Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability
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That being said there are also a lot of applications where the menu is used rarely enough that exposing the first level of menus isn't worth the screen space. In this case I think a hamburger menu is fine. For example in Firefox I rarely use the menu. Most things I do are keyboard shortcuts, or the couple of things I have moved to the toolbar. And I often wish I could see more at the same time. I think the main issue with Firefox is that the menu is basically impossible for a new user to find. I believe the only ways to bring it up (on Linux at least) is tapping Alt or Alt-<m> where m is a mnemonic that you would have needed to see the menu before to know. I guess this is their way of slowing killing it off in favour of their hamburger menu, but I find the hamburger menu has way less options and is way harder to browse. It feels more like a place for frequent options rather than a full menu. As much hate as there is for 3-level menus the actual browsing UX was quite good.
I think people who like the global menu tend to be single application users (window maximized). If you like to have a lot of smaller windows open on your desktop, then a global menu gets annoying. I also think today's larger screens (for desktop) is affecting the argument that user's find it easier to get to the menu if it's at the top of the screen.
But the idea falls flat on its face when you have multiple screens with multiple windows, which window does the menu belong to and why is it detached from my current working context? As most of us have grown up using some sort of pointing device, the argument for speed and accuracy has also lost some relevance.
In reality there are too many context clues and we, as humans, can only interact with one application at a time. Any argument against global menus are really unfounded - the only argument that holds any water at all is one of what you are used to.
People at the end of the day just want to use what they are already used to - whether global menus are superior or inferior is really moot because most people aren't going to get past the "what they are used to part" and will deride it largely on that alone. This is coming from a Windows user that only started to use macOS after like 10 years of Windows usage and no really liking the global menu, or one click mouse and numerous other things about the Mac, but gave it a shot any ways as initially it drew me with its nice looks, but then the UNIX underpinnings & POSIX compliance kept me with the platform. I wasn't even looking for UNIX or POSIX either at the time - but it is now an invaluable part of my workflow, as are global menus and Cmd key positioned for my thumb, not my pinky.
I wrote https://kinto.sh to help bring over the shortcut keys I am used to as well to Linux and Windows.
I disagree, for an example: global menus do not work well at all with focus-follows-mouse. It's not really possible to design a good system that has both. I've seen various attempts to try to make focus-follows-mouse work on macOS, and the usability is very poor. Similarly, you will have bad usability trying to plug global menus into a system that isn't really focused around the concept of menus.
But I think you're right that in the end it doesn't really matter, someone can get used to doing it either way.
I've tried but I hate it. It's like I'm doing yoga with my hands, bending my thumb while reaching over it with my index finger. The ctrl key tethering my pinky gives a much larger range of motion without cramping my hand.
Having the menu bar stuck at the very top of the screen makes it possible to just "zoom" the mouse pointer rapidly to the top. The pointer cannot go off the top of the screen, so you're on the menu bar and can immediately click the button and begin sliding the mouse pointer across the menus to see each one drop down as the pointer crosses it.
This seems subtle, but you wouldn't believe how much faster it is than having menus on windows.
In addition, all of those menu bars on all of those windows are using up valuable screen real estate space.
That global menu bar instantly changes to the menu bar of the front most window when you bring a different window to the front.
The sapce advantage is mixed. If you have windows side-by side (which seems more common than stacked vertically) per-window is actually better as often the global menu doesn't take up the full width of the screen.
Changing to the active window is actually a downside. It means that I need to activate a window before I can open the menu. Especially if the window is not at the top of the screen it can make a lot of travel distance to do those two clicks.
There are definitely pros and cons to both options.
Their UX research is like Lucky Strike paying someone to find the health benefits of tobacco. They will ask the right questions. I remember two posts about UX testing, one a developer asked like a few random people they knew before making heavy changes. The second one looked promising from a scientific point of view and made me genuinely interested but a couple of paragraphs in and you could already see that it was full of shit.
Repo owners can do whatever they want because they can't afford to lose a single maintainer so leaders just quietly accept that and move on. Source: GNOMErs comments on reddit.
