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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

631–640 of 666 posts

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#631

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…

Yep. It's the miscellaneous everything bucket. It also seems to only be motivated by either scarce screen real estate (it first showed up in mobile interfaces), or graphic designers who think everything is "clutter" and by sweeping it away into the hamburger menu they can have their beautiful screenshot-worthy interface. I have a 27" monitor, but tons of websites and even Firefox itself hide half the functionality be…

In Firefox, on Linux at least, when you press Alt you get a bar with all the standard File/Edit/View/History/Bookmarks/Tools/Help menus. In each menu and then in each item there's one letter underlined and it works as it should, so a sequence of Alt, h, a, will give you an About dialog (for example). The fact that the menu bar is not displayed by default doesn't bother me, because I don't use mouse to navigate the menus, and from keyboard I'd need the Alt key press anyway.

Slightly related: somehow, FF on Linux allows you to rearrange tabs from keyboard. Ctrl+Shift+PgUp/PgDown move the current tab left or right. As far as I can tell, this feature is only available on Linux. I have no idea why. It's much more convenient than dragging the tabs with mouse, because you don't have to worry about accidentally detaching the tab into its own window.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IntelliJ is really bad about this sometimes. I get that their software does an incredible amount of really tough stuff behind the scenes (which is why I won't be switching any time soon), but God I wish they prioritized input responsiveness over everything else.

Haha, I love the “My IDE is so sluggish, it must be doing important stuff”. It really isn’t. IntelliJ is just horribly laggish. VSCode, an electron (!) app with 100 plugins isn’t even that slow.

I'm not naive, I've actually built IntelliJ plugins. I know engineers that work on the product, and I have an extremely good idea what it's doing under the hood. A lot of it is important to me and doesn't exist in VSCode, though that's also a great product for some languages.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#633
post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IntelliJ is really bad about this sometimes. I get that their software does an incredible amount of really tough stuff behind the scenes (which is why I won't be switching any time soon), but God I wish they prioritized input responsiveness over everything else.

Jetbrains really should just update the JDK they use. With a slightly larger max memory setting than default and using at least G1 garbage collector (ZGC for even better results) they would get a buttery smooth editor, but it is configured quite badly by default. Though sometimes they just have threading issues, which won’t be solved by above.

Yeah, vm options tweaks still don't cut it for me on my projects, and I've optimized pretty hard. Threading is the killer, esp. when connecting to other processes it can get all tangled up.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#634
post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add that adding to an end of a list dynamically can be okay (if it doesn’t cause previous content to jump as you mention).

It's less egregious, but remember that clicking away from the list (e.g. to close it) is also often an input option. Even though that's a lower input priority it could still disrespect the user's desires if they were trying to leave the list.

You are right, then perhaps leaving a placeholder area which is already bigger to accommodate some additional content? Eg. showing 3 actual lines plus a placeholder of additional 10, which might remain empty (but shows a loading indicator before)?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#635
>I personally feel like Adwaita has been the pinnacle of Linux design Unity to kde Never liked gnome and endure it for more than 1 hour. Yeah he stated it's personal feel, but still strong disagree of existence of concept of pinnacle of design

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#636

So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be…

I don't believe that Canonical or Red Hat would make any money from having a better GUI. Most of their (paying) customers are probably just running servers, or maybe running some simple dumb terminals for nontechnical employees (like a Point-of-Sale where the user may open a web browser or something).

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day I definitely agree with this, and I like your use of the word disrespect. I think the younger generation has encroached onto the sanctity of "the platform", if you will, and now us old timers are suffering. I time myself for my actions every day since I started noticing these despicable UI trends, and on average I waste about 2-3 hours a week trying to discover w…

> But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today. Coming from that era, I strongly disagree. While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era and that one just…

> I don't think that the dumbing down of UI (and reducing palette/layers adds to that) for the dumb users is necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day I am also a dumb user.

I think UIs should be dumbed down for dumb people. This is a good thing.

What I have a problem with is that UIs are forcing power users into only being able to experience software as if we were dumb users.

I'm deeply concerned about the future of software.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.

Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File". Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think…

> The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File?

Happy to know I am not the only one who considers this weird.

