Introducing GNOME 46, "Kathmandu"

https://release.gnome.org/46/

by whalesalad • 2 years ago

117 119 2 years ago

release.gnome.org

dvirsky• 2 years ago

I haven't used Linux as a desktop in over 2 years, and I really miss Gnome.

zeta0134• 2 years ago

Is it at all possible to convince gnome-styled file pickers to put the "Open" and "Cancel" buttons on the bottom of the window? It's really jarring when working alongside other applications that either implement their own native file pickers or use a different widget toolkit. Gnome seems to be the only DE really pushing this style, and it's *really* hard to find the relevant settings. Maybe I don't know the implementation-specific keyword to help with the hunt?

whalesalad4• 2 years ago

This is why I stick to KDE. I like a lot of the aesthetic elements of GNOME, and some of their apps are pretty good, but I dislike the pseudo-macos simplicity that you mention. It's like an attempt to be more like mac, without the good parts of mac.

Intralexical4• 2 years ago

Not needing to rely on hacked-together and essentially unsupported extensions for core functionality that breaks every other update is a nice plus too.

Besides, the aesthetics and workflow are portable from GNOME to KDE with some configuration (though not the other way around).

ragnese6• 2 years ago

In KDE apps, can you move where the Cancel and Open buttons are in file dialogs?

If not, then your comment is a non sequitur.

infinityplus1• 2 years ago

The improvements seem extensive. Nice to see progress happening.

blueflow6• 2 years ago

There is no section for bugfixes?

softirq5• 2 years ago

GNOME has come a long way, but its stubborn insistence on not having a desktop with a real application launcher remains a huge usability misstep. GNOME's marketshare is the desktop, and so the initial value proposition of a hybrid UI seems very much wishful thinking, while the keyboard based workflows it seems to want to enable are better served by tiling WM such as Sway, and do not make sense for the "default" WM that is picked up by casual converts who are used to a point and click system. Overall it's just a confusing mess for new users, which Canonical/System76 rationally get rid of (which is probably a majority of the GNOME user base).

So why does GNOME continue down this path. Is it a fear of being "just like everyone else" by using a tried and true dock/application bar? Is it a desire to not be the front running WM and be more "niche" to power users? I still don't really understand their decision making process.

pjmlp6• 2 years ago

Two things that made me switch to XFCE, JavaScript based extensions affecting performance, complete refusal to add back support for Windows shading (roll up).

panick21_2• 2 years ago

That's why System76 is writting extensions in Rust and runs them in seperate processes.

pmarreck3• 2 years ago

which extensions are js-based?

there's no gnome extension to do roll-up windows?

stonogo• 2 years ago

It took me a while to figure out what you mean by "real application launcher" but I think you mean that hitting the top left corner menu (or the Windows key) launches the fullscreen window overview plus launcher and that's not enough for you? I guess the "Dash to Dock" extension is what you're after but I can't say I've ever missed it. I don't really use the keyboard for it, but every time I use a non-GNOME system I badly miss the ability to just click in the corner to manage programs, whether switching between them or launching new ones. If GNOME got rid of this I would probably stop using GNOME.

whalesalad4• 2 years ago

the app launcher really only works on a laptop with gestures. pain in the butt with a mouse, especially on a large display.

tadfisher• 2 years ago

remains a huge usability misstep

Evidence? The Gnome project has performed UX studies[0] to validate their design, and has continually made changes in response (some of which I disagree with, FWIW).

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Studies

hobo_mark• 2 years ago

We just deployed RHEL9 and had to quickly revert gnome because users (and me!) had no effing idea how to use it.

For instance, no button to minimize and maximize a window, no taskbar to switch between windows, what the actual...

blueflow6• 2 years ago

It is infuriating that they used systematic approaches to UX and still came up with the current thing. I said it before, too many implicit gestures that are not discoverable until you google for it.

