It's possible in both KDE and Sway.
GNOME is probably worst DE imaginable. After 20 years, they still don't have thumbnails in filepicker and even dropped preview side pane in GTK4. I can't even.
Years ago with Ubuntu and ElementaryOS, I could change it in the system settings GUI.
Today, with Wayland now default, I can't change it at all when running Ubuntu or ElementaryOS.
You can say this is a GNOME problem, or a distro problem, or whatever. But at the end of the day, I installed two of the most popular Linux distro's out there and my scrolling is literally unusable - and I can't fix it without apparently installing an entirely different desktop environment or a patched version of libinput.
But also I'm not super clear on how libinput fits into the picture, I think there used to be some Synaptics-specific integration in certain places that I never went back to, to confirm the differences (switched to libinput several years before, and I've completely forgotten since what I was trying to solve back then).
Anyway, I ended up writing a mostly-personal-anecdote below, that would likely not help, so you can probably skip it (if you do want to try anything, KUbuntu and https://neon.kde.org are both on top of Ubuntu, and there's other distros, but I've not kept up with any distro I might recommend)
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I tried Ubuntu (w/ the GNOME default) once (back in KDE 4 times IIRC) and the lack of almost any flexibility felt like I was stuck in a sandbox (a literal one, like from when we were kids, not that it's easy to remember that far back).
The only other time I felt like that was when a friend gave me their old iPhone (6 IIRC?) "to see what it's like" and I had to give up trying it out because both the OS, and the few apps I could find (for its max supported iOS version), had random chunks of features missing (tbh I should've jailbroken it, then it'd just be one more piece of hardware I have no immediate use for - but I digress)
KDE is far from perfect (switched to Wayland recently, and been tracking a few QoL leaps in the next couple releases), but I can at least try to tweak it - same goes for using NixOS or ZFS tbh (not going to even defend those, but I have done both Gentoo-like shenanigans, and randomly RAIDed a dual-SSD laptop, respectively, quite painlessly despite not preparing for it from the start, and the weirdness budget is personally paid for a thousandfold).
Meanwhile I run into e.g. GNOME apps using libadwaita nowadays needing environment variables (that appear deprecated?) to apply the KDE gtk integration theme so they don't stick out like a desaturated winamp skin.
I've never felt like "power user" applied well to myself, like I'm not doing the equivalent of weight-lifting for computers, never want to be doing sysadmin if I can avoid it, I just want to have enough control to make things seamlessly neat for myself.
Opinionated defaults are great in the same way you'd set up a house for a marketing reel, but if I actually buy it, why would I have to deal with a landlord telling me I can't paint the walls or move/replace some furniture to maximize my comfort?
The "personal" in "personal computing" is supposed to be the same as the one in "personal property", and so I'd have similar expectations of "can screw with it without asking for permision" for both (modulo real estate being seen as an investment, and building codes, etc. - should've picked a smaller example than a house, oh well).
To stretch the house analogy further, just like I have leased (some corporation's) private property as office spaces, I would be fine to doing the same (also for business reasons) with e.g. a cloud platform (most likely through GHA, whenever they announce the paid tiers) - tho be fair to everyone, this applies far more to walled gardens than opensource software like GNOME.
Also, to be clear about the "sandbox" thing: sandboxes (and/or ideally more objcap systems) are great, and I think that the XDG Portal work is incredible for what it allows: the apps are getting sandboxed, the user getting more power over them.
Even without Flatpak (which I keep meaning to try out), I was happy to see e.g. the KDE Wayland screenshare dialog outright has an option for "create virtual screen" (which can further be configured in the KDE settings, and e.g. partially overlapped with a physical monitor, etc.). If the app was in charge, they would barely enumerate some of the windows correctly, let alone provide new virtual screens.
All the while there are ZERO GUI apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago.
Eying a return to Mac OS which at least doesn't feel like you're treated as guinea pig by dicks with attitudes. Linux notebooks seem barely good enough for uninspired enterprise work on bloated IDEs and Docker/other container crap only there because said dicks couldn't agree on a set of (really old) lib versions and gui toolkits.
> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off,
> not-so-great app switching
> FF crashing
> insists on chromium as default browser
> apps or other capabilities I'm using that I didn't already use 15 or 20 years ago
When I click a link from Thunderbird (weirdly as it sounds when Thunderbird is a Mozilla app) it opens chromium; dialog to set FF as default doesn't change this.
I need to retest and maybe reconfigure app switching from a (vertical) dock as you say; just doesn't feel fluent as it is.
Occasional FF crashing should probably be addressed at Moz. Maybe it's because FF on gnome gets more usage and testing. Btw, does SuSE (or Manjaro) still have a global-menu patch for FF because kubuntu (understandably) doesn't maintain such patches?
When this occurs, clicking links results in no browser windows opening. At this point I run `killall -9 firefox` and oddly, in that very moment, the link I clicked will open up in Chromium.
No idea why this happens.
That's a hardware issue. If I press Q I am sure it will not be registered as ctrl+alt+Y for example.
> Half of the time I want to press right-click or even left-click on the
> touch pad it actually registers as middle-click
I guess I can remap middle-click to left-click using the wayland equivalent of xinput from a shell script or something. The apparent-FF-crash story described by johnmaguire and eddyb sounds very much like another thing I believe is happening on my notebook. Between these fuckups and the general alienation going on in Linux land (wayland, snaps/flatpack, systemd) I've got to say I'm not enthusiastic to go through those chores and teething probs just to get the same-old gui apps like Inkscape and GIMP (plus FF/Thunderbird) running, so right now I'm leaning to go back to Mac OS more than ever (used Mac OS on and off from 2003 to 2016).
It is built on an Ubuntu base and is almost like Kubuntu, except I think it is set up by people in the KDE community.
For me the difference felt enourmous.
I am using KDE (aka Plasma5) in Wayland mode, on NixOS unstable.
I would not recommend NixOS, just like I mentioned, and I didn't really want to get into the weeds of why, but while Nix is something that more people should try out if they're already familiar with unfortunate asymmetries (e.g. "git's data model is really nice" vs "git's CLI has sharp edges and some workflows the data model implies are entirely unserviced") and/or like to play around with experimental unpolished software, I would maybe avoid it until they actually come up with a "more declarative"/"less computational" flavor for 99% of usecases.
I've used openSUSE in the past, and while YaST2 might be less relevant now, it was shocking how much similar things were outright lacking back then (a lot of this was pre-NetworkManager to be quite fair).
A lot of people like Arch, and if Debian/Ubuntu package management doesn't get in the way I suppose KDE Neon might be nice? (I keep forgetting KDE's Discover exists, it might also help with not dealing with package management directly)
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> FF crashing
Quite ironically, if it is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144 that's technically a gtk limitation (not only does it lead to the FF main thread having to poll gtk often enough to keep the Wayland connection from breaking, but when it does break it calls `_exit` so Firefox can't even do crash reporting, and they refused a patch to address this), and it can also happen for Chrome (which also uses Wayland through gtk AIUI).
If you want to check if it is the case, you can look in the logs (e.g. through `journalctl -o with-unit -r`) for "error in client communication".
> middle-click gets in the way a lot and can't be switched off
Are you talking about the feature controlled by System Settings -> Input Devices -> Mouse -> "Press left and right buttons for middle-click"? (that is, if you intentionally press both buttons, does it trigger middle-click?)
AFAIK that's off by default, but I am on a different distro and running KDE/Plasma 5.25.4 and maybe it changed at some point, or maybe it's specific to touchpads? (which I sadly can't test because I only have an older Nvidia laptop, that can't use the Wayland-compatible drivers, or rather I would have to switch to nouveau first and deal with that etc.)
> insists on chromium as default browser
I've had issues with this in the past, some apps provide their own configuration instead of going through XDG mechanisms, or at least have suboptimal defaults.
I would check the settings of the apps which cause chromium to start, and maybe play around with Flatpak/forcing the use of XDG Portal, but that might be too much to ask.
(note that the preferred abbreviation is Fx, not FF)
Firefox tends to very much like its shared memory buffers and crashes with SIGBUS if they run out: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1245239
How much shm is enough depends on both the browser's rendering engine and the display engine, but apparently 1.5GB shm use isn't out of the ordinary. You won't find any references to shared memory (or even general out of memory messages) if Firefox crashes in this way, so it's just another thing to keep an eye on.
