7 ms·

Gnome really needs help with their typography (and design in general). Gradients, docks and shiny icons do not make a well designed product. It's clear to see

Gnome really needs help with their typography (and design in general). Gradients, docks and shiny icons do not make a well designed product. It's clear to see it suffers from the curse of open source software – design by committee, and the featuritis that results from that. There's often "flashy" chrome in OSS, but no solid interactions behind to back it up. It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink.

dman 16y ago
Believe me - in the open source world Gnome is the one that leans towards minimalism.
- zyfo 16y ago
  Minimalism in what sense?
  - dman 16y ago
    UI fading into the background. Working things around so that there are fewer User preferences. Default desktop themes which are sober and not overly jazzy.
    - mtogo 16y ago
      How? Compared to LXDE (for example), GNOME seems cluttered and slow to me. Not at all minimalist.
- chalst 16y ago
  I've found Sawfish+twm to be a sufficient window manager for my purposes.
_frog 16y ago
I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leadership is extremely important when designing a good UI and I feel a lot of open source projects forget this. Also this leader needs to be thick skinned and self confident enough to take criticism from others on the project but also assert their own subjective views.
- dman 16y ago
  Leadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this. As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great programmer and also has good aesthetic sensibilities). I hope enlightenment comes back and the big two (KDE and Gnome) becomes the big four (kde, gnome, ubuntus take on gnome and enlightenment).
  - wladimir 16y ago
    The problem with the Enlightenment guys (as I understood) is that they always had big plans and awesome ideas, but there's just not many enough of them to implement everything they want. They might consider to simply take the good parts of KDE/Gnome and build a visual shell around it to their liking. Kind of like what Canonical is doing.
  - Flow 16y ago
    Lots of variations of "Dungeons and Dragons"-desktop environments are not a good show of aesthetics. IMHO.
statictype 16y ago
Do you have any specific examples?
naner 16y ago
It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink. What does this mean? Gnome 3.0 is rather incomplete. You can't even change themes or fonts yet.
- ugh 16y ago
  Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.
  - Derbasti 16y ago
    That is only true if the default theme is generic and beautiful enough to not annoy the majority of the populous. We will see how Gnome fares on that.
  - GeneralMaximus 16y ago
    Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?
    - ugh 16y ago
      And some would like to change the way the OS stacks windows, et cetera, et cetera. Picking great defaults is good enough for the vast majority of users, you don't have to waste your time implemnting ever more preferences and can focus on the important stuff.
    - bad_user 16y ago
      I used to change themes a lot back in the day ; now I just wish for a usable desktop that doesn't get in my way, and Gnome / KDE are awful from that point of view. That's the reason why I'm developing software on Linux, but dual-boot in a Windows 7 partition for design-related work, as that requires mouse-based interactions, and in Gnome I can't even rely on copy/paste to work properly. Changing themes and fonts is nice, but shouldn't be a priority. For me priorities would be having basic functionality, like copy/paste, working properly; or how about a task-switching applet (activated on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the window you want; or desktop notification windows that you can close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really obnoxious) ... this has always been the story of the Linux desktop for me, i.e. death by a thousand cuts.

dman 16y ago

Believe me - in the open source world Gnome is the one that leans towards minimalism.

zyfo 16y ago
Minimalism in what sense?
- dman 16y ago
  UI fading into the background. Working things around so that there are fewer User preferences. Default desktop themes which are sober and not overly jazzy.
  - mtogo 16y ago
    How? Compared to LXDE (for example), GNOME seems cluttered and slow to me. Not at all minimalist.
chalst 16y ago
I've found Sawfish+twm to be a sufficient window manager for my purposes.

_frog 16y ago

I think the reason that open source software is so often poorly designed is this committee approach where no one person can lead the design team. Strong leadership is extremely important when designing a good UI and I feel a lot of open source projects forget this. Also this leader needs to be thick skinned and self confident enough to take criticism from others on the project but also assert their own subjective views.

dman 16y ago
Leadership is one issue. Another one is that the big Linux companies (Novell and Redhat) make most of their money from the enterprise market. So there isnt significant desktop design expenditure because the revenue slice from the Linux desktop market is vanishingly small. Canonical is trying to change this. As an aside - www.enlightenment.org is one project which has had pretty strong leadership (Raster is a great programmer and also has good aesthetic sensibilities). I hope enlightenment comes back and the big two (KDE and Gnome) becomes the big four (kde, gnome, ubuntus take on gnome and enlightenment).
- wladimir 16y ago
  The problem with the Enlightenment guys (as I understood) is that they always had big plans and awesome ideas, but there's just not many enough of them to implement everything they want. They might consider to simply take the good parts of KDE/Gnome and build a visual shell around it to their liking. Kind of like what Canonical is doing.
- Flow 16y ago
  Lots of variations of "Dungeons and Dragons"-desktop environments are not a good show of aesthetics. IMHO.

statictype 16y ago

Do you have any specific examples?

naner 16y ago

It's equally important what you choose to leave out from your product, as what you include. It seems Gnome has included the kitchen sink. What does this mean? Gnome 3.0 is rather incomplete. You can't even change themes or fonts yet.

ugh 16y ago
Why should you be able to change themes or fonts? OS X (iOS as well and I think Windows Phone 7, too) doesn't allow you to do that. Those two don't seem like required features to me.
- Derbasti 16y ago
  That is only true if the default theme is generic and beautiful enough to not annoy the majority of the populous. We will see how Gnome fares on that.
- GeneralMaximus 16y ago
  Hazarding a guess here: because some of us might enjoy different colors and fonts?
  - ugh 16y ago
    And some would like to change the way the OS stacks windows, et cetera, et cetera. Picking great defaults is good enough for the vast majority of users, you don't have to waste your time implemnting ever more preferences and can focus on the important stuff.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    I used to change themes a lot back in the day ; now I just wish for a usable desktop that doesn't get in my way, and Gnome / KDE are awful from that point of view. That's the reason why I'm developing software on Linux, but dual-boot in a Windows 7 partition for design-related work, as that requires mouse-based interactions, and in Gnome I can't even rely on copy/paste to work properly. Changing themes and fonts is nice, but shouldn't be a priority. For me priorities would be having basic functionality, like copy/paste, working properly; or how about a task-switching applet (activated on alt-tab) that can use the mouse to select the window you want; or desktop notification windows that you can close (those notifications in Ubuntu are really obnoxious) ... this has always been the story of the Linux desktop for me, i.e. death by a thousand cuts.