| > while the keyboard based workflows it seems to want to enable are better served by tiling WM such as Sway This is where I think your analysis starts to break down. Tiling and keyboard-oriented are almost orthogonal. There's no a priori reason that a tiling WM has to be keyboard-oriented, nor that floating WMs are inherently less accommodating to keyboard-oriented workflows. As an anecdote, way back in my youth, I had all kinds of keyboard shortcuts for resizing and moving windows by different amounts in my Openbox WM setups. Likewise, I really tried to like the popular tiling WMs (i3, xmonad, AwesomeWM), but I eventually realized that I can't literally be focusing on content from multiple windows simultaneously, and it makes way more sense for me to size and position each window so that I can optimize my interactions with that one when I am focusing on it. > do not make sense for the "default" WM that is picked up by casual converts who are used to a point and click system. Overall it's just a confusing mess for new users, which Canonical/System76 rationally get rid of (which is probably a majority of the GNOME user base). Let's be real, though. The year of Linux On The Desktop is not coming--hell, The Desktop is pretty much dying altogether. So, I really don't care if we optimize for the "casual computer user" who just happens to stumble into a chair in front of a Linux desktop, because that person doesn't exist. It may sound selfish, but I rather they optimize for users who already exist. > GNOME has come a long way, but its stubborn insistence on not having a desktop with a real application launcher remains a huge usability misstep.
> [...]
> So why does GNOME continue down this path. Is it a fear of being "just like everyone else" by using a tried and true dock/application bar? GNOME is actually fairly close to macOS in this regard. Yes, macOS has a dock with an application launcher, but if I didn't already know what the application launcher icon looks like, I'd have no idea how to get to its application launcher: the icon I'm looking at right now on my work Mac is a square icon with a 3x3 grid of colored squares inside it--what the hell does that mean? Is it a color picker app? Some kind of Tetris or Candy Crush game? GNOME's top-left stupid oval button is equally bad, but not worse, than macOS's UX discoverability, IMO. And I have to wonder how truly "intuitive" the Windows situation is, either. The old Windows versions used to have the word "Start" on the button, which at least gives some kind of hint that my computing journey "begins" there. I think since Vista or 7, it's basically just been the Windows icon. I suspect it's more intuitive than the macOS or GNOME analogs, but probably only a tiny bit if I were to sit someone down who hasn't used a Windows PC in their life. |