Abbreviations is never something up to the original creator to dictate. And "fx" is alredy commonly used for effect.
Next you will tell us that it's actually called Plasma Desktop and not KDE.
which gets weird, when they push on you things like:
- opening WiFi-portals in whatever crap browser your distro ships with GTK. Executing random JS code in the process.
- make XWayland startup absolutely inconfigurable and hardcoded in C (or was it Vala) and for whatever reason MAKE IT LISTEN ON ABSTRACT SOCKETS (which no Xconfig anywhere else does)! (problem here: if any user-namespace container shares your network namespace and you do a naive xhost +SI:localuser:user - it works for any container, because abstract sockets are not stowed away in the filesystem).
At least the first issue I'd like to report, but don't know how and where...
But don’t blame it on wayland what isn’t its fault.
You chose GNOME , the answer is you are not the target of the GNOME project, they target people with weak minds that would instantly faint if they see a configuration screen with options. So you are using it wrong, with GNOME you bend your mind and body to work as the GNOME self proclaimed UX experts think things should work.
If you decide you want options try KDE, but you are free to complain about GNOME, it will be a waste of time, reality and rationality do not affect people with giant EGOs in power at GNOME.
GNOME's problem is not the lack of configuration options, but lack of empathy. They stubbornly refuse to address (sometimes, even acknowledge) their own users' problems.
> If you decide you want options try KDE [...]
You don't solve this problem with more options. You solve it by understanding your users' needs.
I want a desktop that just works. KDE's promise is I can make it work if I can keep tweaking it; GNOME's promise is it should work if I'm willing to accept the compromises. Both of these options suck.
I would agree that this is also a problem, so GNOME has many problems. But IMO is the big EGO s in charge that cause this lack of empathy.
I will disagree that you can get a Desktop that is perfect for everyone, Kubuntu or whatever KDE distro could do a survey and come with the most popular configuration by default but for sure it would be something like
What value you prefer for X ?
- 45% prefer A
- 25% prefer B
- 15% prefer C
- 5% prefer D
- the rest prefer E, F, G or H
so at best you have 45% happy users and 55% of users that need to change an option , but if you are an extremist of no options then you screw the 55%. And this is what GNOME did, they told their users that don\t like the feature removal or changes to leave.
This is not the goal. The goal is to not suck. Design by survey is what got us here.
But "suck" is some subjective thing, you will find a giant number of GNOME fans that will tell you how great GNOME is, how intuitive it is, and how you just need to give up your own preferences and embrace their UX guru ideas and it will not suck.
It seems that many people are in the "I don't want to think for myself camp" . unfortunately people in my family are also in that camp, never question if maybe there is a way to customize things to make the software more comfortable, they bend their body and minds, causing even distress to follow the defaults.
Something that obviously suck for us is normal for a GNOME user, in GNOME land there is only 1 way of working and if you don't like it you are asked to move on. many tried but you can't change those guys minds this is why there are tons of GNOME forks and probably no KDE fork.
Personally - I think KDE 3.5 (yes I'm that old) was near perfect. As of 4.x, they were prioritising adding the ability to freely hand-rotate desktop widgets (who the actual f8ck wants a skewed widget!?) over performance and stability. I could live with a useless feature, but I couldn't continue to run it on a computer with 256MB of memory, which was all I could afford back then. I can't remember what I switched to at the time, but I never came back.
This is not true, we are not all the same. For example my eyes are bad, and one is worse, so I prefer one side of the screen more, I want to put my important stuff like notifications on my good side, I do not need a pretend UX guru to tell me how to have my notifications and hard code them. I also prefer to change the keyboard layout around so I can do most used keyboard shortcuts comfortable with just my left hand. I don't care that the majority things the keyboard layout should look like, I am more comfortable in my way where a GNOME user will not even consider that it could be possible to customize the keyboard layout or change keyboard shortcuts, some big ego dude decided for them.
Let's assume you are right and defaults could be good for 99% but IMO are great only for 40%, I want great, not good or OK, but I don't want to force my preference on others , just wish others won't remove functionality because it is used by less then 50%.
