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The end of the nice GTK button

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#601

Post by aidenn0 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #560
linmob wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Plasma Mobile Maliit keyboard works with GTK apps on Manjaro Plasma Mobile. There must be some way to make this work on other Plasma Mobile distributions.

I'll try Manjaro then; it definitely doesn't work on an up-to-date postmarketOS on a (non-pro) pinephone. [edit] Can confirm keyboard works in FF on Manjaro, but it has other jankiness (e.g. it seems to think it is much wider than the screen).

Turning scaling down to 1.8 (default 2.0 on Manjaro/Plasma) or lower lets Firefox work on the screen; I didn't have this problem on pmOS; either the default scaling is lower on pmOS, or they have some other workaround.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579348

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#602

Post by michaelmrose »

pmontra wrote: post #29

Wait ten years. New people will start working, old people will move on to other things. The new people will change stuff, mostly for the sake of it as it always happens, and one of the results will be less flat interfaces. Old people will be infuriated by the change. Very old people will rejoice but also complain that those UIs are not as good as the really old ones. New people will shrug them away and keep changing…

This presumes that all things are equally good and the only difference is familiarity. This isn't generally true of other functional areas of endeavor. Neither computers nor cars are all alike save aesthetics. I see no reason why it would be true of UIs.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#603

Post by michaelmrose »

azinman2 wrote: post #245
probably_wrong wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either. I think your example points to a peculiarity of UI/UX: cars have changed a lot since the 1950s, but their interface has remained surprisingly constant. I think there is a point to be made that an interface can reach a point at which it cannot be improved, or at least not without a whole paradigm change.

But even that is not true. Windows are now mechanized, with child locks. The ways to open and lock doors is different, both in the car and from afar. The entire center console now is different, to the point where Tesla has just a touch screen on many models. There are cup holders, EVs have fruncks and often are largely driven using 1 pedal, side mirrors are adjustable with motorized buttons, seat placement is totally…

Child locks were patented in 1949. Powered windows in 1941. Cup holders in cars date back to designs in the 50s popularized in the 80s.

Push button shift considered in 1913. Push button starting actually predates keys.

A touch screen UI is indeed new but its a UI horror story for something that is expected to be operated while driving down the road at 60 mph.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#604

Post by michaelmrose »

rtpg wrote: post #258
MichaelBurge wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. The article focus on the settings control panel. What new needs and expectations does the new settings control panel in 2022 have compared to 2010?

To play a bit in this space, if you check out the settings panel in Ubuntu compared to, say, the Windows XP control panel, you'll see that Gnome's settings panel is more usable. Mainly on account of having a single entry point, and the search bar on the top. I think a lot of this is influenced by modern MacOS and iOS settings management (much like, to my recollection, Gnome 2 settings panels were very influenced by h…

KDE plasma settings is far more usable because it has a single entry point and a search function that actually works.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#605

Post by jchw »

divingdragon wrote: post #598
jchw wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s going to be a bloody mess for a long time, because the choices for how to handle resolution independence are all inherently filled with compromise. With font rendering, I think there is hope. Horizontal subpixel positioning with vertical hinting seems like a good tradeoff to me. Grid fitting vertically is not too jarring, and grid fitting horizontally to subpixels instead of pixels looks pretty good too, on low…

> The fix might be a new API that reveals true coordinates… We already have this with `ResizeObserver` using the `device-pixel-content-box` option. [1] [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ResizeObser...

Pretty sure this API is brand new (last ~year or so) but I honestly had no idea it landed into the standards. Cool, although still, ugly :/

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#606

Post by godshatter »

dv_dt wrote: post #49

Can I also mourn the loss of title bars as I carefully hunt for a spot to grab a window to move it?

This is one of my pet peeves, too. I shouldn't have to find some pixels of unused space on a title bar before clicking on it lest I bring down another menu or launch something. Microsoft programs seem to be enamored with the "search input box in the title bar" concept. Give me a magnifying glass, and drop down the input box or something. I want to be able to just grab the title bar and move the window.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#607

Post by arendtio »

berkes wrote: post #415
jraph wrote: post #89

It seems like KDE and Plasma is the place where look and feel is constantly but incrementally refined; we've been saved from this flat design trend so far and things keep looking pleasant and modern and being usable. We know they care, and have great attention to details because that's documented weekly [1]. I find the Breeze theme really well done and its GTK port, Brise, is also very nice, to the point Gnome looks…

How is KDE these days? I abandoned KDE during the KDE-3 (edit: to 4) migration apocalypse, when nothing worked as it did before, or at all, and everything looked like it needed at least another year of refinement. Is this settled and past now? Is KDE still adament on making virtually every other pixel configurable?

KDE 4 has been fine since 2012 or so.

I used KDE 4 from the first alpha versions (~2007) and never quit using it. However, I had friends who didn't like the mess that KDE 4 was in the beginning and who were very verbose about the good KDE 3 features they were missing and the new behavior they didn't like.

