GNOME 3.16 released [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 25, 2015 22:16 UTC (Wed) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]

Its like when ARM gave up and added unaligned memory accesses: "more compact code!" cried the marketers.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 25, 2015 22:43 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

GNOME 3.17:

> Instead of being shown all the time, the UI components are only shown when needed: a small box showing the underlying controls follows the mouse pointer, and a larger box appears when a mouse is pressed. This creates a cleaner, less distracting view, which helps you to achieve the pure Zen while staring at pure unblemished whiteness of your screen.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 25, 2015 23:01 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> pure unblemished whiteness of your screen

Damn. I wanted black. I guess we'll need a fork.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 25, 2015 23:27 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (3 responses)

And so, another unbelievably annoying OS X feature gets copied into Gnome...

Well, to end to be honest, I'm glad the notifications finally got reworked to something resembling normality. If only there was actually a notification about notifications... I know, I know. It will come later. It is difficult to do etc.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 25, 2015 23:39 UTC (Wed) by hirnbrot (guest, #89469) [Link] (2 responses)

In the linux space the obvious prior example would be Unity's overlay scrollbars (http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-s...).

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 25, 2015 23:54 UTC (Wed) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (1 responses)

Apparently, these things showed up in Lion (10.7), which was released in July 2011, with previews available late 2010. But, who copied is less important here...

This is a little bit like that Windows corner (i.e. missing Start button) on Windows 8.0, which has been reverted. The disappearing tricks may be cute if you're a magician, but they get old pretty quickly when you have to work. IMHO etc.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 0:33 UTC (Thu) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link]

> Apparently, these things showed up in Lion (10.7), which was released in July 2011...

And they still don't work to this day.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 2:46 UTC (Thu) by robinst (guest, #61173) [Link] (33 responses)

It's not only about distraction, it's also about saving some space. That is very much appreciated by people with smaller screens, such as me.

Also, when is the last time you actually clicked on the scroll bar instead of using a scroll wheel or two-finger scrolling?

(Off-topic: Go to https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/309g0w/gnome_316_... if you want to read some constructive comments. I really wish I could up/downvote comments on LWN.)

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 6:15 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (24 responses)

> Also, when is the last time you actually clicked on the scroll bar instead of using a scroll wheel or two-finger scrolling?
A couple of minutes ago to quickly navigate within a 1MB HTML document?

Besides, scrollbars show position within a document and even on small screens they take very little space (a letter-width).

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:20 UTC (Thu) by robinst (guest, #61173) [Link] (12 responses)

> > Also, when is the last time you actually clicked on the scroll bar instead of using a scroll wheel or two-finger scrolling?
> A couple of minutes ago to quickly navigate within a 1MB HTML document?

Fair enough. That will still work with GNOME 3.16.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:46 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (11 responses)

Not on touchscreens.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 11:45 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (10 responses)

On touch screen devices, the scroll bars will appear while you're swiping, and you'll get kinetic scrolling. It's easier to control the scrolling on a touch based device over the whole surface of the scrollable area than trying to hit a small target like a scroll bar.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 15:16 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (9 responses)

No, it's not easier.

Another annoyingly common use-case is to scroll past a long article in the browser to get to the comments section.

PgDown you say? On a tablet?

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 18:21 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (8 responses)

Somehow I doubt that, since on all my touch-only devices (either using iOS or using Android) I never, ever use a scroll bar to scroll around a large content area, or for a paginated content. I'd be hard pressed to interact with those scrollbars in the first place, since they are mostly just indicators.

True, though: GNOME is not great on a tablet, right now.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 18:51 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I don't _have_ a scrollbar on iPad and this _is_ annoying. I had a really nice scroller on Android in Opera and I like it.

So yes, this change is business as usual for GNOME. I.e. they remove useful features just to be 'nicer' while missing the point.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 19:12 UTC (Thu) by coulamac (guest, #21690) [Link] (3 responses)

Heh, for a long time the complaints were that GNOME's design was meant for an iPad or other mobile device, rather than the desktop. Now, when a design change was made apparently more with a view to the desktop, the complaint is that GNOME doesn't work well enough on an iPad. It seems as if the GNOME developer can't win, no matter what they do. ;-)

Relatedly, over the past few releases, there tended to be complaints about the notification system. So, the GNOME developers listened, gave the matter some thought, and revamped the notification system to make it better and to resolve some of the complaints. (And they're still working on it.) In the comments here, no one has said, "Hey! That's great! They listened and are improving an area that was identified as being problematic." Silence. Just complaints about scrollbars and how GNOME developers maliciously change things.

