GNOME Developers Working To Rethink Their Window Management Approach

[kpedersen]

Interestingly reinstating a Gnome2-style task manager and minimize/maximize buttons on the windows resolves most of the issues started in the article. For example:

As new windows are opened, existing ones are obscured, sometimes completely hiding them from view

Use the task manager as an *always visible* list of windows for quick access. Consider the taskbar icon an extension of a window and basically no window is obscured.

Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control

Maximize button on the window sets the largest size and places it automatically. If the rest of the window titlebar is clear (not cluttered up with random client side decorations), it does not need precise motor control to move a window.

[deve]

That's a misconception that a lot of people have. Bigger clicked targets are beneficial to mouse user's as well. Bigger buttons require less accuracy to hit so you can whip your pointer to them and confidently click them way quicker.

Bigger buttons are ok (in reasonable size). Additional clicks and moving mouse on whole screen for simple action are not ok. For example when you have to use context menu in new version. Also the new applications screen is just stupid. There is a lot of empty space on left and right side and everything is displayed vertically one below the other - search, workspaces, application icons, favourite/opened apps, so there is very little space for these big application icons. And if you would like to group them using directories to save space, you get huge 3x3 grid inside a directory...

I was using Gnome because it was working for me without any major issues but since Gnome 4x I had to switch to Cinnamon.

[cl333r]

The most obvious aspect in which both do not overlap is that when using a mouse, how much a mouse needs to be moved is of relevance, so it is better to have compact menus with small icons. Whereas for touch it is better to have large icons, so they can be more easily touched, and the whole screen can be used more freely since it is easier to move the hands anywhere and the fingers themselves also have a certain reach.

It's amazing how they don't get such simple and fundamental things, right? I realized Gnome devs are insane back in ~2010 when they released Gnome 3.

[Crocodilus]

Thats an interesting change of view : “do what the people want “ . Ha . Maybe they should’ve know sooner that most regular people dont want a touch-like UI on their desktop .

That for most, desktop icons and a reasonable taskbar matters. That people still use system tray apps . Oh well ,pretty sure thats just PR mumbo jumbo ,they will continue to do exactly what they want .

[SofS]

That's a misconception that a lot of people have. Bigger clicked targets are beneficial to mouse user's as well. Bigger buttons require less accuracy to hit so you can whip your pointer to them and confidently click them way quicker.

How small is far too small for an icon can be argued upon, specially regarding those with visual or mobility impairments who require larger mouse arrows. However, in any case, for mouse use the icons can be much smaller than touch icons without accuracy issues. For instance, Mozilla hiding the compact mode was nonsensical, it is effectively wasting screen space in a program designed to display things by managing said screen space.

[curfew]

Why do I have a feeling that the devs are overthinking, inflating the "problem" of window management. At least personally I always have the same few windows open over three virtual desktops, and these windows always have the same size that I will never change. Maybe occasionally I unmaximize a window that usually spends months in a maximized state.

There are certain apps that we always want to be either maximized completely or docked to the left or right side of the screen. Then again there are some other apps that we would always prefer to just float around, for example a terminal window, PDF reader or text editor (on a big screen).

What I personally need is for Gnome to remember which windows are docked left/right, which are maximized and which are floating around. I don't need it to try outsmarting me by making these decisions for me, I want it to just remember what my decision was the last time.

For the record: Gnome can almost do this already. It will remember window sizes and positions but won't remember if they were docked. Also restoring a maximized window is flawed because the window usually forgets its size in the unmaximized state.

[Weasel]

They need to come up with new crap that nobody wants, even if it's senseless, to keep their dead weight jobs you know. Because they are technically illiterate to do anything productive.

[Myownfriend]

Interestingly reinstating a Gnome2-style task manager and minimize/maximize buttons on the windows resolves most of the issues started in the article. For example:

You can already do those things yet the issues they describe in the article remain.

