Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 12, 2023 10:56 UTC (Fri) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480)
In reply to: Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update by taladar
Parent article: Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

> What you don't want is to clutter the menus

I think that attitude is very wrong and is actually contradictory. If you want to serve a certain group and to keep all members of said group happy needs, say, 100 options you need those 100 options in the UI. No-one is going to be happy about not having the thing work the way that would be comfortable because "there is no clutter". Instead, I think, the mentality should be all about how to organise those options into logical hierarchies.

Perhaps GNOME and others on the "simplify" train need to understand that there is exactly one vendor (Apple) who can change anything anywhere and have their users cry out in joy about all the "cool new things". Unfortunately for GNOME their users are not like this.

Maybe I just got the wrong end of the stick and the only group that GNOME wishes to keep happy are its own developers. But then I wonder why is GNOME the default desktop almost everywhere ?

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 13, 2023 3:30 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (14 responses)

> If you want to serve a certain group and to keep all members of said group happy needs, say, 100 options you need those 100 options in the UI.

Sure, and that's how you end up with MS Word where every possible feature any big customer needed over the last 40 years has been implemented and is in the UI. I'm sure that has sold a lot but I'm not sure it's made the UI better

> I think, the mentality should be all about how to organise those options into logical hierarchies.

And that explains the ribbon menu concept, organize the options by frequency of use and logical hierarchy

In any event with GNOME I think part of the conversation is that is glossed over is that its tech stack is probably the most widely deployed of the traditional desktops (meaning not ChromeOS) but they have around what, 100 active full time 40hr/week contributors, if even that much and are trying to maintain the whole suite, so the number of people familiar with and contributing to any given part is probably small. I would guess that Windows or MacOS have 10 people full time for every 1 GNOME has covering roughly the same number of features or code So they are trying to track or lead the state of the art but without the literally billions of dollars worth of man-hours that a peer environment like MacOS or Windows has.

I think they literally just cannot implement every obviously necessary feature, and features they do have fall out for lack of maintenance, so instead they work on simplifying the core and prioritizing only the most critical, broadest, paid or fun work.

Other desktops do exist, and some are great, but I think they have even fewer resources and correspondingly smaller scope, or rely on the GNOME tech ecosystem underneath. They might be better in some ways but so far not in enough
ways for distros to consider switching the default experience, although that could happen if distro maintainers believe the benefits outweigh the cost.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 13, 2023 6:22 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (7 responses)

> > If you want to serve a certain group and to keep all members of said group happy needs, say, 100 options you need those 100 options in the UI.

> Sure, and that's how you end up with MS Word where every possible feature any big customer needed over the last 40 years has been implemented and is in the UI. I'm sure that has sold a lot but I'm not sure it's made the UI better

> > I think, the mentality should be all about how to organise those options into logical hierarchies.

> And that explains the ribbon menu concept, organize the options by frequency of use and logical hierarchy

And I know I bang on about it, but this is also the "wizard" mentality - "that's what they asked for, let's give it to them". The *correct* approach (imho) is to ask "what is the underlying problem", and give THAT to them.

Which is why WordPerfect came up with the idea of physical and logical pages, and solved the problem of booklets and labels (and probably several other things) with ONE feature, whereas Word has a bunch of - inflexible - one trick ponies. Ever tried to delete a *single* label from a sheet in Word? If you can edit the underlying database table, it's easy. If there isn't an underlying database of some sort, you're stuffed ...

Cheers,
Wol

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 20:18 UTC (Mon) by MrWim (subscriber, #47432) [Link] (6 responses)

> And I know I bang on about it, but this is also the "wizard" mentality - "that's what they asked for, let's give it to them". The *correct* approach (imho) is to ask "what is the underlying problem", and give THAT to them.

That comes with risks as well of course. Unless you have a really good understanding of the problem you risk "Even better than that!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11fCIGcCa9c . Understanding other peoples' problems is **hard** and requires empathy and humility.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 22:53 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

It's really not that hard to step back, and look at a truth table, isn't it?

