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1. Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 03:55:43 JST Aral Balkan

   Looks like things are about to get more mysterious and bouncy in #GNOME and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

   The GNOME folks are looking for feedback on removing app names from the top bar and adding a bounce animation when switching windows.

   I feel both are regressions. The app name is an important landmark and the bounce animation made me queasy (I don’t have motion sensitivity)

   Test it out with this extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5612/focus-indicator/

   Leave constructive feedback: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/window-focus-call-for-testing/13277/65

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 03:58:24 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     PS. I wrote a bit more about what could be done instead in my feedback on GNOME’s discussion forum: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/window-focus-call-for-testing/13277/65?u=aral

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 04:40:08 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe Good design demands intelligent defaults. That doesn’t preclude you from then layering the seams so people can customise their experience if they so wish.

     GNOME’s approach of making the hard decisions is the right way to do design. Sometimes you make the wrong ones. That’s normal. You iterate and learn.

     What doesn’t work is a committee-based or “loudest wins” approach that occurs in FOSS (and GNOME isn’t immune to this either).

   • Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 04:40:09 JST Fish Id Wardrobe

     in reply to

     @aral The underlying problem here is the same one Gnome has been exhibiting for a long time now: they decide how your computer behaves, not you. One-size-fits-all is not in any way Linux-y.

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 04:48:19 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Denny

     @denny I disagree (both that they borrowed the current interface from macOS and about the app menu). GNOME has its own internally consistent design language and stands quite clearly apart from both macOS and Windows.

     At this point, I prefer it to macOS as a desktop interface on my dev machine.

     (The problem is, of course, that that’s an apples to oranges comparison as you’re comparing a component of an OS to a full OS. My reference is plain GNOME as integrated into on Fedora Silverblue.)

   • Denny (denny@boing.world)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 04:48:20 JST Denny

     in reply to

     @aral I think borrowing a load of UI behaviours from MacOS was the big backwards step (in particular, putting app menu separate at top of monitor instead of being part of the app window itself).

     Ever since then I have to reconfigure a load of stuff back to using 'old' style window switching etc every time I upgrade my installs, and live in fear of the day that becomes impossible.

   • Fish Id Wardrobe (fishidwardrobe@mastodon.me.uk)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 05:02:27 JST Fish Id Wardrobe

     in reply to

     @aral Agree strongly with your first para. But you can have *too many* design decisions. (Imagine if Lotus had decided that 123 could only total down, and not across, because _they_ felt it made more sense that way.) And I'm not seeing much customisation in Gnome compared to, say, KDE.

     Disclaimer: I walked away from using Gnome quite some time ago. Perhaps it's got better since at listening to users. But then again…

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Monday, 16-Jan-2023 05:02:27 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Fish Id Wardrobe

     @fishidwardrobe Give it a shot under Fedora Silverblue (or plain Fedora) sometime if you can and see how it feels :)