Feedback about GNOME from users.

Please file bugs on http://bugzilla.gnome.org to let the appropriate programmers know about the annoyances, and link to it from this page.

Likes

• The ability to join the community and contribute to the limit of one's ability.
• Simple selection of "compulsory" applications.

• The overall look, simplicity -- ThiloPfennig 2005-08-08 15:43:44

• The ever increasing drag-and-drop functionality.
• Application menu uses "Firefox web browser" instead of "firefox" for the title.

• Two panels by default - means that everything isn't cramped on a single panel. -- MikeWilliamson

• The light, yet flexible, overall feel. Even if certain parameters are difficult to edit (because hidden from view, like fonts on a white desktop), Gnome feels _friendly_ to nitwits like me. People who rely on "eye kandy" can always turn to Gnome's baroque cousin. [Simen]
• Resistance to featuritis. Keep resisting! Link checkers, personal time trackers and TNEF file viewers are the sort of thing that should never be included with the standard distribution. -- henrysmith
• Lack of a stupid obsession with the letter G in the application naming convention. -- henrysmith (bitter KDE user still looking for a decent distro that comes with GNOME)

  • Not that I disagree, but think of all the programs for Windows 95 that were called 'WinSomething', and Mac programs used to be MacThing and are now iThing or xThing.

Dislikes

General Interface

• Lots of default apps don't have Undo and Redo.
• Cut/Copy/Paste buffer implementation. (What does this mean? Items are useless here if they are just FUD. Murray)

  • I have now used GNOME for about a week. And the Cut/Copy/Paste simply does not work like it should. Where is the select&paste that UNIX has? Why can't I copy to Terminal? --JanneOjaniemi

    • If you mean the nasty middle button paste, it's there. Otherwise CTRL-C/V don't always work: some widgets are broken, and Terminal doesn't support those shortcuts.

      • That is correct, but it's not a solution. OS X has the advantage over us here, because the GUI uses the CMD key while the Terminal has Ctrl. -- JoachimNoreiko

      • Since CLI apps need to catch the CTRL+C/V keycombo themselves, gnome-terminal uses Shift+CTRL+C/V. --ReinoutVanSchouwen

      • I tried and it doesn't work (tried select/copy an address from one compose-window to another in Evolution) So is this a problem with GNOME or Ubuntu? --JanneOjaniemi

      • How about ALT+P (paste) and ALT+O (copy) ? Cornelius)

• GDM resolution does not respect desktop resolution setting
• Desktop Icons can't stay aligned in grid

  • Ditto. Autoaligning to a grid is a great idea, but the way this is done in GNOME sucks big time! (JohnPeterson)

  • Alignment in grid would be a huge improvement, but that's the way to go: Fences -- TorbenSchmidt

• Metacity is too unconfigurable; technically the switch from sawfish to metacity might have been good, but (for me) at least edge resistance, edge flipping and to a somewhat lesser degree separate vertical and horizontal maximization are sorely missed. These always belonged to the things which most impressed my Windows collegues. -- MartinVanBoven

  • Metacity 2.14.0 does have edge resistance, vert+horz maximization. IIRC there is an app to do edge flipping. -- OlavVitters

• Metacity compositor performance is low, motion is lagging on low end gfx (for eg. Intel 915 onboard) -- JonesLee

• The first time you click one of the desktop menus there is a noticeable pause before its shown. This can cause you to click it again as you think nothings happening, causing the menu to instantly hide when it is eventually displayed.
• When a menu is initially shown, each menuitem icon is not alway rendered straight away. You get a effect of the icons appearing from top to bottom after the text is shown (which appears instantly).

• Panel applets tranparency when using a dark background: applets text becomes unreadable -- LuisMenina

• Panel windows list applet is useless when then panel is placed vertically -- JonesLee

• Inconsistence size stretching of applet, notification icons when panel resizes -- JonesLee

• For a host of complaints about GNOME look here. These are not mine, but some do seem valid.

