Actually I remember that Terminal used the buzzer on my laptop, which for some reason was this really loud square wave noise from my main speakers. Console uses the audio file bell that is set in the Gnome settings so I don't mind it at all.
Sometimes I think gnomes radical approach to simplicity pays off. But people using terminals all day are typically power users who do want all the features present in the old terminal app. Stripping all this away seems completely short sighted
But my impression is that console is not for those people at all; it's for people who rarely use a terminal at all but need something barebones to drop into just in case.
@@xthebumpx agreed that's clearly who it's designed for. But is the regular terminal app so scary that it will confuse those users who occasionally open it? So why cater specifically to them? Downstream distros made the right call here IMO
@@jackevansevo Does Gnome even need to make a terminal app for them? I feel like when one is deep into an advanced workflow, the defaults of a DE or distro don't matter anymore. I suppose the edge case is someone who reinstalls often or is otherwise running off a USB?
@@KeithBoehler true, I guess gnome are well within their rights to do whatever they want. Console better fits their design ethos that much is obvious. I guess lot of people like to have a relatively clean bloat free install where they don't have multiple apps that do the same thing. Why not ship the better fully featured option that's worked for decades by default instead of the new stripped back version that's missing features?
Being a visual person, I see the lack of color customization as a really bad thing. I also consider the scroll limit an absolute basic feature. I understand that they try to make things simpler for new users but I think this was a step too far.
Why, actually? As long as scroll limit is high enough, what do you care whether you can set it or not? My first experience is usually when starting using a new distro or desktop, just do things then eventually run into the situation where there isn't nearly enough scrollback saved, go and adjust the setting once to something vaguely ridiculous, and leave it at that and never touch it again. I have gigabytes of RAM on every system, even on a 2009 netbook has a gig. What do i even care if the scrollback takes a meg or two or even a hundred? Is there ever a situation where you say "oooh this is too much scrollback, i must go and adjust it down" but it doesn't even adjust down right away, it doesn't just purge the old lines that are there, you have to restart the terminal... I feel this setting of like what 1000 lines default made sense when i was running KDE 1.0 on SuSE 6.3 and had maybe 64MB or 128MB of RAM and even then i would probably bump it up! Do keep in mind both the mainstream console applications are THAT old, they're from the 90s. So yeah just give us a million lines default, have the setting hidden, there's no reason that i can see to have it configurable.
@@SianaGearz true, true. I should check my English next time :) I meant that possibility of configuring the scroll limit to some higher number should be possible. RAM is not a problem anymore. And when doing a lot of stuff in the terminal, scrolling through history is very useful.
Boy do I hate that GNOME's main "UX design solution" is to remove features. I'll always love KDE's choice of providing a sensible default with plenty of features and customization options, I'd hated to be treated like "I'm dumb and the folks who make the DE I use obviously know my needs better than I do".
I remember when Gnome 3 removed most of the windows buttons (maximize/minimize etc.) and told users "we decided it is better for you to do everything fullscreen because that helps you to focus on your task". I lack the words to express the disdain I have for those UX designers.
No gnomes ux solution most of the time is to simplify the user workflow. Many times it works as it results in modern looking apps and faster workflow, but in this case of terminal it backfired. Even now almost all gnome core apps look modern and minimalist whereas every kde app i use has so many buttons that i am rarely going to use that it more hinders the look and feel of app and make it look more clunky than help me. Eg lets take kate. Why do you need such a semi powerful text editor for just a test editor where all i am gonna do is type something and save. If you want all the powerful features like highlighting, version control or multi cursor, at that point just use vs code. Kate turns out to be too overkill for simple tasks and underkill for hardcore coding(extensions and all of those stuff). And at the end kate still ends up looking worse ui wise (with its buttons and everything) while being less powerful than vscode.
@@RenderingUser Kitty is great, I just hate messing with config files. If there was a GUI settings menu, I'd have stuck with it. If I hear of the dev implementing this in the future or a fork that does, I'll definitely switch back. Kitty is frankly amazing, just not user friendly. I've been using Terminator for the easy to use split-windowing and configuration menu and haven't regretted my decision yet.
