Dash to panel, no overview at login, kstatus / appindicator tray icon support and gsconnect
The no overview at login story highlighted the sheer hubris of the gnome design team. Wild ride.
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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To be fair showing the overview on startup makes perfect sense on vanilla gnome, it's only dumb if you install one of the two specific extensions that partly replace it.
On default gnome, you still have a hot corner in the upper left, and the dash along the bottom edge of the screen and I'm not sure I get that either.
The dash is only visible in the overview, so this state absolutly make sense. You can immediatly search or click on the dash
I gather the DE is supposed to stay out of your way, but it feels like a bandaid for another poor design decision when you frame it like that.
And in addition, no other desktop environment feels the need prompt the user to open or search for something from the get go.
I think it just comes down to different people using their IDEs different. I almost don't use the dash and always just hit super key and then search or super and then open one of the few things in my dash. And I really like that gnome gets out of my way in tge "default" / "desktop" mode
I can appreciate that people use their systems very differently, but this is something that gnomes designers did not care to acknowledge throughout that whole exchange; input directly from their end users, and that's bearing in mind they collect no telemetry.
I appreciate working in UX for a community driven project is no easy task, many of the people commenting in the thread linked above could be considered more advanced users with their own desktop shortcuts configured, and a one size fits all approach satisfying all is difficult to deliver. All they asked for was an option for this new behaviour.
The communication in that thread was so poor that matt miller got involved.
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