[HN Gopher] GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my to...
___________________________________________________________________
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are
blocked
Author : jfax
Score : 1410 points
Date : 2021-01-10 21:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jayfax.neocities.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (jayfax.neocities.org)
| skynet-9000 wrote:
| How about when you try to save a file, so you choose File Save
| As, change the directory, and then try to start typing the
| filename and it starts _searching_ (recursively!) instead of
| letting you type your new filename? Even better (not), then it
| lands on the first matching search item and makes the filename
| _that_ filename?
| apricot wrote:
| That insane bug was reported many times, and every time the
| developers reply that they won't fix it, it's our workflow
| that's broken.
|
| Are we sure GNOME developers aren't some kind of agents
| provocateurs working against free software?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I mean, their name is Red Hat...
| ironmagma wrote:
| In this case, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
| Mockapapella wrote:
| Wait, this is a GNOME thing and not a Linux thing? WTF? I've
| used GNOME for over a year now but this thread is seriously
| making me consider switching to something like KDE...
| kstrauser wrote:
| A lot of people love GNOME, so I'm speaking from a place of
| personal opinion and not as objective fact: I loathe GNOME
| and only used KDE on my Linux desktops because GNOME seemed
| to have a motto of "there's only one way to do it, and it's
| going to be awful". KDE isn't perfect, either, but GNOME was
| a death by a thousand cuts.
| tsjq wrote:
| This is an insane bug (or feature?), drives me crazy every
| single time
| maelito wrote:
| Android's file picker is usable, with thumbnails, but not great
| either.
|
| But most file transfers are done through shares.
| fnord123 wrote:
| There's a lot of discussion around the motivating example but the
| thesis is as follows:
|
| "This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and
| haven't been popularly adopted. It's little things like this that
| add up. Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it's a stretch
| to just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it's legit because there
| isn't anything else."
|
| The thesis is incorrect. There was Mac, OS/2, BeOS, Amiga, DEC,
| Solaris. It was the OEM bundling and the illegal anti competitive
| behaviour for which Microsoft was found guilty. This was quite
| plainly the reason why Microsoft became dominant on the desktop.
|
| If it were about quality, surely everyone's favourite UX would
| have been dominant. But it isn't; it sits around the same usage
| stats as Linux.
|
| And while bugs exist in GNOME and Gtk, I'm not personally moved
| by a chan board user's gripes about being unable to quickly find
| their favourite anime memes to post since all their images are
| `[1-9][0-9]*.png`
| klodolph wrote:
| OEM bundling and Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior explains
| part of it, but not all of it. There are plenty of factors.
|
| OS/2 was a mess for a ton of technical reasons, like the
| decision to support the 286, market reasons, like its price
| tag, and strategic mistakes like the decision to try and make
| money from development tools.
|
| BeOS? Sure, blame Microsoft.
|
| I don't think I can be in a room with five people without
| getting five different explanations for why Amiga failed--it
| appeared after the Mac, competed directly with both the Mac and
| Atari ST, and was mismanaged by Commodore. It didn't have much
| of a software library, compared to its competitors. In some
| ways it was seen as more of a "toy" than its competitors.
|
| DEC's business strategy was unsuited for the 80s and 90s.
| Making good processors isn't enough, it turns out.
|
| Solaris got eaten by Linux, if anything, not Windows.
|
| > This was quite plainly the reason why Microsoft became
| dominant on the desktop.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying that that isn't the main reason--
| just that there are lots of reasons to go around. Microsoft did
| a _ton_ of things right. They made new operating systems that
| consumers wanted to buy. They kept backwards compatibility with
| a large library of legacy software. They ran on cheap hardware
| with tons of suppliers. They tried to make it as easy as
| possible for developers.
|
| Like, hindsight is 20/20 and all that but Microsoft sure seemed
| to understand the market in the 1980s and 1990s.
| rablackburn wrote:
| (in the context of consumer computing)
|
| The unfortunate reality is that because Windows was so dominant
| for so long you either have to
|
| a) conform to their interaction paradigms to not frustrate
| users
|
| or
|
| b) create something incredibly polished and simple that it
| 'Just Works' how users expect it to (ie Apple).
|
| Once you have people on-boarding to your platform you can
| distinguish yourself and build out your own paradigms, but it
| takes a long time, and users are unforgiving.
|
| GNU/Linux is fantastic for power users, but the moment a
| 'normal' user has to edit a text config file, or open a
| terminal, we've lost them. When they try to do something that
| they're use to doing (see thumbnails of their files when
| choosing them) and it's not possible, GNU/Linux stops being a
| valid alternative.
|
| > I'm not personally moved by a chan board user's gripes about
| being unable to quickly find their favourite anime memes to
| post since all their images are `[1-9][0-9]*.png`
|
| You're uncharitably trivialising the author's point. A common
| user task is selecting an image file from your device (to
| upload/edit/share). A user will often have many images in a
| folder and they want to quickly select the one they're thinking
| of.
|
| There is an almost universally accepted solution (or 'best
| practice') to this problem, which is rendering each image
| visually so that the user can select the correct one at a
| glance (either as a thumbnail view in a file picker, or a
| literal grid of images as in iOS). GNOME and Gtk have not
| implemented this widely accepted (in fact, expected) behaviour,
| despite it being raised as an issue nearly 17 years ago.
|
| Instead you (and others) argue points like "well they should
| rename and manage their files", "it's just an extra click",
| "it's not that important or else it would exist already", "its
| just one inconvenient thing, get over it". And there are
| conversations to have around those points, but at the end of
| the day people are going to have a negative experience with the
| product because "it can't even render thumbnails".
|
| And the point is that this _isn't_ an isolated issue. Every
| project has something like this (Apple and Microsoft still have
| these issues), but we're particularly bad at addressing the
| issue, or even admitting it exists.
| fnord123 wrote:
| The article is an essay written upside down. The thesis is
| that there was no quality competition to windows and that's
| why it is dominant. This is plainly incorrect. The era when
| Windows gained total dominance was when everyone was getting
| daily or weekly bsods.
|
| It is a deep and complex topic and it wasn't 'heres a bug I
| don't like'. Microsoft had a monopoly on the sneakernet: file
| formats like xls, doc, and the like needed windows computers.
| They had an amazing sales force. They did the illegal
| partnering I mentioned. Loads of aspects. Quality is not a
| primary component here. Just like the inherent quality of
| javascript doesn't drive it. It's the platform and the
| platform effects and so on.
| rablackburn wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you've just said. I think
| I'm just focusing on the present and future, while you are
| talking about how we got here.
|
| I find it much easier these days to get people to consider
| trying a non-Windows environment but it never goes well
| because of these small issues.
|
| Of course people expect things to behave in certain ways
| because Microsoft had an anti-competitive monopoly and most
| people learned about computing using their platform.
|
| It's an unfair, shitty situation.
|
| But the point remains that desktop GNU/Linux has a lot of
| these little UX bugs, and we're not even paying attention
| to them. The experience isn't as smooth as Windows because
| we don't have dedicated UI/UX designers thinking over these
| issues and trying to come up with cohesive solutions.
|
| When's the last time a new consumer-facing UX paradigm that
| 'just worked' came out of the open-source world? Apple
| churns them out, oftentimes created from scratch, and it
| extends to their physical hardware design (ie the ipod
| scroll wheel was amazing for its time, airpods are a joy to
| use).
|
| The open source world makes amazing things but the UX
| quality _is_ a major issue in the uptake of new users
| today.
| mmplxx wrote:
| > The experience isn't as smooth as Windows
|
| What is smooth in Windows 10?
|
| The GUI is a chaos in every conceivable way. Have you
| used it in mixed-dpi fractional scaling setting lately?
| Even the builtin software is plagued with legacy apps
| that are unable to scale well and are aesthetically alien
| to the modern platform. Font sizes range from
| ridiculously small (file explorer) to ridiculously large
| (Edge location bar) and there is no font scaling factor
| that fits them all... that is when they even honor it.
| Most third-party apps look ancient. Installers are often
| blurry and unreadable. All Qt 5.x apps show scaling
| problems also, this is acknowledged as an important issue
| in Qt bug tracker. The task view (Win-Tab) has many
| visual glitches: it often flickers and reaccommodates
| itself after the initial rendering, it's not even smooth.
|
| Some of these problems are often attributed to their
| compromise to maintain backwards compatibility. Well,
| it's just the oposite, they are mostly the result of the
| schism they themselves created with Windows 8 and UWP
| (that not even Microsoft uses for their important apps).
| Now they are trying to fix it with XAML Islands, WinUI 3,
| Project Reunion and whatnot, they throw so many names
| that nobody really knows what is the platform they are
| developing to.
|
| There is nothing smooth in Windows 10. There are some
| great ideas and implementations lost in a rage of hubris
| and incompetence that started ten years ago and it's yet
| to see how much damage control they manage to do now.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The contempt for user experience displayed at Gnome, over such a
| long period, is breathtaking, _in its way_ , but Gnome are
| certainly far from alone. Apple presents the same experience, to
| me, except involving different details. Windows, too. KDE, too.
| Maybe one or other get icon-view in file pickers right, but there
| is a lot else to be got right, and they don't. More importantly,
| they neither want to get it right, nor want to enable you to get
| it right.
|
| The commonality is not the details, which differ, but the
| attitude. "This is _our_ thing, not _your_ thing, so we will do
| what _we_ like, not what _you_ like. " This is most evident in
| cases when a shiny new release, with hundreds of new singing,
| dancing penguins, breaks a thing that used to work.
|
| "The old release was better." "But look, dancing penguins!"
| "Dancing penguins do nothing for me." "But look, dancing
| penguins!" "I want a way to switch back." "NO. _Dancing
| Penguins!_ "
|
| Apple's great achievement is getting their customers to believe
| that they always and only ever cared about the dancing penguins,
| and to forget instantly about each thing that had once worked,
| once it is gone. Gnome aspires to that, but lacks Apple's reality
| distortion field, so must make do with contempt.
| type0 wrote:
| > Gnome aspires to that, but lacks Apple's reality distortion
| field, so must make do with contempt.
|
| The difference is that GNOME can be fixable with a few settings
| tweaks and patches, the same can't be said about MacOS.
| stelf wrote:
| This whole story points to one obvious yet very conveniently
| ignored fact about free software and their UIs in particular -
| implemented is whatever is convenient to be written and whatever
| the author thought would be okay, and not to the user... because,
| well, because it comes without any warranty and this is a great
| excuse to deliver only what oneself (the primary dev) needs and
| not what the potential users would need.
|
| Occasionally the two (needs) overlap and then great piece of feee
| software is born...
|
| And because there is no warranty and typically the top devs are
| also (sorry) somewhat narcissistic - they would seldom enquire
| end users about the perceived usability of UIs.
|
| Take arbitrary open source appliance targeted at end-users and
| you can easily argue that it's somewhat broken from usability
| pont of view.
|
| Sad but it is what free software is.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The reason people use Windows is:
|
| - Because it comes preinstalled in their computers.
|
| - Because that is what schools and workplaces use.
|
| - Because MS Office is the de-facto office suite (although now
| you have Google Docs, LibreOffice, FreeOffice, etc)
|
| - Because most games are released for Windows.
|
| All these reasons are pretty sad.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Personally I use Windows because I like the OS model, and the
| GUI, and the workflows.
| samwhiteUK wrote:
| I've noticed this problem on XFCE, and using i3, and I always
| just assumed it's because I hadn't installed a proper
| alternative, and was just using the defaults. I'm ashamed to say
| I'm part of the problem :( I didn't realise it was like this on
| arguably the main Linux DE though. That's awful.
| antonios wrote:
| Indeed. Unbelievable omission for a project that touts simplicity
| and usability above else.
| type0 wrote:
| They don't champion simplicity and usability, it's only an
| excuse to remove code and functionality that maintainers don't
| want to deal with
| sampo wrote:
| The Xfce file manager, Thunar, has thumbnails. For casual use at
| least, it is very similar to the Gnome file manager.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Sounds like a good alternate toilet.
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Thunar is great, however it does no good here. Your various
| programs like GIMP will always use the Gnome/GTK file picker
| because that's what they've been programmed to do. Or, if not
| based on GTK they will use whatever other file picker their
| toolkit provided.
| vetinari wrote:
| > Your various programs like GIMP will always use the
| Gnome/GTK file picker because that's what they've been
| programmed to do. Or, if not based on GTK they will use
| whatever other file picker their toolkit provided.
|
| Well, not really. Anymore.
|
| Recently (give or take few years), toolkits and applications
| started to use desktop portal - mainly as a preparation for
| sandboxing (i.e. putting the app inside flatpak & co). The
| application, optionally inside sandbox, doesn't use the
| framework's common dialog - because that would not give it
| access to files outside sandbox - but talks to the desktop
| provided one via dbus.
|
| That desktop provided one does not have to be implemented by
| the framework that the application uses. It is implemented by
| the DE that the user chooses.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >Thunar is great
|
| Thunar is to Dolphin what a slingshot is to an M16. I never
| understood how people settle for such barebones file managers
| (i.e., less featureful than Windows Explorer).
| Subsentient wrote:
| What exactly is Thunar missing for you? I genuinely like
| it.
| puzzlingcaptcha wrote:
| Interestingly, Thunar has had a similar pet peeve: it could not
| remember per-directory view settings (e.g. sorting order). This
| was finally fixed a couple months ago, 13 years after the
| original bug was filed (#3521).
| colonwqbang wrote:
| I started writing a comment about this but then I saw that it
| finally got fixed!
|
| Not a day too soon, it makes thunar a lot easier to recommend
| to others. And saves me some time when looking for things in
| my downloads directory!
| opencl wrote:
| The post isn't actually about GNOME's file manager (which does
| have thumbnails), it's about the GTK file picker which is the
| same in any DE.
| lmz wrote:
| And without reading the bug, the issue with adding thumbnail
| support to that one is probably because thumbnails need to be
| cached to be fast, and it would be odd for a filepicker to be
| creating its own cache files (since it can't make any
| assumptions about the system it runs on).
| ubercow13 wrote:
| It's not that. Firstly there is a standard for where to
| cache thumbnails at least on Linux, and secondly the file
| picker _already_ generates (or at least displays)
| thumbnails. It 's shown in the article. It's just that GTK
| has no suitable widget for showing them properly.
| [deleted]
| scotty79 wrote:
| Gnome seemed always vary bad to me. Missing a lot of convenient
| features. I used KDE instead which had all the features I
| expected plus some more that Windows didn't have yet but totally
| should have.
|
| I was always wondering why Gnome is so weird and broken. Why does
| it exist? Who uses it? I found out when I got my hands on first
| Macbook in my life. While KDE mirrors Windows, Gnome mirrored
| some version of MacOS. Using MacOS was as horrible for me as
| using Gnome. A lot of basic features that I took for granted in
| Windows and KDE were missing or hidden so weirdly that I couldn't
| find them without googling. And I had to google each time I
| needed them because placement was so weird that my brain just
| refused to remember something this stupid. And yet some people
| used Macs, liked Macs, adjusted their daily routines to work with
| something that for me was missing basic functionality. And
| praising it! "Of course! That's how it works! That's what the
| plunger is for! That's completely intuitive!"
|
| M1 chip might be all the rage but I refuse to touch Mac again
| till their os gets decent free window manager and file manager as
| alternative. Same way I'm not touching Gnome.
| teekert wrote:
| Omg, this is insane, I now realize I automatically memorize the
| first 3 and last 3 parts of filenames I need in the picker... For
| screenshots I read the date very carefully and fear the day I
| upload a wrong one. I was going to the toilet with a plunger, not
| even realizing it.
|
| Btw, if you work on MacOS (which has been a while for me now),
| you get very used to hitting space everywhere to get previews.
| What a feature!
| swebs wrote:
| I just don't even use the picker. Most sites support just
| dragging the image from Nautilus.
| teekert wrote:
| Yup, also a workaround I use very often.
| sergeykish wrote:
| I sort screenshots by date, upload topmost.
| vetinari wrote:
| FYI, Gnome Files has exactly the same preview via space as
| Finder.
| another_kel wrote:
| There's also QuickLook on Windows 10 store which does the same
| thing. https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9NV4BS3L1H4S
| city41 wrote:
| I don't understand the wrong screenshot fear. Can't you confirm
| it's the right one once you select it and see the preview to
| the right?
| williamscales wrote:
| No, not at all. The article is about this precise problem:
| the file picker in Gnome does not show a preview of the
| selected file.
|
| It's truly absurd.
|
| Edit: Folks, instead of downvoting, how about pointing out
| that I apparently have an additional bug going on in my
| desktop setup? This is exactly the problem with Gnome.
| city41 wrote:
| I believe the article is about showing all the files as
| thumbnails at once, so you can select the file more
| quickly. The article shows once you've selected a file it
| shows a preview of it to the right.
| williamscales wrote:
| Hm, I definitely don't have _any_ previews in the GTK
| filepicker. I specifically had to open the Files
| application just this week so I could identify which
| screenshot I wanted to upload in Firefox.
|
| I guess I have a different bug happening _in addition_ to
| what the article is talking about. Lovely.
| sli wrote:
| The image preview only works when the file picker is
| using the list view.
| wander_homer wrote:
| No, the issue is that an application needs to implement
| the preview widget and add it to the GTK file picker,
| hence this work needs to be duplicated by every
| application and of course most applications don't do
| that. But if the application adds a preview widget it
| should work regardless of which view mode is active.
|
| Edit: Also the new GTK API for file pickers to work
| better with sandboxing and platform integration, lacks
| the ability to add preview widgets altogether.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I have zero thumbnails/previews in some of the GTK
| filepicker instances, but not others. Signal Desktop
| shows previews in a pane to the right. Thunderbird shows
| no previews at all.
| therealmarv wrote:
| There is a solution called GNOME Sushi which enabled that also
| in GNOME. Also a Windows solution is existing (forgot the name)
| whatever1 wrote:
| Linux was always a Terminal-first OS. The UI efforts never came
| close to the depth that MacOS and Windows have.
|
| Take for example the scaling issue. It has been now almost half a
| decade with 4k Displays, and Linux still does not know how to
| deal with it other than 100% or 200%. Currently Linux is unusable
| for anyone with a modern display.
|
| I appreciate the work that all the contributors put -for free- in
| projects like gnome and kde, but unfortunatelly, it is not
| enough. You need a Giant with financial incentives to drive this,
| like Google did with Android.
| josephg wrote:
| I use two monitors on linux mint with cinnamon. One is a 4k
| display, and the other a normal display. Display scaling works
| fine - but once enabled I get a weird bug where I can see a
| duplicate, frozen mouse cursor on my screen based on where the
| mouse was in the login prompt. And it hovers on top of all
| other windows. Somehow the mouse cursor bug is related to the
| HiDPI scaling options.
|
| I've learned to just use the downstairs toilet. I move the
| mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen before I log in.
| [deleted]
| gattr wrote:
| Non-integer scaling has been working fine for me for a few
| years now. I use Fedora + KDE, 175% on my 24" 4K monitor and
| 225% on 4K 15.6" laptop.
|
| I just had to manually increase the mouse cursor size, and in
| Firefox change layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to the scaling factor.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I use 4k displays. Everything involving font, chrome, and icon
| sizes is perfect. Don't know what you are having trouble with.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Glad it works for you. It does not for most of us. Including
| multi-monitor setups or various glitches in rendering. Google
| Kubuntu Fractional scaling to have a glimpse.
|
| A few examples:
|
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/1253744/inconsistent-
| resolut...
|
| https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=309&t=164736
|
| https://pointieststick.com/category/high-dpi/
|
| Probably there are workarounds, kernel patches, magic scripts
| that might solve the above, but honestly I don't have time to
| spend on these. It should just work. I use an OS to get work
| done, not to fix the OS.
| priomsrb wrote:
| Not sure what you mean. I use a 3440x1440 display with 118%
| global scaling using KDE.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Take for example the scaling issue. It has been now almost
| half a decade with 4k Displays, and Linux still does not know
| how to deal with it other than 100% or 200%. Currently Linux is
| unusable for anyone with a modern display._
|
| Fractional scaling works fine on KDE, and it's worked for over
| a year since I first started using it.
| Nursie wrote:
| > Linux still does not know how to deal with it other than 100%
| or 200%.
|
| I've been using fractional scaling for years. I had to learn
| how to use xrandr, but it works great. Better than windows or
| macos in the end, I can specify exactly what I want where.
| viseztrance wrote:
| Funny thing. The company I worked for, bought me a 1440p
| ultrawide screen to use on my mac at (the same I used home on
| my linux workstation). It displayed no scaling options
| whatsoever - NONE. Other displays (4k 16:9) shown it but not
| that. And unlike linux, or windows you can't even set the font
| size globally.
|
| Suffice to say, that this isn't a solved problem everywhere
| else.
| tsar9x wrote:
| On macOS you need to "Option-Click" on Scaled radio button to
| see full list of resolutions.
| viseztrance wrote:
| The resolution was correct, but the scaling options were
| hidden.
| rubatuga wrote:
| You need to enable HIDPI then install something like
| "resolution menu"
| kache_ wrote:
| don't use gnome
| andromeduck wrote:
| Gnome still can't resize a window properly on one of the most
| used operating systems on earth.
|
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/1298
| glandium wrote:
| There are many ways the file picker is broken, but, anecdotally,
| this is not one of them on my system.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| > First of all, how do developers so casually ignore this issue?
| Second of all, how do users so casually ignore this issue?
|
| Because it's not important enough to them to force a fix. Hard to
| believe, in this day and age, but some developers have other
| priorities, especially when working with free software.
|
| I question if this is actually a bug. It seems to be working as
| intended, just not the way the author wants. Seems like the
| quickest solution would be for the author to either take on the
| job themself, or absent the time or expertise, pay someone else
| to do it.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| There's a patch on GitHub [1], but apparently the code quality
| isn't up to GNOME's standards (?)
|
| [1] https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk
| websap wrote:
| How long till it makes it to a FAANG interview?
| enriquto wrote:
| In this time and age, do we really need "desktops"? If you only
| need a full-screen terminal and a full-screen browser (as is the
| case for many people), the whole desktop thing is unnecessary
| clutter.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Someone is living in one hell of a computing bubble.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Terminals are probably never again going to be the primary
| computing interface for most people.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Terminals are probably never again going to be the primary
| computing interface for most people.
|
| So what? Neither are desktops! The question is that the total
| number of terminal users is certainly increasing year after
| year.
| nl wrote:
| > the total number of terminal users is certainly
| increasing year after year
|
| Perhaps, but the _proportion_ of them is certainly
| decreasing (especially if we include devices like tablets
| and phones in "computing interfaces").
| mgreenly wrote:
| Without question I think that's true, but they certainly will
| be the primary interface of some people forever.
| branon wrote:
| A desktop for most people is a crutch (plunger) for their
| disorganized computer (clogged toilet). I think the suggestion
| that desktops aren't necessary is a good one.
|
| Several years ago, I started turning desktop icons off (both
| GNOME and Windows make this easy) and it really helped my
| organization, as I was then forced to competently organize
| files into Downloads, Documents, Pictures, Videos directories
| instead of vomiting everything onto the desktop. Simply
| _knowing_ where files are located is faster than scanning a
| cluttered desktop.
|
| As a bonus I don't ever have to worry about the positions of my
| desktop icons changing.
|
| File picker definitely needs thumbnails though.
| mmplxx wrote:
| The OP is talking about desktop environments, not the desktop
| with your wallpaper.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, I want to be able to look at more than one thing at a
| time.
| enriquto wrote:
| Then you need a window manager, not a desktop.
| santoshalper wrote:
| You mean like the literal desktop, the icons and whatnot?
|
| What does that even have to do with this article, which is
| about a file picker?
| jancsika wrote:
| Somebody in Gnome did an awesome thing and I want to know who it
| was:
|
| If I open my laptop after being logged in, I can just start
| typing my password and the login manager does the right thing:
| "Hey, he's probably typing a password. Let's throw it into the
| password widget and see what happens..."
|
| I'm on an XPS running Ubuntu 20.04.
|
| Who implemented that feature? It's a great ergonomic feature and
| improves the UX of logging in so much.
| kevincox wrote:
| Definitely. At a previous job I set the password of my work Mac
| to my password less the first character to keep the muscle
| memory working. No need for an explicit "wake the screen"
| character.
| uncledave wrote:
| The scary thing is we've moved on from there on other platforms
| because those problems were solved forever ago.
|
| I sit at my Mac desktop, press _any_ key on my keyboard to wake
| the machine or tap the touchpad and I'm logged in.
|
| Being impressed with the very small changes is a symptom that
| there are lots of small problems. The most important change for
| me is I rarely if ever have to enter a password now while at
| the same time, no random joe can sit at my computer and use it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Same. Folks in a Linux bubble don't seem to appreciate that
| the idea of a password login is, frankly, quaint at this
| point. You're getting downvoted, of course, but that's just
| reality: on Windows and MacOS (and iOS and Android, of
| course), MFA and biometrics are the norm.
| samatman wrote:
| ...did you skip the part where you're wearing an Apple Watch?
|
| Because when the watch isn't on my wrist, I have to either
| enter my password or hit TouchID, waking up the computer gets
| me to the password dialog box. Which, to be fair, I can start
| typing the password directly because the cursor is in the
| correct place.
|
| And this is what you would want, if waking it up meant no
| authentication then J Random Badguy could in fact walk up and
| pwn my computer.
| jancsika wrote:
| Also for the record, regarding uncledave's general
| principle:
|
| > Being impressed with the very small changes is a symptom
| that there are lots of small problems.
|
| This is directly contradicted by my use case on my XPS
| under Ubuntu 20.04. I no longer have "Gnu anxiety" on my
| laptop-- the overarching fear that the values for the next
| default behavior I run into were chosen at random by
| troglodytes.
|
| Suspend/resume just works. I haven't fiddled with a
| _single_ touchpad setting and it works the way you 'd
| expect on a Chromebook. Camera works, audio is fine,
| battery life is decent, and so on.
|
| I did get a _tinge_ of anxiety when clicking the desktop
| scaling setting, but it seems to have worked perfectly so
| far.
| uncledave wrote:
| Power management is one of those things that works and
| then doesn't quite regularly. I had "fear of closing the
| lid" on numerous occasions.
| uncledave wrote:
| Yes I did skip that bit. The point is the total integration
| which the Linux desktop will never reach. Apple (and
| Microsoft) moved on from the simple cases.
|
| TouchID is a second place to that. My T495s has the sensor
| to do that but it doesn't work on Linux. Again a typical
| Linux desktop outcome.
| hadrien01 wrote:
| I love that feature! My work computer runs Windows and I need
| to press enter or space before typing my password (and because
| of that sometimes I type a space in my password on GNOME)
| thedanbob wrote:
| KDE does the same and I love it too. Windows doesn't, which
| always trips me up every time I have to use it.
| jancsika wrote:
| Hm, I wonder who did it first.
|
| Would love to know more about both cases.
| domano wrote:
| Does searching in Nautlius still lose focus after every single
| character?
| oneperson wrote:
| Ctrl+f tells me that noone wrote about the xdg-desktop-portal. As
| far as I understand one could easily provide one's own
| filechooser implementation by replacing / compiling one's own
| desktop-portal.so
| rubycon22 wrote:
| This is the one problem that torments me every time I am reminded
| of it.
|
| Just today, once again, I tried doing the hack to make programs
| use the kdialog instead of the GTK filepicker. kdialog works,
| however none of the thumbnails are showing! Only the icons
| showing the filetype. I don't use a desktop environment, only a
| tiling window manager, so that's probably it. But what pains me
| is as much as I search, I don't know what the hell to install
| that will make the thumbnails work in the filepicker even though
| thumbnails work everywhere else.
|
| Every time I must go through this, I want to cry. The linux
| community thinks they are so superior, yet they cannot implement
| this one little thing.
| yyx wrote:
| Why don't you use DE? You can change window manager.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > I don't use a desktop environment, only a tiling window
| manager, so that's probably it.
|
| I don't use the Linux desktop often, so perhaps this is an
| ignorant comment, but doesn't not using a DE require a certain
| amount of elbow grease anyway? If you wanted a more
| polished/less DIY experience, it seems to me that you should be
| using a DE.
| rubycon22 wrote:
| You're right but that isn't the point.
| thedonkeycometh wrote:
| It'll do is the main barrier to most software development. As
| anyone who has wrote software out to be used by common folk, the
| heretical workarounds often become the norm, and get perpetuated
| forwards in user manuals. No wonder computers have such a bad
| rap, most programmers see the UI as a annoyance and spare very
| little time ensuring the end user has a good experience.
| Ultimately, if you have a whole OS built by programmers... well,
| this is why Linux still hasn't took hold on the Desktop.
| xuhu wrote:
| GtkFilePicker can't be worse than the Windows folder browser
| dialog: https://i.stack.imgur.com/umdE9.png
|
| You have to scroll through that keyhole of a window that you
| can't resize and it starts with the Desktop, so it's "Desktop -
| Computer - C:\ - Users - Me - Documents - Images - ..." every
| time.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Interestingly, I never noticed it until now.
