ugh… software just keeps getting worse… gnome 3.32… “Switches no longer use
the explicit ON and OFF text, instead using color to indicate state.”
Because that text which made it completely readable what the state of something is
needed to go away so that it could only be maybe obvious to some and completely
unknown to others.
There were a couple of stories posted just the other day about accessibility. Gnome in the past used to have pretty good “human interface guidelines”. I wonder if the accessibility is getting worse or it’s still possible to get the on/off states by hovering with a mouse or tabbing over it with the keyboard?
gnome-shell is pretty bad with respect to keyboard accessibility, and I don’t expect it to get better given the attitude I see on the bug tracker. For example, see these bugs:
The situation in apps themselves is a bit better — they generally have shortcuts and access keys — but all the shortcuts are hidden in a modal overlay, so you don’t get the benefit of spatial memory when looking them up. (Honestly Canonical’s HUD was a really nice solution to this, it is a shame that you had to use Unity to get it).
I don’t like this change, just like I hated the removal of the menu and replacing them by hamburger menus that typically only have a subset of items and no discoverability of keyboard shortcuts, and for some reason they also killed systray icons without providing a proper replacement (you can’t properly inspect Dropbox’s status without some extension that brings back a frankenversion of system tray icons). But just two random observations:
GNOME usability was probably good at some point, because Sun Microsystems considered considerable time and money to improve the usability of GNOME. They did extensive user studies, etc. I think the downward trend in GNOME is caused by not having such a steward for such a long time.
For a newer generation that grew up with iPads and smartphones, these hamburger manus, label-less switches (they used to be just checkboxes) are what they are used to. So the usability is probably just as high for a younger generation, plus a younger generation is probably getting more influence on the direction of the GNOME HIG.
For me, just give me WIMP or nothing at all (tmux, sway, etc.) on a desktop/laptop.
Is it just me, or am I the only one that likes Gnome 3 - or even just tolerates it? Some stuff but I don’t agree on, but I think it overall tries, which is more than I can say for the rest of the “clone Windows 98” desktop environments.
I still can’t handle GNOME but for some reason I love Ubuntu’s rendition of it, I think it’s my favourite desktop environment right now.
Tried vanilla GNOME on Fedora a few days ago and it’s unusable without some extensions. Besides you can’t barely change anything without installing Gnome Tweak Tools (which should really come preinstalled or as part of GNOME itself imho but they refuse for some reason).
So… Six months of work and they change some icons/colours, make switches a lot worse and add some light optimizations for their extremely crappy and intensive animations. Well, let’s say I’m not impressed.
I still use it on Fedora on my daily driver, but I dislike it more every year. Maybe it’s time for something else. Are there people here that went from Gnome to another DE and are happy about the switch? And if so, which one did you choose and why? :)
I switched to MATE a few years ago, but then again, Gnome has changed a lot since then, and from at least my perspective, has improved a lot. I too am not sure about the new icon themes, but maybe it just needs getting used to.
ugh… software just keeps getting worse… gnome 3.32… “Switches no longer use the explicit ON and OFF text, instead using color to indicate state.”
Because that text which made it completely readable what the state of something is needed to go away so that it could only be maybe obvious to some and completely unknown to others.
There were a couple of stories posted just the other day about accessibility. Gnome in the past used to have pretty good “human interface guidelines”. I wonder if the accessibility is getting worse or it’s still possible to get the on/off states by hovering with a mouse or tabbing over it with the keyboard?
The Gnome HIG can be found here: https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/
gnome-shell is pretty bad with respect to keyboard accessibility, and I don’t expect it to get better given the attitude I see on the bug tracker. For example, see these bugs:
The situation in apps themselves is a bit better — they generally have shortcuts and access keys — but all the shortcuts are hidden in a modal overlay, so you don’t get the benefit of spatial memory when looking them up. (Honestly Canonical’s HUD was a really nice solution to this, it is a shame that you had to use Unity to get it).
The new UI style prefers icons to menu labels. The trouble is that there isn’t any way to type an icon, so you can’t assign it an access key. This makes navigating Gnome apps pretty tab-heavy. Weirdly there is no standard “focus primary menu” shortcut.
Oh, and access keys are hidden until you press Alt. The practical effect of this seems to be that app developers forget to add them!
Sorry for the rant… I gave up and am trying out KDE. But they are dropping menus too. :’(
I don’t like this change, just like I hated the removal of the menu and replacing them by hamburger menus that typically only have a subset of items and no discoverability of keyboard shortcuts, and for some reason they also killed systray icons without providing a proper replacement (you can’t properly inspect Dropbox’s status without some extension that brings back a frankenversion of system tray icons). But just two random observations:
GNOME usability was probably good at some point, because Sun Microsystems considered considerable time and money to improve the usability of GNOME. They did extensive user studies, etc. I think the downward trend in GNOME is caused by not having such a steward for such a long time.
For a newer generation that grew up with iPads and smartphones, these hamburger manus, label-less switches (they used to be just checkboxes) are what they are used to. So the usability is probably just as high for a younger generation, plus a younger generation is probably getting more influence on the direction of the GNOME HIG.
For me, just give me WIMP or nothing at all (tmux, sway, etc.) on a desktop/laptop.
Is it just me, or am I the only one that likes Gnome 3 - or even just tolerates it? Some stuff but I don’t agree on, but I think it overall tries, which is more than I can say for the rest of the “clone Windows 98” desktop environments.
I still can’t handle GNOME but for some reason I love Ubuntu’s rendition of it, I think it’s my favourite desktop environment right now.
Tried vanilla GNOME on Fedora a few days ago and it’s unusable without some extensions. Besides you can’t barely change anything without installing Gnome Tweak Tools (which should really come preinstalled or as part of GNOME itself imho but they refuse for some reason).
So… Six months of work and they change some icons/colours, make switches a lot worse and add some light optimizations for their extremely crappy and intensive animations. Well, let’s say I’m not impressed.
I still use it on Fedora on my daily driver, but I dislike it more every year. Maybe it’s time for something else. Are there people here that went from Gnome to another DE and are happy about the switch? And if so, which one did you choose and why? :)
Admittedly, fractional scaling is a large improvement that probably required quite some plumbing.
I switched to MATE a few years ago, but then again, Gnome has changed a lot since then, and from at least my perspective, has improved a lot. I too am not sure about the new icon themes, but maybe it just needs getting used to.