Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 293 posts

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#191

Post by criticalfault »

tmtvl wrote: post #181
criticalfault wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, called gnome boxes. https://apps.gnome.org/Boxes/ This was only an example. Boxes is no metric for anything, but having an app that works well in that Desktop is a good thing. There is nothing flike that or KDE. It's all for gnome. Point here being that KDE has a lack of apps. If talking about more generic apps, gnome has better Multimedia Tools, Firefox uses gtk to better integrate with gnome... The only thing/…

> gnome has better Multimedia Tools I dunno, I really like Cantata (which integrates perfectly with MPD, which has possibly the best music organisation) and Clementine, more than any other music player I've tried. For video I'm very fond of SMPlayer, which is a featureful frontend for MPV. Kdenlive is also really nice (although Davinci Resolve is better, to be fair). > The only thing/app kde has better is krita. Real…

In another comment I also remembered kdenlive. Not even sure what gnome has since I don't edit video.

Gedit (or now gnome-text) is more equivalent of kwrite. Gnome doesn't have an equivalent to kate, me thinks.

Umbrello: https://github.com/gaphor/gaphor

I use smplayer on windows, this is a good app. Does it run on Wayland? And does it have hardware acceleration for decoding? I had issues on Wayland (gnome) with it.

Cantata is abandoned.

Files I excluded because dolphin is better functionally. It wasn't excluded because I want to skew results in my favor, but because there is no discussion. One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#192

Post by rollcat »

tristan957 wrote: post #169
rollcat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile macOS: hold "opt" to shutdown/restart without confirmation: 2 clicks, instant action; vs GNOME's 4 clicks and janky animations. Meanwhile both: cramming so many controls into title bars there's nowhere left to click to move the window. I recently spent a week with OS X 10.5 on a G4, I think it was peak desktop.

You can click and drag anywhere on the header bar. Did you not test this before making your comment? It seems like a lot of people are misinformed.

Well not on Mac, and I don't have anything with GNOME at hand. But that's besides the point: 1. it's not obvious (no other random part of the window can be used in the same way), 2. it's too many things in too little space (cognitive load, applies to Mac as well), 3. you have to be mindful about accidentally clicking instead of dragging (most non-Apple trackpads are simply bad), 4. it's ambiguous what's gonna happen for any UI element that could respond to drags (address bar, seekbar, etc).

I have similar problems telling which parts of the window can be used to drag them around on a Mac. There's a secret feature that allows you to hold Cmd+Ctrl to drag the window by clicking (almost) anywhere, but every release of macOS breaks it for yet another app.

    defaults write -g NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture -bool true

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#193

Post by NekkoDroid »

KETHERCORTEX wrote: post #155
cocoto wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can click on the three dot menu at the right of the path, there is an option to open a terminal. You can also switch to icon view and right-click between icons to open a terminal. You can also go to parent folder, right click the folder you were before and open it in a terminal. Many workarounds but I agree it’s not really good UI.

> You can click on the three dot menu at the right of the path, there is an option to open a terminal. I use Black Box as a terminal app, but Nautilus will open only default distro-provided terminal application with its menu.

Yea, there currently isn't exactly any way for selecting what application is considered a terminal other than hardcoding a list (which IIRC gnome-shell does). There is an open MR on xdg-specs[1] to address this, which seems to have stalled

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/merge_request...

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#194

Post by washadjeffmad »

I think a salient point is the reduction in hackability in modern open source interfaces, driven by reductive centralized developer-centric consolidation.

There's no right design ontology. Each user's need is unique, and the utter abandonment of principle over the past decade (I use GNOME 3 as the turning point) has been deleterious to the ethos that once defined Linux as the platform for those who prize ownership of their systems above closed, committee-design decision making over creating user-first interfaces.

I've returned to the BSDs in part because of it. My main system is, of course, Linux at its core, but I don't feel close to it like I did when I'd have a half dozen WMs and DEs installed, the sessions easily switchable by TTY for whatever workflow that required them.

GNOME 3 is a triumph of bureaucracy over stakeholders, developed antagonistically to the historical consideration of its users. It's a core product that satisfies no one completely, and can't, which I'm sure makes the lives of its developers easier as their stance on shutting down any dialog with users over the years has reinforced.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#195

Post by kaba0 »

savolai wrote: post #164
kaba0 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What data does he have? OP wrote a basic opinion-piece on what they dislike. It’s just as valuable as the parent commenter’s opinion, so we can only say that one user found some feature hard to find. There is no ultimate design, and striving for 100% of users knowing everything immediately is just unrealistic. If we are at opinions, I really dislike this absolutely tone-deaf attacking of GNOME that is always happenin…

This should help you trace the argumentation to cited research that is certainly not ”tone deaf”: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ 1. *Consistency and Standards* Claim: "The 'View Options' dropdown didn't contain view options, but rather sort options, and I didn't realize it was a split button with two completely different functions." Violation: This breaks Consistency and Standards. The use…

Something like this would have been a better post than the linked one, but even this is not necessarily objective on each count - and design has a fundamentally subjective, human element based on our collective experience with every kind of interface, ever, which is affected by experience/culture, everything.

