Linux Mint Looks To Fork More GNOME Software, Make XApp More Independent

[andre30correia]

always DE flame wars, people can use what they like but in the end the only real profissional desktop was unity

[Malsabku]

Seriously? does ANYONE use VANILLA GNOME? And I mean TRUTHFULLY no EXTENSIONS, no other forms of modification, and of your own volition not forced upon you by some entity? If you do, I pity you.

I am using GNOME completely without extensions. It's clean, simple and very fast. Sure there is a lot of room for improvement in Gnome, e.g. with the window tiling management, but a clean GNOME is nevertheless nice for me.

[Malsabku]

All this effort to provide a Windows-like experience based on GNOME tech, when they could have just moved to KDE.

Cinnamon is not as overloaded as KDE with unneeded and overcomplicated features and is much more bug-free. Cinnamon is a nice compromise for people. KDE's biggest advantage it's is use of modern technology, however at least Cinnamon is more modern than Xfce or Mate.

[Blademasterz]

Cinnamon is more modern than Xfce or Mate.

They look almost the same, best trio of Linux DE 😃

[krzyzowiec]

I had a good laugh reading this:
https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-me...t-4e301032670c

Some of that may be valid, but some is plain ridiculous, like this example:

The third-party developer perspective is another chapter of horror in the GNOME ecosystem. For instance, it’s required that extension developers set the GNOME shell version target in their metadata.json, otherwise the extension won’t be loaded, even if the code itself doesn’t have to change after a new GNOME release. And because extensions are not integrated into the package managers, every time GNOME is updated, all extensions will stop working, requiring manual update from the user side. At least this insanity is somehow backward-compatible, meaning extensions updated to work in GNOME 44 may also work in GNOME 43 or older. But to no surprise things got worse this year: GNOME developers decided to make a change in version 45 forcing every single extension to have the code updated, regardless, and this time there was no backward compatibility [12]. To make matters worse, they announced this less than one month before releasing GNOME 45.

How is that a bad thing? This is common sense. It is essentially a check on whether your project is active or not. If it is, then changing the version number is trivial. If it's not, then you don't want the code running anyway, as eventually it will cause problems that Gnome will be blamed for. Remember that extensions are directly modifying Gnome Shell code. It's not like they have a stable plugin interface that you can target.

[ssokolow]

Wouldn't it be nice if they skipped forking libadwaita, didnt use gtk or qt, and actually went with the lighter and more optimized EFL ui when making apps.

I don't know if it still applies, but EFL got a bit of a reputation from this Daily WTF article. (Which seems to have been converted into a forum post. WTF, Daily WTF?)

[davidbepo]

Such idiotic statements as this cause the entire domain of logic and evidence to break. One of Linux Mints many problems of late had actually been falling behind on development and non-breaking development at that from their decisions to move away from Ubuntu as a base and their refusal to include Snapd and then trying to make their own App Store and now trying to recreate the app wheel itself by duplicating Gnome apps. Linux Mint used to mean “out of the box it just works Linux”. No more.

Linux Mint now means “ Hey…look! I have a foot. Let me shoot it!”

leaving aside the sheer amount of stupidity in the comment in general, how is that a response to my claim in any way?

[DMJC]

Gnome is a bad fit for people running 2x 30" Monitors at 5120x1600. It just is. The Linux desktop has always lacked applications. It's frustrating that the obsession with reinventing the wheel every few years has come at the expense of application development. Wayland is a necessary change especially for eGPU owners, so was network-manager. Pipewire has been annoying but it looks like we've finally gotten there. The desktop UI did not need to be changed to support any of these technologies. The breakage and sheer pain of the move to Wayland has been incredible. The issues with GNOME vs MATE/XFCE/Cinnamon are more about the GTK2-3 transition and paying off the technical debt of delaying the migration. This is the price of inaction on moving from GTK2 to GTK3. GTK3 is Wayland compatible. I've developed my software for GTK2, GTK3 and GTK4. If they added traditional menus (GTKMenu Functions) back to GTK4 along with tray icons, adoption would be almost universal (and it would be rapid). But by removing those things they have broken the way MATE/XFCE/Cinnamon desktops worked. This basically guarantees that outside of GNOME GTK4 won't be adopted..

[Magissia]

And again more crappy decisions from Clem and others in the Linux Mint management!
A distro that does absolutely everything, except what it should do, like embracing either KDE Plasma or Gnome and polish that experience, it will never be a good distro and it will never be a distro that I will recommend to anyone!
As for Xcrapps, who the fuck uses that (outstide of Linux Mint)?
Are all Linux Mint developers suffering from the NIH syndrome?
Glad that I abandoned Linux Mint a long time ago!

I'm pretty happy with Cinnamon and XApps, I use them on Arch and Debian.

[Magissia]

It actually is. If GNOME wants to go out of their way to not play ball with The Others then The Others can go play ball elsewhere with people who behave in a respectable manner. It really doesn't help that the GNOME Organization lets their immature developers get away with calling people stupid incel virgins. The GNOME Organization has become more toxic than the Phoronix Forums. It's no surprise that so many have been walking away from GNOME as of late.

The forums are okay... GNOME, League of Legends... here you have real toxicity