It is in the normal control panel, see "Reduce Animation" in the accessibility page.
>All I want is literally the widgets Windows had 20 years ago in all platforms.
This seems to me a very bizarre request. I mean, you can literally do that already: write Windows apps using the old user32 APIs and run them in Wine. But then they will look and behave really out-of-place on non-Windows platforms when all your other apps are using the native toolkit.
>write Windows apps using the old user32 APIs and run them in Wine
Honestly, to me this is the actual choice. I've tried using graphics gale (a win32 app) and fire alpaca (a qt app) on linux. Fire alpaca didn't work. Neither the app image nor the windows version on Wine. But graphics gale worked flawlessly.
The future of crossplatform is just everyone writing Win32 API apps, just like every language communicates by a C api.
I can't agree with that, Wine has been around for a long time and it never really took off for that use. IMO the future of cross-platform is still the web, because "cross-platform" also includes smartphones now.
>Neither the app image nor the windows version on Wine.
That is more the developer's fault. AppImage is a very broken distribution method and IMO it should never be used.
I'm doing exactly this. To me, most native apps look out-of-place and I avoid if possible. I just wish running apps in wine wasn't so slow compared to windows.
>To me, most native apps look out-of-place and I avoid if possible
That doesn't make sense, "out-of-place" here means with respect to the rest of the system and the shell. Doing things that way is guaranteed to result in an inconsistent desktop, so maybe you can understand why that won't really be a supported thing.
For a while I actually used to do something similar to what you're doing. In the early 2000s when OS X was the new thing, I had gotten used to the Mac. So for a while I would only use Qt apps with a Mac-style theme and I would get really upset if something didn't work with it. But I stopped eventually because I realized I was being unreasonable and frustrating my own computer usage for no benefit. IMO it's helpful to recognize when you're in a harmful thought process and break out of it.
The reason you aren't getting any feedback from GNOME developers is because this is a huge long rant without any real new information in it. The developers are already aware of what bugs are present and what features are missing. If it was easy to fix all the bugs and replace the extension system, they would have done it already. If you don't like GNOME's design then just don't use it, it's not possible to change the entire design of the whole system every time one person has a problem with it.
There won't be any official theming where they support changing application themes to whatever you want. That is and will always be a nasty hack -- the entire idea is flawed and conflicts with the idea of GNOME, which is to have a complete platform with a consistent look and behavior. It's impossible to have that and also have full theming capability at the same time, those two ideas are the opposite. IMO you should give up on that or you will be more disappointed in the future. At one time I too used to think it was possible but I gave it up when I realized it just isn't technically feasible.
Thank you, i will completely ditch GNOME and warn everyone who uses or is interested in Linux about it.
Feedback to developers is useful, even if it's on a ranty way, with good reason, those bugs are nasty. They should use the accessibility funds to fix them as some can be considered accessibility problems (the scrolling one).
It's also easy for the developers and contributors to answer well, or at least give some kind of answer (what happened in my GNOME forums post, im just a bit sad it didn't get better). Every time i have a question regarding the upcoming COSMIC or something Pop!_OS related, someone at System76 answers and it feels very welcoming.
Regarding theming, every big OS has AT LEAST accent color selection, all but GNOME.
Edit: I did provide information, you can find sources for nearly everything i talked about. My post on EndeavourOS' forums has more information.
>warn everyone who uses or is interested in Linux about it
See, I think now you are being too overly dramatic. It's not that bad, I haven't encountered the scrolling bug in a long time. And let's not pretend that Cosmic or KDE or XFCE (or anything else) has no bugs or missing features.
>Feedback to developers is useful, even if it's on a ranty way,
No it really isn't. You can rant to your friends but please don't rant at developers, it's never wanted. Would you like it if someone came into your workplace and ranted at you while you're trying to work?
>It's also easy for the developers and contributors to answer well, or at least give some kind of answer
Not if your first interaction with them is to post a several page long essay full of rants and demands. For any open source project (not just GNOME) I recommend to be nice and talk about one issue at a time. Start with simple and short bug reports or questions. At the end always ask "is there anything I can do to help?" If there is already a bug report then be patient and don't nag them asking when it's going to be done. Do everything you can to make it easy and enjoyable for them to respond to your question. Do not blame anyone for being slow. Doing all these things greatly increases the chances of getting a response. If there is still no response, see this page for what to do: https://boyter.org/posts/the-three-f-s-of-open-source/
>Regarding theming, every big OS has AT LEAST accent color selection
Currently that's being worked on.
>I did provide information, you can find sources for nearly everything i talked about. My post on EndeavourOS' forums has more information.
I looked, it's all old information for the developers. They know all those things already. These bugs have already been discussed many times, they know users are unhappy with them.
> If you don't like GNOME's design then just don't use it,
I don't, but for many years GNOME has been in a position where it can't use this excuse any more.
GNOME is most people's first experience of a Linux desktop. These days, more people than ever are giving Linux a try, for various reasons not relevant to this discussion. Most of those people will use GNOME first because it's the default for many distros, and often recommended for its simplicity even when people do have a choice.