Last time i tried GNOME was last week and gave up after a day.

int_19h4• 2 years ago

In my career, I witnessed several software UX changes that elicited massively negative user feedback once released - and every single one of those was backed by a UX study. It seems that if you have really strong opinions about what you want your software to look like, engineering UX studies around that is not difficult.

softirq5• 2 years ago

You just linked to studies that directly support my point:

"On the other hand, new users generally got up to speed more quickly with Endless OS, often due to its similarity to Windows. Many of these testers found the bottom panel to be an easy way to switch applications. They also made use of the minimize button. In comparison, both GNOME 3.38 and the prototype generally took more adjustment for these users.

“I really liked that it’s similar to the Windows display that I have.” —Comment on Endless OS by a non-GNOME user"

Longhanks• 2 years ago

Evidence? No other somewhat popular desktop rejects "core desktop ideas" the way gnome does. Both windows and Mac have desktop icons, tray icons, a task bar/dock, minimize and maximize buttons...

cm_silva• 2 years ago

I know it's not perfect but I use the 'dash to panel' extension

johnny22• 2 years ago

I would assume that it's because there are more people like me who use gnome. I kept using gnome 3 from gnome 2 because gnome 3 worked the way I was already using gnome 2.

I tried using tiling window managers, but they didn't give me the niceties of the out of the box gnome experience. I do have one extension for topicons. (sometimes I use gsconnect, but not recently) I don't need anything else.

addicted2• 2 years ago

Gnome is a DE designed to be used by distributions.

Gnome doesn’t have an opinion on a desktop application launcher because it expects the distribution to add it.

The only distributions which don’t are GnomeOS which is intended for developing Gnome, and Fedora, which is intended to be a bleeding edge distribution to mass release stuff before it’s included in RHEL.

Turns out, however, that a lot of people actually like the default Gnome look and so are happy with using Fedora.

But in practice this isn’t an issue for anyone because their distribution will come with an application launcher.

And even better you can completely change and/or add an application launcher because they are implemented through extensions.

softirq5• 2 years ago

Every DE is designed to be used in a distribution. I think what you are trying to say is that GNOME is designed to be "finished" by the distribution, which is a completely made up idea. Show me where GNOME says you need to finish the DE yourself during integration. GNOME is designed as a complete DE, the reason Canonical/System76 change it is because it's poorly designed for new users/casuals, which is their user base.

ragnese6• 2 years ago

Gnome is a DE designed to be used by distributions. Gnome doesn’t have an opinion on a desktop application launcher because it expects the distribution to add it.

I don't think this is true at all. Where have you read this? If GNOME intended for distributions to customize it, I can't imagine why they'd keep harping on about how custom theming is awful. See: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a..., and https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...

I'm honestly surprised they still support adding extensions via extensions.gnome.org.

petepete• 2 years ago

So why does GNOME continue down this path.

Because it's great and everyone apart from a tiny but incredibly vocal minority get on just fine with it.

iknowstuff2• 2 years ago

Yeah! GNOME is wonderful. I can’t with the neckbeards.

greyw2• 2 years ago

GNOME seems to be least buggy DE and gets out of my way when doing things. A nice bonus is that it also looks and feels good.

I used to use plasma but it was just too buggy for me. Just today a random user realized that installing a theme from the built-in theme selection thingy deleted all his data...

I have some hope for cosmic DE as it seems like they try to emulate GNOME's workflow with some twists.

yoyohello135• 2 years ago

All these comments just want Gnome to be like every other DE in existence. MF'er leave my preferred DE alone, go use KDE if you want a traditional DE.

olliej• 2 years ago

Last time I tried gnome it was in an Ubuntu install I think which had a weird launcher that imo didn’t work particularly well.

I’m not sure what you are meaning by a launcher here - to me there’s a fairly reasonable ambiguity about what is meant. On windows people still seem to use shortcuts on the desktop as a primary launcher (especially given the current start menu abomination, sheesh talk about destroying one of the most effective bits of UI MS ever produced), on Mac I actually mostly use spotlight (though that usage is subject to the “secret chord” problem), but most normal users use the dock for common apps and the applications folder for everything else.

I keep meaning to retry kde at some point but I’m waiting for more asahi work to support my desktop (they are reasonable to focus on the laptops but my laptop is my work machine so less willing to surrender disk space when llvm builds already consume half a TB).

