[ErroneousBosh]

> or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE)

What do you find "dumbed down" and unusable about it?

Press ctrl-alt-T, and a terminal appears. Begin typing.

Press the flag key and a kind of menu thing you can type the name of apps into appears. Type "firefox" or "vscode" as appropriate, begin typing.

It could hardly be made any more straightforward.

[tapoxi]

they still, to this day, pretend the concept of a system tray doesn't exist. unfortunately applications expect one, so they put it behind a menu in a dropdown with a picture of a ghost so you know an app is hiding somewhere

it's insane

[ErroneousBosh]

Okay, what's a "system tray" and what would you use it for?

[Natfan]

a container for information related to your system (datetime, battery, networking, along with custom things that 3rd party apps might put in (automated mouse jiggler, chat client etc)

think i3bar if you need a unix-style equivalency

[ErroneousBosh]

Not something I've ever seen (or noticed, at least) or used.

There's a clock at the top of the screen in Gnome.

[troad]

> Not something I've ever seen (or noticed, at least) or used.

It's all the icons next to the clock, placed there by applications that run in the background but need occasional interactivity.

It's the thing at the bottom right of every Windows since Windows 95, and the top right of every Mac since Mac OS X. KDE has always had it in the Windows position. Gnome had it in the Mac position from Gnome 2 (2002) until recently (Gnome 4?).

Something that every desktop OS considers important enough to show, except Gnome, which insists your computer is a bad iPad for some reason.

[ErroneousBosh]

I guess you'd have to have used Windows to miss it then. I don't understand why it would be important.

Why would I care about what the network is doing?

[mghackerlady]

Its not that (thats actually really good) its the application design being unsuitable for complex tasks

[ErroneousBosh]

Can you give an example of that? Which applications? Which tasks?

[mghackerlady]

They removed dual-pane splits in the file manager ffs. They replaced gedit with a much less capable text editor. Why are all the buttons so big? Why the padding?

[ErroneousBosh]

Okay, can't say I've ever used the Gnome file manager, and while I have used gedit I haven't done so for many years and had kind of forgotten it was there.