Andrey Listopadov

GNOME is better macOS than macOS

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 02:57:00 +0300

Recently, I bought my first-ever MacBook. I’ve spent some time with it, and I gotta say - despite all that hot garbage that is thrown at GNOME for being an OSX clone, GNOME does the job better than I’ve expected, and certainly better than Apple. In some areas, that is.

Good old days of Linux

A bit of a backstory.

I’ve been using GNUplusSlashLinux for more than fifteen years. Most of the time, I used GNOME, starting from GNOME2, moving to Unity maybe for two years, then GNOME Shell, then KDE Plasma 5 for another two years, and switched back to GNOME Shell again. I’m not mentioning some of my at most month-long endeavors to other DEs, like XFCE, or tiling WMs, because they never stuck with me. So I’ve been there for most releases of GNOME Shell, followed them closely, even used to run Ubuntu GNOME when GNOME Shell became a thing, until it became the default in Ubuntu once again. Though by that time, I had already moved from Ubuntu to a different distribution for a variety of reasons.

I wasn’t always satisfied by GNOME, and was a fair bit vocal about it in the past - even got myself banned from r/gnome subreddit, for shitting on it too much. That’s why I experimented with other desktop environments, particularly Unity and KDE.

Unity felt like a breath of fresh air after GNOME2, mostly because Canonical took years of people trying to make GNOME2 more OSX-like, and made decent steps in that direction. A global menu, HUD, blur, buttons on the left - you name it, it was there. Granted, it wasn’t an OSX clone - rather, it was its own thing, and I still remember Unity days fondly.

Figure 1: Honestly, this was the best desktop

I switched to GNOME Shell almost instantly as it was released as Ubuntu GNOME spin, and while it was a bit janky, Unity started to lose steam, and GNOME looked like a hot new thing.

Figure 2: Anyone else remember that wallpaper? GNOME sure has come a long way

I did, however, run Unity on my older PCs, as it was far less taxing on resources than early versions of GNOME3, but then it was discontinued, and long-awaited Unity 8 with Mir never became a thing. So, when I was fed up with GNOME being a resource hog, often crashing, and moving towards Wayland, which didn’t work as good as it was advertised, I decided to try KDE somewhere around 2018.

And boy, how wrong was I, thinking that KDE is a buggy mess that would drain my resources even worse than GNOME. KDE Plasma 5 was nothing like I imagined - it was fast, lightweight, and slick. As a fan of old Unity design and OSX looks, I’ve configured my plasma, but it wasn’t a full clone, as other people often did. Instead, I tried to keep Plasma look like Plasma, but feel like a mix between Unity and OSX:

Figure 3: To this day, I still think this was beautiful. I’ve spent a lot of time fiddling with icon spacings in the top panel, combining widgets, writing my own in QML, just to throw it all away, a few years later

I’ve run Plasma 5 for about two years, and while I was enjoying it, there still were a lot of jank, bugs, occasional crashes (although Plasma recovered from them beautifully), but GNOME also became a lot better. So I switched back to GNOME, and I’m still running it on my old laptop, where I’m writing this part of the text right now:

Figure 4: GNOME 42 (Note, I have a 2K display and use GNOME without scaling with enlarged fonts. Helps a lot with too big GNOME UI elements taking up space)

As you can see, there are no fancy extensions - everything is the same as in a stock Fedora Workstation, because it is a stock Fedora Workstation. And I love it.

Over the years, I had a love-hate relationship with GNOME, but after a while, I came to accept it as it is, and now it feels like a perfect desktop environment for me personally. That, of course, is thanks to GNOME developers actually trying to make GNOME better, and me buying into their vision of what an OS should look and feel like. There is still some jankiness to it, but I’m willing to overlook it at this point, because after years of searching, I couldn’t find anything that suits my workflow better. And I’m fine with that.

A disclaimer

Before I go crazy on bashing macOS, I need to make a disclosure - I AM BIASED. I’ve been using GNOME for a lot of time, and a lot of things that feel logical to me may not feel logical at all to others. Especially for macOS users.

I’m fully aware of that.

Now, with that outta the way, let’s begin.

A new laptop

As I mentioned, I’ve just got myself a MacBook. I did it because today’s laptop market is a bit odd. It’s hard to find a decent non-gaming laptop with good specs. I mean, there are Lenovo ThinkPads, ThinkBooks, and even IdeaPads that are decent, but I already owned an IdeaPad, and while it served me for six years and I liked it, I don’t know if I want another one. Other brands may offer similar hardware, but I didn’t investigate much.

One of the reasons is OS choices. You see, I have run Linux as my main OS since around 2008. But I still have to use Windows from time to time. During university years, most of the non-programming software was Windows-only. After university, I had to use Windows to do media stuff, like music recording and video production, or design.

Design is probably the only task Linux can handle without much of a hassle, given that there are decent programs for that. For instance, I don’t mind GIMP, Krita, or Inkscape for most of my image-related tasks. I can even do video editing in Blender (and I do), but for some reason, it just works better under Windows. Audio production - not a chance. You’ll find me dead in the ground before I figure out how to set up a realtime kernel and configure Jack. Not to mention, VSTs just don’t work because many are relying on Windows APIs, and patching them through Wine is not a path I would like to walk.

So I had to use Windows, constantly rebooting from Linux to it every time I wanted to record myself, or work on some video for my channel. And I also had to use the one that came with my laptop - 6 years ago, it was Windows 10.

My parents recently got a new laptop with Windows 11 on it, and my god, it is horrible. After using Linux for more than fifteen years, I can’t even imagine how Microsoft is still able to get away with it. Ads are everywhere - on the lockscreen, in the start menu, in notifications, etc. You can’t even activate it without connecting to the network and signing into a Microsoft account.

Oh, and updates. Fucking updates are being forced, while I’m waiting for the next 5 hours until my video finishes rendering, because my laptop is too old to render in 4K.

Yes, it’s possible to “debloat” Windows, remove most of the jank they added, disable automatic updates, and have a decent, clean experience. I just don’t want to do that. The whole point of an operating system, to me, is to stay out of the way while managing resources, processes, and making sure my shit is done without major hiccups.

Now, when Windows 10 support is ending, all we’re left with is Windows 11, and god knows what bullshit awaits us in Windows 12.

