Yet another Hacker News

29 points coffeeaddict1 3 hours ago 5 comments

tacomagick 1 hour ago | parent

The accelerometer rotation feature will be an awesome addition, I think so far there is no DE that lets you do that without some custom scripts. I have to test that out real soon. Windows used to handle that pretty good (if you ignore wallpapers breaking etc.) so it was one of the stopping points for users who just want a Linux that works for their AIO laptops.

dhx 1 hour ago | parent

Global offline maps including public transport routing and timetables is a fantastic (and if I'm not mistaken, also unique) feature. Google Maps' offline feature by contrast doesn't work globally (some areas are excluded), doesn't include public transport, etc.

Keeping in that same theme--I've love to see Mozilla Translations models (or similar) integrated in GNOME apps where it makes sense to do so--such as Document Viewer, for good-enough offline text translation built into every GNOME environment.

Such features are highly user visible and set GNOME apart from competition in ways that are easy to describe to anyone. No EULAs, no data sovereignty concerns, no dark patterns--just features ready to go for users out-of-the-box that are incredibly useful, user-friendly and consistent.

In saying that--there's of course all the great GNOME stuff under the hood for geeks too--support for almost every audio and video format to have ever existed easily enabled, glycin, sandboxing of applications, easy and consistent software package management for everything (now with obsolescence management built in too)...etc.

cromka 1 hour ago | parent

Sound like something to propose on their Gitlab, you seem to have thought it through!

I would personally very appreciate this, after having enjoyed similar functionality on MacOS, with easy dictionary access and text translation.

dhx 33 minutes ago | parent

Some feature requests have already been raised previously:

epiphany: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/work_items/2889

papers: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/papers/-/work_items/454

gnome-text-editor: doesn't accept feature requests directly, wants them raised instead at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards/-/work_ite... (no previous translation concepts found)

Translation within these apps is generally not an easy feature to implement. Do you automatically try and detect the language and suggest a translation? Do you make language translation controls obvious and put them front and centre, or hide them away assuming they're infrequently used? Do you show translations side-by-side, line-under-line, or just replace the original text with translated text? Then on more complex matters such as papers, do you try and preserve original formatting (very hard, particularly for things like tables), do you accommodate words split across lines, etc.

There does exist https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.ters.LocalTranslate as a standalone offline text translation application for GNOME desktop environments but a user would have to copy+paste text between applications to use it.

skavi 20 minutes ago | parent

so happy GNOME exists. I hear great things about KDE internals, but Plasma and KDE apps are so ugly.

modern GNOME is honestly a more consistently clean interface than even (modern) macOS.