GNOME In 2020 Saw Many Optimizations, GTK 4.0 Released, GNOME 40 In Development

[chocolate]

So glad to read these comments. Completely in line with what I've been saying and basically half of the comments I've been reading around Gnome.
Spot on.

Some blinkered yes men cultists like 144Hz will fake positivism (with silliness and gullibility, probably paid by Red Hat) without even an ounce of critical mind, but the image of Red Hat and Gnome is slowly being chipped away. Proof that there is something wrong with their method.

But please keep in mind that I love GNOME and its app ecosystem big time. If something on my system has a GUI, it's probably a GNOME app, especially if it makes use of libhandy, which I totally dig. Me being bitter about the shell taking this awful turn is precisely because I use GNOME Shell everywhere, even though it lacks tiling. I've been exploring System76's tiling extension on Fedora for a while... it's the only viable option if you want a truly graphical desktop with tiling without going full Sway.
Also don't disregard everything coming from 144Hz . Yes they're funny sometimes but they have posted many useful links in the past.

Of course coming up with stuff and going full steam ahead with it just because you are in a position of power is not meritocratic, quite the opposite in fact.
As you say, it's the method that's flawed. After reading blog posts that introduce radical changes to GNOME's larger audience for the first time post factum, surely I won't be the one to waste time writing a detailed bug report on GNOME's GitLab only to have it shunned.

[Mez']

But please keep in mind that I love GNOME and its app ecosystem big time. If something on my system has a GUI, it's probably a GNOME app, especially if it makes use of libhandy, which I totally dig. Me being bitter about the shell taking this awful turn is precisely because I use GNOME Shell everywhere, even though it lacks tiling. I've been exploring System76's tiling extension on Fedora for a while... it's the only viable option if you want a truly graphical desktop with tiling without going full Sway.
Also don't disregard everything coming from 144Hz . Yes they're funny sometimes but they have posted many useful links in the past.

Of course coming up with stuff and going full steam ahead with it just because you are in a position of power is not meritocratic, quite the opposite in fact.
As you say, it's the method that's flawed. After reading blog posts that introduce radical changes to GNOME's larger audience for the first time post factum, surely I won't be the one to waste time writing a detailed bug report on GNOME's GitLab only to have it shunned.

I do use Gnome as well, although I need 18-20 extensions to "make do". But I barely use the app grid, and I sure as hell haven't used the shell once.
I don't use many Gnome apps either (except the calculator maybe). They're mostly NIH, not many people use them since there are far more advanced and popular apps on the market. In the end, it's a waste of resources when Gnome would need those devs big time to offer options by default (at least the top 10 downloaded extensions should be in vanilla) and for their maintenance.

What I really like is the GTK GUI look. QT has always felt toyish and childish to me, same as the Apple stuff.

Gnome 3 is backed by the biggest Linux company, Red Hat (around 75% of total commits), and has been around for a while so it's stable (through quantity, not quality). Which is why it's the most tolerable GTK environment right now. And the reason why I've been using it. Not because I like it, but by lack of a better option since Unity was dumped.

But in the GTK workd, I believe Unity or Budgie have a much better design (because flexible enough for the users to decide their own workflow) and the philosophy behind them (listen to the user and offer him/her the most demanded options) feels right (contrary to the Gnome dictatorship and avoidance of responsibility). Budgie is not there yet though (multi monitor handling is even worse than Gnome's) but it has much more potential in my opinion. When you listen to your users by embracing a user-pulled design, those users are more forgetful and patient than when facing a dev-pushed design. Therefore bound to be satisfied.
I'm working as a link between operational end users and IT, and this a very well known principle. The more you involve end users, the less they complain after implementation.
With Gnome, there's close to no involvement of the end-user in the design process, and as you would expect from the abovementioned principle the satisfaction is polarized with a hell of a lot of criticism. No wonder.

[atmartens]

Or try this to have no wallpaper (solid black background):
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background picture-uri ""

I tried the latest Ubuntu over the summer and discovered that there was no way to set a solid background through the settings interface (control panel / whatever it's called). You have to edit that config file. What is wrong with these developers?

[gedgon]

I tried the latest Ubuntu over the summer and discovered that there was no way to set a solid background through the settings interface (control panel / whatever it's called). You have to edit that config file. What is wrong with these developers?

Yep
IIRC, this option has been removed with this background setting redesign.

[chocolate]

I tried the latest Ubuntu over the summer and discovered that there was no way to set a solid background through the settings interface (control panel / whatever it's called). You have to edit that config file. What is wrong with these developers?

Oh, I don't know. I have trusted them for too long. With the shell redesign, it's now clear to me that their mantra is to redesign everything capriciously without consideration for the positive aspects of the status quo, and without bothering to reach feature parity first (well, with the exception of special cases such as icons on the background, those I can understand). Come to think of it, as organized as they now seem to be with their GitLab and everything, there is no official feature list anywhere. I guess they sort of mentally reverse engineer a basic set of features from their own mockups. I might be wrong, though.

[Mez']

Yep
IIRC, this option has been removed with this background setting redesign.

"We remove features" on a large wall ad or on a flying banner ad.

Wouldn't know how to represent Gnome better.

[arQon]

What I really like is the GTK GUI look.

I think that's the inertia in the general case too: especially for users who've been around long enough that they came from the GNOME2 era when GNOME was actually good.

The stupidity of CSD though means you can kiss any *consistency* in the UI goodbye, and that train is already a long way down the track. Now not only do you have to deal with cases where an app decides to randomly have its own controls within the app window, but even the window controls can't be trusted.

sigh. It's like watching time go backwards, with stable consistent interfaces degenerating into per-app UIs again; and even the most utterly basic functionality like being able to choose a freaking *color scheme* (or, as shown above, just NOT have junk like compulsory background images) being removed from the WM and DE.

GNOME's hegemony, thanks to its rigid control of *GTK* rather than any merit of GNOME Shell itself, isn't going anywhere. What will be interesting to see is whether the teams developing decent DEs (i.e. Mint, MATE, XFCE) continue to be Charlie Brown to GNOME's Lucy with the football in 2021, or if they opt to focus on GTK3 instead so that they at least have a stable underlying toolkit that they can actually fix bugs in and add features to.