Now GNOME could take the feedback from users that give it, and start to earn the position it takes in the ecosystem. Instead GNOME has been infamous for many years of actively dismissing user issues. If you have an issue with GNOME and you search for it online, not only are you likely to find it's a known and often long-standing issue, you're likely to find it being either closed or ignored so you know there's no point even trying to file it again.
An experienced Linux desktop user might just shrug and move on to something else. A first-time Linux desktop user can be forgiven for thinking that if this is the experience they have with the most famously user-friendly DE, then the Linux desktop as a whole just isn't for them.
GNOME's attitude towards user issue reports is hurting the Linux desktop as a whole, especially early in the adoption pipeline where the leverage of damage is greatest.
> The developers are already aware of what bugs are present and what features are missing.
Of course the developers are aware what bugs are present, users have been filing them for years, they just don't get resolved. In some cases features already existed and were actively removed with no adequate workaround; and no, extensions as they currently exist are NOT an adequate workaround. I'm not saying it's easy to fix, I'm saying when the state of extensions is so infamously poor and even GNOME developers can often admit that, GNOME developers cannot then turn around and use extensions as an excuse to actively remove working features or dismiss requests for features now standard to every modern DE.
Most people commenting are software developers too, we understand the pain of having to maintain a large project that has years of tech debt. Developers have every reason to be eager to purge old code and reluctant to add new code. But when user experience is on the line, especially in the one DE that most often forms a new user's first Linux experience, you have to actually listen to user feedback and make some tough calls that favor users. At the very least you can't blame the users for reporting the experience the users had, especially when GNOME has already made sure that filing issues constructively is a waste of time so venting on HN is all that's left.
In this HN thread you've told people to stop complaining or use something else or volunteer their own time to help GNOME fix its own mess. How many of those things would you say to a brand new Linux user who tried GNOME in earnest and filed a well-meaning bug trying to participate in the community constructively without being a developer? Never mind, from this thread and many GNOME issues and forum threads online, I already know exactly how the GNOME project and its advocates treat such reports and such users.
>GNOME is most people's first experience of a Linux desktop.
Perhaps that's proof that it isn't as bad as the vocal minority says it is? And if it was really that bad, wouldn't that be the distros' fault for continuing to ship something they know is bad? I don't think you can spin this in any way that makes it GNOME's fault, they didn't force any distros to make it the default.
>If you have an issue with GNOME and you search for it online, not only are you likely to find it's a known and often long-standing issue, you're likely to find it being either closed or ignored so you know there's no point even trying to file it again.
At that point the correct course of action is to fix it yourself or fork it. This is the same as any other open source project. I've had plenty of other open projects close or ignore my issues too, welcome to the club. I don't understand how you can be a developer yourself and still hold GNOME to this unrealistically high standard.
>GNOME developers cannot then turn around and use extensions as an excuse to actively remove working features or dismiss requests for features now standard to every modern DE.
Yes they can? It's their project, they can remove features or dismiss requests for any reason they feel like. You can also do the same in your projects.
>But when user experience is on the line, you have to actually listen to user feedback and make some tough calls that favor users.
No you don't? How many posts have we seen on HN about startups cancelling projects or shutting down because of management or money problems? Nobody likes to make those decisions, it makes the users very angry, but companies have to make them all the time because they have no choice. I know people like to fantasize about open source being different but it really isn't different. If the company employing the maintainers can't figure out how to profit from a feature then it most likely will get ignored or removed after a while. The Linux desktop is also notorious for being a pit of money that nobody can figure out how to profit from hence why a lot of user feedback is just noise. Look at Ubuntu Unity, that was beloved by its users and still it got abandoned because it wasn't profitable. I always found it weird that GNOME has this reputation for making radical changes when I find them to be quite conservative in some areas and reluctant to make changes that would result in the project totally dying off like that.
>At the very least you can't blame the users for reporting the experience the users had, especially when GNOME has already made sure that filing issues constructively is a waste of time so venting on HN is all that's left.
No, this is wrong. I'll say it again, you have the options to fix it yourself or fork the project. Venting is not the only option left and in fact venting is a completely useless option. I've seen so much venting about this on internet forums over the years, it's all the same comments about the same issues and none of it has changed anything in meaningful ways. The bugs that actually do get fixed were because somebody put in the work with the other maintainers and got it done, at no point were they ever helped by somebody ranting at them about how GNOME is bad.
>How many of those things would you say to a brand new Linux user who tried GNOME in earnest and filed a well-meaning bug trying to participate in the community constructively without being a developer?
I wouldn't, I only say these things on HN because the audience here is hackers. All the time I tell new Linux users to use Cinnamon or KDE because those are a bit more familiar to Windows users.
It's actually extremely disappointing to see developers on this forum repeating the same conspiratorial comments and unrealistic demands that you see elsewhere. Just so you know, at one time I made many of the same comments as you. I hated GNOME and refused to use it. Complainers have been saying the same things for decades now every time a new version of GNOME comes out. I was one of them. But still GNOME has lots of users that actually like it and swear by it. So what's going on here? Maybe it could be that the developers who hear feedback from a large sample of representative users on a daily basis might have a different perspective than everyone else? Maybe consider that your view is biased by only reading bugs that you noticed aren't fixed over long periods and are therefore difficult or unrewarding to fix? I know my view certainly was biased when I said those things.
