11 ms·

> Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when

by zrm 7y ago

> Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops. Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and pressing buttons to try to get it to do the thing. I thereby discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter. Having used it this way for two years now, your description of this behavior is the first time I'm learning that it is also possible to do it by dragging the mouse upwards. The discoverability of this behavior apparently does not exist -- I assume if pressing Enter hadn't worked I would have had to use a different device to look it up on the internet.

swiley 7y ago
I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s. This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.
- philsnow 7y ago
  I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth. [0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver hack settings by creating / modifying a theme. [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#Why_doesn.27t_the_screensaver_preferences_tool_allow_me_to_change_the_settings_for_the_theme.3F https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...
  - fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
    Between this and https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/ and the various other systemd/freedesktop “anti-hacker” initiatives, I’ve been finding Linux to be more and more becoming the opposite of the operating system I’ve used for the last 20 years.
    - zzo38computer 7y ago
      Still, I try to avoid GUI stuff and freedesktop stuff as much as possible (I do use a window manager, but not GNOME or KDE or whatever), and write better programs when possible, but a few things don't. I don't use any desktop environment at all. The web browser is one thing that isn't so good. Really, many things should be moved out of the web browser and made to work by simply nc, curl, etc. And some things work better with local programs, but others with remote, with whatever protocol is applicable e.g. IRC, NNTP, SMTP, etc, please.
      - yaktubi 7y ago
        My goaty is a goaty goaty vibrating and oscillating goaty sac goaty
    - gorgoiler 7y ago
      A neat idea that I hadn’t thought of until your comment: Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation. This is pretty much what many people do in macOS. Apple’s OS supports the bare metal, vagrant / VirtualBox give me my tractably scrutable dev environment. It’s not a particularly ground breaking concept but it might cheer me up a bit when battling with the volatility of user facing Linux distributions.
      - philsnow 7y ago
        sounds a little bit like https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/
  - guug 7y ago
    The problem with gnome is that they don't seem to validate their ideas at all. As a result, gnome users are directly subjected to the unfiltered whims of gnome's UI "designers". Instead of spending the substantial donations they received[1] on who knows what, the GNOME foundation should have spent some of it conducting proper focus groups. 1: https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1m-donation-over-two-years/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1...
    - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
      I don't know if that's true. GNOME 3 is just a dark enlightenment experiment, like an attempt at neomonarchy or the Empire from Elite. Instead of feature creep and user accommodation to Windows idioms, they slash and burn despotically to ease developer burden and try to flesh out their own vision. Do you use Dropbox? Too bad. :3 There's extensions that break but whatever we don't care fuck the tray. I think it's an interesting and worthwhile experimental path; I just wish it wasn't the "default" as much as it is. But I also feel that way about Ubuntu. And Windows. xD
  - rleigh 7y ago
    This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option. Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good reason.
    - philsnow 7y ago
      > This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. oh no doubt, I have another comment from 4+ years ago about the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 and even then it was ancient history IIRC man, just looking at that page again reminded me that Windows Registry for Linux^W^W^W^W gconf exists.
- _jal 7y ago
  Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm mostly a command-line person anyway, and have spent most of my working life dealing with horrible UI. But it does have a lot of implications for Linux that I think a lot of people are not ready to accept.
  - yaktubi 7y ago
    Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?
    - gurkendoktor 7y ago
      GNOME, Mate, Pantheon, XCFE, KDE, Deepin, UKUI, LXQt etc. created an unmaintainable mess of competing forks _while all using stacking window managers_. It's maddening how similar they all are to each other. Someone should build a dating site where understaffed Linux projects can find a matching project to merge with.
      - yaktubi 7y ago
        Well, it’s great to experiment. And gnome 2 for example worked really great. I guess I am thinking more in the realm of things like “force touch” gestures, multi touch swipes and such. They could be useful as an added bonus for power users, but I think the traditional paradigm for the OS should work by default: 1) on desktop, single/double click, drag and drop, tool tips, mouse wheel. 2) on mobile quick tap, tap and hold, basic swipe gestures (on mobile these work well but sometimes not intuitive). I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think people out to at least be able to “feel” their way around a UI. Lately there’s been so much push for minimalism like omitting scroll bars and such that make it confusing. But, again that experimentation will root out what works and doesn’t. And new devices like VR of course have yet to be discovered paradigms.
- gbrown 7y ago
  I actually like Gnome 3 a lot. I feel like it’s the first DE I’ve tried that I could interact with with the appropriate mix of 90% keyboard 10% touchpad on a laptop.
- hilbert42 7y ago
  "This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole" Exactly, but what perplexes me is why aren't these issues that are so obvious to us not obvious to them. Why do they think so differently to normal users?
bepvte 7y ago
This behaviour has been removed in the next gnome release
madjam002 7y ago
I dislike it too, but doesn’t Windows 10 do the same thing?
- gowld 7y ago
  Probably, but Windows is terrible at everything UX so that doesn't mean much.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  Windows seems to respond to almost any input to display the password box.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Windows 10 with Windows Hello does face recognition logon without any need to swipe or press key combinations. On a touchscreen, it responds to a swipe upwards. On a machine with a keyboard it responds to apparently any mouse click or keypress. Presumably Gnome copypasted it from Windows, because otherwise where did that idea come from into multiple distinct projects simultaneously? Windows has always had ctrl+alt+del to logon, Ubuntu hasn't had a precedent of having to do something to get to the logon prompt, IIRC.
  - p1necone 7y ago
    Windows hello is such a nice experience (at least just for local login), but I will never use it because I don't trust Microsoft with my data.
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      "the info that identifies your face, iris, or fingerprint never leaves your device." - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-sign-in-options-and-privacy https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-...
      - coribuci 7y ago
ordu 7y ago
> Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and pressing buttons to try to get it to do the thing. I thereby discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter. One more anecdote. I found this screen for the first time when I got my laptop to demonstrate something to a student. I didn't know what to do, started to do random things, trying to figure out what happened, and the student interrupted my attempts, got mouse from my hand and swiped with it. I felt myself old and stupid. It is the thing like 20 years ago when I taught my parents to use standard UI. Only new it is me who needs help. I asked, she didn't see Ubuntu before, and nevertheless she managed it better than me. I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing On the other hand, when my iPhone suddenly would connect with a caller, but neither party could hear the other, redialing didn't help, turning it off/on didn't work, I remembered the ancient trick of "cold boot". Which resolved the problem.
  - tcoff91 7y ago
    You put an iPhone in the freezer and booted it, and that fixed it? Wow. I thought that was just for saving spinning disk drives and preserving the contents of RAM for an attack.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      A cold boot means shut off all power to the device. The normal "off" button the iPhone puts it in standby mode, not off. This is so it can still listen for calls.
      - craftinator 7y ago
        I tried to power off an iPhone today for 5 minutes, failed, and just gave up. Why Apple, why would you make this simple action so damn obscure.
tasogare 7y ago
> I thereby discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter. This is the same this Win10. I was super annoyed they add one more step to a very frequent action, for no benefits on a PC computer. Hopefully I don’t have to use Win10 too much, but this is symptomatic of the mobilification of computers.
iib 7y ago
You can just start typing the password and it will input it correctly, the Enter is not actually needed (at least on 19.10)

