12 ms·

Pop_OS 18.04: the state of the art in GNU/Linux on desktop

83 points by jgalvez 8y ago

CodinM 8y ago
What laptop is that? The one in the first picture?
- boxfish 8y ago
  Looks like a Dell XPS 13.
LeoPanthera 8y ago
This is surely just an ad. The sheer amount of superlative breathless enthusiasm is overwhelming.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  And, it's yet another ubuntu derivative.
  - geezerjay 8y ago
    ...which is yet another Debian derivative.
    - morog 8y ago
      A Debian derivative it may be, but as the server OS with the biggest market share, and also the most widely used Linux desktop distribution, it's hardly 'yet another'
      - geezerjay 8y ago
        It's yet another. It still repackages debian unstable, kinks and all. At best it adds value through maketing while piggybacking on Debian's work.
      - rauhl 8y ago
        You’re quite right that it’s the server OS with the biggest market share, but I seriously don’t understand why. I get why folks like Ubuntu on their desktops — it’s nice & bleeding edge, with all the latest gee-whiz gadgets and tons of proprietary drivers — but why would they use it on a server? For a server one ought to prefer stability & maintainability, no? And for me, that means Debian.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      While technically true, a ubuntu derivative carries, by virtue of ubuntu, a shit ton of non-upstream patches than debian... and, by definition, a shit ton of non-free software than debian.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    I have to admit I had the same thought, but seeing it backed by System76 does give me a lot of hope that it won't be another "flash in the pan" novelty distro that will disappear off the face of the earth in 12 months' time.
- geraltofrivia 8y ago
  Hardly. The article turned midway from explaining why Pop_OS is well designed to why should Gnome not remove a feature from their project.
slededit 8y ago
I know its petty, but that colon in the clock on the main image really bothers me. Its way too chunky compared to the numerals.
flukus 8y ago
Have they patched the Web application to work with dark themes properly? I tried using it but every textbox imports the background color from the desktop theme (good) but it uses the page assigned text color, which is nearly always black, so you end up with every textbox having black text on a black background, making it unusable. Firefox has this behavior now too.
- yolo1 8y ago
  I was able to workaround the issue in Firefox by overriding the GTK theme ( https://askubuntu.com/questions/8336/how-can-one-make-firefox-ignore-my-gtk-theme-entirely https://askubuntu.com/questions/8336/how-can-one-make-firefo... ) and then applying a Firefox-level dark theme. In my experience, Chrome appears to ignore GTK-level themes entirely.
  - callahad 8y ago
    Longer term, this will be fixed when https://bugzil.la/1411425 https://bugzil.la/1411425 is resolved.
    - cpburns2009 8y ago
      From the comment on the issue: > Due to various various theme issues between platforms and HTML native theming, among other things, native theming should be removed entirely and instead replaced with internal 'native' elements in the browser itself. Why are so many developers keen on stripping features instead of just making it optional? This isn't just some unfunded open source project.
KaiserPro 8y ago
Hmm, I'm less convinced about gnome3. I've given it a number of goes, it shows promise, but is not there yet. 1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde. 2) shortcuts are hard. I have a number of shortcuts for my most often used things, and they are always clickable, no matter what. Gnome 3's favorites are _almost_ the same, but its much harder to create custom entries (if its not in the applications list you're out of luck)
- russdpale 8y ago
  lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.
  - k_ 8y ago
    I agree with that :) Though after a while I personnally traded simplicity* for more customization and performance and switched to openbox and now i3. Edit: * Well no, "simplicity" does not exactly mean what I first thought it did. I guess I mostly traded ease of configuration / usage. Openbox and i3 are more difficult to approach but they don't lack on simplicity at all.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    The one laptop I have running a Linux Desktop runs lxde, and it is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's very customizable. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, but how do I add custom menu entries, for instance? How can I add additional menus to the panel? I miss Widowmaker/GNUStep, which still exists of course but no distro on earth uses it by default and Linux Desktops are enough of a pain to build from the ground up that people keep making distros with minor tweaks just so they don't have to do it again.
    - peatmoss 8y ago
g5095 8y ago
This started out as an overview of a new desktop bundle and quickly turned into a rant about why gnome shouldn't change your favorite feature..
- dbcurtis 8y ago
  Yes, indeed, and Balkan's favorite feature is my personal most hated feature. To each his own, I guess... Menu's belong on the app window.
  - inamberclad 8y ago
    I just want that quarter inch of screen retail. Why can't they do the Unity desktop thing and merge the top bar together?
    - devxpy 8y ago
      unity was almost perfect. And then ... :(
    - de_watcher 8y ago
      But there is a buggy extension just for that.
  - ovao 8y ago
    Whether you agree with him or not, he made several arguments for disconnected menu bars. What are your arguments for having menu bars on windows?
    - AaronFriel 8y ago
      It increases the cost of all menu interactions with non-focused app by one click. I'm not sure if gnome 3 duplicates that menu bar on each monitor, but if it doesn't then it means significantly more steps (strictly speaking) to locate the app, locate the menu bar, return to the app. It also encourages a poor menu paradigm (imo) of nested menus. Iconography, ribbons, searchable action bars, and other innovations are more often found on OSes where the choice isn't made for the user. It seems really silly with how UIs have evolved to use a Mac at work, with half of the menus in the app and a seemingly random other half in a disconnected set of nested menus. That's my experience at least.
dingo_bat 8y ago
> Unlike Windows, there is no ungainly multi-level start menu from hell. I wonder which version of Windows the author used last.
- jonathanstrange 8y ago
