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Unified button that disguises as two different icons hiding other useful options

You can only cycle windows in one direction even if you try to do some remapping

Choosing keyboard languages hides a lot of options. Once you understand you need to click on English US to see more detailed options then you get them all, UK, Canadian... Then it's unclear which keyboard layout is currently selected and how to select one from the list you made.

I can't fathom how a DE whose is all about human machine interface guidelines whatever and supposed to be the epitome of UX can't figure out basic stuff about discoverability and clarity




Default keybindings have Shift+Super+Tab doing reverse window cycling in GNOME. Just tried it. Also, which unified button masquerades as two icons?

Keyboard layouts are a pain, but there are some solid extensions that clean the flow up and may be upstreamed into GNOME at some point.

It's all opinions, but boy, compared to the mess that is macOS and iOS regarding discoverability ... I'll take GNOME any. day.


True ! So why can I only remap cycling window in one direction and not the other ... ?

The volume and power icons on the top right is actually one button and hides other option like screen lightning volume and wifi etc. If at list they had made a three vertical dots/stacked bars and is the convention for hamburger menus...

From what I heard GNOME devs do not like change and it sucks to be a GNOME extension developer, a quick google search seems to confirm that so it casts some doubt about them up-streaming any of them but maybe you know better. Has it ever happened to other extensions ?

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/developing-gnome-shell-extensi... https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/pvvku5/why_do_extens...

Haven't really used MacOS or iOS more that five minutes so I can only trust you on that.

On the other hand for example, it is very easy to remap CapsLock to Escape on MacOs. Just go to Setting --> Keyboard and you easily find the option. GNOME ? No, not in settings. Wait I have to use an app called gnome-tweak ? Ok it's in "Advanced keyboard otions" --> Opens a big list of loosely classified options. Oh well it was in miscellaneous category.


I can believe that its easy to bounce off software because of a million paper cuts. But the problem with them trying to address every one of those proactively is that GNOME is a huge undertaking and they do their best to move at a fairly slow pace (now, after the 3 transition, which was akin to ripping a bandaid off ... go fast, piss the person off, but then the bandaid is gone).

I don't know if the CapsLock -> Escape switch is on a roadmap somewhere, but that is a little bananas. That said, my partner comfortably uses GNOME every day to browse the web and manage some files. Has she EVER wondered how to remap CapsLock? No. The people who do want to? Google can give you the answer pretty quickly. Not saying it's good UX, but GNOME balances a lot of use cases, and as this thread suggests, I think they've actually (with a LOT of complaining from engineers and power users) kept that balance pretty damn well to the point where I haven't been surprised by GNOME is a long time, and seems to slowly and progressively get better.

And yes, whoever jumps in here with their own papercut story, I know there is pain in not being the primary audience for software. But honestly, at least I'm in the same Venn diagram with my partner. The primary audience for macOS or iOS now appears to be ... I don't even know anymore. Used to be content creators, now it seems like even Apple doesn't actually know who uses their computers.




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