GNOME Appreciation

May 11, 2023 (IST)

I frequently see people annoyed with GNOME, but I personally like a lot of GNOME’s decisions, even if I don’t use it. This post is about those decisions that make GNOME great.

In summary, it’s simple, pretty and approachable for new users, and its overview screen is in a class of its own.

Super Power (The Overview)🔗

See what I did there? The ‘Super’ button is a name for the main shortcut button, which is ‘Windows’ on most keyboards and ‘Command’ on Apple keyboards.

In GNOME, the ‘Super’ button simply gives you so much power with the press of just a single button.

You can open the overview with the ‘Super’ key, or a three finger swipe up on the touchpad, or clicking on the Activities button, or even just flicking your mouse to the top left (to where the activities button is).

(Video copied from forty.gnome.org: shows swiping up to view overview, then again to view all apps)

You then get, at your fingertips:

• The current workspace.
• All the apps open on the current workspace.
• Any other workspaces and its apps.
• Your pinned applications.
• A search bar to access absolutely all of your apps, files and folders.
  
  And you only need to start typing. No extra clicks or keys required.
• Smooth animations to highlight the spatial relationships between all elements.

All the other desktops require several different shortcuts or buttons for this. You can have an applications menu, but it might not have a search bar. Or you might, but it only searches applications. Then it needs a separate shortcut to search through files and folders.

And you’ll never get a desktop overview with all your apps (launchers) available. Picture this: you’re in the all apps view, with two desktop thumbnails up top. You drag the calculator to the first, then the browser to the second, then GNOME will create a third workspace for you, then you drag the messaging and email apps to the third, and then you start typing ‘Finan’, when GNOME suggests ‘Financial Report.xlsx’ and you just hit ‘Enter’ to open your spreadsheet app on the first workspace — and just like that, you’re off to the races!

Frankly, the overview makes GNOME the smoothest and slickest DE implementation that I’ve ever seen — not just in terms of looks, but also the consistent spatial layout/relation of things, as well as all the power that it presents in such a simple package.

Simplicity🔗

The GNOME DE and apps focus a lot on simplicity. It’s all about doing the things that you need to do and avoiding unecessary clutter.

Advanced features are reserved for other apps or plugins unless/until they come up with a more thought out design.

This creates a great environment for new users to get their work done without making mistakes, or worrying about making mistakes, or getting distracted.

Theming🔗

GNOME apps use a fairly modern and “trendy” UI, with flat design and plenty of white space, which is another thing that makes it approachable to new users.

While this is not for everyone and might not be objectively beautiful, it is familiar and in keeping with current designs.

Responsiveness🔗

A lot of GNOME apps and components automatically adapt to smaller sizes.

This makes it feasible to open lots of apps in the same window, and to use the same apps on mobiles and tablets. Wooooo convergence!

You should see the GNOME mobile shell (Phosh). It basically uses the same apps and UI as the desktop, with minor tweaks to fit the form factor. The consistency and careful design just leaves me speechless.

Short demo videos available in these two articles by articles by Jonas Dressler:

• Towards GNOME Shell on mobile
• GNOME Shell on mobile: An update

Flaws🔗

Now, GNOME isn’t perfect.

There are some things that I don’t quite agree with, and some things that bother other users.

Centre App Bar🔗

My biggest nitpick, which I noticed when Windows 11 made the same mistake, is apps aligned along the centre. When you open a lot of apps, your pinned apps are no longer where you expect them to be, so you now have to be more careful.

Additionally, a button in the corner is much easier to click since you can’t overshoot it with quick movements, which prevents accidentally clicking on something else. GNOME gets this right with the ‘Activities’ button, but not with the app bar.

It might not be a big deal, and it would certainly be difficult to solve, but I just feel like it’s objectively wrong. Perhaps the solution is a combined app and status bar, but I can’t say, since it’s advantageous to have a narrow status bar that’s always visible.

Flatpaks🔗

Another thing that annoys me is their insistence on using Flatpak.

Despite an established culture of maintainers and packagers in the Linux world, they think it’s a great idea to push additional responsibilities on app developers. This also indirectly suggests that developers silo themselves and ignore maintainers.

Furthermore, it hampers performance for apps, especially on lower grade hardware, and as a new technology it prevents some affordances that are available with normally installed apps. I mean, one of the reasons I first switched to Linux was precisely because my laptop struggled a lot.

Bleeding Edge🔗

While it doesn’t bother me specifically (probably because I don’t use GNOME), GNOME sometimes breaks things for existing users, and often despite large backlash, which makes users feel hurt or offended, which can lead to the actions and resulting tension that accompany high running emotions between the core team and users/contributors.

Missing Features🔗

Because of their focus on simplicity, they take a while to work through features, such as the background app statuses, which were recently added after several years.

Thankfully, GNOME has a decent plugin ecosystem.