Hello Everyone,
Is there a tweak in GNOME to shrink the GUI? It's huge! There's so much wasted space. It's eating up a ton of my screen real estate and driving me bananas.
I like GNOME otherwise, I've been using it for 15 years or something silly like that and I don't want to move to a different desktop environment. But, if that's the most reasonable solution, then that's what I'll have to do.
Thanks,
Ranbir
On 3/31/23 16:34, Samuel Sieb wrote:
On 3/31/23 11:47, Ranbir wrote:
Is there a tweak in GNOME to shrink the GUI? It's huge! There's so much wasted space. It's eating up a ton of my screen real estate and driving me bananas.
What part do you think is so big? I find it's quite minimal.
I think so as well. Interested to learn the concern
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On Fri, 2023-03-31 at 17:32 -0400, Roger Wells wrote:
What part do you think is so big? I find it's quite minimal.
I think so as well. Interested to learn the concern
I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Fedora 37. I don't boot into Windows nearly as much as I do Fedora. But, when I do, I'm always struck by how much more I seem to be able to fit on my 3440x1440 display in Windows than I can in GNOME.
In GNOME, the font used is bigger, the window borders are thicker, buttons are bigger and there just seems to be more padding around everything. I don't understand why windows in GNOME have such a thick top bar. The Windows GUI in comparison is tighter and more compact (overall).
It's obviously a stylistic choice that GNOME has made. I just find it bulky and almost cartoonish. It's a clean look, for sure, but huge.
Did any of that help in understanding what I meant?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Ranbir m3freak@thesandhufamily.ca To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2023 04:00:19AM GMT+00:00 Subject: GNOME interface is too bulky
On Fri, 2023-03-31 at 17:32 -0400, Roger Wells wrote:
What part do you think is so big? I find it's quite minimal.
I think so as well. Interested to learn the concern
I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Fedora 37. I don't boot into Windows nearly as much as I do Fedora. But, when I do, I'm always struck by how much more I seem to be able to fit on my 3440x1440 display in Windows than I can in GNOME.
In GNOME, the font used is bigger, the window borders are thicker, buttons are bigger and there just seems to be more padding around everything. I don't understand why windows in GNOME have such a thick top bar. The Windows GUI in comparison is tighter and more compact (overall).
It's obviously a stylistic choice that GNOME has made. I just find it bulky and almost cartoonish. It's a clean look, for sure, but huge.
Did any of that help in understanding what I meant?
I had a friend who also thought this, I had recommended she try Fedora in one of its other iterations?....(KDE....XFCE....CInnamon) to see if something else might not be more to her liking...she ended up with KDE...and while its not Gnome?...it IS "Fedora" which matters the most!! Just a suggestion...
EGO II
On Mon, 2023-04-03 at 00:00 -0400, Ranbir wrote:
I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Fedora 37. I don't boot into Windows nearly as much as I do Fedora. But, when I do, I'm always struck by how much more I seem to be able to fit on my 3440x1440 display in Windows than I can in GNOME.
In GNOME, the font used is bigger, the window borders are thicker, buttons are bigger and there just seems to be more padding around everything. I don't understand why windows in GNOME have such a thick top bar. The Windows GUI in comparison is tighter and more compact (overall).
Much of that is adjustable. It used to be, and may still be, in Gnome. It definitely is with other desktops.
I use Mate, which looks more like the old Gnome, before they pretended a desktop was a tablet (which is when I abandoned Gnome), and it's configurable in it.
I wonder if you've accidentally used some form of screen scaling, or aren't running in your screen resolution.
What Tim says.
Check to make sure your resolution is right and check to make sure the screen scaling is right. I have had both not always work as expected on my 4k monitor. It almost seems as if the assumption is that 4k is running on a small screen(17" laptop maybe) so scaling needs to be 200% to see it by default.
On Sun, Apr 2, 2023 at 11:59 PM Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, 2023-04-03 at 00:00 -0400, Ranbir wrote:
I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Fedora 37. I don't boot into Windows nearly as much as I do Fedora. But, when I do, I'm always struck by how much more I seem to be able to fit on my 3440x1440 display in Windows than I can in GNOME.
