I find these buttons at the top extremely confusing, as I often - from my experience with reading - after I've dealt with the subject at hand (in this case, picking a file), assume the natural place to confirm my choice would be after it (i.e. below it).
What are the UX arguments for placing the confirm buttons at the top of a dialog?
Making Confirm/Cancel buttons this way makes no sense. I'll assume they added this just because it looks cool, as someone mentioned as well.
Original small screen iPhone, where it's easier to reach the top than the bottom, and it's less likely to be an accidental touch.
But now it's cargo-culted everywhere.
With phones, it's always been easier to reach the bottom. This is why tab bars have always been at the bottom. This is why soft keyboards have always been at the bottom. This is why Apple moved Safari's controls to the bottom by default.
But I see that the other Unix machine most Gnome developers use is a Macbook, so they try to make things familiar, because they sort of like that UI. (Those who don't but still want a coherent desktop can pick KDE.)
Did anybody care enough to try?
(I personally don't; I use the file manager for any views I want, and drag the files from it onto an app, or onto a file chooser dialog. That feature, which is also present in macOS, was very much worth reproducing.)
I’d love to watch an eye tracking study of it in use.
it comes from gnome developers wanting to do things different for difference's sake.
it makes no sense and brings no advantage. truly an unnecessary change.
The title bar is supposed to be a mostly empty expanse that you can grab with a mouse. Now it's littered with controls, and I can hardly bring windows to focus or move them around without accidentally searching something or confirming something.
"less vertical space" so let's have a hamburger menu on a desktop screen. Right next to the window close button.
"less vertical space" so let's have a tiny search icon right next to the select button
"less vertical space" so let's have search consistently in the left corner, no in the middle, no to the right
"less vertical space", so let's have tabs, buttons, icons, and hamburger menu in one row. There's no space for the actual title or little space to drag the window? But THERE'S LESS VERTICAL SPACE ENJOY
Pretty bold of you to assume such thought process occurred at any point during design. Someone just thought "this looks good", where good may mean "modern-looking", "trendy", or "looks great on a screenshot for a product page", and slapped the button there.
Of course, laptops used with their builtin display and keyboard are a usability disaster already, so that shouldn’t be a criterion.
Is it decision from GTK or XFCE team ? I almost put the blame on XFCE team for this, :-(
Can app devs who use GTK library overwrite this style?
Anyway, good thing we all have a wealth of choices. If you don’t like Gnome, there’s a huge universe of choices available to you! Long live OSS.
For example replacing a desktop wallpaper with a solid color required manual config changes. Even Windows 95 let me do this from the GUI. Removing the wallpaper is useful for VNC connections for example.
Less features means less to maintain (which is important for an open source, free product).
Until AlphaCode can maintain a codebase as large as gnome, we should probably keeping the workload of open source devs as small as possible.
Just please dont take away tree view...
I like the fat title bar with controls. It's like the Windows 7/macOS aesthetic without wasting space for a title bar above it.
To me, the people complaining that the save button should be on the bottom instead of the top have the same limited view as the people who complain that macOS has the window controls on the top left instead of the top right. It's an arbitrary difference that they claim goes against human intuition but I have seen no proof of any of that, only assumptions based on what direction they read in.
I don't use the save button, I hit enter after typing a name. I don't hit the open button, I double click. Maybe that makes me weird, but I think the "problem" is grossly overstated.
Seems to me like some people just want to go back to the GNOME2 days and that's fine. I may think it looks janky and outdated, but that's what some people like.
Luckily, they don't need to use modern GNOME, there are projects out there that replicate the older design style. I don't see what constantly harping on the newer UI adds if you're not going to be happy with it anyway. Unlike with Windows, where I sorely miss the glory days of Windows Aero, there are alternatives one click of a button away. Just install something else, anything else. KDE and LXDE allow you to recreate your weird old setup with some tweaking, go use that.
However, I do have some problems with the way the GNOME team operates sometimes. There have been attempts to address the file picker problem that went absolutely nowhere. The decision to completely abandon all styling options also disappointed me. The unreasonable demand of forcing client side decorations onto everyone because of their preference annoys me greatly. I like the stuff made for GNOME on GNOME but I wouldn't use it on any other desktop environment or operating system because the "let's do everything ourselves" approach makes applications look incredibly out of place.
Of course, the constant ranting about any change that doesn't turn GNOME back into GNOME2 only drives forward the segregation between devs and their users. After all, if nothing GNOME does is ever any good according to the loud minority, why even bother listening to them?
The most used Linux distros out there are Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu, all of which ship GNOME out of the box. There's a good reason for that.
At least Microsoft, Apple and Google have the market share, and economic incentives to justify putting up with rewrites.