If you have any better ideas and you'd like to step up to write and maintain a different extension API, then you should do that. If not, then welcome to the club with all the other open source maintainers where everyone is underpaid and overworked and no one has any time to work on all the things they want to do.
It's odd you say those things because I've been enjoying GNOME for years and I find they make great additions all the time. For me GTK4 has been a massive improvement over GTK3. There aren't actually any GNOME developers who enjoy removing things just to annoy users -- human beings have limited time and sometimes tough decisions have to be made about what's going to make it in and what isn't.
Yeah. It really does take more effort to leave perfectly working functionality in place than to do the work to remove it.
Come on. Many of the decisions made by the GTK+ developers are utterly unjustifiable.
Take the removal of GtkHBox and GtkVBox in place of GtkBox. A couple of shims for backward compatibility would have taken just a few lines of code and would have avoided a hard compatibility break. Did that happen? No. So a huge burden to update every GTK+ application (incompatibly!) was imposed upon every developer on the planet. Was that a productive use of resources? No. It was an utterly illogical change which had zero real-world benefit to anyone. And that's just one of many, many bad decisions.
There are very valid complaints to be made about GTK+, and you can't handwave them all away with some PR comments.
I thought the change to a standard GtkBox made sense given the way the system was built. This made both kinds of boxes the same class, avoiding an unnecessary layer of inheritance.
But this needs doing in every single downstream user of GTK. Far more efficient to do it once, in the toolkit itself.
This is why sane people don't use GTK. The maintainers literally couldn't care less that their 2 hours of "work" doing the removal causes hundreds of thousands of man-hours of refactoring on the part of others, plus the testing and validation work to prove that every part of their applications are still working correctly.
No, that's incorrect. It's not more efficient at all, and even if it was it would still be less efficient to do it in the toolkit instead of in a separate shim. I explained this in detail in my other comment.
Also the testing and validation always needs to happen irrespective of where the shim layer is shipped, because this is still a new major release of a relatively large library. Having a shim for one widget out of many isn't going to meaningfully reduce the need for testing.
If you could mention what these programs are that are somehow completing the rest of their GTK4 ports in a small amount of time, refactoring everything to use the new improved widgets and rendering system at incredible speed, but are taking hundreds of thousands of man hours to replace the word HBox with Box, maybe someone can look at them and advise them on how to do that faster.
You're trying to argue that water is not wet. This is seriously bad-faith argumentation.
Having a compatibility shim in GTK and testing that, once, would save any downstream user from having to do any work at all for this change. This is obvious and self-evident. Yet you seem to think that it's acceptable to impose this upon every user. It's this disrespect for end-users' time and resources which lead to people such as myself abandoning GTK entirely, when it was abundantly clear that it would not, and could not, ever be fit for purpose when you have this type of attitude prevail. Professional library maintainers do not break backward compatibility in such a cavalier manner, particularly when there is zero material net benefit of any sort arising from the change. Why would a project deliberately cause such breakage when it didn't have to. It's because it cared more about making a "cleanup" than it did about breaking it's entire userbase. It's cosmetic at best, and it could have been implemented without any break at all with a bare minimum of effort. That's the real kicker. The change could have been made without any compatibility break. And that just shows a complete lack of care.
Bear in mind also that Gtk*Box are foundational container widgets. Every application of any serious size will likely use hundreds or thousands of them. And no upgrade path for Glade/GtkBuilder XML either. That all needs hand-updating too. And this is just one example of breakage. You have to multiply it by all of the others, too. The ongoing burden of unnecessary and unproductive work repairing breakage arising from API churn is extraordinarily costly. Plus, it also breaks compatibiity of our application code with older GTK versions, which we might well also need to support in parallel for years. None of this adds value to our application, it's all cost.
You've spent pretty much all of your comments here deflecting and prevaricating. You've not once shown any concern of any sort for the actual real-world problems which have been imposed upon others, and which are genuine deal-breakers for actual application developers who have tried to use GTK for serious commercial work. The exact same lack of concern and understanding which the GTK and GNOME developers have shown all along. And I'm not new to this. I've used GNOME since pre-1.0 and developed with GTK+ since the 1.x and 2.x days. I was using GTK+ for commercial products two decades ago. It was barely viable then, and it's many times worse now. The primary concerns of these libraries should be API stability and implementation quality, and they have repeatedly failed at both.
If GTK wants to be considered seriously, it needs to behave seriously. And you need to actually listen and understand what people are telling you.
I just realized I forgot to mention this before: that shim actually did exist for about 10 years. It was deprecated in GTK3 and then finally removed in GTK4. If 10 years is too short a warning to give for removing a deprecated API, and this offense is apparently so bad that it ruins the credibility of the whole project, then I really don't know what could be expected of the maintainers.
>Having a compatibility shim in GTK and testing that, once, would save any downstream user from having to do any work at all for this change.
No it wouldn't, the downstream users would still have to test. Because in practice there are a lot more changes that need to be made than just the names of those widgets. This is one of those spherical cow situations. It would theoretically save time if apps only used the box containers and never called any methods on them but that's not how real apps are actually built.
