Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 5, 2017 9:13 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Day: Status Icons and GNOME by aigarius
Parent article: Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Icon tray works. You just need better ways to hide some of the unneeded icons. Windows got it right in Win XP, Mac OS X gets it right with additional software.

Heck, even Android now has an API to do persistent indicators.

Yet GNOME somehow got it totally wrong.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 5, 2017 14:22 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (20 responses)

Icon tray does not scale. Three icons give meaningful information at a glance. Five-seven icons might produce meaningful information at a glance. Anything more than that, and you end with a bunch of Blinkenlichten, just less useful than the original ones.

Add to this the fact, that many app developers consider status icons a way to enforce – and spread – the brand message, and that the icon images rarely follows design guidelines, and the thing becomes infuriating. (To wit: without bartender my work macbook has SIXTEEN status icons taking roughly one third of the top bar; of those I care only about three; four perhaps.)

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 5, 2017 14:23 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

*icon image rarely follows or *icon images rarely follow; grr.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 5, 2017 18:52 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (18 responses)

Well, screen space also doesn't scale. I can't display more than 20 applications at the same time. Let's remove all those pesky application windows and leave only the wallpaper and a nicely drawn "Shutdown" button.

I don't _want_ my icon tray to "scale". I'm fine with solution that allows me to have 2-5 indicators for applications chosen by me.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 9:46 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (17 responses)

>Well, screen space also doesn't scale. I can't display more than 20 applications at the same time.

And that's why virtual desktops were commonplace on X Windowing systems at least twenty years ago.

Gnome3 actually improves this paradigm with a dynamic stack-based approach.

> I don't _want_ my icon tray to "scale". I'm fine with solution that allows me to have 2-5 indicators for applications chosen by me.

That, by definition, is "scaling" compared to the overwhelming majority of desktops out there. (Note tha Linux is only a tiny fraction of those)

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 11:55 UTC (Wed) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link] (14 responses)

> And that's why virtual desktops were commonplace on X Windowing systems at least twenty years ago.
> Gnome3 actually improves this paradigm with a dynamic stack-based approach.

the dynamic approach is not some sort of universal improvement. I have no idea what problem this solves and it makes using it a pain as you no longer can place windows in the workspace you want as that one may not exist yet.

and the decision to then only have worspaces on the primary display ??? unbelievable! I thought it was a bug until someone pointed out its was done on purpose.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 12:15 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (6 responses)

I always thought awesome's tag-based approach to virtual workspaces was pretty cool, clearly that isn't something that is going to be useful for non-technical people though. GNOME's implementation seems much more useful for them.

There is an extension for solving the primary display issue.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 20:51 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (5 responses)

While I appreciate the tag-based approach, it doesn't work for everyone. I use a fixed set of 9 workspaces (in XMonad) and have various amounts of monitors on my machines (1 for laptops, 2 at home, 3 at work). Generally, I have tmux on 1, browsers go from 9 on down, 5 is fixed, and temporary things grow from 2 on up. I then display 1, 9, and 5 on the three monitors up to the number of monitors. But this is why I use XMonad rather than any other window manager: I can make it do whatever I need it to do through a bit of code.

By the way, this works because my per-project workspaces tend to be realized through tmux sessions rather than X (or Wayland).

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 7, 2017 6:44 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (4 responses)

Yeah, I keep wondering if/when tiling WMs are going to become more mainstream. Most of them solve _all_ the problems that _everyone_ in this thread is complaining about. But I suppose that folks in this thread already know/can find out how to fix these problems in GNOME, but are nevertheless complaining on behalf of less-competent users who would never change the defaults, so tiling window managers might not be so useful there either.

I have six monitors at work, and am using two of them for "per-project" workspaces that are chained together (i.e. when I press <Super-1>, one monitor jumps to workspace 1 and another jumps to workspace 11; <Super-2> changes to workspaces 2 and 12; etc). The other monitors either have a single workspace assigned to them, or (for my web browser monitor) I create and destroy workspaces dynamically. The workspaces on my browser monitor don't have a keyboard shortcut, since there are typically dozens of browser windows open that monitor (each on their own workspace), so I have a program that finds the titles of all of my browser windows, displays them in a dmenu, and whisks me to the workspace holding that browser window. Pure productivity bliss, not counting the millions of hours getting my setup to be this awesome. (Using the i3 window manager, but I'm sure any other tiling WM would work).

But the reason this works so well is that i3 has barely changed its default behaviour since the project started almost a decade ago. The project is mostly adding new features (like workspace saving and configuration options) and fixing bugs.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 7, 2017 7:05 UTC (Thu) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (3 responses)

> Yeah, I keep wondering if/when tiling WMs are going to become more mainstream. Most of them solve _all_ the problems that _everyone_ in this thread is complaining about.

