GNOME 47 brings back some customization options, but let's not go crazy

The latest release of the de facto default desktop of most Linux distros brings some new features – but the GNOME 4x transition isn't done yet. GNOME 47 was released last week, codenamed "Denver" after the venue for this year's GUADEC event. This release returns some touches of customization that had gone away, brings some …

[Steve Davies 3]

re: GNOME has some of the best in the business

when referring to scheme designers.

They have to be pretty mental to even try this given the swamp that Gnome has become. Sorry... The devs lost the plot entirely when V2 was replaced by V3. Sure, V2 was a bit of a mess but it was at least custimisable by us mere mortals.

They (Gnome devs) lost me to XFCE soon after and despite trying it a few time since, I still get the idea that the decision makers are fiddling while Rome burns.

Hype up this release all you like but a lot of us Linux oldies (Slackware 1.1 was my first) hate what has been done to it.

There is no reason to go back to the stone age by reverting to Gnome. Sorry.

[demon driver]

Re: re: GNOME has some of the best in the business

I'm not exactly a Linux oldie, it's only been 7 (desktop) to 8 years (server) that I migrated nearly everything I personally do with computers to Linux, but I've looked at Linux desktops earlier, and I do feel Gnome's 3+ approach misguided, too. When I chose my first DE it was MATE, and Xfce on one or two low-end machines. When my primary MATE desktop broke in the first major OS upgrade that came upon me, I had a good look around for alternatives – and then I went to Linux Mint Cinnamon, and was happy ever after. (Even though customizability is not its strength, either, but then again it's good enough for me right out of the box, so I'm perfectly fine with it...)

[drankinatty]

Re: re: GNOME has some of the best in the business

So how's that replacement of OpenGL with Vulkan going? We have become numb to the ham-fisted and pea-brained "improvements" to Gtk/Gnome by Gnome. The cancerous part is while Gtk used to be the go-to toolkit for Linux and was widely used back before all of it's sprawling dependencies. libadwaita integration, id-bus and notifications have become the bane of many apps. (and the cause of a recent rash of black-screens and missing system-tray icons of late). Many Linux application adopted Gtk back in the Gtk+2 days, and now without the development resources of RedHat behind them, their applications suffer from changes made by Gnome, for Gnome, that adversely affect many open-source applications. Even GIMP has to bandaid what was the "Gimp Toolkit" just to maintain the ruler widget as that was removed in Gtk+3. Seems like quite a bit of self-serving Gnome progress going on, the wider community be damned.

[corb]

The color tweaks in Gnome 47 are fine as far as they go but, of course, don't have any impact on the design incompatibility of GTK apps subsumed into Gnome when used in non-Gnome GTK environments. The argument that Gnome is well within its rights here is accurate but irrelevant.

Personally, I find Gnome styling to be thin and sketchy, while KDE's default Breeze is awash in grey, while user-contributed themes are dominated by often amateurish efforts of almost identical muddy dark schemes.

[robinsonb5]

Anyone else getting excited?

Only three more Gnome text editors till Christmas!

[Ian Johnston]

The Reg FOSS desk tends to leave theming to the professionals, and GNOME has some of the best in the business

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

<pause for breath>

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

"Professionalism" != "Anal-retentive control freakery"

Even in the world of FOSS where too many developers believe that they know better than "lusers", the GNOME team stands out for its spectacular blend of arrogance and incompetence.

[Snake]

RE: listen to the intelligence

"Even in the world of FOSS where too many developers believe that they know better than "lusers".

From your mouth to the self-important developer's ears. But that will never happen, and FOSS will continue to suffer for it.

[Liam Proven]

[Author here]

Regarding...

> "Professionalism" != "Anal-retentive control freakery"

I think you misread or misunderstand me.

I am talking *ONLY* about themes here. Skins or whatever you prefer to call them.

What this sentence means is: I don't download or apply or customise or tweak or otherwise mess around WITH THEMES. I tend to leave them on default. What that, in turn, means is that I don't really much care about themes and skins, so long as they aren't actively ugly.

KDE's are usually actively ugly and its themes are one of the things that puts me off KDE.

I do not like or use GNOME and only run it for testing purposes. I find it crippled and very confining as a desktop. But it *looks* great. Lovely plumage.

