The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:01 UTC (Tue) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by sramkrishna
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

The number of clicks (or other actions) is the difference. Currently to switch to my Firefox window, I need to click once on a region location of which that does not change during my session, is aways visible and is on edge, so has infinite height. Same for launching any of my favorite applications that I have put on launchers on the panel - one click, constant location, always visible, edge location.

In GNOME 3 both of these actions will require a swipe to Activities, then wait until the animation completes, then find where the Firefox has moved to now, then click on it, which is harder, because it my cursor is already in the corner, so the fact that the button is on one edge does not help. And then if I do want a new window it is an one more click.

So all benefits of launchers are gone and we are back to Win95 start menu (even without quick launch bar of Win98) and additionally that is also without task bar of Win95. So in fact Gnome 3 is *less* click-efficient than Win95.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 15, 2011 23:51 UTC (Tue) by sramkrishna (subscriber, #72628) [Link] (2 responses)

What's broken is the speed of the animation. Once you have the speed, then you'll be able to complete those actions. In the mean time, why not use one of the existing launchers that are out there until that occurs?

We haven't even hit feature freeze yet. You can't judge the product while we're still racing around trying et all the features needed and trying to get them into place. Speed will come. Remember all this stuff is new. Polish will come.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:29 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

The problem is that this new, unpolished stuff is being put out into stable releases as the only interface. The fall-back option has been emasculated. Users are going to have to put up with the lack of polish for a year, perhaps two, given distro release cycles.

This isn't user-centric release engineering.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 7:29 UTC (Wed) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]

Even if the animation was instant, these actions would still take more time, because:
1) there are multiple separate actions instead of one action
2) the second action depends on the results that computer will show me only after the first action is done

Imagine typing on a keyboard where the layout of the keys might change after each keypress - you can't type blindly anymore or trust your fingers to press keys in rapid succession - you'll need to check each time if the key you were aiming for is still there

A lot of people seem to like side bars and application launchers. How about this compromise - create an optional bar on the left side of the screen that would contain application launchers and already started applications (just like the left side of the Activities menu, but: make it be just the with of an icon, make it an always visible panel, make favourite applications always stay on the top side of the bar in user-specified order, make clicking on this sidebar icons instantly execute launch/switch actions without starting the Activities overlay, make the sidebar discoverable by making it morph into the left side of Activities screen during Activities 'show' animation.