  What's funny about this is that I and many others use Classic Shell to get exactly this "multi-level start menu from hell" back in Windows 10. On Linux I only use Desktop and Window Managers that I can configure relatively freely and easily. No need to patronize users.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Old school Windows start menu was a great menu. It was just a menuized folder hierarchy, simple and effective. The only real flaw was that you only had one, you couldn't add new "start" buttons pointed to different folders for custom menus. At some point they added the ability to kinda do that, (right-click taskbar -> new toolbar...), which still works on Windows 10.
jonathanyc 8y ago
What the heck? 90% of the article is just ranting about a Gnome feature; I still have no idea about why Pop_OS is the “state of the art” because the author literally did not provide any commentary on what makes it unique except for a brief mention of it curating various things. This is bad writing.
- johnramsden 8y ago
  Agreed, after getting halfway through I couldn't finish it as it turned into a mindless rant.
alanfranzoni 8y ago
The idea that Linux needs consistency is correct,albeit difficult to achieve. I doubt pop os will make 2018 the year of the linux desktop. Making every app conform to the gnome guidelines on an underdog desktop platform where many interesting software is just crossplatform (java apps, electron apps, browsers) and do not have an interest in a specific toolkit.. is quite a dream.
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mastazi 8y ago
> Having multiple monitors doesn’t remove the need to know which app you’re in or to perform actions specific to that app. Just like the Activities button, the App Menu resides at a known location on your primary monitor and serves a crucial role as a landmark. I have to strongly disagree on this one. Having my window open in my 3rd monitor - and having to go back to the 1st monitor every time I have to use a menu item - seems like a kafkaesque nightmare to me.
- bokchoi 8y ago
  Indeed. MacOS used to only have the application menu bar on the primary monitor -- it was infuriating to use with large monitors or mis-matched sized screens like a laptop + external monitor. This was around 2013 or so?
- lloeki 8y ago
  > Having my window open in my 3rd monitor - and having to go back to the 1st monitor every time I have to use a menu item - seems like a kafkaesque nightmare to me. Indeed, I had to suffer that experience on macOS at some point, and it just kills all the benefits of Fitts's law. There were glorious hacks of apps dedicated to restoring sanity by making the menubar present on all screens, until the feature went native. Nonetheless it does not detract from the fact that I find the menubar concept insanely good compared to per window menus as Windows and Linux had (although this was a configurable in KDE, the implementation was disastrous).
  - mariusmg 8y ago
    Menubar concept never made sense to me. If i have a window on the bottom right of the screen, why should i have to go to top left side of the screen to interact with its menu ? This is literally the same issue with monitors but on a smaller scale.
    - gaius 8y ago
      Historically it’s from a time when mice were new and the idea was you could always just push to the top of the screen and never miss the menu (source: HCI lecturer at college) and of course screens being small having only one menu bar saved space too
lsh 8y ago
puh-leaze. Just another Gnome derivative.
DrBazza 8y ago
Window title bar heights are awful. Title bars at the best of times are just a useful thing to grab with the mouse pointer to move the window around, but they don't have to be about twice the size of those in Windows and MacOS. If anything, on Windows the trend is to use the redundant window space to add more information. I've never quite understood this decision on Linux. If anything it seems a little contrary to linux usage.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  They look about the same as Windoze 10 to me, and they do seem to have stuff in them, so not completely redundant. I still don't like it, I like extremely minimal window borders (I hold alt to move windows around). But you can get that on Linux, and only Linux.
- yellowapple 8y ago
  It's a GNOME3 thing, not a Linux thing. Most other desktop environments (including GNOME2/MATE) have more sane defaults. As for the reason why GNOME3 has window handles the size of interstate freeways: it makes them easier to move around with a touchscreen.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > it makes them easier to move around with a touchscreen. Ok, next question: Why do you need window handles the size of interstate freeways on devices without touchscreens? It's not like it's impossible to detect the current hardware configuration.
    - alxlaz 8y ago
      If you want to see what Armaggedon looks like, try suggesting that something should be user-customizable or that it should change depending on the underlying configuration on a Gnome mailing list.
    - VSTN 8y ago
      >Ok, next question: Why do you need window handles the size of interstate freeways on devices without touchscreens? It's not like it's impossible to detect the current hardware configuration. Because options run counter to the gnome dev philosophy. That can be traced back to the original Havoc Pennington rant to defend Gnome 2.0 (which was actually a controversial release just like every major gnome release since 1.4) : https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html >Preferences substantively damage QA and testing. >As someone who reads dozens of bug reports per day, and occasionally fixes a couple, I can tell you that it’s extremely common to find a bug that only happens if some certain combination of options are enabled. >Upshot: more preferences means fewer real features, and more bugs. Of course, what you propose isn't a preference but automatic detection, but the point still remains valid in terms of their philosophy. >One of the hardest lessons of GUI programming is that hard coding behavior can be the Right Thing. Programmers are taught to make everything generic and infinitely flexible. The problem is that the more generic and infinitely flexible your UI is, the more similar it is to a programming language. Lisp is not a good user interface. These are the same reasons why they canned anything related to screensavers and the likes. Gnome should not be customized, should have brand identity, should not have options whether they are user selected or automatically configured. The UI should be recognizable no matter which device Gnome is run on. Anything that changes confuses the user. If the user installs gnome on a laptop with a touchscreen, what should an automatic configurator the likes you suggest do? make everything tiny so that it's friendliest to screen space since it's a laptop and touchscreen is only sparsely used? or make everything big?
