It's 2023, but GNOME is still trying to reinvent the wheel

Wednesday, 02 August 2023 10:00

It's 2023, but GNOME is still trying to reinvent the wheel Featured

By Sam Varghese

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

The GNOME Desktop project, which develops one of the two main user interfaces for Linux, is once again trying to reinvent the wheel, this time to create a new window management system.

Tobias Bernard, a designer who works with Purism, the company that sells the Librem 5 free software phone among other products, outlined in a blog post the way in which windows could be organised by the system, rather than have the user organised things they way she/he liked.

The post appeared on the American news aggregation site Slashdot a few days back, and the first few comments were not exactly complimentary.

"The reason window management is left to users is that we know where we want them," wrote one commenter. "I don't want 'smart' systems guessing where I want them and I don't want them moving around.

A second commenter said, sarcastically, " You don't understand... these devs know that they are clever and know that they are right about the window position [due to] the clever code generated, regardless of what you claim."

And a third had this to say: "Yes. Again. That's what I thought as soon as I read 'Mosaic will be the default'. Because the app knows better than you. No matter what you're up to do, how many displays you've got or what size they are, the app will decide. Just what made GNOME3 so great..."

Bernard wrote: "The key point we [meaning the design team] keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don’t want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn’t solve the problems the majority of people face.

"To do this we landed on a number of high level ideas: Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed; Make use of workspaces as a fully integrated part of the workflow; and Richer metadata from apps to allow for better integration.

"Our current concept imagines windows having three potential layout states: "Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating; Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge; and Floating, the classic stacked windows model."

There's plenty more, which you can read at this link, gentle reader.

The last time I commented on changes made to GNOME apps was in 2014 when changes were made to gEdit, an editor that I was using at the time, even though I was not using either GNOME or KDE [the latter is the other main desktop environment for Linux users].

As I pointed out at the time, "The GNOME Desktop project often gets a lot of flak for its design decisions, many of which turn perfectly good, usable applications into unusable crud." This windows management business looks to be heading in that direction.

When KDE was started, the people behind it had just one objective: to create a desktop that had all the functionality of Microsoft's Windows so that people could move over to Linux.

GNOME was started in 1999 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero at a time when KDE had already taken off. It was a needless waste of developer talent and time which could easily have been devoted to KDE.

But much was made of the fact that KDE at the time was using QT, a non-free library — which was later released under an open-source licence — and GNOME was started.

De Icaza, who has always been fascinated by Microsoft, worked with the company for a few years – even though he once claimed to be a free software fan. He left Redmond last year.

Another comment embodied the reaction: "Gnome devs are totally f*****, and I'm old enough to remember how they tried to cram 'The Spatial Way' down our throats. Never again. They lost all my trust and reinforced that decision a dozen times over by now.

"They haven't gotten any less arrogant since then. Their bug reports are often 'we removed because we personally don't use that feature, and neither should you. Closed and marked as Working As Designed. Patches not accepted. Thread locked because y'all can't behave'.

"'The Spatial Way' was their genius idea to make the default window management scheme modal, like old Windows 3.11 days: you'd double-click a folder in the file explorer and it'd open a new window, not change the current window ('explorer style').

"You'd then have to close the previous window or hold down control when double-clicking. They had a giant list of reasons why disliking this was actually stupid and you were a legacy user if you preferred it that way."

Doesn't sound like a satisfied user, not from my reading anyway.

One wonders: when will GNOME developers settle down to meeting the needs of users, rather than living with their heads in the clouds?

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