Outside of Unity I usually use Xfce. I often read complaint that it looks boring or dull or old-fashioned. I don't care.

Themes for me should be like incidental and soundtrack music in a film: if you notice it, it's bad. It should amplify emotion and set tone and if you consciously register it then the composer has failed. Source: a friend of mine, David Julyan, a soundtrack composer who worked a lot with Christopher Nolan.

I mention GNOME's looks because I do not like the functionality.

I mention KDE's because they distract me with their horrid jarring mix of RANDOMLY big BOLD _black_ fonts *WHICH* serve _no_ apparent purpose, combined with silly cartoonish icons at random, sometimes animé themed and sometimes not, something dull and grey and then SUDDENLY SCREAMING IN YOUR FACE IN TECHNOCOLOUR.

Oh, and two Help/About boxes, unrelated, and, you know, 5 start menus and 3 taskbar button tools and 76 options to tweak in 42 dialog boxes, but no, you can't have a panel spanning 2 screens, we took that out.

Don't misconstrue me. I am trying to be polite and positive about GNOME because lots of people use it. That doesn't mean I like it. Instead you need to think about why I feel the need to call out something relatively minor like wallpapers.

[K555]

"a soundtrack composer who worked a lot with Christopher Nolan."

Put a breeze block on the lowest register of a pipe organ and call it a day? ;)

[PaulHayes]

I have nothing really to add to this conversation other than to put down in writing that there are some people who do like Gnome 3. I've been a fan of it ever since it was released, I like the keyboard-centric navigation of windows, typing in application names to find them. I also use a macbook and I treat that in the same way, on my more recent macbook I had to configure a keyboard shortcut to open Launchpad, my older macbook had a dedicated button for it and I couldn't live without it.

That Gnome 3 removed some customisation options is of no interest to me, I have no desire to change the colours of things. I just find it a much nicer environment to use all day, no screen space is wasted, on one screen there's a small header and on my other screen, nothing at all except the application I have running.

I know a lot of people couldn't get on with it and prefer the windows 95 style of gnome 2 still to their liking but not me.

[keithpeter]

Circle Apps

Had a look at Graphs on the Circle Apps page referenced in the OA.

Flatpack: 110Mb download bringing an additional 364Mb of system files (flatpack system?) with it. No way to see what those extra bits are. I think I'll just stick to gnuplot and Octave. Which is a pity, I like the idea of a range of apps that will integrate with the desktop.

(95% of my laptop use is Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. Maximised windows one per workspace and I bounce between them. I could use Gnome if it was the system on e.g. a work laptop. But then I could probably use KDE or xfce or any of the other DEs.)

[chololennon]

Ugly and inconsistent...

Liam doesn't miss the opportunity to criticize KDE, even when writing about GNOME, OMG!. Does he has a kind of trauma with KDE? it seems so.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Ugly and inconsistent...

I have been mulling over an article provisionally entitled "Why I don't like KDE".

The snag is, to explain why its keyboard UI is broken, first I need to explain...

* How the Windows keyboard UI works, and why everyone should know it, and why while it is very important to people with multiple types of disabilities, it's valuable for all computer users to learn.

* How the Windows explorer works, how it evolved from Windows 95 to 98 to NT 4 to Win2K (and arguably the downwards slide since then), and then how to do basic customisations to do, which then illustrates how all the dozen+ FOSS copies of it all get it wrong to a greater or lesser extent.

That is a big list. It's _at least_ 4 articles' worth.

However it's becoming clear to me that most sighted users with good motor skills _do not know how to use it well_ and this very clearly includes inside Microsoft itself these days.

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Ugly and inconsistent...

"How the Windows keyboard UI works..."

About 20 years ago, such an article wouldn't have been necessary because the knowledge was discoverable. Once MS decided to hide all the clues, though, it is hardly surprising that people stopped learning.

Now, as you say, it would be interesting to know how many of MS's own developers know how it works.

[ChoHag]

Colour tints eh? That'll get Linux onto the desktop for sure!

[sebacoustic]

gnome

I use gnome on Fedora for work day after day and it helps me stay focussed and productive, (as much as a DE can do such things which isn't a lot).

Is it pretty: yes, think so. I don't customise anything other than a background image, and an extension that keeps dock& top bar off the screen unitl I presss <super>.

