Samuel Sieb writes:
On 1/10/22 17:38, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> Someone who's already used traditional desktop environments, with desktop
> shortcut icons, a taskbar (on top or the bottom), with something that looks
> like a "Start" menu, a tray, a pager, and a few other familiar UI icons –
> someone like that should be able to hit the ground running with XFCE.
Of course, if you're going to use the exact same interactions, then you
probably don't need instructions. But if you always keep everything the
same as it has always been, then where is the chance for improvement? Or do
you think Windows 95 was the ultimate desktop interface and there can never
be anything better? That's basically what you're describing. :-)
A chance for what kind of improvement, specifically? If you believe you can
show me some kind of an improvement, then show me. But then if I'm also told
that I have to read the documentation and learn the right keyboard shortcuts
to get anything accomplished, then I'm going to have a little bit of trouble
getting convincened on what this end result is an improvement of.
This reminded me of one of the first "improvement"s that everyone
experienced in the early days of Gnome 3: the mouse, and the scrollbar.
Before Gnome 3 clicking on an open scrollbar area outside of the scrollbar's
knob ended up scrolling the viewport exactly one page in the direction of
the click. Everyone knew how that worked. But this was "improved" in Gnome
3. Now, doing the same warped the viewport to that absolute position. The
former behavior, advance the viewport by one page, turned into a right mouse
button click.
I was not the only one who called out this clusterfark. In response a claim
was made that this is an "improvement" of some kind. But there was some
struggle to explain exactly how that was an "improvement". There was some
handwaving, citing to some mysterious UI studies cited, somewhere, that
showed this to be the "right" UI. Finally an obscure setting was presented
that restored the previous behavior. Here: do this, go back to your UI that
worked this way for decades, have it your way, don't bother us because we're
busy with more improvements.
I distinctly remember tweaking that knob even though I already used XFCE at
that point, because XFCE is based on GTK. I just realized that late last
year I reinstalled F34 from scratch, and I've been clicking my way on
scrollbars without noticing anything amiss. I could be wrong, but I suspect
that there was another improvement, at some point in the last 7-8 years,
that improved on the original improvement.
Sake for the sake of change is not an improvement.