[HN Gopher] Cleaning up header bars in GNOME 41
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Cleaning up header bars in GNOME 41
Author : strzibny
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-09-12 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blogs.gnome.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blogs.gnome.org)
| entropy1111 wrote:
| I'm loving all recent GNOME and GTK changes like flat design,
| blurred fonts, forced Adwaita theme, racist CoC, no SSDs,
| libhandy's bait and switch, breaking integrations other projects
| spent years building, stopthemingmy.app, demanding public
| apologies from vendors in pull requests, it's like christmas! The
| concept of accelerationism might need a revision.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I already have trouble distinguishing the active tab on inactive
| Firefox windows......
| chungy wrote:
| Same here. Why the hate on UI element borders? It's just making
| things worse.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| I've heard this complaint a couple of times recently. I find it
| odd because I'm using the latest Firefox and the contrast is
| pretty good. I wonder if we are using different themes?
| noobermin wrote:
| Definitely a theme thing. The default theme is similar to the
| article, the buttons are just icons with no hint that they
| are buttons.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Just tried the default theme and the active tab is white
| with a dark grey border, while inactive tabs have no border
| and are the same colour as the chrome background. Even when
| the Firefox window is inactive the active tab still appears
| white with the dark grey border. It seems to me that there
| is sufficient contrast. Does your Firefox look anything
| like this image on your device? https://imgur.com/a/C2JvVRh
| noobermin wrote:
| So, I'm not talking about the tabs, I said "buttons." The
| buttons are just icons and have no outline (for example,
| the close button, the back button, etc)
|
| Also, sorry I made a mistake, I had to edit and add a
| "no" to it to properly say what I meant in that the
| buttons have no hint as to that they are actually
| buttons.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| I am using Adwaita, the stock Gnome 40 theme. Note: inactive
| windows. You are showing an active window on the screenshot
| below. On inactive windows, the unfocused tab background
| color is #f6f5f4. The focused tab background color is
| #f7f6f6. Call me colorblind, but I simply cannot distinguish
| between these two shades.
|
| On Windows 10 it is actually worse, since Proton it is
| ignoring my bright-blue accent color, so by default both the
| color of active and inactive windows is the same gray.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| The screenshot below is an inactive window. I've just
| double checked to be sure and yep that's exactly what it
| looks like when I switch to a different window. It is on a
| Mac though so sounds like the the behaviour is different on
| other systems such as your Windows 10 example. I'll have to
| have a look when I have the time.
| butz wrote:
| I wonder how GNOME Files breadcrumbs bar will look with this new
| design applied.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| It's shown on the mockup mentioned in the article:
|
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/blob/mast...
| smoldesu wrote:
| God bless everyone putting effort into making Adwaita a little
| prettier, but GNOME 40 has been a trainwreck in my eyes. There
| are still glaring issues _everywhere_ , and instead of the
| "sacred cow" slaughtering we were promised, we get more iteration
| on things people don't care about.
|
| Here's an idea: anyone, _literally anyone_ spend a few hours
| updating the GNOME thumbnail generation code. It 's the sole
| reason why file managers and photo browsers don't feel 'snappy'
| on the desktop. Or maybe the new Chromebook-ified topbar could
| revert to it's 3.38 glory, instead of being stuck with
| meaningless bubbles. There are so many regressions, sidegrades
| and completely ignored issues that I had to switch to Cinnamon
| when GNOME 40 rolled out.
|
| I'm hoping that most of these issues can be addressed in the
| coming months, but I don't have much faith. Everyone is seemingly
| more interested in making a 1.5gb Flatpak out of their 500kb
| shellutil.
| corty wrote:
| Another copycat change to get the same crappy non-ergonomics in
| unrecognizable controls as the others. Can we please fast-forward
| all the UI circus to arrive at something usable again? Pretty
| please?
| dathinab wrote:
| It's just flat design in the window header bars not the normal
| window content...
|
| And in GNOME more or less everything in the title bar can be
| interacted with.