by zrm 7y ago

swiley 7y ago

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s. This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.

philsnow 7y ago
I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth. [0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver hack settings by creating / modifying a theme. [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#Why_doesn.27t_the_screensaver_preferences_tool_allow_me_to_change_the_settings_for_the_theme.3F https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  Between this and https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/ and the various other systemd/freedesktop “anti-hacker” initiatives, I’ve been finding Linux to be more and more becoming the opposite of the operating system I’ve used for the last 20 years.
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    Still, I try to avoid GUI stuff and freedesktop stuff as much as possible (I do use a window manager, but not GNOME or KDE or whatever), and write better programs when possible, but a few things don't. I don't use any desktop environment at all. The web browser is one thing that isn't so good. Really, many things should be moved out of the web browser and made to work by simply nc, curl, etc. And some things work better with local programs, but others with remote, with whatever protocol is applicable e.g. IRC, NNTP, SMTP, etc, please.
    - yaktubi 7y ago
      My goaty is a goaty goaty vibrating and oscillating goaty sac goaty
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    A neat idea that I hadn’t thought of until your comment: Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation. This is pretty much what many people do in macOS. Apple’s OS supports the bare metal, vagrant / VirtualBox give me my tractably scrutable dev environment. It’s not a particularly ground breaking concept but it might cheer me up a bit when battling with the volatility of user facing Linux distributions.
    - philsnow 7y ago
      sounds a little bit like https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/
- guug 7y ago
  The problem with gnome is that they don't seem to validate their ideas at all. As a result, gnome users are directly subjected to the unfiltered whims of gnome's UI "designers". Instead of spending the substantial donations they received[1] on who knows what, the GNOME foundation should have spent some of it conducting proper focus groups. 1: https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1m-donation-over-two-years/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1...
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    I don't know if that's true. GNOME 3 is just a dark enlightenment experiment, like an attempt at neomonarchy or the Empire from Elite. Instead of feature creep and user accommodation to Windows idioms, they slash and burn despotically to ease developer burden and try to flesh out their own vision. Do you use Dropbox? Too bad. :3 There's extensions that break but whatever we don't care fuck the tray. I think it's an interesting and worthwhile experimental path; I just wish it wasn't the "default" as much as it is. But I also feel that way about Ubuntu. And Windows. xD
- rleigh 7y ago
  This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option. Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good reason.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    > This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. oh no doubt, I have another comment from 4+ years ago about the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 and even then it was ancient history IIRC man, just looking at that page again reminded me that Windows Registry for Linux^W^W^W^W gconf exists.
_jal 7y ago
Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm mostly a command-line person anyway, and have spent most of my working life dealing with horrible UI. But it does have a lot of implications for Linux that I think a lot of people are not ready to accept.
- yaktubi 7y ago
  Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?
  - gurkendoktor 7y ago
    GNOME, Mate, Pantheon, XCFE, KDE, Deepin, UKUI, LXQt etc. created an unmaintainable mess of competing forks _while all using stacking window managers_. It's maddening how similar they all are to each other. Someone should build a dating site where understaffed Linux projects can find a matching project to merge with.
    - yaktubi 7y ago
      Well, it’s great to experiment. And gnome 2 for example worked really great. I guess I am thinking more in the realm of things like “force touch” gestures, multi touch swipes and such. They could be useful as an added bonus for power users, but I think the traditional paradigm for the OS should work by default: 1) on desktop, single/double click, drag and drop, tool tips, mouse wheel. 2) on mobile quick tap, tap and hold, basic swipe gestures (on mobile these work well but sometimes not intuitive). I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think people out to at least be able to “feel” their way around a UI. Lately there’s been so much push for minimalism like omitting scroll bars and such that make it confusing. But, again that experimentation will root out what works and doesn’t. And new devices like VR of course have yet to be discovered paradigms.
gbrown 7y ago
I actually like Gnome 3 a lot. I feel like it’s the first DE I’ve tried that I could interact with with the appropriate mix of 90% keyboard 10% touchpad on a laptop.
hilbert42 7y ago
"This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole" Exactly, but what perplexes me is why aren't these issues that are so obvious to us not obvious to them. Why do they think so differently to normal users?

