alt Hacker NewsIt’s not just look and feel, it’s approach to various things, like how GNOME shares the iPadOS tendency to cut advanced features instead of putting them in a less prominent position. 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. There are several aspects of out of the box customization that are more like iPadOS than macOS too, which is why the GNOME settings app has less than half the settings that the macOS settings app does.
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.
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> 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.
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.
> 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.