So I thought to myself: “Ok, I like Linux, but I want to be able to do my media-related stuff, and I don’t want to invest in making Linux be able to do so. What options do I have other than that?” I just applied to a new job, and almost everyone there uses a Mac, and many of them are musicians, either hobbyists like myself or even professionals. After asking around, it appeared to me that switching to macOS could be the solution I’m looking for. It’s a Unix, so I guess my Linux habits won’t have to go through WSL hoops, and it has world-class support for media tasks. I think macOS can even be considered media-first when it comes to production, unlike Linux or Windows.

So I saved some money and got myself a new MacBook Pro, with M4, and decent specs. While the laptop itself is nice - I like the aluminium body, keyboard is nice (although I had an opportunity of using their butterfly one, and liked it better), the screen is gorgeous, and even the laptop speakers are great, but…

…but the OS…

macOS

This is the most counter-intuitive, user-unfriendly, confusing piece of software that I’ve used in my life. And I worked as a consultant in a cellphone store and used software for cashiers, yet it still was not as horrid.

I’m sure nothing I will write here will be new, and I’m committing an “internet crime” of “beating a dead horse” here, while it’s probably already reduced to vapors, but I still want to get it out of my system.

The Desktop

My laptop came with macOS 15 Sequoia preinstalled, so I haven’t used previous versions much, although I had used a Mac a bunch of times in the past when I was at the university ten plus years ago. However, I decided to immediately upgrade to the 26.1 Tahoe, so I wouldn’t get too used to the good-looking interface, and instead learn to get comfortable with this liquid glass crap. So I didn’t touch macOS for some years, and some things have changed, but the majority of annoyances I remember are still here.

A note on different desktops/WMs for macOS

I’ve started receiving some comments on this post, and I’d like to clarify that I’m aware of other window manager alternatives for macOS, like AeroSpace, Yabai and the like.

First, I’m not a fan of tiling window managers. Personally, I almost always have one window per desktop. Tiling never stuck with me. I’ve tried it several times during these fifteen plus years, and I don’t really feel the need for a keyboard-driven environment besides my Emacs. I mostly use touchpad gestures and the overview/mission control feature when I need to switch windows.

Secondly, I don’t really have that many issues with the current macOS WM, and I don’t really want to replace it. I was a GNOME user, remember?

Virtual desktops

As an ex-GNOME user, I like my virtual desktops. MacOS has had virtual desktops for a long time, but I think GNOME handled those better.

First of all, switching with the touchpad gesture feels a lot slower. In GNOME, it wasn’t an animation - the speed was tied directly to how fast you move your fingers, with easing after you release them. I got used to switching between desktops with a lot of speed, and on macOS, it’s not like that.

It seems it is also tied to the speed of the gesture, but it feels like there’s a cap on the maximum possible speed:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

An additional feature of GNOME is that it will automatically create additional virtual desktops once you’ve filled all of them, and there’s no limit to how many you can have. I usually have 4-5 desktops, but when I’m not working on something, it’s nice that I can only have one or two.

In macOS, you can have as many desktops as you want, however, they’re not added automatically. Or at least I couldn’t find a setting for that. Because of that, even if I’m not using all of them, sometimes a stray window is sitting on the last desktop, and I have to go through all of them to get to it.

Fullscreen and maximize button

For some reason, the developers decided that the maximize button should instead act like a fullscreen button in macOS. When you maximize a window, it is moved to its own, dedicated virtual desktop - and I like it. I have used this pattern in GNOME for a long time by installing an extension that brings this feature into GNOME.

However, and it is a big however, in GNOME, when I maximize a window, it creates a virtual desktop next to the one I’m on. In macOS, it also creates a virtual desktop, but it moves it to the far right.

So, imagine I’m browsing the web, seeing something interesting, and I want to open Emacs to take a note. I open Emacs, maximize it, and on the desktop to the left of Emacs, I still have my browser, and I can switch between these back and forth. In macOS, if I do this, the window is moved to a desktop at the far end of the list of desktops. You can rearrange those manually, but it’s clumsy. I would much prefer if the desktop were created to the right of the current one.

Figure 5: Emacs was opend on Desktop 1, but after maximizing it is now essentially at Desktop 5

You can prevent this, in some form, by turning on the “Automatically rearrange Spaces based on most recent use” in the settings. Then, a new fullscreen desktop is created to the right of the one you’re currently on, which is nice, however, then the spaces get rearranged all the time. Like, when you’re opening a link from the messenger, you switch to a desktop that has the browser open. The spaces get rearranged, such that the desktop with the messenger is next to the one with the browser, so you have to find the other one that previously was inbetween. It’s so bizarre that we can’t have fullscreen spaces created next to the current one without automatic rearrangement.

And, because it is a fullscreen mode, it also makes things go a bit haywire for some applications. Emacs doesn’t like this mode in particular.

Right now, I’m using four virtual desktops and manually organizing those, but maybe I need to adjust my usage pattern. Speaking of virtual desktops, let’s look at the Mission Control thing.

Mission Control

That’s another pain point for me. You see, GNOME also has something akin to Mission Control - you swipe up with three fingers, and you see all your open windows:

You can then move your windows between desktops or switch between them.

MacOS also has this, with the exact same gesture:

However, it is far less useful.

In GNOME, I can close windows in the Overview:

Figure 6: This close button is part of the Overview, not the window manager

I can tweak the dock:

Figure 7: Actually, the dock is only visible in Overview

I can start typing, and the search appears:

I can even swipe up again and bring up the applications menu:

Figure 8: Not that I use it that much though

There’s a lot of control! Wanna know how much you can control in the Mission Control?

You can move windows and desktops around.

…

That’s it!

What mission? What control? You can’t do anything.

Sure, one advantage macOS’ mission control has is that you can move entire desktops around - in GNOME, you can’t rearrange desktops themselves, only windows. And it plays nicely, with all this full-screen nonsense, but I still much prefer the GNOME approach here.

The Dock

Dock is a weird concept. It’s cool to have it, and I remember in my early Linux days I wanted a macOS-like dock so badly that I tried to make it out of existing panels and custom widgets. I installed various dock plugins in my desktop environments just to have it zoom in on icons when I hover over them. These days are long past.

Figure 9: remember Cairo dock?

Figure 10: remember Plank?

GNOME made a smart decision to only show the dock when you’re in Overview - their “Mission Control” variant. You don’t need the dock constantly taking vertical space from your windows, and you don’t have to deal with it showing up accidentally when you simply hover the mouse pointer at the bottom of the screen. Or at the side of the screen if it is your thing.

