Xfce 4.16pre1 Released As The First Step Towards This Next Desktop Update

[waxhead]

You may find that grabbbing a GTK "headerbar" by one of its widgets (e.g. a button) lets you drag it around.

Too thick, too thin... it's a themeing problem. I personally find that most GNOME apps save space compared to (mostly) equivalent apps, be them GTK2 or otherwise, that show a useless titlebar, a classic drop-down menu bar, and possibly another bar with buttons and so on. Super easy to demonstrate: put them side by side.
Then the question becomes whether you like the amount of actions you can perform with the widgets presented on the headerbar.
Many people have complained about headerbars being too thick in the past, but perhaps the matter has always been what method wins in terms of one-click actions per occupied pixels.
Then again, another question would be: are too many one-click actions good for the average user, or do they clutter the screen too much?

First of all a classic titlebar is far from useless. It contains the title and maybe some status information such as the document you are working on / the website you are visiting etc. It is a clean and structured approach to having a handle where you can move a window about without having any concern that you risk clicking some function inadvertently .
Below the title bar you usually have a nicely structured meny. You would typically have File, Edit, View, Window, Help etc... a clean and structured interface on where to find things. What on earth is wrong with this approach?

These days you have a hamburger button for a menu , that hides the option in the menu - what is the point with that? It does NOT consume less space typically , and when it does is utterly pointless as the free space is unused and could easily have been used to keep certain things visible all the time.

Another thing that modern GUI's do are to hide the scrollbar. Now if only the hidden scrollbar would free up some space then I could partly understand it , you have no idea that there is a scrollbar there unless you happen to scare your paranoid little mousepointer over that area.

And on websites, instead of having a search form with a search button - today you first have to OPEN the search box my clicking a magnifying glass, then you have to write and either press enter or click a second or the same magnifying glass. What is wrong with keeping a searchbox open and just being able to write in it.

In the good old 90's GUI's was nicely structured and organized and frankly the only conclusion is that people do no longer resist idiotic choices and accept features that are best suited for toddlers or people that suffers from a mental handicap. XFCE is starting to walk that route - i just hope they stay sane and focus on usability rather than fanciness.

[JackLilhammers]

You may find that grabbbing a GTK "headerbar" by one of its widgets (e.g. a button) lets you drag it around.

Too thick, too thin... it's a themeing problem. I personally find that most GNOME apps save space compared to (mostly) equivalent apps, be them GTK2 or otherwise, that show a useless titlebar, a classic drop-down menu bar, and possibly another bar with buttons and so on. Super easy to demonstrate: put them side by side.
Then the question becomes whether you like the amount of actions you can perform with the widgets presented on the headerbar.
Many people have complained about headerbars being too thick in the past, but perhaps the matter has always been what method wins in terms of one-click actions per occupied pixels.
Then again, another question would be: are too many one-click actions good for the average user, or do they clutter the screen too much?

Grabbing a headerbar by the widgets is really counterintuitive.
The user has to know how that particular ui library works, which by the way is different from any other platform.
That's horrible design.

I think graphical consistence is the least of the problems, and the space saved is not that much either.
Also on linux you lose the menubar, which is wonderful for discoverability and for teaching the user the keyboard shortcuts.
By removing it we have to rely on icons, which are much less readable than text and could also possibly be subject to theming.
And of course the dreadful hamburger menu. One ui concept of that had already been surpassed at the time of the Apple Lisa.

I'm not necessarily against CSDs, but I think linux has the worst implementation by far.
Windows and MacOS are way better both in terms of usability and space savings.

[schmidtbag]

lmao when I saw CSD in one of the bullet points I'm like "let me guess... there's going to be an argument about this in the comments section". The Phoronix community did not disappoint.

[Sin2x]

If all these weird trends continue at the current pace, the luddites will be back to punching cards in no time. I miss the "old" Xfce...

Give Antix a spin. It's pretty amazing what can be done with IceWM, all using ~180MB RAM post-boot.

[chocolate]

lmao when I saw CSD in one of the bullet points I'm like "let me guess... there's going to be an argument about this in the comments section". The Phoronix community did not disappoint.

Well of course, people read "CSD" and associate an architectural/technological problem with a specific UI/UX, confusing things up for all the others.

[145Hz]

Give Antix a spin. It's pretty amazing what can be done with IceWM, all using ~180MB RAM post-boot.

Thanks I gave it a spin a couple of months ago. It seems indeed interesting but I couldn't be bothered to make the switch yet or rather test it out more than a day.

[Vistaus]

The most stable and usable Windows manager in Linux.
KDE and Gnome are crashing like no tomorrow, riddled with bugs.

Funny, I had Xfce crashing like no tomorrow when I last tried it, but KDE also crashes from time to time, I can confirm that. GNOME not so much, but GNOME has other problems which are worse than crashing.

For me, the only stable WM's/DE's are Deepin, Sway, LXQT and up to some degree TDE (I have had a few crashes/stalls, but not nearly as much as on Xfce and KDE).

[Vistaus]

First of all a classic titlebar is far from useless. It contains the title and maybe some status information such as the document you are working on / the website you are visiting etc. It is a clean and structured approach to having a handle where you can move a window about without having any concern that you risk clicking some function inadvertently .
Below the title bar you usually have a nicely structured meny. You would typically have File, Edit, View, Window, Help etc... a clean and structured interface on where to find things. What on earth is wrong with this approach?

These days you have a hamburger button for a menu , that hides the option in the menu - what is the point with that? It does NOT consume less space typically , and when it does is utterly pointless as the free space is unused and could easily have been used to keep certain things visible all the time.

Another thing that modern GUI's do are to hide the scrollbar. Now if only the hidden scrollbar would free up some space then I could partly understand it , you have no idea that there is a scrollbar there unless you happen to scare your paranoid little mousepointer over that area.

And on websites, instead of having a search form with a search button - today you first have to OPEN the search box my clicking a magnifying glass, then you have to write and either press enter or click a second or the same magnifying glass. What is wrong with keeping a searchbox open and just being able to write in it.

In the good old 90's GUI's was nicely structured and organized and frankly the only conclusion is that people do no longer resist idiotic choices and accept features that are best suited for toddlers or people that suffers from a mental handicap. XFCE is starting to walk that route - i just hope they stay sane and focus on usability rather than fanciness.

I still don't understand why some people think title bars are "classic" and hamburger menus and CSD's "modern" even though Xerox pretty much invented CSD's and hamburger menus back in 1981.

[willmore]

Not a fan of client side decorations or superthick titlebars.... actually the very reason for CSD is the too thick bars that needs to be used for something. The problem is that you end up not having a consistent place to grab onto when you want to move a window.
Xfce's settings panel is not that bad. it is just a search box up there , but it is a start... soon the entire GUI lives in the titlebar

Does your keyboard not have an ALT key? ALT-leftclick should allow you to drag a window without having any titlebar.

[ed31337]

Does your keyboard not have an ALT key? ALT-leftclick should allow you to drag a window without having any titlebar.

Exactly! I love that feature in XFCE. Unfortunately, GNOME doesn't seem to have that, which is really crazy in my mind.