GNOME 3.22 core apps

41 Replies to “GNOME 3.22 core apps”

1. I don’t get it…. distributions REALLY should not include any email or music software if they want to get the recommended gnome experience!? Yes, because nobody ever want to use mail or listen to music….

   1. Most people I know use email daily but have absolutely no need for an installed mail client, as they all use some webmail provider (GMail being the most common by far).

      I guess for music is the same thing with streaming providers, and listening to music on your computer is probably a less general requirement to start with (I don’t do it, most members of my family don’t do it either, some of them just listen to YouTube).

   2. But note that this is a SHOULD, and not a MUST. I would not advise shipping a distro without a music player, we just don’t have one we can recommend right now. We’re still using Rhythmbox for the time being in Fedora Workstation. And it’s a cool music player, but it does have that database management vibe, so it’s not really a great default and not something we want to recommend. And it’s never been part of GNOME releases, doesn’t follow our release cycle, so it can’t be a core app anyway. What we want to recommend is Music. Music is really cool and has some dramatic performance improvements in GNOME 3.22, but it’s still not yet ready for prime time. Hopefully we can change this soon and move it to the core apps list; if anyone wants to help with that, it’d be much appreciated.

      I think most distros should indeed not include an email client out-of-the-box. I suspect that an outright majority of users prefer webmail. I personally want a mail client, but I’m fine with installing Evolution myself. We can’t recommend installing Evolution by default, because it’s much too complicated. We actually do have designs for GNOME Mail, but it doesn’t exist, so we have nothing to recommend for now. But again, this is a SHOULD and not a MUST.

      1. Also note that for GNOME distros, Videos is a better choice for the default audio player than Rhythmbox. That sounds nuts, but it’s true: when you open any audio file with Rhythmbox, it gets added to Rhythmbox’s music database, even if it’s just some temporary file you’re never going to want to play again, or not a music file at all. Then when you remove the file, you wind up with warnings from Rhythmbox about missing files. It’s certainly weird that Videos is a better default, and very much not a desired thing, but it’s currently true.

      2. What about Geary? https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Geary

         1. Ah, this could be a whole discussion thread on its own!

            Geary is very promising! Especially now that it has an active maintainer again. But whenever I suggest it, people unfortunately point out that they can’t use it because it’s missing such-and-such Evolution feature that’s essential for them. Things like Exchange integration, for instance; lots of users simply cannot use a mail client that doesn’t support Exchange. Also, it currently still depends on ancient WebKit.

            Personally, I’d bet on Evolution to become closer to GNOME Mail designs than on Geary to grow a bunch of missing features, but it’s great to see some competition in this space. We’ll definitely be looking out for improvements in both of these apps to see how things are going and reconsidering every six months.

            1. What is the chance of the UI for Evolution being updated to the GNOME Mail design any time soon?

      3. Yeah, actually for the first time, I can actually use Music on my collection :-)

   3. Gnome music app shows album covers and does a great job of listening to music you downloaded onto the system. I still need a good email app like Thunderbird but I also use web mail for my other accounts. Since loading Gnome 3 since Fedora 15 it has really come of age to a point its my go to os.

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3. Why is Boxes a core app? Aren’t virtual machines primarily a developer tool?

   1. Boxes was iffy. It’s actually only half a virtual machine app, half a remote desktop app. Think: you have a Windows machine at work, you want to use it from home, so use Boxes for that. (Actually it can’t handle RDP quite yet, so it can only remote into Linux machines for the time being, but it’s a planned feature.) That’s not a developer use-case. Or perhaps you want to try out a different Linux distribution; that’s not a developer use-case either. But, yeah, Boxes could have gone either way, we just had to decide. It’s just a utility, and it’s OK if many users don’t use it, so long as it’s simple to use and broadly useful.

      1. Well, if someone has a remote desktop and uses Boxes for this purpose, he certainly is able to install an application.

         Providing Boxes but not Tweak tool because remote desktop is easier than choose a theme… that’s not captain obvious ;)

      2. I know I repeat myself and we’ve already discussed it on Fedora desktop mailing list, but I really don’t think Boxes are in the shape to be in GNOME Core and pre-installed in Workstation right now. Just try running Fedora 25 in Fedora 24/25’s Boxes. It’s completely unusable. This is not the quality GNOME or Fedora should expose to users by default.

         1. Jiri, that’s a F25 bug. Try running F24 or any other Linux OS in Boxes, it works great. Only F25 is broken. It’s a proposed blocker.