When it is only inside the Overview/Mission control, it makes sense as a favorites bar and a way of switching between applications. I haven’t used Alt+Tab (or ⌘ command+⭾ Tab) in years because of that. I would much prefer for the dock to be only visible in Mission Control, but sadly, there’s no way of doing it in macOS, as far as I can see. Moreover, Dock becomes useless in Mission Control specifically, so it won’t work that well in macOS.

What baffles me is that when you close an app, it stays in the dock, taking up space. Again, there seems to be no way of disabling it. Disabling the “Show suggested and recent apps in Dock” in system settings doesn’t affect this behavior.

You have to either use ⌘ Q, or right-click on the dock item and choose “close”. What’s the red button in the window for then? Usually, the app simply continues working in the background, as if minimized.

Speaking of which, so far only the minimize button seems to work in a sane manner.

Sure, there’s little point in actually closing applications, given that this laptop has a lot of RAM and CPU power, but it always felt weird to me that apps want to stay open all the time. I’m done with you - why do you think that you’re so important that you shouldn’t be closed? Do what you’ve been told.

The Finder

Linux has always had weird file managers. To me, nothing beats Microsoft’s Windows 7 file explorer - it was the least BS one in my opinion. GNOME’s Nautilus, or Files, as it is called nowadays, had a few long-standing problems, some of which date back ten plus years. KDE’s Dolphin was nice, but too had some weird quirks. However, it’s nothing in comparison to macOS Finder.

See the screenshot?

A normal file view, right? Now, what should happen if I shrink the window?

Your browser does not support the video tag.

The what? Who thought that this was a good idea? For those who didn’t get it, the grid of items remains the same despite the size of the window! Like, seriously?

The oddities don’t end there. Where’s the current path? For some reason, you can only see it when holding the ⌥ option, it appears at the bottom of the window. You can, in fact, toggle it in the settings so it is always shown, and while you can click on it to navigate, you can’t edit it, as it seems.

What really baffles me though is that it seems impossible to shift-select multiple files in grid view - only in list view. Even though, if you do shift-select files in list view, and switch back to the grid view, files stay selected. Seems to be related to how the media viewer works.

Another oddity is that when moving directories around, there’s no option to merge directories with the same name by default. I mean, when I move a directory to a different place, where another directory exists with the same name, I expect them to be merged, but the pop-up only says this:

When the ⌥ option key is pressed preemptively and held during the drag, the option to merge directories appears:

Like, you need to know, before the hand, that the target location you’ve chosen contains a folder with the same name you’re moving right now. And if you didn’t, you need to repeat the drag. Why not show it by default?

For the record, when the same thing is done in the GNOME file manager, it asks you if you want to merge directories, but you can’t replace them, so you can’t ever lose data. And if it contains files with the same names, it asks for each file if you want to replace it, or keep both. Of course, you can choose to replace all files, so it wouldn’t drag:

Cutting files is also super weird. You first copy the file as normal, then proceed to the directory you want to move the file, and press ⌘ command+⌥ option+v. Not only does the shortcut itself make your hand curl up as if you were a lobster, but also the semantics of this operation feel extremely weird - you copied the file, after all, why would it move afterwards? I guess, it’ handy in cases when you thought you wanted to copy the file, but you actually decided to move it, so you don’t need to input a whole new shortcut again, but it’s a minor win in my book.

Thankfully, I use graphical file managers rarely, so I can continue living in my comfort zone of Emacs’ DIRED.

Files and folders

But, while we’re at it, let’s talk about files in general.

I have some local music stored in the Music folder. Some videos and films are stored in the Videos folder. I also have pictures stored in the Pictures folder.

Crazy, right? Imagine using the file system to store files systematically?

I also try to keep things organized, so I manage all these with some directories, like band-name/album-name/track-name in case of music files, or year/place-name/photo in case of photos. I like it because if I want to listen to something, I can just drop the folder into the player, or open the image folder and relive those moments. Organizing these with folders is also handy for backing these things up - just drop the folder to the external drive and you’re good to go.

In macOS, as it seems, tags are the way the system wants to work with files. It’s a different approach, and I’m not entirely opposed to that, since filesystems are an illusion, after all.

But every once in a while, I open the Music folder, and I see a second Music folder inside it. Apparently, it is created when opening the Music app. I can’t use the Music app because it can’t play FLAC, which is what the majority of my local library is encoded in.

When I open the Videos folder, I often find a TV folder inside. I’m not sure what app creates it, but it wasn’t done by me, as I never launched the TV app. And it appears there far more regularly than the Music/Music one.

Other apps often create their own folders anywhere they want. The OrbStack app creates an OrbStack folder in $HOME. Some other app I installed created a folder in the Music folder for some reason, even though it didn’t store music in it, just some audio files.

It feels like that this is not my computer, but one I share with everyone else, and watch they do as they please with my filesystem. Never once was this a problem in Linux.

Why can’t apps keep their files to themselves? I’m tempted to create things like Music/My Music, or Pictures/My Pictures, and use them specifically, forgetting about the default Music, Pictures, Videos thing, but it is such a cumbersome solution. It feels like, when you invite friends to a party, and they go to your bookshelf, and decide that they’ll put some of their own stuff on it for the time being. And when they leave, they forget to take their stuff, but you don’t want to touch it, as it is not exactly yours. And you can’t throw it out, as your friends will be mad.

I don’t know.

The media viewer

Oh, the image viewer.

Let me ask you a question:

You have a directory with some photos. You want to go through these photos in the order taken and view them. What do you do?

In Linux, or Windows for that matter, the answer is simple: you double-click on the image you want to start with, the image viewer is opened, and you can use the arrow keys to go back and forth. Simple and effective!

What happens when you do it in macOS Finder? Well, the image viewer still opens, but the arrow keys do nothing! No, in order to go through images, you need to select the items you want to view, hover over the File menu in the top bar, press the ⌥ option key, and select “Start slideshow N items”:

HUH? Slideshow is cumbersome, as it is a slideshow - it’s not meant for going through images manually.

Alternatively, you can use a different viewer, called “Quick Look”, which supports arrow keys. Horray! But what is it? If you’re in grid view, why are the arrow keys following the grid too?

Your browser does not support the video tag.

HUUUUUH?

Who thought that this was a good idea? Hopefully, I won’t repeat this question all too many times.

The only reasonable way of using it is by switching to the list view and using the up and down arrow keys. Which is still not great, because Quick View is meant to be viewed temporarily. Any accidental click outside of it will close it, and you’ll have to find where you were and start from there.

You can put it into fullscreen mode, but then the arrow keys stop working. This seems like such a basic feature for an image viewer, but somehow they’ve managed to make it unusable. Not only that, but if this folder has any non-image files, like text files or PDFs, they’ll be included in the quick view too.

