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A new wave of Linux applications

tuxphones.com

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Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".

You do however see many complaints when an app doesn’t support dark mode (which is closer to the typical use case of themes). Additionally, see my other comment about accessibility, which is also negatively impacted by hardcoded UI appearances.

Dark Mode is first class in the next releases of GTK4 and LibAdwaita. It'll be available in GNOME 42 and Fedora 36.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#162
post #82

What if you don't want the same applications with the same interface modalities on different devices? Shouldn't we be much more concerned about data portability than application portability?

This just doubles the UI development effort.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#163
post #162
post #82

What if you don't want the same applications with the same interface modalities on different devices? Shouldn't we be much more concerned about data portability than application portability?

This just doubles the UI development effort.

More than doubles it, because there are a variety of phone sizes, tablets, monitors, &c. But that's OK! Build the best thing, don't settle.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#164
post #62
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you use a mouse without a scrollwheel?

I use the acme text editor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) for work every day. It makes heavy use of mouse chords, so I need 3 real buttons on the mouse, and it's hard to find a mouse with 3 real buttons and a scrollwheel which doesn't get in the way of the buttons. I've got a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball which works pretty well, but at the end of the day an old Logitech PS/2 mouse plugged into…

Depends by what you mean by "real buttons" but my first thought was that 99% of gaming mice will have at least 3 buttons and a scrollwheel. Often it's closer to 10 buttons.

This one has 20 buttons (including 3 big ones and a scrollwheel): https://www.logitechg.com/en-us/products/gaming-mice/g600-mm...

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#165
post #130

This could be less about device convergence and more about UX improvements and design coherence among apps. Some examples of what's been happening: - Touchpad gestures through various efforts: https://linuxtouchpad.org - Gnome: libAdwaita: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/12/31/libadwaita-1-0/ - Core workflows getting better first-class approaches rather than being another app to install: (e.g. screenshots & screen…

libadwaita and Kirigami are huge improvements for the desktop app ecosystem from what I've seen as a user. When I started to delve into desktop applications I quickly realized there's a couple hurdles I face: 1. QT was an ecosystem shock to me. I barely knew what to do to get started and got lost easily. 2. Do these applications work outside of Linux; more directly, do they have dynamic dependencies? From my experien…

Rust and GTK3/4 are fairly well supported, no?

I know QT is a bit more of a pain to do from Rust, but I wanna say that's possible too... though nowhere near as evident as gtk-rs.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#166
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found a solution for Firfox on Ubuntu MATE: 1. go to about:config 2. find widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override 3. Change to some pixel value (I have mine set at 26). voila! I do not understand why the default is so thin. Really bucks the trend of every UI element being touch-screen large nowadays!

Because if you have touchscreens you can use two-finger gestures, and if you're on a mouse you'll have no issue targeting a thin widget. It makes a lot of sense from that POV.

If the thin widget is directly against the edge of the viewport, maybe.

If it's literally anywhere else on the screen, then no, Fitts's Law applies, and it's a bad target. It has height but no width.

This is especially true for those with motor or visual handicaps, or both.

It's damned near unusable even with very modest levels of distraction or other factors, e.g., using a device as a passenger on a moving vehicle, as with a boat, train, or airplane.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “don’t theme my app” thing just tells me that GNOME/GTK+/Adwaita aren’t built in a way that gracefully handles theming, or that devs building apps with them are doing things like hard coding colors when they should be using dynamic system colors such as those provided by UIColor[0] in UIKit. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicolor/ui_e...

Supporting themes imposes an ongoing technical burden across the whole ecosystem. It's not worth it. You don't hear people say "I hate macs because I can't make my title bars purple".

If not for scrollbars color, I certainly dislike the macOS GUI for its straightjacket approach. (Also, poor window management.)

I wish Gnome folks did not keep on copying it more and more. I see why it's easier to do, but KDE somehow manages.

(And if one thinks that Apple UX design can't go wrong, remember Macbooks from a couple of years ago.)

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#168

That's cool and all, but who is actually out here using a linux phone?

A bunch of people are. If you compare the efforts of communities of volunteers against the investments in google/apple phones you can already call FOSS phones a big success.

The idiotic silent downvotes are unnecessary.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#169
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would -- but it's set so thin by default that I have trouble targeting it with my mouse!

For a fullscreen window it would be nice if moving the mouse all the way to the right edge was sufficient to target the scrollbar, but that doesn't work in Chrome on my mac

My browser is rarely against the RH side of my display, or even on the RH sie of my screen.

My preferred informational / programming layout is browser on left, terminal on right.

And in any multi-window layout, any window not aligned with the right-hand display border remains difficult to target.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#170
post #36

These applications look really pretty and all, but for my selfish purposes, I just really want real goddamn scrollbars back. I use a mouse that doesn't have a scroll wheel, but for the life of me I've been unable to figure out how to make applications like Firefox just give me a real scroll bar on the side of the window that's thick enough to grab without fiddly pixel-hunting.

Touch users don't use the scroll bar, they just swipe up/down.
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