Thanks for the great release and all the hard work.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 23:46 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

> Now, when a design change was made apparently more with a view to the desktop, the complaint is that GNOME doesn't work well enough on an iPad. It seems as if the GNOME developer can't win, no matter what they do. ;-)

The can win, all right. They just need to stop copying silly stuff from the Mac.

This one is particularly annoying (as you can read from many replies) to folks that would like to see where in the document they are (because the doc may have similar sections, for instance, and the position identifies what is being viewed/edited etc.), want to scroll very quickly to a particular section of the document (because they've used that doc a million times before and remember roughly where stuff they need is) without the fiddly "slow down around the edge so that scrollbar shows" action.

This one is a bit like that annoying thing in Lollipop when you press the multitasking button. The windows come up, but then it takes several seconds for the crosses to appear in the top right corners. So, you either have to wait for them or swipe instead (which may not be your preferred way of closing apps), but of which are annoying.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 27, 2015 16:21 UTC (Fri) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (1 responses)

I do not know who thought removing the silent mode in Lollipop was a neat idea (yeah put it in Airplane mode when going to movie theaters), removing code is fun but removing features is not.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 29, 2015 2:37 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

So that's where that went… Anyways, now you can choose "None" from the tabs when you change the volume for the same effect. A bonus is that you can set a timeout as well so you don't forget it in silent mode so your alarms just blink the screen rather than waking you up. Not that I've ever done such a thing >.> .

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 20:36 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

"right now" - and there's the risk, you make changes to make GNOME good on tablets and are left with something that's not good on either desktop or tablet.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 29, 2015 2:42 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I use them all the time. My problem is usually the kinetic scrolling. When skimming a large page or list (usually alphabetical), scrubbing with the bar is much easier (especially with popups indicating what letter I'm at) and more accurate then trying to stop the momentum if I see what I want fly by.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 31, 2015 20:41 UTC (Tue) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

On the version of iOS I use, there really are only scroll indicators ... and scrolling through a large webpage (or webapp, if you like) I regularly use was so painful (kinetic in this case just equates to frantic), that I implemented a scroll-bar-alike control to the right of the webpage.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:22 UTC (Thu) by robinst (guest, #61173) [Link] (6 responses)

> Besides, scrollbars show position within a document and even on small screens they take very little space (a letter-width).

In an application that uses multiple scrollable components such as Eclipse, that space adds up.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

That's a problem for those who use Eclipse. Why should everyone else suffer?

The Unity experience

Posted Mar 26, 2015 12:27 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

We shouldn't be surprised that the Unity variant of this misfeature was motivated by - that's right - Eclipse!

Back when I studied what was then known as "human-computer interaction" (and still have the large text book), the notion of "affordances" - that you can guess what something does by how it manifests itself - was central to the design of a successful interface. Although the "design" crowd loves to shout down anyone who writes code (because we know nothing about usability, apparently), their tendency to neglect the basics should be noted, particularly by those who see a "nifty" new feature and decide to copy what appears to be a "validated" concept for their own project.

Having actually watched people struggle with initially-invisible scrollbars, where the people concerned were obviously not part of the select few chosen to "validate" the idea (that audience probably being the instigators of the idea and knowing exactly what to expect), I regard such things as a betrayal of users with less than optimal eyesight and motor skills. When you have to tell people to squint at the edge of one featureless slab on top of another to be aware that there may be more content off-screen (and apologise for having to do so), and then tell them to aim for a tiny area of the screen (and apologise for having to do so, admittedly a problem with conventional scrollbars as well), you soon get the feeling that any testing probably didn't involve a very diverse group of people or involved a lot of projection onto the participants.

Usability is a tiresome discipline if done right, which is why it annoys me a great deal when people use the discipline as a way of undermining or rejecting criticism, only for it to be shown that they cut corners and are just using the banner of usability to showcase their "design" ideas.

