I'm very glad GNOME does such an amazing job staying modern in its look. GNU+Linux and free software would be much worse off without it.
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who even decides what's "modern" anymore?
can anyone, honestly, without reading the article (or guessing from the headline), tell me which of these is the "modern" design?
edit: people are getting confused by the fact that one is tree view, not icons view so i changed the image. old image here
Apparently "modern" means hiding options behind extra clicks
i may be blind but what exactly was hidden behind one or more clicks?
Clearly the dark mode is the modern one! Jokes aside, I just realized that there THREE menu options on that toolbar: hamburger, kebab, and waffle! I realize they do different things, but no wonder people are confused by and scared of computers. Also, now I'm hungry!
TIL of kebab and waffle menus.
as someone who's not scared of computers, i have no idea what they do. i assume the right one is icons/list/compact[^1] not a waffle menu, but the hamburger and kebab? i have no clue
[^1]: though why it's showing list when the current view is icons, i don't know either
Since the kebab menu is inside the location/search box, I'm guessing it contains search-related options.
It has the same options as right clicking on an empty space in a directory. Stuff like Create a new folder, Create a new file, that sort of thing. "Actions you might wanna make on this directory". When you start searching, there is another button that appears and that one is the one that let you filter search options
I dont see the usefulness of that button tbh. Its like it assumes good ol right click isnt discoverable on its own. Idk anyond who has a mouse and hasnt pressed right click ever.
It'd be kinda nice if they made these kinds of changes options rather than just deciding this is best
Could honestly take it or leave it, doesn't really add anything
i'm not even sure it's worth having an option. i don't think i'd even have noticed a difference, apart from the menu button being in a slightly different place to every other gnome app. it's fine; but it wasn't worth the development time
The last thing I want is an option for this. My gosh, imagine the amount of options you would end up with if every single design choice was turned into an option. Who in the world would like that many options.
I'm happy to just have a design team work on whatever they think looks better and works best for the user experience, and implement it after some rounds of public review and testing. This looks neat enough to me - slightly less cluttered than what my current Nautilus window looks like while maintaining the same functionality.
Who in the world would like that many options.
KDE fans?
Awww, Plasma fans, you know I'm playin'.
yep, that's me
Seriously, I envy you guys. Every time I try to use Plasma, I end up spending all my time tweaking the desktop, and by the time I'm done, I realize I've just recreated the Gnome workflow...
every time i try to use gnome, i end up spending all my time going "dammit, where are all the bleeding features"
(also the lack of fitts' law adherence due to that pointless bar at the top)
I had to look up Fitts's law, and I'm not sure I get it. Could you explain what you mean?
ETA: I kinda feel like mine was about KDE not being a fit for me personally, and yours was a slam on Gnome rather than a statement of personal preference.
I had to look up Fitts’s law, and I’m not sure I get it. Could you explain what you mean?
basically; the speed that it takes to click a button is dependant on the size of the button and the distance from the cursor. however, buttons at the edge of the screen have effectively infinite size, as they can't be overshot. the most used actions should be placed there, as they are the easiest to click by muscle memory (particularly the corners, as they have infinite size in both dimensions)
on windows, kde, cinnamon, etc.; by default the bottom left is start, the bottom right is show desktop (this one i can't explain), and the top right is close maximised window. the top of the screen is also used for other window-related actions like minimise, restore, change csd tabs, etc.
gnome flouts this by having most of the top of the screen doing nothing (most of it is completely empty) apart from rarely used actions like calendar and power. and the bottom right and left doing nothing[^1]
did i explain well?
ETA: I kinda feel like mine was about KDE not being a fit for me personally, and yours was a slam on Gnome rather than a statement of personal preference.
nah it was very much a personal thing: some people like having a minimal and clutter-free feature set; i like having as many features as possible, because then i find features i didn't even know i liked.[^2]
as for the top bar: this one confuses me - it just seems objectively bad. but obviously it's not as some people clearly like it. i haven't had anyone actually explain to me why, though
[^1]: i mean they also ignore it in other ways, too
[^2]: i didn't know how useful a terminal embedded in the file manager would be until i started using dolphin, now i can't do without it
That's the neat thing. It's so customizable, you can turn it into another desktop environment.
I mean, almost. I can pull it off on my desktop, but I can't get the touchpad/touchscreen gestures to work right on my laptop.
Kinda looking forward to Plasma 6 to play around with, though. Might even be enough to get me to switch for a while!