I understand that the purpose of Quick View is to view files quickly, and often it is a great thing to have, but at the same time, it’s super weird in behavior.

Hardware accessibility

OK, I can go on and on about the software part of the os, but to be honest, all of this is covered by other people rather well. And, in truth, I couldn’t be bothered to try all other preinstalled software, because it’ll take a lot of time to put it into this already long article, but also because I don’t want to. For instance, the Music app is also weird, and I already have an extensive post about how Linux music players are weird, so it goes without saying that I’ll need to replace it with something else. Like, the Quick View can play FLAC without any issues, but the Music app (formerly iTunes, I believe) can’t. Even GNOME’s player could do that, and it kinda copies Apple’s Music app in some aspects. Reencoding all my library into ALAC - Apple’s equivalent of FLAC for lossless audio is not an option for me. I did it once before when I was a happy owner of an old 4th-gen iPod touch, but never again - it is pointless, there are better music players out there.

So to me, the silver lining is that GNOME’s inbuilt software is in a lot of ways better than one in macOS. And KDE has even better software than GNOME in a lot of cases. So instead, let’s talk about hardware oddities and their operating system counterparts.

The Microphone

So, while I do care about my privacy, I can’t call myself a privacy maniac. However, one thing I like to have in my devices is the ability to mute the microphone. It’s best when there’s a hardware switch for that, but it’s so rare that I’ve only seen it once in my life on some Lenovo laptop.

I mean, it’s simply more convenient to do that than switch to a specific application that currently uses the microphone and toggle it there.

So, on Linux, I used the microphone key found on my laptop’s keyboard. It muted the microphone in the system settings.

When I got my Mac, I examined the keyboard, and found almost all usual shortcuts - you can change screen brightness on F1 and F2, you can change volume on F11 and F12, and there’s the microphone icon on F5. So I naturally assumed that this was a button to mute the microphone, after all, my old laptop had it too.

I assumed wrong.

There’s no way to disable the microphone in macOS via inbuilt means. The only thing you can do is to manually set the volume input gain level to 0, effectively making the microphone deaf.

Wanna know what the microphone button does then? I’ll show you:

Yup, it asks you if you want to use the speech-to-text feature. Cool, right?

And you can’t change what this button does.

You can set a different shortcut for dictation in the settings, but look what happens when you press the microphone key:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

It changes itself back to this button if you click “don’t ask again”! And then it asks you again once you press it! So what was the point of providing “don’t ask again” then?

Though I’ve managed to defeat this beast of a problem by writing some AppleScript. This script can be executed in the Shortcuts app, and by analyzing its output, we can rename the shortcut accordingly:

After adding this shortcut to the “Controls” menu, it acts as a mute button:

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Works well so far, and even remembers the current input level value, so I can still adjust it if needed. Even more, it works better than it did on Linux, because it constantly forgot what level the mic was set to and chose a default value of 20%, which was too low.

Here’s a text version of the script, if anyone needs it:

on run {input, parameters}
	try
		set currentVolume to input volume of (get volume settings) as number
		if currentVolume is 0 then
			try
				set storedVolume to do shell script "defaults read com.andreyorst.mictoggle volume"
			on error
				set storedVolume to 50
				do shell script "defaults write com.andreyorst.mictoggle volume -int " & storedVolume
			end try
			set volume input volume storedVolume
			return "Unmute"
		else
			do shell script "defaults write com.andreyorst.mictoggle volume -int " & currentVolume
			set volume input volume 0
			return "Mute"
		end if
	end try
	return "Error"
end run

I can’t share the whole script because no way I’m making an iCloud account for that.

The keyboard layout

Not strictly about the hardware part, since the keyboard itself is pretty good. It’s a bit of a shame that Apple stopped using their Butterfly switches, as I did like them more than the current scissor ones, but the keyboard is still better than the one on my old laptop.

One thing that bothers me, and which I got very accustomed to, is the fact that GNOME can remember keyboard layout per window:

MacOS can’t do that - and I don’t know what is the reason for that. The settings page for layouts has a setting called “Automatically switch to a document’s input source”:

However, I’m not sure what it does. It seems to work sometimes, but other times it does the opposite of what I want to. I only have two layouts. Is it that hard to keep track of that amount of data per window?

The keyboard layout (physical)

Though let’s touch the keyboard one more time. I know that Apple has at least two keyboard layouts for different markets - one for the US and one for Europe.

Figure 11: US layout

Figure 12: European layout

I specifically wanted the US layout, because all other laptops and standalone keyboards I had in my entire life had this kind of layout. Never once in my life have I seen the European layout on any device.

But, for some unknown reason, Apple sells its laptops with a European layout in my area, and when my wife had a Mac, it had that. Every time I used it, I was fighting my muscle memory.

Sure, it has more keys, and these contain some characters otherwise inaccessible without switching the layout, so it can look like Apple does a good thing. However, literally no one except Apple users had seen this layout, and it makes no sense to them. In my particular case, some already existing keys in the European layout are placed differently, like . and ?.

So, since I didn’t want to deal with that, I got myself a version with a US layout. Thankfully, there’s a “PC” layout in the system settings, so I don’t have to relearn anything. Using the “PC” layout on a European keyboard, however, is even more cumbersome.

No middle click on the touchpad

For some reason, there’s no such thing as a middle-click on a touchpad. In Linux, it is usually mapped to clicking with three fingers at the same time. I’ve been using it in Firefox a lot, and to paste stuff into the terminal once in a while.

However, in macOS, my muscle memory is now against me. I click with three fingers in Firefox, and usually it brings up the right-click menu, which is fine at least. But sometimes it is registered as a left-click instead, and it is super annoying. Re-learning to use @@html:<kbd>⌘ command</kbd> click will take some time, I guess

The camera cutout

Same as with the microphone, I’d like to have a physical way of blocking the camera, but because Apple moved towards a custom-shaped display matrix, it can’t be done as easily as before. It has a lot of sensors there, and blocking them with a huge plastic cover will make it impossible to close the laptop lid.

Again, not strictly about the hardware side of things, but the display in general feels weird because of this notch - it’s right in the middle of the screen, and I’m used to having the clock there, after years of using GNOME. Some say it’s more logical to have them at the far right side, as it is commonly done on phones, but phones have a much smaller and narrower screen. The same goes for notifications - having them in the middle feels more natural to me, because most of the content I’m working with is somewhere in the middle. But your opinion may vary (as if anything else I said here can be universally agreed on).

