Purism Hopes To Default To GNOME On The Librem 5 Phone, But Still Supporting KDE

[Djhg2000]

Cue Gnome hate in 3...2...1...

The GNOME Shell feels like it's designed for touchscreens by developers without touchscreens. The OSK has no arrow or special character keys, the window close button is bigger than average but still too small for touchscreen use, the activities menu cannot be opened by swiping down onto the touch area from the top left corner, very few GTK applications support touch scrolling because no solution was backported to GTK2 while the GNOME applications all use GTK3 and cause a wildly inconsistent behavior. Not to mention the constant sniping of random useful system settings and never forget bug #650371 !

*Mic drop*

[Nille_kungen]

I think DWM or Gnome 2 would be far too fiddly for a user to control via touch on a small phone display.

I guess you don't remember Hildon UI in Nokias n900, Maemo 5 used gtk+ later Nokia shifted to use Qt.

[shmerl]

Maemo 5 used gtk+ later Nokia shifted to use Qt.

That's exactly the point. GTK is just a pain to use for developing mobile interfaces.

[DanL]

I also do not see why Gnome needs any more backing with SUSE, Canonical and Red Hat all supporting it... I know that mobile and convergence is not a priority for these companies

Convergence was a big thing for Canonical, and Shuttleworth said he still believes in it even if Canoncial is focusing on more lucrative projects.

[Danielsan]

Gnome Shell as main distro makes sense if you pursue a unified environment, Kde use two different environments for Desktop and Mobile.
Even dough the former is a good ambition we must admit that all the ones who tried to reach this goal have failed miserably; by the contrary Apple, that has some skills in designing UI, decided to not unify Desktop and Mobile. Since these previous experiences it is a big risk try to unify desktop and mobile, overall does who really care about integration?

[ElectricPrism]

The GNOME Shell feels like it's designed for touchscreens by developers without touchscreens. The OSK has no arrow or special character keys, the window close button is bigger than average but still too small for touchscreen use, the activities menu cannot be opened by swiping down onto the touch area from the top left corner, very few GTK applications support touch scrolling because no solution was backported to GTK2 while the GNOME applications all use GTK3 and cause a wildly inconsistent behavior. Not to mention the constant sniping of random useful system settings and never forget bug #650371 !

*Mic drop*

I use Gnome on a Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16 (Basically a big tablet with no keyboard) and it honestly is a pretty nice experience overall. There are some edges here and there that need to be sanded down but overall it is a good experience after using the extensions that I like.

I have submitted several bug reports for minor nuisances that still need to be worked out.

Of all the shells I have used, I feel like Gnome has been created mindful of a touchscreen future.

That said, I am unsure that Purism making this sort of decision at this time is a wise thing. There is no way to predict what the options will look like in 1 year, 2 years, etc...

While I am hopeful Gnome will be in good shape and I do see the idealistic logic of using the same shell for Desktop and Laptop, I am unsure if it is realistic or even plausible.

It could take considerable investment of time and resources and I think there is weight to the argument that Qt might be a better selection than GTK at this kind of form factor scaling.

That said, I also would like to say that GTK is switching to a more regular release cycle and I can't imagine that the issues today will always be issues for the GTK toolkit. Perhaps that is naive, but there's a part of me that says things can change and that sometimes using the perfect software isn't always the best choice, there are many examples of inferior toolkits. apis, and libraries becoming popularized because the sum of the parts and launching a product at the right time is better than the perfect product launched at the wrong time.

I think he is wise to begin the process of knocking on the communities doors to get them to think about what needs to be done for this to become a reality, but I think commitment may be an error until it is more obvious if Gnome will be ready in time.

[caligula]

Not Gnome hate, but GTK is pretty bad at mobile UIs. That's about it. Qt is light years ahead. So whether they are going to use KDE or Gnome is less of a question, but whether they'll use Qt or GTK is what's important.

They really should have learned from others' mistakes.

Which GTK version you are talking about? I'd assume people should target GTK4 now adays? Gtk2 is deprecated old. Don't new versions support touch, multi-touch, scene graph, vulkan, and so on? What's missing? Gnome has been good at keeping things simple and usable. C development pulls in less dependencies (e.g. a huge C++ RT lib). Which Qt version you're referring to? I run both Qt 4 and 5 apps. Not sure what's the status quo.

[stevecrox]

I use Gnome on a Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16 (Basically a big tablet with no keyboard) and it honestly is a pretty nice experience overall. There are some edges here and there that need to be sanded down but overall it is a good experience after using the extensions that I like.

I last used Gnome/Unity on a 10" HP Tablet running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (1080p screen resolution), I remember finding it hilarious that Unity was basically unusable as the clickable areas were so tiny. You couldn't even open applications from the side bar as my baby finger spanned 3 icons. Gnome 3 was a big improvement but dragging windows or hitting the close button was basically impossible, I suspect your finding it easier as your screen is larger (with a similar resolution?).

I'm actually writing this on a 10" Asus Tablet Hyrbid running KDE (plasma-desktop) on Debian Stretch undocked and using the on screen keyboard, the buttons are the same. Icon's are no larger than they are on Gnome, but Plasma seems to correctly guess what I'm am trying to do. I did try Gnome 3 on this tablet but it felt so laggy I quit before trying much.

I really miss plasma-netbook, in tablet mode having a single full screened application by default was nice and the desktop's giant icons made things trivial. If you modded plasma-netbook so it let you split the screen real estate with the virtual keyboard (similar to Android) you would have my ideal interface, alas they discontinued it because no one has a netbook these days.

Plasma Concept X looks fantastic.

[Apopas]

Of all the shells I have used, I feel like Gnome has been created mindful of a touchscreen future.

Gnome shell with it's big bars and icons is incredible in my htpc!

[shmerl]

Which GTK version you are talking about?

I'm talking about using Qt Quick for mobile development.