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by Veliladon 1453 days ago
From the article:

> As a small example, the update makes right-clicking the trashcan in the Launcher to empty it work again, without needing to open the trashcan's own window.

I feel like that single line illustrates just how badly GNOME has lost the plot over the last decade.

2 comments

AFAIK GNOME doesn't really do desktop icons and the ones Ubuntu added were actually a GNOME extension. Ubuntu chose to bundle that extension so the burden on creating a unified experience should be on them.
Not true.

GNOME 1.x, 2.x and 3 from 3.00 to 3.27 supported desktop icons.

They were removed in 3.28: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/01/gnome-desktop-icons-remo...

It was only in 2018. https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.28/

This is not ancient history. It's less than 5 years ago.

> AFAIK GNOME doesn't really do desktop icons

So the GNOME people are taking their inspiration from Windows 3.x?

Windows 3.11 docked applications onto the "desktop" when you minimized them so no, not really.

It's not really taking inspiration as much as trying new things. Everyone has copied over the desktop because everybody else did so, all the way back to when Apple first ripped off Xerox's GUI. Even on Windows I disable all the clutter of desktop icons that programs will randomly add to my desktop because they deem themselves important.

I personally don't see the benefit, but people who do can pick a distro that writes a well-integrated desktop icon addon (apparently, not Ubuntu).

Apparently so does every recent OS, e.g. Windows, Mac, ios, Android,.... . They all feature an app drawer/launcher/start menu quite prominently and that is always not the desktop.

Having one window of the files app always open, removing all window decorations and calling it "desktop" can be good, but I won't pretend that there isn't an overarching movement away from that.

I'm using Ubuntu 20.04. Right clicking the thrash can icon works as intended.
Are you using Unity in 20.04, though?

I am; it is possible, but it is not the default. You have to manually install it. Even upgrading a 16.04 machine to 18.04 removed Unity by default and replaced it with GNOME.