After nearly two decades of waiting, GNOME 44 brings you... image thumbnails

GNOME 44 is reaching readiness, just in time for inclusion in the next versions of the two big distro daddies, Ubuntu "Lunar Lobster" and Fedora 38. GNOME 44 reached beta in mid-February and now it's moved to the next version, 44.rc, or release candidate. The removal of Gtk 3 support and its replacement with Gtk 4 continues. …

[Steve Davies 3]

Lost the plot years ago

And goes more astray with every release.

What idiot decided that we don't need three buttons on every window (close, maximise, minimise) and gave us one OOTB?

While I admit that Gnome 2 was getting hard to maintain, it gave me everything I wanted from a windowing system. Since then it has, like MS Windows become increasingly frustrating to use and configure.

With Windows, we used to say that IE was only used once and that was to download another browser, Gnome is only used on the initial install. Thereafter, it is XFCE all the way.

It is sad to see so much work going into a system that is increasingly irrelevant. (much like MS Windows, sic)

[Anonymous Coward]

It hurts

Yes, it hurts to see how bad open source desktops are, given the huge effort that is being made. The choice to follow MS Windows was reasonable, but they should have stopped at Win7. Taking the mobile/tablet poison pill that was Win8 was a big mistake (for both camps).

Unfortunately there are two classes of users, with conflicting requirements, and the numbers are with the mobile/consumer not the desktop/developer, so that's the direction things will keep going. Just hope MATE sticks around - at least there is choice for non-MS environments (for now).

[cyberdemon]

Re: It hurts

I find that KDE is extremely good these days.

It went through a rough patch with KDE 4, but those days are long gone. If you haven't tried it since ~2017 then you really must give it another go.

No more faffing about with CUPS, they have the printer configuration down to a tee now. My VPN 'just works' and even my Bluetooth mouse 'just works'. And it's just as powerful and configurable as it was in the KDE 3.5 days.

[molletts]

Re: Lost the plot years ago

I used XFCE for some years but it started becoming more and more like "Gnome Lite" with menu bars vanishing, massive wide title bars containing very little, no OK/Cancel buttons in dialogs, etc. so I took the plunge and switched back to KDE last year. I had previously used KDE 3 up until the bitter end when it started succumbing to bit-rot, then KDE 4 which, by that time, had regained most of KDE 3's functionality, before switching to XFCE mainly because I wasn't really using much of the KDE ecosystem any more and wanted something more lightweight that didn't need nearly half a gig of RAM just to log in.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that KDE 5 actually used less memory than XFCE (!), as well as looking and feeling generally more polished (which was expected), thus avoiding the snide comments about "that crappy old Linux thing you use that looks like Windows 95". Someone at work actually mistook it for Windows 11 last summer. How insulting :)

I was, however, a little disappointed to find that the desktop cube animation is no longer available, so when I say, "KDE," and people respond, "Oh, is that the one with the spinny cube thing?" I have to reply, "Yes, but no." :(

[Brewster's Angle Grinder]

When Liam wrote "...we reckon it will be a crowd-pleasing release.", I figured it would be a red rag to a lot bulls, and we'd get a tonne of comments like the above.

[that one in the corner]

crowd-pleasing release

Liam didn't say *which* crowd would be pleased!

This is going to be a good day for sport, let fly the barbed comments, trap the unwary in blanket statements with more holes than a rete.

Ave!

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Wow, image thumbnails. Cutting edge stuff....ar ar.

[WolfFan]

Indeed. I don’t remember when Mac OS got image thumbnails, but I did have an app to generate them by System 7.something. Windows had them either then or shortly afterwards. We’re talking three decades ago, boyz. I think. It’s been a while.

[VoiceOfTruth]

OS/2 had Multimedia Viewer in Warp 3.0. It's good that Gnome is finally catching up.

[IGotOut]

Pretty sure the Atari Falcon did as well, back in 1992, unless it was within an art package that generated them.

[heyrick]

There was an add on for RISC OS that did it circa 1994 or so. A much improved filer viewer, that even nearly thirty years later the default one doesn't come close to replacing. :(

[unimaginative]

The headline is misleadingc

[unimaginative]

This is specifically in the file picker. The file manager shows them. Deliberate decisuon not to have them in the picker

[Anonymous Coward]

"...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

Like the whole 2 users who uses fractional scaling without lowering the resolution? This isn't nearly as big of a problem as jumping monitors or mixing 8/9/10/12 bit color depths, not by a long shot.

