That's hilarious. Remind me, which colour represent “maximize” again? And why are half of the apps I constantly use stuck in a group together such that I have to use a different key to switch between them? And where is the handle to resize a window, anyway?
You only think osx is better designed because you're used to and therefore blind to the various papercuts that osx inflicts upon its users.
- macOS (Quartz): No, you'll need a third-party app.
- Windows (dwm): No, you'll need PowerToys.
- xfwm4: Yes, you can do it out-of-the-box.
This statement of yours is also a bit silly considering Linux desktops have way more in common with macOS than with Windows. They share a whole bunch of concepts like POSIX compliance, use the same shells, and they even share a package manager (Homebrew, which seems to be gaining a bit of Linux popularity lately). Even CUPS comes to mind.
Linux desktops in general skew either Windows-like or ultra-minimal tiling thing.
iPadOS didn't even have overlapping windows until very recently. It barely has application multitasking with a highly compromised implementation. It doesn't even really have a central file system or user directory. It's missing a laundry list of things that macOS has that Linux distributions with also Gnome have.
Let’s not forget that most Windows PCs on the market are available with touchscreens and a lot of people do use them. The Windows PC market is full of 2-in-1 convertibles that do not exist in Apple’s hardware lineup. Gnome isn’t losing their mind by making their desktop environment friendly to them. Apple is one of the only laptop manufacturers that has avoided touch panels on laptops entirely, because they want to sell you two devices with heavily overlapping functionality.
If GNOME wants a touch friendly mode that’s fine, but they’re doing the Microsoft Windows 8 thing and forgetting that there’s a ton of desktop PCs that will never have touch as well as plenty of touch-capable laptops where that capability is unused or even flat out disabled. The least they could do is provide a “traditional desktop” toggle in settings to restore more sane padding values that don’t burn 20% of my non-touch 12” ThinkPad’s limited screen space for no good reason.
This is a kind of "responsiveness" that should be implemented in GTK+ 4 and libadwaita (dynamically changing padding/size values within the theme depending on active input devices, with mouse supporting smaller sizes than touch-only input), not so much GNOME itself. Windows does it already, so it's a realistic possibility.
The thing is that Gnome has numerous desktop environment alternatives and nobody is stuck with it. Linux desktop environments are free to be opinionated because they know that their users can just use something else. You can even install Gnome and KDE at the same time and switch between if that's really your thing.
Gnome doesn't limit you to installing applications that are in Gnome's own design system. You say "The menu bars of Mac apps are full of such functions that under GNOME simply wouldn’t be implemented because they don’t fit in a toolbar or hamburger menu" but that's not really how it works on Linux. The desktop environment is just the desktop environment, it's essentially separate from everything else.
When we are talking about "Gnome apps" we are really only talking about ~30 core apps that are included with the OS. Many/most/all of them you could even uninstall entirely and replace with something else.
Gnome choosing to have a small settings pane is a deliberate choice to keep things simple for their desktop environment's intended audience, but it is not a deliberate choice to limit functionality or freedom (installing apps from third parties, changing your browser engine, compiling code on your own system, etc).
Very much unlike iPadOS.
And yes you can switch between multiple installed DEs and I have done so in the past, but that makes for a messy experience with many redundant apps that the user must clean up themselves. It’s a lot nicer to have just one installed.
I certainly don’t expect most users to switch between desktop environments but there are so many of them that complaining about one is a waste of breath.
Edit: I mean, usable text fields. Like you have on a mac. You hit control-a and it goes to the start of the field. The command key is for interacting with the application.
> You…ever see a screenshot of Gnome?
Let's talk usability, not bullshit. Also gnome looks like... the rest of computers. It has no usability and is indistinguishable from other windows knockoffs
We "PC" users have a dedicated key for that on our keyboard, it is called "home". We even have the opposite, a dedicated key called "end".
> use readline bindings in a textfield
I don’t even know what this means.
readline is a thing that reads lines being input by a user, in a terminal context. It includes a number of keybindings that make editing & navigation while editing the line-to-be-input easy, such as ^A, which moves the cursor to the start of the line.
bash or zsh in emacs mode is similar, those these two have their own line editors, technically.
macOS adopted some (but not all) of the common keybinds from that era into their UI. I.e., in a GUI text entry field in macOS, you can hit ^A to move the cursor to the start of the text entry.
(I don't know that this particular UI-ism would make or break an OS for me, personally, though.)
Given how UI is implemented, this would be up to the toolkit. In GTK3, this was called "key themes"; there was, I think, an "Emacs" theme that would do what they desire. I do not know if GTK4 still has this, however (and I suspect it was removed).
(I think more users are going to expect ^A to be select-all, and home/end and ^← for word navigation, etc. These are the defaults. Thus key themes were probably little used.)
And that's just a wildly nitpicky criticism by the person that brought this up.
To me, as long as the OS includes the functionality, the way it's presented to the user, how customizable it is, and what keys they use is generally irrelevant. Each user of each OS will be used to whatever that OS chooses to set up.
It makes linux unusable
> Each user of each OS will be used to whatever that OS chooses to set up.
You cannot seriously expect each user to manually modify the os
No, I don’t expect users to manually modify the OS, I expect expect most users to leave it alone and learn its conventions.
Sure buddy, the most popular kernel of all time is "unusable." I wonder if 3.9 billion Android users and the entire Fortune 500's data centers know that their platform is "unusable?"