If the customer asks for a solution to a problem, STEP BACK. All too often it's a special case (like MS's label problem). Solve the GENERAL problem - and by trying to identify the general problem that will help you understand the customer's problem! - and then solving the customer's problem will probably be much easier as well.

That's what gets me, again and again. People can't see beyond the end of their noses, and by fixing the special case they screw up the general case.

Perfect example - I've got a weird setup where if I let my distro update /boot, it basically trashes it and renders the system unbootable. Gentoo has a flag - "don't automount /boot". Which is, basically, UTTERLY USELESS.

If I don't have a \boot partition, it does nothing (of course). If I do have a \boot partition the flag defaults to false and trashes my setup. If I set the flag to true, the obvious thing to do is update the \boot directory. Except it doesn't. It just demands I set the flag to false and aborts. WHAT'S THE POINT OF HAVING IT!?

And then the workarounds I get given (a) don't actually do what I want, and (b) don't work. I was advised to set the "don't install" flag ??? but I DO want it to install! I jiust want it to install in the \boot directory, not the boot partition. Even worse, setting the "don't install" flag changes the directory search order and causes the build to crash with "modules not found"???

Seriously, how much effort does it take to step back, and think "does what I'm doing make sense?". It appears a LOT of people can't. Even when a bug report points it out to them. (Okay, my fruity language didn't help. But I always work on the basis "if the person I'm dealing with is frustrated by things OUT OF THEIR CONTROL, then give them slack"!

My big bugbear is that communication is supposed to be two-way. If you don't listen, and try to understand, then communication is impossible. (Yes I now some people might level that accusation at me ... :-) And an important part of listending is trying to understand other peoples' frustration.

Cheers,
Wol

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 16, 2023 7:13 UTC (Tue) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Often these options historically come from completely different use cases and only appear to fit your use case by accident. But the devs cannot adapt them to the new use case because of xkcd 1172.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 7:30 UTC (Thu) by dullfire (guest, #111432) [Link] (1 responses)

out of curiosity: which Gentoo packages are you talking about? It sounds like it's kernel related, but beyond installing the kernel source packages, I have custom tooling to handle kernel builds & deployments

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 11:03 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I'm fairly sure it's genkernel. Building the initramfs etc.

I can't remember what happened, but it build grub.cfg, and messed it up. As did SUSE ... :-(

I've always stored multiple distros in a single /boot, with grub giving me a choice. Which means I need to hand-edit grub.cfg because the automated tools can't cope with several different / partitions in a single cfg file. And then my root partitions are in an lvm volume over raid and SUSE especially really fscked that up ...

Cheers,
Wol

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 13:14 UTC (Thu) by jem (subscriber, #24231) [Link] (1 responses)

>If the customer asks for a solution to a problem, STEP BACK. All too often it's a special case (like MS's label problem). Solve the GENERAL problem - and by trying to identify the general problem that will help you understand the customer's problem! - and then solving the customer's problem will probably be much easier as well.

If you are working for a paying customer you often don't have time to solve the general problem. The customer wants the fix right now, and you certainly can't bill the customer for the two week work that the general solution takes to implement, no matter how much prettier and more useful it might be in the long run.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 18, 2023 13:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

If you're a contractor, yes. If you're a software house, it's in your own interest to eat the cost. And - true for me for pretty much my entire career - if you're in-house, you should be telling your boss "fix it now, or it'll be more expensive later". Personally, I've rarely had problems getting that message across. YMMV.

Cheers,
Wol

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 3:05 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (5 responses)

Reading other comments and thinking about it more, if GNOME was a product team and not community driven then I think they should pick a specific kind of user to cater to, like creative professionals such as audio/video artists and sysadmins/software developers, and make the core experience about that. Those users have work to do, and need an appliance with a browser, terminal, text editor, screenshot and image viewer, audio and video player, file organizer, support for video conferencing and screen sharing, maybe file sync with Google Drive or MS OneDrive and run a handful of professional apps such as vscode, audacity, blender or autocad.

