Gnome is Rethinking Window Management : linux

[-] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 60 points 1 year ago

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@sh.itjust.works 19 points 1 year ago

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@sh.itjust.works 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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[-] strix@slrpnk.net 47 points 1 year ago

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

[+] CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org 37 points 1 year ago

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[-] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

I'm not shitting here shitting on GNOME but I haven't tried it since gnome 3 released.

I got kinda stuck on tiling wms because I hate having to think about laying out windows and so this blog post is exciting! They're very correct that tiling wms only partially solve the problem because you often have to tweak for proper line length or just deal with random void space in settings apps.

Obviously mosaic isn't in yet, but if I wanted to dip into GNOME can it do (or are there addons or alternative more efficient things to try) for the following:

snappy keyboard only application launching e.g. dmenu style.
a way to activate a tiling wm mode for when you're doing something like software Dev or at least a way to save and lock particular layouts?
tell software to always open on a particular monitor?
manipulate windows without using the mouse + move focus to different screens without using the mouse?
display a string in the status bar (I assemble my status bar using a custom shell script which outputs a string. I'd like to not reinvent it)

Cause reading this blog I'm kinda keen to see where they take GNOME and get in early so it's easier to learn.

Like I said, I last used GNOME 2 so it's been a while and I'm sure in my head it's unfairly judged.

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[-] Luci@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Crozekiel@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] TeryVeneno@lemmy.ml 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.

[-] lynny@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago

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...

[-] sab@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] folkrav@lemmy.world 5 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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[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago

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

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

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@sh.itjust.works 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.

[-] tobimai@startrek.website 31 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

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

[-] bjornp_@lemm.ee 19 points 1 year ago

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

[-] 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 year ago

> in gnome the few things it still does despite the dev's desire to make it as bare as mac os while keeping it as heavy and sluggish as they possibly can are very consistent

ftfy

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[-] 20gramsWrench@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

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

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[-] FaeDrifter@midwest.social 9 points 1 year ago

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

[-] ReCursing@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

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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[-] dmrzl@programming.dev 23 points 1 year ago

" 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.

[-] imnotneo@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago

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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[-] xtapa@feddit.de 4 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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[-] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 1 year ago

again???

[-] jman6495@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago

Mfw my bug report is open on the videos lol

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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[-] iopq@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

Window management in macOS is not even as good as current Linux stuff

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[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 year ago

The GNOME team's fixation on their own unique desktop vision holds back the progress of desktop Linux as a whole.

nah, this is totally wrong, want to have a windows like ui?, switch to every other DE that exist, it's thwir project, they do what they want, and they can experiment thungs if they want, that's the beauty of linux

yes, they can take bad decisions sometimes, but don't act like they are slowing down progreds, because they aren't, why we want have 200 looklike DEs?

[-] Vilian@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago

For instance, requiring users to switch to a full-screen interface to access other applications is subpar UX design

no?, it's simply easier to click and find the app, it's not like you are looking anywhere ense when you open windows start, and i use KDE with the fullscreen start-menu

https://youtu.be/GkxAp2Gh7-E

and windows 8 did a lot more shit to just blame it in the start-menu

[-] Crozekiel@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

it’s not like you are looking anywhere ense when you open windows start

That's just not true, at least in my experience. I typically use the search box to open what I am looking for, and frankly would be very annoyed if I had to switch to something that takes over my entire screen to do that. I don't even have to do that on my phone, and that is my biggest complaint with Gnome is that it looks and feels like they are trying to make a mobile interface first, not a PC interface. And if I have to browse for something, I do still much prefer a small organized menu to something filling my entire screen. I'm on an ultra-wide screen, I don't want to have to physically turn my head to see the entire list. Maybe this makes sense on very small screens but that circles me back around to feeling like Gnome is meant for a tablet and not my desktop PC.

Clearly we all have different ideas and work flows that we like, and that's fine. I'm very happy there are alternatives to Gnome as I've hated it every time I've tried it; but, obviously there are a lot of people that like what they are doing. I just probably won't ever understand those people.

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[-] naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 year ago

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

[-] true_blue@lemmy.comfysnug.space 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.

[-] annoyed_onion@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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

[-] MangoPenguin 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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