this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Gnome is Rethinking Window Management (blogs.gnome.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] independantiste 60 points 1 year ago (2 children)

According to the comments here, innovation should not happen because we already have something. It seems everything needs to be a Windows clone with extra settings and worse UI for it to be considered here. Nothing clean or new that could genuinely help the Linux desktop adoption in the mainstream. The FOSS Gatekeeping continues as always.

I think it is kind of sad that so many people are opposed to such innovations as this is truly what we need as an OS if we want it to be mainstream: differentiating features and a distinct experience. Not a clone that makes people think "oh it looks and behaves mostly like Windows, so it must work just like it!" and then run into a brick wall. I think the main reason people who switch to MacOS succeed and stay and even love it is because 1. MacOS is really easy to learn and 2. People go in not expecting to be like Windows, instead they expect to have to learn a whole new workflow.

If Linux could have such an experience I really think it could help sell the idea of Linux as a separate OS experience/product rather than something that looks and feels like a slightly worse Windows with no telemetry and no forced updates.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, GNOME is fine. I used KDE for years and got tired of the jank, so now I'm back in GNOME. It's fine, it launches applications, browses files,and tells me the time, which is about all anyone really needs from a desktop environment. It does a lot more too.

I think it's a great experience. It's not for everyone, but nothing is. Use what makes you happy and cheer on projects that fit others' needs, because the more people use Linux with different configurations, the more functionality we'll all get and the more bugs will be fixed.

[–] independantiste 9 points 1 year ago

The beauty of Linux is the freedom you get to do whatever you want. What's not so beautiful however is the people that will tell you the choice you made is wrong and you should feel bad about it and that you are stupid for using not what they chose to use.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago

This is very well thought out, I'm excited to try this.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (15 children)

I'm always cautious when GNOME says they're reconcepting a process that we're happy with. I'm curious to see where this goes but unfortunately GNOME already lost me to KDE :(

I worry that the changes will forced.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed

This is probably the thing that irks me the most about it. Most everything I open remembers where it was last time I opened it and just goes there. So I only have to decide once where and how big I want a window to be, generally. I don't want that to be contextually different depending on what else is open the vast majority of the time either, so I don't want to fight with my DE over where and how big a window should be.

I don't know, to each their own I suppose. Tons of people seems to like Gnome, so I don't want to hate on it... But it feels like they are making a DE for people that don't want to learn to use a computer, people that have mostly only used tablets and phones, or people that want the device to make the decisions for them... Which doesn't sound at all like the people that are switching to or already using Linux. I don't know, I have to assume I am just missing the magic something that Gnome provides to others.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

To give what I hope is an apt analogy: Imagine you have desk where you do all your work. Every other DE handles this desk like a human would just putting stuff everywhere, moving and grabbing as needed.

This proposal and gnome in general take that desk and make it an auto-sorting desk so you can always grab what you need as fast as possible at all times without doing any organization yourself. Oftentimes I use a lot of different apps sporadically so having something that can auto-sort them is a dream come true.

The real magic of gnome is A: how pretty and polished it and the apps are and B (arguably more important): how little you have to fight it to get work done. I spend zero time thinking on gnome, I just hit the super key or three finger swipe and what I want is done. This proposal brings me even more of that. I’m like 2x more productive than my windows coworkers and most of that is due to gnome.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

" Traditional tiling window managers solve the hidden window problem preventing windows from overlapping. While this works well in some cases, it falls short as a general replacement for stacked, floating windows. "

In 10 years of working with tiling WMs productively on a daily basis this has been an issue exactly 0 times. Even in a world that is tailored to non-tiling WMs they just perform better. Period.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used i3wm for some time, configuring default placements based on window metadata and used it for work. after some time I realised I'm 40 years old and shit like this is a waste of time. I just want it to think for me

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

In 10 years of working with tiling WMs productively on a daily basis this has been an issue exactly 0 times...

...for you.

Different people have different needs.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gnome devs have a nasty habit of "rethinking" things while ignoring tons of usability issues. I'd like them to stop rethinking things until they addressed those first...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You're right! All other developments should be stopped and all further innovations halted until separated workspaces on multiple monitors is addressed. As the most popular issue on Gitlab, this is clearly where the shoe presses.

Really bothers me when people waste their time creating new features of free software when existing software don't even meet the well-established universal criteria for perfection yet. What a waste.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I would love for this to be a thing, but as long as the WM stays EWMH compliant (like most full blown DEs right now), it won't happen. It's the one thing keeping me on true tiling WMs. I want virtual desktops to be tied to a monitor, not an X display.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

again???

