How do you envision the implementation? Should the installer include an LLM (tons of data) and run it at glacial speed locally? Or require a network connection?
The solution may be worse than the problem here. (I have to admit that I still don’t get the problem, I agree with @hatsnp that most users need everything in a desktop, at the cost of a few hundred Mb).
Gnome is still iterating on the gnome 3 launcher style idea of a desktop. It is def not “fundamentally redesigned every few years.” Quite the opposite. Evert release brings subtle refinement and a few new features.
A less charitable view is that Gnome 3, which contained a ton of “innovations” no one asked for, broke the user experience in 2011 and they have been trying to fix it ever since. Gnome 40 and subsequent are kind of usable. But it took a decade to get there.
Mate and Cinnamon came about with the mess of Gnome 3, trying to salvage the Gnome 2 user experience.
Most of us, even command-line users, probably don’t need most of the GNU stuff. But I doubt that any of us would go through it command by command, removing stuff! I can live with some stuff, like eg half of Libre Office, that I am probably never going to use.
You can take a less charitable view of anything and it’ll end up sounding negative. There is always chatter from those who aren’t contributing, that’s just the way it is, sadly.
Gnome didn’t work for me until v42, but now its good, I like the minimalism, I like the apps. Plasma got really crashy for me when it went to 6.x, hence the move back to gnome.
I used to hate Gnome with passion and ran XFCE instead. But these days Gnome with 3 extensions and Nemo and mpv as default apps is quite usable.
I believe Gnome was way ahead of its time with its vision. Amongst all “traditional” DEs, even including Windows and MacOS, it is definitely the best experience at the moment, and often receives that praise from people when they first start using Linux. Its design is also the best amongst all DEs IMO. They use margins and padding properly and it’s a very relaxing thing to use.
My only issues with it are technical and social. Bloated VRAM use, slow file manager due to bad programing practices, their horrible distaste for their own users, GNOME Foundation problems (wasting money on a Professional Shaman con-woman as executive director), etc.
Who remembers the #WONTFIX for thumbnails in the file picker? Only took like 15 years to be fixed. In general they seem antipathic to their userbase. I guess having strong corporate backers does that to you, no need to be pleasant if donations/money is secured.
On install, one can break in and decide what individual packages should be installed. I would envisage a simple dialogue system asking whether one wanted particular categories installing and which packages within selected categories. As an example, I might want only a word processor and spreadsheet within the “Office Software” category, and not the drawing and maths applications.
I agree that these days disc space is not usually a problem, where I see possible user confusion is when one does an update and, for another example, the system tries to update gtk3-immodule-tigrigna. One has to ask, “what is this, and why do I need it to be updated?”
I’m now running GNOME instead of COSMIC to see if it solved my issues related to the laptop waking up from suspend.
It didn’t. 80% of the time everything works fine, but 20% of the time something strange happens, like my speaker starts farting or the mouse goes haywire starting random videos on the open YouTube page. I have to force restart when this happens.
So now I’m wondering if it’s related to CachyOS, Arch or a fundamental kernel issue. More experimentation needed. All I want is to close my laptop and everything go to sleep, then flawlessly wake up again when I reopen the lid so I can continue where I left off.
GNOME is quite nice on CachyOS though. Much better than it was 20 years ago!
You might hate it, but when you get some weird behavior, open the terminal and type dmesg or sudo dmesg and have a look.
Happy to help, start a new thread and we can look at it.
Thanks, but when the weird mouse behaviour happens, I can’t do anything because the mouse is moving everywhere and clicking constantly. So typing is a non-starter.
But yes, I’ll open a new thread if I want to continue this subject. Cheers!
dmesg will show all relevant messages since your boot.
Sorry: Just saw that you need to force restart. I would suggest first trying to go to a different tty through ctrl+alt+FX where X is one number. Then you login and can look at dmesg.
I use Nemo instead of Files, much better.
That may be, but I think the problem was that they replaced Gnome 2 with something so completely different that it made no sense to continue with the same name/project.
Imagine if Darktable devs redesigned the UI and the modules so completely that it would unrecognizable to even seasoned users, then just cheerfully released 6.0 as if nothing happened. It would draw ire from users and most likely result in a fork.
No matter how brilliant some vision is, or how well it works out in the long run, it will definitely take time to get there (again, more than a decade for Gnome), which moves it from mature software to an experimental category while that happens. No wonder that the project ended up with multiple forks and about 5 projects aimed at getting back the classic look.
Is that not OK? Gnome2 was in the repos for a few years, so you could install either 2 or 3.