[charlesdaniels]

I have noticed this trend across many different applications/toolkits. In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.

Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).

A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI elements according to what platform is being used. In an ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and have all my applications respect it. Then the people with touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice.

I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these design trends have become popular in the open source space.

[klyrs]

Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path

[webmaven]

> Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path

I accidentally discovered that the mouse's scroll wheel works for this too.

[wott]

I recently tried to revive a Netbook. It has very limited vertical space.

I had to get rid of almost all programs that used modern GTK.

One major problem was dialogues windows, typically options setting dialogues. They were too big and the buttons were out of the screen (below the screen), because of too much white space everywhere, because of badly organised layout, and because of too many things being packed inside the same dialogue.

But the most infuriating was the bloody CSD (Client Side Decoration). They pretend it saves spaces, because it fuses a menu bar and the window bar (window manager bar).

But firstly, they made it so big that this single bar is only a couple pixels shorter than a traditional set of menu bar + window bar.

And secondly, on a traditional application, with the WM I had, I could (simply pressing one shortcut key) hide both the window bar of the current application (from the top), and the WM task bar (from the bottom), making the entire vertical space available from the current application content (including its menu bar). But with CSD, I cannot hide the window bar, since there is no window bar; so I am forced to keep their huge menu+window bar combo fusion and as a result there is less space available for the content...

[pmontra]

Check these links: I managed to reduce the padding of those huge menus.

https://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bars-smaller/

https://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bar-smaller-f...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36869701/decrease-the-ta...

Your CSS must go to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css

[toyg]

> In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.

That's has always been the case, even before mobile was a thing. GTK components have always been padded to the wazoo, and pretty badly too; it's one of the reasons I was very much a "KDE guy" back in the early '00s, QT component just looked and scaled so much better.

If only QT had had a C implementation, GTK would never have reached a tenth of its popularity.

[kitsunesoba]

Much of the excess padding in GTK apps comes from the Adwaita theme more than from the apps or GTK itself. After applying a GTK theme that cuts the padding down to more reasonable levels, I find that GTK apps are actually pretty nice and generally handle whitespace better than their Qt counterparts (which often go the opposite direction, packing controls too tightly or arranging them somewhat haphazardly).

Agree that Qt would be more popular with a C implementation. The myriad language bindings available for GTK have gone a long way in boosting its popularity.

[Narishma]

Can you give an example of such a theme?

[kitsunesoba]

There’s a number of themes that cut down padding (just take a look at the GTK Themes section of gnome-look) but two where it’s more obvious are the Nordic and Mcata themes:

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1381832/

[ectopod]

I don't know why tabs and taskbars go at the top and bottom of the screen by default. This is exactly where the space isn't. Every screen is wide.

The taskbar can be moved easily, but Firefox doesn't come with a vertical tabs option. Both Chrome and Edge seem to now.

[derefr]

IIRC tab bars are optimized for the most-common usage scenario where you only have two or three tabs open. In that case, running horizontally across the top/bottom of the screen means each tab gets to be wide-enough to show a large amount of text, maximizing the amount of context the tab can give for what it's about.

Vertical tabs are stuck in a side-bar, and that sidebar has to fight with the main content for screen real-estate, with the tab bar usually losing (i.e. getting shrunk by the user in order to increase the size of the main content.) That means that, even with only a few tabs open, a tabs sidebar can't show very much description text for each tab.

When you have a lot of tabs, a tab sidebar shows more per-tab context than a tab top/bottom bar does. But having a lot of tabs is comparatively rare.

[GoOnThenDoTell]

I’ve never met anyone who only had a few tabs open at a time

[derefr]

It’s less “having only a few tabs open at once” and more “having a few tabs per window, in many windows.” People who exclusively use tabs are rare compared to people who mostly use windows and sometimes use tabs.

Remember, the default behaviour in all major browsers is to open external links from other applications in a new window. So, if you’re the regular “go with the flow” kind of computer user who presumes the defaults are defaults for a reason — and are a bit lazy in cleaning up your windows, and you use at least one external app (e.g. a mail client, a piece of collaboration software, etc.) — then even if you yourself prefer to open tabs, you’ll end up opening new windows quite frequently as well.

And, if you don’t care where you open each new tab, you’ll just end up opening it against whichever window was most recently opened; rather than having a dedicated “tabs I opened” window.

(As a person who bothered to install the “Merge Windows” Chrome extension to replicate the feature in Safari, I genuinely don’t get these people — but they really do exist, and are even seemingly in the majority.)

[CRConrad]

Not only Firefox but AFAIK most browsers -- at least on Windows -- have interpreted "target=new" as new tab, not window, for several years now. "Open in new tab" is also the first alternative on the right-click menu, before "Open in new window".

Also, BTW, Firefox has had a Tabs menu for years now; both vertical and hides itself away automatically. (Though perhaps you still can't save any vertical space with it: AFAICR it lives on the tab bar, so if you hide that you lose the menu too.)

[pmontra]

This is very true for monitors especially with affordable 24+ inches high density models.

Actually, the screen of my laptops got only slightly wider in the last 25 years but considerably shorter. 16:9 is bad on laptops.

This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.

That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.

[webmaven]

> This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.

> That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.

Why not use the autohide option with the launcher on the side?

[pmontra]

Because I don't need the launcher. I start most of the programs I need on boot and they go on for weeks until the next reboot (emacs, terminals, browsers, Thunderbird, keepassx, Telegram and 32 GB of RAM.) I use a virtual desktop (a Gnome activity?) per project so I have very few windows open per desktop and I alt tab between them. One browser window per desktop, one terminal per desktop, one emacs frame per desktop, Slack, etc. BTW, I wish that desktop Slack had an option to display multiple windows. Doing it in a browser is obvious but the desktop app is better than the browser one, so I drag it into another desktop when I change project. I run the other programs by pressing the windows key and typing their name, not every day or week. What I use my bottom bar for is to access the icons in the notification bar. Glance at the time, open or close a VPN, take a screenshot with Flameshot. I also placed the favorites menu there (some extension?) to start the file manager. I'm using Nemo instead of Nautilus because I like to predictably access files and folders with type ahead. I occasionally use the bottom bar to click on the name of a dining program and it's nice to have see them side by side as in old Windows versions.

[pmontra]

I can't edit my message anymore: a "dining program" is what my phone's autocorrect thinks a "running program" is doing. Dining on CPUs :-)

BTW, the Gnome's name for favorites is Places.

[md5wasp]

Does Chrome have a vertical tabs mode?! Because the primary reason I use Firefox is because it _does_ have a vertical tabs mode, via use of TreeStyleTabs and some userChrome.css hacks.

[vetinari]

> Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).

Gtk seems to optimized for the higher-end of not-hdpi-yet displays (100-120 dpi, at @1X), i.e. 1600x900 to 1920x1080 at 14". Fullhd at this size, the sizing is great, it doesn't need hidpi support yet, which would also explain the sad hidpi support in many apps (not the toolkit! just some apps; e.g. virt-manager/spice-gtk only recently got it supported).