GNOME Is Making Great Progress On Overhauling Their App Icons

[mulenmar]

People who think GNOME 3 is ugly should go look at Afterstep.

I'm just waiting for Xfce 4.14 and a GTK3 theme "engine" there, at this point.

Part of KDE Plasma -- the panels, I think? -- have heavy graphical corruption in the last version of VirtualBox I tested it in, GNOME is awkward, I got tired of wiring together an Openbox desktop, and I haven't looked into LXQt, Enlightenment, Cinnamon, Lumina, or FVWM-Crystal lately. Or Budgie, ever. So that leaves my old friend, Xfce.

MATE seemed utterly identical to Cinnamon and its parent GNOME 2, last I compared them, and seems to occupy the same space as Xfce, "stealing" ("co-opting", or whatever) devs who might otherwise contribute to the pre-existing system.

On that note: We have faaaaar too many options, folks. There isn't even the excuse of scratching an itch anymore -- several of these options are virtually identical in surface functionality, purpose, or even the low-level technologies. We DO NOT need another new environment, I don't care how much of a hotshot programmer you are or what your "special case" is -- there's already several somethings in your niche.

Contribute patches for more flexibility or well-designed features in an existing one, with test coverage and documentation. Go make a proper, industrial-quality CAD program or something, we have maybe ONE of those. Or patch Easytag to have a dialog for custom tags. Port the timezone and format validator code for xfce-panel's default Clock back to the 4.12 branch and get it in Debian 9 as a fix for that longstanding bug. Go somehow pull Mozilla's PR's head out of their behinds, so they stop pushing ads ("rewards" you have to pay for) on us and telling us it's raining.

Just stop clogging the repos with Yet Another C/C++ Thing To Test, Package, Build, and Debug. Or worse, more single-thread Python!

And if it's just too much fun to build something new and slap it on your resumé: develop some discipline and show you can work in an existing team, instead.

The bazaar has reached, and exceeded, Choice Paralysis levels. Now nobody is able to buy critically.

/rant

[microcode]

Honestly I liked the old icons better; they were a spiritual successor of the spectacular Windows 98 icons. Come to think of it, I wish GNOME were just more like Windows 98, and less like a web browser; maybe then they wouldn't need so much acceleration to get reasonable performance.

[Vistaus]

Sure, people have different preferences. Most people like GNOME which is why the largest distributions have chosen it. Your opinion is in the 0,5% that doesn't like GNOME, congratulations.

Yeah, just like most companies have chosen Office 365 because most employees like it... oh wait, they don't like it and it has been forced down their throats!!! So no, your statement is invalid until proven otherwise (i.e. by a poll on a popular Linux website "What is your favorite DE?").

[Vistaus]

Why hasn't someone forked Gnome 3 and included all the extensions that make sense by default yet?

Zorin is your friend.

[Vistaus]

Each time better and polished, as ever. Don't know how people can use KDE, XFCE or any other unpolished alternative. Budgie is also nice.

While I agree that KDE needs a bit of work here and there (and I'm saying this as a KDE user!), I wouldn't go as far as to call it "unpolished". A few things need work, but it's polished overall. You're right about Xfce, though.

[ElectricPrism]

Honestly instead of GNOME vs KDE I wish we were a little more like KDE vs WINDOWS or KDE vs MAC, GNOME vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac, etc...

If people weren't happy about Gnome's internal management it's a wonder Gnome 3 hasn't been forked to correct mis-steps.

Meanwhile in FOSS, we have names like GIMP and the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE).

Honestly there is a lot of room for improvement for each project.

If we could get some basics right like 100% SVG icons instead of specific size variant PNGs, separation of core app functionality so UX can be HTML 5 (Online), Qt (Local), or GTK3 (Local) I would be really happy.

Also, could we fucking PLEASE have some level of separation between our applications and the desktop environments. It's no wonder people say FUCK THIS and use i3, or openbox with tint2, lemonbar/polybar, AWN, Plank, Slingshot, etc... because the "Panel" is a separate component of the desktop that can be severable and re-purposed.

The whole: take it or leave it situation is a clusterfuck. For example, I use Dolphin on Gnome, it renders thumbnails faster and gets out of my way even though it doesn't match the other apps it performs its functions above adequately and to my expectations.

[mulenmar]

Honestly instead of GNOME vs KDE I wish we were a little more like KDE vs WINDOWS or KDE vs MAC, GNOME vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac, etc...

If people weren't happy about Gnome's internal management it's a wonder Gnome 3 hasn't been forked to correct mis-steps.

It was: MATE (GNOME 2) and Cinnamon (GNOME 3).

Meanwhile in FOSS, we have names like GIMP and the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE).

It's not been "Kool" since not long after announcement, from my quick research.

If we could get some basics right like 100% SVG icons instead of specific size variant PNGs, separation of core app functionality so UX can be HTML 5 (Online), Qt (Local), or GTK3 (Local) I would be really happy.

No HTML5, please, did we learn nothing from Windows 98's Active Desktop, Electron's bloat, and GNOME 3's lobotomized and single-threaded design?

Also, could we fucking PLEASE have some level of separation between our applications and the desktop environments. It's no wonder people say FUCK THIS and use i3, or openbox with tint2, lemonbar/polybar, AWN, Plank, Slingshot, etc... because the "Panel" is a separate component of the desktop that can be severable and re-purposed.

The whole: take it or leave it situation is a clusterfuck. For example, I use Dolphin on Gnome, it renders thumbnails faster and gets out of my way even though it doesn't match the other apps it performs its functions above adequately and to my expectations.

Lumina and LXQt might be right up your alley! The former was created to not be tightly coupled to any particular tech (*cough* SystemD, Pulseaudio, etc *cough*) and thus great for the *BSDs AND Linux. The latter is made of separate apps.

[ssokolow]

No HTML5, please, did we learn nothing from Windows 98's Active Desktop, Electron's bloat, and GNOME 3's lobotomized and single-threaded design?

I read that as more in the vein of a plea for more applications to have a clean split between the frontend and backend code so that, if you want to make a web UI, you could just apt-get the backend for an existing app and build a new frontend on top of it.

[PluMGMK]

It's also about modernizing the icons so they more akin to the likes of other platforms where they are more simple and flat these days rather than being very detailed as was popular in the past.

Sigh…

[skeevy420]

You can set Present Windows in any corner you like in Plasma.

I know. I set it to the bottom right-hand corner on my box, bottom left opens the start menu, top left opens the activity manager.

My point was that I'd hate it if Present Windows, regardless of the hot corner, was the only way to switch programs (like it is on Gnome w/o a plugin).