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I mean, whatever you think about modern linux desktops, but this comment seems a bit strange here, as this appears this is a project with the exact goal of delivering an experience of an early 2000s Desktop that some people seem to like.
I gotta say with so much slowdown in newer windows, macos, Linux desktop ui toolkits compared to stuff that ran lightning fast in 2004 stuff like this is refreshing.
But the rest of your point stands. Like MATE, the entire point is to maintain a UX standard for a group of people that grew attached to the old UI. Similar to people that ran Classic Theme on Windows XP/Vista/7.
Which even with the civil GUI war chaos, are easier to manage through than Linux desktop has been during its lifetime.
I agree with you, but I don't think age or time are the fundamental issue here.
Windows 98 is is 25 years old, and still looks better than almost all Linux desktop environments today, or Linux environments 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. Hell, it looks much better than Windows 10.
In my opinion, the visual appeal of an interface has little to do with age, and everything to do with: consistency, spacing and density, care for detail and, over everything else, good taste.
Sure, today we have a higher "ceiling". i.e. the best possible interface today is better than the best possible interface 30 years ago, thanks to better display technology, better input devices, etc. But we are nowhere near reaching that ceiling. It doesn't matter if my screen has 10 million pixels and can output 8 billion different colors if the UI that I display on it was developed by someone with the aesthetic sense of a 12 year old.
KDE Plasma[1] is the more modern-looking solution, but the aim of the DE is to do one thing well: provide a solid desktop environment. The stock styles look okay but can be customized in almost any way you like.
Why can't I just write I widget in PyQt and have it run without learning something completely new?
Think of it as JavaScript with different Qt widgets.
Not 2002, 2008. Trinity was forked after KDE3 was EOL.
I'm curious if they are keeping DCOP alive or have they embraced dbus?
IMHO GNOME looks more modern and refreshing (and definitely more innovative) than macOS or Windows. Sure, its UX is debatable, but no one can deny Microsoft and Apple haven't been plucking ideas from GNOME since 3.0 came out (given that I find GNOME 3 stupid, i think this is a bad thing).
Agreed, I prefer GNOME to anything else.
What ideas has Apple been plucking from GNOME 3?
(Also, double negations.)
This is quite literally frozen in time from the early 2000s, intentionally so too. Some of us prefer it that way.
If you want a modern UI Gnome or KDE are your choices.
As an open-source developer, I decided to change this state of affairs and create an ecosystem of open-source apps that focuses on user experience and aesthetics while not compromising power users. I've been doing this with my note-taking app Notes[1].
That's a good thing.
I would welcome a return to early 2000s human interface design. Everybody trying to emulate or surpass Apple took us down the road to ruin.
Besides, I think the sentiment that if it isn't flat and minimalistic then it is old-fashioned, betrays a bizarre lack of imagination on designers' part. Any time I mention skeuomorphism, 2.5D, shadows, density etc, people say I live in the 90s. Why? Are these features so onerous that one cannot conceive of a modern, or even trend-setting design that employs them? To me, this seems ludicrous. Designers brag about innovation and creativity. OK, then, here is a challenge: stop aping Apple and design tomorrow's skeuomorphic, dense, slick, rich Desktop UI.
I just want a really solid, wholly original 90's style high-relief theme for GTK/Cinnamon and Qt. I used to use the old 2000 theme on Windows XP and 7 with some darker colors, it looked and felt great.
My biggest pet peeves in Linux desktop land are with the polish, not the behavior. But then again, I’ve standardized on 1080P across the board for years, so I’m not the kind of person too caught up in visual minutiae.
Have you seen modern GNOME 44 or KDE 5? This is just patently false.
Since I asked somebody else to be specific, I feel that I should be specific.
The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable.
A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually hidden, minor feature. That's bad design. GNOME is actively hostile to beginners and less proficient users.
