant is that there is a larger collection of smaller apps to choose from. So if the app you want lacks a configuration option, you might be better served by trying to find a different app that just works the way you want the first time.

[prvc]

>Do you even care? I don't think you do, you'll just delete that desktop and move on and use whatever you want, and that's the whole point.

For the record: I care.

[zxzax]

Can you elaborate? Is there something particular that you need that doesn't work on an RPi? If it turns out to be a small fix, then ultimately you may end up caring a lot less than you think.

[prvc]

Also, telling an individual user to "just use another DE" does not solve the problem, whose effects are widespread, on a whole ecosystem of software, its users, and developers.

[zxzax]

Could you please explain specifically what one or more of these effects is? I may be able to offer suggestions on how to mitigate it. When I was talking about using something else I was specifically referring to the article, which is talking about using a different window manager, and makes a good case for switching, and may even be able to help you deal with some of those effects. I assume you agree with the article, if not then I don't understand because it seems odd to me to single out this one passing mention in a paragraph that otherwise goes against what was just said, so please elaborate if you can.

[daptaq]

I'm not sure what the other user was thinking about, but I think that GNOME's push towards client-side window decoration is annoying and imposing. Depending on your WM, some applications become "useless", they waste space on small screens and just reinforce a sense of fragmentation. I get that it looks better on GNOME, and I appriciate it when using GNOME, but as there seems to be no system to remove the CSD on traditional systems, I still think it is an overall bad move.

[zxzax]

Others may find that pushing towards server-side window decoration is annoying and imposing, so this is unfortunately an area where not everyone can be happy. In any case you may be interested to try a patch: https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic

[jrm4]

Nope. I will continue to bash GNOME because it's something like "the opposing political party." I want Free Software, and by extension, Linux, to gain ground on desktops, and I genuinely believe that GNOME's "philosophy" is not a good one and is detrimental to this cause.

Roughly, I'd characterize it like the following: I believe that the best way for Linux to gain ground is to be a serious, perhaps even a little boring, but definitely "grown-up" desktop. Simplicity is very important, but tt should lean toward configurability and techniness.

What it should NOT do is what GNOME is trying to do, which is trying to streamline and appeal to everyone. This approach is like trying to beat Apple at their own game, which is dumb -- given that beating Microsoft at their own game is well within our reach. Heck, look at Windows 11, we're like a third of the way there already.

[zxzax]

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to each other. They're not really even close to being that, they're open source projects that collaborate on a sizable amount of things. If you believe there is a better way to do something then just contribute to another desktop. The existence of GNOME doesn't prevent you from doing that and isn't detrimental to it, especially when you consider that the cost of switching to another open source desktop is a big fat $0. Please don't unnecessarily politicize things, one of the benefits here is that you explicitly don't have to do that.

To put it another way: maybe some specific mode of "Linux gaining ground on desktops" with "configurability and techniness" is your goal, but people working on any given desktop (including GNOME) may not share that goal in the same way you do, and it doesn't make any sense to expect them to.

[jrm4]

Obviously, I can't expect them to. I'm not paying them. But I can absolutely encourage and discourage different ways of thinking and doing, and I'm absolutely free to express that. And yes, I would like to discourage "the GNOME way."

To elaborate a bit about why I'm saying this; For quite some time, onboarding people to Linux was pretty easy. "Just use Ubuntu" was a really good answer. And then Unity came along, with a) bloat and b) this new paradigm that was ostensibly as simple as a Mac, but different enough that people wouldn't recognize it. And this was a terrible direction for Ubuntu to go, especially since XP was on its way out.

And now, when people ask me, hey, how do I get started with Linux, and they've heard of Ubuntu, I can't just say "Yeah, go for it." I have to launch into a thing and name 2 or 3 different distros, primarily due to the weirdness of GNOME. I appreciate freedom and choice, but I'm also quite free to say, I believe the following: I really wish the GNOME people would more-or-less give up, because they have mindshare not off of the quality of their current interface, but because of the momentum of their old one plus Ubuntu. I believe that (much like Windows, frankly) if they actually had to compete in this space on the merits, they'd lose out.

KDE (and LXDE and others) are doing a better job of making a predictable useful interface.

[zxzax]

I don't understand what you're trying to discourage, what you're saying doesn't follow. That has nothing to do with "the GNOME way" and is mostly related to the decisions made by Canonical, who decided to make their own desktop, and then dropped it in favor of GNOME. Asking the GNOME people to give up isn't going to make it viable for Ubuntu to develop their own desktop again that is more to your liking. Your issue is with them, not with GNOME. And according to them, you seem to have it exactly backwards: it was Unity that was not able to compete on merits, so it was dropped in favor of GNOME.