• Fix the trash in Nautilus! It should be in places or the tree view. How am I meant to get to the trash w/o leaving Nautilus? Next, make right clicking on the background of the trash folder give an 'empty trash' choice. as it is i have to go all the way to the file menu. Both thunar and konqueror get this right!
• Window Management is a catastrophe! It is not possible to re-order windows by a mouse click. Thats a feature, which is as old as computers exist and makes working with gnome more efficient and pleasure. Has been reported several times by several different people, but developer seem to like the idea of ignoring feature requests until nobody cares anymore.

• TouchScreens are not well supported by the UI, but will probably come to broad use with the T91 and T101H series of Asus's Eee PC. There is the need for user interface guidelines considering human fingers. Buttons need a minimum size of 6x8mm (better 8x10mm; keyboards have usually 13x13mm) and a minimum distance of 1mm (keyboards have usually 5mm) to the next button to be used with fingers. Persons with big or shiver fingers might need even bigger buttons. This is ie. important in lists and scrollbars, where elements/buttons are often only about 3x3mm (only useable with mouse or styluses). The user needs to be anytime in control over the (minimum) button and font sizes. -- MovGP0

  • Gestures for singletouch and multitouch screens (ie. Dell's Latitude XT or Lenovo's ThinkPad X61) should be considered. Usecases are ie. zooming the screen and scrolling lists with gestures as seen on the Apple iPhone. This needs also support by the GTK+ and GTK# libraries for broad developer acceptance. -- MovGP0

  • Providing the possibility to zoom the screen and scroll through a virtual desktop (the desktop is bigger than the physical screen size) using multitouch gestures on the touchpad/tochscreen compensate for less space because of bigger buttons if the UI-Design is done properly. --MovGP0

Help system

• Help is very incomplete. Both self sustained help files, as well as context sensitive help. Also the "hover over" popup help thing is generally extremely functional but is not always present. -- MartinVanBoven

Networking

• problems with Samba interaction.
• Gnome panel applets don't respect settings. Setting my own background for a gnome panel doesn't affect the way menu applets draw their backgrounds (or the notification area applet, desktop switcher dealey, clock, etc.).

• Gnome needlessly wastes a lot of desktop real estate: big icons, two panels by default, toolbars cannot be put next to each other to save space like with MS IE, making the bottom bar higher increases the size of the icons instead of making room for two layers as with MS panel. This is strange if you realize that Gnome as a GUI is only present to offer acces to and space for applications. -- MartinVanBoven

Printing

• Non-universalized printer dialog implementation.
• Not feature-rich printing dialogues (quality setting etc)

  • it's not just the printer dialog, printer objects from gnome-cups-manager should be visible in Computer. -- ReinoutVanSchouwen

Scanning

I think what people with scanners are missing is a simple, integrated application the eases the scanning process. I think Xsane is just not it. While it definitely let's us do, what we want it is not simple enough. Such a program should be available under Applications/Graphics/Scan Image. It would be nice if this application would be able to understand the buttons for scanning or mailing on some scanners. The user should be given a very simple interface and the possibility to send the image (this should lead to automatically reduce the size per default) or to open with GIMP, or maybe to import into Abiword or GNOME. I came to this conclusion after failing to support my father via telephone in the scanning process. I also did not find any application at gnomefiles.org. So maybe this should be build into GNOME itself? -- ThiloPfennig 2006-02-16 15:52:36

Development/Bugs

• Bugs when remain unfixed or unaddressed for months or years.

• Patches rotting in bugzilla -- LuisMenina

• Ensure nobody breaks the building tree in CVS server. (MicroTinder ?) -- LuisMenina

• High learning curve to start contributing using jhbuild

Miscellaneous

• I have a shared FAT partition which I use to move files between different OSes. I frequently move the same 80+ files between this and the local filesystem (different drives). If I do this in Nautilus, as its sometimes a file overwrite it initially removes the 80+ files before adding the new ones. Rather than updating the Nautilus GUI once, it updates it for every file removal which slows it down somewhat. Once the files are removed the actual copy is quicker and does not appear to have as many Nautilus GUI updates?