So lots of politics, not a lot of money to be made in the desktop, people are spread too thin. You don't have to deliver a good product when there's no big expectations or your job is on the line.
Is this comment too harsh? I don't know. Red Hat (right they don't own GNOME) is great and did/does so much for Linux/desktop, but many people like me who abandoned GNOME and GTK after v3 have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff. So it's really hard not to be.
>have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff.
Can you please elaborate what you mean here? If there are some bugs that are causing issues, you should consider reporting those.
Well, outside my personal opinion that GTK applications became worse in UX and looks (by nature just by following their abstract HIG or peer pressure to be a "GNOME app"). The most common issue is the terrible filepicker (alien UX, no large thumbnails) that at least now you can use Portals when it's supported. Same could be said about other components like color chooser, modal dialogs, fonts that are barely readable even after KDE patches. Integration issues with Flatpak I only have with GTK applications like fonts and dbus. Some issues with Wayland, SDL, that I can't remember, maybe it was SSD, lack of window controls, abandoning system tray, I don't keep track of things that make my day worse now I just find an alternative until they come back to haunt me.
Does that help? I don't think those are issues where you're being controlled into an unfixable situation, so I can try to help offer some solutions.
>volunteers to work on them
This discussion happens literally every week on reddit and other places. Same arguments and same conclusions from both "sides", not worth having it, nothing is gained.
>GNOME's wayland implementation won't affect users of other desktops.
Affects developers, and GTK itself when used. Or not if you don't think they are issues of course.
I agree, I've seen lots of open source projects get stuck and suffer from this issue where it's hard to get certain things done, it's hardly anything new, that's why I tend to focus on how to reach solutions to the problem. If you know someone who is capable of fixing these issues who needs some support, or if you have some technical insights here, let's talk about that. Otherwise, the issue is not one of being controlled -- the issue is actually because nobody has enough control to get the thing done. So let's see what we can do to give the right people a handle on the situation and empower them to do the right thing.
>Affects developers, and GTK itself when used.
I'm not sure what you mean, the developers of other wayland implementations don't have to worry about GNOME's implementation, unless they are aiming for feature parity. GTK can of course receive patches to support other implementations.
Maybe not a secret plan, but MS sure seems focused on making sure no one understands how to use the local file system.
The fashion in UI is so horrible. Since Windows 95 I've basically watched UI fashion as pure churn for change's sake, to the detriment of all users.
Computer UI needs a cultural foundation, so software can be usable by many many generations.
But with the state of desktop OSes, with OSX in an increasingly walled fortress, Windows still doing the horrible dual-desktop with tiles and other insanities, and Linux just... failing, we regressed it seems around 2005-2010 and now nothing will fix the sad state of affairs.
I used to re-enable the menu bar in Firefox and Atom all the time, until I realized I never used 95% of it and the remaining 5% could be accessed from elsewhere, saving me some vertical space.
I don't like having a menu bar on top. I prefer the Windows-style UX with all the OS widgets and windows list tucked in a bottom bar. (I tolerate the top bar in Pop Shell because its great tile management means I don't need to use the mouse too much for navigating).
I do agree with the author's point about discoverability, though. There's a lot of room to improve there.
> Why on earth would I ever want to switch to a “wrong” (that is, non-matching) keyboard language? Mac OS X had this, in my opinion, counter-productive menu
Because sometimes I play video games and sometimes these games have hardcoded keybindings that assume I have a QWERTY keyboard, and if I want to be able to play the game at all I need to play along.
Now, sure, there's room for improvement. Maybe we don't need a keyboard shortcut to change the language mode, as long as there's a top-level menu that gives me a way to do that.
But a UX designed by the author wouldn't give me either of those options. Because the author never met that use-case, and therefore assumed the use-case didn't exist.
ps. I know of the original Lindows :D. pps. q4os w/Trinity DE is really close
There's a menu bar at the top of the screen with, ya know, menus. Applications can have one, more than one, or ZERO windows open. UI conventions, keyboard shortcuts, etc are consistent.