Fractional scaling utilizes the double pixels of a HiDPi monitor by allowing you to split "on pixel" and if you don't have HiDPi hardware it's irrelevant. It was or still is that if you set the scale to a odd number and use a loupe/scope to look at pixels by eye, then you'll physically see that the upper or lower part of the pixel is not illuminated. So, if you have to set the scaling to 200% on a HiDPi monitor you'll have 100% on a non-HiDPi monitor. To set the appearance correctly, you double (2x) the resolution on the non-HiDPi monitor. Going vice-versa, low to high? Then increase the global DPi and set the HiDPi monitor to 1/2 resolution.

Or, use a capture card or a 2nd GPU for the odd monitor or replace the monitor.

But here's the thing, how often will you do any of this? I've been running 3 monitors for over 2 decades and I've only matched the visual scale a handful of times. With my main current 4 monitors the real problems I have are mixing 10-bit with my NEC and DELL monitors with my 8-bit Samsung and LG monitors (not possible) or jumping displays when they power on.

[Tom 38]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

So, if you have to set the scaling to 200% on a HiDPi monitor you'll have 100% on a non-HiDPi monitor. To set the appearance correctly, you double (2x) the resolution on the non-HiDPi monitor. Going vice-versa, low to high? Then increase the global DPi and set the HiDPi monitor to 1/2 resolution.

Did you miss the fractional part, or just consider it to be irrelevant? Setting a HiDPI monitor to a lower resolution is a waste when you are using HiDPI aware applications, eg UI scaled proportionally, but content like a hi res image displayed pixel perfect.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

Sure but, think that through... do you set your higher DPi monotors to a lower resolution? Does anyone? People run a lower quality monotor as-is, best-they-can before resorting to some LCD between them.

Again, I don't think anyone is doing this. Since there isn't an example given where this feature is required and I can't think of one either, I feel the attention should be on the overall usability of multi monitors... which is pretty much in shambles right now.on all OSes.

[abs]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

I have this problem on my jammy jellyfish setup. The built in display on my laptop is ~2k and the external monitor is 1920 x 1200. I find that I have to choose between either having too fine UI on the inbuilt or a too big UI on my external monitor. I went for the latter as can reduce the text in an application like VSCode and that's ok. There may be a way to sort this but I haven't figured that out.

This is by no means a deal breaker. The thing that I'd like to see is better battery optimisation. From experience the battery lasts notably longer in Windows 11. I'd guess around 15 to 20% longer.

[Liam Proven]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

[Author here]

> Like the whole 2 users who uses fractional scaling without lowering the resolution

You are missing the key point. But reading the rest of your post, I am not even completely sure that you are talking about the same thing that I was.

The key point here is that while today, probably no, not many people do use fractional scaling, but many more are going to need it very soon, as HiDPI screens spread but older kit remains usable and we all need to mix-and-match. Mix old and new screens, and match the on-screen size of text and graphics.

In other words: no, it's not common, _but it will be_. I already need it. I have 3 screens: a 24" and a 22" which are close enough to work OK, but my laptop's built-in screen in significantly higher-res and everything gets smaller on it. This is a problem. I have just learned to live with it, because there isn't a single Wayland desktop I can stand using at the moment.

As for the rest of the comment: I don't think you understand what I am talking about or how it works, as the earlier reply points out. So, no. Not at all.

[Roland6]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

> mix-and-match

Been a part of life since the 1980’s. Back then we had a CAD system, the control was a basic monitor, the display used for the drawing - as big as you could get (17-inch CRT).

With windows it’s been the norm to have multiple displays/projectors of differing sizes and resolutions. So are you suggesting Wayland et al are still 25+ years behind Windows in its handling of multiple displays….

[BinkyTheMagicPaperclip]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

Windows has had multi monitor support for a long time, and global font DPI adjustment for a similar amount of time. However, per monitor scaling is considerably more recent.

I have in one row a 27" 1440p monitor, a 21" 2560p monitor, and a 21" 1600p monitor (but in landscape 1200p mode). A 27" 1440p monitor is still perfectly readable to my glasses assisted middle aged eyes, but the admittedly rather specialist 2560p monitor has unusably small text without scaling (Windows recommends 150% scaling, 125% is livable with).

Even back in the days of CRTs this could have been beneficial as they were capable of some very high resolutions in a comparatively small screen area.

I haven't tried this in X or Wayland yet, must give it a go soon.

[Roland6]

Re: "...it alone could force users to switch from X11 to Wayland."

FYI, Seems per monitor scaling was introduced in W8.1.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whose Informed Opinion?

@Liam_Proven

Quote: "...removal of Gtk 3 support and its replacement with Gtk 4..."

Quote: "...these changes are not obvious, but all of them are welcome...."

Well.....that's a couple of opinions....and Liam is welcome to his informed opinions.

But......some of us wonder about the decision (whose decision?) to replace GTK3 with GTK4:

- GTK3 was fine....I've written a lot of code using it

- GTK4 had almost ZERO backward compatibility with GTK3

- Take a look at the opinion of the glade developers about GTK3->GTK4.....