agorabinary 8y ago
Some interesting points here regarding design improvements to bring us a more mainstream Linux desktop, but what about price point as well? I just configured a System76 Gazelle laptop with the same specs (albeit newer cpu, but moore's law) as my 2 year old ideapad and it's $400 more than what I paid back then.. AND no gpu either. :/
yellowapple 8y ago
Started off as a great article. Turned into an endless rant that's entirely ignorant to the idea that maybe what works for you doesn't work for me. My eyes eventually got fatigued from the constant rolling, and I stopped reading at some point. The whole rant ends up boiling down to putting form over function, which I think is backwards relative to good UX. The form should absolutely be dictated by the function. Now, there are a couple points of (what I read from) that rant with which I do agree: 1) The insistence upon shoving everything into a hamburger menu is asinine. 2) The insistence upon shoving a mobile-first UI paradigm down desktop users' throats in general (an example of which being the previous point) is asinine. 2) It makes sense to have a visual distinction between application-level and window-level operations, and to have those operations segregated into their own respective application-level and window-level (e.g. task-level or document-level) menus. Where I strongly disagree is when there's this strange assertion that there should only be one application menu displayed at any given time. That falls flat for several reasons: 1) A monitor may have multiple applications visible 2) A set of monitors may have multiple applications visible even when each monitor is dedicated to a single application The solution - in my mind, at least - would be to make sure that if an application's windows are visible on a monitor, then the application's menu is visible on the monitor somewhere (and if the application has no visible windows, then feel free to hide the application's menu somewhere out of the way. Whether that menu is attached to each window or to the monitor itself can (and should) be up to the user's preference (I have no objective opinion on a default setting for this, though personally I'd probably prefer these application menus to be in the status bar for the same reasons as the author articulates). Hell, if the user wants to pull a NeXTSTEP and not attach the application menu to anything, then go for it (I probably would not want this as a default, but hey, if you're going for a classic NeXT aesthetic, then you do you). User wants all of the above? Maybe a bit redundant, but if that makes it easier for the user, then why not? This works great no matter the form factor. Larger screens would be more likely to have multiple applications on display at once, and thus would show multiple application menus. Smaller screens would be more likely to have one (or at most two) applications on display at once, and thus would only need to show one or two application menus. In the case of a monitor-level menu, the function here may or may not overlap with a dock or some equivalent interface element. I'd probably combine the two in that case. App launching can be done through a single Activities/Launcher button (with "pinned" and/or running-but-not-currently-visible apps being front and center). Managing running apps can be done through the app's menu, whether the app's visible (and thus would have a visible menu on the monitor's bar) or not (and thus would have a menu hidden somewhere but still readily available, e.g. in a context menu - or hell, an actually-visible menu - on the app's launcher icon). In the case of an application-level menu on each window, I'm envisioning something like the menu Firefox (IIRC) used to have at one point: a button by the window controls (or maybe at the other end) with the application name and/or icon as the label (plus a window-specific title for the window itself). A hamburger menu icon might also make sense here to signify that this is in fact a menu, but that should be in addition to the application title/icon, not as a substitute. In any case, if a window is visible, its application is visible. The user can quickly find the application menu and perform application-level tasks (like opening a new window) without necessarily needing to perform a separate action of switching focus to one of that application's windows (this is a reason why I agree with the author about detaching the app-level menu from the window: much easier/faster to find when it's in a consistent spot). In summary: a hard-to-use interface is poor UX by definition, regardless of how "pretty" or "elegant" or "minimal" it may be. Good interface design means making common things easy while keeping uncommon things at least possible. If the interface is a little cluttered as a result, then so be it.
Vinnl 8y ago
It's odd that the author is an interaction designer, but goes on such a rant about keeping a feature that proved to work badly when tested on actual users. I'd say actual testing should trump whatever intuition you have about what works well. Sure, he theorises that the reason is doesn't work for users is because it hasn't been implemented properly everywhere (which the GNOME developers also state), but "we should expend effort on getting third parties to adhere to the HIG" is a classic cop-out: "things would be better if we would just do them better". Sure, if you can show that the reason third parties do not adhere to the HIG is lack of effort from the team, and you have reason to believe that there is a way to increase the amount of effort spent on that other than saying "just do it", then by all means, go for it. But if that's not the case, the only valid conclusion is that the desired state might not be possible, and removing such a feature is the only proper course of action.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Also even if every app on this planet supported it properly, you should still listen to the users. If they feel like it's wrong that the menu is disconnected from the applications main window, you can come along and go "but most apps have multiple windows and the actions in the menu are application specific, not window specific" and feel really smart about it, or acknowledge that this might be an artificial rule that while technically correct still leads to inferior UX. Because our simple dummy brains just get more confused by the fact that this menu seems entirely disconnected from the application than they would by the fact that the menu is arbitrarily fused to a random window of the application. Really most of the time it's not even that random because many apps have just one main window while the others are tool boxes, settings windows or other dialogs you only open occasionally for a short moment.