It’s weird to me that back when I was a primarily Linux user gnome was The(tm) commercial Linux desktop and kde was the clunky also-ran, I assumed the gnome was destined to win in the long term due to gtk APIs, commercial support, and at the time seemingly more polish and completeness. I guess things can change given a decade or so of development :D

jacooper• 2 years ago

Because not everyone likes a classic app launcher? I like how reliable gnome's search is, it replaces the start menu.

I just click super, see my workspaces, all of my running apps and can just directly start typing and find the app I'm looking for.

Why would I ever need a start menu? It's soo good that KDE added something similar recently.

webkike• 2 years ago

Gnome has a built in extension called “Applications Menu” that is just that.

I don’t really use it that much. I find opening search and typing what I want much faster. Or I use the dock

yoyohello135• 2 years ago

I’m not sure what you mean by application launcher. Is Super not enough?

Super, type 2 or 3 letters of the program I want, enter. Works really well for me.

wwarek• 2 years ago

Right? Also much faster than, I guess, scrolling with mouse through some menus

colanderman7• 2 years ago

Vocally seconding this. I wanted to not like Gnome (longtime wmi/wmii/i3 user) but its application launcher (and actually everything to do with the super/three-finger swipe/hot corner system) is superb. I'm amazed how equally highly usable it is via keyboard, mouse, and touch.

wmf• 2 years ago

That's completely undiscoverable.

foresto4• 2 years ago

Super, type 2 or 3 letters of the program I want, enter. Works really well for me.

I don't use GNOME and can't speak for softirq, but what you're describing sounds to me like a command line interface. I can imagine two problems with it:

- Ergonomics. People who usually keep a hand on the mouse would have to move to the keyboard whenever they launch an app, and then move back again. Not a showstopper, but definitely a time waster. (And perhaps just as annoying to some people as it is to me when no keyboard shortcuts are available for common actions.)

- Discoverability. If someone knows what they want to do but doesn't know (or forgot) the names of the apps that can do it, they're left to type in guesses until they find something that works out. Also, if they just want to browse the apps that came preinstalled on their system, an application launcher provides, while a command line interface does not.

softirq5• 2 years ago

No it's not, for several reasons:

1. Average users primarily use mouse based workflows.

2. Super isn't discoverable.

3. It confused users coming from other DEs.

4. It actually takes more keypresses than clicking a favorited app on a dock that is always available.

Overall it's less discoverable, less efficient, and not baked into the mind of computer users who are coming from almost any other bistro.

Klonoar• 2 years ago

Personal opinion but to me this is the best way of moving around a computer - to be point where it’s all I do in macOS as well. Can’t remember the last time I saw a dock there.

Intralexical4• 2 years ago

Super, type 2 or 3 letters of the program I want, enter. Works really well for me.

You've just described basically every modern desktop user interface. Windows Start Menu ("Windows Key"), Cinnamon menu, KDE defaults, XFCE (w/ Whisker Menu), etc. all support the [Super]→[Start typing]→[Enter] launch workflow.

SkyMarshal2• 2 years ago

Same. Every OS I use always make sure it has this kind of simple app launcher. Super key -> search field -> autocomplete -> enter -> app starts. What more do you need? Most OS's have a version built-in nowadays. Seems like a solved problem.

mdasen• 2 years ago

I've been enjoying Budgie for this reason. It feels like a "normal" desktop experience with a taskbar at the bottom, something like a start-menu with the search functionality we're used to, and without anything really trying to be fancy or transparent. It just feels "regular".

The criticism some people have of Budgie is that it feels like a customized version of GNOME rather than its own thing - but that's what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for something to ditch the good parts of GNOME. I'm looking for something that will just give me a regular desktop where things feel like what macOS or Windows have been offering for a couple decades.

VyseofArcadia• 2 years ago

Out of curiosity, why Budgie over XFCE, MATE, or LXDE? All of those are pretty much just a "normal" desktop experience with a taskbar, something like a start menu with search, or anything trying to be fancy or transparent.

