Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design [LWN.net]

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 13, 2012 8:02 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

It's pretty clear that "Don't bother" meant "Don't bother running Gnome 3", not "I'm not bothered by Gnome 3."

> I suggest to actually read the blog post and the answers given in the comments.

Do you suppose the "David F. Skoll" commenter there might be dskoll? Just a guess.

I read through a lot of the comments... People expressed some concerns about big desktops and multiple monitors, an area where Gnome 3 still suffers. The concerns were hand-waved away with "we're working on it" (paraphrased). Not very encouraging.

We'll see! Should be fun to watch.

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 13, 2012 10:04 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

I find it awesomely funny that you summarize "we're working on it" as hand-waving. To me it means it is acknowledged to be a problem and they want to fix it... but you could also of course just complain on LWN. :P

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 13, 2012 15:55 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

It is hand-waving until you actually hint about how you're going to solve it. I didn't intend the term in the pejorative sense, just the "unsubstantiated claim" sense.

(Unless I missed a reply where Allan Day explained how these features, in conflict with large or irregularly-sized desktops, can be reconciled...? I admit, there were a LOT of comments...)

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 13, 2012 23:51 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

It is not hand-waving. He said at FOSDEM that it is a problem, they want to focus first on one thing, then work on the next thing. He explained it as iterative design.
What he explained that design is not perfect from the start. It is tested and changed until it works better. So when he says something is not perfect, and work is done by iteration, it conflicts with expecting that everything is explained up front. That is not how they do things.

If he said "will get to it", but didn't mean it (or never making time to get to it). Yes, that is hand-waving. But that is not the case here.

I hope you at least attend a conference so you can hear this in person.

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 14, 2012 0:50 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

That sounds great to me as long as they get far enough before releasing it. Gnome 3.2 still doesn't work on my multiple-monitor setup (bugs filed by others) so I would not be surprised if this too ships a little early... Somewhat uncommon desktop setups (like multiple monitors at different resolutions) could be left in the cold again.

We've both made our points, now we'll see! At least this time, should it ship a little early, I'll be a little more prepared for it. :)

I can barely keep up with my EE conference schedule but I'll keep an eye out. If Gnome 3 comes to the Bay Area, I'll make time.

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 14, 2012 9:54 UTC (Tue) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]

> Gnome 3.2 still doesn't work on my multiple-monitor setup (bugs filed by others) so I would not be surprised if this too ships a little early... Somewhat uncommon desktop setups (like multiple monitors at different resolutions) could be left in the cold again.

This is supposed to work ... where is said bug report?

Day: A New Approach to GNOME Application Design

Posted Feb 17, 2012 3:31 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I think this is it...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=748843

I'm running Radeon but not Intel so this might not be related to the problem I'm seeing. That said, I'm not too interested in this bug... I couldn't get Fedora to recognize my wireless adapter so I'm running XFCE on Mint. Worked perfectly out of the box, super stable.

I'll try Fedora again in a release or two.