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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

501–510 of 666 posts

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do. Although I agree this is annoying, to be completely fair, it doesn't suggest that you should start typing your password immediately. You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to. A…

I... am sorry, but I think that is extremely bad practice. You should not put yourself in that position, and your experience in that position does not excuse the design flaws in windows. > You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to. Well firstly, that isn't what the prompt is for, so I'm struggling to see the relevanc…

GP's (I think reasonable) point was that typing A on the keyboard of a locked (or worse, sleeping) computer has no reason to be interpreted as "input the letter A into the password field that will be displayed on screen", which is what the original post is assuming it should mean. There's no real reason it should even mean "input the letter A into the first field that comes into focus", which may anyway not be the password (it could be the Username field in certain setups).

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#502

Superficial opinion: GNOME 3 is the best-looking DE for Linux, but I personally prefer using KDE. It's a shame then that the new flat design in GTK 4 looks ugly. I suppose it's all subjective -- but I'm struck by how viscerally bad most flat designs look to me. I suppose it's another "aesthetic movement" that most of us philistines won't understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

That's precisely how I feel. Words can't really describe how taken aback I was when I typed in "sudo pacman -Syu" that fateful day and rebooted into... whatever GNOME 40 was.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#503

I may be alone here, but maybe there are mountains of functionality never tackled in Gnome. Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. Meanwhile, the visual design has been hashed over and over: I've lost count. Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities?

A lot of work in OSS desktop environments is driven by someone having a personal interest in building a feature.

I wonder if that plays into in (in addition to the effort hurdle mentioned by audidude). I turn off trackpad gestures every time I get a new machine - I just don't get any use out of them. I can't be the only one. And since Gnome lagged behind on gestures, we could presume many Gnome developers either have perfectly good gestureless workflows already, or haven't even had the opportunity to see what gestures can do.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But end users use the same mechanism to theme their apps as vendors and that one is being removed.

Exactly. Now you know why the application developers are so loud and angry. We can’t have nice things because distributions shipped broken default configurations, and that’s messed up.

Don't say "the application developers" like we're all one person. There are multiple GTK developers in this thread that don't care what distros ship with: this is exclusively a GNOME complaint. Don't drag the rest of us into this.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember the good old days where keyboards had Function keys and apps would prominently display a F2 next to the save button, an F10 next to quit. Even for computer illiterate people, that made using keyboard shortcuts a bliss. Save was ALWAYS on F2 no matter what you did, so people would put physical stickers on their keyboard to make the F2 button say "Save" on the keycap.

What system was this? I've used every version of Windows (literally), DOS since the 80s, Macs since the 90s, Linux since the 90s, Atari ST, and several different 8-bit micros and I don't recall ever using F2 to save. I do believe your anecdote but it's completely escaped me what platform might have used F2. Also worth noting that keyboards do still have function keys. In fact I use F2 as my `tmux` control prefix. :)

mcedit does have save on F2 (which I guess is carried over from DOS Norton Commander): https://rubenerd.com/files/2009/3612703566_52304223da_o.png

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#506

I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design. I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average. But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user fr…

I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.

I had to Google how to turn on an iMac.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#507
post #437
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE 3 was rock solid. They did break a lot of stuff when releasing KDE 4. That was very unstable / crashy. At that time I moved to Gnome 2, and moved back when Unity was shipped by default in Ubuntu. The late KDE 4.X releases were rock solid. I didn't like KDE 5 at first. A lot of things felt unfinished / not ready. but KDE 5 has been rock solid for years now, and from what I understand they have promised they would…

Don't forget MATE. It got redone in GTK3, and it is terrific.

Xfce is also based on gtk+3 now. Quite a bit lighter than MATE.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#508
post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there. Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design…

> Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there. I feel the same way about notifications. Both native notifications and notifications via e-mail. It is no longer easy to find out if something changed or happened in most websites/applications. You must be bombarded with notifications all the time, and god forbid you take an extended break or something goes into your spam folder, because if you…

One of the first things I do with a fresh work inbox is set rules to push things into non-default folders. And then, I proceed to never look at them unless I'm digging for something.

61 unread notifications from Az Devops? Nah, I don't need to read those. I was watching that build in the background, I know it failed.

Mobile notifications should offer more filtering options at the system level. Why do I need to trust an app developer to respect my notification preferences? Why should I rely on the developer to build granularity into their push notification frequency?

It all gets simpler when you can filter at the 'inbox'.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#509
post #270

I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something. Whenever I see a hamburger menu I s…

This reminds me of one of my personal bugaboos, which seems especially bad in Microsoft Windows: windows that spawn child windows that require input focus, but that don’t grab focus leaving you typing into nothing at all!

Truly its crazy making.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#510
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodness the start bar on Windows. For something that is meant to be a key part of both the mouse and the keyboard workflow, how can it be so slow? My work computers can hang for so long on it, that it is quicker to find the application shortcut on the desktop.

> how can it be so slow? Because it is trying to be all things to all people: including supporting sponsored content and integrating with any fancy new/copied idea that the company is pushing (which may be quietly deprecated in the next major revision, but the hooks left adding abstraction load to everything else so that the few who actually found it useful don't complain).

Computers are ludicrously fast nowadays. Games are capable of doing a whole lot of shit in <16ms consistently while responding to user input, so I don't buy this "it's doing a lot!" argument, it is coded badly.
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