Now, it seems that GTK4 was a foundation technology for GNOME3 and descendents.

MY OPINION: GNOME3 and GNOME4 are quite unacceptable desktops....hated them for years!

MY OPINION: GTK4 is a quite unacceptable imposition by unknown and faceless folk in the open source community

MY CHOICE: XFCE!!

MY CHOICE: Continue programming using GTK3!!

[Rich 2]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

Gnome is definitely following the Windows model. That is, they just can’t help messing about with something that works (from what I remember Gnome DID notionally work many years ago).

Like Windows, they change some component or other for a different one (eg GTK) for no apparent reason. They add gloop to the system in an apparent attempt to get it to consume as much memory as possible and run as slow as possible, they deliberately remove functionality that was fine in the first place and didn’t need removing (on Windows 10, you can’t even alter the width of the columns in the file explorer any more!!! Why??? Fuck knows. They haven’t even removed the function cleanly because the mouse icon still changes to suggest you can alter the width)

Why can’t these idiots just get to a point where a system works well and then sit back and have a cup of tea? Instead of embarking on an endless journey of software-writing masturbation which does nothing except break it all again?

Personally I use i3. It works. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t fuck up

[simonlb]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

Instead of embarking on an endless journey of software-writing masturbation which does nothing except break it all again?

I know this article is about Linux, but the whole pissing about with the UI business is something which desktop users of both Linux and Windows have been subjected to for years. For me, though, that's definitely the best description of Windows UI development for the past eleven years I've ever seen.

[heyrick]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

Not just desktops. Mobile devices are regularly screwed with.

When I get a new phone (Android), it looks and feels like Android but it's a little different in really annoying ways. They especially can't resist messing with the settings screens, so there needs to be a search function in order that you can find where the hell the setting that used to be right here is now...

Oh, and before any fruity folk comment, the transition from iOS 6 to iOS 7 was utterly ridiculously awful. They went from controls that looked like actual buttons to something that looked like the Gem Desktop. They had to push out a fix a few days later in order to put some different coloured patch behind buttons so you'd recognise them as things to tap on.

But, yeah, either way, I guess designing "awesome new paradigms" for user interfaces is a more exciting job than fixing bugs. Just think how many hours can be pissed away in meetings looking at PowerPoint slides of "epic new icon design", complete with so many buzzwords that only management would be able to look at it without bursting into raucous laughter.

[yetanotheraoc]

awesome new paradigms for user interfaces

It's like the UI has to walk down a runway in Paris, the absolute worst is to have the software reviewer say the interface is "dated". "Modern" is a passing grade, "dated" is a fail. For those of us at a certain age, fashion has ceased to exist. It's not that we think something ugly "looks good", it's that we no longer think about how it looks. But this problem is not going away, because people who care about fashion aren't going to stop caring just because I don't care about it.

What the Linux desktop needs is a fashion week. And influencers.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: awesome new paradigms for user interfaces

What the Linux desktop needs is a fashion week. And influencers.

In terms of naming of applications and utilities, KDE would be the Kardashians of the Linux Desktops

[Rich 2]

Re: awesome new paradigms for user interfaces

I have not used it in a long time but the Enlightenment desktop is (in my mind) a rare good example of a UI

You may or may not like it (though I don’t know what there is not to like) but it is basically the same as it was 20 odd years ago. It works. It doesn’t need to change. I think it is a shame it lost traction and is now a niche UI. Maybe it’s niche because it didn’t “progress”!?

[AJ MacLeod]

Re: awesome new paradigms for user interfaces

Funnily enough, it did "progress", some years ago - it basically became a different WM, E17 (now E25.) They should get some credit though for maintaining the previous version which many people preferred, and E16 is still supported software with its own page on their website.

I have used Enlightenment on and off over many years but I'm afraid the current implementation uses a binary configuration format which I don't like. I also found that the new version more than once screwed up my config when updating, making me recreate it from scratch which pushed me back to my main desktop for most of the past quarter century - WindowMaker. Now THAT is a good example of a UI which doesn't need to change!

[Mac Logo]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

> "on Windows 10, you can’t even alter the width of the columns in the file explorer any more!!! Why??? Fuck knows. They haven’t even removed the function cleanly because the mouse icon still changes to suggest you can alter the width."

Are you sure? I don't have a copy of W10 handy, but I don't remember ever having that issue and I'm sure I would've noticed. It's definitely not the case for W11.

[Roland6]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

The width of the folder column can only be altered in full screen mode.

I also hate the lack of view consistency. I want to see the folder contents as per a directory listing; if I want to see recent etc. then I simply change the column sort setting.

