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 :(
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.
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.
Why is this the sanest thing? There are many people that enjoy using gnome including myself. Don’t you think this is an extreme take for something that just doesn’t align with your views on how the Linux desktop should be?
@SpaceCadet
the gnome design philosophy had been defined for a long time now. it's not just one or two people making gnome like software and forcing people to use their design.
it's people coming together to create user aligned software of you want to mod the heck out of it you can but it always provided a stable base @haroldstork
a. Only about programs using libadwaita
b. About their opinion that just overriding the global style like in GTK3 was causing too many issues in apps defining their own widgets or CSS to be worth it.
IIRC they were willing to accept a contribution of a more advanced theming system (but building it themselves was not something they wanted to prioritise over other things), but lacking that they'd rather enforce using adwaita in libadwaita.
Fuck off with this hot-take shit. Gnome is fucking beautiful and powerful if you spend the 30 seconds necessary to find the necessary extensions to cater to your delicate sensibilities. After that - you'll never have to worry about it ever again.
The main problem I have with Gnome is exactly this: extensions. Vanilla Gnome is so barebones that it makes the MacOS feature-rich. So you really need extensions.
But the problem with extensions is that when you update Gnome, you're not sure if the extensions you're using will work. It's a logistics I don't want to think about anymore. For me, extensions are good for distros because you can update everything as one package.
I'm much happier with KDE. As always, experience varies, but this has been my experience.
But the problem with extensions is that when you update Gnome, you're not sure if the extensions you're using will work.
I can't believe this is still a thing. I made an honest attempt at using Gnome 3 about a decade ago and gave up after a couple of months because of this, mostly.