Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42

by Jaruzel • 5 years ago

49 34 5 years ago

medium.com

desktopninja• 5 years ago

Please MS, give us your Lindows! Modern Linux with the win2k pro DE.

ps. I know of the original Lindows :D. pps. q4os w/Trinity DE is really close

ldiracdelta• 5 years ago

I concure. XFCE gets the job done and gets out of your way. decade. Don't care about fancy 3d animations. Happy user for close to a decade.

acgkmopvvgvmgv4• 5 years ago

Isn't XFCE doomed to have many of the issues inherited by GTK 3 and now 4? Do they fork things or just accept their fate? Even more so with Wayland in mind.

lazyweb• 5 years ago

Agreed, it's my GUI of choice as well.

kevincox2• 5 years ago

I don't like the macOS-style global menu, it gets confusing when you have multiple windows open on the screen. But I do agree that a menubar is a great option for a lot of applications.

That being said there are also a lot of applications where the menu is used rarely enough that exposing the first level of menus isn't worth the screen space. In this case I think a hamburger menu is fine. For example in Firefox I rarely use the menu. Most things I do are keyboard shortcuts, or the couple of things I have moved to the toolbar. And I often wish I could see more at the same time. I think the main issue with Firefox is that the menu is basically impossible for a new user to find. I believe the only ways to bring it up (on Linux at least) is tapping Alt or Alt-<m> where m is a mnemonic that you would have needed to see the menu before to know. I guess this is their way of slowing killing it off in favour of their hamburger menu, but I find the hamburger menu has way less options and is way harder to browse. It feels more like a place for frequent options rather than a full menu. As much hate as there is for 3-level menus the actual browsing UX was quite good.

cestith• 5 years ago

I've been tempted to campaign for an OS menu at the very top and an application menu for the current application just below that. Of course, I've also considered making a desktop environment where every application gets its own virtual desktop and part of the OS menu is a scrollbox for the open applications, so maybe take my minority opinions with a grain of salt.

jj002• 5 years ago

I agree with the global menu. At least Ubuntu (maybe more) gives you the option to switch between the two. I may be wrong, but I believe it's document-focused vs application-focused?

I think people who like the global menu tend to be single application users (window maximized). If you like to have a lot of smaller windows open on your desktop, then a global menu gets annoying. I also think today's larger screens (for desktop) is affecting the argument that user's find it easier to get to the menu if it's at the top of the screen.

NwtnsMthd2• 5 years ago

The global menu was a reasonable idea for its time. It seems it's main selling points are that it's easy to find and requires less precision with a pointing device. It seems to work well when you have one, maybe two windows open.

But the idea falls flat on its face when you have multiple screens with multiple windows, which window does the menu belong to and why is it detached from my current working context? As most of us have grown up using some sort of pointing device, the argument for speed and accuracy has also lost some relevance.

rbreaves2• 5 years ago

I use multiple monitors with global menus all the time and I have never been confused by which app a global menu is associated with unless I walked away and come back and 2 or more windows are not overlapping or dimmed in some way.

In reality there are too many context clues and we, as humans, can only interact with one application at a time. Any argument against global menus are really unfounded - the only argument that holds any water at all is one of what you are used to.

People at the end of the day just want to use what they are already used to - whether global menus are superior or inferior is really moot because most people aren't going to get past the "what they are used to part" and will deride it largely on that alone. This is coming from a Windows user that only started to use macOS after like 10 years of Windows usage and no really liking the global menu, or one click mouse and numerous other things about the Mac, but gave it a shot any ways as initially it drew me with its nice looks, but then the UNIX underpinnings & POSIX compliance kept me with the platform. I wasn't even looking for UNIX or POSIX either at the time - but it is now an invaluable part of my workflow, as are global menus and Cmd key positioned for my thumb, not my pinky.

I wrote https://kinto.sh to help bring over the shortcut keys I am used to as well to Linux and Windows.

rbreaves2• 5 years ago

This is why I like Waterfox - it is Firefox but with a global menu added back in.

DannyB2• 5 years ago

Others here address how global menus aren't confusing. I'll point out a different advantage.

Having the menu bar stuck at the very top of the screen makes it possible to just "zoom" the mouse pointer rapidly to the top. The pointer cannot go off the top of the screen, so you're on the menu bar and can immediately click the button and begin sliding the mouse pointer across the menus to see each one drop down as the pointer crosses it.

This seems subtle, but you wouldn't believe how much faster it is than having menus on windows.

In addition, all of those menu bars on all of those windows are using up valuable screen real estate space.

That global menu bar instantly changes to the menu bar of the front most window when you bring a different window to the front.

kevincox2• 5 years ago

The global menu does have the aiming advantage.

The sapce advantage is mixed. If you have windows side-by side (which seems more common than stacked vertically) per-window is actually better as often the global menu doesn't take up the full width of the screen.

Changing to the active window is actually a downside. It means that I need to activate a window before I can open the menu. Especially if the window is not at the top of the screen it can make a lot of travel distance to do those two clicks.

There are definitely pros and cons to both options.

