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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:50 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (guest, #56959)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by me@jasonclinton.com
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

> It is not the intention that the top panel will ever be movable, officially, though it is conceivable that a third-party JS extension could change it. The top panel is intended as a safe harbor: it's always there looking exactly like its supposed to look and nothing can install applets in to it that do god-knows-what (that's what the message tray is for).

I run GNOME 2.x on a netbook, and when I moved the top panel to the left edge of the screen, the vertical space for each web page increased by at least 10 percent. Since vertical space is at a greater premium than horizontal space, shouldn't any safe harbor be on the left or right sides of the screen?

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The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 16:55 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (14 responses)

Three points:

1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.
2. 90 deg. rotated text is not legible so it's likely never going to be an out-of-the box option though you may be able to use an extension to get some of what you want.
3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:17 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link] (1 responses)

> Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.

Useful content: yes; large content: no.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 18:57 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (guest, #56959) [Link]

> > Without any implied comment on the functionality or behavior of Gnome3, I've gotta just say: that statement is completely ridiculous. You can *absolutely* want a small screen, and yet want to use the whole thing for useful content at the same time.
> Useful content: yes; large content: no.

Another completely ridiculous statement.

foom didn't say anything about large content. Their comment was that users with a small screen may "want to use the whole thing."

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 17, 2011 18:54 UTC (Thu) by amcnabb (guest, #56959) [Link] (1 responses)

> Three points:
> 1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.

I don't have a bottom panel. As I explained in my earlier comment, I only have a panel on the left side of the screen. I don't have a panel on the top or the bottom. Adding an unmovable top panel removes vertical space--a huge amount of space on a netbook screen.

> 2. 90 deg. rotated text is not legible so it's likely never going to be an out-of-the box option though you may be able to use an extension to get some of what you want.

The main menu pops out to the right, so there is almost no rotated text. But my main problem is the removal of useful out-of-the-box options for purely dogmatic reasons.

> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

In GNOME 2.x, I was able to easily configure the panel on the left, and I have made no complaints about the screen real-estate of the device. GNOME 2.x is perfectly usable (with customization) on a netbook. Why take a step backwards in GNOME 3.x? And please don't tell me I have to buy new hardware when I upgrade.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 19, 2011 13:12 UTC (Sat) by gjmarter (guest, #5777) [Link]

>> Three points:
>> 1. We freed up vertical space by removing the bottom panel.

> I don't have a bottom panel. As I explained in my earlier comment, I only
> have a panel on the left side of the screen. I don't have a panel on the
> top or the bottom. Adding an unmovable top panel removes vertical space--a
> huge amount of space on a netbook screen.

Seconded, since the decline of full-height monitors I can't understand why we keep forcing the dead screen space to be along the top (or bottom). Most users have more width than height.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 21, 2011 12:03 UTC (Mon) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link] (5 responses)

> 90 deg. rotated text is not legible

没
问
题

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:03 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (4 responses)

Han characters don't rotate when you go between traditional and Westernized layouts.
The Latin alphabet is not well designed for reading in traditional East Asian text layout.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 20:59 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (2 responses)

Whoosh!

pjm's comment went completely over your head. Your statements are true, but they are completely irrelevant to both pjm's point and the point to which he was responding.

The original comment from me@jasonclinton.com was "90 deg. rotated text is not legible." This statement is false to the point of absurdity, unless you have some hopelessly myopic and restrictive definition of text along the lines of "text = latin text". pjm was pointing out the obvious falsehood: East Asian languages use vertical text by default, and under no reasonable interpretation is such text "not legible".

It is true that Han characters don't rotate, but how is this at all relevant to the legibility of vertically oriented text? It isn't.

Similarly, the latin alphabet is not well designed for vertical text, but this is not relevant to any point that was being made in pjm's comment.

Vertical text

Posted Mar 24, 2011 21:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, vertical Latin text works just fine for the GNOME 2 panel. I can read it without twisting my neck too badly (and without lifting the laptop from the table). But even that matters little: what's there to read on the panel? The Applications/Places/System pulldowns are pretty clear no matter what their orientation is, I really don't have to sound them out every time.

Vertical text

Posted Mar 25, 2011 15:05 UTC (Fri) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]

For the GNOME 2 panel (haven't yet cut myself on the GNOME 3 bleeding edge), the date and time display becomes rotated and unreadable on vertical panels (and, sadly, even in Chinese, GNOME rotates the characters, which is not the right behavior). Conversely, the window titles in the task list are not rotated and thus are never capable of being displayed on a vertical panel unless you configure your panel to be inordinately wide. These are the main items of text that I would like to be able to read on vertical panels.

giving more vertical space in an interface

Posted Mar 25, 2011 4:56 UTC (Fri) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link]

I'm sorry if my comment was interpreted as saying look how wrong you are; that wasn't my intent.

I'm excited that there are common languages that are legible in only a small amount of horizontal space, because it does allow putting some interface elements at the side of the screen or of a window when native English-speaking interface designers wouldn't usually think of that option. Icons are one tool that can help in allowing what might be a horizontal interface element (titles of windows/tabs/..., buttons, menus) to fit in a vertical space; using vertical text is another, and it's important to remember that vertically-oriented text (whether with glyph rotation or not) can work well in some languages better than in english. I thought a "one-line" response would make an impression that might inspire interface designers reading the thread, and might serve to remind them of this possibility for their creations.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 8:01 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> 3. Someone who buys a netbook cannot to complain about screen real-estate when systems of equal cost have normal-sized screens. You got what you choose to buy.

Yet another example of GNOME's "You're wrong for wanting that" attitude towards its actual userbase. Said userbase will, of course, soon shrink rapidly due to the aforementioned attitude.

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:22 UTC (Tue) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

So... the users are wrong. The computers are wrong. What else will you declare unacceptable?

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 25, 2011 14:00 UTC (Fri) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]

1) Good. More free space as a default and fewer panels is better.

2) Who's requesting 90-degree rotated text? I'm hearing requests to make the top-panel moveable to the left or right side of the screen.

3) This is a straw-man argument. Plenty of netbooks are available w/ a 1366x768 resolution or at least 1024x600 resolution. The former is equal to most of those 'equal cost laptops' you mention.

This mindset is also ignoring a basic physical fact:

LCD screens are becoming wider and shorter, to the point even $3k+ laptops aren't physically available except with 16:9 or in increasingly rare cases 16:10 screens.

I'd rather work in an 800x600 box than a 1024x560 box. Maximizing the smallest available dimension seems a more sane idea to me, even if it costs more overall pixel count.