4. If you want a generic name for Cheese, why not use “Camera”? Isn’t that its core function: to operate attached cameras?

   1. I’d assume that an app named “Camera” would also be used for managing cameras (say, importing images from a DSLR). “Webcam”, instead, maybe?

5. Boxes and Photos and Music should not be core apps. Users can’t select files or folders outside their small little sandboxed world.

   Until I can point my Photos to say /home/Photos so the entire family can share, it is a useless application and shouldn’t be included. Sames with Music and Boxes, possibly others.

   Please allow ME to control where things are on MY computer.

   1. There actually is already a setting for this, but it’s buried in gnome-control-center (Search panel -> gear icon -> plus button) so I wouldn’t expect you to have found it. This setting should probably be exposed in the content applications themselves.

      As I mentioned, there are also plans to allow these apps to directly open files.

      Music is not a core app. :)

      1. I’m not sure that’s what they mean, there should be a way so say “music files are in X directory” but at the moment the best you can do is say “please search X directory for any kind of file”.

      2. Music doesn’t appear in the list in the search settings. I store my music files on a separate partition, so I tried to create a symlink from my /home/Music folder to the folder on the separate partition.

6. “Other applications, like Polari, are here because they are developer tools”

   I don’t get this. People still use IRC for many other topics, right?

   1. Outside the geeky free software community? Probably not so much? I don’t think it’s generally useful; it’s only useful to the privileged few who use IRC.

      I was too harsh on Polari, though. It’s actually very nice and easy to use, and hardly a good example of a developer tool anyway.

7. The double Chess app bug in Debian is finally fixed for next year’s new stable release of Debian.

8. Tweak Tool is better as a COULD/SHOULD/MUST. This is what we advised for a while. Fedora was the outlier on this.

9. Evolution is one of the applications that I actually enjoy using, because it can actually do what I want to do. There is no way *that* application can be too complicated; it is the only thing that actually works and allows me to actually read my email. It is impossible any user would be better served by webmail when using webmail requires logging in and visiting a website every time you want to read your email, is slow, and doesn’t support half of the features of Evolution (and yes, nontechnical users actually do use these features—everyone in the modern world makes heavy use of email, not just programmers!). That’s without considering the freedom and privacy issues with using webmail.

   I suspect the two reasons it is not considered a core app are that it has menus, and that it has many features. Is it so hard to understand that menus might actually, for once, actually be the best user interface paradigm for something? I see no way email or office suites could be done without menus without removing all the features and making the software useless for anyone. What’s confusing with menus? Everyone understands how to use them and how to find things quickly with them.

   Has actual usability testing been done on Evolution? I think that the claim that it is too complicated to use is unfounded and that anyone can understand very intuitively how to use it. Everyone manages to use Gmail, and that interface isn’t at all simpler—or, for that matter, prettier—than Evolution.

   Evolution is currently the best email client, all platforms combined (including webmail clients). If no other email client has done better, then Evolution is probably doing it right already. It follows the important parts of the HIG, uses GTK+ 3, and, from what I see on git.gnome.org, is one of the most actively developed applications. Should it really be excluded from the core apps just because it doesn’t have interface gimmicks that neither technical nor nontechnical users care about, like an application menu or client-side decorations? Evolution doesn’t look out of place at all in GNOME, so that it doesn’t have those things doesn’t seem important at all to me.

   Please include Evolution in the core apps.

   1. Hi, I use Evolution every day, but I can’t remember the last time I ever used any of the menus, except to open the preferences dialog once every couple of months or so. Everything I want to do is available in the toolbar. So out of curiosity: what do you use the menus for?

      Here’s a recent Evolution usability test: https://dkripak.wordpress.com/2016/09/04/ux-test-results-part-ii/. Note that was unfortunately performed with Evolution 3.18, which is harder to use to set up with a GMail account than in modern Evolution (the testers had to “allow access to less secure apps” or their correct password would be rejected with no error message), but it was not only GMail users who had difficulty.

      Now there are some UI changes planned in Evolution. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know the maintainer wants to improve the usability and is at least interested in what GNOME designers have to show. We’ll see where it goes and continue to reevaluate!

      1. Oh wow. I have to retract my claims about usability testing and Evolution not being too complicated then.

         I have to use the feature to work offline regularly when my university’s wifi doesn’t work. I back up Evolution data and have imported email from KMail once. I use message filters and search folders a lot, in part because my university has a ton of mailing lists (one mailing list for each course, all communication is done with email).