>Why would a project deliberately cause such breakage when it didn't have to. It's because it cared more about making a "cleanup" than it did about breaking it's entire userbase. It's cosmetic at best, and it could have been implemented without any break at all with a bare minimum of effort. That's the real kicker. The change could have been made without any compatibility break. And that just shows a complete lack of care.
No, this is all wrong. The container widgets were refactored and heavily simplified in GTK4 to make the API easier to use and maintain because the class hierarchy was getting too deep and complex. Along with that they changed the names because there was a break in the underlying APIs anyway so it was a perfect opportunity to simplify the naming as well. It would not have helped at all to make such a tiny shim, that wouldn't even cover the most basic use cases. Like I already said the shim would have to be much larger to be anywhere close to being useful.
>And no upgrade path for Glade/GtkBuilder XML either.
No, there is an automated converter for the XML.
>And this is just one example of breakage. You have to multiply it by all of the others, too. The ongoing burden of unnecessary and unproductive work repairing breakage arising from API churn is extraordinarily costly. Plus, it also breaks compatibiity of our application code with older GTK versions, which we might well also need to support in parallel for years. None of this adds value to our application, it's all cost.
Then by all means, don't update the GTK version. The reason to upgrade is if you want the new features in the new version.
>You've not once shown any concern of any sort for the actual real-world problems which have been imposed upon others
Actually I just asked for some examples of real-world programs that are having this problem, if you could post the repositories then we can talk about them.
>And I'm not new to this. I've used GNOME since pre-1.0 and developed with GTK+ since the 1.x and 2.x days. I was using GTK+ for commercial products two decades ago. It was barely viable then, and it's many times worse now.
Unclear to me why you've been using GTK for 20 years if it's really that bad.
>The primary concerns of these libraries should be API stability and implementation quality
No not really. The developers can choose that concern but they don't have to. Some projects focus on stability, some focus on getting more features out the door, some focus on other things. I can't explain everything about GTK's decisions but I know that like most open source projects they have to make decisions that encourage certain types of contributions, sometimes that means they have to trade stability. And that also means if you see something that's low quality that you can fix easily then you should start contributing or fork the project, instead of demanding that the maintainers do it for you.
>If GTK wants to be considered seriously, it needs to behave seriously. And you need to actually listen and understand what people are telling you.
I'm not a GTK maintainer so I'm not even the person you would need to convince here. But I am listening to what you have to say, that's why I can tell you with confidence that it wouldn't have helped to make that type of shim.
Sorry but that's a really poor example and IMO not a valid complaint. I don't think they made the wrong decision there. There are quite a lot of other API changes in GTK4 so some tiny shims for only a couple APIs wouldn't help in porting at all. It would only create confusion because there would be two APIs for the same thing but now it's even more unclear when the old API is going to be removed. The argument you're essentially making here is "keep deprecated APIs around forever" which isn't realistic. They're deprecated for a reason, if you never remove them then deprecation isn't meaningful anymore.
Also you're incorrect that it would be "just a few lines of code." Those things are GObject classes which can be referred to in various ways through the runtime system or by language bindings, it's not just a matter of creating some aliases for C symbols. If you only use those in such limited ways that a tiny shim would do the job, then it would be just as easy and more beneficial to create a small script that does search and replace on your entire project.
It would be entirely possible to create a larger shim to ease porting, and keep it outside the main project so it doesn't cause confusion. But for it to be truly useful, someone would have to put a lot of thought and effort into making it work for a good portion of the APIs that changed. Then it would have to be tested thoroughly with all the language bindings. It's a way bigger project than just shipping a couple of #defines in a header. And if it did exist, it too would get deprecated and obsolete at some point when all the apps finish their ports to the new version. None of this is a new idea -- all this I'm taking about is exactly what Qt already did with Qt5Compat. It could be done in GTK as well but some interested party needs to make it happen. So far, no one has cared enough to put their money where their mouth is and actually do it.
BTW even the Linux kernel does a thing now where they don't use deprecation attributes in the code at all anymore. If a kernel developer intends to remove an API then they just delete it and fix the build. Because in practice it's actually much worse to keep an API around for long past its expiration date and annoy everyone with deprecation warnings.
Your comments show that you have a close understanding of technical details and processes used in the Gnome project. I believe you should come clean about what your relationship with the Gnome project is. As other have hinted, you do not seem like the impartial external only-just-a-user you claim to be. You clearly have an agenda.
You only registered an account yesterday and have only commented in this thread. Most of your replies include comments like the following:
* This seems to me a very bizarre request.
* That doesn't make sense.
* See, I think now you are being too overly dramatic.
* Perhaps that's proof that it isn't as bad as the vocal minority says it is?
* It's odd you say those things...
* Sorry but that's a really poor example and IMO not a valid complaint.
* Please avoid this narrative.
* You're disrespecting yourself and the readers of your comments by making these kind of hyperbolic statements.
* The issues you mention here are mostly not relevant anymore...
* Speak for yourself please...
That shows a pattern. You seem to dismiss everything everyone else is saying. Considering the history of attitude of Gnome developers towards users and their requests, this leaves little doubt of your connection.
