Regarding that GNOME update, do GNOME developers just don't have any competence in UX design? That screencast is suggesting you need to click the activities button in the top left corner to be able to reveal a nav panel that's all the way at the bottom.
Similarly, right now, in current versions, in the file selection interface the Select button is in one corner of the window and Cancel all the way in the other.
Or the annoying unnecessary dialogue when you uncompress from an archive (no I don't want an app-blocking notification that the file extracted successfully).
> That screencast is suggesting you need to click the activities button in the top left corner to be able to reveal a nav panel that's all the way at the bottom.
That's already the default way it works, and it's perfectly insufferable. AFAIK almost everyone uses an extension or another that makes the panel a permanent or auto-hiding dock, like any other reasonable desktop OS.
I can't see any drastic change, actually. Apparently the main difference is that the panel is visible at login, instead of being hidden (therefore stumping new users that can only see an empty desktop and nothing else).
pojntfx also already pointed to some great resources to understand their reasoning.
Also, it's a FOSS project. Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved. Just try and be kind when you make suggestions. Or, even better, contribute yourself:
https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/
> Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved.
Unfortunately that's not how the Gnome project has been run. Even back in Gnome 2.x times. There's a famous very funny jwz blog post about this (that I won't link because of some well known reasons).
I'm afraid I'm the kind of naive person that believes in the best intention of people and have not read that blog post. So I will have to be provided with a link to better understand and judge for myself.
If you link to that particular blog from HackerNews, he checks the referer and serves you up a nasty message instead of the blog post. So, instead of providing a direct link, search for JWZ, GNOME and CADT.
Patches are available for type-ahead, in particular the gtk-mushrooms fork. If open source is about "scratching your own itch" gnome is making it really hard for developers to do that. There was discussion of burying that features somewhere deep in the gnome registry, all kinds of options, but it's clear that pull requests are not welcome, even if the option is buried deep in some config file somewhere and is only accessible to power users.
That seems to be the case a lot of the time when outsiders try to solve their own problems with a pull request. There's just no room for compromise or for solving your own problems.
I read through most of the thread and I am very confused by the negative reactions. What was tone deaf in the response!? (I do understand my question is tone deaf by associativity, but I sincerely do not get it)
That's fine, and I get that gnome is a platform. The problem is that they're forcing their platform's choices on every GTK-3 app, which makes it really annoying for people who use GTK (not gnome) apps but which don't like the Gnome platform.
The problem is that GTK was used as a generic toolkit, and they've added a bunch of weird customization's to make it work better with their platform. That fucked over a lot of people who used that toolkit on non-Gnome platforms, and for non-Gnome uses.
Most people using GTK didn't sign up to be part of the gnome platform. Firefox isn't a gnome app. They (and everyone else) assumed it was being developed as a generic and cross-platform gui toolkit. Bit of a bait and switch there.
The tight integration between gnome (the platform) and GTK (the cross-platform GUI toolkit) seems an awful lot like a betrayal, like taking something that was for everyone and well.. taking it. Making it all about themselves, and burning the commons so other people can't use it. Or at least like a heavy-handed attempt to force people to write Gnome apps instead of GTK apps.
I'm confused how that's related, the issue you're talking about is in the file manager, not GTK. I don't believe any of the primary nautilus maintainers are also primary GTK maintainers, at least not anyone in that issue. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about that)
But, since I've said this before, I'll say it again: If the other people who use the toolkit want to have input, they need to contribute more. AFAIK there are zero non-GNOME devs working full time on GTK. I hope that changes, i.e. I hope the other desktops can find funding to send more designers and developers to collaborate with the GNOME people so everyone can have their say. That is the real issue here, I think it's incorrect to suggest that anything was "taken." It's open source, there isn't anyone who's going to take the code away from you unless you blatantly violate the license.
The GTK devs were saying that they wanted a flag shared between nautilus and the file picker that would enable/disable typeahead. Unfortunately nautilus refuses to implement that flag, which I think means we're all still relying on forks for that feature.
So you're not really allowed to solve one without solving the other, last I checked.
So yeah, the issues is very much in both, and you can't solve the issue with GTK without solving it in Gnome.
>So you're not really allowed to solve one without solving the other
The final comments from the developer directly contradicts this claim:
>I'd be happy to review a merge request that added the ability to disable recursive search in the file chooser using a GSettings option ... I was thinking more along the lines of having a key in the file chooser settings schema that would be observed by Nautilus.
The idea there is that the key should be in a standard location read by nautilus (or some other GTK file manager) if it also decides to implement that feature. Edit: I also should note that it appears there was not even initial consensus about this, the other GTK developer seemed to be skeptical at first.
Their are some striking similarities between how systemd and Gnome interact with the community. Disregard for portability, feature creep, the way they attempt to monopolize their respective 'markets' and the way they treat everyone that disagrees. Those are all worrying. And the company behind systemd and with significant stakes in gnome (RedHat) recently showed how well they treat open source projects that stop being valuable for them as a company.
It seems that "professional designer" means a person who makes changes that are generally bad. Once the UI is perfected, it must continue to change (and thereby become non-perfect) because how else would customers know that they got a new product?
If the professional designer in question really is expected to do something different, such as make usable software, then a review of job performance is sorely needed.
I was only referring to the fact that Gnome developers get such a bad rap for being unfriendly, as the GGP stated.
The link was an interesting read eitherway and I can absolutely understand where the frustration comes from. The users' comments just flew over the developers' heads. Nonetheless it looks more like a breakdown in communication than willfully ignoring with deceitful intentions on the part of the developers in my opinion.
There are a lot of issues like that. After a certain point a pattern emerges. I don't have time to find a big list of historical issues. Here are some quick links though.