@@trajectoryunown wdym text based config I have like 5 lines in my kitty config It sort of gets in the way to have a menu pop up for a terminal window. I have konsole to do that. I use kitty because the application itself is solely a terminal To each their own I guess
@@RenderingUser Yeah. I hate text-based configuration files. Text-only layouts make navigation a nightmare a nightmare for in programs with a lot of different settings. I'm more of a visual learner who's able to retain information much more readily when there's some connection to spatial/temporal element. That way I can have a whole set of senses to build a memory on. With text-only systems, this is impossible beyond remembering approximate locations of specific lines of text by referencing unique blobs of characters as digital landmarks while scrolling. And it often takes in excess of two or three dozen times of opening and wandering aimlessly until I catch onto those. I'm a firm believer in having a GUI for everything... which is an unrealistic, yet not completely unattainable goal. It's also been making my transition to Wayland quite harrowing. (Dear friends, send help yesterday.😂)
Design language and simplification for simplification's sake is not always a good thing. And all those features they want, I have in windows terminal on windows. There are reasons people use those specific features in their terminals and want them, and not everyone is using the terminal in the same way.
A very important reason to include Console/KGX as a Core app was probably also that Console has support for touch screen scrolling while Terminal doesn't support this and with GNOME wanting its apps to be completely usable on touch screens, having a default terminal app that isn't able to scroll on them would be really bad.
@@ukyoize Sometimes it's easier to just rewrite an app from scratch with newer technologies and a less complex code base. GNOME Terminal probably already has a very complex code base and it would probably be hard to implement it. Programming isn't easy and someone has to do it. And after all, Terminal is already 22 years old so its code base is probably already hard to maintain.
Lack of listening to users. Following their own ideas too much ... Isn't this the typical problem of the GNOME project occurring over and over again? I really like the general design of the desktop environment and the smoothness of it and I also appreciate many simplicity aspects which KDE might even learn from, but lack of configuration and customization options keeps being a serious problem. I have stopped counting the number of times that I needed to open the Dconf Editor to get the things done that I actually needed. A kind of issue that I never have with Xfce and KDE.
Blackbox is really good and I use that as the default terminal on my PC, however on the laptop it's too sluggish to launch. It takes ~1s for it to show up after I press Ctrl + Alt + T which causes me to miss a good part of the command I wanted to run. Granted, the laptop is pretty old, but it still has a 2nd gen i7 and an SSD. Ideally we'd have a lean GTK4 program with just enough features. Basically gnome-console with the most basic settings instead of having absolutely no settings at all.
I actually like the console and I switched to it before Gnome made it a core app. Yeah it lacks features (and I'd still like some of them added) but console resizes smoothly which is actually a big deal with how it blends in with the entire environment. I also like how it changes color depending on the session type (normal user, root, ssh) I'd love to keep using it so it would be nice for someone to take over the development.
I've been using xfce4-terminal on Gnome for a while now and it works great, loads of customizability and still fits the visual design of Gnome really well
You know it's bad when Fedora complains- they usually put up with all of gnomes feature reverts. Canonical abandoning Unity was a huge mistake- Gnome devs do not play well with others.
Well, if they abandoned Unity, they could use features such as GTK, which they depended on, the Gnome login manager, and so on. Just like if they abandoned upstart, they coudl use things like GNOME which they were then bound too... The GNOME guys are kind of politicking dicks.
I completely agree on the blockers that they set, especially the scroll limit. I still use Console, but I hate that it lacks such basic features and sometimes I have to switch back to Terminal.
The Console works and has features that other terminals don't out of the box - and the color change for the level of commands are decent - Terminal is nice as well - but this is far from Messed up - others will follow
I was very upset when I found out there were no profiles in Console, ended up switching to the old Terminal app manually because they are an essential feature for me. I like the newer LibAdwaita GNOME apps for the most part but Console has stripped away too much functionality.
