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Cleaning up header bars in GNOME 41
- phoronixrly 5y agoI'd like to chime in before the GNOME hate train starts. I welcome this change. I've been using GNOME for tens of years now for both my personal and my office systems. I very much enjoy the experience. Keep up the good work!
- kiwijamo 5y agoAlso a GNOME user here, regularly switching to macOS/Windows for work so I do get to compare how GNOME is going with 'mainstream' desktops. Really impressed with how far GNOME has come over the last couple of years. It is really at the point where I feel more productive in GNOME than the mainstream desktop environments. I love the focus on ensuring the default experience is as good as possible -- these days I have no time to tinker so having a desktop that is well configured out of the box is a huge plus. There are a few tweaks I have made which are easily done. Big credits to the GNOME team -- they have come a long way from the 2.x days.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoI already have trouble distinguishing the active tab on inactive Firefox windows......
- chungy 5y agoSame here. Why the hate on UI element borders? It's just making things worse.
- kiwijamo 5y agoI've heard this complaint a couple of times recently. I find it odd because I'm using the latest Firefox and the contrast is pretty good. I wonder if we are using different themes?
- noobermin 5y agoDefinitely a theme thing. The default theme is similar to the article, the buttons are just icons with no hint that they are buttons.
- kiwijamo 5y agoJust tried the default theme and the active tab is white with a dark grey border, while inactive tabs have no border and are the same colour as the chrome background. Even when the Firefox window is inactive the active tab still appears white with the dark grey border. It seems to me that there is sufficient contrast. Does your Firefox look anything like this image on your device? https://imgur.com/a/C2JvVRh https://imgur.com/a/C2JvVRh
- noobermin 5y agoSo, I'm not talking about the tabs, I said "buttons." The buttons are just icons and have no outline (for example, the close button, the back button, etc) Also, sorry I made a mistake, I had to edit and add a "no" to it to properly say what I meant in that the buttons have no hint as to that they are actually buttons.
- dathinab 5y agoI think the default theme depends on your OS theme or something like that (could also be the gnome theme, not sure).
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoI am using Adwaita, the stock Gnome 40 theme. Note: inactive windows. You are showing an active window on the screenshot below. On inactive windows, the unfocused tab background color is #f6f5f4. The focused tab background color is #f7f6f6. Call me colorblind, but I simply cannot distinguish between these two shades. On Windows 10 it is actually worse, since Proton it is ignoring my bright-blue accent color, so by default both the color of active and inactive windows is the same gray.
- 5y ago
- smoldesu 5y agoGod bless everyone putting effort into making Adwaita a little prettier, but GNOME 40 has been a trainwreck in my eyes. There are still glaring issues everywhere, and instead of the "sacred cow" slaughtering we were promised, we get more iteration on things people don't care about. Here's an idea: anyone, literally anyone spend a few hours updating the GNOME thumbnail generation code. It's the sole reason why file managers and photo browsers don't feel 'snappy' on the desktop. Or maybe the new Chromebook-ified topbar could revert to it's 3.38 glory, instead of being stuck with meaningless bubbles. There are so many regressions, sidegrades and completely ignored issues that I had to switch to Cinnamon when GNOME 40 rolled out. I'm hoping that most of these issues can be addressed in the coming months, but I don't have much faith. Everyone is seemingly more interested in making a 1.5gb Flatpak out of their 500kb shellutil.
- lavabiopsy 5y agoGNOME is a volunteer project driven by people working on what they want to work on. If you want to improve the thumbnails, why not have that anyone be you?
- corty 5y agoAnother copycat change to get the same crappy non-ergonomics in unrecognizable controls as the others. Can we please fast-forward all the UI circus to arrive at something usable again? Pretty please?
- drran 5y agoMate (Gnome2) still works. If you disagree with Gnome team, you can invest into this Gnome fork.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoAnd https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1372444 https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1372444 works with that, too! :-)
- dathinab 5y agoIt's just flat design in the window header bars not the normal window content... And in GNOME more or less everything in the title bar can be interacted with. And it's mostly symbols implying intractability. So in difference to most flat design approaches I'm not sure this decreases usability tbh.
- noobermin 5y agoI'll be honest and say I don't like this trend in UX. The article is right that they are merely following others, so I won't lay this on them as their fault, but it feels like making icons buttons look less like buttons is reversing a trend a lot of people are used to, as well as reducing contrast for older users and disabled folks. I think the most recent change that stuck in my mind was recent firefox's redesign. I recall the GNOME team priding themselves on actually starting the original gnome 3 redesign based on studying usage patterns, and against the angry grain I was on their side and used gnome 3 for quite a few years. I have to wonder whether this design was passed by any accessibility folks or even studied, it seems like it is against that spirit of actually evaluating usage patterns.
- sneak 5y agoChoosing to follow a bad trend is indeed the fault of the bandwagon-jumper.
- noobermin 5y agoFair. When I said "it's not their fault" I meant more along the lines as they didn't come up with this ill-advised idea themselves, that others came up with it. They shouldn't have jumped aboard without considering accessibility and usable issues and for that may be they deserve criticism.