  - emmelaich 8y ago
    Using MacOS I often forget there's a menu at the top of the screen. Because I'm so used to apps that have in-app menus (Chrome, Slack, ..)
- fmoralesc 8y ago
  I think the author is confusing two different things, the app menu and the app name indicator (one has to click the indicator to raise the menu). I thought the plan was to remove the menu, not the indicator. The author defends the "Appmenu" because it serves as a landmark, "on Gnome 3, I can always tell exactly where I am". To serve that function, one only needs the indicator.
nkkollaw 8y ago
I've tried Pop OS, but it seems little more than a GNOME theme to me. I also don't understand why they didn't pick (or better yet fork) elementary OS, which is the only good-looking Linux distro that has a different enough vision to justify the duplicate effort to create another distro. Personally, I think that GNOME is completely unusable. Pop OS is too close to GNOME. elementary looks great but its minimalism is similar to that of recent Apple--where so many features are removed that the app stops being useful, and huge compromises are made just so the thing looks good, ignoring that it has a purpose. I'm using an heavily-modified Xfce install and I can actually manage to be productive.
smilesnd 8y ago
I don't think this really qualifies as a new disto. Maybe should have been named Pobuntu so people would know what they are getting. Wish a desktop focus disto would come out that would make it so people didn't have to feel like sysadmins to use a linux box. Simpler to toss some new paint on someone else work, and call it their own I suppose. I am going to hard pass on this one though stick to my lxde since it does everything I need. Plus I spend 90% of my time in a terminal so icons don't mean much to me.
jbb67 8y ago
I like almost none of this and disagree very strongly with many of the assertions of what is good and what is bad. I imagine this is the last we'll hear of this anyway
indigodaddy 8y ago
Hmm, I've tried Pop OS a year or two ago, and I wouldn't call it state of the art. I'll stick with MX17 when it comes to Linux..
hadtocreateanew 8y ago
I switch between Manjaro with Gnome3 on my laptop and Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop. When i use gnome it annoys me regularly with things like: If i want to open a file in a different program than the default i have to open another menu instead of immediately being shown the other programs being associated with that filetype. Just connecting to wireless took me approximately 10 Minutes. Hiding the topbar automatically to maximize the screenestate on my 13" screen is not possible without installing an extension, which last time i looked was not ready for 3.28 and could crash the session if badly written. This guy talks about how important this Appmenu is, which rarely contains useful options if any. He claims he tried Linux Mint, but for me Cinnamon is far ahead in usability. The Mint devs actually listen to their users and work on solving their problems.
honkycat 8y ago
I have a System76 Galago Pro, and I'm a big fan! It's been a joy to use, and fits my use case well. It has rather terrible battery life, but I tend to just plug it in wherever I go anyway.
alias_neo 8y ago
I too have to disagree with the author based on my experience. I use Gnome 3 at work, every day, and both my home computers are on Gnome 3. I use the Pop Gnome theme from the very people the article talks about (System 76), it's a beautiful theme and can be installed on Ubuntu using their PPA. Anyway, At home I also use 3 monitors on my desktop. Lets say I have a "normal" sized terminal open on my right hand of 3 monitors. It's on the right one because my IDE or such is sitting in front of me on the centre monitor and as a lefty I tend to "prefer" the right to the left as I sit looking at my PC. I'm sitting with my chair shimmied to the right of my desk because these monitors are 28" each and I decide to move closer to that window to see what's going on because they're 4K monitors and the text isn't huge. I'm physically about ~4 feet away at the extreme in terms of mouse movement, from that app menu on the top left of my left monitor. As someone who tends to fill all of this screen space flatly with tiled windows as opposed to stacking and switching them, all I want is for every menu for every window to be directly attached to that window, because the "landmark" for me is the window itself. Having to move my mouse, 4 feet across displays to get to a menu for a small window I have open and happen to be working on at that point in nonsensical. I might have 16 terminals tiled across that display, if I want to interact with a specific one, lets say to change the background colour for identification or something, the first place I'm going is to the window itself. My solution, is that by using Gnome Tweak Tool, I have the button on the title bar of the window instead of in the panel.
taohansen 8y ago
I don't know why the article didn't mention the most prominent technical features of Pop!_OS that propels it beyond being a mere copycat. * HiDPI Daemon: They wrote this themselves and what it does is if you have mixed DPI monitors, it auto-detects and conforms them to the lowest common denominator. Wayland does this by default but support for Nvidia isn't there yet and applications like Firefox don't reconform between monitors. * Systemd-boot. GRUB is the past. Systemd-boot is life. Faster startup to desktop. * Do Not Disturb and performance profile picker from the menu bar. * Dat installer. They collaborated with Elementary OS' Daniel Foré on this. It's polished, easy for anyone to grok, offers simple full-disk encryption, and and creates a recovery partition in case you hose your install. System76 has really thought through these usability improvements to bring us a desktop that anyone can use and encourages security out of the gate.
deleted 8y ago
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SZJX 8y ago
Reads a lot like an ad. So far nothing beats my experience with i3wm on Arch Linux. I can hardly imagine going for any other system setup after trying this combination out. Well, maybe another even better window manager, but definitely not any non-wm UI, which will only be clumsy and horribly get into my way.

