Hi,
As my first message to this forum I would like to thank everyone involved with the project, either on the forum or with the distro itself.
As you may have guessed, I would like to express my gripes with firefox’s maia theme, but first I would like to do a little presentation to have a little bit of context : As a -student- developer in an IT school I like to discuss with the student and the teachers alike and put a good word for Linux and open source in general.
A lot of them are curious enough to ask me some advice to install a dual boot to work on (and avoid the horrifyingly configured debian on the school’s computers ) and in the majority of cases Manjaro is my top recommendation.
So, as I was making a guided installation of a dual boot to a freshman, I invited him to give it a try and explore the new interface by himself. To his pleasure a lot a familiar software were present (after activating flatpak for him), a click on the firefox icon changed that…
The same thing append to another person who was making the install on his own.
In both situations the opt out rebuild of firefox’s interface was quite a choc… (Plus some bugs on Dash to dock behaving wrongly with fullscreen apps)
Believe me, I like customization, I like the “Manjaro way” of doing things.
But I also believe making a first good impression is important. In both situations the firefox’s theme was painstakingly removed (ticking the switch or uninstalling the package is not enough, you need to create a fresh firefox profile too).
Dash to dock also needed to be disabled because it kept showing on fullscreen apps.
It raises the question of basing Manjaro-gnome’s identity on buggy software, the first impression for a lambda user was not great. For me (or you) as an experienced user, it might seems trivial to solve, for a new user it’s just a sore point. And this feeling seems to be shared if I see the number of help asked in this forum.
I had flashbacks of Windows where you need to disable or alter half of the default settings before it’s usable…
A I said, I’m not against customization (otherwise I would be on fedora) but maybe make it opt-in and check if it can be easily reversed.
Thanks if you had the courage to read it all, and sorry if it was too long.
I also know it’s maybe not the perfect place to have such a discussion as it’s not directly for support but could not find a more suitable one.
Edit : thanks for moving the post in a more suitable section, I missed it when I read the home page