Zardoz84• 5 years ago

I find very disturbing that not mentions KDE/Plasma even when it had global menus since eons. Plus it's the only DE that allow to have a global menu plus a hamburger menu on the window title.

hyperman1• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what's going on at Gnome? It seems they prefer the 1% of computer illiterates above the 99% professionals who might actually use Linux. I've never heard anyone except gnome designers say anything positive about the dumbification of the UI, yet every version gets worse. Have they some research showing some kind of advantage for someone?

acgkmopvvgvmgv4• 5 years ago

Yes there are a good amount of people who genuinely enjoy GNOME but what that GNOME is I don't really know. Ubuntu is heavily customized. Pop!_OS too and they are even going to release their own version of it, maybe like a fork I don't know the details. Fedora patches GNOME and their applications. When I see comments from their own developers more often than not they are using extensions, patches and tweaks outside the settings app. How many people would manage to tolerate actual vanilla GNOME I have no idea.

Their UX research is like Lucky Strike paying someone to find the health benefits of tobacco. They will ask the right questions. I remember two posts about UX testing, one a developer asked like a few random people they knew before making heavy changes. The second one looked promising from a scientific point of view and made me genuinely interested but a couple of paragraphs in and you could already see that it was full of shit.

Repo owners can do whatever they want because they can't afford to lose a single maintainer so leaders just quietly accept that and move on. Source: GNOMErs comments on reddit.

So lots of politics, not a lot of money to be made in the desktop, people are spread too thin. You don't have to deliver a good product when there's no big expectations or your job is on the line.

Is this comment too harsh? I don't know. Red Hat (right they don't own GNOME) is great and did/does so much for Linux/desktop, but many people like me who abandoned GNOME and GTK after v3 have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff. So it's really hard not to be.

zxzax5• 5 years ago

I've been using vanilla GNOME on debian and it's fine to me. But, I am personally not really picky when it comes to GUIs. From what I understand with Ubuntu and Pop!_OS, those distros are somewhat interested in creating their own branding, and don't seek to upstream everything that they do. I don't think there is anything that upstream can do about that, besides maybe make it easier for them to add more patches and tweaks. Some of the upstream developers I've talked to are not particularly happy that there are so many forks, but it all comes back to the manpower issue.

have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff.

Can you please elaborate what you mean here? If there are some bugs that are causing issues, you should consider reporting those.

zxzax5• 5 years ago

The recent changes were informed by some extensive testing, it wasn't any particular group that was guiding it: https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/02/15/shell-ux-change...

k_bx• 5 years ago

Unity had many of these done right. My favorite de of all time.

CarVac• 5 years ago

The only problem it had was performance, but the UX was fantastic.

jj002• 5 years ago

Really interesting article. I've read the first two in the series and was eating it up. It's also nice to see more criticism about visual design on Linux desktops instead of worrying about the underpinnings.

donmcronald• 5 years ago

Is there a secret plan to cripple the desktop experience by infecting it with less suitable UX concepts invented for mobile phones?

Maybe not a secret plan, but MS sure seems focused on making sure no one understands how to use the local file system.

AdmiralAsshat• 5 years ago

(2017)

mattowen_uk• 5 years ago

Sections were updated in 2019 though.

robertoandred• 5 years ago

I'm so glad Apple has kept the Mac the Mac and not succumb to the UI craziness that is plaguing other operating systems.

There's a menu bar at the top of the screen with, ya know, menus. Applications can have one, more than one, or ZERO windows open. UI conventions, keyboard shortcuts, etc are consistent.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

Where did the ribbon come from? Office is basically one of the 2 or 3 pillars that drives MS Earnings. On what basis of research did it come from? I hate it too.

The fashion in UI is so horrible. Since Windows 95 I've basically watched UI fashion as pure churn for change's sake, to the detriment of all users.

Computer UI needs a cultural foundation, so software can be usable by many many generations.

But with the state of desktop OSes, with OSX in an increasingly walled fortress, Windows still doing the horrible dual-desktop with tiles and other insanities, and Linux just... failing, we regressed it seems around 2005-2010 and now nothing will fix the sad state of affairs.

sunstone• 5 years ago

Linux Mint is #3 on distro watch, ahead of all but MX Linux and Manjaro so I guess quite a few people,mostly developers, can tolerate its desktop.

PoignardAzur2• 5 years ago

I don't really like this kind of inflammatory article. It usually starts from the premise "My UX preferences are universal and whatever tradeoffs the developers are trying to optimize are irrelevant because they should focus on X Y and Z instead", and expands from there.

I used to re-enable the menu bar in Firefox and Atom all the time, until I realized I never used 95% of it and the remaining 5% could be accessed from elsewhere, saving me some vertical space.

I don't like having a menu bar on top. I prefer the Windows-style UX with all the OS widgets and windows list tucked in a bottom bar. (I tolerate the top bar in Pop Shell because its great tile management means I don't need to use the mouse too much for navigating).

I do agree with the author's point about discoverability, though. There's a lot of room to improve there.

PoignardAzur2• 5 years ago

To give another example (from part 3):

Why on earth would I ever want to switch to a “wrong” (that is, non-matching) keyboard language? Mac OS X had this, in my opinion, counter-productive menu

Because sometimes I play video games and sometimes these games have hardcoded keybindings that assume I have a QWERTY keyboard, and if I want to be able to play the game at all I need to play along.

Now, sure, there's room for improvement. Maybe we don't need a keyboard shortcut to change the language mode, as long as there's a top-level menu that gives me a way to do that.

But a UX designed by the author wouldn't give me either of those options. Because the author never met that use-case, and therefore assumed the use-case didn't exist.

Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability

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