[kijin]

Those spacers on both sides of the address bar made absolutely no sense, I agree.

But there's some logic to the growth of empty space everywhere. Even laptops have touchscreens these days. Click targets need to be bigger because fingers are fatter than mouse pointers. I just wish they'd keep around a compact option for non-touch devices, but unfortunately another recent trend is to get rid of user-configurable options.

[jchw]

Yeah, this is basically the problem. Similarly, IMO, using GNOME 3 adapted for phones via Phosh feels far more natural than using GNOME 3 on desktop. It really should be an indictment of the insistence that it's possible to make one single design that works well on all form factors, or even just two form factors as disparate as a tablet and a desktop PC. If it's possible, the "state of the art" isn't really selling it.

Windows 10 honestly comes closer than expected, but then misses in such a way that it can feel both awkward to use on a desktop (the settings app is pretty uncomfortable, along with photos and to some extent even calculator) and on a tablet (tablet mode is hard to navigate; I double click an image in File Explorer, it launches Photos. I hit back, it goes back, but the picture remains open. I go back to the photo and try to close it, and now I am all the way back to the start menu. Mission failed successfully. WM_POINTER is also buggy with split panes, so I hope you didn't want to draw while doing something else...)

I guess everything has to be mobile-first now, but it's increasingly close to "desktop-barely."

[kaba0]

I don’t know, GNOME 3 on laptops with proper gestures is a joy to use. Also, afaik Phosh is fully rewritten and hardly has anything in common with gnome, even the common apps are inferior to use on mobile.

[pmontra]

Does GNOME have gestures? I've been using it since 2009 and never noticed. I googled and found this https://github.com/JoseExposito/gnome-shell-extension-x11ges... plus a tentative design document from 2015.

[kaba0]

You need wayland GNOME (actually not wayland per se, but libinput that can properly process gestures, which can be hacked into XOrg, but I haven’t tried that), and there were a few gestures during GNOME 3, but it got revamped into a really productive environment with GNOME 40.

Not the best video, but that’s what I found: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku5YRMN8Uzo

What I like best is the 3 finger swipe up, for the same view as you would get with the Super key, and the 3 finger left right swipe for changing between desktops (this latter may not be showcased in the video I linked)

[jchw]

Basically I disagree. On phone the titlebars actually make sense. Even on a laptop with a touchscreen, which is probably the most ideal desktop-like platform, I still find GNOME 3 annoying.

[kaba0]

I’m not necessarily a fan of client side decorations, but with some buttons going into the titlebar, I don’t find it annoying at all. But of course UI/UX is subjective to a point.

[MikusR]

That's why Firefox for quite some time has had a special touch mode that increases spacing around elements.