who even decides what's "modern" anymore?
can anyone, honestly, without reading the article (or guessing from the headline), tell me which of these is the "modern" design?
edit: people are getting confused by the fact that one is tree view, not icons view so i changed the image. old image here
Apparently "modern" means hiding options behind extra clicks
i may be blind but what exactly was hidden behind one or more clicks?
Notice Min/Max buttons missing from window bar?
That's the default.
That’s nothing new though, that’s been Gnomes thing for over a decade
Clearly the dark mode is the modern one! Jokes aside, I just realized that there THREE menu options on that toolbar: hamburger, kebab, and waffle! I realize they do different things, but no wonder people are confused by and scared of computers. Also, now I'm hungry!
TIL of kebab and waffle menus.
as someone who's not scared of computers, i have no idea what they do. i assume the right one is icons/list/compact[^1] not a waffle menu, but the hamburger and kebab? i have no clue
[^1]: though why it's showing list when the current view is icons, i don't know either
Since the kebab menu is inside the location/search box, I'm guessing it contains search-related options.
It'd be kinda nice if they made these kinds of changes options rather than just deciding this is best
Could honestly take it or leave it, doesn't really add anything
Adding options
Gnome desktop
Pick one.
i'm not even sure it's worth having an option. i don't think i'd even have noticed a difference, apart from the menu button being in a slightly different place to every other gnome app. it's fine; but it wasn't worth the development time
The last thing I want is an option for this. My gosh, imagine the amount of options you would end up with if every single design choice was turned into an option. Who in the world would like that many options.
I'm happy to just have a design team work on whatever they think looks better and works best for the user experience, and implement it after some rounds of public review and testing. This looks neat enough to me - slightly less cluttered than what my current Nautilus window looks like while maintaining the same functionality.
Who in the world would like that many options.
KDE fans?
Awww, Plasma fans, you know I'm playin'.
yep, that's me
Seriously, I envy you guys. Every time I try to use Plasma, I end up spending all my time tweaking the desktop, and by the time I'm done, I realize I've just recreated the Gnome workflow...
Well I just switched to KDE Plasma last week and I'm pleasantly surprised just how many things are configurable via a menu and how well it runs on Wayland With a Nvidia GPU.
I used to despise KDE Neon, and used Gnome for a bit, but I don't think I can go back anymore until their design philosophy changes again.
The first one doesn't waste space in the title bar by expanding the locator and navigator buttons there.
It's just my opinion (since it's not in the article) but a thing that makes Gnome and Libadwaita a "modern design" is the fact that the production behind it tries to bridge the gap between a "mouse and keyboard" and a "touch screen" workflow.
None of the other DEs come even close to Gnome when used on a tablet
Petition to force anyone talking about software to use "trendy" or "fashionable" instead of "modern".
Full height sidebar - from Mac OS 7 or so - must be modern?
I'm very glad GNOME does such an amazing job staying modern in its look. GNU+Linux and free software would be much worse off without it.
Great. Now do split panel!
And column browse
I don't think I can go back to Nautilus after using Dolphin for so long, even if the search is far better.
The search on nautilus is probably better because a lot of gnome distros have the file indexer enabled by default, and that's what nautilus uses, but many kde distros don't come with the kde indexer, so dolphin doesn't index by default.
So it's not just me having files that exist, but aren't found at all sometimes?
I’d love a setting to change the default file manager. I always install Nemo and configure it to be the default but last I checked, it’s not a simple GUI setting like changing the default browser or email client or whatever. And then you end up with two programs called “Files,” which obviously isn’t ideal.
Would it be that much of a problem to have what app is “Files” be a simple setting? Maybe it’s way more complicated than one assumes.
My dream is that one day we will be able to assign default applications to the “generic” names in Gnome. Launch “Browser” and open Firefox (or chrome 🤢), Files and open Dolphin, Messages and open Elements etc etc.
Obviously I can do the same with custom .desktop files but it would be a nice flair to use the settings to just assign applications to those generic names.
Not a fan of slicing up the title bar like that, to be honest. Yeah, it saves some space, but I'm on a desktop with plenty of screen space, so that really isn't a priority, and being able to easily move windows around is a priority.
Also, what the hell is wrong with old-fashioned menus? This isn't a phone. GNOME doesn't even run on phones.
That's the thing. There is no title bar. The title bar, if forced to exist, would go above both of those sections.
GNOME apps seem to have been headed in this direction for a while.
If I open gnome-disks, for example, the title bar is kind of odd because it doesn't show the name of the program at all. It only shows the size of the currently selected disk, and underneath that in a smaller text subheading is the actual device pathname of the disk. How many other programs do you know that have a subheading under the window title in the title bar?
This feels like an early decision to do something different with that part of the window.
Further along in the evolution is the dconf-editor which no longer shows any kind of title bar at all. The window manager shows that the window title is "dconf Editor" but there's nothing on the window itself that says that.
Earlier versions of each definitely had a standard title bar (I remember dconf-editor having one fairly clearly, because the new interface seemed strange at first), but not any more.
There's also that desktop web browsers generally request that their title bar not be shown. Given that everyone has at least one browser window open, it would be almost foolish to assume there's been no influence from that design choice.
As a laptop user I love the idea that some of the titlebar space being utilized. I don't use GNOME though. I hope there will continue to be good UXs for both of us.
What's the advantage vs. the current version?
Also looks like it's removing an important visual affordance (i.e., which areas you can click to drag the window), unless I'm misinterpreting it
The current version has some problems with adaptivity, e.g. resizing the app window can cause issues. This led to the creation of new libadwaita widgets. If you want to read the technical details, see https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2023/06/15/rethinking-adaptivity/
Also looks like it's removing an important visual affordance (i.e., which areas you can click to drag the window), unless I'm misinterpreting it
The top bar has been full of buttons with no whitespace for a year or more now, that's not new (you can still drag the window using the whole bar, but it's definitely not intuitive and made me subconsciously do Win+drag to be safe many times).
This seems to be a relatively minor visual update to have the left sidebar fill the whole window - ~~maybe they want more space for shortcuts at a given window height?~~ No clue.
Edit: never mind, checked again and it's literally just a tiny visual update with no change to the actual content of the sidebar, but it takes some space away from the top bar.
i welcome merging two triple-dot menus into one, according to screenshots.
Win+drag
Thank you internet person, you have changed my life forever.
I don't like Nautilus and always srick with Nemo but the new look of many Gnome apps is really nice!
Been a Gnome user for years and always glad to see them modernize the UI more, but the one thing I desperately want is .stl and/or .3mf thumbnailers to just work with Nautilus. Tried several times to set up in Fedora using f3d, but instead just get blurry question mark thumbnails
Please also remove the text places and make use of that space
Looks nice, but if I could trade these visual gimmicks for a type-ahead feature, I would do so in a heartbeat.
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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