71–80 of 93 posts
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I would welcome a return to early 2000s human interface design. Everybody trying to emulate or surpass Apple took us down the road to ruin.
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I dislike many UX decisions that Apple have made last 15 years. But I greatly appreciate their consistency and a presence of a design language. Last time I saw a consistent design language on Windows was Windows XP.
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That's completely subjective.
Whether you like the look or not depends on one's tastes.
On the objective metrics that I care about, many Linux desktops outshine the macos desktop by far.
I mean, cmon, no snapping windows? Few virtual workspace management options?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, it has the worst ergonomics of any desktop I've used. Since I asked somebody else to be specific, I feel that I should be specific. The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable. A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually…
Of course many of these things are subjective, and likely post-facto reasoned by people, because we get very fiery over these things, but here are some of my “rebuttals”: > The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable. OSX has a similar toolbar, windows has a much bigger one at the bottom. It is valuable s…
> OSX has a similar toolbar
No, it does not, because it's not similar.
It may look similar but this is not about looks, it's about structure and function. ("S&F" is a specific term in evolutionary biology.)
The OS X top panel is a menu bar. It is a core part of the UI. It contains 3 functional areas, none of which GNOME has.
1. The leftmost entry is the Apple system menu. Click on it, and you get system-wide options such as "about this Mac" and so on. 2. Then there is the app menu. The name tells you useful info: the current app. It has options global to that app, such as preferences and quit, in a standard place. 3. Then there is the app's own menu bar, which varies app to app. 4. Then at the right is the system's notification area, which has global applets, a clock and so on, visually separated. GNOME has a vestige it's trying to banish.
That's 4 important functions, just one of which GNOME implements badly.
Not the same thing. MacOS gives me a lot in return for that strip. GNOME wastes it.
> Windows has a much bigger one at the bottom.
Again, not even comparable. Until the broken Win11, you could move it. You can't in GNOME. It does a tonne of stuff; it's a launcher and a switcher and an info display and a status monitor. That's efficient use of space. GNOME moves less than 50% of this to the favourites bar and then hides it. That is not efficient: that's wasteful.
> It is available by a single flick of the mouse
No, it is hidden by default, that is the point here. I do not want my UI to hide stuff from me. It is there to tell me stuff. If it doesn't tell me it is not doing its job. Tell me, or don't do it. Hiding info from a person is called lying. I do not want my desktop to lie to me.
> (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized)
Which is why macOS puts the menus there. GNOME wastes this vital functionality.
> For power users there is the super key
Bogus.
1. I don't have one. 2. How should I know that? Where does it tell me? 3. Why is the keyboard for power users?
> and for laptop users the swipe up with 3 fingers in a smooth motion is easily the best way to get to the activities tab.
Easily the best? Prove it. That is an assertion of fact. That means it needs evidence.
Personally I loathe gestures and I turn off my trackpad. I know how to use all 3 buttons on my mouse; the GNOME devs do not, because they have removed the core "send to back" function that is far quicker than any PITA gestures.
> Besides the “task switcher” at the bottom, I personally am much quicker to discern which application I want to switch to based on how I expect it to look, vs an icon. Windows didn’t add a popup of how it looks for no reason to their task switcher.
Good for you. Me, I read words. I want words over pics.
> keyboard
It is quite customizable (if nothing else, by plugins), but I think it is unfair to take it as a negative that gnome2 hotkeys no longer work. It is quite clearly not an incremental change from that, for that go with Mate.
>> titlebar > > I am undecided on whether it’s a good thing or not. Your previously mentioned vertical space problem is literally the reasoning behind that, so it is not made on a whim.
False comparison. The space is still wasted.
> Otherwise, I have never really rolled up a window for real use, besides playing with animations back in the compiz days.
Speak for yourself. I did.
> I don’t find it useful.
I did. I want it. It's been taken from me. Says who? Why is that right? Why wasn't I asked? Is this a community project or an autocracy?
> I usually just make multiple desktops and group activity-relevant windows on a same one.
I only use them on laptops when I have just 1 screen. Normally I have 2 or 3 screens. GNOME sucks at multiscreen.
Forcing me to use a kludgy replacement for missing hardware is bad design. Not supporting the hardware properly is worse.
> Feel free to reenable that with a single extension.
No.
1. Extensions break GNOME upgrades. 2. It is again stealing functions I want from me. Bad design. 3. The bolted-back-on functions are crude and only half functional. 4. Chesterton's fence: don't remove something if you don't know why it's there.
> You can use any file manager, it should not be a criticism of the Gnome DE
False. It 100% is part of the GNOME DE and so it is fair target. It is a poor design if the user has to fix it. Assume I have no root privs. Make what is bundled work. Don't lean on others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The linked DE is specifically a fork of a DE from 2002[0], so that would be why it looks like a DE from the 2000s. I imagine anyone wanting to use something like this has a fair bit of nostalgia for that style. KDE Plasma[1] is the more modern-looking solution, but the aim of the DE is to do one thing well: provide a solid desktop environment. The stock styles look okay but can be customized in almost any way you lik…
The problem I have with plasma is that it's easily configurable but not easily extensible. I have tried multiple times to write a widget to run on the panel, but QML is so different from traditional Qt that I haven't been able to make sense of it yet. Why can't I just write I widget in PyQt and have it run without learning something completely new?
Think of it as JavaScript with different Qt widgets.
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This comment makes me think you haven't used a modern Linux DE in a while. TDE is not, by design, one. IMHO GNOME looks more modern and refreshing (and definitely more innovative) than macOS or Windows. Sure, its UX is debatable, but no one can deny Microsoft and Apple haven't been plucking ideas from GNOME since 3.0 came out (given that I find GNOME 3 stupid, i think this is a bad thing).
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Dude this is trinity desktop: That’s kinda the point. Trinity desktop is basically a kde fork from the early 2000s that’s still maintained for use in modern distros by some guy. I gotta say with so much slowdown in newer windows, macos, Linux desktop ui toolkits compared to stuff that ran lightning fast in 2004 stuff like this is refreshing.
Which even with the civil GUI war chaos, are easier to manage through than Linux desktop has been during its lifetime.
I'm a big fan and will keep using and installing it. "Not slick enough"? meh, I'm over here getting work done.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course many of these things are subjective, and likely post-facto reasoned by people, because we get very fiery over these things, but here are some of my “rebuttals”: > The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable. OSX has a similar toolbar, windows has a much bigger one at the bottom. It is valuable s…
As you would probably expect, I reject all of those, but let me explain why. > OSX has a similar toolbar No, it does not, because it's not similar. It may look similar but this is not about looks, it's about structure and function. ("S&F" is a specific term in evolutionary biology.) The OS X top panel is a menu bar. It is a core part of the UI. It contains 3 functional areas, none of which GNOME has. 1. The leftmost…
> No, it is hidden by default, that is the point here. I do not want my UI to hide stuff from me. It is there to tell me stuff. If it doesn't tell me it is not doing its job. Tell me, or don't do it
With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs. Otherwise why would you roll up your window? Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?
> > (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized) > Which is why macOS puts the menus there. GNOME wastes this vital functionality
That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.
The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key. Also often called Meta. You can achieve the same through the UI. Keyboard is often said to be for power users because they are not self-documenting. What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.
> Is this a community project or an autocracy?
It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..
> GNOME sucks at multiscreen
Literally every OS and distro suck at it.
Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point, so I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.