The GNOME Shell user interface has mostly seen minor refinements and quality of life updates in recent cycles, but on the design side we’ve explored a lot of longer-term things we’d like to do. Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding).
While each of these ideas may require additional discussion, prototyping, and testing, we (the design team) have collected them all together here to share our longer-term vision and to give each idea more visibility.
↫ Tobias Bernard on the GNOME blog
There’s quite a few good ideas in there, with most of them already being available in the form of various extensions. I’m not entirely sure if I’m a huge fan of copying Android and iOS by moving notifications into the quick settings dropdown thing, but it’s not like having them in the clock/calendar dropdown thing is any better. I only use notifications as they arrive and never look at the place where they end up – that’s a mobile thing for me – so I don’t think I’ll really care either way.
Things like editable quick settings, transparent top bar on certain backgrounds, the improved window drag and drop in the Exposé view, the alt+tab experiments, and some of the others do seem quite interesting though, and anything that reduces the number of GNOME extensions I need to install and keep updated gets a big thumbs up from me.
If you wish to work on any of these suggestions, working on GNOME Shell has gotten a lot easier recently.
In the past, GNOME Shell was significantly harder to contribute to and test than apps since you needed to use tools like jhbuild. This has changed in the past year: You can now easily build and test your branch in a nested session from Builder using Mutter Devkit. If you use GNOME OS, you can even build a sysext to install your branch on your host system. This allows daily driving experimental branches easily, which is super helpful for evaluating changes to everyday workflows.
↫ Tobias Bernard on the GNOME blog
That’s quite neat.
Well, I’d suppose that the new changes couldn’t make anything worse, but I’ve watched the ‘progress’ of Gnome over too many years. I know that, faced with the statement that ‘it couldn’t be worse’, Gnome developers will reply ‘hold my beer’. They will continue to demonstrate actual hostility to their users by providing a counterintuitive interface that is utterly resistant to customization, and cannot comfortably be used for productive work. I genuinely tried to get to like it, and to use it, the project released such pretty public statements, but it’s just awful.
It’s by far the most popular Linux desktop. Something about your comment just doesn’t add up.
>It’s by far the most popular Linux desktop.
Is it though? There’s no statistics. If it is, that’s surely because of Ubuntu, but Ubuntu doesn’t even come with vanilla GNOME but a heavily improved GNOME with a bunch of extensions preinstalled and tweaks made. Fedora, the other big GNOME distro, now treats KDE on equal footing, and my subjective impression from browsing r/fedora is that KDE and GNOME are mentioned the same number of times. Arch publishes package statistics and it clearly shows that KDE is more popular than GNOME for Arch users. OpenSUSE stopped publishing data, but the end of 2023 survey showed that about 2/3 of their users used KDE.
The most popular distro is now steamos, by far. but i get the jist of it.
It’s the most popular because they became the default with GNOME 2, and they’ve been living off that since then.
I made the same observation. I avoid it like the plague meets covid.
I have been using it, but for periods when I need windows only software, for a decade and find I barely notice Gnome Shell because I am too busy getting work done instead of the constant buggering around that other DE’s seem to provoke / require.
Maybe you just need something productive to do to take your mind of Gnome Shell.
I really wished we could stop using those rather blunt generalization. You may not like it and that is fine with everyone. Full stop.
I do actually like Gnome (though I prefer mixing the Gnome Applications into my XFCE desktop) and I have heavily themed and customized it (Tokyo and Night Moon, less rounded corners). For years. And I do love it and I run a business on it (various machines at various places).
Maybe its just a skill issue or something mental? Think about it.
https://stopthemingmy.app/
This comes from the GNOME devs. They’re also quite hostile to downstream.
Now subjectively:GNOME, same as MacOS, always really got in the way of me doing stuff on my computer.
This is completely fine. You don’t need to like Gnome and you are entitled to have your own taste and opinion.
I just don’t see the point when anyone generalizes across all users and also talks down the devs of open software, which has been provided for free.
Example: I think KDE is technically superior and a great project. Just not my cup of tea and this a matter of taste, hard to argue about.
I’m saying the point about GNOME’s general hostility is valid.
I know i am in a minority here but I like the visual workflow theyre going for. I dislike a lot of the unnecesary cruft around most DEs, like icons on a desktop that is replaced by the launcher, but ill agree the notifications dont really in the quick settings panel in a desktop model. I have some ideas I’d like to play with and made an extension at one point but its also very hard to get onto the design team in a way where the take suggestions seriously. They have a habit of just ignoring some of the ideas on their issue tracker
I’m right there with you. There are a lot of Gnome 3/4 changes I haven’t liked, but what I have liked is GNOME saying “Linux has a lot of DE options, and so we’ll be the _best_ DE for some users rather than an OK DE for _all_ users.”
What is wild to me is that GNOME is the only DE that gets criticized for doing that. I have never seen anyone take XFCE to task for (for instance) not having desktop animations, or seen anyone go after IceWM or WindowMaker for not implementing compositing. In those cases we just grant that it’s OK for a Linux DE not to implement basic features if the developers decide those features do not serve the DE’s intended audience, or decide that those features cause too many problems to be worth supporting.
But when GNOME makes _the same kind of decision_, like “we’re not going to support widget theming because it e.g. breaks documentation and accessibility, and our users want those things, and because maintaining theming is a ton of work that we’d rather not do,” we act like they pooped in the jacuzzi.
We are living in a world of feelings and opinions, not any longer in a world of skills, facts and merits. People try to forget their own small miserable life by spilling hate on others, who do better. And people are scared to death on new things.
I love theming myself but actually do understand where their sentiment is coming from: Nobody will tell me what to do unless its a paying customer. Same as you, I do respect that stance even when contrair my own interest,
Because when they do that they impact things like GTK, which is used outside of the GNOME project. XFCE changes only matter to XFCE users.
GNOME does some things well, others not. The same applies to KDE and all the others…
My work Linux laptop has GNOME but on my personal laptop I use KDE. Honestly? GNOME got way better than it used to be but keeps some of its annoyances. KDE remains great, but also keeps its annoyances.
It’s all a matter of taste and the great thing about Linux/BSD/etc is that you can just switch if you don’t like what you have and try something new. I honestly love openbox. It lets me run programs and that’s it. But I caved to some of the ease-of-life features that KDE has.
And of course sometimes developers will do changes we don’t like but, well, there’s always Windows there for us to remind how messy things can get.