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I have never understood why gnome seems to the go-to choice for default DE for so many distros

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because it just works and looks really good out of the box. Its the only DE with good, seamless fingerprint support for example

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't know that about fingerprint support, but my experience of it is it not working but getting in the way, and looking a bit pants compared to kde

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Nahhh KDE is the one looking pants. In Gnome everything is very consistent and in KDE very much not so. Even something as simple as the toolbar looks ass.

Gnome is very intuitive too, I like the window overview and it just doesn't get in my way.

I was an i3wm user before going to Gnome. All the defaults just work, which saves me time

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

KDE is consistent, and much more configurable. But I mostly like the defaults barring where my toolbars go and switching to single click open for files. Will Gnome even allow me to have one main toolbar vertically on the left hand side of the screen, then two axillary auto-hiding short ones on the top and bottom right with programme shortcuts on one and the taskbar on the other?

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[–] sugar_in_your_tea 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why not? It works pretty well.

KDE is janky, and most of the rest are kind of limited in functionality. GNOME just works.

I actually switched to GNOME recently because Wayland works just fine with it and KDE seems to crash, despite me having an AMD GPU. I want it because I have two monitors with different refresh rates and one supports FreeSync, and GNOME Wayland handles it perfectly, whereas KDE doesn't even launch. I don't know of any other DE that would work well with my setup.

I don't particularly like GNOME, but it works well. I used KDE on openSUSE for >2 years now, and I always seemed to run into random bugs and whatnot. I switched to give it a shot after years of using GNOME on Arch, and now I switched back to GNOME on openSUSE and those janky problems went away.

I'd love for KDE to work well, it just gets in my way too much. GNOME just works, so I use it. Maybe I'll go back to a tiling WM (maybe Sway?) at some point, but since my kids use my computer, I'll probably put off doing that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience, KDE works well and gets out of my way, while gnome does stupid shit and is non-configurable. I don;t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates so I can;t comment on that, but I do not run into bugs in KDE often at all!

(I mean I did accidentally lock up my computer by opening several hundred copies of the screenshot app, but that was my fault - I accidentally put a banana on the print screen key!)

[–] sugar_in_your_tea 8 points 1 year ago

Here are a few issues I've had on KDE when I only had one monitor (all on KDE X11, KDE Wayland wouldn't launch on either Nvidia or AMD GPUs):

  • "start" bar (whatever KDE calls it) gets stuck open, when I try to have it auto-hide; sometimes it stays open even when maximizing videos
  • "win" key stops working to access the start menu, which is an option on the latest KDE (I used to use an extension in KDE4 when it wasn't an option)
  • keyboard switcher bugs out and stays open after selecting a layout (I usually use Dvorak, my kids use QWERTY, so I switch often)
  • sometimes locking my screen boots me out of my session into a new window manager login shell, and I lose my open windows; not sure how this happens, maybe my kids mash buttons, idk, but it happens 1-2x/month

I'm sure there are more.

With GNOME Wayland, my issues. are essentially limited to a weird rendering issue that resulted in my screen getting "cut" (as in, right half of my screen rendered down a pixel or two). That's it. Everything else works smoothly, and I haven't had any issues in the past 2-3 weeks since installing it.

None of the KDE issues were deal-breakers, they were just kind of annoying and made the desktop feel worse. I don't need really any features from my DE, I just need to launch apps full-screen and switch between them. That's it, and KDE failed at that without any extra extensions installed (just whatever ships with openSUSE).

So that's why I use GNOME. I think KDE is fine, but I honestly don't care what my DE does, provided it can launch and switch between applications. Once it's set up and doesn't look horrible, I generally don't touch any of the configuration options. I used to care about such things, but after 15-ish years with Linux, I guess the novelty has worn off.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Old history - Qt had licensing concerns, gtk+ was guaranteed FOSS, so major distros shipped Gnome2 by default, and it stuck.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I know, i was there (and I always preferred KDE... migrated to it from Windowmaker of all things, I never could get the hang of Enlightenment, pretty though it was). But that was sorted literally decades ago!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

it has less information on screen at any given time than stock dwm so it looks clean an professional on screenshots

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Hmmm, I guess that's plausible. Awful reason, but plausible

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

So does openbox /s

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Mfw my bug report is open on the videos lol

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

as a crusty suckless dwm user if this works as advertised I'll switch

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

This actually sounds like a really good idea! This could be big! I wanna try this for myself to get a feel for it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I like this idea, interested to see how they get on with it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Content aware tiling would be my preferred option I think. Tiling currently is a huge pain and doesn't work well.

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