The good parts

OK, enough bitching around, let’s discuss some good parts.

The screen itself is gorgeous, colors are vivid yet natural, and the 14-inch model is actually both a bit bigger and a bit taller than my old 13-inch laptop. I like the screen a lot. I didn’t go for the nano-texture display, as I don’t work in environments where reflections are problematic, so I can’t say how it affects image quality. Maybe if I did, it’d be in the bad section.

The speakers are pretty good. And for a laptop, they’re actually amazing. They have depth, the upmp, and are loud enough to watch films with comfort - can’t say this about any other laptop I’ve had before.

Touchpad - oh, the touchpad. Simply put, the fact that it is a lot bigger (in fact, they had even bigger ones before), and I can press on it absolutely everywhere, is amazing. I was also surprised to learn that they aren’t actually pressed in physically. Instead, it is a glass surface, which has haptic feedback that simulates the click. Purely amazing. I’ve spent a long time trying to find anything remotely close to these touchpads on other laptops, but I never could find one.

M4 Pro CPU is a beast. Recently, I forgot a passphrase to one of my GPG keys and tried to brute-force it. My old laptop had AMD Ryzen™ 7 3750H, which isn’t fast by today’s standards, but it wasn’t a slow CPU either - it handled all of my tasks without major hiccups. I tried it first on the old laptop, and it could try about ~45 passphrases per second. The M4 could try ~750 passphrases per second. Everything is so fast I can’t believe it.

The macOS itself isn’t all that bad. As a matter of fact, writing this post helped me find how to fix a lot of problems I initially had - this post was a lot longer before that, but I had to cut stuff from it, as it was no longer applicable. There are still some oddities - it constantly bothers me with asking permission to run apps for the first time, because I install them through brew, or downloaded from the official website (again, I’m not making an Apple account, no, no). But I finally have a machine on which I can do both my programming tasks and media tasks without needing to keep two different operating systems to handle each task specifically. Finally, I can record my music with my right hand while writing code with the left - a dream.

Even the liquid glass thing is not as bad as I thought it would be. Thankfully, Apple added a tinted style to it, so it is less transparent, which helps readability.

And overall, I really like the device - it feels solid, and that it will last me another five years at minimum. Hopefully I didn’t jinx myself here, though.

Anyhow, thanks for reading, and please do share your experience with me, or if you know ways of solving the problems I’ve listed, I would be glad to know about them!

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GNOME Software

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:59:00 +0300

Have you tried using the GNOME Software? This thing:

Do you use it? Are you even using GNOME?

Oh, sorry, I think should point this out, it’s kinda important - I’m asking the developers of GNOME Software.

Because, apparently, they don’t.

OK, let’s start this post over.

GNOME Software

Wed, Dec 6, 2023

@rant GNOME tools ~8 minutes read

GNOME Software, or, just, Software, is an application that “allows you to find and install new apps and system extensions and remove existing installed apps”. I mean, that’s what description is given to it on the official project page. It is preinstalled on most distributions that use the GNOME desktop environment, except for, maybe Ubuntu, which has its own store for applications. But I’m not going to touch Ubuntu here, I don’t really want to touch Ubuntu at all, to be honest, although I have to use it five days a week.

At home, I use the Fedora Silverblue. I like Fedora, in my opinion, it is one of the finest out-of-the-box-oriented distributions today because of how pure it is. No fancy patches, or extensions, just pure GNOME as it is. In addition to that, the Silverblue variant is immutable, so in addition to providing pure GNOME, it barely provides anything else.

I’ve picked Silverblue because I like to keep my system clean, and immutability helps tremendously. Everything is either a Flatpak or lives inside the Podman container. To be frank, even before I used Silverblue I had the same kind of workflow on the regular Fedora distribution, and the same applies to Ubuntu that I use at work. If your system got messed up enough for you to care you can just delete the container, and recreate a new one, installing only the stuff you do actually require. But I’m getting off track here.

I feel that the fact that I’m using Fedora Silverblue is important for this post because this means that I’m using a distribution that I can’t make changes to. Well, I can, of course, but I don’t do that. Again, all my apps are either in Flatpaks or containers, so the system itself is barely different from the fresh installation. I had installed updates, but these come from Fedora, so I’m assuming they know what they’re doing.

So let’s get back to the topic - I install apps as Flatpaks quite often. I do so using GNOME Software!

And it is pain!

I have used GNOME since 2008 or 2009, can’t remember that exactly, so I’m a seasoned Linux user. I have used a lot of different distributions, and for the past five years, Fedora has been my daily driver because it is simple, reliable, and has everything I need. And what it doesn’t have, I can build from sources in the container with my own hands, so I don’t give a shit about stuff like AUR, Nix, etc. For simple stuff, like a music player, Flatpak is more than enough, and for stuff like Emacs, I’m running a container with all my development tools. And here comes GNOME Software.

For the past decade, ever since GNOME Shell was released in 2011 I have been using it. I had spent two years using KDE just to see if the grass was kreener on the other side but returned to GNOME eventually. And, for the past decade, I’ve been using GNOME Software.

I mean, what, do you expect me to open a terminal every time I need to install or update a package? Sure, back in the day I did that when I used Arch, and Ubuntu before it, but honestly, I don’t care if I need to input pm update in the shell or press an “Update” button in the GUI.

terminal is faster and more convenient for managing packages

Yeah, right. And how am I supposed to go and look for the screenshots of the app I’m about to install on the terminal? You could say it’s a silly reason, but during the post on Linux music players, I have done that a lot. Of course, when I know exactly what app I need, I can go to the shell, and type out the command in a fraction of the time that it takes for GNOME Software to fully load and become responsive. And that’s what brings me to the beginning of the post.

Dear GNOME Software developers, tell me, do you use your application or do you install everything from the terminal anyway?

I think that the developer should be, if not the main, but an active user of the project they’re developing. That applies both to open source and what you do at work - because if not, you don’t know your own software.

A theory is nothing without practice, and the same goes for software development. The code is a theory. You compile the code and verify that it is correct like any theory should be. The application of that code is practice.

And I feel that the GNOME Software developers don’t use the program they create. Here’s why.

As I said before, I use Fedora Silverblue, with everything installed as a Flatpak or inside a container, so the system is pretty much as if I just installed it. I rarely shut down my laptop, instead, I put it to sleep (not even into hibernation) most of the time. Now, imagine I want to go and install the Audacious music player. I open Software and start typing Audacious, and that’s what I see:

I stare at this for a few seconds, check that my internet connection is working, and realize that it happened again - GNOME Software just doesn’t do anything. I tried waiting for minutes, and the spinner didn’t go away. So I closed the app. I opened it again. And I still see the damn thing spinning because you know what? When you press the close button, the Software doesn’t actually close, it always runs in the background, for reasons.