As for disappearing scroll bar…

[AMBxx]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

If you're in 'detail' view like proper grown-ups, you can change any column you like. It's only in the pointless 'list' view that you can't change stuff.

[Rich 2]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

It’s in “detail” view and no - it doesn’t work. I have googled for this in the past and it is a “thing”; I’m not making it up

[Rich 2]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

I have it in front of me right now. Yes I am sure

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Whose Informed Opinion?

Perhaps some of the Gnome developers think of themselves as Artists rather than programmers or developers. And therefore, they ... must ... create!!

Personally, yeah I think a great deal of the Gnome work since v2 has been superfluous wankery.

I switched to XFCE not long after Gnome3 was released (pinched-off), and while I have occasionally dropped in to revisit for a bit e.g. when some major OS release comes out, I've yet to find any reason to return to modern era Gnome. I'd probably go try KDE again at this point before Gnome3, but as long as XFCE stays the course well enough, so shall I.

[keithpeter]

Heresy

People who miss Gnome 2: There is Mate/xfce4 or (*gasp*) Plasma - traditional panel/WIMP desktops.

Just leave the gnomes playing with their shells on the beach.

I'm pretty well sorted with Slackware (so no official Gnome) but I actually find Gnome quite useable given my extremely end user orientation. I was quite happy with dwm/dmenu back on Squeeze so Gnome (oddly) seems fairly logical.

Icon: It's only software

[Liam Proven]

Re: Heresy

[Author here]

> People who miss Gnome 2: There is Mate/xfce4 or (*gasp*) Plasma - traditional panel/WIMP desktops.

I do use Xfce, and MATE is... well, it's all right, it has all the same faults that GNOME 2 had back in the day. They irritated me then, and they still do. I want a vertical taskbar, and it doesn't work, 21 years after GNOME 2 was released.

But the point I was trying to get across was: these don't help you if you need fractional scaling and want to use your expensive HiDPI HDR high-refresh rate monitor. It in not reasonable to pay over £2000 for a laptop and then not be able to use its screen at its native abilities. No, setting the resolution down to 1280×960 or something is _not_ an acceptable answer.

My first draft of this story said that Xfce couldn't do it at all. Then, I did more digging, and I found a workaround -- but the point I was trying to convey was that it was not a good or acceptable workaround.

I do not want a tiling window manager. I am perfectly capable of working solely in a terminal: the first ½ dozen Unix computers I used did not have X11 at all. But we are ¼ of the way through the 21st century and I don't want to work like that any more. I want a rich, adaptable, configurable GUI.

But I also want to use my screen at its native resolution.

At present, that leaves me with about 3 desktops:

[1] GNOME, possibly with a lot of adaptations and extensions (e.g. ZorinOS).

[2] KDE, which I personally find to be a cluttered mess.

[3] Cinnamon, which is just about minimally acceptable.

Both KDE and Cinnamon are implementations of the Windows 9x desktop model, and TBH and IMHO, they are both not very good ones, visibly implemented by people who did not understand how the Windows model works in detail and in its more heavily-customised configurations.

Xfce does it better but doesn't work on Wayland yet. LXDE does it better and also doesn't work on Wayland. LXQt is not as good as either and *also* doesn't work on Wayland.

That was the main point of the story: that this obscure feature, fractional scaling, does not work well on X.org and most desktops can't handle it well, or at all. There *is* still choice, but if you need fractional scaling, there really is not very much choice, and none of the choices are very good ones.

Overall, I tend to agree with your point about GNOME, but you seemed to miss something I was trying to emphasize.

[Mockup1974]

KDE > everything else > GNOME

[Anonymous Coward]

This. It's the truth and strangely enough GNO gets all the attention which reminds me of a non-nix PoS desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it provide?

OK does it provide wireframe more and resize?

does it provide a simple GUI way to select a totally plain background?

Ideally does it detect I'm working remotely and do these things automatically?

Does it work well for people who remotely support systems around the world?

If the answer to the above is anything but YES then please do the world a favour and f*** right off

Bells and whistles are all very nice when they don't get in the way of working but when they do they need an easy off switch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Does it provide?

They need to exist to have an off switch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Does it provide?

Gnome suffers from having bells and whistles with no off switch, it's the off switch that's missing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Does it provide?

Cracked bells and off-key irritating whistles, perhaps.

[Will Godfrey]

Image Thumbnails ???

I can't remember a time when that wasn't available with ROX session.

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently...

I was unaware of the enormous pent-up demand for this new feature.

[Penguinista]

Unpopular opinion: I quite like the GNOME 40-series desktop environment

To be honest, the GNOME desktop environment (since using version 3.28) suits my workflow and ‘clean desk’ mindset, so I'm obviously in the minority. But each to their own and I hope you enjoy what works best for you :-)