Normally, I would never say this, but after years of silence and a couple weeks of fooling myself more -- I finally have to speak up.
Why is GNOME so BROKEN?
I'm not just referring to a
single feature; I mean GNOME Version 3.24.2 (I know there is an update, but why should I risk that when I know the same issues are STILL there) in general is a really bad user experience now. I've been working for DAYS to get past what amounts to bugs in GNOME configuration and when I come across documentation that APPEARS to provide an answer and it doesn't work, it makes me believe that the either the doc is old or the software is just broken.
You can't blame the underlying distro or the kernel for this, these issues are squarely in your court.
For instance, when resuming from suspend, the background would sometimes be displayed as an image akin to TV static (if you can remember analog TV, you know what I mean). I finally FIXED this long standing bug (it's been OPEN for ~7 years, I googled for a solutions and it's still NOT solved). I fixed it, but it's a hack that didn't involve any scripting or fancy stuff -- just an observation about how things are put together in GNOME. This is how I learned how to use 'gsettings' to control behavior. Most people can't do that.
Another issue; I've been working for the last 3 hours to change a setting in GNOME
that has a 'slider' in the "All Settings" dialog. I have yet to get it
to work correctly. I was trying to turn off the annoying "Notifications"
every time I open a folder.
For example, I spent an hour trying to to adjust the cursor "blink
rate". I finally found it in "Accessibility", but the really SHOCKING
thing is that you BROKE the UI convention of MORE being on the RIGHT.
LESS blinking is on the LEFT everywhere in the world! But you changed this to be .... ?!
DON"T BE DIFFERENT, IT CONFUSES YOUR USERS!
Oh there is another way to do this:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-blink-time TIME_IN_MS
gsettings
is a mess; it's beyond difficult to find things and then they work
inconsistently (vis a vis "shell notifications" which I currently can't
turn off).
Even worse, the settings aren't honored consistently across GNOME apps.
All
that started when I noticed opening folders in GNOME opened them in
'dolphin' not 'nautilus'; I had to completely REMOVE dolphin to get it
NOT to launch.
I recall there being a setting
for this in some UI element, but I can't find it -- it's buried in a
jumbled mess of non-related features "somewhere". I spent an hour
grepping gsettings output only to find a key that did NOTHING.
org.gnome.desktop.notifications
application-children ['abrt-applet', 'org-gnome-software', 'rhythmbox',
'gnome-tweak-tool', 'org-gnome-terminal', 'org-gnome-nautilus',
'gnome-network-panel', 'gnome-control-center', 'org-gnome-clocks',
'quodlibet', 'vino-server', 'filezilla', 'brasero']
I read over this in what appears to be the latest documentation, so I'm really thinking it's just another feature that GNOME developers broke trying to support so many ways of doing the same thing IMPLEMENTED differently.
