No meaningful new feature has been added. Similar to what happened to Terminal, GNOME decided to abandon Text Editor (aka as gedit), replacing it with another application with the same name. This GTK 4 text editor has a slick UI and automatically saves your work, to prevent you from losing it. Also, because GNOME is not interested in Terminal anymore, it did not bother to make it respect dark/light modes changed in Settings, potentially adding even more inconsistency. Want to keep using Terminal? Technically you can, as long as your distro keeps building it but who knows how long they will do that for. And for no good reason, Console seems to be the only base application that has transparency, but do not try to change this because it is impossible. However if the user runs Console itself as sudo the header bar color does not change. The new feature GNOME seems proud of is Console's header bar ability to change to red when the user calls sudo. Memory consumption has increased a bit and rendering performance is exactly the same, lagging behind all major desktop environment’s terminals, with the exception of KDE’s one. The search does not even inform the number of occurrences found. Console is provided as-is: apart from zoom and dark/light modes, there is absolutely nothing else to change. Forget all the options and customization found in Terminal. Is it worth it? Only from GNOME’s perspective which seems to believe that the less features the better. But there is nothing so bad that it could not be worse, right? GNOME 42 final release ships with Console in beta version and it still uses GTK 3 and no lidadwaita, meaning more visual inconsistencies.
Good luck trying to figure out why since there is zero feedback/log.Īfter more than 20 years working on Terminal, GNOME decided to introduce a new default terminal application that no one asked for, called Console. It is not even consistent! One may wonder how useful is having screenshots with any margin in the first place.Īlso, if your distro does not ship with GNOME but you want to try it and use the new video recording feature (hidden in previous versions ), chances are it will not work. Just take a look at most of the single window screenshots (not the one above) in this article and notice how big the gap is between them and their captions. This new version keeps an even larger margin to accomodate shadow effects. So unless you know C programming language and want to play this cat and mouse game with each new release of libadwaita, theming in GNOME is officially over.īelieve it or not, this screenshot was taken from a desktop system As expected, their styles do not match.īut what about real theming? At this point libadwaita only allows users to change between light and dark modes. Because of that, users now have two places to set dark/light modes: one in Settings (driven by libadwaita) and the other in Tweaks (driven by libhandy). GNOME could also have embedded in libadwaita both dark and light modes for legacy applications, but they decided not to. GNOME 42, on the other hand, decided to implement freedesktop color scheme standard to deal with dark and light modes, and it is all embedded in this in-house new library called libadwaita.
But at least with a bit of digging the user could find a straightforward application to change themes, which were made using CSS, meaning any designer would be able to create/modify them. Until GNOME 41, if the user wanted to change the theme they would not find a way unless using Tweaks, this application that GNOME would love to get rid of and some distros do not even ship with, like Fedora and Ubuntu. As a result, these apps have better performance, a new modern UI style, and new user interface elements.
GTK 4 and libadwaita provide next generation capabilities for GNOME applications, and many GNOME apps have started to use these components for GNOME 42. Instead of fixing the long list of issues found in previous GNOME versions, the companies behind GNOME decided to add more, creating inconsistencies, including dubious libraries, useless new applications, removing features and even ignoring well-established UI conventions.
GNOME 42 is just another example of that. The majority of popular applications and services are constantly being updated even if these changes are irrelevant or, in many cases, making the products worse. Although we can question this logic, we can all agree it has dominated the market. It seems the tech industry has been trying to make us believe that we need constant novelty otherwise we will be left behind.
0 kommentar(er)