• Most users I know install Firefox right away after installing gnome and never touch epiphany; I don't know if this is representative, but the growing numbers of Firefox users suggest it. Fedora already comes with Firefox as its standard browser (and it even has a "native" look&feel) - I guess it might free recources if you switched to Firefox completely. Since both use gecko, it won't be that much of a change for epiphany users, but the possibilities to extend Firefox capabilities with extensions are a real argument pro Firefox. A second dislike concern evolution, however I guess I won't find a majority for replacing it with thunderbird/sunbird.

  • Now that would be a very bad idea. Please see Epiphany/ProjectFAQ -- ReinoutVanSchouwen

• The menu editor is not very useful. The "alacarte" menu editor should be adopted as the Gnome menu editor, but with the additional ability that top-level menus (Applications/Places/Desktop) can be removed, created, renamed, etc. (However, I want to edit the menus due to the fact that I find the "Desktop" menu not very useful as a seperate menu, and the difference between "Administration" apps and "System Tools" to be arbitrary) -- ReedHedges

  • Note that currently those menus are hard-coded, so without gnome-panel changes, alacarte will not be able to change them -- OlavVitters

• There should be a application to calibrate Joysticks and Gamepads in Gnome and it should allow dead zone settings as well as configuring keyboard emulation for games that lack proper joystick support. Try to play Yo! Frankie with a Xbox 360 Controller, you are completely doomed if you cannot handle command line tools. -- TorbenSchmidt

Suggestions

• The look and feel is dated and static compared with Apple's Macintosh OS X. Despite the need for downscaling to provide legacy support, a concerted effort should be made to update the look and feel of Gnome to be more appealing (comparable to Mac OS X to entice a larger user base in the desktop sector).
  • OS X has a lot of eye candy, but I think it would be better to concentrate on making GNOME easier to use, rather than looking nice, in ways such as implementation and use of pie menus. - JosephH
    • Couldn't both be undertaken simultaneously? I mean, speaking from a strict user standpoint, I look at and use Gnome (no matter what skin) and think of Windows 98 in the blocked, static way. People, users, other than myself, have commented that working on the Macintosh OS over the other offerings (commericial or open source) is more satisfying and easier to work with simply due to the user feedback and aesthetic. Wouldn't this sort of thing be the sort of hook to get people to try Gnome on a desktop level. Despite the arguement that people get blase about the look of an operating system within a few days of use, I believe the user feedback and aesthetic is an intrinsic part of operating system choice. (BTW, although not a programmer, I am working on a mock up of a few usability ideas to be considered and will link to a mock up soon).

  • I find the look and feel to be pretty clean and efficient, even more so if you set your metacity theme to something with less stuff in it. Gnome is far less distracting in graphics than Windows XP or KDE -- ReedHedges

• In regards to the above comment, there should be a location (wiki/messageboard) where graphic artists/designers, GNOME developers, application designers, Flash designers, etc. can get together and talk about not just the theming or background of GNOME, but the look and feel in general from the nuts and bolts (implementation of ideas) upward to the style and animations used. GNOME is one of the vanguards in the Linux desktop movement, and in order to get people to switch and be satisfied with their decision, we need to push the technology to rival that of certainly the most aesthetically advanced operating system, OS X. Here are a few screenshots that illustrate the competition: Screen 1 and Screen 2. The difference between even one still frame of each environment shows a dramatic difference in the quality of the interface, and using each one only strengthens that difference.

  • Try http://art.gnome.org? It also links to some forums. - ReedHedges

• Apps that don't repaint themselves when waiting on I/O! This makes GNOME look totally amatuerish in my (JohnWilliams) not-so-humble opinion

• Apps that don't handle intermittent 'net connectivity well (e.g. Evolution, Gyum)
• Nautilus should have tabable pages (such as konquerer in KDE). This would help keep file manager clutter down to a minimum. Of course many people find that tabs are annoying, but I think it would be a nice addition for us tabaholics.