Almost none of those are feature requests. I mean yes, the gnome developers do write code, and that code does get merged in. I don't understand what you're trying to prove by pointing that out.
The best way in any open source project to make sure a feature is implemented, is to write it yourself and submit a merge request. I don't think any open source desktop is special in this regard, the same rules apply. I am not sure what you're trying to point out by saying that some developers work for Red Hat, the same rules apply to them. If they want features implemented, they write the code and they submit it upstream. What else should happen here? Should they just stop submitting patches and let upstream stagnate?
How? The Red Hat developers have to follow the same review process as everyone else. If your argument is that contributors with more experience and clout are more likely to get their patches merged, how is that different from any other project? Does it really matter what company they work for? And should we be penalizing Red Hat just because they happened to be in the Linux business for a long time?
I'm sorry I can't find the link but I remember reading a discussion on a freedesktop gitlab issue tracker in which some developers of other wayland desktops wanted to standarize a wayland protocol extension that everyone but Gnome already used. A Gnome dev showed up and told everyone this is not needed because the problem at hand is solved with dbus in Gnome. Everyone told him that the extension is already widely adopted (not to mention dbus was Linux only at the time and solving this with dbus would cut off any BSD users from that feature). The response was basically 'the only adoption that matters is Gnome adoption and Gnome did not adopt this, so it's irrelevant'.
The problem with creating additional wayland-only solutions is that they tend to need good, strong implementations in the toolkits first for it to really make sense over a dbus implementation that already exists. (The wayland api is not particularly friendly for application programmers) The person advocating for the protocol is usually the one who has to implement that.
The reasoning behind the GNOME UX is described in their HIGs and is quite similar to iOS, with it's pros and cons: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/. GNOME 40 is also developed openly and a lot of live coding is going on right now (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2OhXheV-cw), so if users have UX suggestions there are many ways to contribute and get your ideas out there. You can now also try out the newest GNOME nightlies with GNOME OS, available here or through the "+" button in GNOME Boxes: https://os.gnome.org/
> GNOME 40 is also developed openly and a lot of live coding is going on right now (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2OhXheV-cw), so if users have UX suggestions there are many ways to contribute and get your ideas out there.
Gnome always struck me as a project that doesn't really listen to anyone and just follows their agenda irregardless of how damaging it is to the community.
I find it hard to believe they started listening to the community, but if it's true then I'm really glad they did.
Also there are microorganisms that digest plastic. They could've thrived at some point and then diminished in numbers after much of the plastic from the previous industrial civilization was consumed.
I had a class that was so easy that most students didn't bother to show up for lectures. Near the end of the semester the profesor got angry that nobody came to his lecture and decided to retroactively grade attendance with 70% of the grade. Most students flunked. I was fortunate that his class was in between two others I was taking, so I attended about half of the lectures and passed it with a grade that corresponds to the American C+/B-
A few months ago I won about $200 worth of Amazon gift card codes. Since nothing from Amazon delivers to my country I decided to give them to an American friend of mine. I remember it was late for him when I sent him the codes over Facebook so he only used up one right away and then went to sleep.
The next morning, however, the other coupons were all used up. He claims nobody else has access to his FB messages and I never bothered to actually check the validity of the codes on Amazon, so there is enough room for plausible deniability, but this coincided in time with this reddit post https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/79x7u3/facebook_em... and now there's that nagging feeling in the back of my mind that some underpaid 3rd world facebook employee read through the messages and decided to use the codes themselves.
I don't know, this is all probably a stretch, but that moment reached a new low for Facebook in my mind (not that my opinion of them was high before).
They touch on a bunch of decently exotic data structures like van Emde Boas trees and things like cache oblivious data structures. If you're comfortable with data structures and algorithm design (which it sounds like you are, from your description) it should be accessible. At the end of the day it's just a graduate level CS course.
Maybe this is a good opportunity for Firefox to abandon its "forced mediocrity" model.
The vanilla installation of Firefox lacks basic UI components (mouse gestures for example), lacks session management, and the bookmark and history interfaces look like they were made in 1995.
When you click an old entry in History I don't understand why it's so difficult for the selection to stay near the formerly clicked item, instead of it selecting the top most entry forcing you to scroll all the way down again if you want to open another entry that's near the previously clicked entry.
Why can't Bookmarks employ a simple logistic classifier? OK I've stopped using Firefox's bookmark system a long time ago (because its so shitty) but if I were to be still using it I would expect the browser to be smart enough to figure out that if all my bookmarks from a certain site are in a specific bookmark folder that most likely means this new bookmark from that same site should go there and should be offered as the 1st choice.
Now, yes, of course you can add all these features in a slow JavaScript-based addon which will eat your memory and cpu time and allow the Firefox team to blame the addons when something goes wrong with Firefox, but at some point you have to reconsider if this is such a good idea.
Sure very few people use mouse gestures in Firefox and adding them out of the box could be interpreted as bloat, but maybe if more users even knew what mouse gestures were and how useful they are, they would start considering them a fundamental aspect of a browser's interface and not just a fancy knick-knack.
I try it occasionally and I'm enjoying it. Most tools come out of the box, like Adblock, screenshot, window tiling, and mouse gestures. Not sure if the Adblock is as good as uBlock origin, though. Some new features like an improved history (haven't used thoroughly yet) and tab stacking.
It still is a bit buggy for me on Ubuntu 16.04. Sometimes when playing videos the window flickers.
On the other hand, you shouldn't lump together and dismiss all MOOCs as there are plenty of more advanced ones that will definitely make a difference. For example, 90% of MIT classes such as Intro to Statistics https://www.edx.org/course/fundamentals-of-statistics or CMU Deep Learning http://deeplearning.cs.cmu.edu/