So I have to go into the System Monitor and kill the damn thing. I reopen it again, type Audactions, after it finishes loading everything, and now I see the player:

And this happens to me every single time. On a system, that is, according to its promise is immutable, and hence this should probably happen even at the stock installation. And, you know what - it does! I have recently reinstalled Fedora on one of the laptops I have and left it working for a while, checking periodically if GNOME Software will behave like that. I didn’t have to wait for long, it happened the next day!

So this bug can be reproduced, with a bit of patience, on a clear installation! Yet, it haunts me for the last 5-6 years or so! Aarrgh! ARE YOU EVEN TESTING YOUR SOFTWARE AT ALL?

*breathes*

Sorry, I’ve got too ~~angry~~ dramatic even for my style of writing. I’m not the only one who experiences this particular bug, among other bugs:

A Reddit post describes this exact problem, and many others, specifically mentioning that they’re not new
A bug report was submitted to the official issue tracker, outlining the same problem. I like the comment there:

Without a log I’m afraid we can’t diagnose or fix the problem, so I’ll close this issue report for now.

Can’t diagnose? Seriously? Have you even tried though?

Seriously, as a software developer, I don’t understand this. I mean, sure, sometimes I don’t want to deal with bugs I personally don’t have, and it is open source, so I don’t really have to do that, someone else can and is welcome to. But to close the issue because there are no logs and it can’t be diagnosed, despite the fact that the issue exists? Especially, when it hits multiple people. I don’t get it. Don’t try to explain me, I won’t get it, because it’s hard for me to get it, so I’ll close the discussion for now.
Many search related requests are closed, yet the problem is still there.

It’s like they find a possible reason why this might happen, fix it, and close the issue without testing. I mean, unless you can reproduce the bug before the fix, how would you know that it is fixed?

I don’t know how the development process is organized in GNOME, especially for GNOME Software. However, I think that they don’t actually use their own thing, because it has so many obvious bugs that I can hit several during a single session. For instance, the Reddit post mentions this:

While installing, the window “reloads” a couple of times, as if it was refreshing.

Yup, happens to me every time.

Sometimes it feels like updates have been fetched, and the ones being displayed are the most recent, but updating only reveals those updates were not the newest ones and even updates need to be downloaded

Happens to me as well. To be more specific it happens like this:

You open the Software (that has been running in the background for long);
You see that the “Updates” tab has a notification;
You open the “Updates” tab and it shows a spinner;
Then the updates appear.

So I would assume, seeing the spinner, that it had fetched everything, but by pressing the “refresh” button, the spinner appears and goes for much longer, revealing that there are in fact more updates than there initially were. Literally happened to me while I was writing the previous line, as I’m writing and testing at the same time.

There’s another issue, that is closed on the tracker, but happens to me all the time, and is extremely easy to reproduce: while you install anything, the search stops working. The funny thing, it is closed as a duplicate of the issue with the name “Rework threading model”, which supposedly should fix all of that. However, how it is a duplicate? At best it is blocked by that ticket, but it doesn’t duplicate it in any way because it describes the actual issue. It should be closed only when the blocking issue is done, and the bug is tested to be gone. What a mess.

So, yeah, GNOME Software is full of bugs, as most of the software is today. If you’ve seen the “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization” talk by Jonathan Blow, you may remember there was a moment where he listed all of the bugs that happened to him in the past few days. Have a look, I’ve linked it with a timecode.

So, why am I complaining in the blog and not actually submitting an issue? Well, I don’t want to. GNOME has a long history of ignoring problems, saying that people use their software in the wrong ways, and so on. I just don’t want to go to their territory and be ignored too. Instead, I can write a quick rant in my personal space, where I’m always right, and no one can prove me wrong, ha ha ha! Obviously, I’m being sarcastic here, if you couldn’t tell.

I guess, someday these bugs will be fixed, it’s just a shame that they have existed for so many years, and it seems like the developers don’t care.

Anyway, that’s enough ranting for this year. Use what you’re making, and test your fixes, or at least ask for feedback once you think you fixed the bug. See ya!

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GNOME doesn't need to be that huge

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 02:45:00 +0300

I’ve been a GNOME Shell user for many years now - I’ve started using it pretty much since its initial release in 2011. I’m using GNU/Linux as my main operating system since 2008, and I started with Ubuntu, as many did back then, and what I liked about Ubuntu was its desktop environment, or DE for short. Back then Ubuntu was using Gnome 2, a predecessor to GNOME Shell (or Gnome 3), and it was great - very well thought out, customizable, responsible, and lightweight. However, with the release of Ubuntu 10.10, Canonical moved to their own DE, called Unity, and I found myself in a weird situation.

The Gnome project just announced GNOME Shell, but Ubuntu moved to its own solution. And both options were, well, how do I put it… buggy?

In my opinion, Unity wasn’t good up until the release of Ubuntu 12.04, and it became really good in 14.04. Well, at least that’s how I remember it. I didn’t like Unity so I continued to use Gnome 2 for several years.

GNOME Shell, on the other hand… Let’s just say that it became really good just recently with the release of GNOME 40. Up until the release of GNOME 3.28 it wasn’t really that good, there were performance issues, occasional crashes, and other problems. Combined with the tendency of breaking extensions with every release, and the overall direction Gnome developers took, it wasn’t the best option, again, in my opinion, especially when Unity was making good progress. But, Canonical decided that Unity isn’t that great, Unity8 wasn’t making good progress, and with the release of Ubuntu 17.10, they’ve moved to GNOME Shell too. However, they’ve used gnome 3.26 and it wasn’t particularly great at the time, as I’ve mentioned it.

Now, you may wonder - why I’m only talking about Ubuntu? There were, of course, other distributions that used Gnome at the time, it’s just I used Ubuntu back then so that’s what I remember personally. I’m no longer an Ubuntu user though, I’ve moved to Fedora, simply because it has a vanilla Gnome, without any stupid things put on top of it by the developers of the distribution, like extra extensions or themes. Yes, I prefer Gnome as is - default Adwaita theme, no extensions that change the UI, like docks.