[Discussion on new ideas for GNOME 3 moved to ThreePointZero ('interaction' section)]

• File dialogs need thumbs view , just like Nautilus (Cornelius)
• File dialogs need a text input to type or paste a path to change location. (Cornelius)
• Make panel menu editing easier: implement an easy interface for modifying menus. Applications often don't show up in the menu after installation, and adding them is a chore. Users should be able to structure their applications, places, and desktop menus however they want. (GNOME 2.12 includes a very rudimentary editor.)
  • Moreover, more options for editing the panel would be nice. Being able to manually override font colors, saturate icons, applets, and notification icons, and have icon-only taskbars would all be nice.

  • Have my vote here too: Menus in Gnome are a hideous mess: they should be editable in a separate editor, but also drag and drop should work in a menu, and the difference between system and user entries should be visually clear. -- MartinVanBoven

• Menu entry logic: I'v always wondered about entries like "Firefox" which ofcourse misses the information that it is an "Internet Browser". And then when this was finally changed, I kept wondering: Why make it "Firefox Web browser" instead of "Web browser - Firefox". The latter is more logical; because the fact that it's a browser is more important fore the average user. Furthermore, if menus are in alphabetical order, this offers all implementations of "Web browser" next to each other in the menu. So suggestion: change all menu entry names in this way: "Picture viewer - Eye of Gnome" etc. -- MartinVanBoven

  • In general, lots of programs have obscure names, because developers like having cool names Gnome does a pretty good job of giving them meaningful names in the menus but this needs to be consistent; it should be a bug if a program doesn't have a name describing its function. -- ReedHedges

• Focus problems: when starting up I am asked for password of samba but GAIM comes into front and input is lost. Applications should not be able to steal focus.
• Make the single click/double click behaviour between desktop and panel objects consistent.
• When making simplifications, allow users to revert to the more complicated setup using gconf or 'Preferences'/equivalent.
• Create a better copy dialog when there is already an existing file with the same name e.g. by showing file sizes/last modified dates, or, in same cases, the actual file, such as with pictures.
• In Nautilus enable drag and drop of files to the Path buttons

  • ?? what are the path buttons? The tree in the sidebar? "Places" in the sidebar? If so this feature request has been made in bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45550 - ReedHedges

• In the dialogue that opens when you want to browse for a file, I would love to have either the possibility to input through the keyboard or at least a checkable "Show hidden files"-button, to access directories and files that start with a ".". [Simen]
• Multiply desktop space by infinite!

Why to have only workspaces, I propose workcylinder... More information at http://parasiilonmac.blogspot.com/2005/10/extreme-desktop-performance.html

• OK thats cool but how about this: OpenGL *Spherical* WM, you then not only have the ability to scroll around your workspace but over/under & into it as well. This would obviously need to be optional as a reasonable amount of GPU power would be required which not everyone has, and it could also potentially increase your mem usage as it gives you the ability to leave apps open all over the sphere. you would need to implement a trigger to snap the view to the front of the active window, and perhaps some way of 'hotkeying' windows to make them easier to find. but it would be very handy, an gives you lots of cool eye-candy (roll-up windows that actually turn etc) perhaps something for ToPaZ?? pretty please

  • Reminds me of Google Earth There would have to be a way to flatten the view. Curving windows around the edges of the screen is not cool. Or maybe just have a single, infinitely big flat workspace which you can scroll around, zoom in and out from to find the set of windows you are looking for etc.

• Implement go directly to next window - instead of Alt-Esc switching between two windows if invoked twice, and the order of cycling depending on something else (what order the windows were opened?), it makes more sense for them to go to the next window, with the shift modifier for going to the previous window.

