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A new wave of Linux applications

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Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#481

Post by curt15 »

floatboth wrote: post #369
tristan957 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status icons were built on old and fractured technologies. They are coming back. Designs and technical discussions are happening right now.

A dedicated tray is a concept tied to windows 95 style UX. I hope the new designs are more about standardizing ways to indicate various statuses and actions of "the app" broadly, without dedicated status icons. For example download progress is still only an Ubuntu Unity protocol that KDE also supports because they can but it's all not freedesktop standard.

How about applications that are controlled entirely from their status icon, like dropbox or vpn apps? Fedora, which normally champions GNOME, is beginning to acknowledge that status icons are here to stay whether GNOME designers like them or not: https://pagure.io/fedora-workstation/issue/246

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#482

Post by curt15 »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #395
selfhoster11 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have read through it. I just vehemently disagree that their requests are reasonable. The only reason why people care so much for their apps' "branding" is being enforced by product management. Absent that pressure, you get a reversion to the Windows ecosystem pre-2005 (more or less), where every user can make their desktop as nice or ugly as they want, and by and large, the sky isn't falling. Because everyone works…

One thing I really hate about electron apps (besides performance in many cases) is the extreme branding they do. Every app looks differently, not fitting in with the rest of OS. As a user, theming is a powerful feature to make things look somewhat consistent. Though I use KDE and Qt apps as preference, and very few gnome apps. They tend to cope with this pretty well.

As some who normally uses GNOME, I actually like apps to have distinct visual identities so that they are easy to tell apart at a glance. When using VSCode or Chromium I prefer their native title bars and modal dialogs, which integrate with the rest of their appearance, instead of the grey system-provided widgets.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#483

Post by [deleted] »

floatboth wrote: post #357
kitsunesoba wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I build bespoke UI elements for iOS apps all the time and building them in such a way that they look and function correctly not only across light/dark and accessibility modes but also future OS versions is not that difficult, and with how they’re built I don’t see them breaking even if iOS took on a radically different appearance. They might not match perfectly but usability will not be impacted. If this is not reaso…

> not only across light/dark and accessibility modes but also future OS versions When Apple makes a future OS versions they are expected to avoid breaking apps. The comparison here would be not to future iOS versions, but to arbitrary jailbreak tweaks that overhaul the look system-wide. You're not ensuring that will look good with your app ;)

[deleted]

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#484

Post by account42 »

akselmo wrote: post #42
kitsunesoba wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases badly designed themes (like dark gray labels on black backgrounds) are the culprit, but most often it’s a result of the app developers hard coding colors in their UI elements assuming all users will be using a similar theme. That’s not only bad for custom theme users, it’s bad for accessibility since there’s no way for increased contrast modes to modify the hard coded colors. Apps really just shouldn’t…

Agreed, definitely. OS should provide basic colorsheets that the apps use, and those sheets should be freely modifiable. Which is why I really like KDE.

KDE (or rather Qt) goes even further and still let's you completely change the way interface elements are rendered, which is great because it means you can use the same look across versions if you want to and are not beholden to the latest design fad.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#485

Post by account42 »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #294
akselmo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like partially the movement happened because some themes made the apps unusable and then instead of blaming the theming, users blamed thee app developers instead.

This is exactly the reason. But people seem to deliberately obscure why the Gnome devs are doing this and instead accuse them of being lazy and/or dictators etc.

Removing themes because they have in some rare cases caused problems is a pretty lazy response.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#486

Post by account42 »

asddubs wrote: post #25
traverseda wrote: post #9

I have to say I just don't like Gnome's design. The shift away from text and towards more and more abstract icons, the "don't theme my app movement", removing features I consider pretty essential like typeahead.... Maybe mobile is where their weird (to me) design choices will finally shine though. Also looking forward to what KDE can accomplish in this space.

I still dislike the gnome3 title bar with the icons. As you say, unlabelled mystery meat and hamburger menus. I'll admit, part of my dislike for the new title bars is probably irrationally rooted in just wanting things to stay like they were on windows 98 when I first became familiar with computers, forever, and never to diverge too much from that. But those unlabelled icons, they really do puzzle and frustrate me. O…

I disagree with the notion that wanting the interface to stay the same just for the sake of it staying the same is irrational.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#488

Post by jcelerier »

jcelerier wrote: post #100
smoldesu wrote: post #12

History is back around to repeating itself. I'm an avid Linux user (and even a developer who uses GTK pretty regularly), but the recent developments surrounding GNOME, Flatpak and their related libraries has not made me optimistic for the future of Linux applications. GTK4 is really bad. It launched with horrible text rendering issues (still unfixed, 10+ months later), broke compatibility with a number of basic featu…

> The general demeanor of the team has been my-way-or-the-highway, so making suggestions mostly gets you labelled as a troll in their gitlab and sees you forcibly removed if you don't give up and assimilate into their opinion. Remember: > I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started t…

(the issue about border decorations: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217)

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#489

Post by account42 »

floatboth wrote: post #362
hughrr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely Inferior to dragging a titlebar as it requires twice as many hands.

On the other hand (ha) it does not require any aiming. I can super+drag windows into "aero snap" targets in milliseconds because I don't have to spend any time on finding the header bar.

Which makes it a great addition to title bar dragging but not a replacement.

Re: A new wave of Linux applications

#490

Post by account42 »

floatboth wrote: post #369
tristan957 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Status icons were built on old and fractured technologies. They are coming back. Designs and technical discussions are happening right now.

A dedicated tray is a concept tied to windows 95 style UX. I hope the new designs are more about standardizing ways to indicate various statuses and actions of "the app" broadly, without dedicated status icons. For example download progress is still only an Ubuntu Unity protocol that KDE also supports because they can but it's all not freedesktop standard.

With "old" method under X11 the icon was just a tiny window the application created that was then embedded in the tray window and you could do basically anything with it. This caused problems with transparency though so for the sake of a prettier desktop (and because this approach would not work with Wayland) we got a more limited D-Bus protocol where you only get an icon and a menu.
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