83 points by jgalvez 8y ago

CodinM 8y ago

What laptop is that? The one in the first picture?

boxfish 8y ago
Looks like a Dell XPS 13.

LeoPanthera 8y ago

This is surely just an ad. The sheer amount of superlative breathless enthusiasm is overwhelming.

craftyguy 8y ago
And, it's yet another ubuntu derivative.
- geezerjay 8y ago
  ...which is yet another Debian derivative.
  - morog 8y ago
    A Debian derivative it may be, but as the server OS with the biggest market share, and also the most widely used Linux desktop distribution, it's hardly 'yet another'
    - geezerjay 8y ago
      It's yet another. It still repackages debian unstable, kinks and all. At best it adds value through maketing while piggybacking on Debian's work.
    - rauhl 8y ago
      You’re quite right that it’s the server OS with the biggest market share, but I seriously don’t understand why. I get why folks like Ubuntu on their desktops — it’s nice & bleeding edge, with all the latest gee-whiz gadgets and tons of proprietary drivers — but why would they use it on a server? For a server one ought to prefer stability & maintainability, no? And for me, that means Debian.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    While technically true, a ubuntu derivative carries, by virtue of ubuntu, a shit ton of non-upstream patches than debian... and, by definition, a shit ton of non-free software than debian.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I have to admit I had the same thought, but seeing it backed by System76 does give me a lot of hope that it won't be another "flash in the pan" novelty distro that will disappear off the face of the earth in 12 months' time.
geraltofrivia 8y ago
Hardly. The article turned midway from explaining why Pop_OS is well designed to why should Gnome not remove a feature from their project.

slededit 8y ago

I know its petty, but that colon in the clock on the main image really bothers me. Its way too chunky compared to the numerals.

flukus 8y ago

Have they patched the Web application to work with dark themes properly? I tried using it but every textbox imports the background color from the desktop theme (good) but it uses the page assigned text color, which is nearly always black, so you end up with every textbox having black text on a black background, making it unusable. Firefox has this behavior now too.

yolo1 8y ago
I was able to workaround the issue in Firefox by overriding the GTK theme ( https://askubuntu.com/questions/8336/how-can-one-make-firefox-ignore-my-gtk-theme-entirely https://askubuntu.com/questions/8336/how-can-one-make-firefo... ) and then applying a Firefox-level dark theme. In my experience, Chrome appears to ignore GTK-level themes entirely.
- callahad 8y ago
  Longer term, this will be fixed when https://bugzil.la/1411425 https://bugzil.la/1411425 is resolved.
  - cpburns2009 8y ago
    From the comment on the issue: > Due to various various theme issues between platforms and HTML native theming, among other things, native theming should be removed entirely and instead replaced with internal 'native' elements in the browser itself. Why are so many developers keen on stripping features instead of just making it optional? This isn't just some unfunded open source project.

KaiserPro 8y ago

Hmm, I'm less convinced about gnome3. I've given it a number of goes, it shows promise, but is not there yet. 1) its too godamn slow. I have 32 cores, 64 gigs of ram and a massive graphics card, yet draging windows about has lag, pressing the meta key has lag. Its just not fast like mate or lxde. 2) shortcuts are hard. I have a number of shortcuts for my most often used things, and they are always clickable, no matter what. Gnome 3's favorites are _almost_ the same, but its much harder to create custom entries (if its not in the applications list you're out of luck)

russdpale 8y ago
lxde for the win! Seriously, I run it on a 12 year old laptop, and newer laptops and htpc's. It just can't be beat, in my opinion. The simplicity and customization is its power. I enjoy it more than xfce or mate. Though to be fair I have no tried mate on a non-ubuntu flavor.
- k_ 8y ago
  I agree with that :) Though after a while I personnally traded simplicity* for more customization and performance and switched to openbox and now i3. Edit: * Well no, "simplicity" does not exactly mean what I first thought it did. I guess I mostly traded ease of configuration / usage. Openbox and i3 are more difficult to approach but they don't lack on simplicity at all.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  The one laptop I have running a Linux Desktop runs lxde, and it is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's very customizable. Maybe I haven't spent enough time with it, but how do I add custom menu entries, for instance? How can I add additional menus to the panel? I miss Widowmaker/GNUStep, which still exists of course but no distro on earth uses it by default and Linux Desktops are enough of a pain to build from the ground up that people keep making distros with minor tweaks just so they don't have to do it again.
  - peatmoss 8y ago

g5095 8y ago

This started out as an overview of a new desktop bundle and quickly turned into a rant about why gnome shouldn't change your favorite feature..

dbcurtis 8y ago
Yes, indeed, and Balkan's favorite feature is my personal most hated feature. To each his own, I guess... Menu's belong on the app window.
- inamberclad 8y ago
  I just want that quarter inch of screen retail. Why can't they do the Unity desktop thing and merge the top bar together?
  - devxpy 8y ago
    unity was almost perfect. And then ... :(
  - de_watcher 8y ago
    But there is a buggy extension just for that.
- ovao 8y ago
  Whether you agree with him or not, he made several arguments for disconnected menu bars. What are your arguments for having menu bars on windows?
  - AaronFriel 8y ago
    It increases the cost of all menu interactions with non-focused app by one click. I'm not sure if gnome 3 duplicates that menu bar on each monitor, but if it doesn't then it means significantly more steps (strictly speaking) to locate the app, locate the menu bar, return to the app. It also encourages a poor menu paradigm (imo) of nested menus. Iconography, ribbons, searchable action bars, and other innovations are more often found on OSes where the choice isn't made for the user. It seems really silly with how UIs have evolved to use a Mac at work, with half of the menus in the app and a seemingly random other half in a disconnected set of nested menus. That's my experience at least.