  • The order depends on when the windows were last activated. By pressing alt-esc twice (or more) without releasing alt, one can switch to windows other than the previously activated one. Pressing alt-tab instead of alt-esc will show the order for the period of time that alt is not released. This is the same behavior as used by MS Windows (and probably others).--NicolasBarbier

  • All right, but I still think a way to go to the next window, or the previous, would help people get their work done. The current behavior is more confusing than simply having a way to switch to the next window, or switch to the previous. MS and others can make mistakes, but that doesn't mean GNOME must copy them.

  • Superswitcher might do what you want (and more), follow the link off PowerUserTools.

• Change the look'n'feel of dialogs --PhilBull

  • Dialog shouldn't have a 'Close Window' button in Metacity, only a Close/Cancel/Whatever button at bottom-right
    • Hard to implement?
  • Dialog should look different to a normal window

    • Maybe with no WM decoration? Similar to this notification

  • Escape key closes dialog. Users seem to like this.

  • Discussed on DDL

• Support right-click context menus on the Menu Bar

  • This is especially useful for the Places menu, where options such as 'Browse' and 'Eject' for locations are required
  • Right-clicking on an item in the panel menu should give a properties option, and clicking on this should bring up the main menu editor, with that item already selected, and with the properties dialog open for that particular item.

• Improve the behaviour of the Window List applet

  • Currently, the WL applet changes the size of buttons in a totally stupid way
    • If the title of a window changes, the size of all the buttons changes. If you try to click a button and a window title changes suddenly, there's a good chance of hitting the wrong button
    • The width of the buttons is rarely optimal - longer titles are often cut off when there is enough space
    • Buttons get reordered if window titles change or windows are created/destroyed. The order of buttons should be consistent.

• Make better use of Emblems

  • Emblems are a useful way of indicating folder content
  • They are also useful for marking files which need attention or are important in some way
  • Using Emblems is too time-consuming to be useful
    • Right-click file; Properties; Emblems; find an emblem; tick emblem; hit Close button

    • Typically >6 steps, very time-consuming

    • Also time-consuming is having to search through the list of emblems (which isn't even aligned, ordered logically or grouped in any way) for an appropriate one
    • In Evolution, an e-mail can be marked as Important simply by clicking the 'Flagged' column.
    • Alternatively, right-click e-mail; go to Label; choose a label. 3 steps, much faster
  • There should be an easy way of applying common emblems quickly
  • It would be nice to be able to define custom emblems and remove stock ones. Most users won't use 'cvs-controlled' for example
  • Searching or filtering by Emblem would be useful, or displaying them in columns of the List view, allowing sort on emblems
  • Emblems could be applied to folders based on its contents. For example, music folders get a musical note emblem

  • CameronHarris: Maybe emblems could work a bit like tags do on flickr. Being able to make virtual folder things from other objects with emblems on them and such would be great.

    • It would be quick and easy to add tags to an object by typing a list of words, creating new emblems for newly encountered words. You could do this in the "file information" sidebar of nautilus, or in a Save or Save As dialog box, or when searching. - ReedHedges

• I would like to see in GNOME a context-sensitive menu bar at the top of the screen like that of Mac OS. I really like that feature.

• Better integration of IM (Input Method)

  • Actually, in Gedit, when typing text with a mix of latin, chinese, japanese, tibetan characters, IM menu is accessible with the mouse right-click. But, IM with right-click method only works with Gnome software. You can't use this method for Firefox, OpenOffice…

  • IM should be accessible in all situations and all software. Better example is the keyboard switch (US, French, Arabic…).
  • It would be interesting to compare with Windows, Mac OS X…
    • Hey! If you're someone who uses and understands Input Methods, please help me fix gnomebug:129110

Meta Comments

Things about this page, this wiki, etc.

• IMO this page should be made very much more important and better organized. -- MartinVanBoven

• This wiki is a bit rubbish. Moin wiki syntax is evil and a the pages are hard to navigate, eg the fiddly little icons at the top right are meaningless and you can't get from subpages back to the top page. How about switching to MediaWiki?

• CategoryMarketing