Improving Gnome Desktop as a 'Where's Waldo' Game

[fox]

One of the other features of Gnome is gnome shell extensions. There are hundreds of these that do all kinds of simple functions. One of them, making the menubar always visible, is set by default in Ubuntu. I use a few others, force quit, recent (recent files), openweather and GSconnect. But there are many others that work the same way as applets in Plasma. I like a tidy desktop, and prefer to have my applets in a menubar, rather than on the desktop. I think that there are more of these in Gnome than there are applets in Plasma. Whether these make up for the lesser flexibility of Gnome I couldn't say.

The only thing I find lacking in Gnome is the Mac-type drilling through folders. I can't think of any other functions missing in Gnome that I would want. The three that Buster mentioned are not of interest to me. (I can see the value of single-click but I'm not used to it and I don't think it's noticeably faster than double-click.) But again, to each his or her own.

[fox]

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Windows wasn't the first to come up with the concept of having menus and I'd almost argue with the tiles since Windows 8 that it has almost as much in common with Gnome.
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No, Windows wasn't. I believe it was Macintosh System 6. In its early days, Windows copied a lot from the Mac OS.

I don't see much similarity between the Windows 8 tiles and Gnome, other than the fact that both make application icons visible that can be single-clicked to open. Older versions of Windows have this, too and the xp/Win 7 implementation is more like Gnome (i.e. small icons on a menubar). But once again, I'm pretty sure that the Mac OS had these before either Windows or Linux.

[Jason]

Well, Linux only goes back to 1991 so yes, Macintosh had a GUI before it. However, Unix had a GUI before Macintosh which was basically ported to Linux, the X Window System. But what I mean is that having pop up program launchers (in a menu format) like in Plasma isn't really Windows-like as many might claim.

[fox]

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And you can do everything almost as easily as in Plasma. Be sure to read carefully Mike.
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Read this carefully, Buster...

You can't do everything as easily in Plasma as you can in Gnome. Try force-quitting an application in Plasma without using the command line (a no-no for Buster), shutting down Plasma or forcing a shutdown. In Gnome there is a force-quit extension that works in the GUI; no such thing in Plasma to my knowledge. I was in openSUSE Leap 15 and wanted to update my files. I made the mistake of trying to do it through Discover. That's a pretty buggy Plasma app if I ever saw one, and I should have known better from experience. At any rate it froze, and I couldn't force-quit it without grepping its PID number in the command line and then issuing a kill command (again in the command line).

Incidentally, openSUSE has an online update app (I think it's part of YAST). Once I killed Discover and went to online update, the operation went smoothly.

[Jason]

I'm not sure where Buster made that comment you quoted Fox as I can't find the post but perhaps I missed it. Or maybe he deleted it?

In any case you can force-quite Plasma applications just by using KSysGuard. No need to go to the command-line. I believe it comes with the Plasma desktop by default.

Another trick that works on every desktop using X is Ctrl-Alt-Esc. A skull and crossbones appears. Click on the application with the offending window. Poof! This is very old so can't guarantee that it shuts down everything related to that application but the window is gone

Regarding Discover, I used to have trouble with it and then I discovered that it was one of the repos that I had added that was causing the freezes specifically for Spotify.

I discovered this by doing an update in the terminal. Once I realized what was happening, I checked the Spotify website and realized they had released a new version and their repo had moved. I haven't had a crash in Discover in months now since I fixed that. Admittedly, it should be able to handle a broken repo more gracefully then it does.

[fox]

I'm not sure where Buster made that comment you quoted Fox as I can't find the post but perhaps I missed it. Or maybe he deleted it?

In any case you can force-quite Plasma applications just by using KSysGuard. No need to go to the command-line. I believe it comes with the Plasma desktop by default.
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Buster made the comment in this very thread, here!

[fox]

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In any case you can force-quite Plasma applications just by using KSysGuard. No need to go to the command-line. I believe it comes with the Plasma desktop by default.

Another trick that works on every desktop using X is Ctrl-Alt-Esc. A skull and crossbones appears. Click on the application with the offending window. Poof! This is very old so can't guarantee that it shuts down everything related to that application but the window is gone
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I just tried them both from openSUSE Leap. KSysGuard was installed by default, and Ctrl-Alt-Esc works exactly as Force quit does in gnome. You learn something new every day.

Funny though, when I had the problem with Discover, I googled for a solution. Ctrl-Alt-Esc came up, but I thought it would sign me out so I didn't try it. KSysGuard didn't come up at all in my search.

[fox]

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Regarding Discover, I used to have trouble with it and then I discovered that it was one of the repos that I had added that was causing the freezes specifically for Spotify.
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Admittedly, it should be able to handle a broken repo more gracefully then it does.

I didn't add any repos to my openSUSE Leap partition and I don't have Spotify. I've had problems with Discover before, but I can't remember what they were. Still not impressed with it, although I don't care for the gnome version of this in Ubuntu either (Ubuntu Software). Give me Synaptic anyday.

[Jason]

I'm not sure where Buster made that comment you quoted Fox as I can't find the post but perhaps I missed it. Or maybe he deleted it?

In any case you can force-quite Plasma applications just by using KSysGuard. No need to go to the command-line. I believe it comes with the Plasma desktop by default.
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Buster made the comment in this very thread, here!

Oh, okay. I'm thinking he meant that the part about you confusing split-view in file manager with split-view on the desktop.