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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 16, 2011 23:29 UTC (Wed) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

I fully agree with comments above that window-switching in gnome-shell is a a big regression. An operation that requires one mouse move to the edge to reach the task bar and click now requires movement to the corner, click, movement to a not stable location and another click.

Another big regression is windows switching with many open windows (say, 20 or more). In Gnome 2 the task bar has the grouping option that places all window behind one application button that, when clicked, expand into a menu with windows titles sorted alphabetically. It is very easy to locate the desired window in that menu and click on it again after very short mouse move. With Gnome 3 after clicking the Activities I see a few small window thumbs randomly places on the screen. Since the thumbs are small, the picture does not help to select the proper window so it is really hard to locate the necessary window and move mouse there.

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 7:53 UTC (Thu) by jjmarin (subscriber, #53201) [Link] (3 responses)

>I fully agree with comments above that window-switching in gnome-shell is
>a a big regression. An operation that requires one mouse move to the edge
>to reach the task bar and click now requires movement to the corner, >click, movement to a not stable location and another click.

That's not exactly true, you don't need to click on the corner. This movement turns mechanical/automatic when you use gnome shell for a while.

>Another big regression is windows switching with many open windows (say,
>20 or more). In Gnome 2 the task bar has the grouping option that places
>all window behind one application button that, when clicked, expand into
>a menu with windows titles sorted alphabetically. It is very easy to
>locate the desired window in that menu and click on it again after very
>short mouse move. With Gnome 3 after clicking the Activities I see a few
>small window thumbs randomly places on the screen. Since the thumbs are
>small, the picture does not help to select the proper window so it is
>really hard to locate the necessary window and move mouse there.

You should group apps in workspaces instead, IMHO.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 10:54 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (2 responses)

> That's not exactly true, you don't need to click on the corner. This movement turns mechanical/automatic when you use gnome shell for a while.

Still it is a regression in amount of moves and extra brain work to locate the desired window.

> You should group apps in workspaces instead, IMHO.

Often when browsing and working with various references I keep many browser and document viewer window open with all referenced articles. I do not use tabs since switching using task-bar and grouped windows is much faster. This is especially true when switching between html, pdf and office documents. With tabs I would need to switch first to the corresponding application and then try to locate the desired tab that is often not easy since the name on the tab is cut.

I do not see how using workspaces in Gnome-3 would provide the same efficiency of window switching. I would need to spent a lot of time to maintain the workspace since combination of windows is dynamic. Also it is not clear how should I split the windows in advance between workspaces since it hard to predict what would be used together.

For me the gnome-shell is a clear regression in amount of efforts to switch between windows. Judging by all the comments here I am not alone and this affects pretty much everybody with all those extra mouse moves and screen starring to locate the window.

I am puzzled why this clear usability regression did not became apparent when designing the shell. I do not see how even with a hypothetical touch screen implementation this would not be slower. On a touch screen one still needs to touch the activities button first to proceed any father instead of touching the desired window on the task bar.

The only user case where this would be faster is on a small screen when user works with full-screen applications taking the whole screen. Instead of explicit panel the interface would use a convention that touching the corner brings the activities window. But with such devices the hardware may well provide a more convenient dedicated button.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 22:39 UTC (Thu) by jjmarin (subscriber, #53201) [Link] (1 responses)

By experience is not what a user (well, myself) feels. If you haven't got a very high number of windows per workspace and you don't change the windows all the time, even the location of the windows isn't a problem, as I though in first place. I even made a suggestion about this [1], so I hope they can do some research about if this could be improved ot not. But hey, the current implementation works ok for the average user and for me IMHO.

If you don't have a combination of windows that works together, then it is difficult to group them in workspaces, but I think this isn't a common situation.

Anyway, try this, and if it doesn't work for you change to another UX (or maybe the GNOME fallback mode is ok for you).

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=637064

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 18, 2011 16:19 UTC (Fri) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link]

> But hey, the current implementation works ok for the average user and for me IMHO.

Does it work faster for you? I.e. does Gnome-3 saves the amount of mouse moves and clicks you need to do to perform a window switching? Or does "works ok" mean that there is a regression that you can live with?