dingo_bat 8y ago

> Unlike Windows, there is no ungainly multi-level start menu from hell. I wonder which version of Windows the author used last.

jonathanstrange 8y ago
What's funny about this is that I and many others use Classic Shell to get exactly this "multi-level start menu from hell" back in Windows 10. On Linux I only use Desktop and Window Managers that I can configure relatively freely and easily. No need to patronize users.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Old school Windows start menu was a great menu. It was just a menuized folder hierarchy, simple and effective. The only real flaw was that you only had one, you couldn't add new "start" buttons pointed to different folders for custom menus. At some point they added the ability to kinda do that, (right-click taskbar -> new toolbar...), which still works on Windows 10.

jonathanyc 8y ago

What the heck? 90% of the article is just ranting about a Gnome feature; I still have no idea about why Pop_OS is the “state of the art” because the author literally did not provide any commentary on what makes it unique except for a brief mention of it curating various things. This is bad writing.

johnramsden 8y ago
Agreed, after getting halfway through I couldn't finish it as it turned into a mindless rant.

alanfranzoni 8y ago

The idea that Linux needs consistency is correct,albeit difficult to achieve. I doubt pop os will make 2018 the year of the linux desktop. Making every app conform to the gnome guidelines on an underdog desktop platform where many interesting software is just crossplatform (java apps, electron apps, browsers) and do not have an interest in a specific toolkit.. is quite a dream.

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mastazi 8y ago

> Having multiple monitors doesn’t remove the need to know which app you’re in or to perform actions specific to that app. Just like the Activities button, the App Menu resides at a known location on your primary monitor and serves a crucial role as a landmark. I have to strongly disagree on this one. Having my window open in my 3rd monitor - and having to go back to the 1st monitor every time I have to use a menu item - seems like a kafkaesque nightmare to me.

bokchoi 8y ago
Indeed. MacOS used to only have the application menu bar on the primary monitor -- it was infuriating to use with large monitors or mis-matched sized screens like a laptop + external monitor. This was around 2013 or so?
lloeki 8y ago
> Having my window open in my 3rd monitor - and having to go back to the 1st monitor every time I have to use a menu item - seems like a kafkaesque nightmare to me. Indeed, I had to suffer that experience on macOS at some point, and it just kills all the benefits of Fitts's law. There were glorious hacks of apps dedicated to restoring sanity by making the menubar present on all screens, until the feature went native. Nonetheless it does not detract from the fact that I find the menubar concept insanely good compared to per window menus as Windows and Linux had (although this was a configurable in KDE, the implementation was disastrous).
- mariusmg 8y ago
  Menubar concept never made sense to me. If i have a window on the bottom right of the screen, why should i have to go to top left side of the screen to interact with its menu ? This is literally the same issue with monitors but on a smaller scale.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Historically it’s from a time when mice were new and the idea was you could always just push to the top of the screen and never miss the menu (source: HCI lecturer at college) and of course screens being small having only one menu bar saved space too

lsh 8y ago

puh-leaze. Just another Gnome derivative.

DrBazza 8y ago

Window title bar heights are awful. Title bars at the best of times are just a useful thing to grab with the mouse pointer to move the window around, but they don't have to be about twice the size of those in Windows and MacOS. If anything, on Windows the trend is to use the redundant window space to add more information. I've never quite understood this decision on Linux. If anything it seems a little contrary to linux usage.

cup-of-tea 8y ago
They look about the same as Windoze 10 to me, and they do seem to have stuff in them, so not completely redundant. I still don't like it, I like extremely minimal window borders (I hold alt to move windows around). But you can get that on Linux, and only Linux.
yellowapple 8y ago
It's a GNOME3 thing, not a Linux thing. Most other desktop environments (including GNOME2/MATE) have more sane defaults. As for the reason why GNOME3 has window handles the size of interstate freeways: it makes them easier to move around with a touchscreen.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > it makes them easier to move around with a touchscreen. Ok, next question: Why do you need window handles the size of interstate freeways on devices without touchscreens? It's not like it's impossible to detect the current hardware configuration.
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    If you want to see what Armaggedon looks like, try suggesting that something should be user-customizable or that it should change depending on the underlying configuration on a Gnome mailing list.
  - VSTN 8y ago
    >Ok, next question: Why do you need window handles the size of interstate freeways on devices without touchscreens? It's not like it's impossible to detect the current hardware configuration. Because options run counter to the gnome dev philosophy. That can be traced back to the original Havoc Pennington rant to defend Gnome 2.0 (which was actually a controversial release just like every major gnome release since 1.4) : https://ometer.com/preferences.html https://ometer.com/preferences.html >Preferences substantively damage QA and testing. >As someone who reads dozens of bug reports per day, and occasionally fixes a couple, I can tell you that it’s extremely common to find a bug that only happens if some certain combination of options are enabled. >Upshot: more preferences means fewer real features, and more bugs. Of course, what you propose isn't a preference but automatic detection, but the point still remains valid in terms of their philosophy. >One of the hardest lessons of GUI programming is that hard coding behavior can be the Right Thing. Programmers are taught to make everything generic and infinitely flexible. The problem is that the more generic and infinitely flexible your UI is, the more similar it is to a programming language. Lisp is not a good user interface. These are the same reasons why they canned anything related to screensavers and the likes. Gnome should not be customized, should have brand identity, should not have options whether they are user selected or automatically configured. The UI should be recognizable no matter which device Gnome is run on. Anything that changes confuses the user. If the user installs gnome on a laptop with a touchscreen, what should an automatic configurator the likes you suggest do? make everything tiny so that it's friendliest to screen space since it's a laptop and touchscreen is only sparsely used? or make everything big?

