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Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)Posted Nov 11, 2011 4:58 UTC (Fri) by RogerOdle (subscriber, #60791)Parent article: Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register)
I found Gnome 3 annoying at first but it is just another environment and not particularly better or worse than any other. It is just a matter of using it long enough to become accustomed which is true of any desktop including Xfce. Xfce is similar enough to the styles of the past that it takes little effort for mature users to adapt to it. But is it really easier to use for first time users than Gnome 3 or anything else? What about all these people whose first computer is a tablet or smart phone? These environments are closer to Gnome 3 than Xfce. Which environment will these users find more comfortable.
Consider a recent report which addressed the computer market by combining desktop/laptop computers with mobile devices like tablets and smart phones. Conventional desktop devices have shrunk from 95% of the market to 70% of the market and this trend is continuing. An important metric to follow is what percentage of internet traffic is done on mobile platforms as opposed to desktop platforms. This tells you something about where people are spending their time.
Gnome 3 is an attempt to deal which this paradigm shift that we are in the middle of. The traditional mouse-pointer centered desktop is ill-suited to the touch environments where it greatest growth in computer platforms is today. Gnome 3 can be operated with a mouse but it is designed to be operated by touch once that technology is perfected in the Gnome APIs. I see it as encouraging the maturation of the touch technology for Linux by providing an environment ready to exploit it. I am certain it is not the best solution because it is one of the first. The next ones to come along always learn from the front runners. Gnome 3 will become better and easier to use but it will never be optimal for the traditional desktop since it is intended to be a merger of mobile environment motifs and desktop motifs so its goal will be to find the comfort zone where these two different environments meet.
I found a particular advantage to using Gnome 3 as an engineer which is probably useful at some level for system administrators. I am developing an embedded system that combines multiple computers that I monitor at the same time with VNC. With a simple movement of the mouse, I can shrink the screen to the "window selection" mode which lets me watch all of my computers at the same time. I can select a particular window and zoom in to a particular machine in a moment. I can see a case where an IT administrator may need to monitor interconnected system during setup configuration when it would be useful to watch the interactions of systems in a similar manner. It is more useful than shrinking terminal windows until they fit your desktop.
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Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 5:14 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
you are missing the point.
nobody is disagreeing with the idea that mobile devices are going to be more important.
what we are disagreeing with is that idea that a mobile interface will work on a desktop screen/mouse environment.
you are looking and saying 'mobile use is 30% of the market, we have to support that', but in the process you are breaking support for the other 70% of the market and telling those people that they aren't important, or are obsolete.
this is an area that it looks like KDE is doing much better in, they are continuing to support the desktop large screen + mouse environment, but at the same time providing a small touchscreen environment that uses the same infrastructure. that is the same approach that GNWOME should have taken
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 14:55 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I don't see GNOME shell as a mobile interface.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 20:55 UTC (Fri) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]
What kind of interface it is then?
Many people are still trying to figure it out..
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 21:36 UTC (Fri) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
Looks and feel very good on my 27", 2560 × 1440 screen and my 720p netbook. As a user, I would say it is a general desktop gui.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 23:43 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
the GNOME developers say that the reason they changed things was for mobile devices, so you may not see it as a mobile interface, but the developers are saying that they do.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 12, 2011 10:28 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Think you misinterpret those statements, GNOME 3 is not for mobile devices. Some things changed to make it easier using bad input devices, like the trackpad on a laptop. Some things are to support tablets (the hiding of mouse cursor in 3.2). Some developers (hadess) really like tablets and ensure that is supported and blog about it. However, just because there is some support for "mobile devices" does not mean GNOME 3 is for mobile devices. IMO 3.2 would be terrible on a phone and wonder if the on screen keyboard from 3.2 is good enough to rely on it on a tablet.
Not sure why you refer to "GNOME developers", but think I am not part of that. I've said elsewhere already that I'm part of the GNOME release team... though don't think that matters much in a discussion and would result in wrong assumptions. Meaning: being part of the release team is not about seeing everything with a glare of sunshine (marketing team).
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 21:46 UTC (Fri) by RogerOdle (subscriber, #60791) [Link]
I never said that 70% of the market was obsolete or that mobile devices will become more important. I am saying that the landscape is changing. That the future lies in a fusion of the mobile and desktop environments we see today. Think about this. It is easier to control a touch based environment with a mouse and keyboard than it is to control a traditional desktop environment with touch controls. This suggests that the trend will be for the desktop environments to become more like the touch environments than for the touch environments to become more like the desktop environments. Why should it not?
People are talking like these environments will never meet but if you do the same thing, such as email, on your mobile that you do on your desktop then why would you want to do it in different ways. People want consistency. They want to do things like email the same way no matter what device they are using. Just exactly what do you think that both Apple with ios/osx and Microsoft with Windows 8/Windows Mobile 7 are doing now? There is concern all over the place that old applications are going to be incompatible with the next generations of these mainstream operating systems and for good reason. The old applications do not work well on mobile platforms but the same human tasks still need to be performed. Gnome 3 is one of the open source answers to these changes but it is not the only one. There is also Ubuntu Unity. The efforts to try to apply touch mechanisms as just some other alternative to the mouse and keyboard have not worked well. They are all inferior to the systems that are purpose built for touch operation. Now touch screens are appearing on desks so those comfortable with touch on mobile devices will be more comfortable with their desktop systems.