But there’s still one problem that I think is somewhat serious, and it is a common problem with a lot of interfaces today. And I noticed this problem when Ubuntu changed to Gnome in the 17.10 release. You see, Unity was made to be something in between - something more modern than Gnome 2, yet not as modern as Gnome 3. When Gnome 3 was released in 2011 it was looking rather different from Gnome 2. Unity, on the other hand, kept the good things of Gnome 2, yet expanded on some usability features, like good support for the global menu and HUD. The in-app menu search in Unity was amazing, but I’m going away from the topic.

What’s common between most modern interfaces as of today? They’re all big. And so was Gnome, already in the year 2011 going way ahead of its time.

Mobile-oriented UI

With the increased popularity of mobile devices, there also was the rise of mobile-oriented designs. Web pages now have a dedicated mobile-friendly mode, where all elements are bigger, so it is more comfortable to navigate with a bare finger, which provides far lower precision than a mouse pointer. Mobile apps use similar designs to web pages, even to the extent that some mobile apps are made with web technologies, and some web pages can be installed as an app.

A tablet is another quite popular device type, quite similar to a smartphone but bigger and more aimed at surfing the web. However, even though it usually has a bigger screen, it is still used with fingers as the main input device, so the UI elements are still big so users could reliably navigate them.

Desktops, however, don’t suffer from this, as they have a touchpad/trackpoint/trackball/mouse to control the pointer with great precision, and rarely have a touch screen, though the latter became more popular lately. But the popularity of mobile devices impacted the desktop UI guidelines as well. The first victims were desktop versions of the mobile-first web pages - they were either just stretched-up mobile versions or desktop variants that were stylized after their mobile versions. And it started to creep into the desktop UI itself. And Gnome and macOS are affected by it the most.

If you’re a Mac user, you know that visually macOS gets closer and closer to the iPad OS with each release. Perhaps that’s because they want to unify the operating systems, and make the iPad a fully featured portable computer at some point, similar to Microsoft Surface. Maybe, it’s just my guess - I’m not an Apple user and won’t likely be one. But what this means is that UI elements are getting bigger and more spaced out, in order to be usable on both desktop and portable devices with touch screens. There’s a great post by Andrew Denty, which has a lot of images, comparing Catalina and Big Sur versions of macOS. Here’s one of the images from that post:

Figure 1: macOS Catalina on the left, Big Sur on the right

If you look at the window headerbar, you’ll notice that it is almost twice as big, as it was before. Well, not twice, but about ~1.4x bigger - the old one is 76px tall, and the new one is 106px:

Yet the close, minimize and maximize buttons size remains the same. Other elements also have bigger padding, making the UI more spacy. I guess it is considered beautiful, but I also think that this is a waste of screen space. Macs are unlikely to get touch screens any time soon, and even if they are, the increased height of the headerbar won’t make a difference for the user, who’s trying to touch the minimize button right next to the close button. So I don’t think it was a change needed to make macOS closer to having the touch-ready interface, but a pure stylistic one.

But, well, the post title was about Gnome, and here we are, talking about macOS - why? Well, because Gnome takes a lot of inspiration from macOS, as far as I can see, at least. See for yourself:

Figure 2: macOS Finder and Gnome File Manager

Yeah, yeah, I know, a Mac user will say that it’s not even close, but the inspiration is pretty clear to me. Nikitonsky even used Gnome’s settings app screenshot as a joke after a long thread on the redesign of the settings window in the macOS Ventura beta version:

Figure 3: @nikitonsky tweet

Well, enough with the comparison to macOS, let’s get back to the main topic.

Mobile-oriented desktop UI?..

Yeah, you’ve read that right - Gnome wants to be on mobile phones and on the desktop at the same time. Their UI is designed with this idea in mind. A lot of apps change layout when you resize the window to be more like a screen of the phone:

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This is a nice touch indeed, and I can appreciate the effort, especially since there are ways to run Gnome on mobile phones today. Alternatives are always good and given the sad state of Android as an operating system, I’m all for full-blown Linux on mobile devices, with nice-looking native apps. And while this is cool and all, here’s a big problem:

Gnome interface elements are just way too big on the desktop.

Here’s a screenshot of the Gnome desktop on a Full HD display:

And here’s a similar screenshot but on a 2K display:

Just by visual comparison, you can see how much more space the file manager window is using on the first screenshot. Note, however, that both screenshots have file manager windows of the very same size, e.g. there’s no interface scaling. If you have a 1920×1080 display, try opening both screenshots in full screen, to see how the UI scale changes with the resolution. I, unfortunately, don’t have two displays with the same diagonal size but different resolutions, but here’s how it looks on my two laptops, from which I’ve taken the screenshots.

Edit: After getting a few comments on the fact that comparison screenshots don’t show anything useful, as the file manager windows have the same pixel size, I understood that I was not quite exact on what I wanted people to see. The problem in my explanation was with the fact that while windows do have the same size, the text size was supposed to be different but I forgot to enable it. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for pointing this out. I’ve enabled font scaling and re-made the screenshots, so I hope that now this will illustrate my point a bit better.

Here’s a screenshot of a display with a resolution of 1920×1200:

Figure 4: UI scale: 100%, display resolution: 1920×1200, font scale: 1x

This is how I see things on my work laptop, which has no UI or font scaling

Now the same image, but I’ve downscaled 2560×1600 to 1920×1200 and upscaled fonts to 1.33x. This way the images will have the same size, but you’ll see the difference in the UI element sizes:

Figure 5: UI scale: 75%, display resolution: 2560×1600, font scale: 1.33x

You can toggle between these screenshots to see the difference in UI scale. I, naturally, see it on screen, given that I use the latter setup on my smaller laptop, and the first screenshot represents the setup on my work laptop. And I indeed had to adjust the size of the file manager window so their geometry matched, however, note that the text size is the same¹ on both screenshots:

Figure 6: UI elements are scaled down, yet the text is the same size

I understand that this was not very obvious to see from the screenshots I provided earlier, that’s why I’ve included laptop photos that should have demonstrated this idea. Hopefully, these screenshots better illustrate my point.

The first one has a 15-inch Full HD display, the second one has a 13-inch 2K display:

Now, let’s set the screen scale on the 13-inch laptop to 125% and compare:

It may seem that apps don’t have the same size, but that’s due to the fact that the screens have different heights, and actually, 125% scaling matches how the screen would look if I had a 2k 15-inch display, instead of a 13-inch one. Here’s a better illustration:

I’ve used my GIMP skills to increase the height of the second display to match the height of the first display. You can see that the file manager windows are indeed (almost) the same size. Well, I guess I could just add a screenshot with the system scale set to 125% but the post already has way too many images, so if you want to compare them, see the footnotes section ²^,³^,⁴.

