GNOME 40 Released (phoronix.com) 49
The GNOME 40 desktop update has been released with a bunch of new improvements. Phoronix summarizes the major changes: GNOME 40 is out with the GTK4 toolkit in tow, many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell including major changes to the dash and workspaces, Mutter has continued refining its Wayland support, Mutter also added a native headless back-end for testing, atomic mode-setting is now supported, input handling is now done in a separate thread, and a wide variety of other improvements. And, yes, there is also the big shift in GNOME's versioning practices moving forward while still sticking to the same six month release regiment. The release announcement and release notes can be found at their respective links.
Shudder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Shudder...
https://mate-desktop.org/ [mate-desktop.org] for me, please.
Gnome seems to want to be Windows, hiding more and more of the nuts and bolts behind pretty pieces of fabric and cardboard that you have to sort of feel your way around and through in order to get anything done.
And forget less is more. Their less is less. Icons that disappear into the background, functionality that suddenly disappears, menus that are now hidden, notifications that simply are no longer available.
They've fixed it to a point that it's no longer suitable for purpose.
In my opinion....
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Well, not quite. At least compared to kwin and compiz.
You have the show windows in activity view, but compiz and kwin had all sorts of options for keystrokes to show different selections (current application, from all desktops, from current destkop, all windows from all desktops with the desktops separate and miniature) and you start typing and the visible windows automatically filter according to your search.
In Gnome shell, the closest anyone managed to do was an extension that just gives a text list of wi
Re:Shudder... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes default settings are awkward and clumsy to use. And fixing weird defaults by searching Google until you find some magic command-line options for gsettings is not a good, such as setting Gtk/DialogsUseHeader to move your file chooser "Save" button back to the traditional place.
Most people just want to get work done.
I agree with that literal statement, even if we don't agree what that means.
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Most people just want to get work done.
I agree with that literal statement, even if we don't agree what that means.
And that is EXACTLY why The Gnome philosophy on "controls" is so wrong. I love that it is spelled out so clearly right here. People need control over their environments so work can get done.
We all think differently and end up with different work flows. An interface should accommodate that, not interfere. My work flow looks very different from yours. Am I doing it wrong because I don't have the same work flow?
(ignore this part please)
It seems that Gnome is trying to enforce their vision of right and wrong. T
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Unfortunately some bastard removed the option to have the scroll bar on my terminal on the left hand side; like all right thinking people know to be the one true way.
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But to be fair MATE wants to be Windows 95. Gnome wants to be macOS.
It's tough to be a macOS if the user experience has been inconsistently presented for the past 20 years. What people like about macOS isn't entirely the aesthetic or the technological aspects of GUI implementation. It is more about a well planned workflow for end-users and a nearly consistent behavior from applications. The trouble with the latter is you need enough clout to influence application developers to do it your way. But that is not the Linux ecosystem at all, GNOME doesn't have every application d
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But to be fair MATE wants to be Windows 95
Well, MATE mostly just wants to keep Gnome 2.x design sensibilities going. The difference between MATE's general default look and Windows 10 is size of the tasklist and whether the tasklist includes words.
the users spend time in their applications.
I find Gnome shell too constrained in managing a larger volume of windows compared to, say KDE. Mainly because MATE continues metacity and kwin is much better, I go with Plasma for my desktop. I did like the alt-tab, alt-above-tab distinction in Gnome and they execute it much better than KDE's compromis
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Get off my lawn!
Re: Shudder... (Score:2)
MATE is what happens when features are added and added and nothing is ever taken away. It is the desktop equivalent of a hoarder.
It can work once you get everything customized just right, but if you make the mistake of going into the basement that is the various control panels and options, you will be overwhelmed by the mess.
Gnome 3 made some weird design decisions I disagreed with, but I prefer having to add extensions to make it work how I want rather than having every option installed by default and sift
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I used to jump around between Gnome and KDE, but Gnome 3+ cemented me as a KDE user like no amount of KDE 4.0 through 4.6 ever could.
I mean, after KDE 4.0, I jumped wholeheartedly to Gnome... I thought. Then they released Gnome 3 a couple years later and I was like "how bad could KDE 4 be?" That answer was "ok" in 4.6, and rapidly improving instead of devolving into whatever Gnome is now.
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In my opinion....
And not only yours. I may not be the best example but I one stopped using plain Ubuntu once they changed [back] to gnome and I spent far too much time trying to make it still work for me.
Unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
So when KDE did their big reinvention with KDE 4 and had a uselessly anemic experience and a huge regression from KDE3, they (eventually) pretty much ultimately recovered and restored the function.
Gnome shell at least has not recovered much of the functionality from the latter gnome 2.x days. Of course the difference is that KDE didn't intend to be less featureful, they just didn't get everything done by 4.0 and Gnome is quite deliberate in their design choices to be pretty limited. I'm not sure who they think the audience is (enthusiast Linux users find it too limiting, embedded is going to use some Kiosk arrangement, and 'casual' linux users are going to be using Android or ChromeOS.
If I wanted a desktop environment so limiting, I might as well run Windows.
Some of the Gnome family of applications are pretty good though.
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The one thing I'd really LOVE to see in KDE (or in Gnome apps?) is better support for switching the file picker to whatever environment you're running in. I've grown to really enjoy KDE's picker.
