6 ms·

GNOME and GTK look spectacular these days. Even when I'm using macOS I now find myself thinking that GNOME looks better. The design is very uniform and coherent

• prima-facie 4y ago
  And to think most of this is done by a handful of volunteers + a few employees of open-source friendly companies like Redhat.
• tmtvl 4y ago
  De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum, I guess, seeing applications without menu bars (the greatest invention in IT, bar none (if you'll excuse the pun)) just makes me feel like I'm looking at someone putting square blocks on wheel axles or praying for lightning to hit a tree to get fire. Like one of the screenshots has in the title bar a looking glass, three tabs, a check mark in a circle, a hamburger, and the close button. What am I even looking at?
  • javajosh 4y ago
    >What am I even looking at? A 2-D array of lit pixels. Any other interpretation is on you!
  • sph 4y ago
    The greatest invention was the global menu bar, as seen on Apple computers. That is the only iteration of the menu bar that respects Fitts's Law: by putting it at the top of the screen, the menu bar has infinite height, so it is infinitely easy to reach. But Microsoft never got the memo.
    • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      That was designed for a non-multitasking OS with a tiny screen. You have to wonder why they never stopped drinking their own kool-aid when technology changed.
    • fnord123 4y ago
      The global menu bar is a design flaw and evolutionary dead end. It doesn't respect Fitt's law when people have multiple monitors. It also implies alt-tab to switch application Vs alt-tab to switch window which is, again, broken when you have multiple monitors (alt-tab to switch window is the correct choice). Not only that but Fitt's law is dying as mice become less and less used as a means to interact with a device. Touchpads and touchscreens have usurped them.
      • sph 4y ago
        Fitts's Law is still alive and kicking in the touchpad era. Until we have anything that drives a cursor, it is relevant. A global menu bar is infinitely tall on a touchpad as well because I can randomly flick my finger up and I will have reached it. And I do not get what a global menu bar has to do with window switching and monitor switching. Tiling WM fans all know that focus-follows-mouse is saner than alt-tabbing like a maniac, and this doesn't invalidate the role of a global menu-bar.
    • kibwen 4y ago
      To be fair, Microsoft got the memo, it took all the useful parts of the global menu bar and put them in the start bar, which is itself glued to the bottom of the screen and thus respects Fitts' Law. Windows did put the application-specific menus into the per-window title bar, but even then the most important part of the title bar is the section with the close/minimize/maximize buttons, and on Windows a maximized window puts those buttons at the edge of the screen, again as per Fitts' Law, whereas Mac disobeys Fitts' Law here and puts those buttons below the global menu bar.
      • sph 4y ago
        Good observation, though Microsoft forgot it (again) when they designed Windows 11 and moved the Start button from the bottom-left corner to somewhere in the middle of the screen.
        • kibwen 4y ago
          Yes, I'm not trying to defend their modern design (in)sensibilities. :P I switched from Windows to Linux (with an aborted attempt at Mac) after realizing the OS-level ads weren't going anywhere.
        • sovnade 4y ago
          It's movable of course, but this is still a downgrade from win10. My biggest peeve is that there seems to be no option anymore to not-condense icons, and you can't change the notification color (when an app flashes its icon). I miss notifications on my work computer all the time because the flash color just doesn't stand out very much with my dark theme, and I can't even expand the width because...well it feels like they released an unfinished and unpolished product, again. I hate that there's trade-offs that shouldn't need to exist with every new version. Meanwhile my mac I don't think has ever lost functionality or customizability in the last..8ish years I've been using it as my daily driver. edit: caveat...this is a work computer and obviously has group policies/etc that might affect things. I will correct this post if I'm wrong :)
      • loloquwowndueo 4y ago
        It took them 11 years after the first Macintosh was released to “invent” the start menu in Windows 95.
    • p-e-w 4y ago
      The global menu bar is bad UX for a windowing desktop because it visually disconnects actions from the window they belong to. It's not always obvious which window has the focus and using the menu bar can easily trigger an action in a different window or application than intended.
      • cuteboy19 4y ago
        Yes I always feel stupid when using mac's because of this
      • Klonoar 4y ago
        The global menu bar on macOS literally displays the name of the current focused application. It’s absolutely obvious.
        • amluto 4y ago
          This adds an extra step of reading what’s focused. It’s also awkward on a multi monitor system.
          • Klonoar 4y ago
            Dude, you literally scan left to right on most systems. This is not a point of discussion and it's not remotely difficult.
            • amluto 4y ago
              On Windows, I don’t stop to think “hmm, which edit menu is this”. And, if I have multiple windows from the same application open (multiple document interface), I know which document the edit menu is for. There is a genuine tradeoff here. Global menu bars are easier targets and waste less space. Per-window menu bars are more clearly bound to their window. Neither approach is better on all counts.
    • thom 4y ago
      I’ve never really understood this. None of the things you actually want to click obey Fitt’s law. It’s really an argument for having the toolbar at the top of the screen instead. Or having a taskbar at the bottom, which Windows had long before the Dock came along. (I’m not really the target market for any of these things, to be clear, gimme the screen space back and don’t make me touch the mouse).
      • sbuk 4y ago
        The Control Strip in System 7 predates the Start button and taskbar found in Windows 95. If we go back further, NeXTSTEP introduced the dock and let’s not forget that AmigaOS and RISC OS both had very similar functionality too, along with others that I’m forgetting that all predate Windows 95.