In GNOME, the font used is bigger, the window borders are thicker, buttons are bigger and there just seems to be more padding around everything. I don't understand why windows in GNOME have such a thick top bar. The Windows GUI in comparison is tighter and more compact (overall).
Much of that is adjustable. It used to be, and may still be, in Gnome. It definitely is with other desktops.
I use Mate, which looks more like the old Gnome, before they pretended a desktop was a tablet (which is when I abandoned Gnome), and it's configurable in it.
I wonder if you've accidentally used some form of screen scaling, or aren't running in your screen resolution.
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On Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:19 -0400 Ranbir m3freak@thesandhufamily.ca wrote:
In GNOME, the font used is bigger, the window borders are thicker, buttons are bigger and there just seems to be more padding around everything. I don't understand why windows in GNOME have such a thick top bar. The Windows GUI in comparison is tighter and more compact (overall).
It's obviously a stylistic choice that GNOME has made. I just find it bulky and almost cartoonish. It's a clean look, for sure, but huge.
Did any of that help in understanding what I meant?
Makes sense. I don't use Gnome because I like the minimal desktop experience, and I am not a power user. I have been using LXDE, even though it is officially deprecated. I recently gave LXQT a try, and it seems to have a conflict with LXDE (probably the window manager, since LXDE is GTK and LXQT is qt), because after I tuned it, I couldn't restart LXDE with my main user. I decided to just keep using LXQT as my main desktop. I still use LXDE for other logins / users. My point here is that every desktop requires tuning to make it optimal for a user, and they have the tools to do so. In LXQT they are mostly accessed through preferences -> Appearance (I remember since I used them recently :-) )
I would be very surprised if Gnome doesn't have ways to tune the look and feel of their desktop if both LXDE and LXQT, minimal desktops, do. And I think the same would apply to XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, and KDE.
On 4/2/23 21:00, Ranbir wrote:
On Fri, 2023-03-31 at 17:32 -0400, Roger Wells wrote:
What part do you think is so big? I find it's quite minimal.
I think so as well. Interested to learn the concern
I have a dual boot system with Windows 10 and Fedora 37. I don't boot into Windows nearly as much as I do Fedora. But, when I do, I'm always struck by how much more I seem to be able to fit on my 3440x1440 display in Windows than I can in GNOME.
In GNOME, the font used is bigger, the window borders are thicker, buttons are bigger and there just seems to be more padding around everything. I don't understand why windows in GNOME have such a thick top bar. The Windows GUI in comparison is tighter and more compact (overall).
It's obviously a stylistic choice that GNOME has made. I just find it bulky and almost cartoonish. It's a clean look, for sure, but huge.
Did any of that help in understanding what I meant?
I use xfce so I'm not sure if this applies to gnome.
Under WindowManager -> Styles there are options that affect windows and borders. Any that have hdpi in their titles make things large, xhdpi makes them HUGE. There's one, Greybird, that eliminates borders (great on a browser) and lowers the profile on the top. On a 1920x1080 it freed ~1/2 inch or so in the height of a full height window. Greybird-dark is really nice if you're one of those people who don't enjoy the tanning booth effect of some themes. It also reduces the font-size on some things (I had to increase font-size to reply to this email using Thunderbird).
On Mon, 2023-04-03 at 14:29 +0930, Tim via users wrote:
Much of that is adjustable. It used to be, and may still be, in Gnome. It definitely is with other desktops.
I don't see where in GNOME I can adjust the font size. Do I need to use gsettings or something?
I wonder if you've accidentally used some form of screen scaling, or aren't running in your screen resolution.
I already checked that under Display: Scale is set to 100% and the resolution matches my monitor's native resolution.
It's GNOME itself that's off. It's just big! It's tidy, but fat.
