GNOME 46 Alpha Released With Many Improvements

[hf_139]

The DRM leasing / portal argument is funny to me as it comes up again and again. Gnome from the beginning resisted attempts to make desktop sharing a Wayland protocol and Gnome devs implemented the sharing portal in a bunch of (not Gnome) apps - and I'd argue the result is great. You seem to make a conspiracy out of it - IMO saying a lot about your judgemental capabilities.

Gnome in my view is usually the side who *doesn't* want to cut corners but do things right from the beginning. So DEs don't need to support a bunch of half-backed solutions forever - and once it's done people tend to be happy with the result. Crucially they usually don't talk any more about the fact that if the opposing parties had it their way, things would be way more shitty now.

But well, have fun using initd, alsa, X11, without dbus and portals and everything, I'm sure it's gonna be great

As for KDE: it's IMO great to see proper competition in the Wayland world and people preferring KDE being able to use it, not being forced to Gnome for technical reasons.

Wasn't it GNOME that blocked fractional scaling in wayland for 10 years?
Cause according to their opinion, it has no usecase and 1080p is enough for everyone.
GNOMies are incapable of thinking into the future and can't imagine any other usecase than a tablet with a webbrowser. It's best for the Linux Desktop if we just ignore them and move on.

[hf_139]

Is it that KDE relies on Qt, while GNOME builds its own tech from the ground up?

Well, gtk tries to do some botched fake OOP in C, while Qt is on C++ in the first place.
So GNOME ends up in a situation where rewriting software from scratch is easier than updating to a different gtk version.
Music player, image viewer, etc., they rewrote all those basic simple things.

There is no fix to this. It is by design. It's a broken bloated and outdated system that has to be abandoned.

[treba]

Wasn't it GNOME that blocked fractional scaling in wayland for 10 years?

*Citation needed*

Cause according to their opinion, it has no usecase and 1080p is enough for everyone.

*Citation needed*

GNOMies are incapable of thinking into the future and can't imagine any other usecase than a tablet with a webbrowser.

So that's why they threw their weight behind Wayland and other technologies while many others where like "X11/alsa/initd/... works fine for me, why should things change?" or "Let's take the easiest solution now and don't care that it'll cause lots of unnecessary work down road."?

[hsci]

Google is helping Gtk and GNOME? Red Hat is helping Gtk and GNOME and Canonical a little. Sadly it is also Canonical which has too often did harmful things, naming Mir, Unity and Snap. I would appreciate if both Red Hat and Canonical hire a lot more developers for Gtk and GNOME and ship more ThinkPads with it (everything would be easier if IBM would still manufacture themselfes).

Gtk and GNOME are improving over years and I'm happy about a keyboard centric UI-Shell which doesn't bother me with a Desktop-Metapher and weird things like a SystemTray. Especially:

- GNOME Software now supports the user installation of local Flatpak files, among other improvements to this GNOME app center.

Flatpak supported that for years and it is a good thing. Shipping applications locally and autonomus without a network is a maybe seldom used but crucial feature.

Regarding the critic from above
GNOME enforce releases every six months. A clocked release cycle fits more for GCC or Linux which isolate features and ship alongside. Within an UI-Shell things need to integrate and the user facing changes (good and bad) are visible to the user. Things should be modified only when are ready and fit together a better approach is shipping optionally implementations or hidden betas (they do the later nowadays). The optional implementations avoid shipping things which aren't feature complete for all users.
And GNOME bundles a lot of things which don't belong the to the GNOME-Shell itself. It makes sense to ship the GNOME-Shell, Nautilus and Settings integrated. Epiphany shouldn't and neither its WebKitGtk. Gtk should integrate its own WebKitGtk to avoid conflicts? Evolution already decoupled somewhat. Another key is the believe that preferences are somewhat bad. The wrong preferences are bad, hard to test and confusing. But needed preferences are important to users and very likely every user needs at least one of them. The question here should be, does the user wants the preference or can we provide something which solves it anyway. If there are none or the bad preferences - you end up with five different clock widgets. Or forks - which means less developers and users.

