GNOME 40 Approaches Its UI Freeze, Easy Means To Start Testing It

[Mez']

Originally posted by L.T.

No project is more important than the users of the project.

I fully agree with you, as my job is to elicit business requirements from users.
But developers have a mind of their own, which is also good, because they're full of amazing ideas and suggest possibilities that nobody would have thought about.

But when there's no feedback and interpretation between both side, it can either be:
- technically impossible to realize - scoped too widely - ... (business)
- genius technically but not fulfilling any actual use cases - going in their own world - ... (IT)
If there's no counterbalance from the users, you end up like Gnome devs, going in a bunker and neglecting entirely what users actually expect or feel comfortable with. I've seen a lot of this. Clear requirements and user feedback always make for a better product. Added benefit, the user will reject the solution a lot less when he was involved in the process and gave his input.

That's also why a middle man helping to compromise between the what and the how usually drives the project towards a better outcome for the user. I call that a translator (although not in actual idiom), as geek language and operational language are as different as Finnish and Spanish or Greek and Chinese.

[mppix]

I'm not talking specifically about you, but that's exactly the problem, many here are extrapolating a link between unusable and progressive for people who dislike Gnome.

It might just be unusable for some and to some extent because of how that progressive nature was implemented, not because of the progressive nature itself.

Respectfully, why care if you dislike Gnome in the first place?
They are unlikely to change paradigms for those that don't like them. They are certainly not going back to gnome classic or the like. They are just refining the design and vision and do -as far as I am concerned- a pretty good job.

[chocolate]

chocolate So this comes down to democracy vs meritocracy. I’ve never seen a viable democratic open source project. There’s tons of good meritocratic open source projects.

If your idea of meritocracy is to take over a project and steer it in a random direction disregarding user feedback, you're spot on.
Sorry, I like you in general and I never want you to stop being enthusiastic about everything GNOME, or post interesting links, but the meme ends here for me.

Merit has to be assigned by someone. Self-assigned merit is dictatorship. Good for personal pet projects, not so much for the standard Linux desktop as you call it (and admittedly it is, which is all the more reason to be sad when developers go blind). Meritocracy can live inside democracy and does not need to be opposed (your "versus") to democracy.

I've yet to find half a poll describing the proposed (breaking/disruptive) changes to the shell's paradigm and the rationale behind them, dated X days/months before they went full speed with coding.

I don't believe the issue needs to be explored further, as it's quite banal at its core.

No project is more important than the users of the project.

[horizonbrave]

Read the title on that reddit and ask yourself about the commented replied. It is basically asking for trouble regardless the project.

They decided to go fancy by bumping to version 40, breaking paradigms with no proper feedback and not even having a working app store yet. My polite guess is the next version we'll be 500 and next next 600. They only troubles is having an over simplified DE not able to do basic stuff.

[finalzone]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comme...hould_we_wait/

Read the title on that reddit and ask yourself about the commented replied. It is basically asking for trouble regardless the project.

[mppix]

I don't know if you're assuming the inflexibility of GNOME3 applies to other desktop environments but these are outright lies.
KDE Plasma is insanely flexible. You can remove the taskbar, or even have multiple. You can have no desktop icons, or tons of them + widgets. The launcher is interchangable, and it being a widget, can be nixed entirely if a user decides.

IF this is how you define KDE flexibility, THEN "the inflexibility of GNOME3" is a lie.
You can do all of these things on gnome (with extensions) if you really want to (not that I'd recommend it).

[BesiegedAce]

But: KDE and others never really tried to go any further past that in my eyes. They kept the status quo auf Windows 95 to a huge degree. You need to have a taskbar, it's got to be there. You need to have desktop icons, it's got to be there. You've got to have a giant clunky launcher menu, it's got to be there. Do you think KDE or others did really advance their UX paradigms past that?

I don't know if you're assuming the inflexibility of GNOME3 applies to other desktop environments but these are outright lies. KDE Plasma is insanely flexible. You can remove the taskbar, or even have multiple. You can have no desktop icons, or tons of them + widgets. The launcher is interchangable, and it being a widget, can be nixed entirely if a user decides. You can have just KRunner. You can swap to a macOS style dock with Latte Dock. Just because KDE (and others) use a more familiar desktop design as a default doesn't mean it can't be changed to the user's specifications.

unlike in the Qt world where it's pretty much Yakuake (at least that I know of).

There's LXQt's QTerminal, which has a dropdown version (simply named QTerminal Drop Down or something similar.

[mppix]

True. Both Gnome and Windows can dream about a fully functional customizable DE, let alone the apps like Kdenlive and Krita.

I use Gnome Wayland 3.38 and am perfectly fine with it. Kdenlive and Krita work perfectly fine.

I don't know what you mean with "fully functional customizable DE". I find Gnome fully functional and sufficiently customizable. Probably I don't spend enough time with the DE as I have work to do. For the same reason, I don't spend tweaking DEs just because the devs didn't time to finish it..

Also, I hope you realize that the following is contradicting itself.

After they release Gnome 3.0 they lost a large portion of their user base on desktop and yet they try so hard to bring Gnome on the market that dominate by Google and Apple.

[Klassic Six]

Everything that is not Gnome is a Windows 95 rehash, right?

True. Both Gnome and Windows can dream about a fully functional customizable DE, let alone the apps like Kdenlive and Krita. After they release Gnome 3.0 they lost a large portion of their user base on desktop and yet they try so hard to bring Gnome on the market that dominate by Google and Apple.

[horizonbrave]

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/las9dk/any_plans_to_fix_gnome_software_or_should_we_wait/