The Unity experience

Posted Mar 26, 2015 22:39 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link]

> Usability is a tiresome discipline if done right, which is why
> it annoys me a great deal when people use the discipline as
> a way of undermining or rejecting criticism, only for it to be shown that
> they cut corners and are just using the banner of usability
> to showcase their "design" ideas.

You just described how I started feeling about the Gnome 3 thing, ever
since I started trying to use it and encountered the wall
of "my way or highway" attitude from McCann et al.

The Unity experience

Posted Mar 26, 2015 22:57 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

This link is pretty interesting

http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2015/03/hands-on...

Has some concrete suggestions.

The Unity experience

Posted Mar 27, 2015 17:54 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

A new "three lines" icon replaces the gear menu for the drop-down menu. This "three lines" menu icon is more common in other applications, including those on Mac OS X and Windows, so the new menu icon should be easier to find.

Sigh!

Beyond this "three seashells" fad, before long I fully expect everybody being obliged to swipe from the edges to see essential controls on screens large enough to show them by default, because someone has decided that it is "clean design" or whatever (and because Apple does it that way).

When I mentioned that usability is tiresome, I was being serious. My brief introduction to it covered things like properly-controlled experiments and things you'd get in disciplines like psychology - not surprising, given that HCI (as it was known) is multidisciplinary - which generally doesn't appeal to a lot of people.

I agree with the author's views on the URL bar. The tendency to withhold that really does undermine people's expectations about how things like browsers work, and I've seen people struggle with that on KDE (where you sometimes need the "gear" menu - soon to be the three seashells, perhaps - to reveal the URL bar). I imagine that he will run his observations by some testers, as he apparently did before, but it might have been better if people had tried to foresee such problems.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 9:38 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

I use my monitor in portrait mode so I've configured my perspective in Eclipse to have only one scrollable window showing code, the outline is under that and the "problems" is under that. There are no vertical scrollbars in the same horizontal pixel row, so that space doesn't add up.

I also used the scrollbar just minutes ago on the "Unread comments" page to scroll back to this comment.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 10:52 UTC (Thu) by ibukanov (subscriber, #3942) [Link] (3 responses)

> A couple of minutes ago to quickly navigate within a 1MB HTML document?

I am curious, how do you know where to navigate? Do you rely on memory or just do a fast scroll to locate the content? I use Ctrl-f with browsers and incremental search with emacs for navigation in big documents if I know the keywords. If not, then two-fingers-scrolling on a touchpad or using a mouse weal is fast enough for me.

> scrollbars show position within a document and even on small screens they take very little space (a letter-width).

Typically an editor shows an exact line or percentage from the top in any case, so scrollbars does not provide any extra information and I disable them with emacs or shell. However I do agree that on a typical desktop/laptop screen a vertical scroll in a maximized window bar does not waste anything as it occupies the space where there is no text.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 13:08 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

My desktop computer doesn't have a touchpad[1].

With page up/down surrounding the cursor keys on the laptop it's not a big issue, but on the desktop computer the scrollbars are really nice to have. Using a scroll wheel is definitely not fast enough, since it scrolls a few lines at most. I know that there are mice with tons of buttons and fancy hoopla, but for my hands a rather small and simplistic 3-button mouse is most suitable.

Searching for text is easy and best left to the computer. Searching for images or patterns is something the human brain is better at and benefits from a quick-scanning work flow (well, the computer is probably better at image/pattern recognition too, but there's no sensible way to quickly describe to the computer what it should be looking for).

This change doesn't remove the scrollbars though, so I'm not really worried about losing that use-case. As far as document position though; browsers don't show position on the web page, nor do, for instance, the scrollback buffer in terminals (admittedly I have the scrollbar disabled in terminals anyway, so that's not really relevant for me).

[1] Nor do I use the touchpad on my laptop, for that matter; having a touchpad just to do scrolling while controlling the mouse pointer the way it's intended -- the trackpoint -- just doesn't make sense.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 15:14 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> I am curious, how do you know where to navigate? Do you rely on memory or just do a fast scroll to locate the content
Just like with a book, I remember a rough location and then scroll to the precise position.

> Typically an editor shows an exact line or percentage from the top in any case
And what about a browser?