I don't have any relationship or agenda. If you really want to know, I had an account here long ago but I received some very rude, hateful and harassing comments so I stopped posting and then lost the password. Is it that much of a stretch for you to believe there's a GNOME user who isn't angry at the developers and doesn't share your opinion? I don't get my FOSS news from social media. I read the developer's blogs and announcements directly and I don't assume they're lying or trying to hide some secret evil agenda, perhaps that's why you see contrasts between my attitude and the attitudes of others?
>You seem to dismiss everything everyone else is saying.
But disagreeing with something is not a dismissal. In cases where I disagree I'm careful to state the exact reasons why and discuss, or present some facts or explanations that someone may have overlooked. That's how to keep the discussion engaging even if you disagree. I'll only dismiss someone if they're intentionally rude. And this comment is against this part of the guidelines: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken." I don't have any way to advance the discussion when you do that, it's personally attacking and putting me on the defense when I haven't done anything but state my opinion. Can't you see how that becomes a way to systematically shut down discussions and make them hostile, when someone constantly throws those accusations at strangers?
>Considering the history of attitude of Gnome developers towards users and their requests
There is no free software project anywhere that is obligated to honor any user's requests. If you have a problem with this, you should not use FOSS. But if you absolutely need someone to honor your requests, you need to pay them and get the contract in writing so they're legally required to do so.
The Linux kernel changes internal APIs, and whoever changes it gets to fix the kernel code that relies on it. The end user of the kernel -- user space -- never sees any of this, and the userspace API never breaks.
You're implying this is equivalent to GTK and Gnome intentionally breaking API with every major release for every applicaton that uses those libs. It is not. Frankly it's a bad faith argument.
>The end user of the kernel -- user space -- never sees any of this
I mentioned it because despite that difference I don't think it's practically much different from a developer perspective. Big changes are still about as organizationally difficult for kernel developers to do. If someone wants to deprecate something that a lot of other people are using and it's a lot of work, then they still have to convince everyone to go along with it, get them onboard with the new API and help out with removing the old API, etc. That's the actual hard part, sometimes it can be made easier by providing a shim but often it's not.
>the userspace API never breaks
This is an aspirational statement, not a rule. It has been broken lots of times. The userspace API in Linux is not just the syscalls. Effectively it encompasses every single thing a driver does and exposes in some fashion to userspace and a number of other things as well. Whether that be ioctls or other non-standard interfaces exposed by block devices, sysfs entries, procfs entries, other pseudo filesystems, netlink events, configuration files, low level userspace libraries like libselinux and libseccomp et al that technically aren't part of the kernel but the kernel developers encourage everyone to use them anyway, util-linux and other utilities of that nature, you get the picture. This stuff changes all the time and it's not even possible to keep it all stable forever because it's such a massive amount of code.
>You're implying this is equivalent to GTK and Gnome intentionally breaking API with every major release for every applicaton that uses those libs. It is not.
Yes you're correct that it's not exactly the same but I'm implying the exact opposite: The GTK and GNOME changes are actually much less of a problem! You can have many versions of those libraries installed at the same time. You can't easily use many different kernel versions at the same time.
>Frankly it's a bad faith argument.
It's against the guidelines of this site to make this kind of statement. And quite frankly it's very uninteresting to respond to. You can make your point without this.
>sabotaging everyone else by removing the Tray or the server decoration
Please avoid this narrative. I personally never liked the tray or server decorations and I don't use them other platforms. If you talk to other happy GNOME users you'll see they feel the same. It works fine for me, there's no "sabotage."
>Please avoid this narrative. I personally never liked the tray or server decorations and I don't use them other platforms. If you talk to other happy GNOME users you'll see they feel the same. It works fine for me, there's no "sabotage."
It is sabotage, most people need to use non GNOME apps, like Slack, Thunderbird that need a Tray.
So the solution is super simple, you do not use non GNOME apps then your brain is not affected by a Tray, you do not use non GNOMe apps then your eyes are not bothered by server side decorations, what GNOME did was to try and force everyone to use the GNOME was and they failled, I no longer follow Linux drama closely so I do not know in how many groups did GNOME users fractured? there were 3-4 new DEs based on GTK.
None of those apps need a tray though. Personally I have no problem using chat and email apps with only notifications. Something not being to your liking does not mean it's sabotage.
>what GNOME did was to try and force everyone to use the GNOME
I would be very interested to know if you could give a source for this accusation. Just show me one comment from a GNOME maintainer saying they are trying to "force" everyone and how they planned to do it. If they were going into homes and offices holding people at gunpoint forcing them to install GNOME then I think everyone would have heard about that by now.
That each time I get of my deska nd then I go back I should either get a stack of notifications or just check each app to see how many emails or messages I missed?
Sure those apps won't crash if soem evil person makes the Tray stuff go to /dev/null.
The idea is if you listen to the users that restored the Tray,a nd the big distros that also restored it or forked GNOME you would be forced to accept the reality, but GNOME designers pretend the reality is wrong and their fantasy is real, somehow reading a book or watching a video about UX makes those guys experts and a big bunch of the community stupid.
Also , stop pretending you are stupid, we all know the big issue with CSD vs SSD , GNOME refusing to make non GNOME apps work on their desktop, check how many forks GNOME vs KDE community had and use logic to understand the real world and non the fantasy in GNOME blogs.
