d0ntpan1c

Gnome Tweaks, dconf UI or cli, or extensions can adjust all of those things, CSD included. I wish it was more baked into the settings, fwiw. One of the first things I do is move the CSD buttons to the macOS location.

I definitely agree the baked-in CSD is annoying at times, but now that Wayland has matured a lot and most apps have adjusted to baked-in CSD along with adding Wayland support, it's pretty rare to run into problems.

Also... if you've only tried gnome recently on Ubuntu, def recommend trying it on debian or another distro that doesn't drastically change everything about it.

(And of course, all that said, desktop choice is wonderful and no one has to settle for anything, big or small 🙂)

That's how Microsoft markets their "safe links" in Outlook, which is more or less the same behavior of wrapping all links with a redirect. Whether they actually do anything with that to save you from phishing attempts or whatever... who knows. Even if there is a safety feature, it's still an easy way to mine url query params for data or learn about the user for other purposes (which they may or may not be doing)

IMO if you can't turn it off, there's a secondary motive to the feature. Especially when the feature is marketed from a place of fear rather than aid.

In Gnome's defense, they also make it really easy to replace or customize the vast majority of things to an almost surprising degree and while their extension SDK is a bit weird with some choices, it's also fairly friendly to anyone with some JS experience.

I used to not be a fan either, but 44 and 45 have felt pretty good to use with minimal changes. Some of the more recent design guidelines they've refined have made a huge difference. I use Dash to Dock, but that's the only real UX change I use nowadays.

I still dislike the macOS-like launcher menu for apps. But I also don't care for an application menu or windows 7-style menu so I live with it.

This. To implement most infinite scrolls UI's you are still doing pagination with an API,just automatically requesting the next page in the list rather than needing to press a "next" button to kick it off (usually). Most apps and sites could implement switching between pagination UI and Infinite Scroll UI as a setting.

One of those things that would not be a ton of effort, but since it does create two different things to show does increase maintenance efforts for the dev. So I get why people tend to go for one or the other and rarely both, but it'd be a huge win for user preference.

I have a 3000+ saved songs list which is my standard "just play some music, give me the kitchen sink" choice. The only way to get Spotify off of a "shuffle-loop" is to turn off shuffle, skip a few songs, then turn shuffle back on.

It will still inevitably go back to the same 50 songs after a while though. I haven't found a way to prevent this with any setting. I've not noticed it on any of my playlists with only a few hundred songs, but I don't listen to those as long or often as my saved songs.

On mobile you can at least pick a (Spotify generated) genre filter which helps.

I just want Spotify to shuffle like old school iTunes. All the songs on this list... but randomized. A setting like iTunes to favor songs you've listened to fewer times would also be neat.

But we're in the era of algorithms for everything, and apparently even Spotify premium isn't enough to save you from sponsored and/or targeted manipulation Or their algorithm is just bugged and they don't care.

I've actually noticed this with their AI DJ too. Listen to it long enough, it basically favors the same handful of artists and songs over and over again.