Tiling window managers are not for everyone. If you value portability in a laptop, then you'll have to compromise on screen size. With a small screen you end up switching between full screen windows.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 7, 2017 9:48 UTC (Thu) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (1 responses)

Why choose one or another when you can have both in gnome-shell? :-)

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 7, 2017 9:59 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

Or in i3 :) I do also have a tiny laptop (which looks hilarious next to my 6-monitor workstation) and use it mostly the way jem describes: one window per workspace, each one taking up the whole screen. But I do have uses for multiple small windows on one workspace, even with a tiny screen.

It's convenient for me because I can use almost all the same keybindings as on my workstation, although I do see that this is a less compelling argument for folks who only use a laptop---which seems to be more and more people nowadays.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 7, 2017 12:48 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I've used this setup since early 2010 from an eeePC to the triple monitor workstation. But, the keybindings are also very custom, so using anything else usually forces me to a mouse for more than basic things anyways.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 12:37 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> the dynamic approach is not some sort of universal improvement. I have no idea what problem this solves and it makes using it a pain as you no longer can place windows in the workspace you want as that one may not exist yet.

The dynamic approach maps to the way I've always worked -- one desktop per active project. I'm immeasurably more productive with it as it maps to my mental model better than static workspaces. This isn't just my wearing rose-colored glasses either; I'm forced to use a G2-based system at $dayjob, and it's like night and day vs my G3-based personal laptop.

So while I'm not going to claim that the G3 approach is necessarily better for everyone -- yet, for many folks, the G3 approach is vastly superior. (And for those who don't like it, it can be disabled in favor of a static set)

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 13:33 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (5 responses)

> and the decision to then only have worspaces on the primary display ??? unbelievable! I thought it was a bug until someone pointed out its was done on purpose.

On the contrary, that's one of the best features . I put a browser on the secondary (fixed) display and use the primary display workspaces for different types of work. These days you _always_ need a browser available and it's an incredible productivity-killer to have to jump back and forth between workspaces to use it. I can't work well without it anymore.

And of course, if you really don't want it you can disable it as has been pointed out: same with dynamic workspaces (I personally DO disable that and set a static number of workspaces).

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 15:46 UTC (Wed) by ken (subscriber, #625) [Link] (4 responses)

> On the contrary, that's one of the best features

no its not. its simply wrong. the correct way would be to have all display be part of the workspace and if you wanted to lock some application to be always visible on one display you would simply have an option in the window menu to set it to always display.

then you can have your way of working and everyone else has a sane default and most importantly no need to go in and change some global state for anybody.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 20:48 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

No, that's wrong too ;) . It's better to have N workspaces, each monitor displaying one of them. I never really liked the "all monitors change workspaces together" and I don't think I'd like the workspaces/fixed duality either.

Workspaces

Posted Sep 6, 2017 21:07 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

The nice thing is that, if you want that behavior in GNOME, it's a simple configuration tweak away. I agree that having only one display participate in workspaces is weird, but I am happy to flip a switch and get something more usable for me. Everybody should of course set their defaults in a way that pleases me, but I've long since given up on convincing the world of that.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2017 2:36 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (1 responses)

> no its not. its simply wrong. the correct way would be to have all display be part of the workspace and if you wanted to lock some application to be always visible on one display you would simply have an option in the window menu to set it to always display.

No. That's clearly the wrong way to do it. The way GNOME 3 does it is definitely superior.

One of the reasons people don't use multiple workspaces is that it's annoying to have to switch around between workspaces to find things, for cut and paste etc. Having a screen locked means that if you want things to stay always visible you just move things to that screen. This is trivially easy to use and easy to understand for even the least experienced desktop user. You don't even need documentation: it's obvious how it works immediately.

GNOME _does_ have an option in the window menu to set the window to always display, but asking people to figure out how to do it then making them do it every time they open the window is too complicated and annoying. If you learn enough to figure out how to pin a window to the screen, then you're certainly capable of figuring out how to disable the locked screen feature if you don't want it.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 15, 2017 5:24 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

>The way GNOME 3 does it is definitely superior.
E17 got this (and so many other things) right, the right way: each screen has independent workspace layouts and switching.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 17:34 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

> And that's why virtual desktops were commonplace on X Windowing systems at least twenty years ago.
And that's why Windows added ability to hide tray icons. Duh.

> That, by definition, is "scaling" compared to the overwhelming majority of desktops out there. (Note tha Linux is only a tiny fraction of those)
Windows supports tray management SINCE FREAKING WINDOWS 2000!!

Every, literally, every other desktop has some kind of tray/menubar indicators: Mac OS X, Android, Windows, iOS (though it's restricted there). Yet GNOME in its great wisdom decided that users don't need them. Facepalm.

Day: Status Icons and GNOME

Posted Sep 6, 2017 19:36 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

Did I already mention the Bartender app? I think I did. That's how you solve the status icon problem on Mac.