They are talking about it on a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027754
Do you feel that the crowded title bar design decisions are aesthetically pleasing and usable? (would really like to know the opinion on these topics from users that like how it's been done, instead of users who hate it, for a change)
It’s obviously not for everyone, but I like it. I also appreciate the focus and the way they cut out features that add complexity and inconsistency to the UI. So, I’m general, I’m a fan. It’s not perfect, but I like it a whole lot.
If only the usability was as good as the visual design...
Like one of the screenshots has in the title bar a looking glass, three tabs, a check mark in a circle, a hamburger, and the close button. What am I even looking at?
But Microsoft never got the memo.
A 2-D array of lit pixels. Any other interpretation is on you!
Menu bars are terrible! Visually navigating a tree structure via mousing is a nightmare, especially if the whole thing disappears or radically shifts if you mouse a few pixels off. Visually scanning huge, variable chunks of the screen is inefficient, awkward, and a burden.
Everything that you can do with those nasty, collapsible visual hierarchies can be done way more efficiently and way more accessibly via a nice search interface with fuzzy filtering and autocompletion.
When it's actually fast and unencumbered by bullshit like advertisements, something like Spotlight or the modern Windows start search is infinitely better than crap like the Windows 9x start menu.
If you've ever coached someone through navigating a graphical, hierarchical menu they've never seen before, you know how painfully slow all that mental processing actually is. Even a hunt and peck typist will be faster in most cases, as all they have to type is at most a handful of letters. Menu bars suck in the exact same way, and they ought to be either eliminated or replaced in the same way as ye olde start menu, too.
Edit: this is something that can be fixed but it requires well funded attention and there just isn’t that because the commercial opportunity is entirely on the server.
they seem to have simply removed the gradients and it just looks half baked with only flat colours
Look at GTK1: https://gtk-gnutella.sourceforge.net/images/shots/092/gnutel...
It looks good. Sharp fonts, good use of space, clearly recognizable widgets, application doesn't treat users like idiots.
What do we have now? Fuzzy-ass fonts (except on phones where DPI>400), huge margins, barely recognizable widgets, GNOME applications written for people in comas.
Way too many random vertical and horizontal lines going everywhere. A mix of text way too close to other controls right next to whitespace controls. Outlines intersecting with the text they're highlighting when there's plenty of space around them. Drag&drop bars that attract way too much attention with how textured they are.
I personally like the modern, simpler designs better. The aesthetic of late 90s UI were great but their designs were often a hodgepodge of whatever control the developers could fit onto the screen, with resize bars placed to let the user overcome the crammed design on demand.
I don't know what your working system looks like, but my fonts aren't fuzzy. The margins are visually pleasing and the widgets are quite intuitive because they're used consistently.
Feel free to go back to the old ways with Chicago 95 and LXDE. It's not exactly Windows 95, but it's pretty damn close. But please don't bring back the jank of overcrammed late 90s UI design, you'll only scare people away.
Mac OS X Server/Rhapsody v, where they basically mixed NeXTSTEP and Mac OS 9, and early Mac OS X releases (before brushes metal) were also nice. All downhill from there… now get off my lawn! ;)
I find modern UIs much more aesthetically pleasing than that GTK1 pic, by far.
- The applications-places-system menu. As said in other post the other day, it was so clever to have all the stuff in your computer categorized in those three categories. You knew at first sight, even if you've never ever used GNOME2 before, where to send your mouse when reaching something, it wasn't a guess game like in Mac or that cram-everything-in-one-button like the Windows start menu - not to talk about the 'moving around your mouse through the whole screen to launch an app' like GNOME3/4 itself.
- Clearlooks was the pinnacle of theming in Linux. Easily readable/scanneable and beautiful by default, 'themeable' up to the tiniest detail with a readable CSS-like syntax (I'm fuzzy on the details but seem to recall it wasn't a feature exclusive of Clearlooks). I concede Adwaita inherited visual inspiration from Clearlooks, but now with GNOME4 they decided to ditch it altogether. For some reason.
- Technological aspects aside which I won't talk about because you people know much more than me on that, but restricting the user to customize their GNOME install was an double-edge sword they seem didn't thought much through. GNOME2 had an almost perfect balance between simplicity and customization capabilities; whereas with GNOME3 upwards it is up to devs decide many things (and it seems those decisions are based much on their criteria rather than their users...). That brought the unfortunate consequence of frustrating users with every unexpected change with releases, something didn't happened with GNOME2 (or maybe even before than that).
Gtk-classic is the only thing that keeps me sane https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
that and not having consistent ctrl+L hotkey to open the dialog that lets you access/enter a full path of a folder
And, ironically, touch support is currently broken, too.