No. Why should anyone avoid discussing what happened?
We can all see with our own eyes how much GNOME cares about collaboration and interoperability with others. It's zero. It's been this way for a very, very long time. And that disdain for everyone else has consequences.
I used to develop GTK+ applications. I no longer do. Because it was an absolutely miserable experience, working with a toolkit which repeatedly requires every application developer to down tools and do a lot of busy work rewriting perfectly working code when APIs are changed or deleted. No other GUI toolkit causes so much pain and disruption to their userbase. It's quite clear that there is no regard for the actual needs of real application developers, and people like yourself aren't helping. You can't defend the indefensible.
You shouldn't avoid discussing what happened, I'm saying you should avoid making unfounded bad faith accusations.
>We can all see with our own eyes how much GNOME cares about collaboration and interoperability with others. It's zero
I mean, the blog post disproves this entire accusation by listing a bunch of projects they collaborate with. This is what I mean: please be more careful with your words. You're disrespecting yourself and the readers of your comments by making these kind of hyperbolic statements.
>which repeatedly requires every application developer to down tools and do a lot of busy work rewriting perfectly working code when APIs are changed or deleted. No other GUI toolkit causes so much pain and disruption to their userbase
GTK isn't the first or only project to deprecate and remove APIs, Qt does is it in every new version too. And you don't have to do this unless you're upgrading to new versions. Some projects are still using forked versions of old Qt and GTK for these reasons. That's totally something you can do.
>I think it's fair to say, though that GTK4+libadwaita is "the GNOME toolkit", and GTK4 alone is just a much less capable, less extensible, less "batteries included" toolkit than GTK3
Your example shows the opposite though. GtkSocket & GtkPlug were removed because they were buggy and never worked on any non-X11 platforms. Removing platform-specific hacks and moving towards standard interfaces is the correct way to go if you want a generic "batteries included" toolkit and not just something that can be used to hack things together on specific Unix platforms using a specific outdated window system.
I doubt anyone has any actual interest in making it work in GTK4 because XEmbed is a pretty broken concept full of race conditions that was never fully implemented anyway. And design-wise XEmbed doesn't actually make any sense because you need to funnel everything through the X server just for one app to host another one. The proper way to do it is to have the Socket be a server and make the Plug a client that talks directly to it through its own socket. I imagine your Wayland solution does this by running a small pass-through Wayland server. That should get easier over time as Wayland libraries improve, which I can't say about XEmbed because X11 isn't being developed anymore. Doing something like that is also AFAIK the only way it would work on MacOS.
Regardless, the GTK developers probably won't merge any replacement for Socket/Plug unless it works on all supported platforms including Windows and Mac, and it actually fixes all the bugs that were in XEmbed. And you have to ask the question: why is this needed anyway? In my experience this isn't a general-purpose feature, the huge majority of apps work better when whatever embedded widget is put in a shared library, or uses RPC (i.e. D-Bus) calls to populate its own in-process views.
The issues you mention here are mostly not relevant anymore or they're unrelated to GTK proper. The GIMP GTK3 port took forever because it's a giant app with lots of complex widgets and a tiny amount of developers. Most other apps didn't take that long to port. Also Vala isn't really used much in GNOME anymore. ElementaryOS is the main user of it now.
>Same goes for glibc and gjs which meanwhile has so many bugs I can probably exploit it with a heap spraying exploit from 10 years ago, as it conceptually is yet another hard forked project inside the GNOME ecosystem which can never be updated with its upstream project dependencies/origins.
I honestly have no idea what you're referring to here. GNOME has never forked glibc. And GJS is periodically updated to the latest spidermonkey.
>The original bug report contained multiple comments pointing out that a file chooser is not a full blown file browser and that it either should not display or cause the creation of new thumbnails.
I think you're misunderstanding those comments, the point is that an external service needs to generate the thumbnails. If the file chooser needs them it will have to call out to that external service. There isn't any desire to build all the complex system-specific behavior around thumbnail creation into GTK itself.
>Like the guy who stopped responding after only a year of complete radio silence from the GNOME devs?
All open source maintainers I know are overworked. You shouldn't take it personally or make negative assumptions if someone doesn't get around to your pull request. This is especially true of large PRs that can be overwhelming to review.
> . You shouldn't take it personally or make negative assumptions if someone doesn't get around to your pull request.
Wether the submitter took it personally or not is not even apparent and it does not change the fact that progress was blocked on GNOMEs side of the process and not by the submitters disappearing after changes where requested as the previous comment claims.
Yeah and I'm saying that's not a bad thing or even a rare occurrence. Sometimes PRs can be de-prioritized or forgotten for reasons that are outside of anyone's control, developers are human beings so that just happens. I've seen it in lots of open source projects.
>bad decisions from the gnome foundation. They can go under for all I care.
This won't help anything. GNOME Foundation doesn't really have anything to do with the development of GNOME or GTK. The Foundation is just the financial entity that does fundraising and owns the hosting. Actual development is decided by developers, i.e. the volunteers who show up to maintain it.
>Overall I truly believe they did a disservice to the whole Linux Desktop and the community over the last 15 years.
Speak for yourself please, personally I've enjoyed GNOME for the last 15 years. There's no need to make these kind of normative statements.
