| I am not related to the Gnome team in any way. These are my uninformed thoughts as a casual user: 1. I've found this confusing as well. It is frustrating. For example, when I have two terminal windows open (one root terminal window and a regular terminal window). 2. Not having a minimize probably helps get rid of complexity like where to put the now minimized window. I can understand where they are coming from with this. I've learned to live with this one. 3. Not applicable. Sorry. 4. I don't use multiple desktops unless I need to minimize a window (which then I stow away to the second desktop). 5. I have a 15" lcd display on my laptop... that's about it. Maybe you can make your mouse move faster or make it cover more ground per distance of physical movement? Just a thought... 6. Pull down menus are going away. Multiple hierarchical menus and sub menus are not good design. I know even though I don't know anything about design. 7. Yes, now that you mention it a lot of what we discussed earlier (including 2: minimize windows) comes from the desire to have a united front when it comes to user experience. Just because the implementation sucks doesn't necessarily mean the ideas are bad. With continuity (that should have been a drinking game at wwdc 14), Apple is dipping its toe in the water. There is a massive risk of failure but the dream of one UI to rule them all is too big to give up. Are we going to say "no, gnome doesn't need to run on touch-enabled devices"? 9. Defaults definitely matter. I think in terms of windows as well, for example. Not applications. However, I can understand where they are going with this in light of your number 7. 10. It will be sad if Debian doesn't ship with Gnome. But at the end of the day, I'll probably use whatever comes default. :) Just not a fan of sub sub menus in pull downs. Reminds me of windows 9x start menu. |
6. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. To be more precise, the thing that I like is the menu bar as a central organizing element of the application, with the familiar "File", "Edit", etc. menus. I agree that having even one level of submenus below these is suboptimal, and having two is terrible. I think it remains to be seen whether they're going away. On OS X, for one, they don't seem to be going anywhere, and that seems like a good decision to me.
7. I would prefer if Gnome, Canonical, etc. gave up on the idea that you're going to run the same desktop and applications on a desktop as on a phone. I think they should make a variant interface for touch devices, like Apple has done. Of course "Gnome Desktop" and "Gnome Touch" should share code to the extent possible, but I think the desktop and a phone are just too different to share a common UI.
Honestly, I think Gnome 3 is in many ways the most polished and beautiful of the Linux desktops, but they've made a few fundamental decisions that I just can't get behind.