Today I noticed GNOME has removed the dog bark sound effect from GNOME 43.
My first genuine reaction was: “There’s a dog bark sound effect in GNOME?!”.
Yup, there is.
If you open Settings > Sound and scroll to the ‘Alert Sound’ section near the bottom, there before your eyes is a veritable litter of sound effects: bark, drip, glass, and sonar.
Yet, for reasons unknown, one Ubuntu user says they are being hounded by a random dog bark whenever the OS encounters an error.
In theory this shouldn’t happen; Ubuntu’s default error sound is a bell ding, not a dog bark.
Confused, they recounted their tail (sorry) in a post to the GNOME Discourse, where they explain the situation:
This morning I was typing a letter to a friend. Once I wanted to put it in a map and save it…but something went wrong…and that when I heard a dog barking sound. A while later I understood what went wrong and saved the document.
Oliver, the affected user
To most of us a ‘barking laptop’ sounds fun. But to this person? This is a really ruff—er, I mean rough, deal, as they continue:
The problem is even bigger…because… I mean…a few days ago we bought a dog. And we try to get it socialised and help it to learn al kinds of things. […]. It is afraid of all kinds of things and in particularly (strange) sounds (for it) and now even the Laptop barks!?!
Oliver, the affected user
This users’ experience has prompted GNOME developers to “let the dogs out” of GNOME 43, so to speak. The sound effect in question is being removed entirely.
No word if GNOME plans to replace the dog bark with an alternative sound effect likely to confuse people hearing it for the first time — car alarm, perhaps?
Is removing the sound effect a paw-sitive outcome? Or has the world gone barking mad? Let me know by leaving a comment below!