On Mon, 2023-04-03 at 00:05 -0400, Edward G. O'Connor Jr. wrote:
I had a friend who also thought this, I had recommended she try Fedora in one of its other iterations?....(KDE....XFCE....CInnamon) to see if something else might not be more to her liking...she ended up with KDE...and while its not Gnome?...it IS "Fedora" which matters the most!! Just a suggestion...
Many moons agao, I started off with KDE. But, at some point I switched to GNOME because it looked cleaner (i.e. not so busy). I haven't used KDE in a very long time.
I used Enlightenment for a while, but that too was a long time ago. Of the three, I found it to be the thinnest and not huge, especially compared to GNOME.
Tim:
Much of that is adjustable. It used to be, and may still be, in Gnome. It definitely is with other desktops.
Ranbir:
I don't see where in GNOME I can adjust the font size. Do I need to use gsettings or something?
Some time ago Gnome minimised customisation options, and various things could only be adjusted by installing a gnome tweaks program. Perhaps try that.
I wonder if you've accidentally used some form of screen scaling, or aren't running in your screen resolution.
I already checked that under Display: Scale is set to 100% and the resolution matches my monitor's native resolution.
Can you scale it the other way?
It's GNOME itself that's off. It's just big! It's tidy, but fat.
You don't have to use it, I don't. I don't like it for various reasons.
Too CPU intensive (I don't have a fancy graphics card).
The removal of an organised menu to a disorganised array of several screens of icons. Trying to add a menu gave me a hideous alternative to the simple structured menu Gnome used to have (and Mate still does). FFS, why do modern GUI systems think that opening a menu should occupy 3/4 of the damn screen, filled with disorganised and continually changing contents, and having to drill down through bogus crap instead of just about one sub-menu and just rolling the mouse in and around?!
The desktop is not a touchscreen, stop trying to use a touchscreen style interface on all computers.
Icons, icons, icons! I can't find a damn thing by icons. The pictures are a very poor clue. I might remember one or two of highly regular use, but most mean nothing to me, and if they're in a different place than last time, I have to go hunting for it.
My Android phone and tablet, which these kinds of interfaces are meant for, are a pain to use when you have lots of applications. I watch friends scroll through multiple screenfulls trying to find what they're after. Mine's organised, one screen with categorised folders in it, and appropriate programs inside that.
Far too much effort is spent on making a desktop look like a work of art at the expensive of it being a computer that you use. I don't even see the desktop, it's covered by the stuff I'm actually doing.
I actually like taskbars. I can put status info I want to keep an eye on in them, I can remove crap that I don't care about. They're thin, and on the edges of the screen. I can easily switch between the half dozen apps I've got running simultaneously. Whacking great big squares of apps on the desktop are next to useless (they're behind other things).
I really do get sick of the re-inventing of the wheel in computing. Convenient things get taken away, and what was instantly doable becomes a six-step illogical procedure.
On Tue, 04 Apr 2023 10:39:25 +0930 Tim via users wrote:
Icons, icons, icons! I can't find a damn thing by icons.
Yes! A stop sign and an envelope are pretty much it for icons that make some sense, after those two it is all guesswork (and I wonder how the envelope will age with no one sending physical letters any longer :-).
Personally, I use the FVWM window manager and my own custom .fvwmrc file which doesn't completely change my interface every six months.
On 4/3/23 18:09, Tim via users wrote:
Too CPU intensive (I don't have a fancy graphics card).
I would be very surprised if your graphics device didn't have enough acceleration to run Gnome at a completely reasonable level. What CPU usage do you think is involved?
The removal of an organised menu to a disorganised array of several screens of icons. Trying to add a menu gave me a hideous alternative to the simple structured menu Gnome used to have (and Mate still does). FFS, why do modern GUI systems think that opening a menu should occupy 3/4 of the damn screen, filled with disorganised and continually changing contents, and having to drill down through bogus crap instead of just about one sub-menu and just rolling the mouse in and around?!
I find menus annoyingly slow. I love how I can press one key and just start typing to get the application I want. No mouse involved at all.
