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

231–240 of 293 posts

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#231

Post by [deleted] »

Spivak wrote: post #168
troad wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely interacting with files is a key component of what people expect from a DE? If a DE can't handle that well, a well-designed 'Videos' app offers small consolation. I can only speak for myself, but it was a Nautilus regression that was the final straw that got me to move to KDE. (And years before that, the rapidly regressing Finder was a key factor in getting me to finally move from Mac to Linux.) Very happy…

Because we're critiquing the design, can you make nice-to-use apps following the GNOME human interface guidelines or is it rotten to the core? Is Nautilus fixable while staying within the "GNOME way?" And the answer is yes, there's plenty of examples. Elementary even makes a nice file manager following them https://github.com/elementary/files . I'm not going to defend Nautilus or pretend it's good, I just don't care.…

[deleted]

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#232

Post by dostick »

Great UX review! Author mentions “designers and developers”, I get the suspicion that there’s no designer involved. At least no UX designer.

Do open source projects, even most notable like this one, ever employ UX designers?

From experience trying to contribute UX expertise to open source, I always end up finding out that the developer considers it their reward to have freedom to make UI decisions and shape UI fit their personal taste.

I try to demonstrate and make prototypes and compelling examples and arguments, but since usually the UX problem we trying to fix is in something that’s already implemented, there’s little will to make those changes, when there’s 100s of issues that can be worked on in that time.

And yes, I end up learning WXwidgets or whatever programming framework used, in order to contribute the UXUI changes, knowing that pull request may not ever be accepted for reasons that’s again someone’s personal taste overrules UX.

There is a misguided culture of treating UX decisions like programming algorithms decisions: as long it’s possible to get user from A to B, developer allowed to play around and invent different ways and optimisations.

You can’t treat UX is such way. UX is a different skill set. To take a Car analogy, it’s letting engine designer make decisions about car body and aerodynamics. Mechanic would design every car as F1 because obviously to them it’s the fastest car and easy for them to use with 80 buttons on steering wheel. And then you see the their F1 car design and it’s “Homer” car.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#233

Post by dxroshan »

tristan957 wrote: post #170
ginko wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're a power-user that likes having many toolbars, don't use gnome, there are other amazing DEs made for you The problem is that Gnome has infected GTK to the point that it's really hard to avoid all their (imo) poor design choices (like lack of menu bars, hidden scrollbars, dialog dismiss buttons on top right) if you're using a GTK based DE like XFCE.

GTK has a menubar widget. GtkDialog is deprecated. Just use a GtkWindow and design it how you feel.

The menubar widget is removed in GTK 4. There is GtkPopoverMenubar in GTK 4, but it is not equivalent of traditional menubar.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GTK/comments/xdfgjr/api_changes_in_...

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#234

Post by dxroshan »

tristan957 wrote: post #171
dxroshan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Gnome 2 was great. I miss those days. The whole Gnome is a disappointment now. The GTK-4 doesn't even have the traditional menu and menubar widgets. I don't know what the Gimp people and the Inkscape people are going to do.

https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/class.PopoverMenuBar.html

Both GtkMenu and GtkMenuBar are gone in GTK 4. Now threre is GtkPopoverMenu and GtkPopoverMenuBar. The GtkPopoverMenu is not a drop-in replacement for GtkMenu.

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/using-gtkpopovermenu-as-a-gtkm...

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#235

Post by dxroshan »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #107
dxroshan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Gnome 2 was great. I miss those days. The whole Gnome is a disappointment now. The GTK-4 doesn't even have the traditional menu and menubar widgets. I don't know what the Gimp people and the Inkscape people are going to do.

Mate is a nice option if you want Gnome 2 but don't want to live in the past. It's very pleasant.

Yes, Mate is indeed a decent desktop for people who like GNOME 2. But GTK people are removing features left and right. I don't know how Mate is going to cope with that.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#236

Post by kaba0 »

josephg wrote: post #219
kaba0 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I think a lot of this disagreement could be cleared up by using “hallway usability testing”. The test is simple: Grab the next 6-8 people who walk past your desk and say “hey do you have 5 minutes to test the usability of something?”. Ask them to do a series of actions with the application (change to a list view, go up one level in the directory hierarchy, etc). Take note of what they find easy and what they struggle…

And that would have been a good test and an interesting data point. But that’s not a step you can just skip.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#238

Post by wao0uuno »

pona-a wrote: post #73
wao0uuno wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s the only modern Linux DE that looks good and doesn’t break constantly.

KDE? Cinnamon? MATE? LXQt? When I was in the GNOME bubble, I too thought GNOME was the be-all and end-all of Linux DE usability, with everyone else being savages slapping together UIs without so much as a style guide. Perhaps at some point this may have been partially true. Today, all major DEs are fine. Plasma did not crash once since 2019 for me and I think its UX is quite nice, in the case of Dolphin in particular…

Only KDE and Gnome offer proper Wayland support making them in my eyes the only truly modern DEs on your list. Out of these two, Gnome is the only one that doesn’t glitch constantly. It’s true that Plasma finally stopped krashing every time you look at it funny but it’s still a bloated, glitchy mess of a DE. You really can’t count on KDE to provide updates without introducing major bugs and stability issues as proven by recent Plasma 6 release. Believe me I hate Gnome for how poorly managed and anti user it is but at the same time I see no real alternatives.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#239

Post by wao0uuno »

mhitza wrote: post #74
wao0uuno wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it’s the only modern Linux DE that looks good and doesn’t break constantly.

Define looks good, and doesn't break constantly.

Looks good: Doesn’t look like it was designed in 2008. Doesn’t break constantly: Doesn’t break constantly.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#240

Post by yoavm »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #221
yoavm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking at what they were doing, and they were not clicking on all the toolbar buttons. They clicked on correct button, except one of them that first clicked on the dropdown next to it, and then on the button. My point is that even non-technical users, without any prior knowledge of the GNOME design language, don't seem to actually find it difficult to figure this out.

You may have a uncommon idea of non-technical people. Such folks don’t know what a list view even is, and would have to have it explained. Not to mention a filesystem.

I told them something like "I'm going to show you an app showing files as a bunch of icons, can you try to make it show the files as a list instead?".

You seem to be very skeptical - did you try asking someone around you and got a different result?

Post reply on HN