Another sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDrZluH4mww.
but since fedora 37 scrolling is totally busted... think it only occurs on x (which i use over wayland for a dozen reasons). its pretty brutal tbh, scrolling is kind of... fundamental.
> One of the reasons is to enable new features. Such as a grid view for the file chooser. It only took us 18 years! You can see the original feature request in Bugzilla. This is easily possible now because GtkListView and GtkGridView can use the same data models.
This is exactly why I do not use GNOME. Absolute insanity.
An application can consistently be made using the same primitives that are flexible, themable, performant, etc.
It is actually really nice.
- Those who want to bring about The Year Of The Linux Desktop and believe this can be brought about by removing every remotely complicated feature under the sun.
- Those who think the only purpose of GUIs is to display multiple terminals side by side.
I can't figure out how my workflow is that different from other linux users or if I'm just part of the silent majority. Literally all I ask of my DE is:
- the super+search thing i mentioned above - run the following programs fullscreen: terminator, intellij, pycharm, vscodium, firefox
And... that's just it. Oh wait, one more thing:
- make video, wifi, audio, multiple monitors etc just work
It's in service of that last one that I've been pretty happy with Gnome 3 the whole time it's been out. None of their shuffles or excisions have interrupted my workflow, so I don't mind it at all.
KDE, GNOME, etc. usually don't only consist of an app launcher, but a file browser, text editor, archive manager, browser, image viewer and who knows what else.
I never understood this tribalism, doesn't the spirit of open source mean that I'm free to choose the tools of my liking, may the best tool win, etc.?
This certainly the case on Windows, where people usually just replace tools to their liking.
Most distros usually strongly push the desktop environment's native apps for every niche.
Honestly, I think the latest version of gnome-screenshot that has been directly integrated into the DE is amazing.
I swear that my initial reading of the title was "74 Decades Later", and I smiled because it fitted the feeling of how late this addition is arriving. Then I realized it'd be a bit strange that they used this kind of snarky sarcasm on their own blog, and had to re-read again the title.
Also,
> This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite ...
read to me as
> this (lack of an essential and basic UI feature) was only caused by the typical "let's rewrite everything" movement that started more than a decade ago
I know HNers are very sceptical of the technical merits (or their lack thereof) that ground-up rewrites usually have. I only hope in some years, GTK 5 or 6 doesn't decide to trash all this work and starts from scratch again.
Regardless, my congratulations to the people who pushed through and contributed their effort to make thumbnails back!
The whole "we needed to rewrite everything" is complete nonsense anyway. There are THREE patches posted on the issue tracker over a period of more than 10 years. They work well, too; people have maintained out-of-tree patches for this (IIRC there's even an AUR package for it in Arch Linux).
GTK developers simply chose to ignore this. They explicitly solicited patches in that issue and then ignored those patches. Not "this patch needs work", just nothing. I get that reviewing patches is work too, but you can't solicit patches for an often-requested feature and then just ignore them. Well, you can, obviously, but it makes you an asshole. When a few years later someone pointed out the latest patch on GitLab it got shot down with a shitty snide "we're not going to look at random patches" comment and had the topic lock (it was on the old/now-deprecated BugZilla).
But hey, got to have some historical revisionism to justify your shitty toxic behaviour towards volunteers and users.
I feel pretty salty about it. Don't say patches welcome if they're not, and don't apply selective burdens of evidence in favour of including a particular change.
Some of them have huge egos and are stubborn as anything. If something wasn't their idea originally it can be a real uphill battle regardless of how sensible it is. Convince them it was their idea and suddenly the gates are open.
That bug is probably similarly old as this one.
I still think this should have happened 10 years ago at least tough.
I've talked to the Gtk devs about this and they say that 3 is will not be fixed, ever. They won't even accept patches because gtk/gtk/gtkfilechooserwidget.c is so cursed.
I hate to be the person who just complains about Gnome, but… a few years ago, you could type into the file chooser, and it would search, quickly, for matching files and folders and display them. Then it broke and didn’t get fixed for years. Once it got fixed, you see matches, but if you actually try to select a matching folder, you hit really hilariously bad bugs that wouldn’t pass the briefest test.
Maybe Gnome could focus on getting old functionality working?
The most annoying thing these days is how they're all different. I just want one (and honestly, I'd love it to be my hacky fzf solution, but again, modular)
This is not the technical problem, that's for sure. Maybe GNOME finally got a real UX expert from IBM :)
I had few talks about it with GNOME devs, they said mostly "this is not a problem!" , "go fix it yourself!" and "we're volunteers, pay us". Most of it was in aggressive manner, just like in Trump supporters community.
Glad I'm done with GNOME for now.
