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Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

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Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#51

Post by pasabagi »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #32
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

> I’d like to see the Linux desktop improve. And I think a wakeup call is needed This. Absolutely this. Please don’t take his post as a personal attack, and consider the possibility that Linux is not as usable as it should be.

It is unsurprising that this falls on deaf ears. The author is the creator of AppImage, the only remotely sane application distribution mechanism in the Linux Desktop world, and it is used by basically nobody. I've come to the conclusion, over time, that the Linux Desktop community just prefers that everything sucks. Maybe it makes them feel more 1337, maybe they just really really like terminals, I don't know.

To be fair, terminals are really nice.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#52

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pasabagi wrote: post #51
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unsurprising that this falls on deaf ears. The author is the creator of AppImage, the only remotely sane application distribution mechanism in the Linux Desktop world, and it is used by basically nobody. I've come to the conclusion, over time, that the Linux Desktop community just prefers that everything sucks. Maybe it makes them feel more 1337, maybe they just really really like terminals, I don't know.

To be fair, terminals are really nice.

They can be. I have a lot of fond memories of TUIs from the DOS era. I'd probably have a lot more respect for the Linux Desktop if they'd not even bothered with trying to be a GUI Desktop OS and just stuck with TUIs.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#53

Post by amiga-workbench »

zzzcpan wrote: post #47
amiga-workbench wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverting back to Gnome 2 makes me want to tear my eyeballs out. The inconsistent icon scaling, lack of padding and non-existence of decent vertical alignment within panels makes it very difficult to design a tasteful desktop.

Desktop is not a picture to look at, it's first and foremost UX.

Can we not have both? Decent UX without all the very easily avoidable and sloppy design mistakes?

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#54

Post by nyir »

oliwarner wrote: post #44

Anybody else starting to hate GNOME? I mean, I use it, but I feel like I use it despite a lot of things that they've actively done to make my life harder. This article distils some of their finer work. From way up here in orbit, it seems the problem is leadership, in that it's way too open. Somebody can suggest a shitty idea, discuss half of the issues it and then four months later —without quorum— drop a patch to im…

Not GNOME, but the implications for GTK and a whole load of libraries that are being worked on to support these changes. Like especially GTK is just not a stable target. I used GTK 1 and 2, and especially the incompatible changes in 3 and removal of features are just super annoying (many examples, we already had the introduction of header bars etc., there was always a little triangle in the status bar that was just cut, lots of deprecated widgets, ...). And if you look at the plans for 4(!) there's more fundamental changes coming.

And personally I still don't want to touch Qt, but it might just come to that. I don't think I'm up for yet another rewrite with a toolkit that can't be stable for ten years. That might sound grumpy, but also consider GIMP is still working on the port to GTK 3 ...

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#55

Post by randomsearch »

zzzcpan wrote: post #38
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point wasn't that such functionality shouldn't be offered, but that a single global volume bar is almost certainly what you want most of the time. It should show a single volume slider that covers the master volume for all output devices and allow tweaking beyond that from another menu. This is the behavior of the Windows 10 mixer, for instance. >The next step is saying that the device is too capable and needs ca…

> but that a single global volume bar is almost certainly what you want most of the time Only true if volume is perfectly normalized. Otherwise you want to be able to quickly control volume per application or some context without affecting other applications, so when you switch to them you don't have to do it again. Browsers are examples of how bad it can be, with overly loud unnormalized instagram videos and no volu…

I don’t recall anyone ever saying to me they were worried about volume normalisation. Don’t design for edge cases that app developers can tackle.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#56

Post by Ads20000 »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #20
apexalpha wrote: post #18

>Now, with a menu bar you could reach the “About” dialog box with one single click, and dragging the mouse around. With this thing, you need at least three clicks, and you need to know where you have to click. A giant step backward with no apparent advantages. This guy talks about some menu options like everyone accesses them 10 times a day. Who cares if 'About' is tucked away somewhere. Has anyone ever used the 'Abo…

It's not just about "About". I often want to revisit a web page and the same logic applies there. In Safari, the "History" menu is always right at the top of the screen. With a single click, I can look at recent pages, and hover over previous days. In Firefox on Linux, I needed to learn to click on the bookshelf icon (?!) in the menu bar, then History. Then the menu acts like a wannabe iOS app and slides the history…

From that article:

'My take-away from all of this is that if most of the user experience takes place in a single view, and it’s only things like user settings and options that need to be accessed in separate screens, then keeping the main UI nice and clean by burying those in a side menu is the way to go.'

That article is saying that A/B testing shows that if you have different content views etc then you should have visible navigation, if it's options then sure, tuck it away in a side menu. I don't think the History menu is a 'view' per se...

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#57

Post by Ads20000 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #32
phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

> I’d like to see the Linux desktop improve. And I think a wakeup call is needed This. Absolutely this. Please don’t take his post as a personal attack, and consider the possibility that Linux is not as usable as it should be.

It is unsurprising that this falls on deaf ears. The author is the creator of AppImage, the only remotely sane application distribution mechanism in the Linux Desktop world, and it is used by basically nobody. I've come to the conclusion, over time, that the Linux Desktop community just prefers that everything sucks. Maybe it makes them feel more 1337, maybe they just really really like terminals, I don't know.

When Simon Peter (the author) actually filed an issue for a GNOME change that he found unhelpful, and gave use-cases and invited people to give use-cases as to why the change needed reverting, the change was reverted: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/437

GNOME prefers that people hop onto their IRC (which is not logged so, unfortunately, people can't easily reference previous progress made) but filing GitLab issues also works. There's the gnome-design IRC for trying to create change to the Human Interface Guidelines. In the Nautilus IRC I suggested trying a GNOME Forum to try and collect design feedback better but they say they've tried this before and there weren't enough people willing to maintain it so the forum died. The problem is that GNOME devs get so much outright abuse for their design decisions that it's too unpleasant for them to engage with the community and, because their devs are nearly all volunteers (bar, like, two Red Hatters (one being the Files lead)), there's no-one paid to engage with the community like there is in, say, snapcraft (who have engaged with criticism very well in my opinion, even if they haven't outright capitulated to demand (which I think is a bad idea anyway since you then end up flip flopping constantly because the outrage is always against the status quo (KDE has this problem (https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2018-June/086117...) also see Ubuntu - outrage against Unity 7 was cited in Shuttleworth's comments on why Unity was scrapped ('In the community, our efforts were seen fragmentation not innovation.' https://blog.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-...) https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/external-repositories/1760 https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/disabling-automatic-refresh-for...). So criticism against GNOME is never engaged with and the rage continues... Still, if you want to try and get the GNOME team onboard, I highly recommend hopping onto their IRC and constructively arguing with them. Arguing here will not change the situation because they don't read pages like this, at least, that's what they were saying in the Nautilus IRC, they want to get on with the task at hand https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/IRC

Admittedly, people like Carlos (the Files lead) do read the GNOME Reddit, so maybe that's the closest thing to a GNOME forum and you could thus try posting there about your gripes with GNOME :) https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/ In fact, this article has been posted on the Reddit recently: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/8shfiu/make_it_simpl... I suggest commenting there to try and make more progress :)

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