GNOME3 and au revoir WAS: systemd: please stop trying to take over the world :)

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 06/17/2011 06:21 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 11:14 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> On 06/17/2011 10:56 AM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>>> Adam Williamson wrote:
>>>> This is a common misapprehension, but it's not true. The reason for the
>>>> large icon grid is actually that the developers did real world user
>>>> research (yes, really!) and found that many people had significant
>>>> trouble navigating the typical Windows / GNOME 2 nested menu system full
>>>> of wide-but-short entries. They would lose levels in the nesting by
>>>> moving the mouse a bit wrong. They would launch the wrong thing because
>>>> the target area was too short. This was especially pronounced with poor
>>>> pointing devices - particularly cheap trackpads on cheap laptops.
>>
>> Rest assured, it is not ... esp. on cheap trackpads on cheap laptops.
>>
>> With Gnome3 you 1stly have to tick on "Applications" (located left top
>> on the screen)
>
> It's a hot spot, and there's a keyboard short cut (as there was before,
> so no change there).
I never used this shortcut, because there wasn't any need to do so. 
Navigating with the mouse was sufficient.

[BTW: Gnome once had "underlined chars" for the short-cuts - Where have 
they gone to?]

>> , then hit this tiny scroll bar located ca. 1 in/2cm left
>> of the right screen (not an easy task - Requires travelling almost the
>> whole screen), then to navigate down several pages to find the
>> applications your are looking for.
>
> If you're not going to use keyboard search, you can use the categories,
As already having been discussed elsewhere, categories are of limited 
use, as well are the "mere icon names".

> You can also of course use wheel scroll, or the trackpad
> equivalent.
My netbook doesn't have any such device - Just a simple touchpad and 2 
buttons. No mouse, no wheel, no fancy buttons.

>>   When doing so, you often you are
>> getting lost in non-self explanatory icons, with cryptic icon-names
>> without tool tips, i.e you are not finding the app you are looking for.
>
> None of these icons or names have been changed; it's still just an XDG
> desktop menu spec implementation, so it uses the icons and names
> specified in the /usr/share/applications/*.desktop files, as did GNOME 2
> and as do KDE, Xfce and LXDE.

They had tooltips, they had/have menus, they had popups. Now users are 
lost without explanation, without "help", just with a "big pane".

[BTW: on my netbook (1024x600 pixel) the last row of the big pane is 
unselectable (shaded gray)]

>>>> The Giant Grid O' Icons is navigable with a much higher success rate.
>> I disagree - It's one of the aspects I am blaming Gnome 3 for to be
>> lacking of SW ergonomy.
>>
>> A "simple application pane" is suitable for "kiosk-style" (smartphone)
>> installations with only a very small set of apps installed, but is
>> unsuitable for a "multipurpose desktop" with 100s or 1000s of apps
>> installed (such as home installations or developers' installations).
>
> Hence the use of categories.
Again, this is only useful if extended package explanation texts (such 
as tooltips) are available, because the package/icon names often are 
meaningless. In Gnome 3's current layout, a user doesn't have anyother 
choice but to try each application.

> A single scrollable list of 24-pixel high
> entries for every app on the system wouldn't be very useful either -
> that's why the 'start menu' has categories, and the Shell has the same
> categories. But you don't lose your category if you move your mouse to
> the wrong place on the screen, as you did with the nested menus...

I didn't mean to say Gnome 2 was perfect (it definitely wasn't), but 
Gnome 3 ... some consider it to be "revolutionary", others consider it 
childish and silly or at least to be immature.

Openly said, though it shares much of the mindset of Gnome 3 and is 
similarly buggy, and though I regret of not being able to avoid saying 
so, I feel much more comfortable with "the other linux"'s new DE on my 
netbook.

Ralf