Back to good things?
GNOME seems to have stopped adding apps with minimum functionality (gnome-documents, gnome-console, gnome-monitor...) which a useless and often unmaintained after a short while. Luckily we see in the list gnome-system-monitor shipping with Gtk4. Not migrating all applications at once also lowers amount of work, GNOME care for a uniform look - other than Microsoft Windows


Here an example for a feature users want and were the developers and UX-Team shall listen to the need of others:
Nautilus shall provide Type-Ahead-Find again, you even don't a preference for that. If you want to search, hit Ctrl+F instead.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/1157

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests/1030

We need to keep in mind. Most developers aren't paid and working on stuff "you don't need yourself" isn't funny. Here we've already a patch.

Their is the other side
KDE
I don't need various themes to select, I want one nice theme. I don't need an preference for "inline renaming" and for "modal dialog renaming" in the file-browser. Seriously?

Windows
They not just need to use the mouse for most stuff. All applications look different. And their own settings looks also always different, its a mixture of Win32, WinNT5.0, WinForms, MFC and WinUI. Do they even have tabs in the file-browser? The "Explorer" is horrible to use. Where is my home-directory? Place it right at the left hand side. Why I need to arrange desktop icons? And this hidden SystemTray is a selection of questionable applications I should uninstall. Right?

MacOS
Menubar seperated from window. No actual maximing of application windows. The useless desktop-icons accumlated. And usability wasn't a concern for Finder.

GNOME is rather good and can improve

[hf_139]

So that's why they threw their weight behind Wayland and other technologies while many others where like "X11/alsa/initd/... works fine for me, why should things change?" or "Let's take the easiest solution now and don't care that it'll cause lots of unnecessary work down road."?

Wayland is 15 years old.
15 years of blocking and NACKing.
This is the "accomplishment" of GNOME. Without GNOME, we would have been able to abandon xorg a decade ago.

[Malsabku]

Gnome Terminal also gets ported to GTK4 with Gnome 46

But since the standard is Gnome Console, it is not mentioned

[AlanTuring69]

Wayland is 15 years old.
15 years of blocking and NACKing.
This is the "accomplishment" of GNOME. Without GNOME, we would have been able to abandon xorg a decade ago.

Someone held a gun to your head and forced you to use GNOME, I take it? Maybe find a hobby that isn't hating on open source software on random forums.

[treba]

Wayland is 15 years old.
15 years of blocking and NACKing.
This is the "accomplishment" of GNOME. Without GNOME, we would have been able to abandon xorg a decade ago.

It's worse, in fact. If Gnome wouldn't exist, Jesus would be back and we'd all be dancing on the street all year long. How I know? Well, I just said it. Doesn't that make it right?

[Myownfriend]

"Wayland isn't secure enough. Y'all gotta do it with Portals now". Y

You might have some misunderstandings about Wayland and security. There are decisions about it's design that are made with security in mind which makes it more secure than X11 but it's not a security protocol or anything.

Portals provides ways to get out of sandboxes in a more secure way but aren't strictly about security either. They're a framework for an application to use DE-provide dialogs to do certain tasks.

For example an application can provide its own file picker in a Wayland session and that works just fine, but it means the Flatpaks version of that app will need to enable permissions to access the file system. By using the File Picker portal, the system provides the File Picker which means it will match the aesthetic of your DE instead of the app, and that apps Flatpaks wouldn't need to be provided file system access to actual access the file system.

Portals also work in Wayland or X11 while a Wayland protocol will only work in a Wayland session. I always like to mention that because OBS uses Portals and Pipewire, it could really drop its X11-specific capture code (the Xshm and XComposite sources) and it would still support capture under X11.

[Myownfriend]

So GNOME ends up in a situation where rewriting software from scratch is easier than updating to a different gtk version.
Music player, image viewer, etc., they rewrote all those basic simple things.

They update old software to use newer versions of GTK all the time.

The new Image Viewer (Loupe) is written in Rust and Gnome Music is in Python so they really couldn't make that transition without a complete rewrite anyway.