[blueflow]

It is infuriating that they used systematic approaches to UX and still came up with the current thing. I said it before, too many implicit gestures that are not discoverable until you google for it.

Last time i tried GNOME was last week and gave up after a day.

[Intralexical]

A lot of times, what you should be doing should probably be relatively obvious anyway. [1] Other times, the people you should be trying to understand are already directly and nearly universally telling you how they feel, and all you actually have to do is just listen. [2]

I'm not saying systematic ways of thinking are universally useless, but the appearance of being "systematic" or "objective" certainly seems to attract some people who use complexity as a means of obfuscating, and of reducing other people to a passive object of study or subject of control. In those cases, "research" isn't a way of finding what's correct. The important thing to them is that they're correct; they already know that they are, and the "studies" are meant to make sure you know it too as they do whatever they already wanted to do anyway.

Such individuals rarely seem to care about "evidence" at the start of their decisions. Only when they're trying to shut down subjective critical opinions, or rationalize the actions they've already taken.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Controversy_over_...

[blueflow]

I did not know that the GNOME 3 thing was such a big controversy. I dropped GNOME during that time for the same reasons, but i was unaware of how big this was.

[Intralexical]

Oh yeah, no. Multiple entire desktop environments with significant popularity (Cinnamon, MATE) owe their existence today to how universally hated GNOME 3 was, and how obstinant and intolerant the GNOME developers were towards differing opinions that challenged their "vision".

In fact, the same thing is sorta playing out even right now with GTK4 and other GNOME stuff, though I think with somewhat less public spectacle but arguably even larger development efforts behind it:

https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-...

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/system76_developing_n...

https://blog.system76.com/post/closing-in-on-a-cosmic-alpha

https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop/issues/141

https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-mess-is-not-an-accident-4e...

[colanderman]

What implicit gestures? Everything in the Gnome desktop you can get to by clicking the "Activities" menu at the top-left: search bar, dock, applications button, minimized windows, and 2nd desktop all then become visible.

Granted, the applications button icon is quite nondescript (9 dots). But it's still just 2 clicks of prominent UI elements away.

Same # of clicks as Windows (Start -> Program Files) and MacOS (Finder -> Applications).

[blueflow]

Maximizing a Window. I had to google how to do it.

[colanderman]

What am I missing?.. there is a maximize button in the top-right corner of every window.

EDIT: Oh, I guess these are hidden by default? I don't remember enabling them on my setup but I've been using Gnome a few years now. I agree it would be better if they were visible by default.

[blueflow]

I only had a cross to close the window. Ubuntu 22.04.