I would think about moving the apps which are not supporting that use case out into independent projects and flatpaks, so those who volunteer on them and use them can still do so. There could be a SIG for mobile phone/tablet (Maps, Calls) or home user desktop (Photos, Music) or whatever for contributors who are more interested in their niche.

I look at a project like vscode for inspiration, out of the box it is just a plain text editor, but you can learn the keybindings, command pallette and settings as much or as little as you want, extending it through plugins to rival emacs in functionality, without breaking the simplicity of the core experience of editing text files. I like a desktop the same way, where the core experience is very simple, advanced features exist and you can learn them as much or as little as you want, and you can extend it with simple plugins without breaking the core simplicity. I tend to find many "powerful" tools to have complex and surprising behavior that makes them less useful, so I really appreciate the GNOME focus on simplicity, I just wish they had the resources to keep more than just the core polished and high quality.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 8:46 UTC (Sun) by Vipketsh (guest, #134480) [Link] (4 responses)

> I just wish they had the resources [...]

This sounds great and all because it is always true to at least some extent, but somewhere in there is also an expectation for projects to use the resources they have available *efficiently*.

From the outside the GNOME project appears to love wasting as much resources as it can making "they have limited resources therefore my experience will suck" a little hard to swallow. Things would look a lot better if instead of rewriting everything all the time in the latest fad* they would focus resources on maintain things. Perhaps they could put off making up new "Human Interface Guidelines" all the time to justify sweeping UI changes and, instead, maintain what they have. Perhaps it would be a little more resource efficient if, instead of breaking API of core libraries (e.g. GTK) forcing porting efforts all over the place, they would put in some effort to keep the API stable.

*: Initially GNOME was written in C. Sometime they made up Vala and decided to (re)write things in that. Then they decided to (re)write some things in javascript. Now it seems like they want to (re)write things in Rust. In the early days there was also some implication that they want to (re)write things in C#, though not sure if anything ever was in C#. Sorry, but if you have resources for this many rewrites then, I think, you should have resources to maintain decent apps.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 10:11 UTC (Sun) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

Yes there was a C# wave, with for example Banshee (music player). There is still MonoDevelop / Xamarin Studio (IDE).

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 15:46 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (2 responses)

> Things would look a lot better if instead of rewriting everything all the time in the latest fad* they would focus resources on maintain things

This is what always happens when you relying on volunteers a lot. Volunteers want to have "fun" and you can't blame them because no one pays them.

Note you can of course be a professional during the day and a volunteer at night, these are not mutually exclusive.

Sometimes corporations also fund "former volunteers" without the former having much power over the later - because there's no one else available to do the work.

When a corporation really wants to focus a project and finds the resources to do so, it just forks. Apple for instance has frequently done that.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 9:01 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

> This is what always happens when you relying on volunteers a lot. Volunteers want to have "fun" and you can't blame them because no one pays them.

Volunteers also want some fame which means lots of other useful code to build upon and shine. Gnome is reaching the point where its platform has been completely diluted by years of half assed unfinished fad-of-the-day rewrites and its value proposition for new developpers is approaching zero.

Remember that if all started by reusing the GIMP UI toolkit and was supposed to fix and generalize it to make it easier to write many useful FLOSS apps. And now it has exhausted its potential to the point that just maintaining a simple stupid official image viewer is deemed to be hard.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 15, 2023 20:10 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> And now it has exhausted its potential to the point that just maintaining a simple stupid official image viewer is deemed to be hard.

But if this all started life as a GIMP-based project, can't they just fork GIMP, rip out all of the editing functionality and, uh, call it a day? That doesn't sound hard to me. Is there some property of the GIMP codebase that makes it harder than it sounds?

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 13, 2023 16:34 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

> But then I wonder why is GNOME the default desktop almost everywhere ?

This is a mystery to me. GNOME change so much that it cannot be for backward compatibility.

Catanzaro: GNOME Core Apps Update

Posted May 14, 2023 15:54 UTC (Sun) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Because alternatives have even fewer volunteers and resources?