In the meantime, its fans claim that it is very keyboard centric, but it does not respect the existing keyboard controls established by Windows and indeed GNOME 2. I was already keyboard power user, but GNOME 3 breaks my workflow for no good reason.
Keyboard centric design is good, but you need to respect existing keyboard controls and existing user interface conventions before attempting to improve upon them. It seems to me that the designers of the GNOME 3 desktop had a very little knowledge of the existing keyboard controls, and simply invented a new set without understanding the existing tooling. Given the extremely fondness and respect for legacy editors such as VI and Emacs, which have heavily keyboard centric design which has not been changed in 40 years so as not to inconvenience skilled users, the same principles should apply to a graphical desktop.
People looking for an editor are told to just learn these 1970s user interfaces. Well, people designing a desktop should just learn those 1990s user interfaces.
The removal of true title bars is a significant impediment to usability. I am using a WIMP desktop and I want to be able to minimise, maximise, roll up, and send windows the back of the stack; none of these possible with GNOME.
I read and write in English language, using the Latin alphabet. This reads from top to bottom of page. Therefore after I have read the contents of a dialog box, that is when I make a decision what to do. Therefore after the contents of the dialogue box is the correct place for the action buttons. Putting them in the fake title bar at the top, before I decide what to do, is a reversal: it is putting the cart before horse.
I do not normally store files on my desktop, except the temporary holding place, but I do use it as a convenient place to store convenient shortcuts to my normal working folders. It's my computer, and therefore I get to choose where to store things. It is not the position of the desktop designers to decide that I cannot store things on the desktop.
One of the major innovations of user interface design in the mid 1990s was a hierarchical view of my folders in the file manager. GNOME removed this. To remove important working features is bad design. To decide on behalf of users which features are important or not and remove some them without soliciting feedback is bad design for an allegedly community centred project.
While having global system search is a useful facility, defaulting to searching for existing files inside the Save dialogue is a deeply stupid move which inconveniences me every single time that I use a GNOME based application.
Intentionally removing features from the underlying GTK toolkit, and making substantial changes which substantially inconvenience third-party apps using that toolkit, is a community hostile move. This is the sort of behaviour that I expect from proprietary software vendors, not allegedly open source projects.
Those are just a few of the first irritations that come to mind in what I consider to be an extremely user hostile design.
> The horizontal panel across the top of the screen is an egregious waste of space, especially on modern widescreen displays where vertical pixels are valuable.
OSX has a similar toolbar, windows has a much bigger one at the bottom. It is valuable space, but I think it is well-used, will come back to it later.
> A graphical task switcher was one of the most substantial UI improvements in Windows 95. GNOME banishers this to usually hidden, minor feature. That's bad design. GNOME is actively hostile to beginners and less proficient users.
It is available by a single flick of the mouse (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized) for beginners/when you are constrained to mouse/(minor point but even on touchscreen). For power users there is the super key, and for laptop users the swipe up with 3 fingers in a smooth motion is easily the best way to get to the activities tab. Besides the “task switcher” at the bottom, I personally am much quicker to discern which application I want to switch to based on how I expect it to look, vs an icon. Windows didn’t add a popup of how it looks for no reason to their task switcher.
> keyboard
It is quite customizable (if nothing else, by plugins), but I think it is unfair to take it as a negative that gnome2 hotkeys no longer work. It is quite clearly not an incremental change from that, for that go with Mate.
> titlebar
I am undecided on whether it’s a good thing or not. Your previously mentioned vertical space problem is literally the reasoning behind that, so it is not made on a whim. Otherwise, I have never really rolled up a window for real use, besides playing with animations back in the compiz days. I don’t find it useful. Minimization is also an interesting question - there could definitely be improvements here (maybe the sketch area of i3 and alia be a better option?), but it is absolutely usable. I usually just make multiple desktops and group activity-relevant windows on a same one.
> I do not normally store files on my desktop, except the temporary holding place, but I do use it as a convenient place to store convenient shortcuts to my normal working folders. It's my computer, and therefore I get to choose where to store things. It is not the position of the desktop designers to decide that I cannot store things on the desktop.