E.g. in your list: there is no “dropdown name”, it’s a misidentified element by the post writer. Add to it that he is not using standard configuration, which is just not how any “test” should be conducted. Like, you are not testing cars with flat tires either.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#196

Post by roryokane »

quaintdev wrote: post #166
sunaookami wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finder is way better than Windows Explorer. Explorer suffers from a myriad of bugs like constantly re-caching thumbnails, lag when opening folders (since Windows 11) and TWO context menus. No bulk rename, search is way too slow and annoying. Also, can't delete words from the file name with CTRL + Backspace, it inserts some hidden character instead. Also the whole OS hangs while an external hard drive spins up, which…

Finder does not have option to move a file. Nor you can resize the window.

Neither is true.

In Finder you could always drag and drop a file to move it. (In certain cases I forget the details of, holding Command is necessary to move instead of copy, as indicated by the cursor.)

Since about 8 years ago, you can also move a file via the keyboard by selecting the file, hitting Command-C to Copy, navigating to the new folder, and hitting Option-Command-V to Move the pasted file. This doesn’t match Windows’s Cut/Paste workflow, but I think Copy makes more sense as a first step. For consistency with Cut elsewhere, one would expect Cut to delete the file until it is pasted, but on Windows it doesn’t.

Finder windows are resizeable in the same way as all other macOS windows. In older versions you had to drag the drag handle in the bottom right. For a while now, you can drag on any window border, when the cursor turns into a double arrow. You can also click or Option-click the green window button to make the window full-screen or zoom it to show all contents.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#197

Post by ishigoemon »

tveyben wrote: post #94
hedora wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current version of Finder is a massive regression from what it used to be. If you don’t believe me, fire up https://macos9.app on a machine with a mouse, and try organizing / browsing some files.

Oh - the Good old MacOS days (pree y2k) - agree the Finder from MacOS 9 was really pleasant to use. These days I’m in love with Total Commander (yes I mainly use Win+WSL2), but I know of several TC style File Managers are available for the Macintosh) And i do know that TC was cloned/inspirere from ’mc’ (to give credit…!)

And 'mc' was a clone of Norton Commander! I don't know if it had precursors, but I'd be interested if anyone does.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#198

Post by dylan-m »

Cockbrand wrote: post #144
jiehong wrote: post #65

This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in. I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1]. [0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/…

I find this debatable from a UI/UX perspective. I think that the designers made the right choice here, because a context menu should show actions which can be applied to the object I right clicked on. "New Document" isn't really some function of a file or folder icon. Even worse: when I right click on a folder, should the "New Document" menu item create a new doc in the current folder? Or in the one I clicked on? It…

> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.

In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.

It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#199

Post by thastings »

Since it hasn't been mentioned yet, I must add COSMIC here, as most comparisons seem to occur between GNOME and KDE. I've used the former for years, but slowly realized that needing to use various extensions to achieve a usable desktop is just plain wrong. Then I switched to KDE Plasma for a year or two, and it also felt off a bit, partly due to the overwhelming number of options with often odd defaults. Fonts were awesome though, and so was Dolphin compared to Nautilus. Finally, the week the alpha was released, I installed the COSMIC version of Pop, and never looked back. Why? Because it has the correct amount of desktop-related settings for me (and hopefully many others as well). These settings are: - dock or panel or both? - place them anywhere - populate them however you want

In this sense, GNOME is too strict and inflexible. Plasma, on the other hand, lets me create the look I'm used to without adding extensions, but also feels "wobbly." This wobbliness comes from the overwhelming amount of tickboxes, radio buttons and whatelse almost calling for interaction to change stuff. COSMIC fixed my problems of the duopoly and feels stable enough for daily use even in its alpha state.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#200

Post by mixmastamyk »

I don’t like most of what gnome did to its UI over the years, as I use titlebars, scrollbars, and menus heavily.

But I consoled myself with the idea that at least it was done to make it more friendly for touch devices—that I didn’t happen need at the time on my PCs.

Guess what? Fast forward a decade. Just got a new linux tablet and come to find out gnome is often shitty and unusable there too. Menus tiny, often keyboard only interfaces! Phosh is decent but none of the video players have a UI in the ballpark of Netflix/Android. All the touch targets are TINY, no tap in the center to play/pause, no tap on sides to skip either. Often have state bugs where the UI won’t hide after an interaction. Won’t stay full screen.

I had to install a new file manager named Portfolio that was actually touch friendly. Making things round is not enough.

So much was lost and we didn’t even get a good touch interface out of the bargain! And their broken interfaces have infected mate, xfce, cinnamon as well.

Post reply on HN