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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

641–650 of 666 posts

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miming mobile OS lock screens is one of the weirdest damn things about modern desktop trends. It's so obviously a bad idea. I can't even figure out what useful functionality anyone thought that would provide. It's a fucking desktop, there's plenty of room to stick notifications or the weather or whatever on the same screen as the login prompt, if that's what you want.

Honestly it's what annoys me most about Gnome. I daily drive Gnome 4x but for the love of god stop making design decisions for mobile users. - Why is there a full screen app drawer? - Why does the top bar do nothing and function like my Android top bar? - Why are there no icons in my tray for my background apps (steam, slack, etc)? - Where can I go to see my current running applications? I would love to use a Linux d…

>Why are there no icons in my tray for my background apps (steam, slack, etc)?

I understand the other ones but I don't understand this one. The Android tray does exactly this, background icons on the bar are a mobile feature. If you consider the Windows taskbar to be the ideal desktop experience, it doesn't do that, it hides the icons in a menu.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. On Windows, the first…

> In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. Congratulations! You were able to recognize that it's a _login screen_ without seeing that there's a hidden password field. The first time I booted to Gnome I waited damn near ten minutes for it to tell me it's ready for my…

agreed. awful.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#643
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up" Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?

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…

Declaring a tool good or bad because it's abused doesn't make sense.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of me wants to throw up my hands in the air and cry out "Why, God, why?" when I encounter yet another UI with flat design. It is like a mass delusion or something that some segment of the population seems to think it that flat design is actually useful for the everyday user. We've seen other stupid useless crap spread like a wave across our industry, across our society... so I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Tho…

Modern UI design is optimized for screenshots in a PowerPoint, and from there, to screenshots in a portfolio and on marketing pages where the audience that needs to be satisfied is marketing themselves, and especially people very concerned that every piece of everything be "on brand" and who are entirely sure this matters a ton for making sales. That's what's going on, as far as I can tell.

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miming mobile OS lock screens is one of the weirdest damn things about modern desktop trends. It's so obviously a bad idea. I can't even figure out what useful functionality anyone thought that would provide. It's a fucking desktop, there's plenty of room to stick notifications or the weather or whatever on the same screen as the login prompt, if that's what you want.

One unfortunate reality is, for a lot of new users - especially people who haven't used desktop computers before - their first computer was a mobile device. If we don't want Apple and Google to take over the entire space, we need to meet them halfway. The lock screen is weird, though, I agree. The newer (blurry background) one is better than the old one with the tedious swipe animation, but really could use a persist…

Oh ok, so people don't make the difference between a mobile phone and a computer. That is also why they don't know how to use a TV because it's not like a smartphone, right ?

That was a very bad idea from the very start. But it's the motto Gnome 3 was built on... I agree with the initial comment, Human-Computer Interraction SCIENCE went down the toilet drain to be replaced with so called UI/UX "experts"

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem Gnome, and Microsoft, have is they keep throwing money at designers. So designers keep making designs for the sake of designing. They should stop designing, stick to the design they already have and only do incremental updates when new widgets come out.

Why are designers so different from the rest of us I wonder? They value minimalism above all else, with little debate, but everyone else has a lot wider of a range of preferences it seems like.

I imagine that its a constant refinement between utility and minimising distraction. They end up skirting this fine line because they live the details, much like how anyone can be distracted or obsess over miniature details when you have hyperfocus on a subject.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miming mobile OS lock screens is one of the weirdest damn things about modern desktop trends. It's so obviously a bad idea. I can't even figure out what useful functionality anyone thought that would provide. It's a fucking desktop, there's plenty of room to stick notifications or the weather or whatever on the same screen as the login prompt, if that's what you want.

Honestly it's what annoys me most about Gnome. I daily drive Gnome 4x but for the love of god stop making design decisions for mobile users. - Why is there a full screen app drawer? - Why does the top bar do nothing and function like my Android top bar? - Why are there no icons in my tray for my background apps (steam, slack, etc)? - Where can I go to see my current running applications? I would love to use a Linux d…

I've said this on Reddit before, but the current Gnome is excellent for someone who loves it and only needs a few changes to make it work for you. Personally, I like how everything works (you could also say that this is some form of Stockholm Syndrome, ha ha). I like not having anything distracting from

The answer for most of these is "there's an extension for that"

> - Why is there a full screen app drawer?

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/6/applications-menu/ (fully supported by the Gnome team; hopefully shouldn't break from release to release)

> - Why are there no icons in my tray for my background apps (steam, slack, etc)?

There are a variety of extensions that do this, I use Topicons Plus (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/495/topicons/), which also seems to be a part of the core suite.

> - Where can I go to see my current running applications?

I rarely have to do this (for me it's almost always IDE, Terminal, Browser), but "alt-tab then escape" is an option. For the window list at the bottom, there is the Window List Extension (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/602/window-list/), part of the core Gnome desktop as well.

In short, most of your complaints would be solved by logging into Classic Mode, which tries to emulate the Gnome 2 experience using some built in extensions.

> - Why does the top bar do nothing and function like my Android top bar?

I am not sure what this means, but I like the Shell's current behavior where we have as few active elements as possible detracting from your active window.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#648
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This is trying to paint someone as being stubborn here after they already changed their mind

I just pointed it out because as I said, this behaviour is fairly common on the GNOME issue tracker. There are numerous instances but for now, the Inter font issue comes to mind

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/2331

> GTK_THEME is mainly a setting for developers, you should probably not be using that

Well, this is new information because this blog post

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

and everyone else I've talked to seems to be presenting GTK_THEME as one of the options for changing themes for GTK4 apps, which is absurd user experience, to say the least.

> 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.

Now I'm wondering if this information was intentionally withheld in that blog post.

> 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.

What if I disagree with basic choices like the dark mode background color? The contrast between the background and text in dark mode is too high for me and I get halation in my eyes within a few minutes of reading text inside a GTK app with the dark version of the Adwaita theme.

I'm fairly certain that this issue won't be entertained on their issue tracker and even if it was, I'm not sure I want to subject myself to their behaviour as shown in the link above and the font issue in context.

> a real theming API

that "real" theming API just changes accent colors and wouldn't solve my issue

> Do you expect GTK to try to please everyone by merging all the widgets from libadwaita and libgranite and deprecating those libraries?

If there are no feasible alternatives to develop GTK4 only apps besides creating your own widgets from scratch, the practical outcome would be that most independent developers would end up choosing libadwaita not because they want their apps to be GNOME apps but because it would be relatively harder to not use libadwaita. This can be seen in this comment from the developer of GTKeddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/pg7gkr/introducing_g...

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#649
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's some kind of timing/performance/hardware interface issue, it's quite possible different machines will act differently.

It might also be working today but not tomorrow, then you accidentally start "Archies terminologies dictionary" as a websearch instead.

This actually has happened to me on Gnome several times ;-)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#650
post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. As a developer who always had an interest in UI design but has zero formal education in the field, I be really interested to know more about this. Could you maybe explain some of those strategies? My subjective…

Yay! UI design is cool. I really love helping people solve their problems with software and often find the intellectual work involved with crafting their interactions to be far more interesting than getting the best algorithm for something, implementing the most reliable architecture, etc. What I believe you're noticing is the the adoption of ideas under the (poorly named, IMO) UX umbrella. UI design is either consid…

Thanks a lot for those pointers. Looking forward to dig into that stuff!
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