But anyway it sounds like you just fixed that by using a different distro, you can even just suggest the KDE or LXDE spins of Ubuntu. Those still exist, and it's not hard to use them. If you're already using them then it's very hard for me to see what your actual complaint is or what you're trying to discourage. It's true you're free to express what you want, but please consider that what you're expressing may not be something that was done with having the full information. I've noticed there is a lot of confusion about what GNOME is and a lot of people seem to mix it up and equate it with Ubuntu or Red Hat or something, which is understandable, but it's not true. I'm only here to explain why.

And just to make it painfully clear: it is already hard enough to maintain open source and fix all the issues and improve the quality of the current interfaces, without people constantly demanding that open source maintainers give up and stop fixing bugs. If you want to get things fixed, you really don't need to do this.

[jrm4]

It's not all that complicated. I'm presuming there are people and companies out there working to make these interfaces, to some extent, for other people to use. Maybe it's business, maybe it's love.

Thus, I'm commenting as a fan/user/potential customer, who might find this useful in some way. Or not. Sports fans can talk about their team or the state of the game or what they like and don't like. That's what I'm doing. I'm not "demanding," and if anything, I'm arguing for less work. By the GNOME people, because their thing is a waste of time. Go work on the better things :)

[zxzax]

>their thing is a waste of time

This is incorrect. GNOME users would not consider it a waste of time, just like KDE users would not consider it a waste of time for someone to do work on KDE, or Mac users would not consider it a waste of time to work on macOS, etc. Please consider that your suggestion can be considered rude, you are simply not the target audience.

In general, open source doesn't work like this. These are volunteers, nobody can really tell them to go work on something else, because they work on what they feel like, which may or may not be seeking the approval of people like you. If you want to find another project that seeks your approval, that's great, go do that, let us know about it later and maybe I'll even try it out. If your goal is to harass open source developers until they quit open source, then please stop doing that, that would be making it worse for everyone.

[pjmlp]

> I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying or what the point of your bashing is. GNOME and KDE and XFCE and whatnot are not political parties and are not opposed to each other.

They surely where born that way, GNOME only exists due to the original Qt license.

Then Gtk+ was always the go to framework for C devs, while KDE was embraced by C++ community on GNU/Linux.

Murray did a very good job for the C++ refugees on GNOME/Gtk, but that has always been a minority versus being on KDE land.

[zxzax]

I honestly haven't seen any real license drama about that for like 10 years now. Qt and GTK are (mostly) the same license.

Also I really wouldn't say that C and C++ are equivalent to political parties, that's like saying the same thing about coke and pepsi.

[pjmlp]

Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no matter what.

You haven't seen any drama, really?

https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...

C vs C++ flame wars have been a thing since C++ was born at AT&T.

Since you aren't following up the news,

"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk

"We stopped teaching C"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUTJ2UNXxI

You can find similar stuff from C side, specially if you back in time to GNOME mailing lists, Usenet archives from comp.lang,languagex

[zxzax]

I figured you would post that. I have heard no actual KDE developers saying that's a problem. They don't use Qt LTS. The "drama" there seems to be mostly confined to unrelated internet forums.

As for your posts about C, I can give a personal anecdote: I would agree with those sentiments, C has a lot of really bad problems as a language. But yet, I still write it a lot more often than C++. So It's not as simple as you're making it out to be. Also I checked some of those slides and I wouldn't describe anything there as a "flame war."

>Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no matter what.

If you really want to look at things that way, you could, but this seems to not be strictly true. Just because there is taking sides does not mean there has to be fighting or politics.

[kstrauser]

Gnome feels like what you’d get if someone read a lot about macOS and wanted to emulate it, but had never actually used it. Gnome makes it very easy for new users to get started and very hard for experienced users to adjust it. Mac makes it easy for new users, but still gives power users room to grow.

[pjmlp]

Specially in the what concerns the developer experience of macOS, regarding frameworks, IDE and languages.

On GNOME the documentation seems to have stagnated, then we had Anjuta, now GNOME Builder (which tries to be XCode like), a UI design tool that is being re-written from scratch, the various frameworks don't seem to compose, and then each binding does their own stuff, only adapts a couple of Gtk tutorial samples to their own language.