I did speak for myself[1], but it's nice that you can have your opinion, while mine is considered void. If the gnome foundation is useless as you described it doesn´t really matter to you if they go under or not right? Your reaction is a repeating pattern when interacting with the gnome dev community, so you're just reinforcing my frustration. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] I hope... , ...for all I care, Overall I truly believe....
If their funding source went under then I imagine they would start another one or try to get picked up by some larger organization like Linux Foundation or SPI. So no I don't think it would be that much of a problem.
>but it's nice that you can have your opinion, while mine is considered void.
It's perfectly fine to not like GNOME but wishing for them to be destroyed is a hostile and destructive opinion. If you don't want negative reactions then please try to recognize when that happens and just don't say those things. I don't wish that your preferred desktop get destroyed, is it too much to ask for you to stop wishing that upon me?
I mean, come on. Of course there is a repeating pattern if you insist on saying nasty things and then you find people always get upset at you. What did you expect would happen?
Fifteen years ago, I wasn't hostile and I am not hostile now. However, now I really don't care about Gnome at all. As I mentioned, I wouldn't mind if they went under. That's not wishing for their downfall; it's simply indifference.
You need to work on your reading comprehension because you're twisting everyone's words in your comments, not just mine.
First, it seems you're still trying to twist my words. I wrote, "Overall, I truly believe they did a disservice to the whole Linux Desktop and the community over the last 15 years."
This is my opinion, and I'm entitled to express it. Just as you are entitled to your own. This is not an attack; it's simply how I feel about the project. You can either voice your own opinion or try to convince me that I am wrong. However, instead of doing that, you are dismissing my opinion, attacking me personally, and resorting to psychological manipulation.
When I said GNOME did a disservice, I was expressing my personal frustration and disappointment with the direction the project has taken over the years. This doesn't mean I wish harm upon the developers or the community. It's more about my disillusionment with the choices made, which I feel haven't aligned with my needs or the needs of many others in the Linux community.
Second, indifference means I no longer have a vested interest in the project's success or failure. It's not the same as actively wishing for its downfall. My comment was intended to convey that I have moved on and am looking towards other projects that better meet my needs.
I appreciate that you enjoy GNOME and have had a positive experience with it. Everyone's preferences and experiences are valid, and it's okay to have differing opinions. However, it's crucial to avoid assuming malicious intent when someone voices criticism.
Lastly, comparing my comment to a personal attack on my GitHub stars isn't quite the same. Open-source projects thrive on feedback, both positive and negative. Through these discussions, developers can gauge user sentiment and make informed decisions. It seems that your feelings about "my desktop" and your emotional investment in GNOME are clouding your judgment, preventing a balanced perspective.
If this is the sort of interaction people have with gnome enthusiasts or developers (whatever you are with your throwaway account) you can see why most people don't like to work with the community you are representing here.
> I was expressing my personal frustration and disappointment
I understood that but that's different from saying everyone is being done a disservice. When you say that, what you're actually doing is accusing them of doing mass harm to the community -- I hope you can see how that's a serious accusation that's separate from your personal frustrations.
>Open-source projects thrive on feedback, both positive and negative. It's through these discussions that developers can gauge user sentiment and make informed decisions.
The feedback has to be structured in the correct way so developers can prioritize issues and turn it into a development plan. If it's just complaining about attitudes and making generalized statements, or constantly trying to renegotiate the direction of the whole project, that stuff doesn't help.
>It seems that your feelings about "my desktop" and your emotional investment in gnome are clouding your judgment, preventing a balanced perspective.
I don't have an investment any more than anyone else who just uses Linux for work/hobbies and is more or less fine with it, actually I probably have much less investment (both financial and personal) than the stereotypical techie who buys a new iPhone or Tesla or something and gets really into it.
>If this is the sort of interaction people have with gnome enthusiasts or developers (whatever you are with your throwaway account) you can see why most people don't like to work with the community you are representing here.
Please notice that you're demonstrating extreme prejudice and creating a vicious cycle here: someone makes some negative comments, I lightly push back on them, then somehow not only am I the bad guy but suddenly I've been elected as representative for the entire community and the entire community becomes responsible for my actions too! The subtext here is that I just shouldn't say anything or express my opinions at all because by the simple act of doing that, all the past disagreements and flamewars going back decades are now my fault too!
> The feedback has to be structured in the correct way so developers can prioritize issues and turn it into a development plan. If it's just complaining about attitudes and making generalized statements, or constantly trying to renegotiate the direction of the whole project, that stuff doesn't help.
Selective absorption of criticism has probably steered gnome to where they are now. Especially if you are talking about the form... akin to the meticulousness of a grammar enthusiast. Since we are on a forum and not a bug tracker or feature request list, the feedback here tends to be more generalized. Also your focus on the form and the distinction between the GNOME Desktop and the GNOME Foundation is deflective when we are primarily talking about user satisfaction for which you made no argument at all besides your personal anecdotes. Why is GNOME considered so great? Why are 8 of the most downloaded/popular extensions designed to rectify the bad decisions made by the GNOME development team? Why are there countless forks? These are all points you conveniently ignored or decided not to engage with. You went for the low hanging fruit.