|
| I guess it's extremely important for some people and not
| important at all for others.
| albertzeyer wrote:
| You will find lots of such examples of a feature which you
| personally find very important and wonder why such a simple thing
| is not supported yet. I guess everyone has such examples. And you
| will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows.
|
| For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll acceleration
| is still not implemented. I implemented it a while ago for Xorg,
| which is outdated now, and also the maintainer was not happy with
| my approach. It's now a long outstanding proposal for libinput,
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/7 /
| https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/405
| (original bug report from 2010:
| https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29905).
|
| Anyway, I guess there are actually not too much people caring
| about this feature. And the intersection of those who do and
| those who have enough free time and knowledge to implement this
| is just empty.
|
| Btw, I don't quite understand the comment about KDE. It sounds
| like the the author claims that KDE lacks other relevant
| features. But comparing Gnome vs KDE, it is quite clear that KDE
| has much more features. This is never a complaint I heard about
| KDE.
| worik wrote:
| This, lack of thumbnails, has annoyed me too, for years.
| input_sh wrote:
| If you're used to GNOME, might I suggesting a fork?
| elementary OS has thumbnails for years:
| https://imgur.com/a/7JlJCnN
| 1_player wrote:
| Why is there a metric ton of whitespace between the image
| and the label? Why doesn't anyone care about pleasant
| design in the Linux world? It's arguably the reason one
| would pick Elementary OS, yet this is the result.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Is that a file picker, or just the file manager?
| gsich wrote:
| file manager
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| You can solve this in hardware with a mouse with a free-wheel.
| My Logitech G502 lets you click a button to swap modes from
| free-wheel to braked-wheel.
| Nursie wrote:
| I tried a logitech mouse with that feature, mx anywhere 2s,
| but you lose the mousewheel middle-click as the wheel-mode
| switch is a physical switch and cannot be remapped.
|
| Ended up taking it back for a refund and getting a g703
| instead.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Interesting. The G502 has the middle-click on the scroll
| wheel and the wheel-mode is a separate one. Presumably like
| in your G703.
| Nursie wrote:
| I don't think I have a wheel-mode option on my G703. I
| have a small button above the wheel which changes the
| pointer speed, but nothing I can see that puts the wheel
| into an accelerated more.
|
| Honestly if the "2s Anywhere" had had the setup you
| described I would have kept it. Logitech tried to explain
| that middle slick was still there, on the button further
| back towards the palm rest, but it felt so unnatural and
| inconvenient. The 502 looks like a nice piece of kit.
| m463 wrote:
| There's a quote that I think of in situations like this:
|
| "Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi
|
| That said, you can't do that with windows or macosx.
|
| Now capitalism works, so apple and microsoft apply the money
| they make to hard/unsexy things like sleep-wake bug fixes and
| APIs and sane defaults.
|
| But they also bake advertising into their codebase and leech
| data home to the mothership and prevent you from running all
| the programs you'd like.
|
| So look at linux as an opportunity.
| userbinator wrote:
| _That said, you can 't do that with windows or macosx._
|
| I'm not as sure with Macs (and the surrounding culture isn't
| really eager on such things anyway), but there's a _long_
| history of people modding Windows in various ways, that goes
| back to the DOS days. Of course your customisation is highly
| unlikely to make it back to MS, but things like WindowBlinds
| were _extremely_ popular.
| lmm wrote:
| You can contribute all you want but it's not going to be
| enough to stop Pottering or RedHat from hijacking the project
| and breaking everything. I used to contribute but these days
| what's the point?
| sfgweilr4f wrote:
| For more information on "Pottering", a random search
| produced this:
|
| https://slated.org/the_poetterisation_of_gnu_linux
|
| The more you know.
| dghf wrote:
| > There's a quote that I think of in situations like this:
|
| > "Be the change you want to see in the world" - ghandi
|
| Gandhi (spelled thus) never said that. What he did say (in an
| article about first-aid treatments for snakebites, weirdly
| enough), was this:
|
| > We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the
| outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we
| could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would
| also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the
| attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine
| mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of
| our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.
|
| -- _The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandi,_ vol. 13, p. 241
| (http://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/gandhi-
| literature/mahatm...)
|
| Not quite as snappy, admittedly.
| andrewmackrodt wrote:
| I love Linux desktop but miss these creature comforts too. For
| me, my biggest input issue is the lack of customisation around
| trackpad deadzones, i.e. the 15% or so deadzone on the left and
| right of the trackpad. My trackpad is exactly in the center of
| my laptop but my palm is usually offset slightly to the left.
| This means my first interaction with the trackpad often happens
| in this deadzone area on the left-hand side of the trackpad, so
| no input gets registered until I lift my finger and "enter" it
| more towards the center.
|
| There are a huge variety of laptops with different size
| trackpads, different positions, varying levels of palm
| rejection etc but there's zero customisability around this
| seemingly simple behaviour.
|
| My Windows dualboot has no such issue and macOS of course
| (using a MacBook) works fantastically without this limitations.
| cmurf wrote:
| Sounds like a libinput bug.
|
| https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/libinput/
|
| https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/touchpad.
| ..
|
| I'd file a bug though, and see if whatever's wrong can be
| fixed for every trackpad of that same make/model.
| andrewmackrodt wrote:
| Thanks for the links, particularly the second one. It looks
| like something I may have experimented with before but I'll
| try again. It could be that my touchpad does not support
| ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR (Dell XPS 2-in-1 2019).
|
| My "issue" is described as expected behaviour in this
| documentation:
| https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/palm-
| det... (the "A" event).
| sergeykish wrote:
| I've never noticed such issue, quick search shows that one
| has to start on edge and movement in vertical direction [1].
| Vanilla edges are 8% of the width on each side [2]. There was
| a proposal to add configuration option [3], rejected --
| they've tried this route before, it was impossible to test.
|
| Fortunately source is there and it is easy to patch (try to
| set 0%). That's quite common, for example there are several
| patched libinput on AUR [5].
|
| Does your hardware has firmware palm detection mechanism?
| Current bug [6] (Palm exclusion zones are not worth it on
| some hardware).
|
| [1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/palm-
| det...
|
| [2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/blob/f
| 2ba...
|
| [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues
| /19...
|
| [4] http://who-t.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-libinput-doesnt-
| have-l...
|
| [5] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/?O=0&K=libinput
|
| [6] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues
| /43...
| andrewmackrodt wrote:
| Thanks for your detailed reply. Unfortunately the Microsoft
| Precision Touchpad on my Dell XPS 2-in-1 2019 (Wacom HID
| 48EE Finger) does not support ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR; it's
| worth mentioning however that Windows works perfectly and
| palm rejection seems to work on a hardware/firmware level
| (no output when running "libinput debug-events" and moving
| a palm) making libinput restrictions unnecessary and most
| definitely unwanted.
|
| The touchpad is about 7 fingers in width and the palm
| exclusion zones are a little more than one finger on each
| side; this is roughly 30% of the trackpad, or 15% each
| side, certainly bigger than 8% and even that would be too
| much.
|
| Additionally, although the documentation does state that
| rejections should only happen for a vertical like movement,
| it also happens for a completely horizontal one.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Sounds extremely strange. You should fill an issue.
|
| My Dell Latitude E7440 follows description and I believe
| same is true for most of the users. I have to start
| movement at least diagonally, once it catches further
| direction does not matter.
|
| It produces no output when running `libinput debug-
| events`. I've recompiled my version with 0% just to
| check. /* palm edges are 8% of
| the width on each side */ - mm.x = min(8,
| width * 0.00); + mm.x = min(8, width *
| 0.08); edges =
| evdev_device_mm_to_units(device, &mm);
| tp->palm.left_edge = edges.x; -
| mm.x = width - min(8, width * 0.00); + mm.x
| = width - min(8, width * 0.08); edges =
| evdev_device_mm_to_units(device, &mm);
| tp->palm.right_edge = edges.x;
|
| Disabled. I like how it is easy Arch allows such
| experiments: $ yay -G libinput
| $ cd libinput $ makepkg -so ==> Verifying
| source file signatures with gpg...
| libinput-1.16.4.tar.xz ... FAILED (unknown public key
| E23B7E70B467F0BF) ==> ERROR: One or more PGP
| signatures could not be verified! $ gpg --recv-
| key E23B7E70B467F0BF $ makepkg -so $ vim
| src/libinput-1.16.4/src/evdev-mt-touchpad.c $
| makepkg -fei
| andrewmackrodt wrote:
| Thanks for updating your answer with your diff. Arch
| really looks great in how easy it was to try that. I'm
| running Ubuntu and have experience compiling custom
| kernels so this should be slightly easier to try, thanks
| once again for such a great reply.
|
| Ultimately, I would prefer that this kind of feature is
| configurable in userland. Wayland's documentation page
| mentions that "Data from touchpads showed that almost all
| palm events during tying on a Lenovo T440 happened in the
| left-most and right-most 5% of the touchpad. The T440
| series has one of the largest touchpads", and this may
| have been true several years ago, but it's quite common
| now to have larger and wider form-factor touchpads.
| beci wrote:
| Wow, I didn't know how easy to do these things in arch.
| You made my day!
| Yaggo wrote:
| > I love Linux desktop
|
| Which "Linux" desktop are you referring to?
| andrewmackrodt wrote:
| I answered generically because my comment was about a
| libinput "issue" which affects all distributions and
| desktop environments. (Queue 2021 is the year of linux
| desktop).
|
| Personally, I see this change as a regression from the
| highly configurable synaptics driver.
|
| As you've asked, distribution wise I typically run an
| Ubuntu LTS with Gnome 3 but rolling releases such as
| Manjaro and lightweight DE like XFCE are also very nice.
| Technically wrote:
| Why would you gripe that a person uses your software but cares
| too much?
| rob74 wrote:
| First, I fully agree: this is not a bug, it's a missing
| feature. Second, I may be a minority here, but I actually don't
| mind this feature missing at all. I however do (or did) mind
| Windows putting its "thumbs.db" files all over the place, so
| that's the first thing I deactivate when installing it (along
| with enabling "show hidden files" and "show extension for known
| file types").
| xeyownt wrote:
| - "Welcome to the new GNOME car. It's totally free!".
|
| - "Looks great. But there are no mirrors. Isn't that
| dangerous?"
|
| - "Yeah, but that's not a bug, it's a missing feature.
| Besides, we don't like mirrors because in all cars they need
| to be cleaned all the time."
|
| - "Really? Apparently the KDE cars also have mirrors but
| different technology, and they don't need to be cleaned at
| all. Also, what's the difference between a bug or missing
| feature if a lot of people complain about it?"
|
| - "Oh yeah. But honestly we really don't like that people
| have to clean their mirrors, so we prefer not to have them."
| rob74 wrote:
| Looks like we disagree on what's a bug and what's a feature
| in a file picker. But the mirrors on a car are mandated by
| law, so the equivalent for that would be a missing Cancel
| button (which forces you to always open a file). If I had
| to pick a car part equivalent to the file thumbnails, it
| would probably be seat heating or a built-in navigation
| system - it's nice to have (for some, others never use it),
| but you can use the car without problems if it's broken or
| not installed.
|
| I'm not saying that it's not a nice feature to have, but
| it's also definitely non-trivial - it's not only thumbnails
| for images, if you do that people will also demand
| thumbnails for videos (including, of course, all ancient
| formats), PDF files, Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents, HTML
| pages etc. etc. etc.
| eitland wrote:
| > And you will also find such examples for MacOSX or Windows.
|
| If anyone wonders, here are three from Mac last I used it:
|
| - fn took the place of ctrl on the laptop (but not the full
| keyboard). Unlike on Dell and Lenovo who also has this problem
| it could not be remapped neither at boot nor in the OS.
|
| - CMD - tab forced me to think ahead of time if I want to
| change to the last application or the last window of the same
| application. I.e. switching between two Safari instances takes
| a different key combination than switching between Safari and
| IntelliJ.
|
| - modifier keys worked differently between applications, e.g.
| selecting to the end of a word was either ctrl-shift, alt-shift
| or CMD-shift depending on application.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| macOS has more consistent keyboard shortcuts than Windows.[1]
| Some cross platform apps do their own thing.
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236
| wdobbels wrote:
| Things that annoy me on mac: - there's no volume mixer (each
| app having an individual volume slider) - no window snapping
| (before I bought BetterTouchTool, which includes window
| snapping, I had windows everywhere and it was just a mess) -
| column view in Finder is nice, it would be really useful to
| pick a new "root" folder for the viewer, or to move one
| directory up from the "root"
|
| Things that annoy me on windows: - No tabs in explorer.
| Imagine having a web browser that didn't have tabs, that's
| how bad this is. - No preview in explorer. Mac has this
| awesome feature where you press space and it gives a quick
| overview of most files (not only images but also pdfs, .docx,
| ...). - No column view. Column view makes it much easier to
| navigate across directories, and back and forth between
| subdirectories of a root directory.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I use both and really miss the spacebar Quicklook on
| Windows, I found this 3rd party app that adds it
| https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook and works better than I
| expected.
| oefrha wrote:
| > CMD - tab forced me to think ahead of time if I want to
| change to the last application or the last window of the same
| application. I.e. switching between two Safari instances
| takes a different key combination than switching between
| Safari and IntelliJ.
|
| That's a feature, not a bug. I personally hate having to tab
| through a million browser windows to find the application I
| need, or having to tab through unrelated applications when
| looking for a browser window, which is what I have to put up
| with when using Windows.
| eitland wrote:
| It is a feature which replace another feature (stack based
| switching). It broke my flow multiple times a day for three
| years until I got a Windows machine again. I guess we are
| just differently wired, the idea of stopping to consider
| which shortcurt to use was neither natural nor possible for
| me at that age (around 30).
|
| KDE does this perfectly however. It _defaults_ to Windows
| /classic Gnome 2 behaviour but can easily be configured
| however one wants it.
| silon42 wrote:
| It's not a feature for anyone used to standard alt+tab (and
| ctrl+tab). Often I wish switching between tabs was on first
| level too.
|
| I don't appreciate the Mac/Gnome way.
| oefrha wrote:
| "Standard" is just your habit built on another operating
| system. macOS has a fundamentally different application
| and window model, which is also why there's a consistent
| application menu bar across all applications and windows,
| not what each app decides to invent or not invent for
| itself within the window.
| ploxiln wrote:
| On macOS, I install https://github.com/emreyolcu/discrete-
| scroll to disable scroll acceleration, because I find it
| annoying, and macOS has no config option to disable it.
| samatman wrote:
| Hey at least it's possible. System Preferences-level config
| has a cognitive cost, it's ok by me to move 1% or fewer level
| stuff to plugins. My example is that I want the scroll
| direction reversed when I have my trackball plugged in, but
| not on the trackpad, and there's a helper app called Scroll
| Reverser which does the trick.
|
| Alas, my white whale is focus-follows-mouse, and I just...
| can't have it. Not worth abandoning the Mac over, not for me,
| but.. arrgh.
| ibly31 wrote:
| How does "focus follows mouse" work? If I'm understanding;
| your desktop is a collection of various sizes windows,
| maybe overlapping and stacking. If your mouse goes off the
| side of the one you're focusing, it will auto focus the one
| you're now hovering over. Won't this lead to accidents
| where you'll have a larger window suddenly gain focus, with
| no way to see the old one and re-focus it? Seems easy to
| make a mistake.
|
| This maybe would be solved by a window manager that
| enforces never allowing windows to stack depthwise? Which
| OSX doesn't have of course. Just size-and-position-hotkey
| workarounds
| samatman wrote:
| Nope, what you're describing is a mistake in focus-
| follows-mouse, one which has been made more than once.
|
| In real, XWin-style focus-follows-mouse, the window you
| mouse over gets the focus, _but_ , isn't pulled to the
| front. If you click, it gets the front and the focus.
|
| I use Moom, a semi-tile snap-style window wrangler, and a
| widescreen with three panels. What I want to do is just
| slide the cursor over and start typing, but I have to
| remember to click, and often enough I just don't.
|
| The One True Wiki has a nice discussion of the subject:
| https://wiki.c2.com/?FocusFollowsMouse
| wruza wrote:
| I remember setting some reasonable "raise timeout" and it
| worked well for me. For one use case, I had a workflow
| with two full-height overlapping windows (vim, xterm) and
| little mouse shifts toggled them up/focused.
|
| Alt-tab didn't work because its mru usually gets spoiled
| by other (browser) windows. If only there was a setting
| that fixed alt-tab mru into a stack. Alt-tab-tab to
| switch to app which _started_ second may be much better
| than mru for some workflows, because you can always
| predict what it does with certainty of 1.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I actually have it set to not raise even on click; I
| often want to click just one thing in a window that is
| behind other windows. Moving a window brings it to front
| and I bind windows-click-drag to move a window. That lets
| me raise any window I like.
| invsblduck wrote:
| same. i don't raise on click. this is incredibly useful
| when a smaller window is in the foreground--and perhaps a
| window underneath is maximized--and i just need to
| select/copy something from the background real quick. the
| main task i am working on is in the foreground, and i
| don't want its window to immediately vanish from my sight
| because it's mentally and visually disruptive (in fact, i
| usually don't want to blast every other window out of
| sight when the maximized window raises either). i will
| easily raise the background window when i need to (in a
| variety of ways, depending upon whether i am currently
| using keyboard or mouse); meanwhile, i can lazily _focus_
| it and interact with it while all my windows stay put. it
| 's very calming.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| While you're here and know a thing or two about libinput: it's
| completely unusable for me, and the only reason I'm able to
| work at all is that the old synaptics package (on which
| libinput is based as a clean rewrite as I understand) still
| works. The reason is that libinput doesn't support sensitivity;
| I still remember the physical pain of hard-pressing the
| touchpad when my current notebook was new, and in particular
| the moment when I looked at the notebook and just stopped doing
| anything at all on it in conditioned anticipation of a
| frustrating experience. Also, kinetic scroll doesn't seem to
| work, amplifying the issue.
|
| I noticed Ubuntu have switched to KDE (or, alternatively, LXDE)
| as DE for their "Studio" variant. I'm guessing that's mostly
| because the minimal window decorations for resizing etc makes
| gnome hard to use, and Studio is for large notebooks or
| desktops anyway. I think the exercise of patience that was
| resizing windows on gnome2 has slightly improved, but I'm still
| speechless as to the loss of the global menu to be replaced by
| ... a centered clock accompanied by a minimal dot that I found
| out to display notifications after a while, and nothing else.
|
| I mean I'm glad that F/OSS for desktops still exists at all,
| but gnome3 is really just a big regression for no reason at
| all, and I'm starting to get a bit concerned where gnome is
| heading. It's not that we have a wealth of new desktop apps
| anyway. Maybe Ubuntu is testing the waters to switch to KDE as
| well.
| ognarb wrote:
| Disclainer: KDE dev so take my opinion with a pinch of salt
| :p
|
| The decision by the Ubuntu Studio variants was made by the
| Ubuntu Studio developers and not by Canonical. The developers
| are also maintaining Fedora Jam with KDE installed by default
| too. Unfortunately all the big commercial distros are using
| GNOME as default DE because RedHat is providing the
| commercial support for GNOME already and it's easier for them
| to just make the same choice. So I don't think Ubuntu will
| switch to KDE anytime soo, even if GNOME developers don't
| like Ubuntu and make their opinion very public.
|
| For those interested on why artists like Plasma so much,
| David Revoy made a nice summary:
| https://www.davidrevoy.com/article783/kubuntu-
| linux-20-04-fo....
| noisy_boy wrote:
| > Anyway, I guess there are actually not too much people caring
| about this feature
|
| I do care about this feature just like the author and though I
| don't have any evidence supporting my thinking, I think nobody
| enjoys trawling through bunch of weirdly named files (which is
| typical of how downloaded image files get named by default)
| looking for that specific picture/icon. After the Gnome 3
| debacle where they basically refused to listen to the users and
| even removed not-so-obscure features like tabbed windows in
| nautilus (which I noticed is back now), I just didn't have the
| confidence that raising a feature request would amount to much.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > it is quite clear that KDE has much more features.
|
| My guess is that the author prefers Gnome because yes, it has
| fewer features, but those feel more polished. KDE is powerful
| but some less frequently used features felt more like
| functional prototypes that were thrown somewhere into the nth
| level of the system settings.
|
| Then again the last time I tried it Gnome had a lot of issues
| as well, so maybe I'm completely wrong nowadays.
| ognarb wrote:
| There is a lot going on each week in KDE trying to improve
| the situation. Nate Graham is making a summary of the parts,
| he monitors: https://pointieststick.com/ There is definitely
| still quite a bit to improve but compared to 3 years ago,
| Plasma and KDE software has improved by a lot.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| They pretty much had this nailed down in KDE 3.5, we're now
| 12 years later, how much longer will it take before current
| KDE will show any signs of being "finished"?
| swebs wrote:
| At least enough people care that its become a meme in some tech
| communities.
|
| https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme
| jdright wrote:
| Yes, and Gnome is in part responsible for a lot of "desktop"
| issues with linux. Distros must switch to KDE by default to
| help eliminate part of this stigma. KDE is so amazingly good
| that there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.
| swiley wrote:
| I've never understood why so many distros make gnome the
| default DE. There are much better and friendly ones, some
| of them forks and some written from scratch.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I disliked KDE 3 & 4, however KDE 5 is great. Plasma
| Desktop is impressive and pleasant to use.
| k_sze wrote:
| Yep. I've been a long time GNOME user and I switched to
| KDE Plasma when I upgraded from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. I
| don't think I'm looking back.
| kdtsh wrote:
| In the early-2000s like many other people I was attracted
| to the Crystal[1] theme/icon pack, but it did not take
| long for it to start looking tacky to me. I feel like KDE
| never really abandoned this kind of look-and-feel until
| Plasma was released, which is very clean and pleasant. It
| has discarded cartoon-ish icons and has sharper lines and
| colours which are nicer to look at. I am a big fan!
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everaldo_Coelho#Crystal
| scythe wrote:
| Elementary is also working on a way to default most apps to
| a better file picker:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/elementaryos/comments/gs86hj/thumb
| n...
|
| https://medium.com/elementaryos/a-new-native-file-
| chooser-19...
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep
| using Gnome._
|
| I have nothing against KDE, but come on. Many of us really
| do prefer GNOME despite its perceived deficiencies. This is
| just a matter of personal preference.
| ziftface wrote:
| I'll never understand this. It's like people who swear by
| xfce. Both are borderline unusable to me, but gnome
| certainly isn't in that category, despite its bugs.
| alekq wrote:
| Which feature(s) exactly do you miss on XFCE that makes
| it unusable in comparision to GNOME?
| ziftface wrote:
| Didn't mean to pick on xfce, I haven't used it in a
| couple years to be fair. But when I did, it just didn't
| fit my workflow that well. For example, I'm used to
| pressing command+space and getting system-wide search for
| all files and apps. This is basically the default
| behavior on gnome, I just needed to remap the shortcut. I
| also often move desktops and the "activities" view makes
| that really simple.
| jdright wrote:
| Nothing against options, but having distros with a
| default on Gnome just seems wrong, defaults are supposed
| to be good and complete.
| Kalq wrote:
| Wish somebody would tell that to the Emacs maintainers.
| dleslie wrote:
| KDE or MATE, really.
| alekq wrote:
| I was happy KDE user for very long time - first 3.x, then 4
| (even with all those glitches and bugs at the very
| beginning). Then I had 7-8 years break off Linux and last
| year decided to install it on my new desktop machine.
|
| Went with Plasma first - did not go well. I simply cannot
| get comfortable with it and general look and feel is not
| working for me (I prefer defaults and I avoid much tweaking
| and any 3rd party customization). I settled on Cinnamon,
| but it was close tie with GNOME which was actually quite
| refreshing experience for me.
|
| So, to each his own, but I just do not see KDE as "the
| sanest" default.
| Yaggo wrote:
| 3.x/4.x was the golden age for KDE. I never felt home
| with Plasma.
| int_19h wrote:
| The default DE should be "sane and boring". I think the one
| that best fits this description at the moment is MATE.
| [deleted]
| curt15 wrote:
| >KDE is so amazingly good that there is no excuse to keep
| using Gnome.
|
| IMO, one aspect where Gnome excels is its tight integration
| of alternative input methods. I remember it being
| controversial that Gnome blessed ibus over alternative
| engines, but as a result, setting up CJK input is simple
| and foolproof. Although I prefer KDE in every other way, I
| have never managed to get ibus working correctly in that
| environment.
| just_for_you wrote:
| CJK input magically working easily and reliably in Gnome
| is the pretty much the only reason I use it over KDE. And
| setting it up doesn't require following a wiki, using the
| commandline and/or having to edit obscure config files or
| messing around with weird GUI settings apps.
|
| I have nothing against KDE by any means (I love it, and
| also really appreciate their initatives like KDEnlive,
| etc.), but I don't think I've ever gotten
| Japanese/Chinese input to work in it before. Maybe once,
| but then I gave up on finding a sane way to easily cycle
| between the different input types (eg, WinKey+Space).
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| I remember finding what worked was quite of a hassle in
| KDE, but once I chose fcitx over ibus I've had little
| issues with CJK input.
| young_unixer wrote:
| I find KDE to be pretty ugly.
|
| For instance, margins and paddings seem to be all over the
| place [1]. At least Gnome gets that part right.
|
| [1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Notifications
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| "This page assumes the status quo as of Plasma 5.7".
| Plasma is now on version 5.20 so the page you linked has
| some pretty old examples. The KDE folks are working
| pretty diligently to clean stuff like this up as they
| find it. Nate Graham's weekly blog documents this and
| other updates to the project.
|
| https://pointieststick.com/
|
| I personally like KDE and it's Breeze Dark theme a lot.
| j1elo wrote:
| Small half-joke: Only _two words_ into the front page
| post I already hit a UX issue! (and a UI inconsistency)
|
| > _This week_ (KWin's compositing code was almost totally
| rewritten...)
|
| I then instinctively went on to the top of the article to
| check on the date, to get an idea of _when_ was "this
| week" for the author... but there is no date. Oh, well
| :-)
|
| Opening the post itself (instead of reading from the main
| page) does indeed change the UI and it now happens to
| show the date.
|
| Loved the irony...
|
| This all shows that even for people dedicated to it,
| getting UI/UX right is _hard_.
| ognarb wrote:
| Nate is not a web developer and is just using a default
| wordpress theme.
| j1elo wrote:
| Totally understandable. The theme developer, however,
| could have strived for a bit more consistency on its
| default settings...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If you don't like the defaults, there are thousands of
| 3rd party themes that are directly listed and installable
| from KDE's theme preference pane.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Do any of them solve the problem?
| gsich wrote:
| No.
| O_H_E wrote:
| That page looks kinda out dated, and "contains some ideas
| how to improve the Plasma notification system". So a lot
| of that is mocks and not real screenshots.
| ognarb wrote:
| Yes, this page is full of mockups created years ago.
| tylerjwilk00 wrote:
| Agreed. It occupies some weird uncanny valley of design
| that is hard to pin point.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Absolutely. It feels like they're getting there (VDG is
| working on it and shown some results), but they're just a
| few years away.
|
| ... it has been feeling like that for the few years I've
| been following it.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| KDE, to me, looks like someone designed it to be a touch
| interface.
|
| Everything is so LARGE and padding between elements is
| YUGE. The tech is cool and everything seems to work fine,
| but something about the UI just grates me.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > there is no excuse to keep using Gnome.
|
| Don't know that I agree there.
|
| I actually really like GNOME's workflow on laptop,
| especially with Pop OS's extensions.
| danmur wrote:
| I think that's very much personal preference. I tried KDE a
| few months ago and I couldn't stick with it; it is slower
| than Gnome in a lot of ways, it's (to my eyes) much more
| cluttered, and has lags at annoying places. For example, I
| tend to hit the windows key and start typing to launch
| things, but under KDE there's enough lag before the menu
| opens that it doesn't catch my first few keypresses.
| murrayb wrote:
| This. I get periodically frustrated with Gnome and give
| KDE a go and always end up going back to Gnome within a
| couple of weeks. I want to like it, I want it to work but
| Gnome (on my setup) is more responsive and that is more
| important than all of the other deficiencies of Gnome.
| aruggirello wrote:
| Stay tuned - it seems KDE's home menu will get a major
| overhaul.
|
| "This week Plasma also saw a new Kickoff menu that is a
| complete rewrite, which is also coming with Plasma 5.21.
| There have also been many bug fixes, performance
| improvements, and other ongoing UI refinements."
