Day: GNOME OS [LWN.net]

Day: GNOME OS

Posted Aug 8, 2012 16:29 UTC (Wed) by nevets (subscriber, #11875)
In reply to: Day: GNOME OS by drag
Parent article: Day: GNOME OS

> No. But having desktop that is also usable on a touch screen is a important priority for them. This is something that Linux distributions, in general, never had in the past. There existed lots of software and environments that were intended to make writing and using touch screen oriented software easier, but nothing in general to make Linux desktop usable using anything other then a keyboard and pointer device.

I'm curious to why this is important?

By making a desktop environment that works well with touch-screens, they created one that works horrible with a mouse and keyboard. I don't know many desktops with touchscreens, except for kiosks and the like. The last thing I want to do is to mess up my monitor with fingerprints.

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Day: GNOME OS

Posted Aug 8, 2012 17:22 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> I'm curious to why this is important?

Things like tablets are reaching parity with desktops and laptops in terms of performance and capabilities. Ideally they are not going to be locked down as much as they traditionally have been.

Also there are now more and more ways to interact with computers.

> By making a desktop environment that works well with touch-screens, they created one that works horrible with a mouse and keyboard

Mousing leaves a little bit to be desired, but Gnome 3 a hell of a lot more keyboard friendly then Gnome 2 was. A exponential improvement, IMO.

If you prefer to have window lists, static desktop choosers, start menus
and the like to make mousing friendlier they can be taken care of with extensions easily enough, although I hope that Gnome folks will address some of the current mouse limitations.

> I don't know many desktops with touchscreens, except for kiosks and the like.

Koisk and point of sales are big ones. Despite Linux popularity in embedded devices the Linux environment proved too problematic for these sorts of things as POS seems to be predominately XP POS (a actual microsoft product)

> The last thing I want to do is to mess up my monitor with fingerprints.

In practice it doesn't seem to be a problem except that touchscreens are miserable on desktops and laptops anyways. Nobody wants that.

A nice way to try out Gnome 3 on a tablet-like struction would be on one of those Mimo USB+touchscreen monitors, if/when they get the GPU offload stuff sorted out.