I have them mostly as a very easy way of connecting to different SSH sessions, it’s simpler than typing in the command and I can also set custom colour schemes for each one.
@@shock59 Interesting. I always wondered what people used them for too. I thought Console coloring it's header bar differently for ssh/sudo was brilliant (if a bit too subtle...), but it never occurred to me I could do that with profiles in Terminal.
I look at Console and I see something perfectly in line with GNOME: It’s a new application that removes EVERYTHING and destroys discoverability. And what is the underlying complaint here, really? Lack of features. Because of course it is. Thank God for KDE. Or I guess more appropriately thank you Nico, and all the rest of KDE.
Every distribution I run, I install gnome-terminal. I hadn't known of gnome-console until viewing this. I'll leave it installed, but I prefer the options of gnome-terminal, especially screen color.
As a long-term KDE user I just go with Konsole. I used xterm back when I first started on Linux, but the configuration annoyed me so much. What kind of a psychopath defaults to a white theme for a terminal emulator? Copying and pasting with xterm is weird too and none of the configuration options worked to change the keybindings. Maybe it's changed in the past 20 years, I don't know, but Konsole just worked right off and having two incredibly obvious shortcut keys for copying and pasting was part of what had me sticking with it.
but this is the problem with gnome apps, specially the core apps, they are striped down beyond the minimum and then get little to no developing time. Another example is gnome music: if you have your music collection in any other location than ~/Music the "app" won't play any music. Similar thing to gnome videos and other core apps... but who cares they look good don't they? And I'm saying this as an hardcore gnome user... At this moment I'm not using most of the core apps. For instance i'm using Haruna as my video player, Tauon for music and Tilix for console application. even for some time i was using nemo instead of gnome files (nautilus) because it was broken/striped down
Ah, so that’s where the “Kgx” nonsense in its “WM_CLASS” came from. I tried Console a couple of times and it just felt like an unfinished early beta. Never understood what was happening with it and why it was being pushed as a replacement for Terminal. Interesting that I was clearly not alone in thinking it was not ready for prime time. Thanks Fedora team! 😂
Terminal emulators are usually for advanced users anyway. Most distros have done an incredibly good job making it that you really don't have to open a terminal window unless you want to, with very little exceptions. So stripping back features from a console app to appear simpler for new users, you've kinda missed the point of what the application is for and who uses it.
Terminal Emulators are for advanced users only? Well, Gnome is doing great keeping things like that instead of making things easier to use so more people can use the terminal when needed.
@@VallThyo I didn't say it was ONLY for advanced users, just that most typically users who know how to use the command line also are more advanced users, and those more advanced users would prefer having features over stripping them out in the name of "simplicity." I also don't believe that removing these features makes the program any easier to use. When even novice-friendly distros like Ubuntu prefer Gnome Terminal over Gnome Console, there was a misstep somewhere I feel. How does removing colorschemes, terminal bell and font options make a console easier to use?
at least they didint mess up as much as windows it took them until the windows 10 aniversary update in 2016 to add ansi escape sequences and proper resizing (you couldn't resize it bigger then the screen buffer size before) i still use conemu
Hi Nicco, I was at PyConIT last weekend (and last year), and your talks were brilliant! Why don't you consider sharing similar content on your channel? It would be awesome!
I consider wayland to be in incubator. Currently, wine/proton uses xwayland. Xwayland is an application, basically wayland compositors are using fork/processes and not clone/threads for multitasking and this is bad for performance. Actually what wayland users want is for compositors to run xwayland using soft threads, hopefully whatever async/await they use to manage multiple wayland clients... why treat these sockets differently? However, even using hard threads would be better than what is currently offered.
i agree and have been using it more. however it still seems a bit half finished, with many bugs are not being fixed. but i hope the best for blackbox project. mayby the dev just unsupported and cannot spend the necessary time on it and/or too busy with their other day job etc.