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=KDE-
| KWin...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm on a 3 year old laptop, and I tried several times to
| get a keystroke to be dropped after I hit the windows key
| and I couldn't get it to happen.
|
| I use windows-key and start typing to launch things all
| the time, and after reading your comment at first I
| thought I might have developed a habit to pause, but
| nope. I wonder what the difference is.
|
| My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-tray
| disappear if you move the cursor outside of them. Maybe
| pro gamers can manage to keep the cursor in every time,
| but for me I often take 2 or 3 tries to click on
| something.
| ognarb wrote:
| > My biggest KDE gripe is that popups from the system-
| tray disappear if you move the cursor outside of them.
|
| This looks like a bug or you changed the default setting,
| just to be sure in System Setting -> Window Management ->
| Window Behavior -> is the Window Activation Policy set to
| click to focus?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Ohhhhh. Of course I changed it to focus follows mouse
| because that's the One True Way(tm) of managing window
| focus. So I'm guessing that when the popup loses focus,
| it disappears. Thanks for solving that mystery. I'll
| ponder whether it's worth it to make the disappearing
| have a lag, conditional on the window activation policy.
| eznzt wrote:
| My personal opinion is that KDE is less polished, more
| bloated (in terms of features and options), and slower than
| GNOME.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Good joke.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Plasma Desktop uses about the same amount of resources as
| XFCE.
| kworker wrote:
| If you use it with every basic extension, like Kubuntu's
| default setup, then it's really bloated (Akonadi and
| MySQL is a dependency for KMail), but thankfully it's
| highly modular and enough fast for my taste.
| bmn__ wrote:
| Akonadi supports at least four DB engines. To combat
| bloat, select the SQLite dependency instead of
| MariaDB/MySQL.
|
| I wish there was the option of not installing Akonadi,
| but apparently it's not possible any more to run sticky
| notes and feed reader without it.
| laumars wrote:
| I've not used Kubuntu in years but there was a time when
| it was consistently running 50% slower than every other
| KDE orientated distro (and some distros that were DE
| agnostic too).
|
| I think Kubuntu did more harm than good for people's
| perception of KDE.
| dagw wrote:
| That was my opinion as well until about 4 month ago when
| I actually seriously tried an up to date KDE for the
| first time in years. Turns out I was completely wrong.
| jdright wrote:
| Did you try it recently? That was also the stigma of KDE
| 4.x. 5 is snappy and bloated is probably the wrong word
| to featureful. I just can't stand gnome exactly due to
| the opposite: bare bones, missing features, lack of
| integration and mainly lack of standardized ux.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| Add that Gnome it's painful slow and uses more resources
| that KDE.
| O_H_E wrote:
| > more bloated (in terms of features and options)
|
| that might be subjectively correct to a lot of people,
| but I find that they are usually set to sane defaults and
| a lot is disabled by default. Also, I would like to
| emphasis that the choice of disto kinda matters here as
| they sometimes change defaults.
| just_for_you wrote:
| I think this may have been true in the past, but KDE 5 is
| nowhere near as bloated as KDE once was. (And they've
| also made huge strides in consistency and a sane UI
| experience.)
|
| I've tested comparing Gnome/KDE on old hardware (eg, 2 GB
| of RAM and CPUs built for power conservation), and
| subjectively I found KDE to be a lot snappier (Gnome
| Shell always choked for me when hitting Activities) and,
| after a few hours of uptime, found it used less memory
| than Gnome. On the same box, it even gave Xfce a run for
| its money, which was surprising.
|
| Although, when it comes to peddling Linux to other
| people, I'm hesistant to install KDE for anyone because
| it's a bit _too_ configurable. I 'm always afraid of
| getting asked for help because of someone accidentally
| messed up their UI and losing their taskbar or something
| like that. KDE's came a long way in recent years, but
| that "you can configure everything" core will always
| probably be there. And on the flip-side, if I install
| Gnome, people often find it outlandish and barebones...
| numlock86 wrote:
| > https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File_Picker_meme
|
| > Debunking: lInUx Is JuSt A kErNeL
|
| Ah yes, countering a meme with another meme. Good one.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> For me personally, I wonder why mouse wheel/scroll
| acceleration is still not implemented.
|
| This came up recently with SolveSpace. Two developers spent an
| amazing amount of time getting scroll wheel zoom right.
| Discussion here:
| https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/pull/825
|
| Love these guys, they give a crap about usability. BTW next
| release soon - after a bit more polish. Polish take time and
| work, but do you really care about the software if you don't
| spend _some_ time unclogging the toilet?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| > the maintainer was not happy with my approach
|
| This is the absolute CORE of the problem with open-source
| software. Someone becomes the "maintainer" of a project, often
| through no skill of their own (they just showed up at the right
| time), which effectively makes them BDFL with infinite veto
| power. Hard-forks of popular projects are politically unpopular
| (for good reason), so that isn't an option. Instead, the whole
| world of software that relies on a package is broken or fixed
| at the whim of one dude.
| [deleted]
| josteink wrote:
| > This is the absolute CORE of the problem with open-source
| software. Someone becomes the "maintainer" of a project,
| often through no skill of their own
|
| That's a bit unnuanced, isn't it?
|
| Nobody randomly becomes the maintainer of a big/popular
| project without having a history of contributing. They were
| the ones _willing_ to pick up the task of doing free labour
| for everyone after the last guy didn't want the job anymore.
|
| As maintainer of a project, their job is to try to respond to
| bugs, maintain it, improve it and keep it working. All for
| free.
|
| If somebody submits a low quality or low effort patch which
| goes against the projects conventions or general strategies
| or patterns which will over time increase the maintainer's
| burden, he is under no obligation to accept that patch.
|
| On the contrary, whoever submits the patch is the one who
| wants to benefit from all that time invested into the project
| so far, for his own good. I think it's absolutely fair to
| expect/demand that they are also willing to put up _some_
| effort when they send in patches and receive feedback.
| legulere wrote:
| > But comparing Gnome vs KDE, it is quite clear that KDE has
| much more features. This is never a complaint I heard about
| KDE.
|
| Usability is not about how many features a program has. Usually
| more features make it harder to have good usability.
| kuroguro wrote:
| I've always hated the thumbnail view. Always turned it off on all
| windows machines - it might be just me but it's harder to find
| what I'm looking for 80% of the time.
|
| What's worse is that windows seems to find some sneaky way to
| turn it back on for some folders. Have multiple registry tweaks
| to show every folder in "details" mode that I have to run every
| couple of months for some reason to keep it that way!
| andybak wrote:
| I agree most of the time - aside from when I need to choose an
| image in a directory of (poorly named) images. Surely this is
| the situation where you do need thumbnail view? Does this never
| happen to you?
| kuroguro wrote:
| I agree, but that's really rare for me. Most of the time I
| find the right file by flicking trough the image viewer and
| memorizing the filename.
|
| Also it's a more generic problem - say for poorly named
| documents or other files that don't have thumbnails. Right
| click -> open seems to solve most of those times.
|
| So it does happen to me, but I still don't use it.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Thumbnails are performance hogs
| enneff wrote:
| For who?
| airstrike wrote:
| All of us on a Pentium II 300MHz with 32MB RAM
| sgt wrote:
| Sweet. How many BogoMIPS ya got?
| josefx wrote:
| I don't think GNOME runs on those specs.
| bananamerica wrote:
| I think that was a joke, dude.
| rleigh wrote:
| GNOME 1.2 would have.
|
| It wasn't until the arrival of Nautilus with 1.4 that the
| requirements jumped and the performance tanked.
| smabie wrote:
| woosh
| p_l wrote:
| I think I had fast and reliable thumbnails at those
| specs, but GNOME3 would lag too much (GNOME 1.4 did
| because Nautilus was borked, but at least 1.4 didn't
| patronize me as "dumb user, we the gnome/rhel devs know
| better what you need")
| josefx wrote:
| And you can turn them off on any system that supports them when
| that is an issue.
| CarVac wrote:
| My personal theory about why this isn't fixed is that in open-
| source software, if you halfass a UI implementation one time it
| keeps that halfass implementation more or less eternally because
| it's "good enough" for the person who learns to work around it.
|
| For my photo editor Filmulator I resolved to _not add_ features
| that haven 't had the UI fully thought through. For a while it
| meant it was definitely subpar capability-wise, but now that it's
| approaching feature completeness it means that it's actually
| intuitive and streamlined to use.
| allenu wrote:
| I agree with your theory. For instance, I've tried Anki and
| found it incredibly confusing to use. However, a lot of folks
| online comment on how it just works for them and how they can't
| see how you'd improve upon it. I'm convinced that if you work
| with something enough and absolutely need to work with it, you
| find workarounds and eventually forget that you're using
| workarounds.
|
| I use Inkscape regularly and have issues with its UI. If I
| click and drag an object fast enough, often the object beneath
| the one I want is selected and dragged. It's absolutely
| frustrating but I eventually learned to click, pause briefly,
| then drag to get around it. I've invested too much time
| learning the tool to move onto something else at this point.
| cam_l wrote:
| I guess using KDE would be, to keep the analogy going, a Toto. It
| cleans the pipes before that shit even gets to the toilet.
|
| Though I do find the various ways you adapt your work flow to
| tools amusing. Like the file picker thumbnail rarely bothers me,
| because I have a habit (hard won) of using clear naming for
| files. Though it does annoy me that Sushi doesn't seem to work in
| the file picker.
|
| That said, what really annoys me, every day, is the breadcrumb
| bar. Damn that to hell. If you are serious about naviagtion, why
| not just show me the whole tree? And I have to press Ctrl-L to
| revert to a text directory imput, and then, or otherwise click
| fifteen times to navigate to another directory.
| anewguy9000 wrote:
| author of gnome file picker here.
|
| jk, where are you? what do you have to say for yourself!
| benlivengood wrote:
| While we're complaining about Gnome: why can't nautilus handle
| more than 10k files in a directory? Especially an NFS or Samba
| share. I installed Thunar in order to browse the pictures I have
| on a local server.
|
| I think 10K file names should fit in cache on any processor made
| in the last 10 years. readdir isn't _that_ slow.
| swebs wrote:
| Someone created a fix for this 3 years ago. The Gnome maintainers
| refuse to add it for whatever reason.
|
| https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk
| shp0ngle wrote:
| well, they rewrote everything to gtk4, so that would need to be
| updated
| type0 wrote:
| > The Gnome maintainers refuse to add it for whatever reason.
|
| Because the issue would be solved, "this is why we can't have
| nice things"
| konjin wrote:
| Gnome is notoriously terrible for not accepting patches outside
| of redhat employees. I tried adding a patch to gnome in the 00s
| and the number of hoops they expected me to jump through along
| with the tone made me never install their de again.
| thoughtsunific3 wrote:
| Until Hacker News deletes this account they will be promoting the
| following:
|
| - 9/11 never happened. - Jews were responsible for the
| propagation of Communism. - New Testament is false
| arendtio wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if I should just quit starting my own side
| projects and instead take one open-source project and just work
| to improve the quality. No new and shiny stuff, but boring bread
| and butter business.
|
| For example, I like XMPP, but many clients seem to have quality
| issues. So I could start writing tests for them and therefore
| find and fix bugs?
| rablackburn wrote:
| I have similar thoughts. I finally swapped to desktop linux
| last year and tried to be very mindful about all the little
| niggling issues I ran in to.
|
| I think the difference between an okay piece of software and a
| great piece of software is how cognizant the designers and
| developers are of these things. It's partially why I use an
| iphone now over android. Even if I disagree with how something
| is done it's usually evident that Apple at least _thought_
| about it. It's not perfect, there's still the occasional
| interaction that's just plain bad, but those moments are much
| rarer than I encounter on my PCs (Xubuntu/MX Linux).
|
| If I ever have the resources to retire I think I'd dedicate a
| solid chunk of my time to just work on those quality issues.
|
| Just to preempt the replies, this is how most of these
| conversations go:
|
| Alice: I dislike [x] because I can't do [a].
|
| Bob: Oh, why are you trying to do [a]? You can accomplish that
| by doing [b], [c], and then [d]. [a] doesn't really make sense,
| let me explain the model behind how this all works.
|
| Alice: Thanks for explaining the model to me, but I still just
| want to do [a]. Could we expand the model, or handle this as an
| edge case?
|
| Bob <any of the following replies> : No! [a]
| breaks the model! Things are much simpler if you just embrace
| the model. : If you want to do [a] go use this other
| product that's broken in other slightly annoying ways.
| : If you want to do it, you can open a PR adding it. But we
| probably won't add it because it doesn't fit the current model,
| and we consider that 'bloat'.
|
| It's difficult to get into contributing to some of these
| projects because you come in with a change you want to make,
| but you have no standing in the project to effect that change
| (or are out of your depth and need to convince a more
| established dev to help you). Which makes perfect sense, a
| project with random contributors adding their own preferences
| is anarchy.
|
| It really seems like the best projects have a very strong
| guideline/interactions framework, or a BDFL (benevolent
| dictator for life) who takes UX very personally. Most open-
| source projects are founded with a strong technical vision, but
| not a strong UX one.
|
| The closest I can think of in the open-source desktop space is
| ElementaryOS. Which is lovely, but I dislike a few of their
| core decisions enough that using it is a pain.
|
| The dream is a DE that enforces strict UX paradigms...but also
| lets you customize them easily. But I'm not sure if that's even
| possible. Even Apple isn't perfect and they're just trying to
| enforce one 'Apple way' to do things.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| I'm just curious but what were the issues with a few of
| elementary OS's core decisions that you have?
|
| I know personally I'm not a fan of Ubuntu or that it's the
| LTS version too but I know that you can use Pantheon, it's
| desktop environment, on other distros (something I have been
| considering myself).
| rubycon22 wrote:
| Hello, just wanted to let you know you should probably use a
| different word instead of "niggling", just to be safe in case
| some day in the future someone may find your post and try to
| cast you as a racist. Or worst, it may be detected by an
| algorithm and your post could be demerited based on that
| parameter and you would not know why. While niggling is a
| legitimate word and has no racist origin, people may construe
| it as insensitive because it might trigger someone due to the
| similarity to a certain word. Also, actual racists sometimes
| use a variation of niggling to refer to black children. Sorry
| that it has to be this way.
| rablackburn wrote:
| While I appreciate you taking the time to write this note,
| I don't think I will edit the word.
|
| The fact that it sometimes is being used by racists gives
| me a little pause (that's basically how semantic shift
| happens, and there comes a point where the new meaning
| eclipses the old), but I have never come across it in that
| context, whereas I see it used in it's original meaning
| commonly (and in professional contexts).
|
| If someone tries to cast a comment of mine in a technical
| thread as racist I don't think changing my language is
| going to help.
|
| Similarly I'm not so invested in my imaginary internet
| points that being flagged by such a poor future algorithm
| concerns me. If HN got to that point, I would probably have
| lost interest in it long before.
|
| I'm here for interesting, technical discussion. Not for the
| zeitgeist's culture wars that are engulfing all the other
| platforms. With the exception of recent threads (which
| considering the tumultuous events that are happening, I
| understand), I find HN to be a lovely corner of the old web
| where users try to read each other's content in good faith.
| MattJ100 wrote:
| Actually if you're serious about this, ping me at the address
| in my profile (XMPP/email). Even if just to chat :)
| bionade24 wrote:
| That's why Qt can do shit and people like me will still prefer it
| over GTK. There were many fixes for this problem, none got
| merged.
| esarbe wrote:
| I like Gnome. I use it every day and I'm very satisfied. There
| might be little issues here and there, but no other DE gets out
| of my way and lets me do my work like Gnome.
|
| Thanks guys and gals!
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I see a lot of people recommending KDE in the comments. While I
| use KDE it also has big issues in its file picker. Most notably,
| when a save dialog is open it looks like the filename is focused
| and selected but if you start typing it actually does a search
| rather than editing the file name. I don't know if Gnome also has
| this issue, but it is quite annoying.
| sn_master wrote:
| "If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you, it's because
| you're used to mediocrity." He's lucky to have his own website.
| That statement would get him downvoted/deplatformed in most
| places unless its about Windows.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and
| haven't been popularly adopted
|
| Free OSs have been doing very well. The ultimate reason I 100%
| switched to Free OSs was because I couldn't stand software
| crashing at random points in time anymore. With Windows
| (especially 98 like in the article) anything can crash, during
| boot, Explorer, Word, the Desktop, and in the past it did. Maybe
| part of the reason Free OSs did better at this is that they did
| solve things differently and didn't implement every single
| feature. That said, Free OSs offer other features: focus follows
| mouse, configurable window behavior, virtual screens etc. I think
| this is why I will never be able to use Windows again because it
| feels just too constrained.
|
| Nowadays I use macOS for Desktop though but only because they
| make such nice hardware. It's only a question of time until I
| either install Linux or get a new Laptop with Linux.
| jhy wrote:
| I read this post this morning and felt pretty smug in my choice
| to use Windows.
|
| But when I went to share a photo this evening, I found that the
| Chrome file picker in Windows is actually much worse! Not only
| does it not show previews for thumbnails, it doesn't even show
| the image in the detail pane. It just shows the registered
| application icon. So, you get a sea of big blue (E) Internet
| Explorer icons.
|
| Not sure if this is a Chrome or a Windows thing, or if there's a
| setting for it. But as a user, I clicked about a bunch and
| couldn't find a way to see the actual images.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/NYHCDZw.png
| ferongr wrote:
| There must be something wrong with your system.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/KtTbjkq.png
| therealmarv wrote:
| GNOME is in general terrible for everything with image related
| work (last tested on Ubuntu 20.04). In the past I thought finder
| on macOS is terrible (it's still the worst piece of macOS and I
| don't like it) but GNOME files aka Nautilus tops it for sure
| (also because of space wasting issues).
|
| XFCE and KDE both do a better job than GNOME in this regard. And
| also Windows Explorer was and is much much better in this area.
| Hitton wrote:
| In this particular case XFCE isn't any better than GNOME. Even
| though it does have thumbnails, they are so small that they are
| not usable.
| type0 wrote:
| GNOME files is a horrific dump, it is one of the few things
| that make GNOME unusable out of the box
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean it's definitely not for power-users but I think it's a
| pretty nice basic file manager. I've never really wanted for
| something more powerful than Nautilus but less powerful than
| a terminal.
| sercand wrote:
| Why do you don't like Finder? I couldn't think any issue with
| it.
| stretchcat wrote:
| Symlinks on the desktop or in Finder to files on network
| mounts don't receive preview thumbnails. But if you drag that
| same directory to the dock, those symlinks _do_ receive
| thumbnails (but only when viewed through the dock.)
|
| Tested on El Capitan through to Mojave.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I could give you _so_ many, but I 'll kick off with just
| three that spring to mind. i] Keyboard navigation is
| _terrible_. ii] Tags cannot be applied to symlinks. iii] If
| you 're looking at a tree view, with any number of folders
| displaying, the only one you can create a new folder inside
| is the very top-level folder.
| therealmarv wrote:
| My biggest complaint: Normal Copy and Paste does not work. My
| mother is used to Copy and Paste and it would work in Linux
| but not in macOS finder because of: think different
|
| Also why are folders sometimes cluttered all over the place
| and shorts cuts so weird?
|
| Well I fixed it all with Forklift but I also grew up with
| Norton Commander ;)
| Klonoar wrote:
| What about copy and paste doesn't work...? I use that
| feature daily.
|
| And for the clutter, you can configure Finder to be more
| militant in how it displays/orders things.
|
| The only gripe I have with Finder is needing to set up a
| million QLPreview things to do better spacebar peeking.
| Otherwise, it's fine - it "just works" and isn't fancy.
| Teever wrote:
| I actually filed a bug report with Apple in 2005 regarding
| the inability to cut and paste files in Finder.
|
| They actually responded a few years later and said that
| this is the intended functionality.
|
| Maddening.
| Zarel wrote:
| They do support copy and move, which I think is clearer
| that the file doesn't get deleted if you don't "paste" it
| (and safer than if it did).
|
| It's probably annoying to learn a new paradigm, but you
| could make the argument that it's worth it to learn
| something that isn't lying to you.
| spideymans wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Copy and Paste works exactly as I'd
| expect in Finder.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think they possibly mis-spoke and mean cut-and-paste,
| which does appear to be intentionally permanently
| disabled in Finder via the menu or shortcut. But you can
| drag so it's not a huge issue to me. Copy-and-paste works
| a-ok.
| carlosrg wrote:
| Cut-and-paste on Finder works perfectly fine too. It's
| Cmd-C and then Option-Cmd-V on the destination instead of
| Cmd-V.
|
| Alternatively hold Option when opening the Edit menu.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Alternatively hold Option when opening the Edit menu.
|
| This doesn't change the Edit menu for me. Does it work
| for you today on latest macOS?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| It does change the Edit menu in Finder on Big Sur.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Well doesn't for me - strange. It does change 'copy' to
| 'copy as pathname' though.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| That's not cut-and-paste. That's copy and some weird
| modified paste that, as far as I'm aware, doesn't exist
| anywhere else. Why completely break the existing
| convention?
| carlosrg wrote:
| >the existing convention
|
| It is the existing convention, the Mac Finder convention.
| And yes, it's effectively the same as cut and paste.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Do you not think that it's terrible UX, to have cmd+x
| followed by cmd+v for cut and paste in some places and
| cmd+c followed by option+cmd+v for cut and paste in
| others?
| [deleted]
| pseudalopex wrote:
| I think it's terrible UX for cut to mean different things
| in Explorer and Word.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > It is the existing convention, the Mac Finder
| convention.
|
| I think the point is this doesn't match the convention in
| the rest of the macOS. A convention of one is a poor
| convention!
| carlosrg wrote:
| If you mean cut text and so on, it doesn't match because
| they're not the same thing. When editing a text document,
| if you cut some part, it actually goes away. If you saved
| the document at that point, that selection would be gone.
|
| On files, if you cut a file on Windows for example,
| _nothing happens_. Until you paste, no operation is done.
| So it 's not the same thing, and I think the way Finder
| handles it makes more sense.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| macOS came first.
|
| Other file managers don't really cut and paste. They have
| a weird modified cut that doesn't exist anywhere else.
| spideymans wrote:
| >Why completely break the existing convention?
|
| Because cutting-and-pasting is a destructive action that
| can lead to data loss.
|
| Under the conventional implementation of cut-and-paste,
| it's easy for a user to inadvertently cut-and-paste a
| file, when they meant to copy-and-paste said file, either
| through a misclick or, by hitting the wrong keyboard
| combination. This is because:
|
| 1. The menu option for _cut_ is right above the menu
| option for _copy_
|
| 2. The keyboard shortcut for _cut_ (command-c) is just
| one key away from the keyboard shortcut for _copy_
| (command-c) on a QWERTY keyboard
|
| Cutting and pasting deletes the file from its original
| directory, however under a traditional cut-and-paste
| operation, the system does not ask for confirmation.
| Consequently, if a user mistakenly cuts a file or
| directory without _immediately_ noticing their mistake,
| their files could be rendered unrecoverable (and keep in
| mind that there 's no particular reason why they _would_
| notice... the UI provides no special indication when a
| file or directory is deleted via cut-and-paste). This is
| arguably a very bad user experience.
|
| The equivalent action to cutting-and-pasting on OS X is
| copying, pasting and then deleting the original file. By
| adding in this extra step, the UI has forced users to
| acknowledge that their action is potentially destructive
| and unrecoverable.
|
| Also notice that the command-x shortcut in Finder copies
| a file. It does not cut the file. Again, this protects
| the user from inadvertent data loss if they use the wrong
| keyboard shortcut.
|
| It's a rather unusual move Apple has made here by
| breaking convention, but I think they've made a wise
| wager that users would rather be annoyed by a small extra
| step, then be faced with the loss of important data.
|
| Thinking about this design choice, I now wonder how many
| times I've had files mysteriously go missing on Windows
| and other operating systems simply because I used CTRL+X
| when I meant to use CTRL+C
| yyyk wrote:
| >Thinking about this design choice, I now wonder how many
| times I've had files mysteriously go missing on Windows
| and other operating systems simply because I used CTRL+X
| when I meant to use CTRL+C
|
| Zero. If one CTRL+Xs accidentally, Windows and most Linux
| Desktop pickers change the highlight colour before the
| copy. At worst you can CTRL+Z it after or copy it back.
| It's not a 'destructive' operation since you always have
| one copy of the file.
|
| It's a typical case of Apple deciding users are stupid
| and therefore should be limited, combined with the
| typical 'just everything Apple does' syndrome.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Because cutting-and-pasting is a destructive action
| that can lead to data loss.
|
| Isn't this the same for all cut-and-paste? It's expected.
|
| What's special about files that mean they need special
| protection?
|
| Pop them in the Bin until they're pasted if you want.
|
| It's not as unfathomable as you make out.
| spideymans wrote:
| If I accidentally cut-and-paste from a text document, the
| absolute worst case scenario is that I lose the contents
| of the text in that document. It's a bad situation, but
| the damage is limited and contained.
|
| If I accidentally cut-and-paste a file or _directory_ ,
| the damage could be immense. Years worth of important
| documents, records, photos, etc... could be gone, because
| the user's finger slipped and pressed CTRL+X, rather than
| CTRL+C.
|
| Whether or not the operating system should be protecting
| users in this manner is fully debatable and a matter of
| opinion, but Apple's approach here is definitely safer
| (at the cost of being a bit more annoying)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Doesn't putting it in the Bin until it's pasted fix this?
|
| And you always have undo, just as with text.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I take your point. I can't be certain why, because it's
| been so long since I used Windows, but I never found this
| to be a problem in practice -- maybe I was just lucky. I
| guess you could make the same argument about cut in any
| context, except:
|
| a) you could argue that cutting text isn't as destructive
| as deleting a file, although they could be one and the
| same if you happen to have an entire file's text selected
|
| b) mechanisms for undo'ing text operations tend to be
| more sophisticated than undo'ing filesystem operations; I
| might argue that's a separate problem to be resolved
|
| I'd be perfectly happy if this were an option, buried in
| some obscure preference panel somewhere, labelled "yes, I
| really want to shoot myself in the foot" but, as it
| stands, I don't even get that.
| spideymans wrote:
| >I can't be certain why, because it's been so long since
| I used Windows, but I never found this to be a problem in
| practice
|
| I would have said the same thing. But then again, I'm
| sure there's been times where files have gone "missing"
| on my computer. Did I misplace them? Accidentally deleted
| them? Accidentally cut-and-paste? Who knows.
|
| >I'd be perfectly happy if this were an option, buried in
| some obscure preference panel somewhere, labelled "yes, I
| really want to shoot myself in the foot" but, as it
| stands, I don't even get that.
|
| Yeah, no argument from me there. I'd appreciate an option
| buried in the OS X CLI at a bare minimum.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's not permanently disabled, it enables itself when you
| are editing text (for example, if you're renaming a
| file).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think we're talking about copying-and-pasting _files_
| in this thread, rather than text in input boxes, as you
| 're thinking.
| saagarjha wrote:
| No, I know that. I'm just providing insight as to why
| that menu item is there and when it enables itself.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I think they mean cut+paste to move a file.
| [deleted]
| therealmarv wrote:
| I meant the standard cut and paste and short cuts. Sorry.
| sercand wrote:
| Copy, Cut, and Paste works just fine. I use the following
| default shortcuts:
|
| Cmd+C: Put file to Clipboard
|
| Cmd+V: Copy file in Clipboard
|
| Cmd+Option+V: Move file in Clipboard (aka Cut)
| alkonaut wrote:
| Note that _showing_ the thumbnails would likely be simple enough.
| The whole desktop system needs a system for generating and
| maintaining those thumbnails too. Those systems are always
| complex and messy (remember thumbs.db?)
|
| A dialog that opens every file in the directory to read the image
| and show it, won't be very popular.
|
| So implementing this feature isn't a change to a dialog but an
| implementation of something akin to the windows thumbnail cache
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_thumbnail_cache
| ATsch wrote:
| Nautilus does already have such a cache though. But there is
| little to no code sharing between nautilus and the gtk file
| picker, which I think is the actual problem here.
| [deleted]
| alkonaut wrote:
| That the file save dialog isn't based on the explorer tool is
| precisely why a windows file save dialog has e.g. thumbnails
| "for free" while the gtk file picker doesn't.
|
| It very clearly explains why you want to choose to base
| _every_ file listing tool on the single file navigation tool.
| Any effort that goes into one is reflected in the other. If
| that means a surprising UX at times - that 's probably worth
| it.
| 6510 wrote:
| Windos 10 can display thumbnails too! You have to find the
| settings dialog of something called One Drive, disable something
| called "Files On Demand service" and restart the PC.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > I live in the UK, a country where people spend far more time
| evading work than actually doing any
|
| Uh, what?
| MisterTea wrote:
| A blog spam contains over 1,000 words criticizing a >10,000 word
| bug report yet does nothing to help. No code was written. No
| progress was made. Instead we are treated to a story about
| toilets and demands to complicate a rube goldberg user interface.
| vortico wrote:
| I've had a thought in the back of my mind to write a
| replacement/alternative for the GTK file picker for years. I've
| probably spent at least a day total using it throughout my life,
| so it would make sense to spend a few days on it to help myself
| and others. To improve it I would remove several features I don't
| need, add features I would use, and repair subtle but important
| workflow issues such as key commands and widget focus issues.
|
| But how extensible is it? Would it require a recompile of GTK? Or
| perhaps a shared library plugin? Realistically, the likelihood of
| me actually diving into this is low due to life keeping me too
| busy.
| mmplxx wrote:
| > the likelihood of me actually diving into this is low
|
| I was all the time thinking of this since "I've had a thought
| in the back of my mind to write a replacement".