Icons, icons, icons! I can't find a damn thing by icons. The pictures are a very poor clue. I might remember one or two of highly regular use, but most mean nothing to me, and if they're in a different place than last time, I have to go hunting for it.
Not sure what you're referring to here.
My Android phone and tablet, which these kinds of interfaces are meant for, are a pain to use when you have lots of applications. I watch friends scroll through multiple screenfulls trying to find what they're after. Mine's organised, one screen with categorised folders in it, and appropriate programs inside that.
There are some different interfaces for Android phones. But at some point, there has to be a full list of applications so you can find them. But there's also usually a search field and once you find it, you can put it on your home screen to find it easier later.
I actually like taskbars. I can put status info I want to keep an eye on in them, I can remove crap that I don't care about. They're thin, and on the edges of the screen. I can easily switch between the half dozen apps I've got running simultaneously. Whacking great big squares of apps on the desktop are next to useless (they're behind other things).
I have too many windows for a taskbar to be useful. ALT-TAB and ALT-` work great. Also multiple desktops, so I can put certain applications on particular desktops making them easy to access.
I really do get sick of the re-inventing of the wheel in computing. Convenient things get taken away, and what was instantly doable becomes a six-step illogical procedure.
I'm mostly happy with the path that Gnome has taken and it does keep improving in general.
On 04/03/2023 07:09 PM, Tim via users wrote:
You don't have to use it, I don't. I don't like it for various reasons.
And let's not forget that it's bloatware, taking up far too much RAM, and that the only apparent way to get control of it is by using a number of third-party extensions that the devs understandably refuse to worry about when updating the DE.
Tim:
Icons, icons, icons! I can't find a damn thing by icons.
Tom Horsley:
Yes! A stop sign and an envelope are pretty much it for icons that make some sense, after those two it is all guesswork (and I wonder how the envelope will age with no one sending physical letters any longer :-).
On Evolution emailer, the first few menu bar buttons have icons & text:
New (message/folder/etc), send/receive, reply, group-reply, forward
They're as clear as day what they're for, and big enough to click on them easily.
The next few are tiny icons only, and only by hovering over them and waiting (an annoying delay), do you find out that the thing that looks like a paper shredder is print, the next one that looks like a volume knob is a wastepaper bin, the next one that looks like an iceberg is junk mail, the next one that looks like an iceberg with a red x is not- junk mail, there's a set of drawers which I just found out is to archive a mail (a function I've never used, and never will, though just tried it now and I have no idea where the message went), there's some back and forth arrows that I don't know if they mean next message in the thread or list (I never use them), and a stop sign (which ain't that great at aborting something that's going haywire).
You end up using just a few of them, and it tends to always be clicking second icon along, rather than clicking on icon with certain picture on it (because the pictures aren't intuitive).
And one or two hotkeys, because they're the only ones that stick in your mind.
On Mon Apr03'23 09:24:57PM, Tom Horsley wrote:
From: Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2023 21:24:57 -0400 To: users@lists.fedoraproject.org Reply-To: Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org Subject: Re: GNOME interface is too bulky
On Tue, 04 Apr 2023 10:39:25 +0930 Tim via users wrote:
Icons, icons, icons! I can't find a damn thing by icons.
Yes! A stop sign and an envelope are pretty much it for icons that make some sense, after those two it is all guesswork (and I wonder how the envelope will age with no one sending physical letters any longer :-).
Personally, I use the FVWM window manager and my own custom .fvwmrc file which doesn't completely change my interface every six months.
Wow, I used to use twm for a while, pre-Fedora, and then fvwm2, and then went to xfce briefly before pekwm and then settling on openbox. I make my own remix, and my wife who used to make fun of my desktop environment (shunya/zero) eventually adopted it, and does not want to go back. She went kde -> xfce -> lxde -> openbox. (She still makes fun of it though.)
There is something to be said for stability and backwards compatibility, which seems to be missing from at least a few modern software -- I was long ago given to understand that achieving 1.0 in a software version meant that backwards compatibility would be maintained in the future, however this does not seem to be the case anymore.