Feel free to reenable that with a single extension.
> file manager
You can use any file manager, it should not be a criticism of the Gnome DE, just because it runs under the same project. The same is true for your criticism of GTK.
> OSX has a similar toolbar
No, it does not, because it's not similar.
It may look similar but this is not about looks, it's about structure and function. ("S&F" is a specific term in evolutionary biology.)
The OS X top panel is a menu bar. It is a core part of the UI. It contains 3 functional areas, none of which GNOME has.
1. The leftmost entry is the Apple system menu. Click on it, and you get system-wide options such as "about this Mac" and so on. 2. Then there is the app menu. The name tells you useful info: the current app. It has options global to that app, such as preferences and quit, in a standard place. 3. Then there is the app's own menu bar, which varies app to app. 4. Then at the right is the system's notification area, which has global applets, a clock and so on, visually separated. GNOME has a vestige it's trying to banish.
That's 4 important functions, just one of which GNOME implements badly.
Not the same thing. MacOS gives me a lot in return for that strip. GNOME wastes it.
> Windows has a much bigger one at the bottom.
Again, not even comparable. Until the broken Win11, you could move it. You can't in GNOME. It does a tonne of stuff; it's a launcher and a switcher and an info display and a status monitor. That's efficient use of space. GNOME moves less than 50% of this to the favourites bar and then hides it. That is not efficient: that's wasteful.
> It is available by a single flick of the mouse
No, it is hidden by default, that is the point here. I do not want my UI to hide stuff from me. It is there to tell me stuff. If it doesn't tell me it is not doing its job. Tell me, or don't do it. Hiding info from a person is called lying. I do not want my desktop to lie to me.
> (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized)
Which is why macOS puts the menus there. GNOME wastes this vital functionality.
> For power users there is the super key
Bogus.
1. I don't have one. 2. How should I know that? Where does it tell me? 3. Why is the keyboard for power users?
> and for laptop users the swipe up with 3 fingers in a smooth motion is easily the best way to get to the activities tab.
Easily the best? Prove it. That is an assertion of fact. That means it needs evidence.
Personally I loathe gestures and I turn off my trackpad. I know how to use all 3 buttons on my mouse; the GNOME devs do not, because they have removed the core "send to back" function that is far quicker than any PITA gestures.
> Besides the “task switcher” at the bottom, I personally am much quicker to discern which application I want to switch to based on how I expect it to look, vs an icon. Windows didn’t add a popup of how it looks for no reason to their task switcher.
Good for you. Me, I read words. I want words over pics.
> keyboard
It is quite customizable (if nothing else, by plugins), but I think it is unfair to take it as a negative that gnome2 hotkeys no longer work. It is quite clearly not an incremental change from that, for that go with Mate.
>> titlebar > > I am undecided on whether it’s a good thing or not. Your previously mentioned vertical space problem is literally the reasoning behind that, so it is not made on a whim.
False comparison. The space is still wasted.
> Otherwise, I have never really rolled up a window for real use, besides playing with animations back in the compiz days.
Speak for yourself. I did.
> I don’t find it useful.
I did. I want it. It's been taken from me. Says who? Why is that right? Why wasn't I asked? Is this a community project or an autocracy?
> I usually just make multiple desktops and group activity-relevant windows on a same one.
I only use them on laptops when I have just 1 screen. Normally I have 2 or 3 screens. GNOME sucks at multiscreen.
Forcing me to use a kludgy replacement for missing hardware is bad design. Not supporting the hardware properly is worse.
> Feel free to reenable that with a single extension.
No.
1. Extensions break GNOME upgrades. 2. It is again stealing functions I want from me. Bad design. 3. The bolted-back-on functions are crude and only half functional. 4. Chesterton's fence: don't remove something if you don't know why it's there.