So what do I want you to take away from all of this?

I’m using the laptop on the left for 9 hours a day because it’s my work laptop. And each day I do I feel that the interface could have been 25% smaller. Notably, I felt this way even before I got myself a laptop with a higher resolution - and when I did I realized that Gnome works perfectly with this kind of pixel density.

I’m using the right laptop right before and after work. This is basically my hobby machine - I write this blog on it, and I code all my side projects on this very screen. And every time I use Gnome apps on this screen they feel right at home. I don’t have the best eyesight, mind you, so small elements should be problematic for me, but with this level of scale, they simply are not small - they’re normal.

So my takeaway here is that Gnome can safely reduce all their UI element sizes by 25% and it will still work great! Like, seriously, I even used ~/.config/monitors.xml to set the UI scale to 0.75 under the Wayland session, which looks amazing⁵ on my 1920×1080 display UI-wise. The text is a bit too small for my liking, but this can be fixed by scaling fonts up, the main thing I wanted from this is to make UI elements take less space. All UI elements such as buttons, menus, headerbars, panels, e.t.c. are perfectly usable with this scale on a regular Full HD display. The same can be done under XOrg with xrandr --output <display> --scale1.25x1.25.

On a side note, I once owned a GPD Pocket, the first revision, and it had a 7-inch screen with a 1920×1200 resolution. I’ve used Gnome on it, and funnily enough, upon installation Gnome detected that the screen is small, and automatically set the interface scale to 200%. Fractional scaling is still an experimental option, so I guess it was rounded to the next non-fractional scale available. Using it like this was not possible at all, because nothing was able to fit on the screen. I don’t have the device anymore, but I can set the scale to 200% on my work laptop and add it via GIMP to an old photo I’ve taken in 2018:

Figure 7: A mockup of how Gnome looked on GPD Pocket with scaling set to 200%

Setting the scaling to back 100% made the device usable but the text was too small. So I’ve turned font scaling only, and could use Gnome on this tiny screen without any hiccups - because all UI elements were perfectly usable in their unscaled form. GPD Pocket also has a touch screen, and even the it wasn’t affected by scale change - all elements still could have been pressed reliably with ease. I hope you can now trust me that the Gnome UI elements can be smaller without impacting usability because I’ve used Gnome on a large variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Big for the sake of being big (or just different?)

There’s another thing I’d like to mention. Gnome is quite different from other desktop environments available for GNU/Linux. There are a lot of different DEs, of course, but the most common ones to pop up are KDE Plasma, XFCE4, MATE, and Cinnamon. All these DEs are not “big” in terms of their UI elements. KDE is more Windows-like, and Xfce and Mate are more Gnome2-like (well, Mate is a continuation of Gnome2). While Xfce and Mate are more of an old-school type of DEs, which are still mostly using UI guidelines from that era of Gnome2 but build on top of modern GTK, KDE is not. KDE aims at being modern UI, without being big, and somehow that’s possible too!

I’ve used KDE Plasma 5 for two whole years from 2017 to 2019 if I remember correctly. Even though I always was a Gnome user before that, I enjoyed my time with KDE, after I got past the initial setup. KDE, ships with a ton of settings, unlike Gnome, and for some reason, the KDE dev team decided to turn most of them on. It was a major barrier for me because I want my desktop to be as simple as possible, not as noisy as possible. So I had to turn off all these jumping cursor animations, loading circles, e.t.c. speed up window animations one step up, and so on. After that KDE felt like a big improvement over what I’ve had in other Gnome2-like desktops.

Figure 8: Official KDE Plasma 5.25 screenshot

While I liked KDE, I’m just more familiar with Gnome, so I’ve returned to it after some time, but KDE was what made me start thinking about smaller interface elements again. I also wanted Wayland, and KDE didn’t have great support for it back then, while Gnome kinda did.

But what’s interesting, is that KDE Plasma also can be used on mobile phones, yet they don’t use mobile UI on desktop, unlike Gnome. I’m not sure if Plasma mobile ships with completely different apps or reuses apps from the desktop, but as far as I can tell, all apps that are built with the Kirigami framework can work as both desktop and mobile apps, similarly to Gnome. So it can be done, even without using a big UI on a desktop. Gnome just didn’t want to do that, unfortunately.

I’ll admit, there are other desktop environments with big UI elements, it’s just the fact that Gnome is one of the most used desktop environments in the Linux ecosystem. Gnome is used by default by two major out-of-the-box distributions - Fedora and Ubuntu. It is used by default in Pop_OS!, Tails, Debian, CentOS, and RHEL, and even Oracle’s Solaris switched to it in version 11.4. This is why I think that there should be put a bit more thought on the UI guidelines, as all these distributions are not for the mobile market.

It’s getting better

Though I don’t like decisions that were made in the past by the Gnome developers, I must admit - Gnome is getting better with every release. Gnome 40 introduced a lot of tweaks to the UI, making workspaces horizontal by default for example, and changing the overview screen to better utilize space because of it. The dark mode is another new addition, and it is made good, though it’s not automatic, you need to use an extension for that, but it’s fine. What I’m saying is that the project is lively and ever-changing - maybe we’ll get a more desktop-oriented design in the future.

I’ve mentioned that I prefer not to use extensions, but in actuality, I use two extensions - maximize-to-empty-workspace and Night Theme Switcher. Because of the first one, I’ve adopted the workflow, that I think the Gnome team envisioned - one maximized window per workspace. Thus the big UI elements are not that of a problem, for me, at least, given that most of the screen is used by the maximized app, and I usually don’t stack multiple windows on one workspace.

Even though, I think Gnome shouldn’t use these huge UI elements, or at least should provide a variant of the default theme that has 20-25% smaller window-related elements. If this were done, I could use fractional scaling on my 2k laptop display, making text slightly bigger, while still having more usable space on my other Full HD laptop. But we’ll see, I guess.

Thanks for reading, and let’s hope that Gnome will become even better in the future!

There is a small rounding error after upscaling fonts to 1.333333, so the text sizes are not exactly same, but very close. ↩︎
Gnome file manager at 1920×1080 with a scale of 100% ↩︎
Gnome file manager at 2560×1600 with a scale of 100% ↩︎
Gnome file manager at 2560×1600 with a scale of 125% ↩︎
Gnome file manager at 1920×1080 with a scale of 75% (resolution was artificially increased by scale settings in ~/.config/monitors.xml) ↩︎

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