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Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

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Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#42

To be fair to firefox, this has changed recently.

What has changed? - Hamburger menu is still there. - Sidebar-everything is still there.

The menu button has been there for a few years (I refuse to use the abomination of a name that it's acquired). However, it's layout has become more sane recently. It used to be a bunch of tiles. Now it looks more like a classic file menu but with weird, mobile-esque, sliding menus.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#44
Anybody else starting to hate GNOME? I mean, I use it, but I feel like I use it despite a lot of things that they've actively done to make my life harder. This article distils some of their finer work.

From way up here in orbit, it seems the problem is leadership, in that it's way too open. Somebody can suggest a shitty idea, discuss half of the issues it and then four months later —without quorum— drop a patch to implement the whole thing. That gets accepted and before you know it you can't launch executables from Nautilus. See: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/184

I'm not saying Carlos shouldn't have some autonomy here. He's been running Nautilus for a few years now... But is it acceptable that just one person steers the most fundamental component of a desktop used by so many downstreams? I wonder how many of the other GNOME culls (https://askubuntu.com/a/286438/449) can be attributed to a couple of people with so little discussion.

I do abhor design by committee and trying to keep too many stakeholders happy can really lead to a product becoming flabby and inefficient, but interface decisions within GNOME seem to happen too often without any scientific rationale, let alone a consideration of how it might affect users.

Also slightly pissed that the major commercial desktop players (Canonical, SUSE, Red Hat, etc) aren't pushing back. They'd seemingly rather write their own stuff than feed into the running of the project. NIH.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#45
I totally agree that menu bars and shortcut hints in menus are important ui features. But I draw the line at global menu bars.

If I've got an app in a small window in the lower corner of my screen (which in fact I do at this moment), I want the menus for it right there, not all the way in the far corner of the screen.

Plus, global menus are terrible with focus-follows-mouse, which for me is such an important feature that I've even set up my work Windows laptop to have that behavior.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#46
post #5

It's like these people haven't heard about Cinnamon.

Reverting back to Gnome 2 makes me want to tear my eyeballs out. The inconsistent icon scaling, lack of padding and non-existence of decent vertical alignment within panels makes it very difficult to design a tasteful desktop.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#47
post #5

It's like these people haven't heard about Cinnamon.

Reverting back to Gnome 2 makes me want to tear my eyeballs out. The inconsistent icon scaling, lack of padding and non-existence of decent vertical alignment within panels makes it very difficult to design a tasteful desktop.

Desktop is not a picture to look at, it's first and foremost UX.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#48
post #36

There is a big recent trend for inventing new UI/UX solutions for things that aren't broken until they are. I'm really looking forward to see this problem to be addressed in the near future. That hamburger menu button in Chrome kept me from adopting the browser until I gave up only about a year ago. There are so many projects born and die each day, it's a mystery to me why nobody have solved the famous Linux Desktop…

I think the reason UI/UX is not solved on Linux is that designers do not readily work for free. And there are often very good reasons they don’t. The only solution I see is for someone to pay large amounts for great designers.

Re: Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

#49
post #4

If more people read this and comment (one way or another), we might get a more usable desktop on Linux. I’m going back to Linux after years on the Mac and windows, and it’s killing me. Finding anything is a pain in the butt, hence me posting this.

Same situation - forced to used Linux again at the moment and having a hard time using Ubuntu 18.04 and hence Gnome. Shockingly bad UX, I find myself googling things like “what’s the Firefox shortcut key for X” all the time.

I decided to stick with it for a few weeks, now considering leaving Gnome and even buying a Mac for the job.

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