After nearly six months of development, the GNOME 43 “Guadalajara” desktop is finally here and introduces a few interesting changes, the most prominent one being the Quick Settings menu that can be accessed from the system top bar, very similar to those you probably saw on Android devices or the latest Windows 11 and macOS systems.
Nautilus has also been improved considerably, and Epiphany (GNOME Web) now supports WebExtensions, instantly making the browser a lot more useful. The move to GTK4 continues, too, of course, and there’s countless other improvements.
>no taskbar
>no thumbnails in filepicker
>no type-ahead find in Nautilus
>no server-side decorations
No thank you.
Others may add their own complaints – e.g. no files on desktop, no tray icons, no minimize/maximize buttons – which I personally don’t care about but that are still valid.
But good to see that Epiphany now supports extensions. That means there’s finally a usable Webkit based browser out there that’s not called Safari.
Dude its Gnome, ever since Gnome 3 they have had that Apple Gestapo “You VILL do things our vay and you VILL like it!” attitude which I suppose is fine if you like being dictated to (which considering how popular Apple is there is a market for that) but on Linux I always preferred either KDE or XFCE as it never fails there is always a couple settings that need tweaking and at least those let me do so.
Honestly, I don’t think most people care. The defaults are fine and they work. KDE has been up and down over the years in terms of stability for my setup. I really like XFCE and Sway, but there are some times where some odd feature isn’t built in, and its far easier to tweak via purpose built GUI than cli and no one has built that except Gnome. So regardless of what ever Desktop environment I have set up on a box, it always always has to also have Gnome.
@joscher
> I’ve never been fond of the task bar, but hitting one key and being able to see all your windows that are open is quite nice. Doesn’t need to have a static thing at the bottom, of course just my opinion, there are extensions that add a taskbar. At least it isn’t a confusing mess like macOS’s…
> Uhm, I just tested the image viewer, clicked open, and the file picker has thumbnails.
> Unless I’m misunderstanding you… Nautilus has had type ahead there for a very long time. Unless you’re talking about clicking on the magnifying glass icon and then having to type in something you’re searching for (I have seen varying success of that, sometimes it’s mostly just annoying to me, even on search engines, mainly due to the way they’ll show suggestions, but then it’s randomly not down arrow, or something keyboard usable…)
> no server-side decorations is pretty specific, as a lot of DEs do not 😛
You can use Tweaks still to add the minimize/maximize buttons. I usually configure a middle mouse click to minimize the window if I click on a window bar. This isn’t even an extension, but built into gnome as a hidden option.
Epiphany getting web extensions (though I wish they had been confident enough to not hide the option) is amazing. Unfortunately I did test it with FoundryVTT and it never even finished loading….
When GNOME 3 will finish its migration to mobile user interface. By that time i will likely be able to use GNU/Linux on a mobile device smaller then laptop PC. Then hopefully it will all start to make sense again.
It’s funny, JingOS on their tablet used Plasma, but very much looked like they styled everything after iPadOS. Gnome 43 looks like they snagged the developers from JingOS when it died off, but it’s built with GTK4 instead of Qt.
imagine having 4 settings apps, then having quick setting for dark mode 🙂