@@dreamcat4 What issues do you have? When I initially tried it, I immediately gave up on it because it didn't format the flatpak update screen correctly. But I've recently began using it and haven't had any major issues, part from it taking about a full second to start.
KDE and Gnome: An age-old clash of philosophies. By its true essence, KDE strives to bring the ultimate in user-customizable experiences so the user can have virtually endless control of the desktop and app experience. Gnome in its true spirit strips many of the features from its offering, providing the user with what they deem is "most important" and making many of the decisions for the user. The decision process is easier when it's not even there. A strategy that has worked well for Apple. And so both philosophies work but I am an adult; someone who wants to make my own decisions and wants to choose my meal from a full menu. So the choice is clear to me. Thanks Nicco for for you passion and energy in creating all of your useful and informative content.
great work @Nicco. small question: Is there any reason that on KDE, the system settings are so ugly? it doesn't have the same panel backgrounds as other applications, and if you have a dark theme with blur enabled it looks like it was stitched together from several different applications.
Personally, I like Konsole and Xfce Terminal. Been using Konsole primarily since becoming a dedicated Plasma user back in 2021. Never had any problems.
The application is useless in my daily work but at least they fixed the perennial gnome-terminal problem related to the shrinking of the window size after the maximize and restore size operation. Basically, this application is hopeless and actually goes in the same direction as the whole Gnome :( The only thing that keeps me with this environment is my innate laziness.
It's maintained. There have been some changes aside from translations made by Christian Persch in the last three months, who seems to be the maintainer of Terminal. Hell, he's been answering issues as well, even those that have patches on them. It's not surprising that translations are most of the commits since Terminal is a mostly (if not completely) done application.
@@lucas7061 that is kind of the problem, the author considers it done and in maintenance and that's it. From what I remember it seemed like he didn't want to go gtk4, which means no mobile support and not matching gnome hig.
"when your major down-streams revert your decisions its really bad news, and best case scenario it means you're a bit out of touch with the needs of the users" Why assume the distro developers always make more in-touch decisions, especially when talking about Ubuntu and Fedora? They are making subjective design decisions all the same. Plus, it's very apparent that many Linux desktop users don't like default settings in the first place. This entire community is based on taking control of your system and making it the best for your use case. The people who are appalled by the simplicity of kgx are people who already know they could just install gnome-terminal back on their systems. It never makes sense to me when users of other DEs flame another specific DE for some change when they never intend on using that DE in the first place. If you don't like gnome's design philosophy you're probably already on KDE and vice versa, and if you don't like the design philosophy of DEs in general you're probably on a standalone WM. None of these developers are making decisions on what they think is best for some individual user and they are not telling you how to use your computer. They are making choices based on what can serve the majority of users in a cohesive desktop, knowing that the majority of users are probably going to modify their system anyway.
I already thought Terminal was pretty bare bones, let alone what console is. To be fair, my favourite terminal is iTerm2 on the Mac, which has so many features & options, I'm not even aware of half of them.
The new application is just worse then the old one, I don't inderstand why it's better in any way. The old one looks great. Instead od adding features and make the old terminal application better, like adding ligatures for example, they chose to give us something outright worse.
Gthumb is honestly a great image viewer and it even helps create thumbnails for image types not supported by the file explorer. I think they should use that instead of photos.
when I have two terminals open in the same workspace, how can I alternate between them without using the mouse to select terminal 1 and select terminal 2?
Working by default like boxes vs virtmanager is a good goal. Lack of configuration options and style over usability is gnomes and apples constant mistake. It is very rude of boxes to have an icon that does not work with a light panel though. kde is great but one issue I have is that konsole takes 40meg per open window. i use xfce4-terminal or yakuake for that reason. gnomes terminal also uses extra memory per window but not when running gnome where a terminal server is running.
Just to drop the name sinve I haven't come across a mention: WezTerm might be worth checking out. GPU accelerated and tons of customization, also in active development 😁
I've used Linux since 2009 now. I have used the terminal less now than I ever had in the past trying to understand the difference between terminal/shell/console/terminal emulator is pretty much lost on most average users like me. The easier I can copy paste a one liner code from the help forums the better. I dont ever do "work" in the shell... so the more simple the better and I think GNOME got the pulse on that and implemented accordingly. If you need something more complex... get something more complex. Complex shouldnt be the default.