| dschuetz wrote:
| > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and
| haven't been popularly adopted. It's little things like this that
| add up.
|
| That's it. That sums up what's wrong with the Linux desktop. It's
| the little annoying, arbitrary and broken things. It's that
| constant denial (the 2 decades old GNOME bug report is the
| perfect example), that _it 's not broken, people are just using
| it wrong_ mentality among Linux desktop developers that breaks
| Linux desktop.
|
| I know, desktop is hard. I know we should be thankful to GNOME
| developers no matter what. I am thankful! I just don't want to
| use their broken software anymore. GNOME is dead to me since a
| decade. I just could not appreciate it as much as I wished to.
| Timpy wrote:
| > Why was there a Windows monopoly? I think it's a stretch to
| just blame it on OEM bundling. No, it's legit because there isn't
| anything else.
|
| I agree GNOME-3 is blocked toilet, but Windows 10 is also a
| blocked toilet. I have a file that I would like to open on my
| Windows 10 computer "passport.pdf", I hit the winkey and type
| "passport [enter]" to open the file. Windows launched a Bing
| search on Edge for the word "passport", but Edge has to go
| through its welcome dialog because I've never opened it before.
| This is only one example; all in all using Windows 10 is like
| taking a hike with a rock in your shoe.
|
| Windows WAS a monopoly because of its usability, but now it's
| ubiquitous because we're path dependant. Having to use Windows 10
| for me is having to walk downstairs to use the bathroom in the
| middle of the night. I wish I could stay on Windows 7 forever,
| but I'm very happy with Mint Cinnamon DE for now.
| speeder wrote:
| I am using a mix of Win7, Ubuntu, Win10 and old OSX on various
| computers.
|
| To be honest, so far Win7 is winning, it is the OS that gives
| me the least headaches.
|
| Win7 problems: occasionally something doesn't work because it
| is Win10 only and Wine can't emulate it. Also recently I had an
| issue trying to use hardware that was intended for Win98 but
| that is kind of expected.
|
| Win10: randomly updates without permission, reboots itself,
| break stuff that I need working (for example one time its
| unexpected updates broke the software my company use to
| generate invoices, meaning Windows10 update managed to
| singlehandedly shut down my company income for a couple days
| until we reinstalled our bank invoice software on Win7), has
| telemetry, insists in re-enabling telemetry after we disabled
| it, has ads, has games without permission, insists that we use
| Cortana, but then complains Cortana is not available in my
| country, and the list goes on.
|
| Ubuntu issues: the default interface is weird, there is no way
| to type file paths on filepickers, and this is quite maddening,
| it requires command line to do basic stuff too often, even
| native Ubuntu games might have bizarre issues with Fullscreen
| or random notification software hijacking the focus, and
| weirdly, it crashes more often than Win7, usually because of
| out of ram issues.
| apricot wrote:
| Comparing the GTK File chooser dialog to a clogged toilet is an
| insult to clogged toilets.
| coding123 wrote:
| The worst experience in Gimp is also the file picker.
| sombragris wrote:
| I know that the authors explicitly rejects this, but "use
| Plasma". Seriously, these were non-issues at least since KDE3
| times.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| KDE3 is an entirely different workflow
| its-summertime wrote:
| > Okay. Well, how much money should I pay for someone to fix this
| then? I'm legit offering a bounty here.
|
| How much are you willing to offer?
| michaelt wrote:
| The problem with feature bounties is: $500 is a lot to give,
| but not much to receive.
| sterlind wrote:
| it'd be nice if there were some quickly-accessible bounty
| portal (maybe even from the DE itself) where proposals could
| be upvoted and crowd-funded. 500 people see it and offer $10
| and that's a $5000 bounty, payable on merge or returned in 90
| days. people could even run side-hussles of proposing
| features in the hopes that they're funded.
| agambrahma wrote:
| I haven't had an opinion on Linux-on-the-desktop for _several
| years_ now, but TIL about ... "Neocities" (!)
|
| https://neocities.org/about
| pachico wrote:
| I read all the post hoping for a happy ending about the toilet
| issues.
|
| Spoiler alert, there isn't such end.
| snvzz wrote:
| There's more serious reasons this file picker is broken.
|
| Here's a trivial to reproduce and obvious issue that's been there
| for several years now:
|
| 1. Open a directory that loads slowly (e.g. one with thousands of
| files on a smb3 mount)
|
| 2. While the list is loading, select a file (but do not open it)
|
| 3. Wait for the whole list to load
|
| Once the list finishes loading, the file on the very top of the
| list gets automatically selected (discarding your selection).
|
| Thus, if you select a file and click open, in the time between
| you select and click open, the selection can auto-change and
| you'll end up opening something else than what you've selected.
|
| It is this bad.
| dheera wrote:
| Also if you are in the "Recently used" tab you can't hit Ctrl+L
| to get a path box
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Picking directories has been pretty broken forever as well. Say
| you start in ~/Downloads/foo and want to store the file in
| ~/Downloads, then navigating up will have "foo" selected, with
| usually no blank space to un-select (so you'd need to do
| ctrl+click or something to that tune); clicking "Save" (or
| whatever) will then _descend_ into that directory instead of
| saving, so just using the mouse, or not using any shortcuts,
| you really can 't do this.
|
| This, other UX and even performance (!) issues that have been
| mentioned in siblings as well as TFA makes the Gtk file pickers
| easily one of the TOP10 reasons to avoid Gtk and Gnome for
| anything.
|
| The interaction design of these dialogs is simply shit. Windows
| (and also KDE, which has been using a copy of the Windows
| dialog for about 20 years) show how to do it correctly.
| Hello71 wrote:
| Actually, I think the intended usage in this situation is to
| click on the filename field, _then_ press Save (or Enter
| /Return). Which is still terrible discoverability, but at
| least it's theoretically possible?
| tylermenezes wrote:
| Wow I never thought about Ctrl+Click to deselect in that
| situation. I've probably wasted at least an hour of my life
| by giving up and re-opening the window in a different way.
| Thanks!
|
| (I actually asked someone more knowledgable about this once
| and was told that it's my fault for using the file picker
| incorrectly and I simply need to stop doing that.)
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| One thing I was happy to discover as a kid was shift + tab
| to go backwards with input selection (Spacebar to trigger
| checkboxes was nice too)
| jfim wrote:
| These shortcuts have been a thing for quite a while too,
| they come from the IBM CUA guidelines [0].
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Can't take credit for that -- someone told me to use
| ctrl+click in this situation after I ranted about it
| elsewhere.
| snvzz wrote:
| I tried C-shift-A, but didn't work.
|
| Control click seems to work.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Picking directories has been pretty broken forever as well.
| Say you start in ~/Downloads/foo and want to store the file
| in ~/Downloads, then navigating up will have "foo" selected,
| with usually no blank space to un-select (so you'd need to do
| ctrl+click or something to that tune); clicking "Save" (or
| whatever) will then descend into that directory instead of
| saving, so just using the mouse, or not using any shortcuts,
| you really can't do this.
|
| That's a degradation from 2.10, or 2.16, from time even
| before the 3.0.
| joseluis wrote:
| Thank you for the accurate description. and it's also broken
| in xfce. I personally deal with this annoying situation by
| ascending to the grandparent and then descending to the
| parent again.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I recall this being a problem, but I just tried it in
| Gnome+Chrome and it worked correctly and the picker 'looks
| native' at least. Then I tried it in GIMP (which has a
| different picker) and it works like you describe.
|
| Some other Gnome apps also work correctly so I think it's
| fixed in Gnome but not whatever GIMP is using.
| abrowne wrote:
| GIMP is still Gtk 2 unless you're using a preview build.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Window's UI is not really an upgrade though. All the fake
| roots (why the heck is the Desktop the root) and the forced
| broken navigation therein, the removal of up so you have to
| navigate everything like webpages, treating some folders like
| databases and others with duplicate names like standard
| folders, hiding extensions, and the 'My Computer' naming
| madness.
|
| KDE is the best desktop experience available.
| scotty79 wrote:
| There's "Up one folder" button and keyboard shortcut in
| Windows. Button is placed next to weblike Back and Forward
| buttons. It works according to path displayed next to it
| and you can even click the elements of the path to go up as
| many levels up as you want with single click.
|
| I agree that KDE still feels better though.
| sixbrx wrote:
| That's true but annoylingly it doesn't always take you up
| one folder. For example If you click it from Desktop, it
| takes you to the whole PC instead of to your home folder.
| [deleted]
| LarvaFX wrote:
| For Linux, I agree.
| ht85 wrote:
| Let's do another... Open any directory with 3+ items. As first
| item is highlighted, quickly hit <down arrow>, <enter>, <down
| arrow>. The 3rd item opens...
|
| There is a lag when hitting <enter> and the last <down arrow>
| is processed out of order :/
| buckminster wrote:
| This is bad but it's not unusual. There are similar issues in
| Firefox and Windows. Nobody gets UI asynchrony right. There
| are race conditions in everything. It's particularly
| noticeable with a slow computer.
| danaliv wrote:
| I promise you people have gotten this right. I have a 198?
| Mac Plus on my desk that I can boot up and do this on and
| it will work properly. I'm having trouble even imagining
| the insane event-processing architecture that results in
| _keystrokes_ being processed out of order.
|
| Edit: Alright, alright, forget the old computer. My new
| ones get it right too. All of which is a red herring,
| because the point is this behavior is ridiculous and never
| should've shipped.
| masswerk wrote:
| However, the Mac was about the only system getting this
| right by rigorously prioritizing UI events on the system
| level.
|
| (Which is also, why applications like Photoshop on
| Windows weren't a viable option for professional users
| for some time, until hardware became faster. How do you
| draw or paint, if the events representing your gestures
| are not synchronized, as they are subject to system
| load?)
| ivanbakel wrote:
| >I'm having trouble even imagining the insane event-
| processing architecture that results in keystrokes being
| processed out of order.
|
| It's relatively simple: the picker executes file-opening
| asynchronously, and only checks which file was selected
| at some indeterminate point after enter is pressed. In
| the meantime, the down arrow input in the main GUI
| changes the selection. The keypresses are always in
| order.
|
| Whether or not that's the correct decision, it's not an
| inconceivable design. That example is probably one of the
| only times it would matter, since you would need async
| code that cares about some part of the file picker state.
| userbinator wrote:
| To sound like Linus Torvalds, "that's braindead stupid!"
|
| I have never looked at the code in question, but it
| almost sounds like the developers went out of their way
| to create these ridiculous bugs, because the simplest
| solution definitely would not have something like that
| happen: The handler for Enter gets the current selection
| (which will definitely be the correct one) and opens it.
|
| The actual opening can be slow, so that can be done
| asynchronously. But to interpret "Enter opens the current
| selection" as anything other than _the current selection
| at the time the Enter key event was received_ is
| definitely in the realm of rookie mistake if not worse.
|
| If getting the current selection of a UI control somehow
| needs to be done asynchronously, then something is
| seriously wrong.
|
| As a long-time Win32 programmer, the manifestations of
| these bugs are definitely hard to conceive.
| stelonix wrote:
| This is an issue with X11 which I don't know exactly
| where it comes from and what causes it. Yes, it has to do
| with the async nature of it all and I agree it's stupid
| and it's a miracle the desktop even works. Over time,
| I've been wondering if Windows dodges this simply by
| having syscalls that interface with window procedures
| while Xorg deals horribly with it by being pure userland.
| Another issue is, there's no mapping of pid <-> X11
| window. It's simply impossible with the current design of
| client-server.
| account42 wrote:
| > This is an issue with X11
|
| What makes you think this is the case? X11 has an ordered
| event queue and there is no reason an application can't
| process the keystrokes in the correct order.
|
| > Another issue is, there's no mapping of pid <-> X11
| window. It's simply impossible with the current design of
| client-server.
|
| What do you need this for? There is _NET_WM_PID [0] which
| can be set by clients.
|
| [0] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-
| spec-1.3.h...
| stelonix wrote:
| _NET_WM_PID is optional, some clients do not set it and
| even then afaik the server doesn't do any sanity check
| and the client can set it to anything, making it
| inherently insecure. This is not good design.
|
| > What makes you think this is the case? Many other ways
| in which async behavior happens on X11, on any machine
| I've tried, with the mouse cursor lagging to register a
| click event, for example.
| josefx wrote:
| > there's no mapping of pid <-> X11 window
|
| There is a standard window property that anyone can set
| and that any halfway sane UI framework sets. I ran into
| maybe one that didn't and even then it was five lines of
| copy/paste code to add it.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Whether or not that's the correct decision, it's not an
| inconceivable design.
|
| I'm having trouble with the part of the design where we
| recognize that a file is selected (such that pressing
| <enter> causes a file to open), see the <enter> keypress,
| and then fire an event saying "open any file, whichever
| one you feel like" as opposed to "open this file right
| here, the one we can see is selected".
|
| If, as you maintain, the _keystrokes_ are processed in
| order, then at the time <enter> is processed, we
| specifically take notice of which file is selected.
| (Because, as I said above, we only know that <enter>
| should open a file at all because we see that a file is
| selected.) We fire the file-opening event after that.
| This isn't a mistake we can make by accident; we'd have
| to be making it on purpose.
|
| I can see where the assumption that the keystrokes are
| being reordered comes from; it's _much less insane_ than
| what you 're proposing.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| Because the event says "open the currently selected
| file", not "open this file because it is the selected
| one". If the event is processed asynchronously w.r.t.
| other events which can modify the selection, you can get
| buggy behaviour.
|
| I don't find such a design that surprising. If you like
| simplicity, you would be tempted to go for it, because it
| doesn't involve duplicating data (namely, the selected
| filepath) between the main GUI state and the event
| handler for opening the selected file. If you're writing
| in a memory-managing language like C, it's even more
| tempting - by not copying data, you don't risk forgetting
| to free it later.
| polynomial wrote:
| This is a great example of where OOP and FP necessarily
| part ways.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| That's a cool idea, how so?
| ballenf wrote:
| Why wouldn't the <enter> key interrupt or freeze the
| keypress queue? I don't think you need some advanced
| async logic to get this right.
|
| The only potential downside would be if people expected
| to be able to cancel the <enter> action. But that would
| be unusual, I think.
| ivanbakel wrote:
| As a rule of thumb: if you ever ask "why not", and the
| alternative you're proposing is more complicated - that
| is normally why not. Lots of UI/UX bugs can simply be
| attributed to the programmer taking the most simple
| possible design.
|
| In this case, the async logic is not advanced. In fact,
| I'm willing to bet that this is what happened: at first,
| the file-opening was synchronous in the GUI. People
| complained that opening certain files locked up the file
| picker, so a developer sticks the file-opening code in a
| background thread. This produces the above bug, without
| complicating the input design - in fact, preventing the
| bug requires making additional changes to the code in
| some way.
| toast0 wrote:
| You can't do work on the UI thread, it'll block the UI!
| With only half a /s
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Why does the enter keypress save the relative index
| instead of the actual target of the action? Even Windows
| gets this one right.
| buckminster wrote:
| All old computers get it right. They are not doing UI
| asynchrony. It's a fairly recent problem.
| mkl wrote:
| Keyboard maybe. That same old Mac probably processes
| mouse events out of order: when it was being slow you
| could click on something then move the mouse somewhere
| else, and it would click the new place instead.
| danaliv wrote:
| My new computers get this right too. This is a design
| flaw.
| viraptor wrote:
| That Mac cannot multithread the UI interactions. It
| doesn't have to be a keystroke processing issue. It can
| be "hey window parent, I've got your result in my
| properties, pick it up" which doesn't get processed
| before the next event changes the related property.
|
| It's almost a classic TOCTOU issue.
| edoceo wrote:
| Time of check, Time of Use
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-check_to_time-of-
| use
| [deleted]
| Ndymium wrote:
| LibreOffice had (has?) a similar strange race condition
| when typing. When the computer was acting slow and
| LibreOffice Writer was lagging, the Finnish layout's
| characters aoa would jump to the front of the typing queue
| somehow. So if I typed "menkaamme", I might get "aamenkmme"
| when LibreOffice finally renders the typed text. I don't
| know if it still occurs but it was really annoying and I
| always wondered how on earth it could happen.
| jfoster wrote:
| It's akin to typing and having the characters appear out of
| order, isn't it? Are those particular keys more difficult
| to process?
| efreak wrote:
| Only if each key has its own function to process that
| keystroke, and some keystrokes had to do more processing
| and thus take more time about it. Selecting an item in a
| list view is a fast, simple process; what happens after
| that isn't up to the list view anymore.
| j1elo wrote:
| Assuming an asynchronous UI programming model, I can only
| conceive this happening because they skipped having a proper
| Model and instead the View is accessed directly (in the Mode-
| View-Controller way of thinking).
|
| However the most disturbing thing is that events might get to
| be processed our of order. Even if you stored current state
| in a proper Model, there is nothing you can do if your event
| queue ends up being "<down>, <down>, <enter>".
|
| I guess that's why Qt prefers to do all UI event processing
| exclusively in a single thread. The event queue will always
| be serviced in order.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| Incidentally, that lag is there independent of how fast your
| disk is, it seems. It's kind of annoying.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| That's likely the fault of the GVFS and other virtual-fs-
| on-top-of-kernel-VFS layers. Gtk seems to be slower than
| others (such as KIO/KDE), but all of them are pretty slow.
| E.g. the KDE file picker takes about a second or so to
| finish listing the contents of my home directory (though it
| is usable while it is doing so, unlike the Gtk dialog),
| where the Gtk takes quite a bit longer (perhaps on the
| order of 3-5 seconds). Meanwhile ls is essentially instant,
| as you'd expect for just a few thousand files or so.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| KIO is pretty fast I think. Dolphin is insanely fast at
| least - if you list a large directory almost everything
| that can't be loaded instantly is loaded asynchronously
| and streamed in to the UI after the UI becomes
| responsive. I think the KDE file picker is using other
| code altogether, I'm not sure why it's so much slower.
| GIO is horribly slow and makes everything that uses it
| next to useless, eg [1]
|
| [1] https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt/issues/462
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| Interesting explanation at the end of the bug report:
|
| The slowness is only caused by the GIO's
| G_FILE_ATTRIBUTE_STANDARD_CONTENT_TYPE and
| g_file_info_get_content_type. Wherever they are used,
| there will be a slowdown because the contents of files,
| that lack extensions, should be read for finding their
| mimetypes. Almost all the time is taken by that; the
| other operations are done pretty fast -- particularly,
| the Qt GUI takes no time in comparison.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Yes, actually reading that it makes it sound like the
| file manager itself is just badly architechted - of
| _course_ you shouldn 't load mimetypes synchronously
| before listing a folder in the UI, that seems obvious.
|
| So maybe I'm not right about GIO as such. But Nautilus is
| also excruciatingly slow despite being more fully
| asynchronous.
| sam_goody wrote:
| KDE user here, so cannot comment on this case exactly, but in
| my experience the default "Windows" of Windows and Mac are also
| terrible.
|
| Try to split a window pane on Windows, or right-click and
| create a file in Mac. In either, try to open an SFTP folder as
| if it is local, or integrate Git status icons into finder (all
| easy to do on KDE and Gnome). Good Luck.
|
| The number of copy+paste bugs and QuickLook hanging issues on
| Mac is not even funny.
|
| Just look at all the enhancers like Norton Commander and Path
| Finder, and you can see that even calling the OS Windows didn't
| make MS put too much effort into their windows.
| amlib wrote:
| The gnome file picker is so bad that I will pretty much always
| load files by drag and droping files into the application from
| a file browser!
| circularfoyers wrote:
| This is pretty much how I've resorted to solving the issue
| for myself as well. It's a shame when I personally like GNOME
| in most other ways.
| MawKKe wrote:
| Many years ago I was a hit by a bug in the Gnome file chooser
| (on ubuntu) that selected a random sibling file in the same
| directory. Caused me to accidentally upload something I
| definetely didn't want to publish.
|
| In fact I have never since directly uploaded anything from my
| own personal file directories, instead I make a copy of it
| under /tmp for the upload process.
|
| Not sure if this is the same bug you are talking about
| j1elo wrote:
| It's stuff like this that makes so hard to onboard new non-
| techie users. The proverbial mom or grandma, whose knowledge
| about the "filesystem" and "directory hierarchies" is already
| pretty weak, would probably spend 30 minutes or more with this
| exercise in frustration, before giving up and/or grabbing the
| phone to ask for help.
|
| When you're past the stage of first impressions, it's a death
| by a thousand cuts.
|
| Windows is not better in lots of these details, but at least
| users already know its tricks due to Microsoft's years of
| desktop dominance. I'd argue the effort of changing platforms
| should be about improving the experience, not about swapping a
| list of UX issues with a set of different ones, otherwise the
| change isn't really worth it for most users.
|
| EDIT: oops I meant to write this comment as a reply to the
| sibling that talks about how difficult it is to select a parent
| directory in the file picker dialog
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25721368)
| enriquto wrote:
| Even worse is when you know the exact file name that you want
| to open, and the interface fights against you writing it! For
| example I want to open /tmp/a.png, but there's thousands of
| files on /tmp and the cursor disappears while "loading" them,
| and and some characters of the file name are lost, or typed on
| different parts of the interface.
| dn3500 wrote:
| Or when you have the full path name already and want to paste
| it in to GtkFileChooser. It turns out this is possible, but
| you'd never know it from the UI.
| ju-st wrote:
| The Windows folder chooser dialogue has this problem as
| well.
| for_xyz wrote:
| Old one yes. New one (since win vista) allows you to pick
| folders.
| pFileOpen->SetOptions(FOS_PICKFOLDERS | FOS_PATHMUSTEXIST
| | FOS_ALLOWMULTISELECT);
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/api/shobjidl_...
| edoceo wrote:
| IME users aren't doing a lot of C
| eznzt wrote:
| That API is accessible from any language.
| vel0city wrote:
| There's been some changes and refinements since Windows
| 3.1. The current default file chooser dialogue shipped
| with Windows allows you to put in a full path into both
| the top file path or in the Filename dialog.
|
| Reference photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_dialo
| g#/media/File:An_%22...
|
| In this, a full path can be pasted in to both the top bar
| where it says "This PC > WINDOWS (C:)" and also into the
| blank "File name: | |" box.
|
| I'm pretty sure I remember this dialogue being available
| since NT days. It seems fairly discoverable to me,
| clicking in the empty space of the current working
| directory path changes it to show the text path of the
| directory. The "File name" box offers autocomplete if you
| did something like "C:" as a file name, or started typing
| a folder name of the current working directory.
| mmwelt wrote:
| Thank you for that hint! I always thought it wasn't
| possible, so I didn't even try typing.
| benibela wrote:
| In an older version there was autocompletion for typing.
|
| You could type /tmp/a. and it would autocomplete it to
| /tmp/a.png
|
| It is a good idea, but I type too fast. So I would write
| /tmp/a.png and then the autocompletion triggered and replace
| it with /tmp/a.pngpng
| enriquto wrote:
| > You could type /tmp/a. and it would autocomplete it to
| /tmp/a.png > > It is a good idea, but I type too fast. So I
| would write /tmp/a.png and then the autocompletion
| triggered and replace it with /tmp/a.pngpng
|
| This is so sad.
|
| Autocompletion of filenames should work perfectly no matter
| the conditions. If "ls" can list tens of thousands of files
| in a fraction of a second, there's no reason that
| autocomplete has some delay. I can see why this happens,
| maybe you have a thousand images in /tmp and the file
| picker is opening them all to compute their thumbnails
| (which in my opinion is useless, but whatever). Then it
| uses quite a few kernel threads and it clogs the system,
| making the completion to fail. But it sounds like this
| problem should was already solved many years ago, and that
| modern "improvements" of the file picker made it fail.
| steerablesafe wrote:
| Type ctrl+L first. Don't you love how discoverable these UI
| tricks are?
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Oh my god I had excised this from my memory.
|
| So many times I would go to a folder, start typing the name
| of a file/sub folder that I knew was there and it was like
| "nope! Let's instead search whatever default directory
| instead. Apparently this behaviour is by design and
| alternatives won't be considered. (This was when I was using
| Ubuntu 18/19?) at some point they changed a bunch of default
| things in the UI interface (including getting rid of what I
| considered was the far superior previous lock screen
| manager).
| uncledave wrote:
| That one really really really pissed me off because it's a
| task I expect to do tens of times a day. Also it has some
| serious focus loss issues in that space where you'll have to
| tab or click something again.
|
| I must have installed a Linux distribution 100 times with the
| intent of using it as a desktop and lasted less than a day
| every time. I've been doing it since 1998. Literally
| something that horrible punches me in the face every time.
|
| I refer back to my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25678434
|
| I bought a Mac now. I'm too old for the fight.
|
| Everything I do server side is on Linux but the desktop is
| vile and I want no part of it any more.
| invsblduck wrote:
| > I bought a Mac now. I'm too old for the fight.
|
| I said the same a decade ago. As of last week, I'm back on
| X11... chipping away at configs for hours and hours and
| hours.
|
| But I have libnotify popups now. :D
| 1_player wrote:
| And if it goes like it did for me, that smile will turn
| upside down in a month and you'll format your Linux
| partition and move to WSL2 on Windows even if you haven't
| used it in 20 years. That's it, I'm done.
|
| At least now I only have to put up with a slightly dated
| and crufty interface but I can use my PC to full
| potential - gaming AND work AND working bluetooth. Crazy
| huh?
|
| In my case, I also managed to notice that my computer is
| much faster than it ever was on Linux, which is nice. If
| I had an old Core 2 Duo Linux would make it fly, but
| alas, I can afford a modern PC.
| uncledave wrote:
| Yeah I've got a hefty PC here too running Windows. WSL2
| is wonderful until you get your first Hyper-V bugcheck,
| filesystem corruption or weird ass network issue to
| debug. It's really not very good. I used it from day one
| and WSL1 before that which was even more horrible (NT
| impedance mismatch was obvious)
|
| The compromise for me before migrating to Mac was using
| Windows on the desktop with Ubuntu VMs in Virtualbox. I
| had whole clusters running on my desktop.
|
| Windows 10 is fairly decent on most hardware I have
| found. If they finished off all the little quality
| issues, had a decently integrated mobile ecosystem and
| stopped all the telemetry bullshit I'd be there now. I
| had some hope back in 2015ish when I was full time
| windows desktop dev with WP handset etc. Alas the world
| moved on so I dug the old Unix hat out.
| 1_player wrote:
| Mac is great, I would use it full time if Jobs and Apple
| hadn't decided gaming is for kids. It's my hobby,
| especially now that I'm locked home, and being unable to
| play the latest PC game is an unacceptable compromise for
| me. No, a console is not what I'm looking for.
|
| So in that case, Windows is the best compromise. And
| while I'm still in the proprietary world, I'm outside the
| walled garden.
|
| In any case, I haven't hit any WSL2 bug or corruption in
| these 6 months (nor blue screen), so fingers crossed.
| uncledave wrote:
| Yes I keep my PC for games as well.
|
| I wish you continued fortune with WSL2.
| bmn__ wrote:
| Run `kcmshell5 kwinoptions` or System Settings - section
| Workspace - item Window Management - subitem Window
| Behaviour - tab Focus.
|
| You are not allowed to complain about "Linux" when your
| beef is really about Gnome.
| uncledave wrote:
| If I use KDE I'm still subjected to GTK and Freedesktop
| for stuff I use which is where all the bugs live. But
| then I have more inconsistencies between Qt and GTK so in
| fixing it that way I now have two problems.
|
| Linux itself is fine. It's the layers of shit smeared on
| top that are not.
| kaszanka wrote:
| Recursive search instead of type-ahead search within one
| directory in the file picker is criminally terrible. I don't
| think there is any implementation of a file picker that
| behaves like this (other than Gtk's).
| garaetjjte wrote:
| I use this patch: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tr
| ee/typeahead.patch?...
| ziotom78 wrote:
| I have found a (cumbersome) solution to this using Xfce.
| Its Thunar file manager _does_ implement type-ahead, so
| whenever I need to open a file that is saved in some
| deeply-nested folder, I open Thunar (using a custom
| shortcut, Ctrl+Alt+E) and quickly navigate to the file
| using type-ahead and press Ctr+L to copy its full path to
| the clipboard, then I switch to my app and paste the
| address.
|
| For complex paths, I found that this is the quickest way to
| open the file I want.
| efaref wrote:
| Using TFA's analogy, that's a workaround where you use
| the neighbour's toilet.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| Exactly!!! :-)
| skrap wrote:
| Is this https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2366 ?
| It really bothers me as well.
| [deleted]
| baybal2 wrote:
| > Free software development is not a democracy, and does
| not get driven by polls. Features and bugs are introduced
| by those who show up, within a community that works
| towards a shared goal.
|
| And it is exactly to let themselves yell that, they work
| hard to alienate few normal devs left in the project.
|
| I understood now that Gnome 3.0 was from the start
| Redhat's fully intentional attempt to appropriate the
| project, and is not dissimilar to Microsoft's embrace,
| extend, extinguish.