- Zababa 5y agoI like GNOME, I just don't see the point of updating interface. Interface is something people depend on. Shouldn't we want it to be the same for a long time? Unless this change is the result of years of research and experiences with users. But with "This is not a new idea either — pretty much everyone else is doing it, e.g. macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, elementary OS, KDE.", this just seems to be following the trends.
- im_down_w_otp 5y agoI've always assumed it's because it's easier to do and piques public interest more, at least in the short-term, than updating, improving, or fixing the deeper plumbing problems and shortcomings.
- jacobmischka 5y agoI love GNOME and I'm sad about this, I felt the previous style was pleasant to look at and very clear, and a contrast to all other flat UIs.
- onli 5y agoThis is a very flat UI. I ran usability tests in the past with enterprise software that followed Windows inspired flat design. Guess what the users could not manage? The flat design, as it destroys easy discoverability of what can be clicked on and what can not. This weighed as heavy on the usability of the software as other UI mistakes and usually compounded them - as in, a difficult screen, difficult because it had a wrong interaction flow, got completely unusable for users because a button did not look like a button. Flat design got so thoroughly critized in the last decade, that people still jump on that bandwagon now that it's on its way out is astonishing. Leave it to Gnome to proudly announce flat design - worse-than-metro flat design, flat design without colors and backgrounds - for 2022. Unbelievable.
- flyinghamster 5y agoI long ago realized that I was far, far away from GNOME's target audience. If I have to install a half dozen plugins just to get things to behave the way I expect them to, then the answer is a resounding NO. These days, I gravitate to XFCE for virtual machines, low-power systems, and remote desktops, and Cinnamon for full-fat machines with a GPU. Why am I not surprised that GNOME would adopt flat design? I know it's trendy, but any time I have to use a recent Windows flat-design application (hello Visual Studio!) I find it annoying - it becomes a lot harder to determine whether something is a modal popup or an independent window.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoI still don't know what GNOME target audience is. I have yet to find a gnome shell user that doesn't use tons of plugins. It's like the GNOME dev never actually puts mockups in the hand of real users before starting to code.
- toomim 5y agoIt's no excuse for Gnome's designers to say "you're not my target audience." Linux's default desktop UI should be good for all users. It's possible, and something to strive for.
- dathinab 5y ago
- puppet-master 5y agoFlat design is basically a form of elitism. In order to understand how and why the computer works, you must subscribe to a cathedral of thought that exists at this stage more or less to protect itself and celebrate its own brilliance, because any real invention in the UI space had already basically topped out by the late 90s. From this perspective, we have flat UI for essentially the same reason we're starting to see the formation of tech unions. It has been a long time since a lot of our industry has done anything new or even productive, and much of what we do is entirely self-serving, creating a kind of fragility that ultimately threatens the workforce. Endless UI churn producing worse and worse designs isn't a problem, it's a symptom that is impossible to ignore.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoDidn't know XView, Athena widgets, Win3.1, System 6, and more were elitist.
- Gualdrapo 5y agoWindows 3.1 UI was not flat design. And even things like System6 weren't that _flat_. There were subtleties on their UI that gave a little depth to some stuff. But one could argue the _flat_ in their UI was some sort of answer to the limitations of their time.
- setpatchaddress 5y agoI don’t necessarily agree with the post you’re responding to, but the intent seems to be to criticize the lack of visual distinctness between elements, not the lack of pseudo-3D-style rendering.
- nixpulvis 5y agoElitism... fashion, style, trends...
- noobermin 5y agoWhile I'm mostly there with you, I feel like it's a bit too strong to call it elitism. It does assume the user has background knowledge and quickness to recognize the difference between an icon, label, and clickable button and some part of these decisions come from some insularity amongst ux designers may be, so it might stem from some out-of-touch-ness but it's probably more unintentional than being elitist.
- kawsper 5y agoLooking at the examples of changes done to the Obfuscate application it looks like quite a regression.
- jagger27 5y agoWow what a shame. I really liked how GNOME 40 looked out of the box.
- entropy1111 5y agoI'm loving all recent GNOME and GTK changes like flat design, blurred fonts, forced Adwaita theme, racist CoC, no SSDs, libhandy's bait and switch, breaking integrations other projects spent years building, stopthemingmy.app, demanding public apologies from vendors in pull requests, it's like christmas! The concept of accelerationism might need a revision.
- lavabiopsy 5y agoThis is quite the negative and cynical comment and includes quite a bit of misinformation, I suggest taking a break from the net for a while. Your mental health is important.
- butz 5y agoI wonder how GNOME Files breadcrumbs bar will look with this new design applied.
- mongol 5y agoWho are developing these changes? Is it the same people that design them? I.e UX people? Does it boil down to stories in sprints for someone to develop? Somehow I don't think this is the result of patches or pull requests by developers in a traditional sense.
- barrkel 5y agoI guess they still haven't fixed the almost imperceptible shading which indicates the active window.
- e2le 5y agoGiven the criticism towards flat design from both normal users and power users, I have to wonder who their target audience is supposed to be? Is it neither or perhaps flat design elitists who don't represent the needs and wants of users?