However, at some point they saw that the very few things they were still missing were neglectable compared to the good things that KDE 4 brought with it.

Nevertheless, 2007 to 2012 were 5 years during which it wasn't easy to be a KDE user ;-)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#608

Post by chefandy »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #287
chefandy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about a…

> UI designer proposing changes is received with hostility > solicited the wrong kind of designers This points to me that the root problem is that we can't tell what kind is the wrong kind. It's a trust issue, but also a competence legibility issue. That said- > referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt Uh yeah? Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt.

> can't tell what kind is the wrong kind

To some extent you can tell from their title and previous work, just like with developers. Foe example, I had an entirely non-technical boss that understood I might not be the guy to re-write some printer drivers because I was a web developer. He didn't know the specifics, but being in charge, knew he had to ask someone who did, or do enough research to figure it out.

Likewise, UI designers will specialize in designing UIs and be better at making buttons look like buttons than Graphic Designers, and Experience Designers will be better at integrating user feedback and research into projects. Just like you wouldn't trust any one developer to implement critical functionality you don't understand without outside input, you probably shouldn't rely on one designer to that either. If you maintain a project, though, you can't expect designers to instinctually work around what you don't know. Being in charge means that you're in charge of figuring out how to evaluate it. I'm positive that a "I'm not sure how to interface with this sort of thing. Let's work through it so I can figure it out." will be received kindly by people you should consider working with. Good design proposals should already come with explanation and justification to help you down the path

This is a random selection from a google image search of proposal ideas. It was from another post where I was talking about higher-level topics but the principle is the same. Changing a set of control widgets should require no less thought and explanation.

https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/759 https://github.com/stashapp/stash/issues/1549 https://github.com/newrelic/nr1-groundskeeper/issues/3 https://github.com/creativecommons/creativecommons.github.io... https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/1823

> Developers absolutely refer to developers with glib contempt.

ok— now copy and paste the rest of what I wrote. An overly opinionated, defensive person with veto powers that understands the purpose and value of your work is fundamentally different.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#609

Post by jchw »

jcelerier wrote: post #599
jchw wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True! VNC is not ideal because it's pretty old by now. Chrome Remote Desktop would've been a better example, and even that is behind what can be done, as I believe it still uses VP8. It's possible even a lossless codec like ffv1 could be plausible in the window of 8 MiB/s, but I'm not sure it's necessary, as even old h264 does a pretty convincing job at very low bitrates. Here's a snippet of my 2256x1504 screen, unco…

> Here's a snippet of my 2256x1504 screen from an OBS recording: I wouldn't be able to stand something like this at all, it looks horrible to me. The text is all smudged.

The only place where the text looks remotely smudged to me is in the low contrast bits in the header. It’s very difficult for me to tell the difference otherwise, especially considering that it’s high DPI.

And h264 is old, and I’m using software x264 with fairly modest settings. More modern general video codecs like h265, VP9, perhaps even AV1 can eek out slightly better fidelity at similar bitrates, at the cost of higher complexity. (But if it can be hardware accelerated at both ends, it basically doesn’t matter.)

And these codecs are designed for general video content… it would be instructive to see exactly what kind of performance could be achieved if using lossless codecs or codecs designed for screen capture like ffv1 or TSC2.

It would be… but honestly, there’s no point, because all I was trying to illustrate is that I sincerely doubt 8 MiB/s is the best that can ever be done for a decent desktop experience. Judging by Qt issue reports, it’s worse than what Qt used to be able to accomplish. If you really like your X11 setup, there’s no reason to change it, because it isn’t going to become unusable any time soon. Even if you switch to Wayland in the future, you should still be able to use `ssh -X` with Xwayland as if nothing ever really changed.

This is all a serious tangent. The actual point was that again, X11 doesn’t have any built-in scaling. All along, it was Qt 4+, GTK 3+, and other X11 clients that have been handling all of the details. And traditionally, it wasn’t good. And even contemporarily, it still has issues. Beckoning to the “way X11 did it” makes no sense because 1. X11 as a protocol or server never did anything 2. Even then, historically toolkits have had a lot of trouble dealing with it. The fact that you set the DPI for Xft specifically, which is just a font rendering library, hints at the reality: what oldschool X11 “scaling” amounted to in the 2000s was changing how font sizes were calculated. Modern toolkits just read this value to infer the setting, and it still isn’t good enough for many modern setups that Linux desktops want to support.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#610

Post by kasabali »

TillE wrote: post #146
naoqj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the defaults are atrocious, but freetype can be configured and the options are limitless.

Maybe there's some configuration magic you can do, but I don't think I've ever seen decent font rendering on a Linux distro out of the box. It's one of the biggest reasons I've never switched to desktop Linux, and I'm not even one of those super picky people who talk about the intricacies of typefaces all day.

Ubuntu's font rendering is really good in its stock configuration.

But I understand libre licensed typefaces it ships with might not be to everyones liking.

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