GNOME's 2018 Performance Hackfest Wraps Up In Cambridge

[starshipeleven]

Yeah! Gnome followers speaking about "behaviour". The right ones! Attacking everyone else who have a different view of things.

But hey! We are talking about the Desktop that got abandoned by its own creators. No one abandons a project that they belive in.

What GNOME was abandoned by its creators again?

[starshipeleven]

There are more android devices being bought and replaced and people are browsing more on their phones rather than whipping out their laptops when on the go... great, That doesn't really change how they're using their desktops unless...

.... unless someone starts making Android PCs, OEMs take notes plz.

For now the newer Chromebooks that have Play Store support are spearheading this, I really hope it catches up.

[tessio]

I'm an ace at operating Android, down to nerdgasm levels of hacks to get shit to work the way I want it to, and I can guess what to do on iOS better than most iOS owners even if I never used Apple products.

Still think that placing a touch-centric interface on a desktop or laptop (that was not designed with touch interface in mind, at most it is added as an afterthought) is a stupid idea.

Even MS backpedaled quite a bit on that.

But no one is talking about "touch-centric" design here. We are talking about doing specific things at specific places. Like on those newer platforms you download apps from a software store, not your web browser.. and you certainly don't run then from you file manager.

[Vistaus]

But the time Windows was the most popular OS is gone. This is Android now. People expect to download apps from an App Store and use the launcher to execute it.



And I can tell you right now that you're living in the past.

But the difference is that most software is available for Android in the Play Store and the Software that is not is available in F-Droid or as an easy-to-install APK file. On Linux there is still software that is not available from the respective software centers and/or is packaged as something that's not easily installable. For example, if you want to run SeaMonkey on Solus, you can't directly install it so you have to actually download the tar file and double-click the executable if you don't want to compile it. And there's many more software like that. And again: such software is easily installable on Android because it's at the very least presented as an APK file which you can install easily.
So don't compare Linux desktop to Android.

[starshipeleven]

But no one is talking about "touch-centric" design here. We are talking about doing specific things at specific places. Like on those newer platforms you download apps from a software store, not your web browser..

There is more than one store, and many install apks manually too, from the browser.

Of course I'm talking of the more tech-savyy (or reckless).

There is also a lot of people that didn't yet get the memo that they can install other applications on their device at all, same as the lamers that kept using IE6 for as long as their WinXP pc was operational.

[starshipeleven]

So don't compare Linux desktop to Android.

He isn't comparing, he is stating an intent (well, GNOME devs are). They want to lockdown their ecosystem to use packages ONLY (either flatpack or the distro's).

[leipero]

People comparing Android/iOS/whatevermobileOS with PC are getting it wrong..., there is a huge limitation on those mobile devices, it is not "new paradigm", it is simple necessity, screen estate on mobile devices is up to 4-5 inches for something that might be called practical (hardly), otherwise you end up carring a brick with you all the time, wasting energy in keeping it safe (since it is fregile device) but accesible at the same time. That problem does not exist on 19+ inch screens (and now, most likely 21+ inch on average), therefore it is really dumb to to introduce that "new paradigm" (that isn't new at all btw) to something very different without those exact limitations that created it in the first place.

And how is it "oldschool" being practical? Being practical doesn't mean you are "unable to adapt", it means you refuse to use something because simple cost-benefit calculation dictates that approach, and it isn't worth for you. I still hold small Nokia cellphone, that is about 4 inch in total (diagonally), and even that device bothers me sometimes and I would prefer not to have it with me because of it. If I'm not home, there are exactly 0 reasons to use web, email, games etc., because most of the time I am not alone, and I do not want to be rude with people who share their time with me, and because I consider it rude to use your phone (outside of answering to potential call) when I share my time with you, therefore, I've managed to remove that ugly habit from quite a bit of people.

And I know exacly how bad is to carry bricks with you all the time, since my part time job requires usage of Android smart phones, and I have no idea how people can carry such thing 24/7 whole year without getting annoyed and smashing damn thing into asphalt..., it's beyond me lol.

So, in short, mobile and desktop can't be compared..., plus, decision of removing such feature from nautilus is most retarded one in recent times...

[OneBitUser]

While I have never had a performance issue with GNOME on my computer, I have heard enough people in the community mention it that it is great to see the Devs focus a hackfest on this topic. Don't worry too much if you rely on desktop icons, those are just being moved to an extension, where optional features should be to being with.

This doesn't change the case at hand, namely that the developers removed functionality from Gnome again based on ideological standpoints.

Making UI choices based solely on the developers' perspective is a terrible way to develop user-facing interfaces.
I want programmers to make UI choices as much as I want a UX expert to dabble in Flatpak architecture.

I made some honest efforts to use Gnome 3 on top of Fedora 3-4 releases back (right after Wayland became the default session) seeing that it was becoming more and more dominant in Linux distributions, but I already needed about 15-18 extensions to have the core functionality I've come to expect from my desktop, not to mention I basically had to replace all default apps with better accessible ones.
The large number of extensions was already annoying, not to mention complicated to use: I had to take care of the order in which I enabled extensions... if I messed up the order then one or the other simply wouldn't take effect, or had a different effect.
Functionality also broke regularly with each update, which I think is an instant no-go for anyone: you want your core workflows to be rock solid and guaranteed to work.

So moving even more functionality to extensions will only result in even more unstable features that are not guaranteed to work after an update.
Removing features without offering alternatives is just not s solution. Or, well, maybe it is to the developers who do not have to maintain the code..

Personally I'm gonna stick with Plasma with all its functionality including a sensible file manager that has an integrated terminal... incidentally, also a solution that could be added to Nautilus so you can have it both ways: only launch executables from a terminal while keeping everything easily accessible in the file manager.