|
| And it's mostly symbols implying intractability.
|
| So in difference to most flat design approaches I'm not sure
| this decreases usability tbh.
| drran wrote:
| Mate (Gnome2) still works. If you disagree with Gnome team, you
| can invest into this Gnome fork.
| noobermin wrote:
| I'll be honest and say I don't like this trend in UX. The article
| is right that they are merely following others, so I won't lay
| this on them as their fault, but it feels like making icons
| buttons look less like buttons is reversing a trend a lot of
| people are used to, as well as reducing contrast for older users
| and disabled folks. I think the most recent change that stuck in
| my mind was recent firefox's redesign.
|
| I recall the GNOME team priding themselves on actually starting
| the original gnome 3 redesign based on studying usage patterns,
| and against the angry grain I was on their side and used gnome 3
| for quite a few years. I have to wonder whether this design was
| passed by any accessibility folks or even studied, it seems like
| it is against that spirit of actually evaluating usage patterns.
| sneak wrote:
| Choosing to follow a bad trend is indeed the fault of the
| bandwagon-jumper.
| noobermin wrote:
| Fair. When I said "it's not their fault" I meant more along
| the lines as they didn't come up with this ill-advised idea
| themselves, that others came up with it. They shouldn't have
| jumped aboard without considering accessibility and usable
| issues and for that may be they deserve criticism.
| Zababa wrote:
| I like GNOME, I just don't see the point of updating interface.
| Interface is something people depend on. Shouldn't we want it to
| be the same for a long time? Unless this change is the result of
| years of research and experiences with users. But with "This is
| not a new idea either -- pretty much everyone else is doing it,
| e.g. macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, elementary OS, KDE.", this
| just seems to be following the trends.
| im_down_w_otp wrote:
| I've always assumed it's because it's easier to do and piques
| public interest more, at least in the short-term, than
| updating, improving, or fixing the deeper plumbing problems and
| shortcomings.
| jacobmischka wrote:
| I love GNOME and I'm sad about this, I felt the previous style
| was pleasant to look at and very clear, and a contrast to all
| other flat UIs.
| puppet-master wrote:
| Flat design is basically a form of elitism. In order to
| understand how and why the computer works, you must subscribe to
| a cathedral of thought that exists at this stage more or less to
| protect itself and celebrate its own brilliance, because any real
| invention in the UI space had already basically topped out by the
| late 90s.
|
| From this perspective, we have flat UI for essentially the same
| reason we're starting to see the formation of tech unions. It has
| been a long time since a lot of our industry has done anything
| new or even productive, and much of what we do is entirely self-
| serving, creating a kind of fragility that ultimately threatens
| the workforce. Endless UI churn producing worse and worse designs
| isn't a problem, it's a symptom that is impossible to ignore.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Didn't know XView, Athena widgets, Win3.1, System 6, and more
| were elitist.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| I don't necessarily agree with the post you're responding to,
| but the intent seems to be to criticize the lack of visual
| distinctness between elements, not the lack of
| pseudo-3D-style rendering.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Windows 3.1 UI was not flat design.
|
| And even things like System6 weren't that _flat_. There were
| subtleties on their UI that gave a little depth to some
| stuff. But one could argue the _flat_ in their UI was some
| sort of answer to the limitations of their time.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Elitism... fashion, style, trends...
| noobermin wrote:
| While I'm mostly there with you, I feel like it's a bit too
| strong to call it elitism. It does assume the user has
| background knowledge and quickness to recognize the difference
| between an icon, label, and clickable button and some part of
| these decisions come from some insularity amongst ux designers
| may be, so it might stem from some out-of-touch-ness but it's
| probably more unintentional than being elitist.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| User Interface expertise was lost way back 20 years ago. There
| has been a constant onslought by aestheticians and minimalists
| on the very definition of Design. Design used to be less
| creative and more objective. It was about addressing the
| requirements of a product, how best it can serve the user and
| empathizing with the operator. Now, it means how best to market
| to the user, brainwash them with glitter of aesthetics, numb
| them with animations, and tell them to open up the wallet. Make
| that sale, functionalism be damned.