Are there things that suck? Yeah, totally. But about a factor of 10 fewer than on the windows desktops I use via RDP. Oh yes, and the RDP client on Windows is basic to the point of being practically useless... wot? No hotkey for switching key sequences like <alt-tab> form local to remote and back? This sucks!!!!

I so use KDEs editor Kate for text editing though, since it has lots of useful nicknacks akin to notepad++ that I use. Ugly: yes. Do I care... not really.

[wjl]

Made my peace with it, mostly

Like pretty much everyone else, I was put very off when they changed from v2 to v3. And like Linus, I was angry. Made my peace with it again over time (also like Linus IIRC), but what still gets me that even for minor upgrades like from 3.46 to 3.47, we still need extensions - which break pretty much with *every* upgrade, just because those Gnome devs don't care about things they threw out. For me, this time it was GSConnect - and no, like Liam I think that KDE is no option as well. A modern desktop should try to integrate people's phones in my opinion, both Windows and MacOS (and KDE) try to do that, so why not Gnome? It's always "My way or the highway" for Gnome...

[Mockup1974]

KDE is far superior to Gnome for an average user. This is mostly due to Gnome's poor design choices (lack of taskbar, useless top panel taking space, pop-ups locks to the parent window (cannot peek behind) etc.), consuming the user's productivity. This would not be an issue, if it wasn't for Gnome currently being the primary DE representing Linux for average users through Ubuntu and Fedora, and effectively pushing the users back to Windows/MacOS and consuming development resources from the actual competitive alternatives, such as KDE.

Looking at the Linux environment from an outside perspective as an ordinary user, trying to leave Windows/MacOS and break their dominance, the fragmentation and lack of leadership in the Linux desktop environment is the advantage of Windows/MacOS. KDE is currently the only reasonable option to effectively penetrate into larger user segments of the desktop market, and Gnome is holding it back. I hope the Ubuntu team one day decides to make KDE the front runner, and together with Valve and other sponsors, can finally focus their resources and iron out the last major gaps that would bring an end to the Windows/MacOS market share.

[LionelB]

> ... the fragmentation and lack of leadership in the Linux desktop environment ...

Some would call that "choice" - lack thereof being one of the things that puts me off Windows and Mac UIs.

> KDE is currently the only reasonable option to effectively penetrate into larger user segments of the desktop market ...

Not at all. There are also, e.g., Cinnamon, Mate and XFCE. None of those would be a jarring transition for a Windows user - they hark back, if anything, to the Windows 7 UI (which to my mind was about as good as it got for Windows UIs).

Never been a big KDE fan personally - always found it bloated, confusing and ugly - but to each their own.

Agreed, though, that Gnome (and Ubuntu) have lost the plot over their desktop policies. I'd like to see major distros like Ubuntu and Fedora offer alternative desktops on an equal footing. Meanwhile, I'm sticking with Mint, which I think gets it about right.

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

Dash to dork

The biggest thing keeping GNOME off my desktop is their stubborn refusal to combine the dash and dock in a single panel. There are extensions which attempt to do it, but they always seem to crash and make things stop working. All I want is everything in one panel on the bottom of the screen -- launchers, notifications, everything. A computer should look like a computer, not like a phone or a Mac.

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE user by virtue of never walking away in disgust

I've been using KDE for at least the last 15 years, and they've never delivered something that's prompted me to jump ship. The closest was dropping the desktop cube effect, which was a pretty cool feature. I also tried GNOME and a few other desktop environments (way back when), but there was too much "my way or the high way" with GNOME, and the other DEs just had some puzzling behaviors (at times). KDE delivers a very usable UI, without any "make sandwich" drama, it just feels like a straightforward DE, you want a sandwich, you get a sandwich.

There is a strong argument that UI/UX on the desktop is just as dead as on mobile - to be honest I'm quite happy with that as I'm just tired of pointless changes that feel like UX guys showing they can add value.

[wjl]

The point against KDE...

... it's not only incoherent and IMO butt ugly (sorry), but it also has a lot of problems with simple and old stuff like Conky - well Gnome has problems with that one too lately, but that's mostly because of Wayland; under X.org that still works much better.

Also, KDE - and also others like Cinnamon - look too much like Windows IMO; even XFCE is far better in that it has more of an own "personality". Gnome *is* the market leader here for a reason, I just wish those devs weren't that stubborn...