        • thom 4y ago
          The Control Strip was pretty anaemic though. It was more like the tray (i.e. a dumping ground for stuff people don't regularly interact with). But still, when you do want to play a CD, there you have it in one click, rather than one click blessed by Fitt's Law to drop a menu down, followed by moving back down carefully to find the thing you actually want. In the meantime I just typed the command with autocompletion in Emacs and moved on with my life.
    • MegaDeKay 4y ago
      I disagree. I have a 38" ultrawide monitor (that I love). That is a long way for the mouse pointer to go every time I want to select something from the menu bar. To make matters worse, I have progressive lenses and the "sweet spot" for the text to be in focus within my field of view is relatively narrow. So not only would I have to move my mouse quite a bit if I had a global menu, I have to move my head quite a bit as well. I think Fitt's Law is something like Moore's Law: both couldn't be counted on to go on indefinitely. Fortunately for me, I use KDE and could switch between the two if I wanted.
    • kitsunesoba 4y ago
      I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea but I wish that global menubar options on Linux were more robust. There are extensions to add one to GNOME and XFCE, and KDE has it as a built in option, which is great. Problem is, this feature relies on programs advertising their menus via dbus, and a lot of them don’t bother at all, meaning that it’s sitting up there blank half the time. The only reason that this is even possible is because the desktop paradigm moved menus into the space of the app UI, which I think is a mistake. Menus are such an important accessibility feature that even if they’re glued to windows, it should be a standardized system owned widget so overzealous IKEA-minded designers can’t screw with them. This is very frustrating to me because with hamburger menus and window attached menus I feel like I’m chasing a frequently used widget around the screen.
  • pxc 4y ago
    > menu bars (the greatest invention in IT, bar none Menu bars are terrible! Visually navigating a tree structure via mousing is a nightmare, especially if the whole thing disappears or radically shifts if you mouse a few pixels off. Visually scanning huge, variable chunks of the screen is inefficient, awkward, and a burden. Everything that you can do with those nasty, collapsible visual hierarchies can be done way more efficiently and way more accessibly via a nice search interface with fuzzy filtering and autocompletion. When it's actually fast and unencumbered by bullshit like advertisements, something like Spotlight or the modern Windows start search is infinitely better than crap like the Windows 9x start menu. If you've ever coached someone through navigating a graphical, hierarchical menu they've never seen before, you know how painfully slow all that mental processing actually is. Even a hunt and peck typist will be faster in most cases, as all they have to type is at most a handful of letters. Menu bars suck in the exact same way, and they ought to be either eliminated or replaced in the same way as ye olde start menu, too.
    • tmtvl 4y ago
      I very much disagree, the discoverability with a search interface is terrible. With a menu bar even the most computer-illiterate troglodyte (e.g. me) can just go oh, it says "Help" there, I'll click it without having to worry about my one neuron overheating. EDIT: I think the best option is taking the golden middle road and having a menu bar which can be searched through, kind of like Unity has.
      • pxc 4y ago
        > I think the best option is taking the golden middle road and having a menu bar which can be searched through, kind of like Unity has. Yes! I've been a KDE person since like KDE 3.4, but I gave Unity a chance in its heyday and I absolutely loved it for that feature. Discoverability with a search interface can be improved by adding a visual representation of search categories or common search terms, and an old-school hierarchical menu can do just fine for that. (I think a different kind of menu might be better for discovery, though. You could do a more search/filtering-oriented descent of the same hierarchy, and enrich the menu entries being filtered with documentation and previews.) Discoverability of search interfaces can also be improved with by tagging things with synonyms and descriptions, so that users can search by task instead of the app's canonical names for functions.
• gumboza 4y ago
  I agree. But unfortunately it’s still pretty horrible to use. There’s just a really bad quality feel to it. Like you bought something from China trying to cheap out when you should have bought the branded thing and you’re still at the telling yourself it was a good deal phase of denial. Edit: this is something that can be fixed but it requires well funded attention and there just isn’t that because the commercial opportunity is entirely on the server.
  • kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
    Could you elaborate on what specifically you find "cheap" about GNOME?
    • sbuk 4y ago
      Not the OP, but the mishmash of icon styles in the default installation and the oversized titlebars I find amateurish to say the least. It really puts me off. Bizarrely, as a Mac user, I prefer the look and feel of KDE.
  • 0thgen 4y ago
    maybe it's a personal workflow thing, because I've had the opposite experience
    • gumboza 4y ago
      I think the thing is it's just the full picture is not good enough. I mean I'm sitting there earlier having a shit and I shout at my watch to add some more toilet paper to the shopping list. This is now on all my devices including the one I take shopping. If this was on Linux I'd have to crawl back to my desktop, write it on that, then export it when I went shopping. Everything is just that much more difficult and disjointed. The whole experience leaves me somewhere around 2008. I can't find any real advantages over my gnome2 desktop in 2008. It stopped being usable then for me. Linux has become what its good at, which is a container target and server platform. As a desktop it hasn't even caught up with the 2010's yet...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• schmorptron 4y ago
  Every time I do the swipe gesture to open up the activities overview on my laptop I am delighted at how smooth and polished it is now. It's such a small thing but you do it so often throughout the day that it matters. The way the desktop moves backwards spatially, how the icons slowly fade in, how the windows correctly stay at the elevation they were at based on how recently they were clicked, how the animation curve isn't flat but feels bouncy. Just nice! Same thing applies to switching between desktops. It feels a lot better than on Windows.