7 ms·

I'm very impressed and happy for the continued support for non-Linux systems. It's very heartening that when necessary, they are coding backends for other syste

by byuu 12y ago

I'm very impressed and happy for the continued support for non-Linux systems. It's very heartening that when necessary, they are coding backends for other systems, instead of buying in to the Linux-only systemd lock-in. I was also very surprised to see how decent the UI looks even under GTK+ 3. I was afraid they would get sucked into the horrible catastrophe that has befallen Gnome with things like client-side decorations. Gedit, for instance, went from this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit2261.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Gedit226... ... to this: http://cdn.xfce.org/about/tour/4.12/xfwm4-csd.png http://cdn.xfce.org/about/tour/4.12/xfwm4-csd.png ... the horror. Has anyone given this a try yet? I would like to know if the common dialogs (eg file open, file save) use proper window decorations, or if they too now look like the Gnome 3 CSD garbage. Also, it's still possible to use Clearlooks-Phenix, right? They're just saying they discontinued the Xfce-* themes, right? Adwaita is such a dull theme.

zatkin 12y ago
Wow, that Gedit transition looks awful. I'm curious what the motivation was for these 'client-side decorations' you speak of.
- ronjouch 12y ago
  1. What do you consider "awful" (or, OP, a "horror") in this transition? (This is a real question, not a rhetorical one.) CSD are one of the better recent GNOME UX trends, I think, for the reasons below which feel well executed to me. 2. Motivations are (to my understanding) to save vertical space, reduce window clutter, and put common actions at the forefront. Matthias Clasen talks about it in great detail at [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decorations-continued/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decor... [2] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-side-decorations/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-... [3] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-12/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-...
  - lottin 12y ago
    The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Sure they've saved some vertical space but in doing so they've also made the UI a whole lot less efficient to use. There's also more clutter, not less, with all sorts of unrelated controls crammed into one tiny space.
    - vog 12y ago
      Why not simply use shortcut keys? These are more efficient than having to grab to the mouse, especially on an editor, on which most the the time both your hand are at the keyboard anyway.
      - lottin 12y ago
        Yes but here we're talking about a graphical user interface and the whole purpose of a GUI is to let you do things by interacting with graphical elements.
        vog 12y ago
        Then, I don't understand the criticism about efficiency for regular users, as this is – for text editors – also clearly out of scope for graphical user interfaces. (Of course, the story is different for the graphical domain such as Blender).
    - ronjouch 12y ago
      > The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Agreed on that point. The Office team made a wonderful job at this, by also putting actions in the title bar (e.g. by default: save, undo, redo), but making it configurable. However, MS has orders of magnitude more dollars to develop/support/bugfix the added complexity, and given the hate of GNOME committers regarding anything configurable, I doubt that will ever happen in GNOME. I'm not bothered by it because, like others here, I use keyboard shortcuts for 99% of my actions and never need to reach for buttons or the sandwich menu, but I understand why I'd be bothered too if it wasn't the case.
- dimsuz 12y ago
  It looks awful with Xfce default theme. Gedit = Gnome Edit (I guess) - and it looks well and integrated really well when used in GNOME environment (gnome-shell). So its not fair to judge it this way. Try to open some Xfce apps in GNOME and it will look like horror too (compared to gnome ones) :)
- digi_owl 12y ago
  Design wankery under the banner of "usability" most likely. The whole Gnome/systemd/fedora sphere seems to have a severe case of OSX envy.
acous 12y ago
I think it's a little unfair to compare the gedit UI at different sizes. I hastily mocked up how they would look at the same size: http://i.imgur.com/hb6TLEr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hb6TLEr.jpg Personally I love the minimal and uncluttered look. I don't need big buttons for copy and paste, and even on a 30" monitor I appreciate the extra space it allows for actual content.
- ExpiredLink 12y ago
  > I love the minimal and uncluttered look. Uncluttered, unintuitive, unhelpful - just like a vi buffer in input mode.
  - acous 12y ago
    > unintuitive Unintuitive for whom? It abandons the traditional structure, which some people are accustomed to, but I suspect that it would be measurably more effective for people who haven't developed patterns of familiarity with the traditional workflow. > just like a vi buffer in input mode I think the key difference is discoverability. In gedit I can immediately see how do 6 common actions, and that there's another layer of less common actions in the hamburger menu. I never had to google "how to exit gedit" for example.
- ronjouch 12y ago
  Your mockup is right on target, Allan Day blogged about it at http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you-space-since-2009-or-so/ http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-y...
- kristianp 12y ago
  That unstyled grey look, plus the missing File, etc. menus under fvwm, caused me to abandon gnome apps under fvwm. I couldn't get a theme that supported gnome apps nicely. Sorry gnome, I don't want a mac-style menu bar.
ptx 12y ago
To be fair, although they made the keyboard shortcuts invisible, added another nesting level to the menubar, gave the title too little horizontal space while simultaneously wasting vertical space, and made the UI inconsistent with every other window on the system... they did manage to save as much as 7 pixels of space.