agorabinary 8y ago

Some interesting points here regarding design improvements to bring us a more mainstream Linux desktop, but what about price point as well? I just configured a System76 Gazelle laptop with the same specs (albeit newer cpu, but moore's law) as my 2 year old ideapad and it's $400 more than what I paid back then.. AND no gpu either. :/

yellowapple 8y ago

Started off as a great article. Turned into an endless rant that's entirely ignorant to the idea that maybe what works for you doesn't work for me. My eyes eventually got fatigued from the constant rolling, and I stopped reading at some point. The whole rant ends up boiling down to putting form over function, which I think is backwards relative to good UX. The form should absolutely be dictated by the function. Now, there are a couple points of (what I read from) that rant with which I do agree: 1) The insistence upon shoving everything into a hamburger menu is asinine. 2) The insistence upon shoving a mobile-first UI paradigm down desktop users' throats in general (an example of which being the previous point) is asinine. 2) It makes sense to have a visual distinction between application-level and window-level operations, and to have those operations segregated into their own respective application-level and window-level (e.g. task-level or document-level) menus. Where I strongly disagree is when there's this strange assertion that there should only be one application menu displayed at any given time. That falls flat for several reasons: 1) A monitor may have multiple applications visible 2) A set of monitors may have multiple applications visible even when each monitor is dedicated to a single application The solution - in my mind, at least - would be to make sure that if an application's windows are visible on a monitor, then the application's menu is visible on the monitor somewhere (and if the application has no visible windows, then feel free to hide the application's menu somewhere out of the way. Whether that menu is attached to each window or to the monitor itself can (and should) be up to the user's preference (I have no objective opinion on a default setting for this, though personally I'd probably prefer these application menus to be in the status bar for the same reasons as the author articulates). Hell, if the user wants to pull a NeXTSTEP and not attach the application menu to anything, then go for it (I probably would not want this as a default, but hey, if you're going for a classic NeXT aesthetic, then you do you). User wants all of the above? Maybe a bit redundant, but if that makes it easier for the user, then why not? This works great no matter the form factor. Larger screens would be more likely to have multiple applications on display at once, and thus would show multiple application menus. Smaller screens would be more likely to have one (or at most two) applications on display at once, and thus would only need to show one or two application menus. In the case of a monitor-level menu, the function here may or may not overlap with a dock or some equivalent interface element. I'd probably combine the two in that case. App launching can be done through a single Activities/Launcher button (with "pinned" and/or running-but-not-currently-visible apps being front and center). Managing running apps can be done through the app's menu, whether the app's visible (and thus would have a visible menu on the monitor's bar) or not (and thus would have a menu hidden somewhere but still readily available, e.g. in a context menu - or hell, an actually-visible menu - on the app's launcher icon). In the case of an application-level menu on each window, I'm envisioning something like the menu Firefox (IIRC) used to have at one point: a button by the window controls (or maybe at the other end) with the application name and/or icon as the label (plus a window-specific title for the window itself). A hamburger menu icon might also make sense here to signify that this is in fact a menu, but that should be in addition to the application title/icon, not as a substitute. In any case, if a window is visible, its application is visible. The user can quickly find the application menu and perform application-level tasks (like opening a new window) without necessarily needing to perform a separate action of switching focus to one of that application's windows (this is a reason why I agree with the author about detaching the app-level menu from the window: much easier/faster to find when it's in a consistent spot). In summary: a hard-to-use interface is poor UX by definition, regardless of how "pretty" or "elegant" or "minimal" it may be. Good interface design means making common things easy while keeping uncommon things at least possible. If the interface is a little cluttered as a result, then so be it.

Vinnl 8y ago

It's odd that the author is an interaction designer, but goes on such a rant about keeping a feature that proved to work badly when tested on actual users. I'd say actual testing should trump whatever intuition you have about what works well. Sure, he theorises that the reason is doesn't work for users is because it hasn't been implemented properly everywhere (which the GNOME developers also state), but "we should expend effort on getting third parties to adhere to the HIG" is a classic cop-out: "things would be better if we would just do them better". Sure, if you can show that the reason third parties do not adhere to the HIG is lack of effort from the team, and you have reason to believe that there is a way to increase the amount of effort spent on that other than saying "just do it", then by all means, go for it. But if that's not the case, the only valid conclusion is that the desired state might not be possible, and removing such a feature is the only proper course of action.