Except that if you're a simple user the complex terminal doesn't offer any barrier to use. Also, terminal, console and terminal emulator are all synonymous. Shell is the program that runs in the terminal which you interact with, generally bash, though some people prefer others like tcsh and ksh and even fish.
Sure, the inability to set the text size makes this completely unusable for people with eyesight issues, but GNOME's UX experts assure us that this isn't an accessibility issue...
Shouldn't it just pull the font size from the system settings? And you can quick-zoom which changes the font size. If i remember right, i don't have it at hand.
So as a developer I have multiple terminals open 24/7, but I guess I don't consider myself terminal "power user" either. Speaking personally, the defaults in Console seem "good enough" to me. If anything, I was annoyed that some things open Console and some Terminal, and I remember searching how to force one or the other... I forget if I actually did that or if the Fedora 38 update changed everything to open in Console now. I does let you change change text size as I make text bigger when sharing my display with a coworker. As for configuring other stuff? Meh, I mean I guess I never really did that before, and figured that Terminal was never a super configurable tool for power users anyway. I guess I can't say if it makes sense on the continuum of actual users, but I find it good enough as a default I didn't bother changing it.
Honestly I thought the workspace concept in GNOME was great when it came out, but GNOME has had more regressions in the past 12 years than most of the projects I follow. I will begrudgingly switch to KDE.
Terminal emulators are so easy to take for granted--when done right all the "features" are nearly invisible. But when you can't get one to look or feel like you're expecting, it's incredibly jarring. The Pantheon terminal is my favorite, but it turns out its preferred monospace font doesn't ship as part of the base of most distros, and so the first time I installed it on a non-elementary distro, I had to delete it immediately.
KDE and Gnome: An age-old clash of philosophies. By its true essence, KDE strives to bring the ultimate in user-customizable experiences so the user can have virtually endless control of the desktop and app experience. Gnome in its true spirit strips many of the features from its offering, providing the user with what they deem is "most important" and making many of the decisions for the user. The decision process is easier when it's not even there. A strategy that has worked well for Apple. And so both philosophies work but I am an adult; someone who wants to make my own decisions and wants to choose my meal from a full menu. So the choice is clear to me. Thanks Nicco for for you passion and energy in creating all of your useful and informative content.
I have a recurring donation to both DEs, but I like Gnome because it defaults to being simple and unobtrusive, and I find that to be what I want nearly all of the time. On the other hand, some people think Python is simple, but I can't write the sort of code I want with it and so I often write C with a smidge of assembly to fill in the gaps. Neither is wrong, just the use cases are different. (shrug)
@@slembcke And that's the beauty of Linux. There is something for everyone. I didn't mean to say that there is a winner here. The winners are you and me. I am an unabashed KDE fan but that doesn't mean that I dislike Gnome, Budgie, Cinnamon, or XFCE. KDE's DE and suite of tools just fit me best.
Fixes: Debian/based: apt purge gnome Fedora/based: dnf remove gnome Void/based (not yet): xbps-remove -R gnome Arch/based: pacman -R gnome Gentoo/based: emerge --ask --verbose --depclean gnome Don't get me wrong but gnome decreasing its quality wih every release. I had nightmare experiences when I reported several gnome application bugs. They don't like name? They changes without asking. They don't like the application? They remive without asking to its users. It just freaking awful tbh. I personally prefer KDE because of flexibility than GNOME. And GNOME devs never understand that nothing is perfect and over polishing a already working thing will mess up even more. Yet no one literally listen.
well, being out of touch with the (current standard) users might not be a too bad thing for linux at the moment, since I still think most users are developers and admins. As a regular university teacher and researcher, who has nothing to do with programming and SysAdmin tasks, a lot what is done in linux, and also what most linux channels address, is out of touch with my needs.