Nothing against Budgie, I'm just curious what made it stand out for you.

mushufasa• 2 years ago

Not sure how much this is still true, but as I recall, GNOME used to have a 'start' launcher like Windows, and removed it because of a lawsuit (gates/ballmer era Microsoft). That was the big motivation for gnome 2 to 3, and also why canonical split off unity for a while

ragnese6• 2 years ago

while the keyboard based workflows it seems to want to enable are better served by tiling WM such as Sway

This is where I think your analysis starts to break down. Tiling and keyboard-oriented are almost orthogonal. There's no a priori reason that a tiling WM has to be keyboard-oriented, nor that floating WMs are inherently less accommodating to keyboard-oriented workflows. As an anecdote, way back in my youth, I had all kinds of keyboard shortcuts for resizing and moving windows by different amounts in my Openbox WM setups. Likewise, I really tried to like the popular tiling WMs (i3, xmonad, AwesomeWM), but I eventually realized that I can't literally be focusing on content from multiple windows simultaneously, and it makes way more sense for me to size and position each window so that I can optimize my interactions with that one when I am focusing on it.

do not make sense for the "default" WM that is picked up by casual converts who are used to a point and click system. Overall it's just a confusing mess for new users, which Canonical/System76 rationally get rid of (which is probably a majority of the GNOME user base).

Let's be real, though. The year of Linux On The Desktop is not coming--hell, The Desktop is pretty much dying altogether. So, I really don't care if we optimize for the "casual computer user" who just happens to stumble into a chair in front of a Linux desktop, because that person doesn't exist. It may sound selfish, but I rather they optimize for users who already exist.

GNOME has come a long way, but its stubborn insistence on not having a desktop with a real application launcher remains a huge usability misstep. [...] So why does GNOME continue down this path. Is it a fear of being "just like everyone else" by using a tried and true dock/application bar?

GNOME is actually fairly close to macOS in this regard. Yes, macOS has a dock with an application launcher, but if I didn't already know what the application launcher icon looks like, I'd have no idea how to get to its application launcher: the icon I'm looking at right now on my work Mac is a square icon with a 3x3 grid of colored squares inside it--what the hell does that mean? Is it a color picker app? Some kind of Tetris or Candy Crush game?

GNOME's top-left stupid oval button is equally bad, but not worse, than macOS's UX discoverability, IMO.

And I have to wonder how truly "intuitive" the Windows situation is, either. The old Windows versions used to have the word "Start" on the button, which at least gives some kind of hint that my computing journey "begins" there. I think since Vista or 7, it's basically just been the Windows icon. I suspect it's more intuitive than the macOS or GNOME analogs, but probably only a tiny bit if I were to sit someone down who hasn't used a Windows PC in their life.

nullifidian• 2 years ago

Just an anecdote: I'm currently patching nautilus to move ellipsisation of long filenames in the list view mode from center to right aligned, because of course there is no option for it, but technical books tend to have several authors, long names, and with Gnome's default center ellipsisation I can only see the author list and the year of a book.

Another pet peeve of mine is the lack of type ahead. The relatively recent type ahead efforts were blocked (or stalled) by "design considerations" https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/issues/1... As the result Gnome Files is very unpleasant to use for deep trees with thousands of files in every directory on spinning media (zfs). The standard search feature also destroys context, i.e. being able to see the files filtered out by the query.

This release is also consecutively the third time they moved the list of ongoing file operations -- from top right, to top left, to bottom left. With all the obsession about "not confusing users" that the Gnome's leading figures declare the constant change in the UX should be one of the primary sources of the actual confusion users experience.

rstat12• 2 years ago

One of many annoyances I have with GNOME, is that they still insist on forcing their slow search crap, instead of doing the sensible thing (that literally everyone else does) and give type-ahead search.

bloopernova• 2 years ago

I just want Miller Columns like macOS Finder. Either Gnome or KDE, that view always feels "right" to me.

hollandheese• 2 years ago

Pantheon Files has them. Can fit in well enough as a Nautilus replacement.

awill• 2 years ago

Gnome breaking compatibility of extensions on EVERY single release means I hate relying on extensions for anything important.

panick21_2• 2 years ago

Gnome breaking all of System76 Cosmic extentions resulted in them saying "We rather make our own desktop instead of having to rework everything all the time".

benrutter2• 2 years ago

Urgh yes! As far as I understand this is all because extensions have to opt in and say "yes this works with the new gnome" or else it won't run so even if everything actually dies run fine, it won't work until an update is patched.