|
| So here we are. Witnessing complete destruction of the field of
| Design by commercial optimization and shareholder maximization
| syndrome. Thrift baby thrift.
| mongol wrote:
| Who are developing these changes? Is it the same people that
| design them? I.e UX people? Does it boil down to stories in
| sprints for someone to develop? Somehow I don't think this is the
| result of patches or pull requests by developers in a traditional
| sense.
| barrkel wrote:
| I guess they still haven't fixed the almost imperceptible shading
| which indicates the active window.
| kawsper wrote:
| Looking at the examples of changes done to the Obfuscate
| application it looks like quite a regression.
| e2le wrote:
| Given the criticism towards flat design from both normal users
| and power users, I have to wonder who their target audience is
| supposed to be? Is it neither or perhaps flat design elitists who
| don't represent the needs and wants of users?
| onli wrote:
| This is a very flat UI. I ran usability tests in the past with
| enterprise software that followed Windows inspired flat design.
| Guess what the users could not manage? The flat design, as it
| destroys easy discoverability of what can be clicked on and what
| can not. This weighed as heavy on the usability of the software
| as other UI mistakes and usually compounded them - as in, a
| difficult screen, difficult because it had a wrong interaction
| flow, got completely unusable for users because a button did not
| look like a button.
|
| Flat design got so thoroughly critized in the last decade, that
| people still jump on that bandwagon now that it's on its way out
| is astonishing. Leave it to Gnome to proudly announce flat design
| - worse-than-metro flat design, flat design without colors and
| backgrounds - for 2022. Unbelievable.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I long ago realized that I was far, far away from GNOME's
| target audience. If I have to install a half dozen plugins just
| to get things to behave the way I expect them to, then the
| answer is a resounding NO. These days, I gravitate to XFCE for
| virtual machines, low-power systems, and remote desktops, and
| Cinnamon for full-fat machines with a GPU.
|
| Why am I not surprised that GNOME would adopt flat design? I
| know it's trendy, but any time I have to use a recent Windows
| flat-design application (hello Visual Studio!) I find it
| annoying - it becomes a lot harder to determine whether
| something is a modal popup or an independent window.
| toomim wrote:
| It's no excuse for Gnome's designers to say "you're not my
| target audience."
|
| Linux's default desktop UI should be good for _all_ users. It
| 's possible, and something to strive for.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I still don't know what GNOME target audience is. I have yet
| to find a gnome shell user that doesn't use tons of plugins.
|
| It's like the GNOME dev never actually puts mockups in the
| hand of real users before starting to code.
| dathinab wrote:
| Through don't forget the context:
|
| It's flat design in the title bar where everything in there
| (except sometimes the title) tends to be interactive.
|
| Making the window header bars feel less heavy is important.
|
| But tbh. the problem was placing all kind of stuff into the
| title bars. Works well for a few handpicked examples but in
| general it works just so-so and in context of cross platform it
| falls apart...
|
| So IMHO they should instead of trying to use the space in the
| header bars of windows they should have tried to see if they
| can eliminate header bars instead.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Wow what a shame. I really liked how GNOME 40 looked out of the
| box.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| I'd like to chime in before the GNOME hate train starts.
|
| I welcome this change. I've been using GNOME for tens of years
| now for both my personal and my office systems. I very much enjoy
| the experience. Keep up the good work!
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Also a GNOME user here, regularly switching to macOS/Windows
| for work so I do get to compare how GNOME is going with
| 'mainstream' desktops. Really impressed with how far GNOME has
| come over the last couple of years. It is really at the point
| where I feel more productive in GNOME than the mainstream
| desktop environments. I love the focus on ensuring the default
| experience is as good as possible -- these days I have no time
| to tinker so having a desktop that is well configured out of
| the box is a huge plus. There are a few tweaks I have made
| which are easily done. Big credits to the GNOME team -- they
| have come a long way from the 2.x days.
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