Gnome Usability

[Written ]

I read several articles on the usability of Gnome. I’m not sure where I started from, but perhaps the middle of the chain is Gnome Files at datagubbe.se🌎, and the next step was I Don’t Care for Gnome🌎. (I’d apologize for the lack of organization, but I wasn’t planning on writing about it at the time.)

The point being, the usability of Gnome in general, and Files in particular, is examined in several places. I had used Gnome fairly recently, by way of Pop!_OS, and I had noticed some of these problems, but I hadn’t really had feelings about it. (I don’t know whether to be proud or sad that I knew the answer to “which menu has Cut, Copy, and Paste in it?”)

It turns out, this is because I do my intensive file management tasks through the terminal. To copy something from one known place to another, it’s just a lot easier for me to type those place names to cp. Even if I have to use the Tab key a bunch to travel through a convoluted path name, I prefer to take my thought and run it through language, instead of waving my hands around a bunch. I’d rather not open windows, find things in them, and arrange them so that I can see both at once to avoid the (unintuitive) “drag-to-taskbar-and-wait” maneuver.

Once I learned syntax like for loops and "${i%.png}.jpg" (for one contrived example), I had far more power at the command line anyway. There are whole apps to do mass file management, but they can only do what the developer conceived of. It’s easy to make a photo management app that knows how to convert PNG to JPEG and rename them on the way, or to optimize PNG in-place, or to remove duplicates. It’s a lot harder to build an everything app that can also run a MIDI through TiMidity++ and encode copies to Vorbis and HE-AAC. And honestly, in today’s environment, that seems more like a gaping security vulnerability app compared to the predictability and limited code-execution ability of a dedicated, single-type app.

I am aware it is contradictory and hypocritical for me to prefer CLI file management, while harping on “how would I accomplish this without the terminal?” for every piece of advice online that goes, “Open a terminal and type sudo whatever to make [something that should have worked out of the box] functional.” But I think there’s a difference there.

A file manager fills a basic need, and the terminal multiplies a sufficiently advanced users’ ability tenfold. (Including the ability to really make a mess.) Requiring a terminal to get GUI software operational is completely backwards.

As for Gnome itself, well, I don’t use it anymore. Ubuntu Studio chose KDE as their base desktop, which slowly replaced Windows 10 as my home PC OS of choice. Maybe don’t ask me to switch to Edge every month, under the guise of “finishing setting up.”

When I ran out of patience waiting for COSMIC, I switched my work laptop over to Kubuntu, so I could have a 24.04-based system instead of the aging 22.04 one that was Pop!_OS. Using 25.04 didn’t work out, because some third-party software is only packaged for long-term supported versions.

The Gnome desktop is mostly inoffensive to me, but the “so simple it’s useless” credo for apps has pushed it to a point where the only software I used was non-Gnome software. That included the terminal🌎, GVim, PHPStorm, Firefox, Thunderbird, and LibreOffice. So like, why bother with the straitjacket?

The offensive part is where it takes an extra click to get Power Off:

I guess they need the fourth click for simplicity, somehow.

Overall, I ended up preferring macOS > KDE > others, when considering purely UX. (I’m not sure I can commit to putting either Gnome or Windows above the other.) Holistically speaking, the advantage of Free Software moves KDE above macOS, and Gnome still can’t take second place. I haven’t used Cinnamon🌎 enough to know where it ranks relative to KDE, but with Cinnamon existing, there’s no real reason to have a Gnome project… except to keep the Gnome developers from ruining other projects.