EDIT: I think I might have misunderstood your point and my reply was offtopic, I assume that GNOME big EGO designer checks the touchspeed setting on his laptop, decides what is best for him and hardcodes it in, in their mind GNOME is usable and if you somehow disagree they will tell you to move on, they will never admit anything, they want to push out all the people that disagree with their vision and keep only the ones on the exact sam page with them on all the possible points.
I have been using Linux/Unix on desktop since the nineties, and while it has come a long way, it feels like that last 10-20 percent will never happen. It's that part that needs a manager with a large stick/carrot willing to make (informed) decisions and enforce them.
Which in turn is the biggest problem with wayland. We are fragmenting the ecosystem with every window manager dealing with shared problems in their own custom way, because wayland only takes responsibility for a tiny fraction of the common things that every window manager does.
We could call it X-Wayland
You may be interested to learn about wl-roots though. It's a project that I think originated from sway, and it aims to provide most of the low-level plumbing for writing your own Wayland window manager/desktop environment.
Sway made it initially but others are using it too. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots
After enough time some best practices do solidify into standards, but it wasn’t overnight in X either, and first and foremost it wasn’t made with that in mind. Wayland has protocols which are queryable and provide a very good way of implementing more and more standard ones from the experimental “fragmented” ones, and I don’t see much problem with this model in practice either.
The fact that developing a new compositor with wayland basically required wlroots to be even feasable for a one-man project is concerning enough. The amount of stuff you have to handle is insane compared to writing your own x-wm.
And developing a new compositor also does not require wlroots. Originally there was libweston, wlroots is just another option.
Part of what drives me nuts about Wayland is they could have learned these lessons from X's history and actually had it in mind. Instead, they threw it all out without learning a thing.
They absolutely chose to do the protocol with enhanceable protocols, something greatly missing from Wayland, so I don’t think your criticism is fair here.
If you want to do something even slightly off the happy path, GNOME is the worst Wayland experience. Because of ideology (and in the name of security), they refuse to implement features and extensions that users and app devs need.
Example: No support for server side decorations. Instead, their solution is to force app devs to use client side decorations.(https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1836)
This is just an issue that I have run into; there are more. Even ignoring wlroots and KWin, users coming from Windows and macOS except features like this.
Practically, for small apps that don't really have their own style (or games that are just one big opengl window) it's much better to rely on the window manager to provide a titlebar that somewhat fit in with the rest of the system. This is what users expect when coming from Windows or macOS.
Instead, apps like kitty just provide a godawful stopgap titlebar for GNOME users, because implementing good CSD is outside the scope of the project.
I agree. And yet I also still use GNOME. I just really like the GTK aesthetic. And you'll have to pry dash-to-dock from my cold, dead hands.
It forces every single DE that will use it to reinvent same thing. There is no good reason to do that, just a lot of duplicated effort. You will not want to have different mouse behaviour when you use different WM. Having it pluggable is fine, even desired, but pushing it on every DE is just waste of effort and just bumps the bar required for any DE to move to wayland.
> GNOME is probably worst DE imaginable. After 20 years, they still don't have thumbnails in filepicker and even dropped preview side pane in GTK4. I can't even.
For me it peaked somewhere in 1.x, 2.x was prettier version of it, after that they completely lost me. And their constant dumb arrogance with assuming what their users want is just cherry on cake of shit. And the "fuck the compatibility, just change APIs will nilly" attitude they got after 2.x
Should Web Standards mandate the use of a given JS implementation because it hinders the creation of new ones?
Also, the million+1 “de” under X are more like skins, there is absolutely no reason for them to exist in that form, they could just build on top of another wayland compositor.
This latter is pretty much a library to build your own de with minimal code up on top.
All these conversations end up kinda pointless because of a sort of "it works on my machine[desktop environment]".
Really disappointing to see this very lazy and trite criticism upvoted. If you look in KDE Plasma or Sway, you can also find plenty of missing features and bugs. You can find those anywhere.
It’s a small(-ish) issue but people often share it as a good example of their frustration with the way Gnome is managed - the bug report has been open for years, there has been several patches proposed, but they’ve always been either rejected or ignored with no discussion. My personal (and similar) pet peeve is that typing in the window will trigger a search instead of selecting the file matching the key like in every other OS.