> You can use any file manager, it should not be a criticism of the Gnome DE
False. It 100% is part of the GNOME DE and so it is fair target. It is a poor design if the user has to fix it. Assume I have no root privs. Make what is bundled work. Don't lean on others.
> No, it is hidden by default, that is the point here. I do not want my UI to hide stuff from me. It is there to tell me stuff. If it doesn't tell me it is not doing its job. Tell me, or don't do it
With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs. Otherwise why would you roll up your window? Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?
> > (Fitt’s law: the corner is basically infinite sized) > Which is why macOS puts the menus there. GNOME wastes this vital functionality
That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.
The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key. Also often called Meta. You can achieve the same through the UI. Keyboard is often said to be for power users because they are not self-documenting. What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.
> Is this a community project or an autocracy?
It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..
> GNOME sucks at multiscreen
Literally every OS and distro suck at it.
Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point, so I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.
It used to. Now they are all collapsed into a single drop-down thing. (Which is not a panel, BTW. A panel is a toolbar that is permanently attached to the edge of a window or screen.)
Why? Who decided this? Who got to vote on it? What is the benefit?
I used to use an addon called "Extend Panel Menu" to split these into much more useful separate controls: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1201/extend-panel-men...
Of course, GNOME broke it in a later release. This is why no amount of extensions are an answer: they break. Extensions do not work from one release of GNOME to another, and when they fail, the whole desktop often fails.
> Also, it’s not really Gnome’s fault that linux doesn’t have as great metadata from apps to be able to display the apps’ menubars (unity could do it).
False. Gtk exposes this; Unity didn't have stored metadata on lots of apps, it just displayed the existing controls' contents somewhere else. If you run brand new Gtk apps on Unity today, they get panel menus. This was not some clever hack.
Unity is still around:
The distro is back again:
Brand new apps, like Waterfox, integrate with it fine although they did not exist when it was written.
> With all due respect, that is bullshit reasoning. Selectively displaying useful things is the whole point of UIs.
I disagree.
1. I want to choose what is shown or not. In order to choose, I have to be able to see it.
2. In other words, it needs to be there at first, and then I can choose whether I want to show it or not. If I can't see it in the first place, then how am I to know it's there?
3. It's the users' choice what is shown or not. It is not up to the developer to say "they don't need to see this and I'm going to hide it away."
Any piece of software that does that is user hostile.
> Otherwise why would you roll up your window?
Again: it's my choice. I get to choose. It's my computer. They are my windows. I choose if they are shown or not.
That is the point of free software: Choice.
GNOME says it's free, but it takes choices away from me. I object to that.
> Why do you have menus in the first place that hide their content until clicked?
To save space for my document. You can't show everything all the time: that is why you leave it up to the user to choose what they show and when.
(Incidentally, this is also why in my opinion the Microsoft ribbon based fluent interface fails. It tries to show far too much all at once, and the result is that it wastes a huge amount of screen space, and is actually more difficult to hunt through for what I need when I need it.)
> That is no longer the corner, so it doesn’t benefit from this law at all.
False.
Fitt's law is about target size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...
It is not about corners. It is about edges too.
By the way I do have a clue about this stuff... for example here is a screenshot of a piece of software which I designed about a dozen years which makes use of Fitt's Law.
https://twitter.com/SimplicityComps/status/54085863397497241...
> The super key is the same as the windows, or the mac command key.
So, yes, but those environments don't suddenly change your entire screen.
> Also often called Meta.
That is a different key. Meta and super are not interchangeable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_key
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_key_(keyboard_button)
> What’s the problem here exactly? Is alt+f4 written over the screen? Or ctrl+c? Especially that the same behavior is expected from the windows start menu.
The problem here, as I'm attempting to spell out, is that there were existing conventions for this stuff, and GNOME does not respect them.
> It’s a community for its users. You clearly don’t use it nor contribute to it either by work or financially, so it is not really fair to ask someone else to work for you specifically..