Naturally being GNU/Linux, everything that falls out of the UI only has POSIX or GNU/Linux specific C APIs to refer back to, yet another experience completely devoid of how things work on macOS (there is no Foundation, Accelerate, Core...).

[anthk]

Gstreamer, Cairo...

[pjmlp]

Depends on the year, if you haven't been paying attention they are on their way out, and then we have again the issue of documentation, tooling, language bindings,...

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> Gnome feels like what you’d get if someone read a lot about macOS and wanted to emulate it, but had never actually used it.

I find this statement humorous because I've said much the same thing about Linux Desktop GUIs in general. "It's like they were made by someone who's only ever had a GUI described to them in an email". Compared to a system like the original Macintosh or RiscOS that thought hard about how to abstract things for a graphical display and a mouse, or even Windows that just copied as much of that as they could get away with, it's really quite terrible.

[alisonkisk]

Even Linus Torvalds and Debian stopped resisting GNOME 3 and agreed that it's manageable for an experienced user to configure it or their needs.

[pjmlp]

Sorry to disappoint you but GNU/Linux is definitely not a third of the way to compete with a Windows 11 desktop, and the best it will ever manage is to run on top of Hyper-V.

[alisonkisk]

> I will continue to bash GNOME because it's something like "the opposing political party."

This is a vice, not a justification.

[imwillofficial]

> “Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do“

> “ The goal was never to make a desktop with no features”

Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn’t matter to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman.

So to address your first paragraph, I’d say people here care a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most of us here would LOVE to see improvement in $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn’t appeal to us.

As for the second paragraph, GP didn’t say “no features” in reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them.

I’d take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.

[zxzax]

I'm not accusing anyone of that and I'm not misquoting, please stop with this hostility. In my experience, people are happy to switch when it suits them. By "no features" I was referring to those basic features. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the record, if you'd like to get involved in development, places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests don't visit here.

[imwillofficial]

So let me get this straight. According to you, I should not criticize software that does not meet my needs lest it be interpreted as bashing and ruin the party for those who do use the software in question? That’s my take, please correct me if I’m not understanding your point properly.

Also, no hostility here. I find these discussions illuminating.

As for Reddit and HN, these places are excellent places for such commentary. Often times the maintainers of different packages heed complaints leveled here and change their ways. That’s a win for everyone if the change is a positive one.

[zxzax]

>According to you, I should not criticize software that does not meet my needs

I have not said that, I just asked you for your specific criticisms.

[imwillofficial]

I don’t know what GP deemed as basic functionality that was removed from GNOME. I use MacOS on the desktop.

[zxzax]

Well there you go, you switched to a Mac :)

[imwillofficial]

> “ I find it pretty disappointing” - Then you go into the praise vs bashing.

What do you find disappointing? I guess that’s what I’m driving at. When somebody knocks MacOS, and it’s a valid point, I hope somebody from Apple is reading! Then maybe it gets fixed. So why would that arrangement disappoint you?

[zxzax]

For me personally I find the endless "Linux desktop wars" to be disappointing. It doesn't matter, this stuff is open source, if you really want it to be fixed then just go write a patch. But in my experience most people will just take a few minutes to switch to one of the many alternatives.

I'm just relaying what other people have told me, these type of forums are full of uninformed comments, and are not a good place to solicit feedback. You could hope that maybe an Apple engineer would read it but they probably won't. You would have better luck sending them feedback through their official channels, where you know they will read it. If you're giving feedback to a YC startup then this would be a good place, but otherwise not so much.

[imwillofficial]

“ these type of forums are full of uninformed comments”

Hacker News has solid representation from Big Tech, FOSS projects, and Academia. What data do you have to back up that this is a bad place to air grievances with software?

Whenever anyone mentions Amazon, my ears perk up. If it is within my power to correct, I take action. So what data do you have to support the assertion that HN comments are uninformed, and that this is only a good forum for YC startups?

[lobstrosity420]

The people that characterize GNOME this way are desperate to identify themselves with a certain sub group of Linux users that prides themselves in doing things the hardest possible way (such as recompiling your terminal every time you want to change the font size) because it makes them feel 1337. Don't sweat it too much, it's just a little bit of garden variety internet tribalism.

[anthk]

Not leet. Gnome is unusable in any machine older than 2015. Also, CWM flies on my 2007 netbook.

[zxzax]

I completely disagree, I'm using GNOME on a laptop from 2008 now. It's working fine for me. I did tweak it a little bit however.