The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:
Improve the current state of accessibility
Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
Encrypt user home directories individually
Modernize secrets storage
Increase the range and quality of hardware support
Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
Why would you want desktop icons? I mean I get it, there were quite popular back in the day, but I don’t see how a big junky place of a desktop has any benefit
I wonder if there's a way they could neatly implement them without cluttering the desktop. Like what if they were somewhere in the overview or something?
I really like Gnome but requiring extensions to work properly is bad design imo.
For example my moms laptop runs Gnome and she doesn't need much except 3 basic features: a dock, desktop & tray icons. Tray icons are necessary because Nextcloud relies on them to show the sync status, desktop icons are great to have temporary files easily accessible for a presentation.
In my opinion the most frustrating decision of Gnime is to not allow making the "dash" permanently visible, in other words, a dock. I'd argue it's even an accessibility option because it's easier to click on something visible than having to open the overview.
It's frustrating since Gnome is an almost perfect desktop for anyone who wants a simple, working desktop.
I use Gnome without extensions, it's great. IMO Microsoft didn't invent the perfect UX paradigm back in the early 90s. People use a task bar and start menu because they're used to it, not because it's better IMO.
I'm glad Gnome had the balls to do away with tradition and go with something different. It's led to a much better workflow IMO.
Gnome is great for people who like the opinionated workflow. Sadly that is not most people, at least I know of 5 people who tried Gnome and 4 came to the conclusion that the lack of a taskbar/launcher/dock makes it unsuitable for their desktop usage.
If Gnome had an optional dock, they might've actually used it and found out how great Gnome is. Maybe at some point they'd even disable the dock and return to the blessed workflow.
For the 1000th time, those extensions aren't even close to what something really native would offer. They fail in some circumstances like drag and drop to certain plains and behave inconsistently.
GNOME Extensions actually run in the gnome-shell process itself and can do most things that a builtin solution could offer.
They fail in some circumstances […] and behave inconsistently
That proves why they shouldn't be part of GNOME Shell themselves. Offloading some (debatable) functionality to extensions helps keeping the core components reliable and maintainable.