GNOME Human Interface Guidelines Being Updated For GTK4, Other Modern Features

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Human Interface Guidelines Being Updated For GTK4, Other Modern Features

GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" are in the process of being updated around the GTK4 tool-kit and new components like libadwaita and libhandy...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-HIG-2021-Design

[kpedersen]

Libadwaita is a great example of upstream collaboration. The transformation from traditional desktop widgets to a hybrid desktop/mobile environment is a huge task. Congratulations to all involved.

Especially impressive seeing as there is no mobile hardware available that Gnome 3 can actually run on for testing!

It really makes me wonder what their success criteria was.

[skeevy420]

This first one here is extremely pedantic, but with all their inclusiveness I feel the need to point out that on the Header Bar page they refer to the left side exclusively as the start side and the right side as the end side. In RTL languages can be seen as backwards. Does GNOME flip the Header Bar for RTL languages so they follow their culture's start and end sides instead of Western ideology LTR start and end?

Anyhoo, I was hoping to find something about better window management controls. I do not like only having close as an option. To me, that is seriously the worst part of the HIG. And because HUMANS mis-click stuff putting the fscking close button next to menu buttons is a very UNHUMAN place to put it. Y'all should really consider how humans work and operate if yer shit's gonna be called Human Interface Guidelines. We're not perfect. We mess up. We click the wrong things. Close needs a better buffer. It should not be a small amount of pixels from the main and most used app menu. That's the R word meaning dimwitted that gets my posts flagged.

Want to also know what is unhuman? Magical header bars. There is nothing intuitive about them. Nothing about them say "double click me for special actions" or "you can hold me and drag me around". Take people interfacing with thing in real life. Most people don't go around touching blank walls to see what happens. If nothing is there you don't expect anything to happen. They will, however, go around and push a button they see on a wall. That's Human.

In closing and to repeat myself, if y'all are going to call it the Human Interface Guidelines then please consider how Humans actually Interface with the world. FWIW, I agree with trying to make as many things as uniform as possible; especially core projects. I just don't agree with how it is all being done nor do I agree that everything can be thrown into a header bar. That sucks because I think that GNOME is a very beautiful desktop environment. I wouldn't be so critical if it wasn't something that I wanted to use and see get better.

[Danny3]

Again with all the crap in the titlebar ?
Does Gnome people never drag the titlebar to the top or left and right sides of the screen and use the keyboard instead ?
They think that Windows developers haven't thought about this already and then they decided to drop it ?
Glad I'm not a Gnome user and the GTK programs that I use don't strictly follow these weird things.

[scottishduck]

Since this is gnome guidelines I’ll assume they emphasis adding as many clicks to actions as possible

[gedgon]

Again with all the crap in the titlebar ?
Does Gnome people never drag the titlebar to the top or left and right sides of the screen and use the keyboard instead ?
They think that Windows developers haven't thought about this already and then they decided to drop it ?
Glad I'm not a Gnome user and the GTK programs that I use don't strictly follow these weird things.

Haters gonna hate. Dude, you can drag the window by clicking on almost anything in the headerbar.

[zareami10]

Again with all the crap in the titlebar ?
Does Gnome people never drag the titlebar to the top or left and right sides of the screen and use the keyboard instead ?
They think that Windows developers haven't thought about this already and then they decided to drop it ?
Glad I'm not a Gnome user and the GTK programs that I use don't strictly follow these weird things.

You can drag it however you want, what are you talking about?

[kpedersen]

kpedersen It’s 2021 and you can’t imagine people using a 2in1 laptop/tablet in vertical mode?

No. Not really. "Open" ones running Linux distros simply don't exist in the wild. The last one I saw was a (now ancient) Thinkpad X61 tablet back in 2007 (Gnome 3's absured GPU requirements can't even support this machine now anyway).

Anyway GnomeOS is preparing support for RISC-V so there’s more hardware you can pretend doesn’t exist.

There exists some RISC-V SoC and servers... Thats pretty much it. Can you point me towards those fantasy RISC-V 2in1 laptops or tablets of yours?

Sarcasm aside. I hope you can prove me wrong. A RISC-V laptop would be awesome. I would be genuinely interested (and impressed) if you can point me towards one.

[JackLilhammers]

Especially impressive seeing as there is no mobile hardware available that Gnome 3 can actually run on for testing!

It really makes me wonder what their success criteria was.

To be fair there are both the librem 5 and the pinephone, but they are the perfect example of just how bad desktop operating systems work on mobile devices.

Anthony Young on:
Librem 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH8DRyKUZDg
PinePhone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCKMxzz9cjs

[Danny3]

Haters gonna hate. Dude, you can drag the window by clicking on almost anything in the headerbar.

Except that I have to waste my time to think on what not to click.
That in addition to the time wasted by having to click on the menu and actually seeing it an then visually searching for the category of the menu that I want to open.
This obsession with space that slows everything down makes no sense to me.
If Gnome developers would've designed a road, probably every sign would've been hidden in the ground and pop-up only when you are close to it.
Maybe some people woud say that is a good idea because the road looks clean an nice, but I think it's not practical at all with all the unnecessary delays.