Live data from Hacker News

System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

blog.system76.com

281–290 of 427 posts

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly like Gnome. I have been using it for years. But the development team of Gnome is so closed minded that it makes my head hurt. I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.

If you want a laugh, duck for the thread where the developers debate how to implement .epub format in Evince before ultimately deciding that Evince doesn't actually need to be able to open the most popular ebook format in the world.

I like your usage of the word duck.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#284
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a workable window manager" sounds to me like you just mean "I want a macOS clone and I don't want to learn anything else even if it's more efficient". If I got it wrong, I'd recommend sway or any other tiling wm that adapts perfectly to laptop limitations of 1 screen and no mouse included.

Right but to be fair to the parent - tiling window managers are the only kind that are superior to the Mac, and they are simply not to everyone’s preference.

The benefits of tiling window managers are mostly realized when you use them with a very structured workflow. For example, one project per screen/desktop. I use i3 this way and I dedicate one desktop per patch I am working on, including the editor (vim in my case) and the the command line for the git branch.

Without such rigor, they can end up being more cumbersome and confusing than a traditional window manager. For the same reason, I specifically don't use a tiling wm for less structured tasks (i.e web surfing) because it would be too annoying otherwise. I so still tile all the windows in my traditional wm though.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently have XPS 15 with 4k screen and I can easily see pixels, so 14 should be a little better. There is also the feeling that it is 2021 and should I still be seeing pixels? I think crisp high resolution view is much better for the eyes and feels more natural. I am also almost always within reach of a mains socket, so I don't particularly care about battery life, just that I can move the machine from one place…

I love pixels. Seeing them reminds me that I am in front of a computer and not a TV. Same as a car that smells a bit of oil/gasoline. Feels like a real car.

Same.

I enjoy the much higher resolution displays, but rarely get more out of them.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#287

I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch. If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux. After watching th…

4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit

To get full 2x HIDPI character rendering at the same size as 1x on a 1080p monitor.

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really weird, considering things like gedit and gnome-terminal are tabbed. Perhaps ask them to get the usability study from those guys :).

"The concept of Evince is one document, one window"

Cite a usability experiment showing that sharing user interface paradigms between applications on the same system helps usability. :-)

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#289

Nice to see! And glad they are...gasp...listening to people. The Gnome devs could learn a lot from that approach. The most popular distros all include a dock. And yet with Gnome 40, they not only refused to add a dock, they moved what gimped dock they had to the bottom of the screen. But you can't see it until you hit the top left corner. I wish I was making that up. (keyboard shortcuts aside, in fairness) Rant aside…

I mostly like Gnome. I have been using it for years. But the development team of Gnome is so closed minded that it makes my head hurt. I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.

Can they cite a usability study suggesting any of the changes they made from gnome 2 to gnome 3 (or current) were not major regressions to the user experience?

Re: System76 Developing “Cosmic” Desktop Environment

#290
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly like Gnome. I have been using it for years. But the development team of Gnome is so closed minded that it makes my head hurt. I asked on the bug tracker if Evince could have a tabs feature, so I can have 10 pdfs open in one Evince window. They asked me to cite a usability study showing that it would objectively improve user experience.

It's clearly unreasonable for a developer to ask a bug reporter to cite a usability study out of the blue. However, I don't think it's unreasonable for a developer to do so if the person commenting explicitly claims that not having a feature hurts usability : https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evince/-/issues/182#note_3837...

An N=1 study is a study.
Post reply on HN