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
deleted by creator
Also forcing people to go KDE to be again disappointed because their design is bad.
KDE is awesome
Meh. The design and all is very good, great even, but the performance is donkey. And no, telling people to turn off animations and compositor is not a valid solution, when other DEs keep the animations, especially GNOME.
What’s the point of going against every tried and true DE experience. Why can’t we just have them, disabled by default so some people don’t freak out.
I wonder if there’s a way they could neatly implement them without cluttering the desktop. Like what if they were somewhere in the overview or something?
You might not want to but the average user definitely uses that. It should be a toggle in settings for the best of both worlds
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.
Gnome is great for people who like the opinionated workflow. Sadly that is not most people, at least I know of 5 people who tried Gnome and 4 came to the conclusion that the lack of a taskbar/launcher/dock makes it unsuitable for their desktop usage.
If Gnome had an optional dock, they might’ve actually used it and found out how great Gnome is. Maybe at some point they’d even disable the dock and return to the blessed workflow.
No amount of funding will make native desktop icon happen if the devs simply don’t want to implement then.
Human ego is quite fascinating
It’s zero to do with ego and 100% to do with them believing desktop icons are awful.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2087/desktop-icons-ng-ding/
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.
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/
deleted by creator
Yes, until you decide to use GNOME and suddenly everything “endlessly complex” while you wait for pointless UI animations to finish. :P
GNOME is the snappiest DE on low end hardware besides LXQt and XFCE, but go on.
Never had issues with Gnome on low end hardware but, you can disable animations in the accessibility settings. (No extensions needed!)
Not all animations.
deleted by creator
Desktop icons 🤢