No. What I do is, I write about it for a living. I analyse this stuff, I draw comparisons, I point out weaknesses and strengths. That's my job.
In my professional capacity, the GNOME foundation invited me to its GUADEC conference about six or seven years back. I asked a lot of awkward and difficult questions, because that's my job, and I didn't get invited back.
> Literally every OS and distro suck at it.
False. For example, using most other interfaces, such as XFCE, I can treat a multiscreen desktop as one big space. I can have one panel at the far left, and one on the far right, of the entire multi-monitor desktop.
But GNOME doesn't let me do that.
Why not?
> Nonetheless, I feel you are reasoning from a very biased point
Because I disagree with you, you think that I'm biased?
Do you think that everyone who disagrees with you is biased?
Have you considered that perhaps I have opinions, and can draw upon years of knowledge and experience, and make reasoned arguments based on evidence, and that is not the same thing as being biased?
> I don’t think it is as fruitful a discussion.
So because I can counter your arguments with examples and reasoning, you don't think that it's fruitful discussion?
Personally, I think that the arguments where people can defend their points, and produce evidence to back them up, are the most fruitful kind.
Don't you?
Not because we disagree, because you are talking out of emotion, while I am not. Also, many of your supposed arguments/evidences are just hand-wavy emotional statements.
I’m fine with disagreeing with someone, or even if someone can change my mind, but I don’t see it happening here, and mind you, I simply like Gnome’s UX more or less, but not to a degree where I would get blinded by it.
You do not like Gnome. That’s completely fair, subjective opinion - though you seem to be actively hating it, which is I believe way too strong of an emotion to feel, but you do you.
Your arguments are not logical, and don’t conclude what you say they do. That’s a fact. Just look at the bullshit you wrote about menus and how they are good, while what gnome does is bad — menus also don’t show you what they hide! They don’t start out opened, like come on! They are exactly analogous to what gnome does with the task bar - you just have been using one for decades, and the other is new. But then say that you don’t like new things — completely fair, and feel free to use xfce or whatever! People really dislike change, being a designer is not a kind job, no matter how objectively good your work is. But let’s not post-facto “reason” yourself into that position, because that’s just made up bullshit brains are very good at — we like to build up a reasoning from the emotional conclusion backwards, and not the correct way.
"Why does this replica of a 68 Ford Mustang look like it's stuck in the 1960s?"
I dislike many UX decisions that Apple have made last 15 years. But I greatly appreciate their consistency and a presence of a design language. Last time I saw a consistent design language on Windows was Windows XP.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel
Why can't I install UI themes which makes the UI look like whatever I want? Why does the user interface of the Apple user next to me have to look exactly the same as mine?
(I'm also mainly an Apple user, and I don't like some 'traditional' Linux desktop clunkiness - mainly related to the touchpad - but criticizing a desktop environment (which the user is free to install or uninstall) for its looks is a bit ridiculous - especially from a user of a system where replacing the desktop environment isn't even possible).
That's completely subjective.
Whether you like the look or not depends on one's tastes.
On the objective metrics that I care about, many Linux desktops outshine the macos desktop by far.
I mean, cmon, no snapping windows? Few virtual workspace management options?
Once you go to install stuff things are made of different tool kits. In principle it is the same for macOS. Yes, all Apple stuff mostly are consistent. There are lots of dialogs inside System Preferences that seem old and not migrated. Also, once you install MS office, and other dev. stuff from macports things go weird.
This looks old because it is a fork of KDE 3. To Trinity's developers and users, the '00s form and function is a feature, not a defect.
I miss the macos input controls about a hundred times more than I miss the window manager.
Design is subjective, I'm taking PopOS custom GNOME over OSX any day of the week.
There are some mighty nice setups that look far more attractive than anything Microsoft or Apple have put out recently.
This is the case for Gnome, KDE, XFCE and probably others too.
You can install whatever font macOS is using, then get icons that look like the ones from macOS, cursors, then a GTK or Qt theme. And now it will look essentially the same.