Affan's Blog

WARNING: RANT AHEAD!

After my first rant about Snap, now is the time for me to shit on GNOME. Most people might think GNOME is a nice desktop environment, that’s why Ubuntu is using it for default. That is true in most cases, but there is the other side to it that not widely known. A lot of people pissed off by GNOME because GNOME has this toxic environment where the developer is either “We gonna remove this useful feature for no reason” or “Not a bug, that’s a feature! so I won’t fix it”. Today I want to talk about this.

They Hate Certain Workflows And Enforce Everyone To Follow Them

The article just came in. “GNOME team is removing a basic feature from Nautilus that many people still use”. The feature they were talking about is launching executable from nautilus. Basically, you can’t double click executable or AppImages. Now you are forced to use terminal to open it. Sure “But a lot of people use terminal to open executables” but a lot of people is not everyone. This is punishing people for going to specific workflow.

Why Should You Care?

You ignore this because you are not the victim. I am not the victim either, but I know that: “If a changes break the workflow, then it is a total user experience design failure”. What would you feel if GNOME team decide to disable file icons because the think it is useless? What would you feel if GNOME team decide to disable show hidden files because they think user shouldn’t be able to view it?

I am sure you would be mad. Why the heck GNOME team get to decide that? My workflow is my workflow and they shouldn’t put their dirty hands into it.

This is the reason why it matters. GNOME is known to be selfish bastard and won’t listen to people. It seems like they removing feature to make it sleek and simple like Micro$oft Window$ but their design decision is a total failure and nothing took off.

Minimize/Maximize Button Is Disabled

Again, small changes that makes several distros out there disable the minimize button. But now they assume that Nobody use this button! If anyone still do, they shall suffer and must follow the way I want to! Ugh, I got triggered by writing that. Why would they disable such feature that everybody use?

Some GNOME fanboy said “I really do not need to minimise windows, and for that one time that is useful I can just use Super+H”. Sure you don’t need to, kiddo. But just because you don’t need it doesn’t mean everyone don’t need it. Just because you don’t need it mean GNOME has to disable it! Just let it be! If anyone want to use it then great, if don’t then no problem just ignore it. This is again, breaking the workflow and enforcing their own workflow down to people’s throat.

Summary

GNOME 3 is a total disaster because it broke user experience.

The biggest thing any program can do is not the technical details of the program itself; it’s how useful the program is to users.
So any time any program (like the kernel or any other project), breaks the user experience, to me, that’s the absolute worst failure that a software project can make.
– Linus Torvalds