GNOME 45 beta: Less buggy, more colorful, and still not your grandma's desktop GNOME 45 has just graduated from alpha test to beta, and will see final release late next month. Here is what to expect. It should appear on September 20 if the developers hit the schedule in the project wiki. Incidentally, if you wanted to attend GUADEC, you've missed it – it happened last month, but you can still watch the …
......so that users (like me) with lots of GTK3 stuff......can get BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY from GTK4 to GTK3.........
......but no......the GNOME masters-of-the-universe know better than to worry about BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY.....
......and, of course, it's a pity that GNOME3 and GNOME4 are both completely unuseable.....except by masters-of-the-universe!
Sigh!!
No major versions of UI toolkits on mainstream operating systems are backwards compatible. This is not only true of GTK but also Qt and even Cocoa (dirty hacks needed). Heck, even WinUI is not backwards compatible between major releases. The only way to maintain a stable UI is to choose a frozen toolkit. On Windows many use WinForms for this reason, while on Linux it’s GTK2 or GTK3.
Well you can argue (and I do, often) that the absolutely woeful state of Windows is largely down to Microsoft's acquiescence to the constant desire for backwards compatibility from their enterprise customers. It's a millstone round the necks of non-enterprise Windows users, and I don't see why the Linux world has to follow suit when the code for older versions can be forked if enough people really don't like the direction something is going in.
May I humbly suggest that the project leads for these tools lose a finger every time that some critical feature is removed without consulting the users. Your strive for minimalism has gone way beyond a joke.
Just make a version that looks and behaves 100% like Gnome-2 and you might... just might get a few users back. Otherwise 'go to hell'.
[Author here]
> Just make a version that looks and behaves 100% like Gnome-2
It's called MATE.
Personally, I was never a big fan of GNOME 2. It did the job acceptably and was less bloated than KDE 3 or 4. But it was always rubbish at vertical taskbars, which for me are a _sine qua non_ on a widescreen computer.
It is an acid test: a desktop that can't do that simple Win95 feature correctly is a desktop whose designers did not understand how to use the thing that they were copying.
Xfce and LXDE got this right.
GNOME 2, MATE, LXQt, and Cinnamon got it wrong.
KDE (3, 4, 5, all of them) does it, but very poorly.
[Author here]
> Have they innovated a minimize button yet ?
It's there. It's just turned off by default.
It's easy to turn back on:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/651347/how-to-bring-back-minimize-and-maximize-buttons-in-gnome-3
Many distros do this for you.
[Author here]
> But why on earth is it off by default?
Because, as far as I can tell, the design concept of GNOME 3 is aimed at intensive, mainly terminal, users. They mainly want one full-screen window all the time, and the ability to switch easily between them.
It is not intended for people who do intensive manual window management. It's intended for people who live in a tiny handful of maximised windows, and they probably do their own document management in there, thanks to Emacs or Vim or Byobi and in the shell.
Things like the file manager and text editor are afterthoughts for newbies.
This is just my impression.
That's why I am interested to see extensions to make it tiling. It seems like a natural fit for me.
Thanks, it's good to have a reliable solution for a huge annoyance.
Part of my frustration is that when I googled for a solution, I got several non-working solutions.
Another part of my frustration is that not having the button is a ridiculous default. As an example of their design philosophhy, it speaks volumes.
Another part of my frustration is needing a side app to control a basic setting. (which is the way I went, then lost the setting in an upgrade).
In the Linux based OS world there are choices.
I'm using xfce4 on old core-duo laptops with 4Gb ram and intel graphics upwards. Its fine. It works the way I'm used to. I get stuff done.
Leave the Gnomes playing with their shells on the beach. Bug fixes are *good* so the GTK libraries get better.
Icon: to all involved.
I can't use Gnome because the accessibility is shit. Orca can't read the desktop, the overview panel is retarded, the supposedly "new" text editor crashed whenever I tried to use it, the terminal had this weird output duplication problem.... I have no incentive to go back to Gnome. Wayland has little accessibility to speak of because the developers are still concerned about security (among other problems). KDE works, sort of. But I just go with XFCE now. It has only one accessibility problem that I know of, but eh, what else can I do when accessibility is currently ruled by Gnome and Gnome seemingly doesn't give a shit about it unless they're forced to take notice? I mean, half the time they just ignore us disabled people anyway, thinking they know best, so.... Yeah, I'm definitely not going to use this release.
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