The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:
- Improve the current state of accessibility
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
- Encrypt user home directories individually
- Modernize secrets storage
- Increase the range and quality of hardware support
- Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
- Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
- Consolidate and improve platform components
Great news! Maybe now they’ll spare a day of work to get desktop icons going again. No more funding excuses for the fanboys now.
Why would you want desktop icons? I mean I get it, there were quite popular back in the day, but I don’t see how a big junky place of a desktop has any benefit
Shooting yourself in the foot to dab on the people trying to convert to linux
Also forcing people to go KDE to be again disappointed because their design is bad.
I really like Gnome but requiring extensions to work properly is bad design imo.
For example my moms laptop runs Gnome and she doesn’t need much except 3 basic features: a dock, desktop & tray icons. Tray icons are necessary because Nextcloud relies on them to show the sync status, desktop icons are great to have temporary files easily accessible for a presentation.
In my opinion the most frustrating decision of Gnime is to not allow making the “dash” permanently visible, in other words, a dock. I’d argue it’s even an accessibility option because it’s easier to click on something visible than having to open the overview.
It’s frustrating since Gnome is an almost perfect desktop for anyone who wants a simple, working desktop.
I use Gnome without extensions, it’s great. IMO Microsoft didn’t invent the perfect UX paradigm back in the early 90s. People use a task bar and start menu because they’re used to it, not because it’s better IMO.
I’m glad Gnome had the balls to do away with tradition and go with something different. It’s led to a much better workflow IMO.
For the 1000th time, those extensions aren’t even close to what something really native would offer. They fail in some circumstances like drag and drop to certain plains and behave inconsistently.
GNOME Extensions actually run in the gnome-shell process itself and can do most things that a builtin solution could offer.
They fail in some circumstances […] and behave inconsistently
That proves why they shouldn’t be part of GNOME Shell themselves. Offloading some (debatable) functionality to extensions helps keeping the core components reliable and maintainable.
Side note: there is also a DING implementation with supposedly better DnD support: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5263/gtk4-desktop-icons-ng-ding/
No amount of funding will make native desktop icon happen if the devs simply don’t want to implement then.
Cool. Now how about image thumbnail in the file picker. I mean seriously…
My understanding is it’s 13 years or so of requests, and still nothing. Something so incredibly basic, and required.
Btw, why is filepicker a toolkit thing and not something the user can choose or switch out?
If the program uses xdg-desktop-portal, the file picker isn’t provided by the toolkit but by your desktop / portal implementation.
Oh, good. Gnome gets more money.
I mean… yeah?
A major GPL software stack used by major Linux distributions getting more money to invest in accessibility tooling seems like a “good thing”.
and optimally performant DE
Except it’s the worst DE in terms of performance. Using KDE instead of Gnome made a big difference in my weaker laptop.
GNOME is the best performing modern DE outside of lightweight nice DEs.
This is straight up not true, GNOME is a memory hog and uses almost twice as much as KDE. I’m idling ~4% CPU usage on an i5 7300HQ, which is just barely better than yours. There’s a reason the Steam Deck opted to use KDE and not Gnome.
KDE is an absolute mess and is a hobbyist DE in comparison to the professional GNOME.
As someone who used gnome for two years, hell no. Gnome is trying too hard to be minimalist and is lacking basic features that you have to use extensions for. Extensions which, by the way, break each update and have their own bugs. I also had to use gnome tweaks for basic crap like disabling mouse acceleration. KDE is a much more polished experience for people who actually use computers, but gnome is okay if you’re just looking for something simple that looks smooth.
This money would have been far better given to KDE instead of the assholes at Gnome.
I am aware of the difference in philosophy taken by both Gnome and KDE, but would you mind elaborating on the ‘assholes’ bit?
- Calling the Arch Wiki contributor’s clowns
- The public tantrum with System76 because of the poor attitudes on the part of the Gnome project
- The Gnome way: stop making shell extensions and contribute to the Shell or get fucked.
- The overall attitude of the devs regarding user opinions, resulting in the plethora of extensions available, and the tone deaf attitude regarding all of them.
- The world must be perfect before we do jack shit about fractional scaling, despite people moving to HiDPI/4K monitors.
Trundle on over to KDE-land, and you find a very different tone. They’re not too proud to adopt paradigms that conflicted with core design principles if they’re widely beloved (look at Overview as a prime example). Fractional scaling is miles ahead of Gnome in functionality and performance impact, solved in both X11 and elegantly in Wayland so that xwayland apps have a hook to get correct DPI info without looking blurry. The deep customizations available have negated the need for much of their session modifications, as they rapidly adopt good ideas (floating panels anyone? Ahh yes, Plasma has got you).
They’re also extremely nimble when it comes to changing course on their backend. They went from having a buggy Wayland session to having the most stable one by far. They also take criticism far better, either taking it in stride or recognizing then they did something off-base.
Gnome can go to hell, and fuck the stupid ass GTK which is objectively inferior to QT. Redhat can nibble on my shit too for all I care.
How so? I miss the old gnome, but I have accepted gnome 3 for what it is. Kde was quite interesting for me back in 2012, but it didn’t perform well with my old setup. What’s new with kde? Id like to give it a try, but I’m too old to break my SO by having both gnome and kde on it.
The KDE guys have been on fire for the past two years. Between their theming, color selection, and session handling they’ve come a long ways. They’ve also implemented some gnome-only features such as the overview, albeit in a very optional way. As opposed to eliminating a panel and forcing you to use the overview to see what applications or windows you have open, or available to launch, it’s just a window management tool instead of a UX paradigm.
Their wayland session is stable and also deals with xwayland in a very different way. If you set a custom scaling factor, the QT apps and GTK apps are talked to in a way that makes the same scaling factor consistent across all your applications, even under a wayland session with xwayland. The Gnome devs hand-wring about how the world has to be perfect before implementing an idea, where the KDE devs try something and then iterate if it’s successful.
