Somehow the title reminds me of Madonna's song Material Girl.
Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
221–230 of 271 posts
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use cinnamon, for that very reason. Just works, and works well for my use case, is very stable, and I've no wish to learn and configure another desktop paradigm.
I've been using cinnamon as well but in 20.04 the new mac-ish taskbar that conflates the quick launch favorite apps and running apps in one widget turns me off. Starting to look for alternatives that aren't trying to copy Apple. Installed apps and running instances of installed apps are different concepts, damnit, and I don't need a phone-like interface that fakes the idea that all apps are "always running" when they…
1. It's not a mac-ish taskbar, if anything it's a Windows 7-ish taskbar. If they're trying to chase new trends they're 11 years late ;)
2. You can disable that feature and use old-style taskbar. In fact it's a prominent toggle in the first-run config window.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#223I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…
I recently switched to Sway because gnomes workspaces annoyed me too much. Let me choose a workspace independently on each monitor please! On i3 I was getting really bad screen tearing, even with conpton/picom otherwise I’d have just used that, but Sway/Wayland has no such problems. Sadly a few things don’t work so well in Wayland. For example, Windows games under Proton work fine on X but not on Wayland/Xwayland (I…
Same, after years of X/i3 tearing and unsuccessfully tweaking compton, I switched to sway/wayland on arch and couldn't be happier.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#224Looks really nice. I like how creative the Linux community is with their GUI experimentation.
My favourite feature is the ability to tile windows with a little gap between them. Having visibility (even a little) into the wallpaper when you're doing work makes a big difference for me. It's like it grounds you in a more natural frame of reference. I'm sure Mac users can relate to this due to the late introduction of true window maximisation, but as a Windows user I'm coming to appreciate the "non-fullscreen" or "edge-to-edge tiled" working environment.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think those are all valid interpretations that give some useful information about the product. I tend to think of the words as staking a position vs its opposite, so you at least have some idea where the product lies on at least one axis. - minimal vs maximal: "we favor fewer few design elements vs more" - streamlined vs not streamlined: "we have intentially chosen to focus on a few specific goals" - sleek vs rough…
The opposite of modern is quaint. Modern means that it uses new technologies (Web/HTML5/React), quaint means that it uses old technologies (Win32 UI/HTML 4/command line)
Modern could mean technically not just stylistically. Like hackable in a contempirary language or use fancy tech like wayland. When we talk styles modern could mean anything, to some people it means minimalistic and functional, to some it means trendy
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think those are all valid interpretations that give some useful information about the product. I tend to think of the words as staking a position vs its opposite, so you at least have some idea where the product lies on at least one axis. - minimal vs maximal: "we favor fewer few design elements vs more" - streamlined vs not streamlined: "we have intentially chosen to focus on a few specific goals" - sleek vs rough…
The opposite of modern is quaint. Modern means that it uses new technologies (Web/HTML5/React), quaint means that it uses old technologies (Win32 UI/HTML 4/command line)
You say this with authority. According to whom is web modern and everything else «quaint»? Not to be that guy again but electron-based apps feels nothing like modern, except maybe in the worst possible sense.
«Command line» is still very much alive as well by the way, and underpins a lot of things, say ci/cd.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#227I don't see why you would need such a complex system (spatial model) to switch between your apps. In my opinion, this has been solved perfectly many years ago. I simply use Super+ to launch/switch to my 10 most important applications. Supported out-of-the box by both Windows and Gnome and 100% predictable. Every shortcut invocation will launch exactly the right application.
I find that wierd too, and example of nerds cooking up something no one needs but then it catched on because nerdy things are hip now.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#228The word "modern" is really overused in tech, and it doesn't really tell you all that much, just that "this is better because it's new, and new stuff is better than old stuff". Consider a more descriptive word, such as: - minimal - streamlined - sleek - simple - opinionated - spatial - comprehensive etc...
Why is it worse to use the word "modern" in tech compared to any other context? If they called it "postmodern", would that be acceptable? BTW, do you propose renaming the Museums of Modern Art?
These questions seem to be a bit grasping.
It's clear from GP's post that the problem with 'modern' in this context is that it lacks semantic meaning within the given sentence. As 'modern' has no domain-specific denotative definition, one must turn to its connotation — of some quality that is only available in newer products, not prior ones.
On the other hand, to simply say that something is 'new' in technology is clear: it is a recently-developed or recently-published effort, free of insinuation that there is anything better or worse than what came before it. 'Modern', on the other hand, implies some sort of quality that might not be apparent in prior art.
> If they called it "postmodern", would that be acceptable?
Why would that be acceptable? That would carry even less clear meaning.
> BTW, do you propose renaming the Museums of Modern Art?
In that context, 'modern' has a domain-specific meaning — art made past 1860.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#229The word "modern" is really overused in tech, and it doesn't really tell you all that much, just that "this is better because it's new, and new stuff is better than old stuff". Consider a more descriptive word, such as: - minimal - streamlined - sleek - simple - opinionated - spatial - comprehensive etc...
You are over analyzing the marketing pitch, and/or expecting it to be the exact specification. It’s not. IMO it’s fine for a project to pick a few vapid buzz words to get you interested, because a complete specification of the project certainly isn’t going to catch eyes.
Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same application, not even the file explorer (Finder). I use HyperSwitch[0] on macOS to solve this issue. I use it to override the default Cmd+Tab behavior to cycle through windows on the current desktop. It's become one of the first things I install on a new machine. [0]: https://bahoom.com/hypersw…
Cmd-~
This only works if you already have the relevant app focused, which is an additional piece of state that I shouldn't need to keep in my mental stack.