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Comment by strzibny | Hacker News Reader

We have GNOME 40 now which is beautiful.

I can imagine it would be beautiful on mobile pretty soon as well.

I sometimes find it hard to understand the GNOME's design rationale. When GNOME 40 moved the dock from the left side to the bottom of the screen, it created an ergonomic problem for mouse users, who now need two large mouse gestures to switch apps -- first to the upper left corner to reveal the dock, then all the way to the bottom. And in the issue thread[1], Gnome's designers seem to be carefully avoiding the obvious solution of a hot bottom edge, proposed by several commenters, which is how Mac OS has always handled an auto-hiding dock.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/issues/68

I don't really understand the rationale either, but it's easy to add a hot bottom edge with this extension:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4222/hot-edge/

Of course it depends on the person, but I have never really used the dock for anything. I usually use the overview, or start typing the name of the app I want, or even more often just apt tab to it.

I hope you are joking. I have Fedora 34 with Gnome 40 right now on my gaming PC as a second system and I can barely find two windows (not even apps, just two windows) that can be defined as "nicely done". Everything else is terrible. Even worse once you start looking for apps on he net. Everything that is not Electron-base is simply ugly, constructed without any thought about UX.

You might have hit on a solution here: Electron, or, ideally, a really nice mobile-first web browser with access to APIs provided by the underlying Linux OS.

I’m essentially imagining a phone OS that decouples the front-end and backend design. Implement the apps as APIs. Implement the UI using HTML5 so more designers can use their existing skills to contribute & the GUI layer can be replaced more easily. The experience would be a refinement of pulling a Docker image and opening a browser to use it on localhost.

Edit: a mobile OS also needs a really nice mobile-first shell app. People do so much with text messaging now that I think they might be open to it…

Flutter or something similar + your backend of choice.

There's a prior attempt in the form of Firefox OS, which tried to push the “Web technology as driver of local UI” thing. Some cursory looking around suggests that webOS may also have done this, but I'm not as sure (it would make sense from the name).

You're basically describing WebOS and FirefoxOS.

WebOS lives on as LuneOS (and runs on the pinephone), but FirefoxOS effectively went closed source and became KaiOS.

Not joking. Everything Electron is actually the opposite: ugly. It doesn't blend well at all (maybe macOS Electron is a bit better). Native GTK apps are beautiful, which one you don't like? Only applications that are not on latest GTK might look out of place, but I am talking all the new stuff, from Calendar to Maps.

if you thing gnome4 is good design then linux phone is dead

What desktop approach do you consider to be modern? Or do you like to stick to the “win95“ approach of desktops?

> We have GNOME 40 now which is beautiful.

Don't know about that, chief. Looks like a same old Gnome.

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