|
| 1. Get command of some more abandoned parts of the
| project.
|
| 2. Push a series of guaranteedly unpopular sharp
| direction changes which will lead to loss of devs.
|
| 3. As devs leave, you get more reinforcement to your
| casus belli, saying that "nobody maintains this pile of
| garbage, so now I am taking it over too"
|
| 4. Rinse, and repeat.
| cycloptic wrote:
| Please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories.
| If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction
| changes, you don't have to work on them, you can work in
| the direction of your choosing. AFAIK there are numerous
| forks of GNOME over the years that are still going.
| int_19h wrote:
| The problem is that GNOME is not just a DE. By virtue of
| being a project that's used by RedHat and Ubuntu, it's
| the closest thing to the standard DE that desktop Linux
| has at the moment.
|
| Worse yet, its developers consciously make design
| decisions that make it hard to write applications that
| play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it -
| their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a _platform_ ,
| and their main interest is supporting "GNOME apps", even
| to the detriment of all the rest.
|
| Between these two things, deficiencies in GNOME affect a
| lot of people who didn't necessarily choose to be
| affected.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I'm not sure what you expect can be done about that.
| Every desktop is going to have its own set of features
| and APIs that other desktops don't. That's what they mean
| by "platform." Should e.g. KDE developers spend less time
| working on their own features and start contributing more
| to GNOME, to make GNOME apps work better in KDE, and vice
| versa? Maybe, but they would have to take the initiative
| to do it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Plus Gtk gets picked by several cross platform runtimes,
| e.g. Java, Uno, Xamarin, wxWidgets, as the "official" UI
| on Linux.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > If you are a developer and you don't agree with
| direction changes, you don't have to work on them
|
| I would tell the same to Poettering, Clasen, and co.
|
| There is really nobody who obligates them to work on
| their "innovations" in GNOME with religious zeal if the
| rest of the project showed no interest, speaking lightly.
|
| If nobody wants to work on their stuff, they can't claim
| "victimhood" as if that happens as a result of somebody's
| ill intents.
|
| I have to reference Torvalds vs. SystemD here as an
| example how Sievers, Poettering, and co. instantly drew
| up a picture of kernel community being some kind of a
| bullying ring when the only thing they did to them was to
| ignore their (bad quality) patches.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I would advise holding off judgement on specific
| individuals unless you have worked with them closely and
| you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions
| were made.
|
| Again, if you are a developer and you disagree with
| someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own
| direction. You do not have to work on anybody else's
| stuff if you don't want.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's
| choices, you are free to take it in your own direction.
|
| That would be best said to persons named above.
|
| They were free to fork GNOME into their touchscreen based
| imaginary future, and experiment with it even more freely
| as a minority group, rather than trying to hijack the
| project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular
| pushback.
| cycloptic wrote:
| >trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-
| way because of popular pushback
|
| Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy
| theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it
| seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to
| say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be
| hostile towards any specific developers for any specific
| project, I will have to decline to get involved with
| that. You don't have to resort to character
| assassination, if you have some ideas on a good technical
| direction for a project, just make the argument and write
| the code: people will listen if your arguments are sound
| and your code works.
| baybal2 wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy theory.
|
| GNOME 2 was a project of 100+ developers.
|
| TOPAZ was a half-baked tablet UI tech demo from a dozen
| Red Hat employed devs, later dropping to 7-9 regularly
| active ones.
|
| Tell me what is more to explain about this?
| cycloptic wrote:
| I personally don't know the full history; you might
| consider looking for some old blog posts or politely
| contacting a GNOME developer for an explanation of the
| history. From what I understand, the run up to mobile was
| a major source of funding for GNOME 2 from several mobile
| companies, and that's where all the developers came from,
| but most of those companies were not able to keep up and
| failed to iOS/Android. So the funding dried up and Red
| Hat was one of the few companies that happened to survive
| because of their other business. That's what I've heard
| but you should talk to more people who were actually
| involved in the project back then if you want a more
| complete answer. (Please assume good faith and don't be
| hostile, we're all friends here, these are just
| developers trying to pay the bills like the rest of us)
| pantalaimon wrote:
| GNOME 2 was forked as MATE, but there is no funding for
| 100+ developers working on it.
| sergeykish wrote:
| There was a story recently, On the Graying of Gnome,
| comment by boudewijnrempt [1]:
|
| > The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much
| lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego.
| Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were
| paid to work on the documents application. For all of
| Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was
| enormous.
|
| > And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows,
| and well, that was 2012.
|
| > By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and,
| yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free
| software had gone.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489580
| cycloptic wrote:
| Thank you, I figured there was a blog or comment
| somewhere with more info.
| stretchcat wrote:
| > _I would advise holding off judgement on specific
| individuals unless you have worked with them closely and
| you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions
| were made._
|
| Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or
| just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this
| standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be
| worms even though I never worked with them. And don't
| even get me started on politicians, I've never worked
| with one but I certainly feel entitled to have harsh
| opinions about some of them.
|
| If the advice is limited in scope to professional peers,
| then I have to disagree with it; having double standards
| for people like yourself isn't great advice.
| cycloptic wrote:
| For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a
| grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding.
|
| If we are trying to be good open source citizens and
| avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.
| circularfoyers wrote:
| I just want to say that what you said here and in your
| other comments in this thread resonated with me in how
| you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been
| discussed here. I wish there were more people like you
| and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as
| well.
|
| I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know
| the full history and implore others to understand why for
| example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many
| people love to theorize about what these are, making
| correlations which are usually driven more by their
| feelings than reality.
|
| I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I
| feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat
| people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people
| are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not
| considering that person like they are more likely to do
| so if they were in person.
|
| I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt
| by some people in a community where there is freedom to
| take a project in another direction if they desired (I
| know that not everyone has this option).
|
| I do think however that the article of this thread
| expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it
| explains how it effects them without resorting to
| emotional attacks towards the project and it's something
| I really liked about reading it.
| sergeykish wrote:
| I think people believe Linux is community driven project,
| while in reality it is strongly corporate backed. Just
| look at kernel contributions [1]. I think same applies to
| most of the infrastructure, someone works on FreeType,
| Cairo, Pango, etc.
|
| In such case _disjoint_ between users and developers is
| even further. I am professional developer, yet I have
| zero contributions to my framework and just a few
| contributions to libraries. After 10 years my
| contributions to Linux community limited to bug reports,
| few patches and manuals.
|
| In reality there is not enough community support to
| maintain existing systems. "Freedom to take a project in
| another direction if they desired" by individual is
| overrated, that's TempleOS.
|
| EDITED: Some bragging about making a difference
|
| There are a lot of projects with less corporate
| influence. No systemd on BSD, but hardware support is not
| as good. Generic distributions is something that works
| for most of the users. There are a lot of niche
| distributions and projects (Void Linux runit!). Current
| state is just a reflection of users priorities.
|
| [1] https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/
| cycloptic wrote:
| Sorry if it was not clear, by take it in another
| direction I generally mean find funding, get hired by
| someone else to work on it, or start another company to
| work on it if there is enough of a business opportunity
| there. It's very hard to make significant changes to a
| large codebase without a team of people.
| cycloptic wrote:
| I just don't want our community to turn to conspiracy
| theorizing and conjecture. We can do better.
| scaramanga wrote:
| > Is this advice meant to be applied against all people,
| or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this
| standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be
| worms even though I never worked with them. And don't
| even get me started on politicians
|
| These developers do not wield power over anyone and they
| are not filing lawsuits. They are developing code, either
| as their job, or as volunteers. And in either case,
| contributing their work as open source.
|
| It might help to take a little perspective before
| publicly passing judgement on _individuals_ and what you
| imagine their intentions to be rather than merely judging
| the merit of their contributions. Those are completely
| different things.
| stretchcat wrote:
| What I'm talking about really has nothing to do with
| power. Maybe the examples I chose suggested that power
| dynamics are relevant to my point, but I think they
| aren't, so here is another example without one: Should an
| architect refrain from judging Frank Lloyd Wright just
| because they never worked together? I think certainly
| not. That seems completely backwards to me. Anybody is
| entitled to have an opinion on Frank Lloyd Wright,
| another architect particularly so.
| scaramanga wrote:
| Are you talking about judging his contributions and
| significance to architecture or his worth as a person?
|
| I get that the two things have some overlap and aren't
| cleanly divisible. What we do is a major part of who we
| are.
|
| But I mean, it's one thing to say "I think it [his
| architecture] is awful", or even "I think his
| architecture had a negative impact on
| people/society/cherished values/whatever" but quite
| another to say "I think he sought the ruination of
| everything good and decent because he was a demented and
| feeble mind." Because, yes, I do think the last one would
| only be appropriate if you actually knew something about
| the guy...
|
| Edit: And yeah, of course, I'm not trying to censor
| anyone's opinions. Of course you can _have_ the opinion,
| you can even express it. I just think that it's not what
| engaging in productive/civil discourse looks like and,
| depending on the venue, people may call that out or
| whatever.
| stretchcat wrote:
| I am not talking about judging his 'worth as a person';
| rather his 'worth as a developer.' Maybe in his private
| life he's a wonderful person, who knows? _Who cares?_ It
| is his professional activities that concern people.
| addicted wrote:
| This advice definitely applies to open source developers
| whose work is out completely in the open.
|
| You can literally take millions of lines of code that
| they may have written wholesale, and change a single word
| in it that you don't like.
|
| In open source, they have nowhere to hide. If you
| disagree with a certain decision they have made, you are
| welcome to take the effort they have put in to implement
| the hundreds and thousands of other decisions they have
| made that you do agree with, with a simple "git clone".
| stretchcat wrote:
| This sure seems accurate to me, from what I've personally
| observed, but I don't understand what motive they might
| have. What's the point of controlling popular software by
| making everybody hate it?
| Chyzwar wrote:
| A lot of people like it. Just because there are old
| timers that cannot move past gnome 2 it do not mean that
| Gnome 3 is bad. It faster and more polished that KDE.
| Workspace management and screen real estate is supierior
| to anything I used.
| stretchcat wrote:
| I believe the 'graying of GNOME' discussed here a few
| weeks ago is evidence that fewer and fewer people like
| GNOME each year. New developers would naturally be drawn
| from the ranks of enthusiastic users. (Why would a
| developer volunteer their labor for software they don't
| use and care about?) The graying of GNOME shows that the
| pool of enthusiastic users has been shrinking since GNOME
| 3. That's about when GNOME tipped over the edge and
| started losing developers faster than it gained new ones.
| The missing new developers would be _new_ developers, not
| old timers. If it were only old timers who feel
| alienated, I wouldn 't expect GNOME to have trouble
| recruiting _new_ developers.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > What's the point of controlling popular software by
| making everybody hate it?
|
| I think, in their view, all comes after taking hold of
| the project. But here, they got that, and now what? Now,
| all lofty plans have to meet the cold reality.
|
| It's like a mutunineers on a ship throwing officers
| overboard, just to realise hours later that they are in
| the middle of an ocean, and they have no idea how to sail
| a ship without skilled crew.
|
| I saw that happening in public companies: a single
| asshole activist with puny few percents of the company
| keeps throwing big radical decisions onto every
| shareholder meeting, until he gets everybody so
| discombobulated, or the company so disfunctional that
| others either leave the company to him for taking, or he
| gets a legal casus belli to sue the company to try to
| wreck it further, and then seize it.
|
| For such people, it doesn't matter if the company in
| question dies, as long as they come out with gain. Some
| are plainly idiots with too much legal education, and
| some are genuine degenerates doing it with full knowledge
| of consequences.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > What's the point of controlling popular software by
| making everybody hate it?
|
| they'd be the only left able to offer (paid) support?
| stretchcat wrote:
| Does GNOME really bring in much paid support momey? In
| the past I have worked at a company that did have RHEL5
| workstations with GNOME by default, but everybody I knew
| treated that as a joke and sshed into the workstations
| from their (Windows) Thinkpads or Macbooks. The desktop
| software on those workstations was unwanted and unused.
| lmm wrote:
| That sounds like the ideal situation for RedHat's
| business model.
| arpa wrote:
| Screw Red Hat, the amound of crapware and bad attitudes
| coming from them is astounding. And of course, since they
| have big bucks, it gets shoved down everyones' throats.
| sergeykish wrote:
| The amount of their contributions is astounding
| https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-
| office/c...
| klodolph wrote:
| I use Linux, macOS, and Windows on a regular basis. I use
| mostly default settings, only a couple changes. Over time
| my settings move closer and closer to defaults. I tell
| people to upgrade their OS (with a couple exceptions). I
| was on-board with GNOME 3 when it came out (I was an Arch
| user at the time, but I'm in remission now).
|
| The GTK file chooser dialog is easily the most garbage
| piece of fucking shit. Honestly, sometimes, if I want to
| post something online I just copy the file to my Mac
| first just to avoid dealing with the fucking piece of
| shit GTK file chooser. If I need to sort through a bunch
| of files, easier to run Samba and sort through them on my
| Mac, because Nautilus was scooped out of the same fucking
| pile of shit than the GTK file chooser was scooped from.
|
| As far as I can tell, the last time that browsing files
| on macOS really changed was 2007, when 10.5 came out and
| had Quick Look. Since then, browsing files on Linux has
| somehow gotten worse. Do you know what it's like on
| macOS? Every once in a while, Apple quietly adds support
| for previewing a couple more formats.
| kaszanka wrote:
| Yes. As you can see, this is by design.
| philsnow wrote:
| This is in my experience emblematic of GNOME in general.
| I've shaken the dust off my sandals and don't use
| anything gnome-y if I can avoid it.
|
| Here's the thing that convinced me, a while back: https:/
| /wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...
|
| I'm sure there's people here who are long-time
| contributors and/or supporters. Just ignore me, I'm not
| your target audience. ... I'm _really_ not sure who your
| target audience is, though.
| throwdbaaway wrote:
| > I'm really not sure who your target audience is,
| though.
|
| We should ask Havoc Pennington about this, he must have
| names for all the personas that he came up with, after
| reading "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum":
| https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-
| list/2002-Dece...
|
| I actually have a copy of the book, and it is indeed a
| good book. The problem is that it somehow empowers GNOME
| developers to keep creating/maintaining/rewriting broken
| software, all in the name of "usability".
| Renevith wrote:
| Holy crap. It reads like a parody written by someone who
| read this thread and article. I was thinking it couldn't
| be as bad as people we're saying, but it's worse!
| mard wrote:
| The lack of typeahead in GtkFileChooser is my biggest
| annoyance that I've ever come across. Ever since I started
| using computers nearly 25 years ago I used typeahead to
| navigate through directories and I can't imagine doing it
| otherwise. The idea of removing typeahead is anti-human to
| me, I couldn't adapt even though I really tried to.
| Rompect wrote:
| So true. That is the biggest concern that I have with
| Linux overall.
| jopsen wrote:
| Yeah, the first thing I do after installing Linux has
| always been to replace nautilus with something else.
|
| Nautilus is pretty, and for the most part fairly nice.
| But lacking typeahead just makes it unusable.
| vidarh wrote:
| Which makes me think the biggest problem with the file
| selector as described is not that it's flawed, but that
| it's hard to replace.
|
| One of the thing I loved about the Amiga was that because
| of how the API was structured, it was easy to replace
| things like this, as you could patch every API endpoint.
| As a result, it took very little time before more
| advanced replacements for the standard file requester
| appeared. You "just" had to patch (via OS-provided
| functions) a couple of library calls.
| dm319 wrote:
| Yup - one of the many reasons I needed to stay on MATE.
| ziotom78 wrote:
| It has been a long time since I tried MATE. Do you mean
| that the file dialog does not implement recursive search?
|
| If it is so, then I must consider switching! (At the
| moment I am using Xfce.)
| pizza234 wrote:
| MATE's based on GTK, so it inherits all the GTK
| "features", last but not least, the v3 file chooser,
| which lost along the way the create new folder key
| binding, and the quick search by prefix (which now has to
| be inconveniently performed on the address bar).
|
| Additionally, programs may rely on different GTK
| versions, which also makes things confusing. For example,
| Visual Studio Code and Firefox use GTK3.
|
| edit: extended with programs explanation
| ziotom78 wrote:
| Sigh, I feared this answer! :-(
| dm319 wrote:
| Oh darn. I don't have a problem on my UbuntuMATE, but
| realised I'm still on 18.04. At least caja seems sane?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Caja retains all the features of Gnome 2's Nautilus and
| gained a few more.
|
| I actually _like_ background textures for my file
| manager, so i 'm happy this stayed.
|
| But there is also tabbed and two pane view which got axed
| from Nautilus too.
| dleslie wrote:
| MATE continues to be fantastic; I see no reason to
| switch.
| salawat wrote:
| This is why if you're smart, you hide that behind a short
| timer to pick up the pause. Tuning it just right can be a
| pain, but hooking natural behavior as an indicator of needing
| assistance increases the UI bandwidth in terms of signaling.
| It's the little details.
| keyle wrote:
| Right. So typical bug of redrawing selection once the list is
| rendered.
|
| On the plus side it should be an easy fix?
| Qub3d wrote:
| Given that we've seen multiple examples in both TFA and other
| comments in the discussion here pointing to simple bugs that
| have A) been open for 10+ years and/or B) locked and closed
| as WONTFIX, I don't know if that "plus side" is valid here.
| juskrey wrote:
| On nearly every OS I know (now I am on MacOS):
|
| 1. System boots up and starts some apps which are creating
| windows. This may take some time.
|
| 2. While all of that loading, I am seeing some of the apps of
| no use, I am quickly switching to one, capturing focus, and
| pressing the quit shortcut.
|
| 3. Between my reaction and actual button press, some other app
| loads, and focus is switched to its window.
|
| 4. My keypress goes into another focused window, which gets
| closed instead of original one. Tada.
|
| Why OS focus has a priority over user focus?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| I get this all the time with Safari windows on Macs ever
| since they changed the new tab view when they switched to
| location naming rather than big cat.
|
| Hit cmd+new window pops up with search highlighted, start
| typing after a split second the window pops behind the other
| and all the key presses are then fed into the previous
| window.
| benlivengood wrote:
| GUIs should effectively be finite state machines and people
| expect them to operate that way. People understand latency and
| get used to it; it happened on mainframes and other terminal
| applications and people memorize the state machine and can tab
| and type through an interface at high throughput anyway.
|
| One of the most frustrating experiences is related to the OP;
| reflow in browsers as new elements load making it impossible to
| click on the right thing until the whole page finishes loading.
| Popups are also nearly as bad but maybe less avoidable.
| jffhn wrote:
| I remember the time (10 years ago?) where you could go to
| google webpage and start typing your search immediately. Then
| one day I got my typing deleted once the page finished
| loading. I thought Google would quickly fix this, but soon
| realized that this kind of annoying asynchronous behavior was
| becoming a new normal for a lot of GUIs. I have a rule in my
| GUIs to only show up something when it's consistent and
| usable: the GUI should never lie or mislead.
| wincy wrote:
| This has started happening to me constantly in Amazon! I
| start searching for something, make a typo, go back, then
| somehow it snaps back to the typo before I hit enter and I
| get bad results. Super annoying, I don't remember it being
| a thing before a year or so ago.
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| The ebay search button has been like this for ages. To
| the extent, that sometimes, you correct your search
| query, hit enter to search and it _resets back to the
| previous search query and re-searches that!_
| 3np wrote:
| Gmail has gotten worse with this. Convenience and usability
| are no longer arguments to not switch.
| Torwald wrote:
| Google search bar also breaks the standard OS behaviour on
| a Mac, eg. when I am i the search bar and hit <cmd-left> it
| should jump cursor to the beginning of the line, which it
| doesn't.
| salawat wrote:
| You can thank things like auto-suggest for this as well.
|
| I remember the first time I encountered the epiphany that
| "woah, typing too fast can break my textbox/inputs" and
| coming to the realization that in order to accommodate the
| faster users you often have to be very careful thinking out
| your UI flow.
|
| Hence why I hate UI's. Sometimes feels like they are
| nothing more than a fight between me and another developer.
| j1elo wrote:
| The reflow issues as _incredible_ in the Twitter mobile web,
| at least for me on Firefox for Android. When you go back from
| seeing a tweet 's replies to the main timeline, it might take
| up to 5 seconds (or even more) to load some UI elements and
| reach a steady state. It even scrolls to a different point
| than where you were before!
| amaccuish wrote:
| On Twitter for Android, I quite often open the app after a
| while, and the previous state is shown. Super! I start
| reading a tweet, and then the popup comes at the top that
| there are new Tweets; at the same time, that very tweet I
| was reading disappears from the timeline, whilst the tweets
| around it remain. Why??
| jabl wrote:
| Yes. Twitter on mobile web seems to have some state of the
| art ai to reflow the page just when I'm about to press my
| thumb to read a subthread , like a post or such so I always
| end up liking the wrong one.
| Rompect wrote:
| Twitter Mobile is hands down the worst mobile website that
| I know. I always use nitter.net if I want to view something
| on mobile. Opening the browser and manually rewriting the
| link is more handy that clicking on it (e.g. in reddit).
| That should tell you something.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Some folks use this fact to place ads in such way that when
| you want to click something by the time your finger taps the
| screen there is an ad underneath. So annoying.
| tylerjwilk00 wrote:
| Indeed. An even more nefarious Dark Pattern [1] if the have
| a listener on the "mouse down" event and use it as the
| trigger.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
| tapland wrote:
| That's not even a dark pattern, that's eqvuivalent to the
| link pointing to the ad all along =/
| tsukurimashou wrote:
| This is the worst, a french website Leboncoin (craigslist
| basically) does this, makes me want to murder the people
| behind it
|
| When you click next page nothing happens long enough to
| make you think your click hasn't been registered, then
| right as you click again the page loads with ads right
| where the button was
| speedgoose wrote:
| You should use an adblocker.
| 3np wrote:
| ...at which part the whole site experience breaks. find a
| fine-tuned config that blocks the right things and it
| might break again in a month.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The people who should complain about this are the
| advertisers. It amounts to fraud on the web site's part.
| b0rsuk wrote:
| I've become a fan of terminal, I use the i3 tiling window
| manager. Thumbnails is one of the few remaining reasons why I
| occasionally launch Thunar file manager. Whenever I have a messy
| folder like Downloads, having thumbnails at a glance makes it
| easier to spot patterns in it and decide where to put files.
| Thumbnails are one of the best features of graphical interfaces.
| db48x wrote:
| The author thinks that anyone using a file picker with no preview
| thumbnails is doing it wrong. I think that anyone using a file
| picker is doing it wrong.
|
| I frequently open files in projects that have tens of thousands
| of files scattered across thousands of directories. Any process
| for opening a file that involved navigating that directory
| hierarchy by clicking with a mouse would waste an enormous amount
| of time.
| wander_homer wrote:
| Well, for one using a file picker doesn't imply mouse usage and
| secondly, how would you do something like uploading a pdf or
| picture in your web browser?
| db48x wrote:
| I don't do that in my web browser. Instead I type a command
| in a shell that adds the file to a git repository, commits
| it, and syncs the repository with my web server.
| wander_homer wrote:
| And what about the servers you're not in control over, like
| web services which expect you to submit pdfs, videos or
| pictures like a resume, exercises and their solutions,
| scientific papers, a picture for printing...?
| db48x wrote:
| I can count the number of times I've used anything like
| that on the fingers of one hand.
| wander_homer wrote:
| And our university staff and students have to upload
| numerous files per week in that way and since you claimed
| they're doing it wrong I'd like to hear your alternative
| to that.
| db48x wrote:
| I'd be pretty annoyed if my school or employer forced me
| to work so suboptimally. Still, a POST is a POST, whether
| it comes from a web browser or curl. Or from Emacs.
| p1necone wrote:
| Aren't there plenty of little UX niggles in macOS/windows just
| like this that haven't been fixed for years either? I'm not sure
| why this is being used as a reason why "Free desktop operating
| systems are a joke".
|
| I think "use KDE" is perfectly valid advice here too. The toilet
| analogy doesn't really hold, your satisfaction of software that
| works for you shouldn't be at all affected by the existence of
| software you don't like and don't use, that's just silly.
| city41 wrote:
| Frankly I find the whole blog post silly. All OSes/software
| have trade offs. It's just a question of what is important to
| you. I'm primarily an Ubuntu user but I have one Windows
| machine. There are things in Windows that just flabbergast me
| that people put up with. And Windows users can easily say the
| same thing about most Linux variants.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| IMO it's perfectly valid criticism in its lambasting of the
| bug itself as well as its vintage. When I want to upload a
| screenshot, photo or video to an email, an IM, a web page
| etc., I really do not want to send the wrong one.
| p1necone wrote:
| It absolutely is valid criticism. It was more the snarky
| "and therefore commercial software is better than free
| software" stuff that rubbed me the wrong way.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| At the risk of splitting hairs, to me it reads more that
| the author is slating free software (or perhaps the only
| available free software), rather than praising commercial
| software. I think I read the article as a bit of a
| "stream of consciousness rant" and often give the spewers
| of such words a bit of leeway for interpretation. I've
| written in a state of mind of frustration and later
| thought "Yeah you did go a bit over the top there, but
| it's a reflection of your state of mind at the time".
| city41 wrote:
| I can agree with that. But I could say that about things in
| Windows and MacOS too. It's not like Gnome is unique in
| this regard. In some regards Linux is more advanced than
| Windows or MacOS, does that mean Windows and MacOS users
| are "used to mediocrity" as the article says?
|
| As for not wanting to upload the wrong one, doesn't the
| file picker show a preview of the selected file? Sure, not
| as good as thumbnails, but it should be enough to avoid the
| problem.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I do say things like that about Windows too, and I back
| anyone who writes a blogpost excoriating Microsoft for
| their longstanding faults. As a long-time Windows user I
| can definitely say I am used to mediocrity in many areas.
| Thankfully no longer on a daily basis :-)
|
| Some of the GTK filepickers on my system do show previews
| (e.g. Signal) but others do not (Mozilla - since fixed by
| the incantations needed to have them use KDE's).