iforgotpassword 8y ago
Also even if every app on this planet supported it properly, you should still listen to the users. If they feel like it's wrong that the menu is disconnected from the applications main window, you can come along and go "but most apps have multiple windows and the actions in the menu are application specific, not window specific" and feel really smart about it, or acknowledge that this might be an artificial rule that while technically correct still leads to inferior UX. Because our simple dummy brains just get more confused by the fact that this menu seems entirely disconnected from the application than they would by the fact that the menu is arbitrarily fused to a random window of the application. Really most of the time it's not even that random because many apps have just one main window while the others are tool boxes, settings windows or other dialogs you only open occasionally for a short moment.
- emmelaich 8y ago
  Using MacOS I often forget there's a menu at the top of the screen. Because I'm so used to apps that have in-app menus (Chrome, Slack, ..)
fmoralesc 8y ago
I think the author is confusing two different things, the app menu and the app name indicator (one has to click the indicator to raise the menu). I thought the plan was to remove the menu, not the indicator. The author defends the "Appmenu" because it serves as a landmark, "on Gnome 3, I can always tell exactly where I am". To serve that function, one only needs the indicator.

nkkollaw 8y ago

I've tried Pop OS, but it seems little more than a GNOME theme to me. I also don't understand why they didn't pick (or better yet fork) elementary OS, which is the only good-looking Linux distro that has a different enough vision to justify the duplicate effort to create another distro. Personally, I think that GNOME is completely unusable. Pop OS is too close to GNOME. elementary looks great but its minimalism is similar to that of recent Apple--where so many features are removed that the app stops being useful, and huge compromises are made just so the thing looks good, ignoring that it has a purpose. I'm using an heavily-modified Xfce install and I can actually manage to be productive.

smilesnd 8y ago

I don't think this really qualifies as a new disto. Maybe should have been named Pobuntu so people would know what they are getting. Wish a desktop focus disto would come out that would make it so people didn't have to feel like sysadmins to use a linux box. Simpler to toss some new paint on someone else work, and call it their own I suppose. I am going to hard pass on this one though stick to my lxde since it does everything I need. Plus I spend 90% of my time in a terminal so icons don't mean much to me.

jbb67 8y ago

I like almost none of this and disagree very strongly with many of the assertions of what is good and what is bad. I imagine this is the last we'll hear of this anyway

indigodaddy 8y ago

Hmm, I've tried Pop OS a year or two ago, and I wouldn't call it state of the art. I'll stick with MX17 when it comes to Linux..

hadtocreateanew 8y ago

I switch between Manjaro with Gnome3 on my laptop and Mint with Cinnamon on my Desktop. When i use gnome it annoys me regularly with things like: If i want to open a file in a different program than the default i have to open another menu instead of immediately being shown the other programs being associated with that filetype. Just connecting to wireless took me approximately 10 Minutes. Hiding the topbar automatically to maximize the screenestate on my 13" screen is not possible without installing an extension, which last time i looked was not ready for 3.28 and could crash the session if badly written. This guy talks about how important this Appmenu is, which rarely contains useful options if any. He claims he tried Linux Mint, but for me Cinnamon is far ahead in usability. The Mint devs actually listen to their users and work on solving their problems.

honkycat 8y ago

I have a System76 Galago Pro, and I'm a big fan! It's been a joy to use, and fits my use case well. It has rather terrible battery life, but I tend to just plug it in wherever I go anyway.

alias_neo 8y ago

I too have to disagree with the author based on my experience. I use Gnome 3 at work, every day, and both my home computers are on Gnome 3. I use the Pop Gnome theme from the very people the article talks about (System 76), it's a beautiful theme and can be installed on Ubuntu using their PPA. Anyway, At home I also use 3 monitors on my desktop. Lets say I have a "normal" sized terminal open on my right hand of 3 monitors. It's on the right one because my IDE or such is sitting in front of me on the centre monitor and as a lefty I tend to "prefer" the right to the left as I sit looking at my PC. I'm sitting with my chair shimmied to the right of my desk because these monitors are 28" each and I decide to move closer to that window to see what's going on because they're 4K monitors and the text isn't huge. I'm physically about ~4 feet away at the extreme in terms of mouse movement, from that app menu on the top left of my left monitor. As someone who tends to fill all of this screen space flatly with tiled windows as opposed to stacking and switching them, all I want is for every menu for every window to be directly attached to that window, because the "landmark" for me is the window itself. Having to move my mouse, 4 feet across displays to get to a menu for a small window I have open and happen to be working on at that point in nonsensical. I might have 16 terminals tiled across that display, if I want to interact with a specific one, lets say to change the background colour for identification or something, the first place I'm going is to the window itself. My solution, is that by using Gnome Tweak Tool, I have the button on the title bar of the window instead of in the panel.

taohansen 8y ago

I don't know why the article didn't mention the most prominent technical features of Pop!_OS that propels it beyond being a mere copycat. * HiDPI Daemon: They wrote this themselves and what it does is if you have mixed DPI monitors, it auto-detects and conforms them to the lowest common denominator. Wayland does this by default but support for Nvidia isn't there yet and applications like Firefox don't reconform between monitors. * Systemd-boot. GRUB is the past. Systemd-boot is life. Faster startup to desktop. * Do Not Disturb and performance profile picker from the menu bar. * Dat installer. They collaborated with Elementary OS' Daniel Foré on this. It's polished, easy for anyone to grok, offers simple full-disk encryption, and and creates a recovery partition in case you hose your install. System76 has really thought through these usability improvements to bring us a desktop that anyone can use and encourages security out of the gate.

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SZJX 8y ago

Reads a lot like an ad. So far nothing beats my experience with i3wm on Arch Linux. I can hardly imagine going for any other system setup after trying this combination out. Well, maybe another even better window manager, but definitely not any non-wm UI, which will only be clumsy and horribly get into my way.