bepvte 7y ago

This behaviour has been removed in the next gnome release

madjam002 7y ago

I dislike it too, but doesn’t Windows 10 do the same thing?

gowld 7y ago
Probably, but Windows is terrible at everything UX so that doesn't mean much.
nitwit005 7y ago
Windows seems to respond to almost any input to display the password box.
jodrellblank 7y ago
Windows 10 with Windows Hello does face recognition logon without any need to swipe or press key combinations. On a touchscreen, it responds to a swipe upwards. On a machine with a keyboard it responds to apparently any mouse click or keypress. Presumably Gnome copypasted it from Windows, because otherwise where did that idea come from into multiple distinct projects simultaneously? Windows has always had ctrl+alt+del to logon, Ubuntu hasn't had a precedent of having to do something to get to the logon prompt, IIRC.
- p1necone 7y ago
  Windows hello is such a nice experience (at least just for local login), but I will never use it because I don't trust Microsoft with my data.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    "the info that identifies your face, iris, or fingerprint never leaves your device." - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-sign-in-options-and-privacy https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-...
    - coribuci 7y ago

ordu 7y ago

> Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and pressing buttons to try to get it to do the thing. I thereby discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter. One more anecdote. I found this screen for the first time when I got my laptop to demonstrate something to a student. I didn't know what to do, started to do random things, trying to figure out what happened, and the student interrupted my attempts, got mouse from my hand and swiped with it. I felt myself old and stupid. It is the thing like 20 years ago when I taught my parents to use standard UI. Only new it is me who needs help. I asked, she didn't see Ubuntu before, and nevertheless she managed it better than me. I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing.

WalterBright 7y ago
> I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing On the other hand, when my iPhone suddenly would connect with a caller, but neither party could hear the other, redialing didn't help, turning it off/on didn't work, I remembered the ancient trick of "cold boot". Which resolved the problem.
- tcoff91 7y ago
  You put an iPhone in the freezer and booted it, and that fixed it? Wow. I thought that was just for saving spinning disk drives and preserving the contents of RAM for an attack.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    A cold boot means shut off all power to the device. The normal "off" button the iPhone puts it in standby mode, not off. This is so it can still listen for calls.
    - craftinator 7y ago
      I tried to power off an iPhone today for 5 minutes, failed, and just gave up. Why Apple, why would you make this simple action so damn obscure.

tasogare 7y ago

> I thereby discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter. This is the same this Win10. I was super annoyed they add one more step to a very frequent action, for no benefits on a PC computer. Hopefully I don’t have to use Win10 too much, but this is symptomatic of the mobilification of computers.

iib 7y ago

You can just start typing the password and it will input it correctly, the Enter is not actually needed (at least on 19.10)