Unfortunately, I have read that openbox and other such window managers will stop working as wayland progresses without more development. I hope that is too long into the future.
Ranjan
Tim:
Too CPU intensive (I don't have a fancy graphics card).
Samuel Sieb:> I would be very surprised if your graphics device didn't have enough
acceleration to run Gnome at a completely reasonable level. What CPU usage do you think is involved?
Sure, it can run it, but it's noticeably slower than other things. Why would I deliberately choose to use something slower? Especially as it's slower because it's doing a hoard of things I don't need.
It's only on-board Intel chipset, i915 if I remember correctly.
I find menus annoyingly slow. I love how I can press one key and just start typing to get the application I want. No mouse involved at all.
I don't (find them slow, except for the crap ones). The new Gnome menu (if you add it) is an example of a bad menu system. The old one is a good example of simple, clean, quick.
Typing the program names is all very well, *if* you know the name of the command you want to use. But adds another round of messing around when you're not already sitting at the desktop.
But when you're already using the mouse, draw, click, scroll, follow link, move something on the page, hopping back and forth between the mouse and keyboard is a usability nuisance.
There's a very good reason Windows (quite crap) Start menu was so well liked. But if only they knew what better ones were like. Let's put EVERYTHING in one programs folder! And in a stupid order.
Icons, icons, icons! I can't find a damn thing by icons. The pictures are a very poor clue. I might remember one or two of highly regular use, but most mean nothing to me, and if they're in a different place than last time, I have to go hunting for it.
Not sure what you're referring to here.
A screenful of icons, like an Android tablet, none of their imagery gives a clue to which one you want. They're far too abstract.
Their positions change as you install extra things, or if you have one of those systems that puts what it thinks you want to use near the top, continually changing its mind about that. Alphabetical ordering makes no sense to grouping related things together. It becomes an Easter egg hunt to find the one you need.
My Android phone and tablet, which these kinds of interfaces are meant for, are a pain to use when you have lots of applications. I watch friends scroll through multiple screenfulls trying to find what they're after. Mine's organised, one screen with categorised folders in it, and appropriate programs inside that.
There are some different interfaces for Android phones. But at some point, there has to be a full list of applications so you can find them. But there's also usually a search field and once you find it, you can put it on your home screen to find it easier later.
I have to say that tablets and phones are the worst interfaces to use. Laboriously scroll through large numbers of things you don't want, and often can't remove. Or, laboriously try to type something into its midget keyboard. And again, that depends on you knowing its name.
Yes, I do put regular apps on the homescreen, but that's only practical up to a point. It also soon becomes a "whoops, I didn't mean to press that," while holding your phone.
And the full list of apps, is what I reorganised into one screen with folders of categorised apps, instead of 5 screens of everything in an illogical order.
I actually like taskbars. I can put status info I want to keep an eye on in them, I can remove crap that I don't care about. They're thin, and on the edges of the screen. I can easily switch between the half dozen apps I've got running simultaneously. Whacking great big squares of apps on the desktop are next to useless (they're behind other things).
I have too many windows for a taskbar to be useful. ALT-TAB and ALT-` work great.
I don't have that many open, but I always find the navigate by thumbnail approach to be poor. It usually involves half a gazillion presses, as you try to find the one you want, go past it, have to cycle through again. I find it only ever practical when you have as little as two or three things open. The taskbar is far easier to go straight back to the email program, straight over to the web browser, etc.
Also multiple desktops, so I can put certain applications on particular desktops making them easy to access.
I certainly do that, too.
I'm mostly happy with the path that Gnome has taken and it does keep improving in general.
I can't say that I am. The move from Gnome 2 to 3 was an abomination. Their "you can't adjust anything" attitude is worse than Mac. But their persistent "we are right, you are wrong," attitude to any complaints has pissed off no end of users.
-
Edward G. O'Connor Jr. -
Joe Zeff -
Mike Wright -
Ranbir -
Ranjan Maitra -
Roger Heflin -
Roger Wells -
Samuel Sieb -
stan -
Tim -
Tom Horsley