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Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern GNOME is horrendously limiting compared to modern Windows,
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and 'casual' linux users are going to be using Android or ChromeOS.
And you just answered your own question. Linux has a casual user problem, and Gnome was trying to address just that. Android or ChromeOS are not Windows alternatives.
If I wanted a desktop environment so limiting, I might as well run Windows.
The great thing about Linux is that you have choices. I don't use Gnome either, that doesn't mean there isn't a potential market for what they are doing.
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The issue I have is that a more constrained DE isn't really going to move the needle for casual adoption. In fact, I would say Microsoft is finding that certain things they previously thought would be a nightmare to even make possible don't even cross the paths of casual users (notably, virtual desktops, WSL, etc).
It's not that desktop environments provide a 'too hard' experience, it's just that Microsoft and Apple largely got a lock on the home desktop in the 90s and that momentum has continually carried o
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I couldn't disagree more. Linux has a reputation as the hard hacker OS that isn't suitable for normal use. Sure Windows has a stranglehold, but nothing demonstrates this point of Linux's reputation more than how easily ChromeOS overtook its desktop market share.
Linux has both an image problem and we also suck at marketing.
I do agree with the issue about Gnome being "primary" choice. There's no need for that, and the disapproval of the community demonstrates that nicely through the existence of forks that do
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ChromeOS share has grown because it was a device that was marketed as 'just enough device to just let Google take care of everything for you and your device doesn't matter'. Meaning the point of the device is that if it got lost or stopped booting, you could just pick a new one and pick up where you left off. So people got it for schools and people who were tired of being afraid of their device breaking being the end of their data. It isn't because they wanted a variant on the general purpose desktop, it's
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You made my point for me. It was simple, well marketed and cheap. Linux runs on absolute potatoes. The only thing missing is marketing and an easy UI.
Although...
and your device doesn't matter
You must be remembering a different ChromeOS because I for one remember it being released on laughably overspec'd and expensive laptops which we openly mocked here on Slashdot. The kind of "low cost" device that had a 4K display when the default laptop was still 1080p.
Linux desktop distributions want to cater to the same general usage model that OSX and Windows do: devices that are locally capable and generally pretty open ended in the sorts of applications and files you want to run. There is no amount of 'easy' that will make people go away from OSX and/or Windows without some fundamental change like how Chromebooks are pseudo-thinclients to cloud hosted data.
That is spectacularly ignorant of the role of an OS. It's not the OS that decides
Is GNOME for phones? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The simplified Linux UI for the retiree's My First Linux GUI distro. It all needs to be big so they don't need to get their reading glasses.
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Hey, I resemble that remark!
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You must have meant retardees, not retirees.
Retirees have been using computers 30+ years and wouldn't touch gnome with a 10-foot walking pole. Grumpy old people want usability, not elegance and rounded-corner-cuteness.
Still Over-Simplified, or Usable ? (Score:2)
I don't like it when hide stuff away in the name of "cleanness" ( eff you Marie Kondo ) and I hate it when you can't get to stuff you need to when you want to ( with a right click, say ).
I left Gnome a long time ago because it did this.
Is this version any better ?
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No, it's worse. It is dumbed down to the point of idiocy.
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It should be straightforward by default, and not *require* you to tinker to get going, but providing options to tinker does not mean the user must mess with it.
Frankly, even if they didn't have a GUI for them all but still had the same level of flexibility as say KDE if you threw enough gsettings magic at it, I'd be fine. However a lot of capability is just explicitly not there to enable no matter what. In theory the ability to go in and code up custom UI in javascript has some potential, but there's only s
What? No April first is a week away posts? (Score:2)
I did a double-take on my calendar just to verify it wasn’t April 1...
Desktop icons (Score:2)
Can I have my desktop icons back?
Like on the Macintosh in 1984?
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And whatever happened to right-click an icon or object to get to the properties? Intuitive like every other GIU out there.
Is it like Mac OS? (Score:2)
All my computers are running Linux Mint MATE, so I have only a little experience with Mac OS X and almost no experience with GNOME. So I could be completely wrong here.
But looking at the announcement for GNOME 40, it struck me that it's a lot more like Mac OS X than it used to be. In the early release of GNOME Shell, there were these little previews of the various workspaces, and IIRC you started with one and could ask for more. Now the workspaces seem to be arranged next to each other, like MATE does or
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P.S. Does GNOME 40 let you have a "minimize" button on your windows now?
It is in Gnome Advanced Configuration app (gnome-tweaks), which probably is not installed by default.
Coming soon... (Score:1)
For the Enterprise (Score:2)
Enterprise IT departments don't like an infinite number of different customizations that have been set by their users, creating a maintenance headache when a problem arises. Enterprises like homogeneity.
That is also the reason why each Windows release offers less and less customization options.
Regimen (Score:2)
The word is not regiment, it's regimen. A regiment is "a permanent unit of an army typically commanded by a colonel and divided into several companies, squadrons, or batteries and often into two battalions." A regimen is "a prescribed course of medical treatment, way of life, or diet for the promotion or restoration of health."
Ugly (Score:2)
Every release of Gnome has been uglier than the previous one. The whole team needs replaced. Preferably by people who don't design their numbering based on irrelevant and illogical issues amongst thick people.