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I can speak for Windows and say absolutely, yes. With each
| major version Microsoft try a new method of abstracting away
| the file system from the user in File Explorer and it just
| makes it less intuitive. One example being: the new "add recent
| places" feature just fills the navigation pane with garbage
| from system/program files areas.
|
| There are still some keyboard navigation issues with File
| Explorer which can sometimes make it act in unreliable ways,
| there is a strange bug with system tray context menus still to
| this day and don't even get me started on the dumpster fire
| that is Windows 10's entire Start Menu design and
| implementation.
| saagarjha wrote:
| The point is that there are fewer because people actually have
| to use that UI that can't figure out workarounds.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There are overwhelmingly many such contempties in Apple and MS
| systems. Not more, but different and disabling. Apple and MS
| don't try to present the illusion that what they build is for
| your benefit. People know they are Big Corporations that care
| less-than-nothing for you or me, or our wants or needs, and
| that it is only by luck when we can get them to do anything at
| all.
|
| It is the imagined promise that Free Software is done for our
| benefit that lends us the delusion that things should be the
| way we want them.
|
| In fact, Free Software things are much more likely to actually
| work, in the way that _somebody_ wants, than Apple 's or MS's.
| Just, not you. In the case of Apple and MS, there is typically
| no living individual who wants it to do what it does, but
| changing it would require initiative whose attempt at exercise
| would severely punished.
| chaganated wrote:
| Who needs thumbnails? Most images are haraam anyway.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I feel this way about Ubuntu remembering my screen configurations
| without having to manually edit a file, why this isn't a first
| class feature is totally confusing to me.
| peanut_worm wrote:
| I am sort of new to linux but gnome seems kind of unstable. I
| have a lot more problems with graphical glitches and bugs with
| Nautilus/gnome than KDE plasma.
| hedora wrote:
| This has somehow gotten worse in recent years. When saving, it
| used to be you could use the mouse to navigate to a directory,
| then type the desired filename, and press enter.
|
| Now, typing the filename initiates a contextual search within the
| current directory.
|
| Clicking in the filename textbox and starting to type doesn't
| work either. You have to highlight the base (not the extension or
| ".") of the filename. At that point, you can finally start typing
| the name of the file you want to save.
|
| The same problem occurs if the file chooser happens to already be
| in the directory where you want to save the file.
| tim1994 wrote:
| Yes this super annoying. Its almost daily I run into that
| issue. The contents of filename input are even selected.
| rozab wrote:
| Yes! This issue infuriates me to no end. I've made my set up
| quite clean, I've got my tiling window manager set up how I
| like it, but if I want to keep using firefox I have to keep
| dealing with this ridiculous bug. What on earth was the person
| thinking when they created this?
|
| I've seen many other downgrades with gtk updates. The UI for
| Deluge, one of my favourite pieces of software, got pretty
| ruined by the gtk3 uptick.
| kiwidrew wrote:
| Yes, this exact issue frustrates me to no end.
|
| Another related issue: when saving something from Firefox, the
| file picker opens into _a random directory_ each time. Like
| maybe 50% of the time, it will be the most-recently-used
| directory, but the rest of the time it is a random directory
| that I had saved something to at some point in the distant
| past.
|
| It boggles the mind how these bugs can persist for years upon
| years, but my occasional forays into the GNOME bugtracker
| indicate that the developers just don't seem to care one bit
| about this stuff. They often seem downright hostile and
| defensive and dismissive of the bug reports, either closing
| them as WONTFIX or ignoring them until they rot.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I believe they are not random at all. I haven't dug into it,
| but I've seen similar behavior here, and my impression is
| that Firefox stores an association between some or all of the
| URL host component and the most-recently-save-to location.
|
| If you saved something from http://foo.bar.com/ to /whatever
| in the past, future visits-and-saves to *.bar.com (or maybe
| just foo.bar.com) will use /whatever as the default location.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Yeah it is this. I believe there is some config option to
| turn this behaviour off, maybe
| browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite
| eitland wrote:
| The joys of modern ux where everything is supposed to be so
| intuitive that no manual, help file or getting started
| guide is needed.
|
| To achieve this features and configuration options are
| removed left and right.
|
| Now we have half the software, no manual and often it still
| confuses users :-)
|
| Edit: and I don't have a good, inexpensive solution to it.
| salawat wrote:
| >Now we have half the software, no manual and often it
| still confuses users :-)
|
| I was going through the contents of a storage unit and
| came across one of those old digital executive day
| planner things from the 80's, still bundled with the
| manual.
|
| I cannot describe the sudden surge of childlike
| happiness. I loved reading about how to use things as a
| kid, and the little fold out pamphlets giving you a
| roadmap into efficiently using a device/software filled
| me with many hours of happiness and confidence as a
| child.
|
| I now do my best to WTFM (Write The Frigging Manual)
| where I work. It's amazing how quick something can be
| picked up with a little bit of guidance.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Instead of fixing old problems that the entire community agrees
| with wild consensus, they insist on spending time creating new
| problems.
|
| Perhaps we should stop whining and start fixing them. And then
| if the developers refuse to accept things people have been
| wanting for well over a decade then we can fork it and simply
| abandon them like any other archaic unusable thing of the past.
| We've all asked very politely long enough.
|
| This is open source, we don't have to put up with this, that's
| the whole idea behind it. Closed source solutions from 23 years
| ago shouldn't still be running circles around the current
| stuff. We should all be embarrassed.
| wruza wrote:
| You can fork code, but neither a development, support nor
| maintenance process. The truth is that there is no fork, Neo.
| akerro wrote:
| Like Mint failed to fork Ubuntu? Or Ubuntu failed to fork
| Debian? Or LibreOffice failed to fork OpenOffice? MariaDB
| MySQL?
| kristopolous wrote:
| So someone implements all the features that a massive
| number of people want, people use it, but then you think
| there will be no interest in maintaining it?
|
| Sorry, I don't buy that.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| If the fork is closer to the final result that most people
| want, it's a no-brainer that developers, maintainers and
| the community will follow. There's no incentive to stay
| behind.
|
| It's worth studying the case of OpenOffice.org and MySQL.
| Both of these weren't satisfactory to the community for
| <reasons>, so the community forked them and did all the
| high-demand feature implementation on the fork. Now the
| original projects that were forked from are near-ghost
| towns.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is still the case as I haven't used
| desktop Linux for about a year now, but what made this extra
| irritating is that the file name would be highlighted already!
| How on earth can selected text in an in-focus modal window not
| be the target of keyboard input?
| alpaca128 wrote:
| For me this is really annoying as well, together with the
| stupid text input fields that may display a blinking cursor
| even when they're not focused. And Firefox has this weird
| issue that now and then a newly opened tab doesn't focus the
| address bar, forcing me to use the mouse to select it.
|
| And I still don't get this trend in some newer software to
| make tab switching via Ctrl-[Shift]-Tab feel like the lottery
| instead of just going to the one on the left or right.
| There's a reason we can reorder tabs by dragging them around,
| and a reason our keyboards have more than just those three
| keys, and "fidget cube replacement" is not it.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if the UI designers never use their own
| products or just aren't aware that building habits for chains
| of workarounds should not be the normal way to interact with
| computers. /rant
| afiori wrote:
| ctrl-tab in Firefox can be configured to move through tab
| in a last-visited order, I personally love it and can't
| stand the lack of this feature in chrome/edge when I use
| them
| simon04 wrote:
| Ctrl+L focuses the address bar. No need to lift your
| fingers from the keyboard.
| efreak wrote:
| Or alt+d or F6. These are mostly universal.
| Evidlo wrote:
| ctrl+pageup/pagedown switches to the next/previous tab in
| Firefox and Chrome and also works on Windows.
| efreak wrote:
| If you have to use Firefox on shared computers
| occasionally, it may be worthwhile changing your habit to
| use ctrl+pgup/dn instead of ctrl+tab; ctrl+tab defaults
| to switching in order of most recently used tabs these
| days, while ctrl+pgup/dn stays with current tab order.
| tomsmeding wrote:
| > And Firefox has this weird issue that now and then a
| newly opened tab doesn't focus the address bar, forcing me
| to use the mouse to select it.
|
| I'm not sure I have this issue, but ctrl-L (or
| equivalently, ctrl-K) focuses the address bar. Less mouse
| usage.
| cesarb wrote:
| If you keep them separate (it's configurable), Ctrl-L
| focuses the address bar, Ctrl-K focuses the search bar. I
| don't know how these keys behave if you configure it to
| use a single combined address/search bar (I've always
| kept them separate).
| Rusky wrote:
| When combined, Ctrl-K focuses the address bar with a `? `
| prepended, which turns it into a search bar. (In the most
| recent version it replaces the `?` with the name of the
| default search engine, similar to Chrome.)
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Doing some introspection (all too rare for me!), I find that
| this is the reason I've started avoiding creating new files in
| LibreOffice, and why my Downloads and Pictures folders are
| flat, unstructured messes. Too many programs use the GNOME file
| selector.
| Spivak wrote:
| Isn't that "better" in some sense? You don't have to actually
| categorize anything in order to find it later. Just type what
| you want and let tracker pull it up for you.
|
| If I could just "accio my black jeans" I wouldn't bother
| organizing my closet.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I suppose it might be better? But the folder-first sort
| means I've got a miscellaneous pile of extracted archives
| very far away from the archives themselves... it's a
| complete mess.
| nl wrote:
| The assumes you know the _name_ of the random image you
| downloaded to insert into the document.
| _mjx3AmQXM5OrkxV7.jpg_ isn 't super easy to remember (as a
| random real example chosen from my downloads directory)
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean nothing excuses not having thumbnail previews.
| That's just stilly. I just mean the default typing action
| to be search rather than typing the name of the file.
| nl wrote:
| Yeah ok.
|
| I think the OP was talking in the context of _saving_ ,
| where searching during the "save" process seems a much
| less frequent occurrence than giving the name to the file
| you are trying to save (which presumably you have to do
| 100% of the time).
| [deleted]
| tkuraku wrote:
| This is the most maddening behavior. I don't really care about
| the thumbnails not being there, but this irks me evertime I
| save a file.
| akerro wrote:
| >This has somehow gotten worse in recent years
|
| I used to contribute bugfixes to Gnome2 in months before Gnome
| 3 was released. I observed product plan for Gnome 3 and was
| joking Gnome 3 will be just a red button that farts.
|
| So many functionalities removed, slower response time,
| regressions and defects everywhere, broken user experience
| worse than what Window 10 gave us later. I moved to XFCE and
| then to Plasma.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| On macOS, when you drag a file into an Open or Save panel, the
| panel's current directory switches to the dragged file's
| containing directory and highlights that dragged file.
|
| On Windows, when you drag a file into an Open or Save panel, the
| dragged file is _moved_ from its original location to the panel's
| current directory. It is a destructive action!
|
| That may be one little thing but it's part of a whole number of
| reasons why I dislike using Windows. Alas, all the counter
| arguments to any and all reason I might give for preferring macOS
| do sound like toilet-plunging family members.
| alkonaut wrote:
| What's a save panel? You mean a save dialog?
|
| Note that on windows there are at least 3 generations of save
| dialogs. Which one you see depends on which generation of the
| api is used.
|
| The most common one is the more modern which is basically just
| an explorer window. Dragging a file into an explorer window
| works that same regardless of whether it's an open/save dialog
| or not. It's a move/copy operation (depending on e.g modifier
| keys).
|
| I didn't quite get the point of dragging a file to a save
| dialog at all though? (Assuming that's what you meant by panel)
| is it that you _wanted_ to use it for navigate+set-name? That
| to me as a windows user seems alien. I expect it to work as an
| explorer window! Expectations are everything. The principle of
| least surprise doesn't really work cross platform I guess.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Yes, a save panel is a save dialogue. It's just Apple
| terminology.
|
| > I don't quite get the point of dragging a file to a save
| dialog at all though?
|
| On macOS (since forever) and iOS (since 11), there is a heavy
| focus on drag. You should be able to drag anything from any
| app to any other app and something should happen.
|
| This is facilitated both by system-level frameworks (so that
| all apps can gain correct drag-handling behaviour out of the
| box) and can be further enhanced by an app's developer.
|
| That begins with behaviour you might ordinarily expect from
| most apps: drag a image file from Finder into a Word, it
| should embed the picture; drag an audio file from iTunes into
| an open Audacity project, it should add the audio as a new
| track; or, drag highlighted text from a text field to the
| desktop and it will create a text snippet file containing
| that text.
|
| On Windows, apps need to implement this behaviour manually.
| Figuring out how to deal with certain file types is not built
| into every app out of the box.
|
| On macOS and iOS, it's not just built into every app, it's
| built into the operating system itself. It's a fundamental
| feature of Cocoa, open which all native apps are built, so
| every app gets the correct behaviour for free. Dragging and
| dropping is super powered on Apple platforms.
|
| For example, proxy icons: on any given document window (a
| window for an open document, like a Word document, Photoshop
| document, Final Cut project, etc), the name of the document
| is preceded by an icon that represents the document. You can
| actually drag that icon off the window's title bar to any
| other on-screen element that supports receiving dragged
| objects -- an open document, a Finder window, an email, a
| text field, etc.
|
| I say all of this to cement one point: dragging and dropping
| is a key interface metaphor on macOS and iOS/iPadOS.
|
| So, imagine I have a browser window open asking me to upload
| a file. If I have that file open, why should I navigate the
| directory hierarchy in the open panel? I can just drag the
| proxy icon for that document straight into the open panel.
| Bam, the open panel is pointing at the correct location.
|
| Or perhaps I've just downloaded an image from the web that I
| want to share with my friend. Again, I can open up my
| favourite messaging program, click on the Add Attachment
| button, and drag the image in from my Dock's Downloads stack.
|
| (Although, that's a slightly odd example; I wouldn't bother
| with the Add Attachment button, I'd actually just drag the
| file directly from the Downloads stack on to the app and
| expect it to figure out what I want to do)
|
| For save panels, I might already have a folder open in Finder
| where I want my document to be saved. When I save the
| document for the first time and the save panel appears, I can
| either drag that folder or its proxy icon from Finder
| straight into the save panel -- bam, the save panel is
| pointing to the correct place.
|
| Or perhaps I want to save a file into the same place as an
| open document. Again, I would just drag the proxy icon of an
| already-open document into the save panel, bam, we're looking
| at the right folder.
|
| Notice: these actions are non-destructive. Non-destructive
| actions follow the principle of least surprise. All I'm doing
| is telling an open/save panel where I want to be.
|
| > That to me as a Windows user seems alien. I expect it to
| work as an Explorer window!
|
| Ask yourself what the basic function of an open/save panel
| is: to select a location for a file (and in the case of a
| save panel, give it a name). Of the four CRUD operations,
| only C and R are directly relevant.
|
| Something shouldn't act as something else, especially if it's
| destructive. That, in my opinion, violates the principle of
| least surprise -- an interface to C or R should not U or D.
|
| The only thing I expect to act as an Explorer window is ...
| an Explorer window.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > On macOS and iOS, it's not just built into every app,
| it's built into the operating system itself.
|
| I can't see how it's any more part of "the OS" in MacOS
| than in Windows?
|
| > On Windows, apps need to implement this behaviour
| manually. Figuring out how to deal with certain file types
| is not built into every app out of the box.
|
| Every app on both Windows and MacOS have to implement most
| drag & drop handling themselves. You get notified that the
| user has dropped some data, and you implement it. Some
| _controls_ are basically miniature apps and can handle some
| of it (e.g. a text control could as default accept dropping
| text into it) but that 's a rare edge case and in most
| situtaions you are obviously going to have to implement it
| yourself. If you are the audacity developer you'll be
| notified that someone dropped an mp3 on the surface of your
| window. You'll have to take it from there. That's 100% the
| same thing in windows.
|
| > drag a image file from Finder into a Word, it should
| embed the picture; drag an audio file from iTunes into an
| open Audacity project, it should add the audio as a new
| track; or, drag highlighted text from a text field to the
| desktop and it will create a text snippet file containing
| that text.
|
| File drag events work like that on windows. Text selections
| aren't objects in that sense (dragging just changes the
| selection) so that's typically not a draggable entity. A
| picture is, and behaves like you expect (e.g. insert into a
| word document).
|
| > I'd actually just drag the file directly from the
| Downloads stack on to the app and expect it to figure out
| what I want to do
|
| Of course, a chat app has drag and drop for pictures into
| chat messages on both windows and mac. Otherwise it would
| be a pretty terrible chat app. Any cat app could of course
| be terrible, and there is every chance that more chat apps
| are terrible on windows - but that doesn't change the
| point. If you launch Teams or Slack or whatever and drag a
| picture from a word document into it, it will add it to
| your chat message. On both windows and mac.
|
| > So, imagine I have a browser window open asking me to
| upload a file. If I have that file open, why should I
| navigate the directory hierarchy in the open panel? I can
| just drag the proxy icon for that document straight into
| the open panel. Bam, the open panel is pointing at the
| correct location.
|
| As a windows desktop developer myself (who struggle a LOT
| with drag & drop) I can see myself implementing something
| like this. But it's always a question of user expectation.
| First of all, there is no proxy icon! I'd love to see those
| in windows, but it's not currently part of the UX. As such,
| you don't have a "drag source" for open documents. To get
| anywhere to drag _from_ for an open document you 'd need to
| open explorer and browse to the location. But that's the
| exact same effort as doing it in the file dialog, so what's
| the point? As you can see, the mistake wasn't "poor
| handling of drag & drop" here, the missing capability I
| think is the proxy icon.
|
| > All I'm doing is telling an open/save panel where I want
| to be.
|
| I want to repeat - and this is important. The windows save
| panel isn't special. It's a full explorer file list, plus a
| file name textbox. One can argue that this is a poor choice
| - but that's what it is. It has different areas (a filename
| textbox, a file listing view etc). The file listing view is
| just like any file listing view in any explorer window. As
| such it has all the capabilities you expect. If you select
| a file and hit delete, it's deleted. If you want to create
| a new folder - perhaps the most common operation for a
| SaveAs dialog, it does that. So here microsoft had a
| choice: if you drag a file onto this area of the dialog,
| should it work like all the other explorer file listing
| areas in the OS, or should the Open/Save dialogs have
| special treatment? I think you could argue both ways there,
| but there are definite drawbacks to both. It's absolutely
| not a clear cut case of "Well that dialog should be non-
| destructive so dropping should do navigation! case
| closed!". This doesn't mean you can't have that
| functionality _anyway_. You could just make a drop of any
| file elsewhere on the dialog (such as on the path-section
| of the dialog) initiate a navigation, for example.
|
| > The only thing I expect to act as an Explorer window is
| ... an Explorer window.
|
| I think this is merely a UX choice not a clear case of
| "well this way is better". As I said there are several
| types of file dialogs in windows, and some are more like
| what you describe and not "Just an explorer window".
|
| Perhaps if windows had proxy icons, there would never had
| been a thought to make the latest gen file dialogs be full
| explorer views, because then the proxy icons would have
| made drag to navigate work?
|
| I use both windows and mac today, but growing up on
| windows, I use MacOS less and I use it like I would use
| windows. Which means it's _extremely_ frustrating. For
| example, I had no idea whatsoever that the little icons in
| menubars (I just learned they were called proxy icons) were
| draggable. I always launch finder like I would launch
| explorer and drag things around, even documents I already
| had open... It sounds to me you have a few such discoveries
| to make on windows which would make the experience less
| frustrating.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Text
|
| > I can't see how it's any more part of "the OS" in MacOS
| than in Windows?
|
| Think of "the OS" as the whole package, not just "system
| components and software other than user-installed
| applications".
|
| Because it's implemented at the system framework level,
| and there's basically only three system frameworks for
| developing macOS apps -- Cocoa, UIKit for Mac, and
| SwiftUI -- and two of them call into the other.
|
| That means practically every application (well, maybe not
| _every_ ; the number of UIKit for Mac apps is on the
| rise) shipped with macOS is a good macOS citizen,
| compared to Windows which is a mish-mash of apps built
| with all the many various application frameworks that
| have shipped with Windows.
|
| Some parts of Windows are UWP. Some are Win32. Some are
| WPF. None of them can be expected to behave identically.
| Many of them don't behave the same way as basic system
| apps. Explorer behaves nothing like Settings.
|
| > Every app on both Windows and MacOS have to implement
| most drag & drop handling themselves.
|
| On macOS, only custom handling is required. When an app
| is built from standard components, Cocoa does it for
| them. These are _not_ rare edge cases -- these are
| buttons, text fields, text areas, image wells, and all
| the other basic components that make up the majority of
| apps.
|
| > If you are the audacity developer you'll be notified
| that someone dropped an mp3 on the surface of your
| window. You'll have to take it from there. That's 100%
| the same thing in windows.
|
| I'm aware of that. Actually, I mentioned Audacity in a
| section where I illustrated three examples of where one
| would _expect_ an application to accept something that
| has been dragged in. That wasn't an example of anything
| exceptional to macOS.
|
| > File drag events work like that on windows.
|
| Again, you're on a section where I'm illustrating
| standard, expected behaviour for drag-and-drop.
|
| I don't start really talking about anything macOS-
| specific until the section where I mention proxy icons,
| so I'll respond to the next section.
|
| > First of all, there is no proxy icon!
|
| I explained proxy icons as an illustration of why a Mac
| user might want to drag-and-drop into open/save panels as
| a means to directly answer your question on that very
| point.
|
| > the missing capability is the proxy icon
|
| You got a bit hung up on the proxy icon. It was just one
| way that a Mac user might want to drag and drop. I
| mention a couple of other ways that a person might want
| to drag and drop something into an open/save panel.
|
| The lack of proxy icons in Windows is orthogonal to the
| point of open/save panels being needlessly destructive.
|
| > I want to repeat - and this is important. The windows
| save panel isn't special.
|
| That's a technical detail. That has nothing to do with
| the merit of whether or not it _should_ be that way.
|
| > One can argue that this is a poor choice
|
| Yes.
|
| > but that's what it is
|
| Yes. That doesn't make it good.
|
| Microsoft has demonstrated an affinity for reinventing
| their own user interface elements with breaking changes
| in each iteration. There was nothing stopping them fixing
| this behaviour then, there's nothing stopping them doing
| it now -- there is absolutely no reason an application
| should _depend_ on destructive behaviour.
|
| > It's absolutely not a clear cut case of "Well that
| dialog should be non-destructive so dropping should do
| navigation! Case closed!"
|
| That slightly misrepresents my argument. I don't believe
| it's necessary that Windows open/save panels should
| behave as on macOS.
|
| I just believe user interfaces whose purposes only cover
| two of four letters in CRUD (specifically [C]reate for
| saving a file and [R]ead for opening one) should avoid
| being destructive.
|
| That could even be fixed with a simple confirmation
| dialogue.
|
| > there are several types of file dialogs in windows, and
| some are more like what you describe
|
| Why are there non-destructive _and_ destructive file
| dialogs? Why are destructive ones the most common?
|
| > Perhaps if windows had proxy icons
|
| Irrelevant. Protecting user data doesn't necessitate
| proxy icons. Microsoft simply chose to reuse a control
| with zero affordances for use-case; they made the choice
| _not_ to protect user data.
|
| > because proxy icons would have made drag to navigate
| work?
|
| You're stuck on the proxy icons. They were just _one_
| thing you could drag.
|
| > It sounds to me you have a few such discoveries to make
| on windows which would make the experience less
| frustrating
|
| I've been using Windows for the past 25 years. I still
| use it today, every day.
|
| I don't have any sudden discoveries to make, I know it
| back to front. With every release, it deviates worse from
| its own standards than any UIKit for Mac app ever could
| from regular Cocoa.
|
| Fundamentally, Windows is composed of several
| incompatible technologies that all work completely
| differently from each other because of historical
| internal competitiveness from a fractured company. That
| legacy lives on today -- and worsens with each release as
| Microsoft continues to pour efforts into other
| application frameworks (WPF is deprecated; UWP is
| unloved; WinUI is supposed to unify them; but React
| Native is more likely to have an impact), creating
| massive schisms in the consistency of the user
| experience.
|
| When Windows' absolute basic components, the user
| interface elements you encounter in every app, are
| clearly the product of some technical desire for
| standardisation on a single control rather than any real
| desire to protect user data, I'm inclined to think the
| user experience is not at the forefront of Microsoft's
| design philosophy.
|
| But that's _not_ because of a lack of proxy icons.
| alkonaut wrote:
| > Some parts of Windows are UWP. Some are Win32. Some are
| WPF. None of them can be expected to behave identically.
| Many of them don't behave the same way as basic system
| apps. Explorer behaves nothing like Settings.
|
| As far as I know there is only one one system for drag &
| drop so while it's certainly true that apps look like a
| mix of of every framework on earth, I don't think this
| makes drag & drop any less a core OS feature on Windows.
| Dragging from UWP to WPF to WinUI to Win32 works just as
| well as between two apps of the same kind (As far as I'm
| aware). Of course since there ARE no "standard drag &
| drop" thing - e.g. because text snippets aren't draggable
| so it's only app-specific objects that can be dragged.
|
| > These are not rare edge cases -- these are buttons,
| text fields, text areas, image wells, and all the other
| basic components that make up the majority of apps.
|
| Maybe there are interaction modes I'm not aware of but
| apart from dropping text into text fields which basic
| components actually give meaningful default interactions?
| Dropping text or images into a document needs a per-app
| implementation just like the mp3 in Audacity. Can you
| give an example that isn't just a text field? For example
| what's the typical use case for dropping something on a
| button?
|
| > just believe user interfaces whose purposes only cover
| two of four letters in CRUD (specifically [C]reate for
| saving a file and [R]ead for opening one) should avoid
| being destructive.
|
| The topic of this post is "why are there no thumbnails in
| the gtk filepicker"? The anwer is that there is a
| thumbnail system in the explorer (nautilus) but the
| developers chose NOT to use the explorer component in the
| file picker. So the capabilities for browsing files
| diverged and would require duplicated effort to do what
| people expect from Nautilus, inside the filepicker. This
| had also happened in Windows - and this I assume is why
| explorer is now part of the FileDialogs in Windows. I
| don't mind it being a full file browser experience (I
| like it) and I also think it's pretty easy to rationalize
| the decision to make use of the system wide file browsing
| experience here. No windows user ever expected anything
| else. I'd always want my file open dialog to accept a
| dragged file to mean "move/copy file there". But I'd also
| gladly take a drop on the path part to mean "change
| location".
|
| > Why are there non-destructive and destructive file
| dialogs? Why are destructive ones the most common?
|
| There are older and newer APIs, even within the same
| frameworks since Win32 2020 is different from Win32 1990.
| A new app showing a file dialog would typically get the
| "new" one. An old app making a call to show a file dialog
| will always get the old one - even on a new version of
| windows. The reason they can't just redirect those calls
| to show the new one, is because these are objects that
| the app can also modify/customize the dialog with code
| that doesn't make sense for the next gen dialog. So all
| generations of the APIs and all the appearances of the
| dialogs must remain available otherwise those apps would
| risk breaking. E.g. a 90's AutoCad would hijack the
| window area and render a preview of the drawing to the
| right of the file list. In the modern dialog such
| previews are handled by explorer plugins instead of a
| hack to draw a picture in the dialog surface itself. But
| obviously that 90's AutoCad program isn't changing, and
| must continue to run forever. So it gets the old dialog.
| And obviously between different toolkits the dialogs
| could change just like between Cocoa and something else.
|
| Of course, ALL file dialogs allow selecting any file and
| deleting/renaming it - so they are all 100% "destructive"
| and all have both "U" and "D" in CRUD if you want, apart
| from handling the job of selecting a file name. I'm not
| sure whether the older ones handle drag-drop or not (good
| question). If they do, I'm pretty sure they do exactly
| what the new one does, i.e. actually move/copy a file
| into the filesystem at the shown location.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > On macOS and iOS, it's not just built into every app,
| it's built into the operating system itself. It's a
| fundamental feature of Cocoa, open which all native apps
| are built, so every app gets the correct behaviour for
| free. Dragging and dropping is super powered on Apple
| platforms.
|
| This isn't true. It is true that it's built into the
| development tools and toolkits that Apple provide and
| expect you to use when writing software for their platform.
|
| But it's not particularly hard to avoid. Google "nibless
| development mac" and you'll find some links that reveal how
| to develop full GUI apps on macOS that do not rely on this
| infrastructure. Regardless of whether or not you think this
| is a good idea, please rest assured that an application
| developed in this way does _not_ share the "OS-level" drag
| behavior that you describe above. For it to behave in this
| way requires explicit code to handle notifications
| delivered by the OS.
|
| Why does this matter? Because those Apple SDKs that make
| all this happen "seamlessly" are hard to use if you want to
| do cross-platform development. Qt (and GTK) work at trying
| to take care of this for you, but its not 100%, precisely
| because (as you note) this concept doesn't exist on other
| platforms.
|
| So yes, from a user perspective this is a "universal"
| feature of apps on macOS. But it does not come with the OS
| - it comes from only developing apps using Apple SDKs and
| tools, which makes it harder for people doing cross-
| platform development to correctly play the game in the
| expected way.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| My only response to that is apps that aren't made to be
| good macOS citizens wouldn't even vaguely register on my
| radar as 'native', even if they link against Cocoa.
|
| 'Native' on Apple platforms isn't just a technical
| description, it's also about UI and, more importantly,
| UX. Of course, Apple are starting to muddy the waters
| with UIKit for Mac -- but even then, the fact that iOS
| apps can now run 'natively' on macOS goes a long way to
| showing that just because an app links against the
| relevant frameworks compiled for the right processor
| architecture, that doesn't make it native in the Apple-y
| sense.
|
| Apps made using cross-platform frameworks like Qt and GTK
| certainly don't register to me as native. They don't just
| work differently, they even look odd. I don't think this
| fazes Windows and Linux users/developers as much because
| there has never been any level of consistency remotely
| close to what Cocoa and macOS offers -- if an app puts a
| few buttons in a slightly odd place, that's not seen an a
| problem.
|
| So I agree with your point on a technical basis that my
| assessment wasn't 100% technically true -- but I think
| from the point of view of what 'native apps' means when
| discussing Apple platforms, I don't think I'm too far off
| the mark.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > My only response to that is apps that aren't made to be
| good macOS citizens wouldn't even vaguely register on my
| radar as 'native', even if they link against Cocoa.
|
| Sure. But two things:
|
| 1) I wasn't saying that an app that use nib-less
| techniques couldn't do the right thing - it could. It
| could appear totally native if someone just does the
| work.
|
| 2) There are several pro creativity apps (Logic,
| Mainstage being the biggest) that are actually Apple
| products but they do not adhere to Apple guidelines. They
| use non-standard widgets, do not fully follow desktop
| interactivity guidelines, use the keyboard in non-
| standard ways. So even within the set of Apple's own
| applications, there are things that are about as
| different as a Qt or GTK application might be.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| I agree on those points. Especially on the first: when
| people put in the hard work, those pay dividends -- but
| often mean those apps lag behind when Apple does breaking
| changes (which must happen at least every 3 or 4 years).
|
| Apple's Pro-apps are very alien. I expect that's because
| they appeal to an audience that spends almost all their
| time in them, not moving much between a whole bunch of
| apps.
|
| Lastly: Nothing's ever as non-native as a GTK app. :D Qt
| and Wx apps do an infinitely better job than any GTK app
| I've seen for macOS, even if I don't think they come very
| close aside from tapping into Cocoa's control drawing.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| > So, imagine I have a browser window open asking me to
| upload a file. If I have that file open, why should I
| navigate the directory hierarchy in the open panel? I can
| just drag the proxy icon for that document straight into
| the open panel. Bam, the open panel is pointing at the
| correct location.
|
| On Windows you can drag the file right onto the 'Browse...'
| button on the web page. (this does require some precision,
| as otherwise you'll open the file in the browser)
|
| > Something shouldn't act as something else, especially if
| it's destructive. That, in my opinion, violates the
| principle of least surprise -- an interface to C or R
| should not U or D.
|
| Perhaps I'm too used to Windows's idiosyncrasies, but an
| open/save dialog is an Explorer window (at least in a
| functional sense). When you drag a file onto it, it does
| the same thing as an Explorer window. This does not seem
| that surprising to me.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| > On Windows you can drag the file right onto the
| 'Browse...' button
|
| I know, but I was illustrating a point about how the
| open/save panels work. That's why in the following
| example, I mentioned that I'd just drag straight into the
| app.
|
| > Perhaps I'm too used to Windows's idiosyncrasies
|
| Yes, you are. If you want an Explorer window, you should
| open Explorer. When you see a file picker dialog, you
| don't see an extra Explorer process spawn nor does that
| dialog get added to Explorer's list of windows.
|
| > This does not seem surprising to me
|
| Because you're looking at it from a technical level, not
| a user interaction level.
|
| At the interaction level, what is the goal of an
| open/save panel? To pick a location. It doesn't
| fundamentally need to do or be anything more than that.
| That its default behaviour is _destructive_ is
| classifiable as 'surprising'.
| baxuz wrote:
| I love this comment. One of the reasons I prefer using
| MacOS as my daily driver even though I have a lot of
| complaints.
|
| Sadly, due to the ever-increasing number of non-Cocoa apps
| (primarily Electron ones), these features are getting the
| boot.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Indeed. Little things like Apple's implementation of
| drag-and-drop being lost in this sea of ugly, slow
| Electron apps is something that you just can't explain to
| Electron developers -- they make for Windows first, they
| have no idea what Mac users complain about, and even when
| we tell them they think we're being silly.
|
| As per the comment to which I replied asked (although I
| believe GP asked in good faith): "why would you want to
| do that anyway?"
|
| Because that's how we do it on macOS. That could be _why_
| we use macOS. If you care so much about letting macOS
| users access your app that you went with Electron rather
| than writing something Windows-only, it shouldn't be hard
| to learn to respect the Mac platform and, more
| importantly, its users.
| williamscales wrote:
| Thanks for this great comment! As a non Mac person who has
| occasionally used a Mac, it makes perfect sense.
|
| > The only thing I expect to act as an Explorer window is
| ... an Explorer window.
|
| One thing I wanted to add from my perspective (software
| engineer, use Linux and Windows): if I observed that the
| "save" button had created a literal Explorer window, then I
| think I would expect it to function as a Explorer window.
| I'm not surprised by that because I can recognize that
| Microsoft has taken the approach of implementing everything
| they can using Explorer. This gets back to what was
| discussed in the article actually!
|
| Overall I think I prefer the approach Apple takes on this
| problem.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| If the "save" button did indeed create a literal Explorer
| window, I expect it to come with all the trimmings -- but
| it doesn't. Plenty of what makes Explorer what it is
| aren't part of the actual control that both Explorer and
| file picker dialogs use.
|
| To me, thinking of file picker dialogs as literal
| Explorer windows is as contrived as file picker dialogs
| _not_ offering full CRUD abilities -- except one approach
| is vastly friendlier and safer.
|
| I understand the technical decision, too, but there's
| nothing that could prevent Windows from making file
| picker dialog behaviour non-destructive.
| kergonath wrote:
| Entirely agree with et dry thing you said. I just wanted to
| say, re
|
| > For example, proxy icons
|
| The way they are buried in Big Sur, and often invisible
| unless you mouse over where they are by accident is my
| biggest gripe with the update. This is fundamental in how
| we interact with documents on that platform, and one of its
| great features. What were they thinking?
| zapzupnz wrote:
| I suppose it comes down to the fact that sidebars can now
| inhabit the space usually reserved for title bars. It's
| not a design decision against which I have any opposition
| so long as draggable space remains (and there usually is;
| I complained to Apple during the Big Sur beta period and
| they made some spacing adjustments).
|
| But I agree, those icons coming and going can make using
| them something of a pain. It also makes less clear what
| apps actually _have_ them. An option in System
| Preferences to make proxy icons show all the time would
| be lovely.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The ability to set the destination folder to a folder you
| have open in a file manager window without copy-pasting the
| path is convenient. But at the same time, the file-management
| capabilities of the macOS file picker are basically non-
| existent (although there seem to be more right-click options
| in Big Sur?)
