| |||||||||||||
Pervasive contemptPervasive contemptPosted Nov 22, 2012 1:46 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)In reply to: Pervasive contempt by bojan Parent article: GNOME Shell to support a "classic" mode
Activities overview, click on the application you want, get automatically taken to that workspace.
(Log in to post comments)
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 1:47 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
What application? There is no application.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 2:02 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
You spend most of your time switching to empty workspaces? That seems like an unusual use case.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 2:12 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
Nice try, but no. There are things that can be done on an empty workspace, like, I don't know - right click and start something? Go to a place? Create a new document?
Even in your case, where you do have a running application, overview is still a regression, because there are two changes of view and you cannot even see where your application is without entering the overview. (I never claimed things could not be improved in the "classic" paradigm - just that activities overview isn't it).
Please read Windows 8 review by the real usability expert I pointed to a few comments above. It is rather instructive when it comes to Gnome 3. I wasn't even aware of how hard Gnome developers have been looking at Metro before I saw Windows 8 on YouTube.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 2:51 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
You seem to be running some Gnome 3 that isn't the one I'm running. Right clicking does nothing. I've no idea what "Go to a place" means.
Sure, it's mildly more involved to move an application to a different workspace. But that's made up for by not *having* to know where my application is - I click, I get taken there. I spend much more time interacting with running applications than I do starting new ones.
(I'm pretty convinced you've got your timeline wrong regarding Windows 8 and Gnome 3)
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 3:04 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> You seem to be running some Gnome 3 that isn't the one I'm running.
I run F-17, Gnome 3 fallback. Local desktop with mutter, remote one with metacity (mutter too slow on a VM).
> Right clicking does nothing. I've no idea what "Go to a place" means.
Just another two regressions introduced in Gnome 3, really.
Go to a place means clicking on Places and picking one. Right clicking does plenty when you have Nautilus run your desktop. If you install nautilus-open-terminal, it does even more.
> (I'm pretty convinced you've got your timeline wrong regarding Windows 8 and Gnome 3)
Possibly. Still, Nielsen's review of Windows 8 appears rather applicable to Gnome 3, as many ideas are the same.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 23:57 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
Ideas might be the same, implementations are different. For example, Windows 8 still does not have multiple work-spaces. Simply try Window 8 yourself. I can tell you it does look nor work like Gnome Shell at all.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 5:36 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
The key disconnect imho seems to be that bojan is wed to a workspace = taskset work model, i.e. each workspace is dedicated to performing certain tasks. Although one workspace will suffice for doing new things, there is only one empty one in a dynamic location in gnome3 whereas in gnome2 the workspaces were laid out in a static grid and therefore amenable to what i suspect is his workstyle.
I suspect it would be very enlightening to watch these users under a controlled environment in gnome2 and then in gnome3 ti see where precisely the disconnects come and to see if my hunch above is correct.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 6:21 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
You don't need to guess, I can tell you.
Yes, I use workspaces to separate things (they are called _work_ _spaces_ for a reason). Most times by task, but sometimes simply because there is not enough space to hold all the required windows to complete one task open at the same time (yes, some of us actually use more than _one_ window at one time). The old MS Windows paradigm of minimise/raise is rather messy compared to seeing _everything_ in the workspace switcher and going there with one click (i.e. most times, no window is behind anything).
Static nature of workspaces (which to Gnome developer's credit has been reintroduced) is essential for visual orientation. If you read that paper by Nielsen that I pointed to, you'll see that he talks about "glancing" being superior to "switching", because you don't really have to do anything other than raise your eyes to do it. That is what workspace switcher is for, window thumbnails included.
Gnome 3 has zero visibility. That is problem number one. Gnome 3 needs two view switches for every workspace change (using GUI). That's problem number two.
Don't get me wrong. I use "activities overview" on my Android phone all the time, because there is no space to put everything on the "desktop" there. Not so on my computer. So, I don't see why I should be RFC1925(6)-ed all the time...
