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by marginalia_nu 224 days ago
When I complain about Gnome driving away users with hostility, it's mainly their GTK stewardship I talk of.

That, and things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off. Very out of touch.
2 comments
xethos 224 days ago
> things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off.

That was actually an absolute godsend using the Pinephone, and IMO laid the groundwork for the Librem 5 (and modern Linux-on-Mobile interfaces) to take root. I do not believe PostmarketOS would be doing as well as it is if they didn't have apps that play nicely with touch.

You don't use it, and you don't appreciate it, and that's fine. I'd say it most defintitely has a place though, without even touching on the chicken-and-egg bit about touchscreen / mobile Linux not taking off vs Gnome pushing for touchscreen / adaptability before it goes mainstream

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marginalia_nu 224 days ago
I really don't understand why we need to absolutely ruin desktop UIs in order to have mobile interfaces. For web UIs it may be argued as a necessary evil as designing multiple front-ends is expensive and reactive UIs can theoretically be made to exist and shown in small demos to be decent, but when designing desktop applications?
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xethos 224 days ago
Having a framework that can be adaptable, like GTK, allows for padded, but IMO reasonably-sized touch targets. Designing an adaptive desktop app means the effort is only spent once, but can kickstart the virtuous cycle of "Mobile Linux is less trash than it used to be" -> More users are willing to use Mobile Linux -> More effort is spent making it less trash.

Though if you insist on click-targets that are exclusively for the mouse, I've found most KDE apps less mobile-optimized. The elderly and mobile users can appreciate larger touch-targets, and you can avoid GTK, which seems like a perfect compromise

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ragnese 224 days ago
Point taken on GTK, and I can't really disagree since I haven't even poked at writing a GTK GUI in many years.

But, you still couldn't resist complaining about the UI implementations, which sounds more like complaints about GNOME apps and GNOME Shell. Who cares if you think that GNOME Shell looks like it accommodates touch screens? Firefox, for example, uses GTK and doesn't seem to look like a touch screen UI to me as I'm typing into this text box.

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marginalia_nu 224 days ago
The problem isn't that they accommodate touch screens, but that they do so at the expense of keyboard and mouse users, and then they push these changes to GTK in a way where keyboard-and-mouse interfaces become clunkier and GTK-developed UIs become very hard to integrate with other desktop environments.

Firefox has definitely been affected by this. The hamburger button is a touch paradigm which makes no sense on a large desktop screen with a mouse and keyboard-control scheme. It only serves to add more clicks to every interaction. Likewise the reduction of the scrollbar to a scroll indicator.

I was sad when Gnome 2 became Gnome 3 because I really liked Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 was broken. Then I moved on, but where ever I went insanity from the Gnome project kept leaking and making UIs worse.

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