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Yeah, there are file management options available via a
| context menu. I believe certainly keyboard shortcuts also
| work (Cmd-Del to send a file to the Trash/Bin, Return to
| rename a file, etc.).
|
| You can also choose to Show in Finder.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| See you've been conditioned to think that some file views are
| different from others. On Windows, a file viewer is a file
| viewer is a file viewer. So yes, dragging a file from one file
| viewer (windows explorer) to another one (which happens to be
| inside a file save/open dialog) is a move action. I love this
| and wouldn't have it any other way. Although I agree it should
| be a setting. Although perhaps Apple has patented it. Gotta
| always remember that GUI patents are a thing.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| > See you've been conditioned to think that some file views
| are different from others
|
| They _are_ different. Their _purpose_ is different. It is the
| _purpose_ of an open panel to let me pick a file /folder
| location. It is the _purpose_ of a save panel to let me pick
| a folder to save a file.
|
| User interfaces and user experiences go hand in hand. A user
| interface should be purposeful. It creates a better
| experience.
|
| Sure, you can get used to an open/save panel having
| destructive behaviour and it can be handy -- but that doesn't
| make it a better user experience. It puts destructive actions
| front-and-centre, violating the element of least surprise and
| potentially endangering user data.
|
| > Although perhaps Apple has patented it
|
| Doubtful. It's just a consequence of Microsoft using the same
| Explorer control throughout the operating system without
| making any adjustments for behaviour.
| CiceroCiceronis wrote:
| Having switched from Mac OS to Windows a year ago, this
| specific thing had annoyed me to no end, and there are no good
| ways to replicate that behaviour (believe me, I've looked!)
|
| What I currently use is Listary, which automatically switches
| open/save modals to the last used Explorer window location.
| However, I'd rather switch to something that offers this
| functionality exclusively.
|
| You can also see this AHK script which I found in a comments
| section here a few days ago - https://pastebin.com/cmLVFdbB
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Good to know that there are some things out there, though. A
| few glasses of ice water in Hell, so to speak.
| acgkmopvvgvmgv wrote:
| Pretty sure 99% of _regular_ people would be happy if there was a
| desktop with GNOME 2 feature parity but with a good Wayland
| compositor and probably some modern features that would come from
| that (multimonitor, VRR, ...).
|
| I just can't understand how anyone could defend GNOME 3. Their
| own staff have to use extensions (that break every update), even
| Fedora (!!!) has to patch GNOME packages now.
|
| They kept fighting that their workflow is superior and now they
| are going to change it all over next release. They keep
| butchering their toolkit, I can only use Qt applications now.
| Hell I'll take even Electron over GTK.
|
| For me the Linux desktop with a WM is the perfect balance of
| exposing the internals and UX. It could be better but that's true
| to every OS, at least here I have my freedom. I'm keeping my eye
| on KDE, seems like they rewrote their less than ideal compositor
| (legacy X11 is a burden) and maybe in a year I could be using
| that.
|
| I've once heard someone say that GNOME is Microsoft's favorite
| DE. You can guess why.
| ansible wrote:
| > _...but with a good Wayland compositor..._
|
| Up until 2020, I didn't use screen sharing all that much, so
| the lack of support for that wasn't a big deal with using
| Wayland.
|
| Now days though... this is a problem. I feel sorry for the
| folks running some Linux desktop that don't know why the option
| to start screen sharing just doesn't exist in various apps. I
| can imagine another Linux user saying "but it is right there!"
| to them, also not understanding why they have it but the person
| they're talking to does not have screen sharing.
| TingPing wrote:
| GNOME on Wayland supports VNC ootb.
| KraftKacke wrote:
| To be fair, that's rather a problem of the applications not
| supporting Wayland. You can share within Xworld and
| Waylandworld, but not between them. I assume that's a non
| trivial problem and inherent to Wayland's design.
| Arnavion wrote:
| You can screenshare just fine through xdg-desktop-portal.
| It has nothing to do with whether the DE / compositor
| providing the implementation of xdp uses X or Wayland or
| something else, and it has nothing to do with whether the
| application doing the screenshare has an X window or a
| wayland window or any window at all.
| nightfly wrote:
| Have you looked at MATE? https://mate-desktop.org/
| twic wrote:
| Or Cinnamon:
|
| https://projects.linuxmint.com/cinnamon/
|
| I've been running Cinnamon on a few machines for years, and
| it mostly works fine, which for a Linux desktop is high
| praise. The file picker has thumbnails (although it only has
| a list view, so they're ant-size).
|
| I haven't used MATE. My understanding is that MATE started
| life as Gnome 2, whereas Cinnamon started life as Gnome 3
| reskinned to look like Gnome 2. Both have grown considerably
| from their starting points.
| nerdponx wrote:
| My desktop user experience with Mint Cinnamon was as close
| to delightful as I've ever had on Linux. All the GUI stuff
| worked without me having to fiddle around in the terminal
| like a "hacker", the UX was generally high-quality, and the
| default theming was pretty and consistent.
|
| My overall impression was that it was definitely and
| surprisingly usable for non-technical people like my mom,
| grandma, etc. who don't use their computer for anything
| sophisticated but also don't have the
| time/energy/wherewithal to debug and configure things.
|
| I can't speak highly enough about the Mint Cinnamon
| experience, and I recommend that everyone involved in the
| "Desktop Linux" world try it (at least in a VM) so they can
| get a sense of what "good defaults" actually look and feel
| like.
| twic wrote:
| > All the GUI stuff worked without me having to fiddle
| around in the terminal like a "hacker"
|
| This was also my experience.
|
| The only customisation i've done is:
|
| 1. Moving the panel, depending on what my feelings about
| proper panel placement are at the time.
|
| 2. Removing all the default shortcuts, because they
| collide with IntelliJ and/or are useless, and defining a
| few of my own
|
| 3. Setting up custom compose key sequences
|
| Removing the shortcuts was done in the UI, but i really
| wish i could do it in a config file instead, because it's
| a pain to spend ten minutes clicking around. I had to hit
| the command line to set up compose keys, although i think
| this is an X problem, not a Cinnamon problem.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| And somewhat related, TDE is the KDE 3.5 of the modern era.
| https://trinitydesktop.org
|
| (I say modern era; it's more or less just recompiled. Still
| comes with some of the yuckiness of days gone by, like aRtsd
| for audio.
| dm319 wrote:
| I've been using MATE with the arc theme for years now. It
| feels very modern, and the interface is remarkably refined.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Pretty sure 99% of regular people would be happy if there
| was a desktop with GNOME 2 feature parity but with a good
| Wayland compositor
|
| You mean like the ability to put things on the desktop? There's
| even a desktop folder, but well....
|
| I use gnome and I agree with you.
| simias wrote:
| I don't use a DE myself but I do package software that's
| meant to run on "normal" Linux distros and the lack of a
| desktop on modern Gnome is absolutely baffling. I make
| industrial software so these machines are really single-use
| so it makes sense to put shortcuts where they won't be missed
| by somebody who may not be super familiar with the Linux
| desktop (especially since said shortcut will often be used
| when something goes wrong and speed is of the essence).
|
| I remember thinking "what on earth were they thinking" the
| first time I realized that none of the usual way of putting
| things on the desktop worked on modern Gnome. Absolutely
| baffling. Breaking such a well established convention is pure
| hubris in my book.
|
| I'd be perfectly fine if this was a niche DE that you'd have
| to go out of your way to install but this is bloody Gnome,
| the de-facto standard DE for Linux. Absolute insanity.
| thoughtsunific5 wrote:
| Until Hacker News deletes this account they will be promoting the
| following:
|
| - 9/11 never happened. - Jews were responsible for the
| propagation of Communism. - New Testament is false
| hmottestad wrote:
| Ooohhh. I remember the magic pixel in Gnome back when I was a
| student at uni.
|
| If you managed to mouse over that one single pixel in the corner
| you were allowed to resize the window...
| stephen82 wrote:
| Install PCManFM and that will do; an extremely lightweight File
| Manager which I happen to use parallel with Thunar.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| This post is about the Gtk file picker, not file managers.
| miguelmota wrote:
| I use pcmanfm but there's no thumbnails in file picker still.
| They are separate programs it seems.
| turminal wrote:
| And despite all such issues everyone still has the time to argue
| about things like stopthemingmy.app
| benibela wrote:
| Windows 98 had the best GUI
|
| Everything that came later has turned into crap
|
| Also, I use the Lazarus Pascal IDE. After updating from Kubuntu
| 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10, it has started crashing every other time I
| open a file with its GTK2 file chooser.
| skratlo wrote:
| Gtk and GNOME is utter trash, it's going nowhere, has no art
| direction nor QA process. It's for the large part responsible for
| Linux desktops having negligible adoption. I wish there would be
| a open-source, but not free desktop environment built with Qt.
| Not free because you can't have just about everyone pushing their
| opinion on it. There has to be a team with strong design and QA
| skills behind it.
| stuaxo wrote:
| It seems like in Gtk3 and earlier there was an architectural
| reason, IIRC all the icons had to get created once and so would
| use loads of RAM.
|
| In Gtk 4 the limitation is lifted, so this might be a matter of
| someone implementing it.
| vfclists wrote:
| This is a consequence of the unfortunate intersection between C++
| and Javascript.
|
| UI design is an iterative affair and compile debug cycles just
| never seem to end. It is why you get all this meaningless
| requests to remove this tiny feature or that tiny feature.
| Apparently every little thing affects compile times and you have
| all these so called "developers" trying to gain attention or make
| some name for themselves by proposing insignificant things all
| the time.
|
| As for Javascript UIs - well they are all built on C++.
|
| If you can't get the C++ right, how can you get Javascript that
| depends on it right.
|
| Says Joe Amstrong - "I think the only computer languages one
| needs are C and Erlang, don't you think so?
| miguelmota wrote:
| If someone sets up a bounty on gitcoin or something similar I'd
| be down to contribute to sponsor this feature request. The
| thumbnail viewer would save me time from mistakenly choosing the
| wrong file when they're all labeled similarly.
| andarleen wrote:
| oh wow that's a lot of pedo stuff in those "thumbnails". is that
| normalised on HN these days?
| [deleted]
| awill wrote:
| What's the root of the problem here? In other words, why has an
| important usability bug been ignored for years?
|
| Is the problem that Gnome is mostly funded by Redhat, and Redhat
| mostly focuses on enterprise usecases, as that's how they make
| money?
|
| I remember years ago Ubuntu had their 100 papercuts initiative,
| which seems like exactly the sort of initiative to fix a bunch of
| smaller desktop usability items that enterprises might ignore.
| ehutch79 wrote:
| It's open source.
|
| I'm sure they're accepting pull requests.
| bsdubernerd wrote:
| Not really. This is not the first or the last one fixing
| horrible behavior in the default file picker.
|
| Most of the time there's a deliberate reason the picker was
| designed this way, and the GNOME team won't accept your patch.
|
| I personally stopped contributing to GTK very late in the GTK 2
| series with very similar problems, and stopped using GTK in my
| projects since GTK 3.
|
| GTK used to be my favorite toolkit back in the day.
| type0 wrote:
| I saddens me that GNOME and GTK are so hostile to new or
| inexperienced contributors, most of the time the development
| happens in a GNOME/GTK Cabal; I heard about but couldn't
| believe it until I saw their responces myself. I really is
| worse than that and puts a stain on the whole Linux open
| source movement (if you can even call it that).
| dleslie wrote:
| They're hostile to users who post bugs! It's an absolutely
| toxic developer community who rejects any reflection upon
| the quality of their product that could somehow indicate
| that there exists problems with their design vision.
|
| It doesn't matter that they've made the UI harder to use
| for those with ability concerns, or that their market share
| is dwindling, or that they've steadily lost developers for
| most of a decade.
|
| Everyone should give up and move on; I use MATE and am
| happy, others like Plasma and Xfce. There's plenty of
| vastly superior DEs with healthier developer attitudes.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| What I find more a pain in the ass of the GtkFileChooser, it's
| that I can't type the path. It's very annoying, when you need to
| jump to a path that you have on the clipboard and you can't, and
| you are forced to navigate to these path because the removed a
| simple text field to puth the path. The equivalent from QT/KDE
| does this far better. It allows the user to switch from the
| graphical "user friendly" path representation to a crude text
| field where you can write/removed/modify/copy/paste the path.
| st1ck wrote:
| Ctrl+L seems to work for me.
| luxcem wrote:
| I think you can enter a path by pressing "Ctrl+l"
| agurk wrote:
| So I just checked on my install (Gnome 3.38.2, Debian testing)
| and all the GTKFileChooser windows I could find had the
| thumbnails representing the underlying images.
|
| Interestingly I checked a few apps I have installed through
| Flatpak, and they generally didn't have thumbnails for the same
| dialogues, although sometimes did for the "recents".
|
| Unless this has been recently added as a feature, it sounds more
| like he has another issue affecting his desktop rather than
| outright missing functionality. Or could this be a Debian applied
| patch? I couldn't find any details after a quick google.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Can you provide a screenshot?
| agurk wrote:
| If you read the article more closely than I did originally
| there is an example of what I see in their original article
| [0]. The thumbnail is part of the list view and they want to
| see a thumbnail without the other file details.
|
| [0] https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome2.png
| fvdessen wrote:
| We want to see all the thumbnails at once, not just the
| selected one.
| agurk wrote:
| The screenshot from the article is very low resolution,
| so it's quite hard to see if you don't know what you're
| looking for, but it does have a unique thumbnail against
| each filename.
|
| The underlying complaint is that people want this to be
| bigger.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| Yes, they are so small that they are completely useless.
| What is needed is a widget like the one from Windows at the
| top of the article that actually shows all the thumbnails
| at a decent size so you can use them to actually locate the
| right image.
| agurk wrote:
| After a downvote encouraged me to re-read the article more
| carefully it seems the OP wants to be able to see only the
| thumbnail (and maybe the filename) - not a thumbnail that is
| part of the list view with further details.
|
| Older builds of Gnome only seemed to use the generic icon for
| the file type, so it does sound like there has been progress
| here - if not enough to satisfy the OP.
| [deleted]
| vermaden wrote:
| Similar situation with ElementaryOS not having icons on the
| desktop ... or many other Linux 'desktop oriented' distributions
| without icons on the desktop.
| rtpg wrote:
| I'm legit worried about consumer FOSS, and especially around how
| work just kinda gets stuck in this limbo when an issue is over,
| say, 3 years old (I recently had this come up with a 12 year old
| FF bug as well)
|
| I desperately want to pay, like, $100/month to get some guarantee
| of cleanup work on the free software I'm using (FF, GNOME, and
| Emacs in particular)
|
| Lots of software projects do fundraising for lots of auxiliary
| stuff but I really want maintainers to be paid
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > One might also say "Just use KDE!" Yeah, I guess I could use
| KDE, just like I use the downstairs toilet instead of the other
| ones.
|
| Yeah but when you go to the downstairs toilet you can't bring in
| your favourite newspaper because the paper its printed on isn't
| compatible with the light bulb and you can't read it.
|
| Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails._
|
| Not if you set the GTK_USE_PORTAL environment variable.
| $ GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 firefox
|
| The above will make Firefox use the KDE filepicker.
| corty wrote:
| So they say. But I could never get that to work, with
| KDE/Plasma the dialog just never shows up.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| An AppArmor rule used to prevent it from working on my
| system.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I just set this up today and found that one also must
| install the xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-kde
| packages. I then added GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 to .profile and
| relogged.
| Zren wrote:
| Did you install the KDE portal and restart the portal
| process? When I initially tested it the gtk portal was
| installed so it used that.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BGHnVF_WWls
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why I wish Falkon had more active
| development. Having a fully KDE native browser is so nice.
| nisa wrote:
| > Firefox on KDE uses the GTK filepicker. No thumbnails.
|
| Not true. Firefox on current Arch/Plasma works fine with the
| KDE filepicker.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| It's completely true on Kubuntu 18.04. Ah !
|
| now that I think about it I remembered a little trick
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/1100261/how-do-i-make-
| firefo... Have to try it again.
| ognarb wrote:
| Kubuntu 18.04 is a bit too old, if I remember correctly
| this was implemented only recently.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I remember doing that last year, or even the year before.
|
| Anyway, a distro released in 2018 and still supported
| until 2023 and 2028 for extender support can't be "a bit
| too old" for something like the file picker. I mean,
| people were making fun of me when I told them I was using
| that ubuntu distro that had no mp3 support by default but
| it was 15 years ago.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| OSS is not designed to solve user problems, it's designed to
| solve developer problems. Therefore it will always suck compared
| to a commercial product developed for users. Good product design
| solves users' problems. ( _And_ usually there 's somebody who
| will get fired if they wait indefinitely to solve it)
| bsdubernerd wrote:
| As a dev I still have to interact with the file picker a huge
| number of times in a single day. The GTK file picker is perhaps
| one of the worst offenders that's irritating devs, power-users
| and plain regular users.
|
| Patches get dismissed.
|
| I don't know where the problem is. It's as if the GNOME team
| had a vision, but didn't actually try to see how this vision
| plays out using the tools they're making.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > I don't know where the problem is.
|
| The problem is nobody's gonna get fired for not solving the
| problem in GNOME. Nobody is accountable, and nobody _has_ to
| cooperate on and solve the user 's problem. One person can be
| a blocker for 10 years and nobody can do anything about it.
|
| The second thing Leadership is useful for is forcing people
| to do the right thing. That seems to be missing here.
| bsdubernerd wrote:
| I'm not convinced. Leadership is somehow preventing these
| fixes to be merged with "design decisions".
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| On a tangential note: the author knows how to write.
|
| The first few paragraphs of "rant" on his toilets are just
| brilliant. I wasn't sure I was going to read the whole thing, but
| after reading these, I decided that this blog post deserved my
| time.
| mseepgood wrote:
| It's a design decision. There is no right or wrong.
| corty wrote:
| There are design decisions that are wrong. Invisible emergency
| exit signs are a wrong design decision. Making the emergency
| off button the same color and shape as the light switch is also
| a wrong design decision. And yes, I think the original problem
| is also a wrong design decision.
|
| Design isn't just art, design of functional objects needs to be
| functional. That means that there is an objective criterion for
| wrong design: if it isn't functional, it's wrong.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's a design decision if both sides have competing benefits
| and you choose one. In this case it's a planning / engineering
| decision: other work is prioritised higher than implementing
| the previews.
| mseepgood wrote:
| If it was just that then the blog author and the combined
| technical intelligentsia of Hacker News could jump in and
| make it happen by implementing it.
| viraptor wrote:
| I'm not sure why you say that. Bugzilla had a partial patch
| with some outstanding issues needing polish. Nobody
| rejected it, but nobody is working on it anymore. You're
| welcome to take https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk/pull/1
| and continue the work in a gtk PR on gitlab.
|
| You can jump in and implement it. The last few comments are
| basically "here's a patch that works", "ok, open a PR then"
| (and no follow up)
| fortran77 wrote:
| And this, to the surprise of people who think because I'm some
| 1337 h4x0r I must be running Linux, is why I use Windows 10. If I
| need Linux, I spin up a VM.
| senko wrote:
| Users like these are why maintainers of open source software are
| burning out.
| ornxka wrote:
| If people are going to make crappy half-baked software that
| doesn't work, they need to be upfront about it so people stop
| expecting it to do its job. If they're not going to do this,
| people are right to expect a basic level of quality and to
| complain when they don't get it.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| It also doesn't help that theres an utter legion of Linux
| users who deny that the ecosystem has any deficiencies at all
| compared to windows and macOS. It's so misleading.
| vetinari wrote:
| All three have deficiencies, and for all three you will
| find people claiming that their chosen one is best thing
| since sliced bread.
|
| No need to single out a specific one.
| rayrag wrote:
| No it's not users, it's open source developers are guilty
| themselves. There is no need to have dozens of Linux distros,
| multiple packages, few desktop environments (with apps like
| email clients, music players, etc. created for each
| environment). Windows doesn't have multiple desktop
| environments to choose, Microsoft isn't developing multiple
| email clients and so on. The amount of wasted time (creating
| multiple solutions for one problem) in Linux world is
| staggering.
| type0 wrote:
| You're not even comparing apples to oranges here but apples
| to nuts. And as a linux user I can confirm that situation is
| indeed nuts, but the apple that MS is offering you is
| poisonous but you don't even seem to know it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| These user complaints are 100% legit...
|
| But we need some good funding model to pay someone to fix them.
| Good funding models are something the opensource world has been
| missing for a while...
| viraptor wrote:
| The complaint is legit. But making a page about your pet
| issue to create emotional response and cause rants about
| gnome on social media? That's annoying.
|
| Here's a better structure for the post "This is an issue that
| really impacts me and I care a lot about. See existing bug /
| discussion links. I can't solve it myself, but it's important
| enough that I'm willing to put up bounty for that work." I
| don't think anyone would complain about it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I don't think the author cares about _this_ issue.
|
| The author is trying to point out a process problem in the
| hope that some of us here at HN can help solve it.
| onli wrote:
| I wouldn't be confident that funding is the solution here.
| This is about adding a feature to a project that seems to be
| completely disinterested in that feature, some recent answers
| from project developers in the gitlab issue are even hostile
| to it. Likely to be not something money can fix, this goes
| directly into the deep rooted problems GNOME has with
| usability.
| xgbi wrote:
| He IS actually offering a bounty, though..
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| "There's some hypothetical money to claim from somebody,
| somewhere" is not a good funding model. At best, you'll get
| a dozen additional issues sorted in a large project.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's a pretty basic feature for a modern file manager.
|
| The way I see it, maintainers like these are why users of open
| source software are burning out and switching to macOS.
| coldtea wrote:
| How come this doesn't come up every time "just use Linux" is
| mentioned as some superior solution?
| agilob wrote:
| This reminds me why I decided to use KDE years ago. KDE3 had
| image previews, GNOME didn't.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I have a lot of issues with gnome on the latest Ubuntu. When you
| open a folder with icon view, sometimes loading the folder just
| stalls. You have to go back and open it again and then it's fine.
| Also selecting multiple items with ctrl click only works in list
| view. There's some bug in icon view where when I click on an item
| it instantly scrolls my window and selects something else. It's
| honestly weird that this basic aspect of file browsing is so
| broken. I do wonder too if I've broken my system or if it always
| behaves this way.
|
| As an aside right now I'm designing a part in the free version of
| the commercial software OnShape and I just discovered it does not
| support scaling a sketch. There is a long support thread going
| back 5 years of people asking how to do this and recommendations
| for elaborate workarounds. I decided to export the sketch as a
| drawing, open it in the free and open source program QCAD, select
| everything and choose the "scale" option, scale as desired, save,
| then upload to OnShape.
|
| FLOSS needs to be better than this but as someone else said
| commercial software has issues like this too. The reality I think
| is that we need to look at how to better fund open source, as
| time strapped teams aren't super functional in general.
| ben_utzer wrote:
| No one is talking of the highlighted color used by Ubuntu in
| their file pickers? I keep believing I can type the file name
| when saving but instead I am just filtering. Nothing was
| highlighted.
|
| That is bad.
| [deleted]
| gfxgirl wrote:
| MacOS also has this issue. The thumbnails are so small as to be
| useless. Especially if you have multiple similar images. In the
| Finder you can choose larger thumbnails but not in a file open
| dialog. Used to be able to several versions of the OS ago though
| you had set some internal OS setting (no UI) but that setting no
| longer works.
|
| If Windows does anything better than MacOS this is one tiny area.
| I don't understand who at Apple thinks not being able to have
| large thumbnails is a good design.
| still_grokking wrote:
| As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if their
| BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying!
|
| They refuse since over a decade to implement some generic way to
| open the file-picker native to the running DE. They force their
| garbage usability on everybody, even people that would prefer not
| to use "anything Gnome". Same issue with CSDs, by the way.
|
| Like I said: They can have their broken stuff at their place if
| they prefer it like that. But it's utterly antisocial to force
| that stuff on everybody without any opt-out possibility. They
| even actively and deliberately break and remove configuration
| options. That's just not OK.
| pndy wrote:
| > As a KDE user I wouldn't care what the Gnome people do if
| their BS wouldn't affect me. But it does, and it's annoying!
|
| KDE has own sins as well - they removed ability of running
| Dolphin as root giving some vague arguments about security and
| users protection, while other DE allows running their file
| managers with highest rights without any walkarounds nor weird
| acrobatics. I've seen some Plasma addons restoring this feature
| but it seems it doesn't work on my Manjaro at all.
| Spivak wrote:
| You can actually fix that! Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in your
| environment and then basically all your GTK apps will use the
| platform file picker.
| still_grokking wrote:
| It works fine with Firefox for me since some time. But does
| it really work with all GTK apps? I would have to install
| some Gnome app to test.
|
| Maybe someone else could confirm? This would be progress!
| (Even it uses some parts of Flatpak under the hood, which is
| less nice).
|
| I'm a little bit skeptical as Firefox had to add support for
| the desktop-portal before it started to work.
| wander_homer wrote:
| No, the GTK application needs to explicitly add support for
| that feature, by using the newer GtkFileChooserNative API,
| introduced in GTK 3.20, instead of the older and more
| extensive GtkFileChooser API. In my experience it's still a
| complete hit and miss whether a GTK application supports
| native dialogs and of course you actually might loose some
| features with it, since the new API doesn't support
| everything of the old one.
| Spivak wrote:
| I wouldn't really expect that the new API will ever be able
| to support all the features of the old one simply because
| the dbus API it farms out to has to be generic across all
| toolkits / DEs.
| xuhu wrote:
| From a distance it looks like a personal preference thing: some
| people that prefer the KDE desktop environment might just
| prefer the GTK dialogs, controls or UI decisions made by
| certain GTK apps.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why I wish Falkon had more active
| development. Having a fully KDE native browser is so nice.
| arendtio wrote:
| Somehow I feel pity for Gnome users. It reminds me of the early
| KDE 4 days, just that they seem to be stuck in this limbo for a
| much longer time. Gnome 3 was released in 2011...
| lrossi wrote:
| Meanwhile, Qt seems to have the same issue:
|
| https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-3796
| jcelerier wrote:
| thumbnails work in kde tho:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=kde+thumbnail+file+dialog&tb...