We need to stop looking at mobile and desktop systems as separate systems and look at them as they truly are. They are all computers. They are all used to perform the same essential tasks. They all can be made to perform any task a computer is suitable for. They are more and more being used in a unified environment where the boundary lines between them gets more difficult to distinguish. The difficulties in applying touch style operation on desktop systems has more to do with the comfort zone of the users which it built from their experience with the desktop than it does from the actual technologies. It is very similar to the difficulty long time users experience when they switch from Apple to Windows or vice versa. One it not truly better than the other at the level of human interaction, it is more a matter of style.
Gnome is going to continue to change in the ways that it sees the mainstream environment change. At times it will be a mover of those changes. It is not going to be stuck in the past but will always move forward. What is going to come next? Will touch be replaced by sensors that detect hands waved in the air? I am not sure how it would work but who knows?
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 23:32 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> This suggests that the trend will be for the desktop environments to
> become more like the touch environments than for the touch environments to > become more like the desktop environments. Why should it not?
Touch environments are great for consuming information, but bad for entering information into the computer. It doesn't make sense for the interfaces to be the same.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 11, 2011 23:51 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
as Android is learning, what works on a 4" screen is tolerable on a 7" screen and bad on a 10" screen (and the same thing works the other way), scaling it up further to multiple and very large screens breaks things even further.
and you can't even decide based on screen resolution.
if you have a 4" 1080p screen you need very different sizes of things and it takes significantly less effort to move large numbers of pixels around the screen (and it is significantly harder to specify a location precisely) than if you have a 54" 1080p screen.
for that matter, even at the same screen size you may need different interfaces.
a 30" 1080p screen sitting on your desk needs a vastly different environment than the exact same 30" screen at TV viewing distances.
Android is trying to deal with this issue by suggesting the developers use multiple panels in their apps, and on a 10" screen display multiple panels at once while on a 4" screen switch between panels. this works to some extent, but it doesn't scale indefinitely.
trying to force a UI designed for a 4" screen to a 30" screen is not going to work much better than taking the UI designed for a 30" screen and trying to use it on a 4" screen. It will _work_ but it will not work nearly as well as a UI that can take advantage of the larger screen and more precise pointing.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 12, 2011 15:42 UTC (Sat) by RogerOdle (subscriber, #60791) [Link]
I understand the technical difficulties. But the world is changing. Both the mobile environments and the desktop environments are changing. What is driving them is user experience and the perception of usability and familiarity. I don't know that the future will be a single unifying environment but I do think that the standard interfaces for the most common applications will. If you want to send an email you are going to be irritated if you have to figure out all over again how to do the one thing you do everyday. Even if you are familiar with the email programs on both machines, if they do not have a common look and feel then it is going to irritate you. Not just you but everyone who does these same common things. This is the kind of force that drives change. Someone will make a small change that makes it more seamless to move from working in one environment to the other more seamless. It will seam so obvious that everyone takes it for granted that that is the way it should always have been. The two worlds will have moved a little closer.
There is no question that data entry on a big desktop is more efficient than a small mobile screen but data entry will have to be done on the mobile device anyway. Whether you are gathering information in the field or making a last minute change to your spreadsheet. It just has to work. In the long run, the applications have to have the same features in both worlds. Then look at it this way, how many of those mobile devices have HDMI for playing back movies on HD screens? Just how sure are you that mobile devices are unsuitable for data entry when large (bigger than desktop) screens are so readily available?
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 12, 2011 11:57 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] People are talking like these environments will never meet but if you do the same thing, such as email, on your mobile that you do on your desktop then why would you want to do it in different ways. Because my desktop supports UI models that (a) don't work on mobile phones and (b) work better on desktops than a UI model built around the limitations of mobile phones would.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 13, 2011 17:20 UTC (Sun) by deepfire (subscriber, #26138) [Link]
> I found a particular advantage to using Gnome 3 as an engineer which is
> probably useful at some level for system administrators. I am developing > an embedded system that combines multiple computers that I monitor at the > same time with VNC. With a simple movement of the mouse, I can shrink the > screen to the "window selection" mode which lets me watch all of my > computers at the same time. I can select a particular window and zoom in > to a particular machine in a moment.
Gnome 2 (actually, Compiz) had a very very similar feature. It was merely disabled by default. It was called "desktop wall". I /think/ it even was enabled by default at one point.
You'd strike a key combination, and you'd be transitioned from a single desktop view to seeing the whole desktop grid, in an animated style.
I found it quite nice at the time, although I didn't use it much.
Where I guess it differs, is that in Gnome 3 you see /just/ the apps you started, instead of all the desktops.
Why GNOME refugees love Xfce (Register) Posted Nov 21, 2011 17:42 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
GNOME 3 with Compiz (either with or without the Unity plugin) still has this feature.
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