Use the task manager as an *always visible* list of windows for quick access. Consider the taskbar icon an extension of a window and basically no window is obscured.

Having an Application List (which is what Gnome calls it in Gnome Classic) would always give you a list of buttons to raise a window but it's not improving window visibility. A good portion of the post is talking about fixing the issue of windows launching on top of existing windows which might require the user to manually re-place them so they aren't doing that. Having the Application List doesn't fix that.

Maximize button on the window sets the largest size and places it automatically. If the rest of the window titlebar is clear (not cluttered up with random client side decorations), it does not need precise motor control.

Having a maximize button by default also doesn't fix what they're talking about and maximizing everything isn't a good replacement for what they're talking about. As it pertains to precise motor controls, headerbar's are generally much larger than SSD titlebars and the button in them, at least in GTK's implentations of them, don't click when you drag them.

[L_A_G]

Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed

I'm probably not the only one who realizes that the number of pitfalls here makes this job into something that might as well have been conjured up by AM from "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

Not only do you have to contend the absolute cacophony of screen sizes, resolutions, number of displays in a setup and multiple input methods, you get an even greater number of variables from people's preferences. What works for me on my dual 27" 3840 x 2160 displays with my preferences is going to be drastically different not just from some, but probably also a majority of people. Additionally what works for the myriad subsets of other people won't work for me so the settings to change things to suit everyone's use cases are going to end up so unwieldy as to be unusable to people who aren't tech savvy and frustrating to those who are.

There's that old saying about how a good compromise is one everyone is equally dissatisfied with and I think it's why it's not really been tried in desktop products. No solution is going to work for any significant subset of use cases so the solution with the greatest level of user satisfaction is going to be the one that annoys everyone; i.e not even trying.

Then again Gnome has spent money on far dumber ideas and some valuable insights could come out of this as it's done in public and not hidden from the public inside a totally opaque company like Microsoft or Apple.

[Myownfriend]

Bigger buttons are ok (in reasonable size).

I don't really find any buttons in Gnome Shell to be overly large though.

Additional clicks and moving mouse on whole screen for simple action are not ok.

Overall mouse movement being increased can be an issue but I don't find the distance to be as much of an issue. A larger flick of the mouse vs a shorter, more precise flick of the mouse are largely identical to me.

For example when you have to use context menu in new version.

You mean because you have to click to open submenus? That also decreases mouse movement though and removes the possibility of someone accidentally making the submenu disappear because they accidentally drifted their mouse too far down or up when navigating to the submenu. It may not be completely typical but it works just fine and does solve some minor issues without really creating new ones.

F
Also the new applications screen is just stupid. There is a lot of empty space on left and right side and everything is displayed vertically one below the other - search, workspaces, application icons, favourite/opened apps, so there is very little space for these big application icons. And if you would like to group them using directories to save space, you get huge 3x3 grid inside a directory...

The current applications screen is one of the reasons that I stopped using start menu like extensions after Gnome 40 so I don't find it stupid. You get 24 icons before a new page is created so that's really not a small amount of space. That's not a decent amount of icons and pretty decent amount of icons compared to other application launchers. Sure, if you're looking at it on 4K display with 100% DPI sizing then you'll see the whitespace and feel like you can fit maybe twice as many icons at least but that's just on that screen with those specific settings.

The applications screen is not intended to be a re-flowing list of alphabetical sorted application icons. The intent is for your application icons to be in the same spot on the same page regardless of your settings. If you have have laptop and you connect to monitors of different sizes, resolutions, and DPI scales, the position of icons is supposed to be the same so you can quickly bring the application grid up and click where you normally would to launch a specific application. If it just kept trying to show as many applications icons as possible depending on the screen resolution and DPI scaling then icons wouldn't consistently be on the same row, column, or page.

I would encourage you to set up a VM with Gnome OS or anything that uses Gnome and try it out at different window sizes and see what I'm talking about.