Trinity Desktop Environment – a modern KDE3 fork

Why are there so few of us :(

Besides, I think the sentiment that if it isn't flat and minimalistic then it is old-fashioned, betrays a bizarre lack of imagination on designers' part. Any time I mention skeuomorphism, 2.5D, shadows, density etc, people say I live in the 90s. Why? Are these features so onerous that one cannot conceive of a modern, or even trend-setting design that employs them? To me, this seems ludicrous. Designers brag about innovation and creativity. OK, then, here is a challenge: stop aping Apple and design tomorrow's skeuomorphic, dense, slick, rich Desktop UI.

> Gnome includes many of the OSX menus in its right hand panel.

It used to. Now they are all collapsed into a single drop-down thing. (Which is not a panel, BTW. A panel is a toolbar that is permanently attached to the edge of a window or screen.)

Why? Who decided this? Who got to vote on it? What is the benefit?

I used to use an addon called "Extend Panel Menu" to split these into much more useful separate controls: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1201/extend-panel-men...

Of course, GNOME broke it in a later release. This is why no amount of extensions are an answer: they break. Extensions do not work from one release of GNOME to another, and when they fail, the whole desktop often fails.

> Also, it’s not really Gnome’s fault that linux doesn’t have as great metadata from apps to be able to display the apps’ menubars (unity could do it).

False. Gtk exposes this; Unity didn't have stored metadata on lots of apps, it just displayed the existing controls' contents somewhere else. If you run brand new Gtk apps on Unity today, they get panel menus. This was not some clever hack.

Unity is still around:

https://unityd.org/

The distro is back again:

https://ubuntuunity.org/

Brand new apps, like Waterfox, integrate with it fine although they did not exist when it was written.

https://www.waterfox.net/

> With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs.

I disagree.

1. I want to choose what is shown or not. In order to choose, I have to be able to see it.

2. In other words, it needs to be there at first, and then I can choose whether I want to show it or not. If I can't see it in the first place, then how am I to know it's there?

3. It's the users' choice what is shown or not. It is not up to the developer to say "they don't need to see this and I'm going to hide it away."

Any piece of software that does that is user hostile.

> Otherwise why would you roll up your window?

Again: it's my choice. I get to choose. It's my computer. They are my windows. I choose if they are shown or not.

That is the point of free software: Choice.

GNOME says it's free, but it takes choices away from me. I object to that.

> Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?

To save space for my document. You can't show everything all the time: that is why you leave it up to the user to choose what they show and when.

(Incidentally, this is also why in my opinion the Microsoft ribbon based fluent interface fails. It tries to show far too much all at once, and the result is that it wastes a huge amount of screen space, and is actually more difficult to hunt through for what I need when I need it.)

> That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.

False.

Fitt's law is about target size.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...

It is not about corners. It is about edges too.

By the way I do have a clue about this stuff... for example here is a screenshot of a piece of software which I designed about a dozen years which makes use of Fitt's Law.

https://twitter.com/SimplicityComps/status/54085863397497241...

> The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key.

So, yes, but those environments don't suddenly change your entire screen.

> Also often called Meta.

That is a different key. Meta and super are not interchangeable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)

> 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.

The problem here, as I'm attempting to spell out, is that there were existing conventions for this stuff, and GNOME does not respect them.

> 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..

No. What I do is, I write about it for a living. I analyse this stuff, I draw comparisons, I point out weaknesses and strengths. That's my job.

In my professional capacity, the GNOME foundation invited me to its GUADEC conference about six or seven years back. I asked a lot of awkward and difficult questions, because that's my job, and I didn't get invited back.

> Literally every OS and distro suck at it.

False. For example, using most other interfaces, such as XFCE, I can treat a multiscreen desktop as one big space. I can have one panel at the far left, and one on the far right, of the entire multi-monitor desktop.

But GNOME doesn't let me do that.

Why not?

> Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point

Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased?

Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you is biased?

Have you considered that perhaps I have opinions, and can draw upon years of knowledge and experience, and make reasoned arguments based on evidence, and that is not the same thing as being biased?

> I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.

So because I can counter your arguments with examples and reasoning, you don't think that it's fruitful discussion?

Personally, I think that the arguments where people can defend their points, and produce evidence to back them up, are the most fruitful kind.

Don't you?

The problem with a design field becoming established is that, in pursuit of fads, status, or inflated sense of self-importance, the designers begin to pursue design for design's sake. Looking backwards for ANY reason becomes taboo, and they start to conflate their ridiculous ideas with "progress." Without a clear line to the end-user it becomes a goal-seeking exercise that only claims to be user-oriented.

I just want a really solid, wholly original 90's style high-relief theme for GTK/Cinnamon and Qt. I used to use the old 2000 theme on Windows XP and 7 with some darker colors, it looked and felt great.

I am as well, but I am refreshed by a world where computers were literally so shitty they still stayed on desk. And despite that they still had better interactivity than they do at times today.

> Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased

Not because we disagree, because you are talking out of emotion, while I am not. Also, many of your supposed arguments/evidences are just hand-wavy emotional statements.

I’m fine with disagreeing with someone, or even if someone can change my mind, but I don’t see it happening here, and mind you, I simply like Gnome’s UX more or less, but not to a degree where I would get blinded by it.