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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Except for the fact that it monopolizes the whole screen? Windows 8's start screen was panned for the same reason; there's no reason to send the user's state to the background for something that objectively does not require it.

An example of doing the same thing, the Right Way, would be Quicksilver or Spotlight on MacOS.

What's the use case for the launcher (activities menu) on G3? If you've invoked it, either by throwing your mouse to the corner or by hitting the super key, you either want to:

1. Start something

2. Close something

3. Switch to something (that being an open app or a virtual desktop).

Zero of these cases require, or even benefit from backgrounding all open windows. Compare and contrast with the Win7-Era start menu and taskbar, or Ubuntu Unity's sidebar, or MacOS's Dock.

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What's the advantage of just using a little bar on the screen to search for what you want to launch, or close, or switch to? Because when I'm on windows 7 and looking for what I want to switch to on the start bar, i'm definitely not using the rest of the screen for anything. I'm looking for the right little icon to click.

Tell me why it's the "Right Way".

For one, you can look between the start menu and and an open window. More than once I've need to run some obscure command or some program I didn't even know was installed, and I can just glance over to my documentation to make sure I've got it right.

My eyes have muscles that allow me to move them where required. Most people do. They don't need the entire desktop blanked out for a single UI element that might take up ~10% of the space.

Again, we're right back to mobile-first use cases- everything is fullscreen. Except that nobody is using G3 on mobile devices, so why design in that fashion? What's the user benefit?

When the "windows" key (for me the "command" key -- I use a Mac BT keyboard), the visible windows are shrunk (but readable) and the I start to type. I can still read the window contents (1920x1080 11" display, 10 point touch). The desktop is not blanked out. On that selection screen, I have fast-start icons, and the desktop selector. Yes, it is "different" but I find it more usable than either Windows or Mac.

Of course, that may be due to familiarity. My primary platform is a mobile device, but I also use Gnome 3 (Fedora) on desktops. We use Mate on RHEL 7 on our larger display configurations (4x4K monitor in a 2x2 grid and 3x4K in horizontal configurations). But, on those configurations, we lock down and don't offer start menus to the end-user at all (kiosk style application).

I do like Gnome 3 for general use, though.

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