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| If you switch to KDE you're just going to have a different set of
| similar problems.
| znpy wrote:
| > https://wiki.installgentoo.com/wiki/File:Gloriouskdefilepick...
|
| KDE Fixed this.
|
| As usual, regular old stuff is broken as hell in GNOME and has
| been working for years in KDE.
|
| Nothing new under the sun.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Bounties can be a great way to stimulate open-source projects!
| You can use BountySource or IssueHunt to create one.
| juniperplant wrote:
| I would avoid BountySource:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23551098
| userbinator wrote:
| Windows' file picker is actually an almost fully-featured
| Explorer instance, and is easily accessible from any application
| with a single function call. The "loose components" model that a
| lot of OSS seems to follow means that things like this require
| more effort, despite the fact that GNOME is supposed to be an
| integrated environment.
|
| _What's the point of doing a whole upgrade of the GTK toolkit
| while ignoring this problem?_
|
| An unfortunate consequence of the incessant trendchasing that has
| taken hold of the software industry, closed and open source
| alike. Frankly, I am as puzzled as the article author how solving
| existing problems is somehow shunned in favour of ignoring them
| and making "new things"... which usually tends to just create
| more new problems instead. No one seems to value stability and
| the strive toward perfection anymore. This phenomenon has been
| ascribed to "resume driven development", but I'm not sure if that
| is completely responsible for it.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Or maybe no one who's in the position to implement a feature
| like that or get it integrated wants it enough to prioritize it
| over new features. Some aspects of perfection are subjective.
|
| Addendum: I'm not arguing icon view is not a great feature
| though.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| >The "loose components" model that a lot of OSS seems to follow
| means that things like this require more effort, despite the
| fact that GNOME is supposed to be an integrated environment.
|
| It seems like the opposite. It's the tight integration of the
| toolkit with applications that causes this issue. If there was
| loose integration between the file picker and the application
| and its toolkit, like with the newer xdg-deskop-portal
| protocol, it would be simpler for someone to create a better
| file picker witout risking breaking anything else, and for
| applications to be made to use it.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs...
|
| It's such a shame, because fixing most of these small bugs is far
| less work than building new features. Nobody wants to put the
| work in though... Nobody has the overarching vision of a
| consistent UX that just works out of the box without oddities,
| quirks and workarounds.
| noncoml wrote:
| > Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs...
|
| I agree, this is the problem. GUI OS developers like to work on
| big features and eye candy but forget to fix the basics. I have
| yet to find a Window system that:
|
| 1. Works without glitches in HiDPI setups. Especially mouse
| pointer glitches.
|
| 2. Comes out of the box with fonts that don't feel like thorns
| in the eyes, including the browser.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Part of the reason no one wants to put in the work is because
| all it takes is a technical dictator to say "I don't like this
| approach, let's rethink this", and scuttle your weeks of work.
| Even if you got a sign-off on the approach earlier. This has
| happened enough times to me in open source projects that I only
| submit code to projects that I know have reasonable maintainers
| that I've interacted with in the past.
|
| Developers frequently hate it when "product people" get a say
| in the direction of the product, but the alternative is
| commonly to have developers prioritize perceived code purity
| over actual user interests. And emphasis on "perceived",
| because usually the codebase is a hot mess but maintainers want
| it to be _their_ hot mess, not someone else 's.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Oh but people did put in the work[0]. The problem is that gnome
| maintainers are hostile towards anyone from outside their
| little bubble wanting to get in some patches.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/Dudemanguy/gtk
| ilaksh wrote:
| Maybe I will switch to KDE. Does the file picker in Chrome use
| that if I am running KDE? Someone said you have to trick Firefox
| in that case to not use GTK.
| yyx wrote:
| It does on my system. Maybe firefox trick works on Chrome too.
| Anthony-G wrote:
| When I read this article yesterday, it occurred to me that this
| was a specific symptom of what Jamie Zawinski cynically refers to
| as _Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers_ :
| https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
|
| > I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and
| then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the
| new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version
| has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the
| previous version.
|
| (No clickable link because he doesn't like Hacker News as a
| referrer.)
| lol768 wrote:
| Sounds like there is already a working patch on GitHub, but it's
| not been reviewed because an MR wasn't opened on GitLab?
| hda2 wrote:
| Not providing a standard view in their file picker is only one
| problem in a looong list of GTK/GNOME inadequacies.
|
| Try not having any way to set up or interact with system tray
| icons in a toolkit that purports to be a "cross-platform GUI
| toolket". It gets better when you learn that system tray support
| was only removed recently by GTK developers because GNOME doesn't
| have one anymore. The worst part of this is that even if I
| submitted a patch that implements system tray support, they would
| just reject it. I know this because I asked them.
|
| These days, GTK and GNOME seem to be designed _only_ for gnome
| developers and no one else. All 5 or 6 of them.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That is a great metaphor, and pretty much nails why so many
| tecchies have difficulty with true usability.
| andi999 wrote:
| If you think about it it is even worse. For UX the file picker
| should be the same software as the OS file browser, not a
| rewrite. So staying in the example, he actually has two
| additional functioning toilets on the other levels, but
| unfortunately the room where they are in does not have a door but
| 4 solid brick walls.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Imagine these sorts of honest computer novices watch you use
| GNOME. Imagine how silly you look to the 99% of the population
| who uses a functioning file picker._
|
| Been trying to point this out for years. I love Gnome (not sure
| why, I guess because it used to be lighter than Qt?) but it's
| gotten really tired-looking. I think back to when I used to use
| Enlightenment on top of Gnome and everything was super-
| configurable and it looked way ahead of other UIs. Some things
| are still better, like semi-transparent terminal windows. But I
| can't remember the last time I looked at Linux desktop
| environment and thought 'wow.' A lot of things are...pretty
| clunky.*
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Gnome uses Gtk; Gtk is the Gimp Toolkit. It was created for an
| image editing program. In a way funny that their file picker is
| missing such an feature one would expect in an image editing
| program these days.
|
| (From scrolling offer the discussion I can in parts see the
| architectural constraints they have and can image they have other
| priorities ...)
| trissylegs wrote:
| If you notice the dependcies:
| https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/gimp/
|
| GIMP still runs GTK 2. The version from ~10 years ago.
| pferde wrote:
| They're actually well on their way to switch to GTK3. I guess
| it takes a while.
|
| https://www.gimp.org/news/2020/11/06/gimp-2-99-2-released/
| Biganon wrote:
| GIMP is also one of the most atrocious UX I've come across
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| According to Wikipedia[1] GtkFileChooser is from 2.4 in 2004.
| So that was designed more than 16 years ago. Not sure when
| Windows got the feature, but previews could have been
| thinkable then and machines powerful enough to handle it with
| some usable threshold.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTK
| eugenekolo wrote:
| I really enjoyed the writing style.
| barrkel wrote:
| This is why I use bash for almost all filesystem operations
| across all desktop operating systems.
|
| I don't deal with image files on disk, mind. I use various media
| databases to handle those (and audio and video) with tagging,
| timestamps, previews, thumbnails etc. in a dedicated UI.
| [deleted]
| allenskd wrote:
| I'm not really surprised at all this is still an ongoing issue.
| And by far I think people that work on the so called Human
| Interface Guidelines need to get off whatever ideology/belief
| they fed themselves for the desktop environment to finally, you
| know, grow for actual humans rather than their egos. At times it
| feels more like a cred, like when elementary OS was released I
| read so many comments on how Apple nailed the UI.
|
| From the site: >If you use GNOME and this is a revelation to you,
| it's because you're used to mediocrity. If you think your
| experience all this time was normal, you're completely mistaken--
| and it's not least because you're using a specific desktop
| environment that's available only on Free operating systems that
| account for only a fraction of a percent of desktop computer
| usage anyways.
|
| I like the author just sarcastically points it out, because I
| remember reading years ago the same on both GNOME and elementary
| OS subreddits "it's because people are used to mediocrity". Or,
| you know, maybe people find it super helpful to being able to see
| the images without extra steps so they can choose whatever they
| want.
|
| And then it all just spirals down into:
|
| "Have you tried X/Y/Z?" no? Sucks for you buddy I guess you are
| stuck with mediocre people making design decisions. But as crud
| as I put it, I might not be wrong.
|
| That said, I have completely given up on all the nonsense someone
| would have to follow to file a enhancement report and discuss it
| just to be stuck on discussion for 10 years. There's just no time
| and energy for that, and at the end people would just ditch the
| desktop environment because it's just too much of a hassle to
| use.
| reddotX wrote:
| no desktop, no system tray icons.. gnome is a joke
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| Tools and features have ergonomics and affordances that suggest
| a certain way of using them, and desktop filling just seems to
| encourage people to make a massive mess. Even when I was a
| Windows user, desktop icons were the first thing to go. Not
| having quick access to a dumping ground meant that I had to go
| out of my way to make a mess.
|
| As for a lack of system tray icons, the practical upshot is
| that my system bar isn't littered with multiple special
| snowflake applications, each with their own unique icon art
| style and mismatching proportions.
| benibela wrote:
| Somehow nextcloud shows a system tray icon on my Gnome laptop
|
| Looks like there are still tray icons, they just need to be
| implemented differently?
| amiga-workbench wrote:
| If you're using Ubuntu then they include an extension to
| bring them back. In older versions of Gnome 3 there used to
| be a pop-out panel in the bottom left for legacy system
| tray icons.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _As for a lack of system tray icons, the practical upshot
| is that my system bar isn 't littered with multiple special
| snowflake applications, each with their own unique icon art
| style and mismatching proportions._
|
| Plasma Desktop's System Tray widget that lets you hide icons
| you don't want to see. You can disable the widget, or
| configure it to show no icons at all.
| vetinari wrote:
| The problem with that is, that applications will assume it
| is present and enabled. If it is not, they will inflict a
| pain on the user until it is enabled again. For example
| Skype.
|
| With default being off, it is applications that have to be
| careful. They can use it, when they detect it is present,
| but cannot assume it anymore.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can make the System Tray show no icons unless it is
| invoked to deal with applications that behave poorly.
|
| System trays exist on most platforms, and apps,
| especially cross-platform apps, will sometimes assume
| that they exist. I prefer to use a system that can handle
| those apps.
| vetinari wrote:
| It was a crutch when windows 95 introduced it, and it is
| still a crutch today.
|
| I prefer when applications do not assume that it is
| available at all; if they do, they are broken.
| Applications, that force themselves on the user upon
| startup, then sit in the systray and are resisting the
| user that is trying to close them are outright black UI
| pattern.
| efreak wrote:
| LastPass is especially horrible at this. I have it
| configured _not_ to start with windows because I don't
| want it running in the background. Whenever I need to
| open it, I launch it, copy the password to the clipboard
| and paste it into whatever program, and click the X or
| hit alt-f4 to close it. Unfortunately, it does not close.
| It minimizes itself to the system tray, and gives me a
| helpful notification to let me know that my attempt to
| close it has failed. In order to close it, I must right
| click the tray icon, at which point the icon moves to
| hide itself in the hidden tray icons due to a bug in
| either LastPass or more likely in Windows itself. So now
| I have to click the overflow menu on the tray and right-
| click the icon again to close it. Finally LastPass is
| closed.
|
| Now, due to another bug in Windows, the overflow menu has
| remained open and must be manually closed. The third bug
| here is when I alt-tab out of LastPass, it doesn't take
| me back to the most recent application; instead it dumps
| me on the desktop or some other program at random (why is
| the desktop even there in the alt-tab menu?)
| vetinari wrote:
| This is exactly what I'm talking about. Applications
| abuse the systray to force themselves on the user and
| that is a bad thing, that should not be supported or
| apologized for.
|
| I'm not against apps running in background, just that
| monolithic implementation with systray is the wrong
| approach. Android has shown a good model: background
| service that cannot talk to UI, but can send
| notifications or communicate with separate UI app. With
| this model, user has control over what is running in
| background or what started on login time by system (not
| app-specific!)-provided tools, like systemd user units
| under Linux or LaunchAgents under macOS. When the user
| wants something off, it will be turned off in one place,
| with no ors or buts or other black patterns that prevent
| user turning the application off.
| inshadows wrote:
| Your kind is a minority. 99.9% of Windows users keep desktop
| icons.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Reminds me of a different story involving Bill Gates, toilets,
| and user interface design:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120427101911/http://jacksonfis...
|
| "At one particularly frustrating moment, I offered the following:
| "Bill, a shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have
| mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes
| out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain,
| but we don't combine them into one thing to reduce their learning
| curve. We don't merge them into one object because each of them
| are in use in fundamentally different ways at different times."
|
| Then the pause.
|
| Then Bill's verdict. ["That's just rude."]
|
| Ouch.
|
| As I saw my career disintegrate before me, I started to question
| just how "beautiful" my analogy really was. To his credit, Bill
| was forgiving, and met with me many times after that, giving me
| numerous opportunities to get him on board with all manner of
| ideas coming from my team (with varying degrees of success on my
| part). Ultimately, I never did succeed in making Bill really
| comfortable with a more emotional approach to software design.
| But the real lesson of the day was learned. In the software
| industry, as long as the engineering-minded run the show, the
| notion of subtle and textured user experience design that
| balances the emotional and functional aspects of a software
| experience will always struggle to take root."
|
| --
|
| I keep a running list of little workflows and experiences I
| generally love on macOS and see if alternatives exist here:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/148zTJUwfVv9xfDcpSoH3...
| hitekker wrote:
| Great anecdote. The outrage in its comment section indicates
| the author struck a nerve.
| z3t4 wrote:
| If a software developer would design a bathroom. eg. DRY (don't
| repeat yourself) mantra. Class Toilet extend Basin.
| salawat wrote:
| If it's any comfort, had it been me, you'd have gotten a
| promotion on the spot. Toolmaking requires a delicate balance
| between realism, and sytemic abstraction. You have to
| simultaneously keep the view of system-as-world and end-tool-
| in-the-world firmly in mind simultaneously. Sadly, with
| programming, it can be very difficult to keep oneself from
| getting bewitched by overall system complexity in ways that end
| up having an adverse effect on the usability of the tool
| itself.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| Funny you'd post that in here because MacOS sucks at this and
| Windows does a great job. In fact arguably the engineering mind
| worked great there. The file open dialog in Windows is just a
| repurposed Windows Explorer view which means you can access all
| the things you can from explorer when opening and saving
| including things like unzipping a zip file, renaming some
| existing file that's in the way (like file.txt -> file-old.txt
| and then saving the current file as file.txt), moving files
| (create a folder "old", drag file.txt info old, save the new
| file as file.txt where the old file.txt was.
|
| Basically you can actually do the things you often need to do.
| Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things your
| only option is to use Finder which really sucks because you
| then have navigate to wherever you were in the app
|
| And of course you can set the icon size in Windows file
| dialogs, something you can't do in MacOS file open/save dialog
|
| So in this case, thank god the engineering mindset won out in
| Windows, at least for this particular feature. Whatever UX
| designer on MacOS decided to neuter the file dialogs failed UX
| class apparently and chose based on some random airfairy idea
| then users actually getting work done.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| - Re: file open dialog - repurposing Windows Explorer means
| that every time I want to open a file in an app in windows, I
| have to look for it, rather than just drag/drop from a window
| I likely already have open into the file open dialog (or from
| a quick-find launcher tool).
|
| - "Basically you can actually do the things you often need to
| do. Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things
| your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because
| you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app" - I'm
| having trouble understanding what you mean here.
|
| - Don't get me started on sizes for accessibility reasons,
| that was partly why I had to switch elder friends to a mac
| after watching them suffer on windows. Things may have
| improved over the past few years though.
|
| - I really want to see Microsoft or the FOSS community figure
| these things out, I dip my toe in once in a while but I think
| there's an evolution in cultural/governance/funding needed.
| Maybe the popularity of videoconferencing may help the FOSS
| world actually see how people work rather than just posting
| pictures of 'screenshots' and battlestations.
| int_19h wrote:
| Have you tried? A properly written Win32 app is supposed to
| handle drag-and-drop of files onto its window, and treat it
| as "Open". Try this in Notepad, for example.
|
| That said, I'm not sure what this has to do with
| repurposing Windows Explorer? It uses the same _widget_ to
| browse files, but the File Open window is not actually an
| Explorer window.
| kccqzy wrote:
| GP is talking about drag-and-drop of a folder into the
| file picker view, which results in the file picker
| navigating to that folder. Or drag-and-drop a file into
| the file picker view, which results in the file picker
| navigating to the enclosing folder and then selecting the
| file being dragged.
|
| This is even more useful when saving files than opening
| files.
| foolfoolz wrote:
| i run into this a lot and always think in my head how much
| easier this is in windows
| wodenokoto wrote:
| > Conversely on MacOS if you need to do any of those things
| your only option is to use Finder which really sucks because
| you then have navigate to wherever you were in the app
|
| While I don't disagree that it would be nice to be able to do
| more of the same things in file picker as in finder, there is
| the possibility to right-click -> open in Finder
|
| Filepicker also supposrt Finders "go to" (cmd+shift+g) that
| let's you type paths, with autocomplete and support for ~,
| which is a super nice feature.
| bborud wrote:
| There was a paragraph in that article that made me think of
| something
|
| >"But engineers (like everyone) see the world through their
| lens. Engineers look at code all day. And when they see two
| pieces of code doing roughly the same thing, they immediately
| think about ways they could eliminate the wasted effort by
| combining them into one piece of code that performs both
| functions".
|
| I shudder when thinking of all the times I have wasted time
| trying to generalize something only to end up with code that is
| harder to understand, awkward to use, more complex, more prone
| to bugs, or all of the aforementioned, just because there is a
| stupid voice in my head going "do not repeat yourself".
|
| With maturity comes the insight that not repeating yourself is
| good. But sometimes avoiding it makes things worse and costs a
| lot more.
| berkes wrote:
| In software there is the distinction between visually DRY and
| functionally DRY.
|
| The latter should be collapsed, but might not be duplicate
| code at all. Automated code analyzers will often not even see
| these.
|
| And the former must be kept duplicate. Unless you can make it
| functionally duplicate too. Automated code analyzers will
| often flag these wrong.
|
| Don't get me wrong: I love automated analysis in a CI or my
| workflow. But it is not binary like a linter: pass or fail.
| It requires context and interpretation; I see e.g.
| CodeClimate as suggestions, not laws.
| 1_player wrote:
| > I shudder when thinking of all the times I have wasted time
| trying to generalize something
|
| My programming life has improved for the better when my
| threshold to generalise and DRY is not when I need to use
| some piece of code in two different places, but when I need
| to use it in three different places.
|
| I am not joking, that was life changing advice for me.
| dexwiz wrote:
| If software engineers wrote novels, most of them would just add
| new pages to a million page choose your own adventure novel,
| and then laugh at all the authors who write a novel from
| scratch each time.
| int_19h wrote:
| Reading this story from 2012 now, it aged... interestingly.
| It's basically complaining that this mentality:
|
| > Concept reduction, consistency, skill portability, were all
| core to how to make a great UI. Why have 17 different ways to
| pop up (or drop down) a menu? Why have 17 different graphical
| treatments? With "one menu to rule them all," users could learn
| how to use the menu once and then apply this knowledge anywhere
| they saw this affordance. That way, developers don't have to
| reinvent the wheel, and users don't need to relearn the wheel.
|
| was taken too far, and argues for dialing it down a notch or
| two. But the industry did exactly that, and the resulting UX is
| _worse_ than what we had in early 00s - and keeps getting worse
| every year.
|
| So, perhaps Bill was right?
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and
| haven't been popularly adopted. It's little things like this that
| add up.
|
| > It stands though that KDE seemed to have this feature working
| for ages, and they're doing it for free too. Also, operating
| systems from the olden times also had it too--Windows 98, as you
| see at the top of this HTML document.
|
| I'm sure this will upset NN but it is 100% the truth.
| arnon wrote:
| 624 comments further on HN, on top of a 1280 word essay about why
| GNOME has no thumbnails...
|
| And unfortunately this will change nothing, because of the
| immense amount of protectionism and self righteousness of these
| idealistic projects.
|
| I wish it was different, but with so many stakeholders it's
| really hard to reach a decision.
| pndy wrote:
| GNOME team seems to be busy for years on the goal of baking out
| some weird hybrid of macOS, iOS and own solutions that tries to
| be so far away from _classic_ desktop paradigm as much it 's
| possible so I'm not surprised at all that this issue is still
| not resolved.
|
| At least they managed to tame their DE to be not a resources
| hungry hog.
| gyger wrote:
| Although this rant complains a lot, the programmers in the bug
| report acknowledge that they like this fixed, but also explain
| that there is architectural debt in the code that makes it hard
| to implement. Being a user in Gnome, I have to say would be nice
| if it is there, but this will not break my whole experience.
| Subsentient wrote:
| Honestly, they should just toss the file picker and write a new
| one. It wouldn't be _too_ hard to do. I 've written custom file
| pickers in Qt before, and I've used GTK+'s API a lot for other
| things, it's not very different. I think they'd just need some
| guy to spend 3 days on it.
| Jedd wrote:
| The author unfairly attributes adequacy (or at least consistency)
| to the Microsoft desktop environment.
|
| Start Microsoft Windows, open up File Explorer, remove the ever-
| present 'Type' column (because if you're old school you'll have
| suffixes enabled), then go to Options and say 'Save this view
| format for ALL Explorer instances'.
|
| Within an hour you'll have a Type column back in some new
| Explorer window, to inform you that your file.pdf is a PDF file
| type.
|
| Any and every version of Microsoft Windows file explorer has
| done, and continues to do, this. It's hugely frustrating.
|
| If you're using Gnome then it's a relatively easy (free,
| ethically sound, painless, etc) process to switch to, say, KDE,
| and enjoy pleasant file explorer/pickers.
|
| If you're forced to use Microsoft Windows (say for work) then you
| are stuck with this particular broken toilet.
| rablackburn wrote:
| I don't think the author attributes universal consistency to
| Windows? They just say that this particular issue has been
| 'solved' by Windows since 1998. It's been raised as an issue in
| Gnome since 2004 and still hasn't been fixed.
|
| I agree with most of what they say, and I think the point is
| that we're uniquely bad at addressing these issues in the open-
| source world.
|
| We accept a degraded UX experience (which I think this
| unarguably is from a normal user's point of view) because at
| least it's not proprietary lock-in. But it's a big reason why
| desktop GNU/Linux doesn't crack 2% usage. Inversely, I think
| this is _the_ core value proposition of Apple's ecosystem. They
| pay particular attention to consistent, unsurprising
| integration, and the Apple experience offsets their iron-grip
| over your device for most users. It's easier to convince
| someone to change how they do a task if you consistently
| deliver pleasant UX.
|
| I recently had the opportunity to help a _very_ 'normal' user
| with their computing, and it was remarkably eye-opening
| watching them interact with their machine (Windows at the time,
| but they also use a Mac). Indeed, they hated Windows because it
| wasn't as consistent as a Mac, but Windows was dealing with
| their ambiguous interaction remarkably well I thought. Much
| better than a GNU/Linux DE would have.
|
| If we want a world where normal people can use free software
| for their everyday computing needs this is something we need to
| get much better at. Forget 'normal' users even, these projects
| (and threads on HN) are full of _developers_ arguing back and
| forth that they find it infuriating/unusable. And unfortunately
| not many of us have the time and money to contribute code or
| fork projects to increase competition and spur improvements.
|
| (also, hi again Jedd :) )
| Jedd wrote:
| In the sense the author was saying 'Gnome is a bit bad, but
| Microsoft does this much better, which is why it wins' I was
| intuiting that the author believes Microsoft does _not_ have
| extremely frustrating, long-lived, bugs within their basic OS
| suite.
|
| Cue contra-example.
|
| I've used Gnome perhaps for a dozen hours in the past twenty
| years - none of those (the dozen hours, not the two decades)
| were especially pleasant, but not because of this missing
| feature enhancement. So perhaps I'm not well positioned to
| cast judgement there.
|
| Anyway, any claim that an operating system is intuitive is
| subject to much discussion. I endorse the early 90's (perhaps
| predating even then) claim that the only intuitive interface
| is the nipple, beyond that the necessary interactions are
| learned.
|
| And - hello again, yes - I'll weigh in on the somewhat
| plaintive 'if we want normal people to use free software'
| rejoinder with a marginally cynical observation. Normal
| people _can_ understand how computers work, and adjust their
| expectations, behaviour, and workflows to suit - worst case
| they 'll acquire the necessary skills to file bug reports or
| fix it themselves.
|
| _Average_ people, on the other hand, are less likely to be
| satisfied.
| danShumway wrote:
| > This is why Free desktop operating systems are a joke and
| haven't been popularly adopted.
|
| I'm at least somewhat with the author in general, but this is a
| case of "grass is always greener" syndrome. I made a full switch
| to Linux from Windows in no small part because of issues just
| like this, I got tired of OneNote completely breaking on my
| Surface. Even on much more polished operating systems -- Mac's
| window snapping is still inexplicably awful for, as far as I can
| tell, no reason at all except that Apple refuses to copy the
| simple model that both Windows and Gnome adopted. We tolerate it.
| I purchased a 3rd-party program to replicate the functionality,
| and it sometimes works.
|
| A more drastic example, my proprietary router won't let me set a
| custom DNS server at the router level. It has an option to do so,
| but it doesn't do anything, and this is an open bug that people
| complained about for years that was just... ignored. And
| eventually they pushed a fix for it that _broke everyone 's
| routers_ and required manual rollback.
|
| If something isn't a showstopper, sometimes it just gets ignored
| in general. Has nothing to do with whether or not it's free
| software, and everything to do with whether or not somebody
| somewhere cares enough to fix it.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| This brings up a great point about GNOME. GNOME appears to try to
| emulate macOS at times, but tends to try to oversimplify and
| paradoxically be quite user-unfriendly.
| curt15 wrote:
| GNOME has an obsession with a "distraction-free" interface that
| really takes keyboard shortcuts to navigate efficiently. For
| example, despite the popularity of the dash-to-dock extension,
| the GNOME developers stubbornly refuse to make the dock built-
| in. So with the default setup, mouse users (like many in my
| family) need two large cursor movements (flick to the left
| corner, then slide down to the dock) every time they need to
| switch between applications[1]. In fact, at least one core
| developer has even floated the possibility of removing the dock
| and its list of currently running apps altogether.
|
| [1] No, the window previews aren't really useful because their
| positions are non-deterministic and it's hard to rapidly
| distinguish mostly white, unlabeled windows anyway.
| WhoCaresLies wrote:
| you know they are linux screenshots, because font rendering is so
| bad
|
| no wonder people don't stay
|
| and please stop with the oversexualized kids anime pictures, i'm
| worried
| WhoCaresLies wrote:
| stop downvoting the useful feedback
|
| font rendering on linux is bad since forever
|
| https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/
|
| pedo weeboos are infecting the internet with their over
| sexualized anime kid pics
| bithavoc wrote:
| In KDE, when browsing a list of files in Dolphin(KDE File
| Explorer), you can't really select the entire row, you can only
| select the file if you click on the label which doesn't span the
| entire row, there is no wide row setting and it's really
| annoying, this is also marked as no-fix.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hahaha this made me realize a workaround I use. I always drag and
| drop from Nautilus to upload. Hahaha oh man. Talk about being
| trained by inferior tooling.
| type0 wrote:
| Depending on the application there is not always that
| possibility available.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| The file pickers in general in Linux are just dreadful. Wouldn't
| companies who release commercial products on Linux contribute to
| it by assigning a team to overhaul this? It's unbelievable that
| it seems okay to them to leverage "free" OS that people wrote
| sacrificing time with their families often after work into the
| night, without giving anything back. It especially looks bad when
| companies make billions off of these tools and won't share a
| penny with contributors nor open source their products.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I don't think it's a contributor problem, I think it's
| maintainers who don't approve of the changes necessary to make
| something work. In this case Gnome and KDE teams need to work
| together to fix this, and they're insular and will never
| cooperate.
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