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 29, 2015 2:43 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> > Typically an editor shows an exact line or percentage from the top in any case
> And what about a browser?

Uzbl does :) .

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:13 UTC (Thu) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (2 responses)

The scrollbars in Gnome 3.12 are already quite minimal, though omnipresent. I suppose that's the expected gain with the new ones; that they'll be entirely invisible when the view is not actively scrolled and highly visible when activated with the pointer?

My concern is that this new size-changing effect on scrollbars will be as focus disrupting as Ubuntu's overlay scrollbars. One of the first things I do after an upgrade is:

apt-get purge overlay-scrollbar

Now, I haven't tried Gnome 3.16 yet, I'll leave my final judgement til then.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:29 UTC (Thu) by robinst (guest, #61173) [Link]

> The scrollbars in Gnome 3.12 are already quite minimal, though omnipresent. I suppose that's the expected gain with the new ones; that they'll be entirely invisible when the view is not actively scrolled and highly visible when activated with the pointer?

I think so, yes. There's a video here: https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/10/23/an-early-view-...

> My concern is that this new size-changing effect on scrollbars will be as focus disrupting as Ubuntu's overlay scrollbars. One of the first things I do after an upgrade is:
>
> apt-get purge overlay-scrollbar

I did the same when I was still on Ubuntu. AFAIR though, the scrollbar was shown outside of the window, which was really confusing.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 11:54 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

The overlaid scrollbars in GTK+ 3.16 are pointedly not like the Ubuntu ones — they are overlaid on top of the content, not outside of the window, and they do not cause a resize of the content area. They change appearance from simple indicators of the current position of the scrolled region to interacting UI elements depending on whether the pointer is close to them or not. Also, one of the major reasons why people disabled the Ubuntu scrollbars was that they were fairly buggy; they poked at the internals of GTK+, and usually broke every time the toolkit was refactored internally.

Canonical is also going to drop the overlay scrollbars as soon as they can switch to GTK+ 3.16 — which is planned for Ubuntu 15.10, at this point (source).

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 9:21 UTC (Thu) by bandrami (guest, #94229) [Link] (3 responses)

> when is the last time you actually clicked on the scroll bar

You don't read and navigate large documents often, do you?

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 11:47 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (2 responses)

I do. I read PDFs of multiple hundreds of pages.

That's why I use search, page up/down, or a trackpad with kinetic scrolling, instead of trying to pinpoint the precise location by pinning a tail on a small scrollbar.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 26, 2015 22:47 UTC (Thu) by deepfire (guest, #26138) [Link] (1 responses)

> That's why I use search, page up/down, or a trackpad with kinetic
> scrolling, instead of trying to pinpoint the precise location by
> pinning a tail on a small scrollbar.

So, that is a way that works for you. Good!

What isn't, and actually is even offensive, it's the implication that
the fact it works for you somehow is invited to mean that it invalidates
the /different/ ways other people operate with their computers.

Gnome folks have a very clear track record of such attitude.

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 27, 2015 12:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

While I'm not a Gnome user, can I point out that (a) I am an "old hat unix" style user - I am far more verbal than visual, so actually I tend to find the whole "gui" paradigm doesn't work for me ...

And like many people, my wife is not well - ageing plays havoc with memory and many illnesses exacerbate that - so the *last* thing she needs is gratuitous changes happening underneath her! Having been trained as a typist, I sometimes now need to help her even to use a keyboard! because she's forgotten how - how on earth can she be expected to remember how all this new stuff works!?

Cheers,
Wol

GNOME 3.16 released

Posted Mar 28, 2015 19:10 UTC (Sat) by suckfish (guest, #69919) [Link]

> It's not only about distraction, it's also about saving some space.
> That is very much appreciated by people with smaller screens, such as me.

I don't see that you gain *useful* space:

For landscape layout monitors, I find that height is the dimension that is at a premium, not width.

So the space recovered by making vertical scroll bars disappear is not particularly useful.

Horizontal scrollbars I find appear for two reasons: either a layout done badly (broken web sites) or else paning through a large diagram/image (in which case you probably actually want the scrollbars visible). In both cases, making the horizontal scrollbar disappear is not what is needed.

I used the ubuntu implementation of this for a while and just found it annoying. Maybe the gnome people have done a better job, I haven't used it yet.