GNOME Developers Continue Tweaking The Shell, Tuning For Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Developers Continue Tweaking The Shell, Tuning For Performance

Not only have KDE developers been very busy this week but so has the GNOME crew working toward the GNOME 46 release later this month as well as working on various other improvements to land past the 46 cycle...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-This-Week-VRR-VTE

[skeevy420]

Most of it I liked, but I have to say something about the proposed Background Apps Redux.

A regular system tray has your icons in a manner where you can access their functions within 2 clicks. It's either click the app's tray icon that's directly on the main bar and you have access to everything or you click the arrow next to the tray on the main bar, click the app's tray icon, and then have access to everything. With this method you have to click the tray, click the submenu, and then you click the app's widget to have access to everything.

Why can't they move the entire background task menu up to the top bar so all the background tasks are 2 clicks away like practically every other environment? Click the Tray Arrow, click the app's widget, and then do what you intended to do.

Not only does it save a click or two, but they could tie in notifications into the arrow button.

I find it funny how GNOME is rethinking that whole "No system tray" stance. Go figure that a graphical interface needs a place to stash long running programs and programs that act as graphical daemons.

[spicfoo]

I find it funny how GNOME is rethinking that whole "No system tray" stance. Go figure that a graphical interface needs a place to stash long running programs and programs that act as graphical daemons.

It is more of "the current protocol doesn't work in a sandboxed environment" stance. Independent of this background applications, there is ongoing work to come up with a new spec that addresses that issue. However all of this is muddled up in poor communication and lack of progress since everyone has a different idea on how to do things as is common with desktop Linux.

[botipua22]

Gnome have an entire black bar at the top with almost nothing in it, but they hide new functionality under multiple clicks to keep the desktop "clean". The top bar is begging for global menus and app indicators! And if you hide the mostly useless top bar with an extension, a cute mutter bug makes maximized windows "jump" up and down randomly after the screen is unlocked! This bug has been open for years and yet to be fixed.

[user1]

Why can't they move the entire background task menu up to the top bar so all the background tasks are 2 clicks away like practically every other environment? Click the Tray Arrow, click the app's widget, and then do what you intended to do.

I think this is also due to Gnome's design philosophy of being "distraction free". On one hand, I actually like how strict Gnome's design philosophy is (while KDE does improve on that front, there are still ui's that are total abominations, like Kate). On the other hand, I'm not a fan of this "distraction free" design philosophy because it leads to many things ending up behind extra clicks. This is exactly why the dash doesn't appear on your desktop by default, so launching any app is behind at least 1 extra click (unless you install the dash to dock or dash to panel extensions).

I heard Gnome does some research on how people use the ui's, so their design decisions are supposedly partly affected by the research. So I'm really curious about how they came to the conclusion of what's really considered a "distraction free ui". Like how did they decide how many ui elements / buttons should be hidden behind extra clicks and how many should be always visible so that it will suit most people? Because I imagine that for some people even the default Gnome ui (like the empty desktop with only the top bar) might be distractful, while for others even the messiest of the messy ui's might be fine.

[OneTimeShot]

I think this is also due to Gnome's design philosophy of being "distraction free".

Here's an idea... let me drag the toolbars around to where I don't find them distracting Gnome is both pretty good and pretty restrictive at the same time.

I don't get their "we-know-best" philosophy. I doubt they've done a fraction of the user research that Win95 and MacOS did... and it shows.

[juxuanu]

I find this article a bit underwhelming, given the unusually large amount of news in this TWiG

[pranav]

It would have been great if they picked Dynamic Tripple Buffering for GNOME 46 similar to how they picked up VRR.

[osw89]

I doubt they've done a fraction of the user research

Does it really surprise you when it is being developed by geniuses who unironically responded to a bug report about text being blurry with the sentence "what makes you think sharpness is a metric"? Gets even funnier when you realize the idiot who thought this was a good response wears glasses. Their entire mentality is that they are always right and it's an open source project so the users have to put up with everything they do and shouldnt be vocal about not liking something they did.

[Okki]

I hope that in my lifetime, Michael will finally allow us to block all these haters who continually pour their hatred onto a project that they don't even use.