         I have hidden the toolbar because I use the menu items instead. Like in LibreOffice and Firefox, I can press the Alt key and then letters to select menu items with the keyboard. I cannot do that with the toolbar and other buttons (I found the Alt key could be used with buttons in gedit, and with F10, but it’s a pain to use and menus are more pleasant). Some applications like Nautilus are not accessible with the keyboard; it was far easier to use when menus could be used, but they were removed.

         Even the Ctrl+G Go To Folder menu item I use sometimes, because using the tab key to move to the side pane… try it and you’ll see why I prefer Ctrl+G…

         There are things that could be removed from the menus, though. File → Empty Trash is redundant because there is already a way to empty the trash from the context menu, and it is not clear which trash it empties (trash folders in all accounts, or in the current account?).

10. I was kinda thinking about Empathy here…
    Yeah, I know it has a pretty dated UI and don’t follow current GNOME standards.
    But, as we do have the Online Accounts so when adding i.e. a Google account you get the chat function enabled. And it would kindof need Empathy to be useful, wouldn’t it?

    1. gnome-online-accounts should really be built without Telepathy support, then the chat stuff doesn’t show up in Online Accounts. That’s what we’re doing in Fedora. Unfortunately it looks like we never changed the upstream default, so other distros still have it, which is why you’re complaining about this. I’ll ask if we can flip it.

11. About Cheese name: I think it does not qualify as a generic name. The problem isn’t obvious in English, but it is obvious in other languages.
    Most GNOME core app generic names are translated as is. For example, Videos becomes “Видео” (“Video”/”Videos”), Documents become “Документы” (“Documents”) etc. There are exceptions, e.g. Web becomes “Веб-браузер” (“Web-browser”).
    With Cheese, however, it’s much worse. The current translation is “Cheese”, in Latin. Not only that inconsistent, but the app also gets the glorious topleft spot in the overview. You can’t translate it either: “Сыр” (“Cheese”) can only mean this in Russian: http://flexibristol.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/cheeses.jpg and the photo metaphor basically isn’t there. I’m sure there are many other languages with similar problems.

    “Camera” suggestion above makes much more sense here.

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13. Evolution MUST be a core GNOME app.

    Having a proper email/calendar client is NOT optional. This the only app in the entire GNOME stack that can connect to MS Exchange and thus makes possible using GNOME in a corporate environment.

    Putting Evolution on a list of optional apps is insane.

    1. So is saying that default apps should be dictated by what is used in a corporate environment, particularly one narrow definition thereof.

14. What’s wrong with Bijiben? I use it often to jot down notes, and it has a nice look, in my opinion. It has never lost my data.

    1. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728293 for the biggest problem. Too many smaller bugs on top of that. I want it to create lists when I type * for instance, surely any note app should do that. Nothing insurmountable, but it’s almost unmaintained right now so it really needs a volunteer to step up.

       1. Wow. I looked at those links and I don’t understand any of it. I just used Bijiben (Debian Jessie) and it still works perfectly. I was pleased when I discovered Bijiben a while ago because, at the time, it seemed to be simple and elegant compared to Tomcat.

          I guess bulleted lists are nice, but does a note-taking app really need all those bells and whistles? I use Bijiben as a quick way to write down something in a hurry, not an app I use in and of itself. If I needed a list, I would just type

          * one
          * two
          * three

          and move on to more important stuff. Note taking is not that deep, in my opinion.

          1. I wanted to launch it to show a screenshot of a bug, but it crashed. :)
             Launched again:
             https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6Q15WgSizoncXg0d1pIRGhLRkk
             Here I can see at least 2 major things:
             1. The popover… Well, you see it. Additionally, I can say that it’s really annoying when you select text.
             2. The background should be yellow, as selected. It worked prior to GTK 3.20.

             Additionally, I remember that I managed to somehow leave the menu open and the window freezed so that I had to kill -9 it. It happened at least 2-3 times. (About the same amount of times I used it. :) )

             So, perhaps at least these issues should be fixed first?

15. I agree with removing Evolution, but for a different reason. Over the past 10+ years I’ve never got it to work well with Microsoft mail servers, which is my only use for an incredibly large mail client. I’d love it to disappear from Debian.

16. Howdy,

    Maybe i missed it somehow but i think the screenreader orca schould been added to the core list. Its important for a11y.

    1. Hi, it’s part of core and you’ll find it in the jhbuild moduleset, but I didn’t list it here because it’s a core OS component rather than an application.

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