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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see! And glad they are...gasp...listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach. The most popular distros all include a dock. And yet with Gnome 40, they not only refused to add a dock, they moved what gimped dock they had to the bottom of the screen. But you can't see it until you hit the top left corner. I wish I was making that up. (keyboard shortcuts aside, in fairness)

Rant aside, I'll definitely give it this a go. PopOS is a really nice distro.

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I mostly like Gnome. I have been using it for years. But the development team of Gnome is so closed minded that it makes my head hurt.

I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.

It's clearly unreasonable for a developer to ask a bug reporter to cite a usability study out of the blue.

However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a developer to do so if the person commenting explicitly claims that not having a feature hurts usability:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/182#note_3837...

I find it unreasonable in this case as well, just like when people ask for studies during the course of a conversation. It cuts the conversation short and it brings nothing to the table, at worst people will come up with studies they haven't read and that often neither side is equipped to critically interpret and analyze (and doing so would take hours or days of work for an expert). To me it's a falsely scientific method of discourse, I'd rather have people elaborate on their personal opinion and use case than anything like this.

An N=1 study is a study.

If you want a laugh, duck for the thread where the developers debate how to implement .epub format in Evince before ultimately deciding that Evince doesn't actually need to be able to open the most popular ebook format in the world.

I like your usage of the word duck.

That's really weird, considering things like gedit and gnome-terminal are tabbed. Perhaps ask them to get the usability study from those guys :).

"The concept of Evince is one document, one window"

Cite a usability experiment showing that sharing user interface paradigms between applications on the same system helps usability. :-)

"The concept of Evince is one document, one window"

This is becoming Reddit

Sometimes there is simply no better way to convey one's ideas :-D.

Wish they'd just say they don't want to do it than trot out a pompous question-begging rationale.

Can they cite a usability study suggesting any of the changes they made from gnome 2 to gnome 3 (or current) were not major regressions to the user experience?

I use gnome as my daily driver. Was OSX previously. Now, I can’t stand the wasted real estate of a dock. I really love Gnome, so maybe they’re listening to some of us and not to others.

I think most people just want the option. I don't want to force a dock on you. I also don't want you to force a barren wasteland on me. That's what I liked about this design shown in the video, it's all optional!

You can get a dock on Gnome via any number of plugins. Manjaro ships with one out of the box, if I recall.

None currently work well on Gnome 40. Leaving such basic, widely used things to third parties, it is what's bound to happen.

Dash to panel in particular breaks often because of Gnome changes.

To be pedantic, you can see the dash/dock when you hit the super key, I don't believe anyone actually uses the hot corner.

Also to be pedantic, there are plenty of desktops that don't use a dock, in the form of most window managers. I'm currently running opnebox with no dock and it's totally fine, though the approach is better suited to tiling window managers.

I love the hot corner. In some distributions this behaviour is disabled and I always turn it back on to the point that I automatically make the gesture on other operating systems as well. When I'm browsing on my laptop, I often end up with my finger on the touchpad. A quick swipe to the top left is quicker than moving my hand to the super key. On desktop, a low-precision swing of the mouse is also quicker than moving my fingers to the super key. I don't get the hate the hot corner gets.

All in all, I honestly don't really care about the changes they made to the dock. As long as my shortcut buttons work, I can deal with some small changes if they improve the polish of the system overall. I like the Gnome aesthetics that improve with every version, so I'm open to the tweaks made in Gnome 40.

I find the new thee-finger swipe really cool and intuitive.

Funny, the hot corner is my favourite thing in Gnome.

I like the dock on the left of my screen and I'm happy that there is ways so everyone can customize this the way they want.

Same here, I find myself swinging my mouse to the top left whenever I am helping my mother on her laptop with Windows.

It's a completely unnecessary extra action the completely breaks your flow.

I'm a GNOME user and almost never use its dock directly. I have my typical programs added as favorites on the dock and switch to them directly via keyboard with meta + 1 through meta + 9.

Seldom used applications don't make that cut, but they're... seldom used. I tend to switch to them using alt-tab rather than clicking through on the dock.

In general, I prefer using the keyboard, so I have never once wished that a dock was more prominent in GNOME. I'm glad it stays out of my way until I explicitly summon it with a keypress.

The power of window managers. Use whatever floats your boat. I love i3wm too much and its the exact reason I love Linux

No dock thanks. But I like the menu to open on corner and super key.

Seems recently the Gnome team have been too busy demanding RMS' cancellation to listen to their userbase. That's clearly more important work than, you know, actually writing good open source software.

Although I know some who would say Gnome has never been good. Opinions on DEs can be pretty harsh.

When you say 'dock', do you mean the top bar? Well, that would be a development. If you mean a menu of application icons at the bottom, I never had that in GNOME 3 on Fedora.

I actually like GNOME 3 as a desktop: the streamlined process of hitting the Super key or moving the mouse toward the corner and typing in the application name that I want to launch, with the whole screen used for the preview. I also never put anything on the desktop (as in icons, files etc.). Even saying this I get strange flashbacks to 2000s computing.

What pushed me away from it at the end (to KDE) was the applications. The trend in GNOME is clearly removing or at best hiding everything except the barest minimum required for pretending we have an app. At some point it shifts from very annoying to unusable. And now I'm putting up with KDE's own weirdnesses, like insisting on creating a cryptographic wallet for everything, or broken hibernation on desktop (a.k.a. big people computer). I hope it's just standard Linux jank and not sign of decline of the space.

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