I do understand the gnome team wanting to guarantee a good user experience with extensions, but I can't help but think the damage caused by breaking every extension on every release is worse than some of them working unpredictably.

lambdanil• 2 years ago

The "workaround" I have found for this is to use a slow-updating, non-rolling distro; in my case it's Debian.

svara• 2 years ago

I'm sure this year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop.

pmarreck3• 2 years ago

NixOS finally convinced me to switch, since the declarative config and rollback functionality meant I went from accidentally bricking (or at minimum "mysteriously unstabling") each previous Linux distro I tried at least once a year (NixOS basically gives you built-in safety belts to counter all the untested possible Linux configurations) to being able to mess with configs to my hearts' content with aplomb (since backing out is trivial and can be done in GRUB). It really feels like "Linux, unleashed" and like I've made the "final distro hop." There is a feeling of "Yep, this is it!" I have the same fearless feeling to alter configs that I have in macOS, except with, you know, more open-source and less walled-garden...

Plus, I can finally boot off ZFS and a mirrored boot drive with no worries thanks to an excellently written guide and first-class ZFS support (just pick the latest ZFS-compatible kernel via a special config that automatically does this for you!)

The negative of course is that Nix/NixOS have a learning curve. Once you grok it, though, you will literally want to install it on ALL your machines. It has eliminated so many headaches (assuming you can find the right option to tweak).

pjmlp6• 2 years ago

It has been for me for a while now, it comes packaged on a desktop VM like VMWare Workstation, Virtual Box, and now WSL.

The only I still bother are classical desktop like towers and NUCs, on laptops I have less headaches with a VM.

Then for everything else, my distributions are Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux and whatever Sony decided to use on their Blue Ray players.

maztaim• 2 years ago

I am seriously considering a look at KDE 6. I've kind of settled on Gnome plus some extensions (arc menu and dash to panel) over years, but they don't really give me exactly the feel I want, and the extensions I use may or may not work the way I expect them to at the time Gnome releases.

Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made.

I've tried i3/sway and hyperland recently. The problem is they don't work well with all the applications I need to support (zoom, slack). Gnome typically "just works" and is why I wind up continuing to use it.

foresto4• 2 years ago

You might want to wait a little while, or look at 5 instead, because Plasma 6 was only just released and is still shaking out early bugs.

Every time I look at the release notes for Gnome, I continually find myself either not excited or disappointed in different decisions, additions and removals that were made.

This extends into the toolkit as well. I was happily using XFCE until it adopted Gtk 3, at which point it quickly went downhill. The GNOME maintainers' insistence on designs that I find frustrating, the frequent removal of common desktop features that I use, and the general fragility imposed on applications that surfaces whenever the toolkit gets minor updates, all conspired to drive me away.

It took some time and effort to migrate to KDE Plasma, but it was worth it. I'm pretty happy with my desktop again.

juujian• 2 years ago

The KDE 6 Changes are mostly under the hood, so you don't lose a lot in terms of user experience either way.

jwells89• 2 years ago

GNOME is somewhat frustrating to me because there’s a number of things that I feel it gets more “right” than KDE, at least for me, but there’s about as many things that it doesn’t. KDE gets a lot of things “somewhat right” but also gets more less wrong, making it maybe better overall but still not leaving me satisfied.

I appreciate that both exist free of charge as the result of a lot of time that people didn’t have to volunteer and shouldn’t be taken for granted. I’m glad both exist and continue to be maintained, but regardless, the situation leaves me much less jazzed about the Linux desktop than I’d like to be.

Window manager setups might be a solution, but they take a lot of effort to make as polished as any of the major DEs, requiring the user to hunt down daemons to get tray items and the like. They also have a strong disposition towards hyper-minimal tiling which isn’t my thing, something along the lines of openbox is probably the most minimal I’d want to go but WMs like that don’t see much fanfare.

benrutter2• 2 years ago

If you're interested in i3/sway but want something that "just works"- have you checked out Regolith?