It would probably make more sense to have an "Application" menu before "File". It could contain things like "About", "Help", "Setting" and "Exit". (Especially in cases where the current "Help" menu only contains "Show help" and "About". If it has more than five items, then I'd say it deserves a separate menu.)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#639
post #281
post #100

A lot of comments in this thread are negative. As a developer using GTK4 and libadwaita, and as a user that uses gnome, I really like the changes. GTK4 brings some much needed changes, and the major bugs like listview scrolling being broken or bad text rendering on non-hidpi displays suck, but both have people working on fixing them. Libadwaita is a huge improvement, and makes it way easier to build good apps. As for…

> or bad text rendering on non-hidpi displays suck, but both have people working on fixing them. It wasn't even acknowledged as a bug in the beginning, even after screenshots with clear signs of regression were posted. Matthias Clasen closed the bug report saying it wasn't a bug but an intended feature. There's really no appropriate words to describe such behaviour, which is fairly common on the GNOME issue tracker,…

>It wasn't even acknowledged as a bug in the beginning, even after screenshots with clear signs of regression were posted. Matthias Clasen closed the bug report saying it wasn't a bug but an intended feature. There's really no appropriate words to describe such behaviour

Please stop fanning this flame war. You're making it worse and choosing to omit that the bug was reopened after a better argument was made in favor it, just to make a point and attack them, please stop doing that. I'm like you and I just want the bug to be fixed, these kinds of bad faith comments calling people "dense" aren't helping. This is trying to paint someone as being stubborn here after they already changed their mind and did what you want. Just take the victory, you don't have to be a sore winner.

>Sure, but in that case, an officially supported method to change the theme should be provided in case I don't agree with your choice. Apparently, GNOME tweak tool was never supported, is not supported, and will never be supported. For now, GTK_THEME is being presented as an alternative but do you expect me to close all of my programs and relogin to my session to change my theme? Should I create wrapper shell scripts for all of my GTK apps?

GTK_THEME is mainly a setting for developers, you should probably not be using that unless you're developing a theme to be upstreamed with an app. It has all the same issues as the tweak tool where it's unreliable and some apps may not function correctly with some themes or may not respect the setting at all.

If you're interested to actually help, what you should do is contribute towards fixing issues with the upstream theme. In almost every case when I've seen people complain about the default theme it's because of fixable bugs in the theme that upstream wants fixed. And if you want to do more, you can contribute towards the libadwaita theming API which is intended to be a real theming API and not a hack like GTK_THEME or the tweak tool. It's still being designed so now would be the time to start contributing if you want to get in early.

>The fact that there are no non-trivial GTK4 apps out there that don't use libadwaita or libgranite tells me what I need to know.

That those libraries have widgets and skins that developers really like and want to use? I'm sorry I just don't see what you're getting at here. Do you expect GTK to try to please everyone by merging all the widgets from libadwaita and libgranite and deprecating those libraries? Because I think that would be a lot worse.

>Even LibreOffice uses libadwaita now.

Actually it doesn't, that was just a proof of concept. But even if they did, it would be entirely optional.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#640
post #4

All of this is pretty much how I feel on the matter, too. GTK3's interface was a really lovely blend of skeuomorphism and more abstract widgets that came together to make a really unique experience. Even if it didn't work in every context, I appreciated how well it worked for less complicated applications and making great-looking, device-agnostic GUIs. Cawbird was a wonderful native Twitter app made possible with GTK…

I'm sorry but most of this comment is a lot of nonsense. You're certainly allowed to disagree, but when you approach people with comments about their own work that are factually wrong, you'll get corrected. You're confusing those two things and taking it personally and that's a terrible mistake. Don't do that, it hurts you and it hurts everyone else around you.

Just to clear up any confusion:

- People have been working on the font glitch for the last ten months. It's not easy and the solution is not straightforward. Multiple solutions have been proposed but none are without issues. The problem is not being ignored. I want it to be fixed too.

- The choice of whether to allow themes or not belongs to the app developer. This hasn't changed at all from GTK3. When making an app, you can choose to allow themes or not. Some app developers won't, but you don't have to make that choice.

- The stylesheet isn't forced at all, when you develop an app you can configure your styles to always override the platform theme. This also hasn't changed at all from GTK3 and doesn't change with libadwaita. Take a look at the style context priority system for more info.

- Pinning your packages to GTK3 in protest doesn't help you. It doesn't make a difference to the GTK developers at all. If you want to make use of some GTK4 features eventually, it would be best to start working with it and getting your issues sorted out now. You can ignore what the other app maintainers are saying, that has no effect on you.

Hope that helps, thanks.

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