You have to sort of get in the mindset of the general consumer. many people who choose linux and gnome aren't really techy and only open the terminal when absolutely necessary to copy paste a command. i bet that's what the gnome devs were aiming for.
this question was answered in a seperate comment... because the original gnome terminal does not support touch controls wheras this app does. (however anotherr mater might be gtk4 version support...) i dont necessarily agree with gnomes decisions myself though. as i always preferred the original gnome terminal. and still never have picked up a touch screen. at least not yet. so if you take the simplicity vs completity out of the debate. then theres your general answer also with a lot of other gnome apps.... providing native touch screen support within apps is a lot easier the simpler these apps are. so in gnome's own flawed thinking this is all fine. and then the simpler the better. "because users dont need complex things'. if there is only 1 thing in my entire life that is very complicated... then it is definately my computer! or not even the computer itself. but the software i choose to put onto my computer. this is why i use kde now (and not gnome). because if i agreed with gnome's philosophy i would just have to dump the whole thing in the bin. and regress back to chiseling straight lines onto stone tablets. there's your 'touch' technology for you. feeling the imprints onto the stones
gnome design guidelines: delete as many settings as possible. the ideal situation is to have no settings menu. also remember to delete any existing dconf keys so the user can't customize things even by force
That's not as notable as Fedora though. Ubuntu uses Gnome, but does their own thing: they have their own theme, icons, extensions, etc. They even held back some Gnome 40 and 42 updates because they changed a lot of things (so Canonical wanted more time to test things out). But Fedora closely follows Gnome. They always ship the latest version, no extensions (apart from the wallpaper watermark), and ship core apps. But then they didn't change to console, which is notable.
@@that_leaflet actually that makes sense. There was a little debate between Ubuntu Maintainers and GNOME Devs on launchpad, I remember Jeremy Bicha requesting some features to be present on Console so it can be a viable substitution of Terminal.
@@RenderingUser i guess it fill ups some gpu-accelerated off-rendering buffer that is not properly managed, "find" is just a way to quickly increase the scroll buffer.
Terminal emulators are such ugly monsters in general. Emulating non-existent hardware using obscure terminology and ancient libraries that were written by my great ancestors is not what I consider a high priority for a DE. I use kitty and I think this change is just fine. If you're a power user, just grab an alternative. It's not that hard.
trust gnome to remove their only apps from core which i ever thought were any good. they work hard! ... at completely alienating their own user base and driving people away. thank you gnome, i am 100 percents kde user now. and the stench of un-earned elitism is absent / gone from my developer interactions
When it comes to terminal applications I think the good benchmark of minimalism and advanced features is to follow macOS terminal. Apple is such a neat freak that they do not want to ship any feature in any core system applications which is not an absolute must.
So let me get this straight. Gnome project switched to a barely developed terminal to "simplify" (i.e. take away features and options), and the solution isn't to realize their mistake and switch back, but to introduce even more process and delays as a blocker to positive change. Yeah geez I wonder why Gnome and Linux on the Desktop aren't gaining traction.
Gnome terminal has been totally unmaintained for about 2 years now, that's why they switched to it. That doesn't change the fact that the Console sucks.
@@carlod1605 So they switched from one unmaintained terminal to a different less feature rich unmaintained terminal that has caused problems, and came up with rules that mean included software has to be maintained, even though they don't have an maintained software option in this case, and now they have no idea what to do. Yeah sounds well managed to me.
While i can applaud the developers wanting to "move forward"? I'll be sticking with gEdit, as its what i started with and it is as customizable as I need it to be (suffer from eye problems and the font the Console comes with?..is too fine...I need monospace and bold fonts only in the terminal and I also need certain colors that help me to see!) So while they're free to toss Console into whatever distros / desktop environments they want to?...if I ever install a distro and gEdit isn't already installed?...I will simply install it, and then I'll set it as the "default" app for text editing. Sometimes?...when you have a solid performer?...you don't switch them out for something else!!.....LoL!
