GNOME 46 Released With Improved Search, Experimental VRR & More Polish

[logical]

The best feature: you can just click on the path bar in Nautilus to type a path like every single other file manager ever. GNOME devs have been taking their anti-insanity meds!

LOL I've never noticed that as I've always used the keyboard shortcut ^L when I want to type in a path.

[jaypatelani]

Comment section is fun lol

[varikonniemi]

what a useless release video. I have not tried the new release yet, but if it is anything like ubuntu 24.04 then there is no hope.

[chocolate]

Forcing a touch interface? Just click, bro. Not that hard. There's a reason why there's now pointer events on the web instead of just mouse or touch events. Pointer events combine touch and mouse events because a mousemove/touchmove, mousedown/touchstart, mouseup/touchend are generally used at the same time for the same purposes.

You don't want to or can't touch your screen? Then use your mouse. You're not forced to do anything. Got a lot of people with a victim complex on here about software they don't use. Gnome is a hell of a lot better than any interface you'd create.

Yeah, many criticisms may be valid, but with all its quirks it's still the best on laptops and convertibles so far. Friendly enough for touch input (though the OSK isn't particularly powerful), and fairly optimized for k&m with extensive shortcuts. Can't find a fault with the core interaction paradigm, so to speak, even though I find the pre-40 shell layout better. I find myself trying to replicate it if I'm testing something else.

Perhaps embracing duality in life is a sign of maturity: discerning the good from the bad, while taking both if necessary. The "bad" may be subjectively super important, but the "good" is objectively huge, especially for prospective Linux users.

[horizonbrave]

Can't find a fault with the core interaction paradigm, so to speak, even though I find the pre-40 shell layout better. I find myself trying to replicate it if I'm testing something else.

How exactly was the pre-40 era different? I'm curious.
Thanks

[chocolate]

How exactly was the pre-40 era different? I'm curious.
Thanks

When I say that, I'm mainly referring to the activities overview in pre-40. The dock and the workspace selector were rotated 90° counter-clockwise with version 40. I find squishing so many elements vertically (top panel, workspace selector, search, scrollable workspaces, dock) inefficient. I don't know what the reasoning behind this choice was. Maybe that mouse movement is reduced since vertical distance between elements on 16:9 screens is shorter? But then elements are too small and finicky, and every other input method is worsened, as e.g. touch input is better if you have stuff on the sides. The old layout works better both in portrait and in landscape on a convertible.
I find my eyes fatiguing less if workspace content is always centered horizontally, and then workspaces scroll vertically, regardless of current screen proportions.

If you have a convertible you can try the old layout on, I recommend giving Pop!_OS 22.04 a spin, as it offers a 40+ base with built-in options to reproduce it. It also doesn't lag with more than one window open (don't know how they do it), and it's the only distribution in my experience that supports sensors for automatic screen rotation and automatic backlight adjustment (tested on Panasonic CF-MX5).

[George99]

Try https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome...8#note_2055714. More details at https://ondrej.holych.net/whats-new-...-for-gnome-46/

Thanks for the explanation and step by step help. I just wanted to give it a try but don't need One Drive right now so I will wait for Gnome to get their own client ID to make things easier for us.

[QwertyChouskie]

When I say that, I'm mainly referring to the activities overview in pre-40. The dock and the workspace selector were rotated 90° counter-clockwise with version 40. I find squishing so many elements vertically (top panel, workspace selector, search, scrollable workspaces, dock) inefficient. I don't know what the reasoning behind this choice was.

The point is to have a consistent spacial flow. Desktops scroll horizontally, while you "scroll" vertically into the overview and again into the add launcher. This matters A LOT with touchpad gestures, but having a consistent spacial flow is arguably useful even on desktop, just because having a logical spacial flow can make interaction more intuitive.

If you haven't used Gnome 40+ with touchpad gestures, it feels SOOOO good, give it a try. There's even an extension ("X11 Gestures") that makes it work on X11 if you're still on X11 for one reason or another.

[chocolate]

The point is to have a consistent spacial flow. Desktops scroll horizontally, while you "scroll" vertically into the overview and again into the add launcher. This matters A LOT with touchpad gestures, but having a consistent spacial flow is arguably useful even on desktop, just because having a logical spacial flow can make interaction more intuitive.

If you haven't used Gnome 40+ with touchpad gestures, it feels SOOOO good, give it a try. There's even an extension ("X11 Gestures") that makes it work on X11 if you're still on X11 for one reason or another.

Absolutely, I give every release a spin on desktop as well as laptop(s) and I've been a fan of so called 1:1 gestures. They have been executed amazingly, considering that you can't always rely on good touchpads, and that it works well even on those. That must be because the gestures are also simpler. Pre-40 we had to pinch with four fingers (or three, can't remember) to bring up the activities overview via touchpad, and it was fairly difficult to perform, to the point that a flick of the cursor to the top-left hot corner was always the best choice.

Clearly they also tie into the new spatial model.
Unfortunately, I don't find myself on the same page about it. Having it completely "connected" (e.g. something comes from the bottom relative to the current view) is not that important to me, and I'd even argue that the place to think outside the box is exactly the shell.

Spatial flow inside an app, I can understand to some degree. Inside the shell? Please materialize something in front of my eyes out of thin air; who cares? I want a launcher pop-up (like in Pop!_OS) right now; if you want to justify its existence inside a realistic and connected space, have it perform an animation so that it looks like coming from the Z axis (macOS does this, for example).
There may be concerns regarding discoverability and so on, but I don't think they are so important that they justify designing a shell around them, sacrificing long-term use.
Or maybe stuff coming from the sides if you scroll from the bottom is considered ugly (old dock & workspace selector)? Have them slide into place vertically, I don't know.

Purity for purity's sake kills real world usability, and an entire army of developers claiming they have tested stuff behind closed doors with a usability group won't convince me otherwise.
What matters to me is that the technology works and it's still hackable downstream. I'll be perfectly happy with the defaults not being to my liking, if it means there's good FOSS attracting people to more FOSS.

[Rovano]

https://i.stack.imgur.com/In80b.png

I don't understand why the full app names can't be seen on the big screen.
Can it be set somehow?
It's a No GO zone for me.

I tested it on fullHD resolution and it's practically the same as you can see in the picture.

after TEST
I tried GNOME 46. The situation is better. But even on more than a fullHD monitor it does these things, just not to such an extent.

I also didn't understand that when I have an application window open and 2/3 of the screen is unused, why does the window manager open a new window over the first one. And again, 2/3 of the area is unused.

So all that remains is to replace this window manager.
Moment!
So is it even worth using GNOME when there is so much work to be done with it? (windows manager, plugins, ...)