Tweak Tool in Workstation?

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > * Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we 
> > shouldn't
> > relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a 
> > better
> > location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than
> > Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at
> > worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
> 
> Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree.
> If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only 
> a
> step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add 
> support
> to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome
> -tweak-tool
> is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser 
> if not.
> 

At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users
for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that
it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the
Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it
would also be interesting to know whether those using the default
behavior know about the extension).

Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot
live without:

* Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the GNOME
designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today
that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre
-3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them
entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it
legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility
layer is harmful to users.

* Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they want
across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom
of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every
workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than
to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3)
scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.


Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent
choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought
otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect
is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience
feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are
many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there
are two problems:

1) Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume that GNOME is
immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome
-settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to
install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints
anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora
to popular extension pages, etc.

2) Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be) stable API. So
even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot
survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the
next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be
solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions
and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new
versions of Workstation.


...
> > * Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed"
> > settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need
> > the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
> 
> Absolutely not. Rationale is in the gnome-settings-daemon bugs and
> commit messages for that.
> 

Sorry Bastien, but "go look at the git/bz history" is not helpful. I'm
also curious why we don't allow users to select lid-close options. At
least a pointer to one such example of the rationale would be useful.


> > * Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
> > panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
> 
> We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
> 

When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to
use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing
more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful,
particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that
space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot
figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can
understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are
far less interesting.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/attachments/20150512/dc12f10c/attachment.sig>