> Please notice that you're demonstrating extreme prejudice and creating a vicious cycle here: someone makes some negative comments, I lightly push back on them, then somehow not only am I the bad guy but suddenly I've been elected as representative for the entire community and the entire community becomes responsible for my actions too! The subtext here is that I just shouldn't say anything or express my opinions at all because now all the past disagreements and flamewars are now my fault too!
It's not prejudice; it's a consistent reaction from multiple people in this thread to your comments. You might want to reflect on why that is and consider how your responses might be perceived. I am also only engaging with you in this specific subthread, and not elsewhere. Please refrain from distorting the facts to strengthen your argument. No one is suggesting that you represent the entire GNOME community—just that your behavior reflects poorly on its less favorable aspects. You are entitled to your opinions, but no one is obligated to agree with them, just as you don't have to agree with mine.
If you truly believe I’m not entitled to my opinion that GNOME has, overall, done a disservice to the Linux Desktop and its community over the past 15 years, then please, enlighten me:
What would be an acceptable way to express this sentiment while maintaining the same level of concern?
>Also your focus on the form and the distinction between the GNOME Desktop and the GNOME Foundation is deflective when we are primarily talking about user satisfaction for which you made no argument at all besides your personal anecdotes.
There's no argument to make, user satisfaction is entirely subjective and it depends very much on which users the maintainers decide they want to pursue. It's well within their means to decide they want to change or shrink their userbase for any reason. And plus it's open source so even if that happened it may not be a problem because any person can decide to start contributing or fork it, thus bringing in new users if that's what they want.
>Why is GNOME considered so great?
These type of questions are a lot more interesting questions for me to answer, I wish you had asked these earlier. I don't think I would argue it's great, but I think GNOME is popular because they have a mostly complete platform. The quality of individual parts may vary but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Otherwise known as network effects. And I would say the same thing is true of Windows or Android any other major desktop OS that are their own platforms.
>Why are 8 of the most downloaded/popular extensions designed to rectify the bad decisions made by the GNOME development team?
Not sure I understand, are you criticizing GNOME for having extensions? Again "bad decision" is completely subjective, that's why you can choose which extensions you want to install or not install. That's why KDE also has extensions.
>Why are there countless forks?
Well no, currently there are only two notable forks, MATE and Cinnamon. And I wouldn't say either of them compete directly with GNOME, they have different goals. But also, any popular open source project has forks. If you want something that actually has countless forks, see the Linux kernel.
>It's not prejudice; it's a consistent reaction from multiple people in this thread to your comments. You might want to reflect on why that is and consider how your responses might be perceived
In this thread I've been on the receiving end of a bunch of conspiracy theories and gaslighting so I don't consider that type of reaction to be reasonable or worth reflecting on, it's not even appropriate to post that stuff on this website.
>No one is suggesting that you represent the entire GNOME community—just that your behavior reflects poorly on its less favorable aspects.
No sorry, I have to push back again here. I could sum up my view as "GNOME is not that bad" and I really don't think that's any kind of notable behavior, or something that reflects on anything, or even fulfills this abstract idea of favorability. I couldn't care less what transgressions other community members did either. Come on, what am I supposed to do here? Go looking through years of IRC logs and Twitter comments reading flame wars, to make sure I don't accidentally say something similar to what somebody on "the wrong side" said in the flame war? To be honest I had a period in my life where I really didn't like GNOME at all and I probably said a lot of the same things being said here about how bad it is!
>What would be an acceptable way to express this sentiment while maintaining the same level of concern?
How would such a concern ever be quantified empirically? And who decides just what the community is? Is that anyone who's ever tried Linux once in their life? Or do they have to have used it within the last month? Year? Decade? I could go on here, whatever we come up with is a likely minimum of millions of people, can any of us conclusively speak for all of them?
See what I'm getting at here? The statement is so vague, IMO it doesn't actually communicate any information and it's just going to inflame. The users who think GNOME is terrible already agree with you and will only be riled up by hearing that. The users who are happy won't learn anything new from being told that and they'll think you're being a bit of a jerk by suggesting their feelings are wrong.
>why should other desktop environments work on a different 'design language' library?
The responsive widgets are only a small part of libadwaita. Part of the reason those widgets are still there is because they're still being iterated on -- once a widget gets into GTK it has to be maintained for a long time and GTK developers got burned before by adding a lot of random widgets without iterating first. So the bar is understandably a lot higher for adding new GTK widgets than it is for adding widgets into one of these "design language" libraries.
I could see some responsive widgets getting merged into GTK but only if they become stable enough and everybody (not just GNOME) likes the API wants them in GTK.
>reintroducing proper theming support to libadwaita
It does have proper theming support if you're using it as an app developer. If you mean allowing users to add arbitrary themes to arbitrary applications, that isn't going to happen. It can't be done without breaking applications, and arbitrary theming ruins the whole purpose of it anyway which is to enable all GNOME apps to have a consistent UX and theme.
>All I want is literally the widgets Windows had 20 years ago in all platforms.
This seems to me a very bizarre request. I mean, you can literally do that already: write Windows apps using the old user32 APIs and run them in Wine. But then they will look and behave really out-of-place on non-Windows platforms when all your other apps are using the native toolkit.