I tried KDE, it's cool but I get the same thing of trying to recreate gnome/pantheon
It kinda sucks in GNOME when there's just one thing you would like to change though
Have been trying to get a tiling window manager on GNOME but all the gnome extensions that do it kinda suck
It's just my opinion (since it's not in the article) but a thing that makes Gnome and Libadwaita a "modern design" is the fact that the production behind it tries to bridge the gap between a "mouse and keyboard" and a "touch screen" workflow.
None of the other DEs come even close to Gnome when used on a tablet
meh, subjectively i find that creates a "worst of both worlds" situation. but this comment was more about the futility of the development time that went into this specific feature
Full height sidebar - from Mac OS 7 or so - must be modern?
The first one doesn't waste space in the title bar by expanding the locator and navigator buttons there.
Honestly, I haven't yet seen the article, the light theme one is probably newer because of tabs.
Anyways both look like an android app, I know most will hate reading this but Windows Explorer rules.
So glad KDE exists.
I don't get it... Does this tiny change ruin it for you?
Having to create .desktop files in god knows where for me to be able to right click -> "open with" my program of choice sure pushed me away
I don't even know what they were thinking not letting you beowse for any executable file on disk
Aren't you supposed to use alacarte
app to create new program entry on gnome?
Great. Now do split panel!
I don't think I can go back to Nautilus after using Dolphin for so long, even if the search is far better.
The search on nautilus is probably better because a lot of gnome distros have the file indexer enabled by default, and that's what nautilus uses, but many kde distros don't come with the kde indexer, so dolphin doesn't index by default.
So it's not just me having files that exist, but aren't found at all sometimes?
Not a fan of slicing up the title bar like that, to be honest. Yeah, it saves some space, but I'm on a desktop with plenty of screen space, so that really isn't a priority, and being able to easily move windows around is a priority.
Also, what the hell is wrong with old-fashioned menus? This isn't a phone. GNOME doesn't even run on phones.
That's the thing. There is no title bar. The title bar, if forced to exist, would go above both of those sections.
GNOME apps seem to have been headed in this direction for a while.
If I open gnome-disks, for example, the title bar is kind of odd because it doesn't show the name of the program at all. It only shows the size of the currently selected disk, and underneath that in a smaller text subheading is the actual device pathname of the disk. How many other programs do you know that have a subheading under the window title in the title bar?
This feels like an early decision to do something different with that part of the window.
Further along in the evolution is the dconf-editor which no longer shows any kind of title bar at all. The window manager shows that the window title is "dconf Editor" but there's nothing on the window itself that says that.
Earlier versions of each definitely had a standard title bar (I remember dconf-editor having one fairly clearly, because the new interface seemed strange at first), but not any more.
There's also that desktop web browsers generally request that their title bar not be shown. Given that everyone has at least one browser window open, it would be almost foolish to assume there's been no influence from that design choice.
As a laptop user I love the idea that some of the titlebar space being utilized. I don't use GNOME though. I hope there will continue to be good UXs for both of us.
Even my laptop has a large-ish display (17 inch). Really not a fan of small displays. Sure, large laptops are heavy, but I could use the exercise. 😄
What's the advantage vs. the current version?
Also looks like it's removing an important visual affordance (i.e., which areas you can click to drag the window), unless I'm misinterpreting it
The current version has some problems with adaptivity, e.g. resizing the app window can cause issues. This led to the creation of new libadwaita widgets. If you want to read the technical details, see https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2023/06/15/rethinking-adaptivity/
Also looks like it's removing an important visual affordance (i.e., which areas you can click to drag the window), unless I'm misinterpreting it
The top bar has been full of buttons with no whitespace for a year or more now, that's not new (you can still drag the window using the whole bar, but it's definitely not intuitive and made me subconsciously do Win+drag to be safe many times).
This seems to be a relatively minor visual update to have the left sidebar fill the whole window - ~~maybe they want more space for shortcuts at a given window height?~~ No clue.
Edit: never mind, checked again and it's literally just a tiny visual update with no change to the actual content of the sidebar, but it takes some space away from the top bar.
i welcome merging two triple-dot menus into one, according to screenshots.
Win+drag
Thank you internet person, you have changed my life forever.
Been a Gnome user for years and always glad to see them modernize the UI more, but the one thing I desperately want is .stl and/or .3mf thumbnailers to just work with Nautilus. Tried several times to set up in Fedora using f3d, but instead just get blurry question mark thumbnails
I don't like Nautilus and always srick with Nemo but the new look of many Gnome apps is really nice!
Please also remove the text places and make use of that space