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 15:08 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I have to say that I'm confused by the GNOME 3 and KDE 4 notion of activities. I also tend to group my activities by workspace - it's arguably the most powerful feature of KDE 3 and earlier that the proprietary environments never supported out of the box - and being able to jump to a workspace using Ctrl-Fn is incredibly convenient and puts that increasingly neglected row of function keys to some use.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 18:43 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
static workspaces is also a core part of my work-flow. I've got winkey+1 burned into my fingers for accessing a collection of terminals, winkey+2 for web, winkey+3 for email/IM. GNOME3 destroys that for me. Even the UI to configure the shortcut keys is gone, had to futz in dconf. XFCE works better in this regard for me (though has other downsides). Will try MATE next, now it's packaged for Fedora.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 27, 2012 0:16 UTC (Tue) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link] Even the UI to configure the shortcut keys is gone, had to futz in dconf. It's under System Settings, Keyboard, Shortcuts tab, Navigation group. (This is in GNOME 3.2, hopefully not removed since!)
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 27, 2012 0:41 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
It's there in 3.6.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 27, 2012 8:46 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Ah cool. I remember when I tried I did find a UI for shortcut keys, except it didn't let you specify workspace bindings. But this was a while ago, perhaps 3.0? I'll have a look next time.
Though, both Cinnamon and GNOME Shell induce occasional complete lockups of the X server with Nouveau in Fedora 16. When I upgrade to Fedora 18 I'll see if that's improved (must have right - "force drivers to get better" was one of the aims of GNOME Shell going 3D, no?). Till then I have to stick to XFCE.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 18:51 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite. Not only do I organize workspaces by task, but the assignment is nearly static: some workspaces have had the same task assigned to them for nearly two decades now (though some change much more frequently). So the spatial locations on the workspace grid of tasks I've needed for a long time are very much wired into my memory. As a result, I always know exactly where I am and where everything I need is, without ever needing to think about it. I have hotkeys assigned to such long-term workspaces but I hardly ever use them because a couple of keystrokes to flip to the right workspace by simple spatial navigation is much faster, and in the absence of a working teleporter fits better with the geographic metaphor. And that metaphor is *useful*: geographic location tracking has been wired into our brains since we started walking on land. I think of virtually everything that way, workspaces, inheritance graphs, ownership graphs, filesystem hierarchies, they're all geographic maps of a sort. I'm hardly the first person to evolve this scheme: the old 'palace of memory' trick is doing something similar.
Dynamic grids (and similar things such as the dynamically-changing alt-tab ordering of many windowing environments) *ruin* this sort of geographic metaphor completely. They must not be the only available option, or those of us who use geographic metaphors are left completely out in the cold. (I've been using this metaphor for so long that I actually feel *seasick* in a GUI that uses some other metaphor, as if the solid ground has turned to water, and yes, I get all the physiological responses that go with seasickness, too. Getting any work done in that state is hopeless.)
There's nothing wrong with a grid that expands dynamically as you use more workspaces, but moving existing things around, or changing the navigation between existing things without explicit user permission, will break the model and break the workflow of people like me. (And cause me to lose my lunch!)
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 23, 2012 9:51 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]
Really great post, thanks.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 23, 2012 11:58 UTC (Fri) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]
+1
You're describing something very similar to my own working habits here...
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 23, 2012 19:42 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
It's probably common to most of us who grew up with fvwm and other similar '2D gridded infinite screen' window managers. They seem to be out of favour these days in favour of completely-separate-desktop 1D window managers, and I have no idea why -- apparently it's *useful* to be able to lose your windows off the edge of every screen rather than only those at the edge of the grid, or something.
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 23, 2012 11:59 UTC (Fri) by hholzgra (subscriber, #11737) [Link]
True, so true ...
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 16:31 UTC (Thu) by niko (guest, #80138) [Link]
This is valid use case, I use to switch to new workspace when I want to start something new there. Or do you start app and then move it to new workspace?
Pervasive contempt Posted Nov 22, 2012 12:22 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
For me, this breaks down as soon as I have windows of the same application on different workspaces. This is very common for "meta" applications such as gnome-terminal and web browsers.
|
|||||||||||||