I used to daily drive it and was a big fan- it's basically i3 + gnome for stuff like settings etc. So you get a nice simple tiling window manager, but don't have to install something new whenever you want to (eg) get Bluetooth working.

whalesalad4• 2 years ago

KDE is truly a great DE. I am still on 5.27, have not upgraded to 6 yet (Debian woes, lol) but considering all the praise I have heard - it is probably even better than the experience I have now which is solid. I am running Debian 12 with Wayland on AMD hardware. Everything "just works". I can record stuff with OBS studio, loom recording works, slack calls/screensharing works great, vscode, 1pass, spotify. I have been a macOS user since Tiger (10.4, intel transition) and have dabbled on and off with desktop Linux over the last decade but lately it is truly solid and quite polished.

My current setup: https://i.redd.it/fnwnmfzvr4pc1.png

hannofcart• 2 years ago

After spending most of a decade in i3wm, I decided to give Gnome a try again.

The most debilitating issue that I kept running into over and over again was extension memory leak.

After a restart and within a week, gnome shell process would end up using 10GB. And all guides on how to debug this seem to say: turn off extensions one at a time to see what's leaking.

Speaking to others I realised that I'm not the only one facing this.

I just threw in the towel and switched to KDE. It has been smooth sailing since.

Gnome shell desperately needs a resource monitor for extensions IMO.

iknowstuff2• 2 years ago

I wonder what percentage of users uses extensions other than distro defaults

pmarreck3• 2 years ago

I use a bunch thanks to NixOS' ease of installing them, such as the one that previews a file by hitting spacebar (which is a knock-off of the same functionality in MacOS).

pjmlp6• 2 years ago

Given that GNOME has quite a few stuff that they shift into extensions, even distro defaults make use of them.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

GNOME Tweaks has a lot of settings options that should be in the default software.

greyw2• 2 years ago

A very nice release, especially the new VRR support is awesome.

rcarmo• 2 years ago

As someone who mostly accesses their Linux desktops via RDP, I’m curious to see how good the new integrated RDP support is (all my `xorgxrdp` setups are tweaked to do sound, accelerated graphics, etc.)

acheron2• 2 years ago

More great work from the University of Bob Seger.

neilsimp1• 2 years ago

Sorry, what?

acheron2• 2 years ago

Sorry, just making low content posts. It's a punchline from an entirely unrelated Norm Macdonald joke ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBs5Al_eudc ), but I thought of it because Seger had a famous song called "Kathmandu".

betaby• 2 years ago

Gnome is the best advertisement for KDE Plasma.

sebazzz• 2 years ago

For the RDP remote login, assuming they refer to the MS RDP protocol, are they using xrdp as a backend or have they developed something themselves?

neurostimulant• 2 years ago

I think it's implemented by gnome-remote-desktop, which uses FreeRDP for RDP support.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop

firecall• 2 years ago

Please bring back Miller Columns!

NeXTSTEP had them in 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

Here are two reasons I stick with macOS:

  1) Miller Columns
  2) The Magic Mouse

Not the only two, but two seemingly unreproducible features by other desktop OS vendors and makers of peripherals! :-)

yason• 2 years ago

Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The ctrl-shift-f for a global search sounds like a generally bad idea that will conflict with a lot applications. Or maybe it doesn't impose itself on applications but only the desktop, I don't know.

But one thing I know that if I disagree with Gnome developers then I'll have a hard time working around and hacking my own way in. I've usually ended up starting to patch Gnome/Gtk components at which points I just realize that it is absolutely futile and I give up.

Gnome used to be the marvel of configurability. Around Gnome2 time there were gazillion settings and options that you could change, and even more via gsettings/gconf. Then the UI was gradually dumbed down but you could still configure most things. "Tweak" tools appeared. Now it seems I bump into an ideological obstacle left and right, and even the tweak tools won't let me change anything much besides some cosmetic properties.

Mate has some rough edges but it's pretty much the only thing that still works for a power user that wants an UI with a traditional window manager of my choice instead of whatever tiling configuration is in hype this year.

devinprater• 2 years ago

It's amazing to see the accessibility improvements listed in an actual release note. I do wish the images on the page were labeled with Alt-text though.

Introducing GNOME 46, "Kathmandu"

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