by byuu 12y ago

zatkin 12y ago

Wow, that Gedit transition looks awful. I'm curious what the motivation was for these 'client-side decorations' you speak of.

ronjouch 12y ago
1. What do you consider "awful" (or, OP, a "horror") in this transition? (This is a real question, not a rhetorical one.) CSD are one of the better recent GNOME UX trends, I think, for the reasons below which feel well executed to me. 2. Motivations are (to my understanding) to save vertical space, reduce window clutter, and put common actions at the forefront. Matthias Clasen talks about it in great detail at [1] [2] [3]. [1] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decorations-continued/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decor... [2] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-side-decorations/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/20/even-more-client-... [3] https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-12/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/03/21/dialogs-in-gtk-3-...
- lottin 12y ago
  The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Sure they've saved some vertical space but in doing so they've also made the UI a whole lot less efficient to use. There's also more clutter, not less, with all sorts of unrelated controls crammed into one tiny space.
  - vog 12y ago
    Why not simply use shortcut keys? These are more efficient than having to grab to the mouse, especially on an editor, on which most the the time both your hand are at the keyboard anyway.
    - lottin 12y ago
      Yes but here we're talking about a graphical user interface and the whole purpose of a GUI is to let you do things by interacting with graphical elements.
      - vog 12y ago
        Then, I don't understand the criticism about efficiency for regular users, as this is – for text editors – also clearly out of scope for graphical user interfaces. (Of course, the story is different for the graphical domain such as Blender).
  - ronjouch 12y ago
    > The problem is when you want to use some action which isn't one of the 2 or 3 that they've put at the forefront. Agreed on that point. The Office team made a wonderful job at this, by also putting actions in the title bar (e.g. by default: save, undo, redo), but making it configurable. However, MS has orders of magnitude more dollars to develop/support/bugfix the added complexity, and given the hate of GNOME committers regarding anything configurable, I doubt that will ever happen in GNOME. I'm not bothered by it because, like others here, I use keyboard shortcuts for 99% of my actions and never need to reach for buttons or the sandwich menu, but I understand why I'd be bothered too if it wasn't the case.
dimsuz 12y ago
It looks awful with Xfce default theme. Gedit = Gnome Edit (I guess) - and it looks well and integrated really well when used in GNOME environment (gnome-shell). So its not fair to judge it this way. Try to open some Xfce apps in GNOME and it will look like horror too (compared to gnome ones) :)
digi_owl 12y ago
Design wankery under the banner of "usability" most likely. The whole Gnome/systemd/fedora sphere seems to have a severe case of OSX envy.

acous 12y ago

I think it's a little unfair to compare the gedit UI at different sizes. I hastily mocked up how they would look at the same size: http://i.imgur.com/hb6TLEr.jpg http://i.imgur.com/hb6TLEr.jpg Personally I love the minimal and uncluttered look. I don't need big buttons for copy and paste, and even on a 30" monitor I appreciate the extra space it allows for actual content.

ExpiredLink 12y ago
> I love the minimal and uncluttered look. Uncluttered, unintuitive, unhelpful - just like a vi buffer in input mode.
- acous 12y ago
  > unintuitive Unintuitive for whom? It abandons the traditional structure, which some people are accustomed to, but I suspect that it would be measurably more effective for people who haven't developed patterns of familiarity with the traditional workflow. > just like a vi buffer in input mode I think the key difference is discoverability. In gedit I can immediately see how do 6 common actions, and that there's another layer of less common actions in the hamburger menu. I never had to google "how to exit gedit" for example.
ronjouch 12y ago
Your mockup is right on target, Allan Day blogged about it at http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-you-space-since-2009-or-so/ http://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2014/08/27/gnome-design-saving-y...
kristianp 12y ago
That unstyled grey look, plus the missing File, etc. menus under fvwm, caused me to abandon gnome apps under fvwm. I couldn't get a theme that supported gnome apps nicely. Sorry gnome, I don't want a mac-style menu bar.

ptx 12y ago

To be fair, although they made the keyboard shortcuts invisible, added another nesting level to the menubar, gave the title too little horizontal space while simultaneously wasting vertical space, and made the UI inconsistent with every other window on the system... they did manage to save as much as 7 pixels of space.