Debian, so ugly and unwieldy!

[Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>]

This is about GUI appearance and ergonomy.

I'll concentrate at XFCE, as I consider GNOME3's UI a lost cause, thus I'd
find it hard to bring constructive arguments there.

I also hate with a passion so-called "UX designers".  Those are folks who
created Windows 8's Metro tiles, lightgray-on-white "Material Design" flat
unmarked controls, and so on.  They work from a Mac while not having to
actually use what they produce.


For example:
* our XFCE's layout has a thinnish bar with actually useful controls (menu
  button, window list, desktop list, clock, systray, logout) at the top...
  plus a tall redundant "OSX dock" that takes a lot of screen real estate.
  It's too much even on 4:3 aspect ratio, and on currently prevailing 16:9
  any loss to vertical space is bad.  Most code, web pages, human images,
  etc, benefit from a portrait rather than landscape layout...

  => Can't we move two useful pieces from the dock to the top bar?


* the default theme has a thin disappearing poorly marked scroller.  This is
  nasty with a bad touchpad (laptops), high-resolution small screen (PDAs).


* people tend to use computers with only limited lighting.  The hacklab I'm
  in right now has mostly covered windows (and even some artificial light
  from the above!); at work opening window blinds too much can result in you
  getting murdered; I for one prefer to hack after midnight rather than at
  insane times like morning, etc.  And this is not just hackers like us --
  even Windows and Mac brag about "night mode", random websites have this as
  well, etc.  On the other hand, if we install some themes by default they
  have at most lightish grey background.  I packaged
  dark{cold,mint}-gtk-theme with real black, perhaps there are better ones?

  => Let's install by default a black theme, perhaps even enable it by default?


* the default icon theme is fugly

  => Default to eg. faenza?


* default font is ugly and poorly hinted -- the latter is especially jarring
  on a low-resolution screen I'm at right now, the former still applies to
  one's proper battlestation at home/work.  Tarzeau recently had some
  interesting rants, but even Quicksand that recently got added (during hard
  freeze...) to desktop-base is pretty nice.  Or, if you want something more
  conventional, Clear Sans (Intel Clear).  Or, Inter.  Or...

  => Actually configure a good font by default.  Quicksand looks fine.


* likewise, default monospace font.  My personal preference (Mononoki)
  hasn't been made to build from source yet (b-deps are available now, but
  it's still in contrib), my other preference is not packageable; there's a
  bunch of good monospace fonts available for choice but _programming_ font
  is an especially contentious issue.

  => Default to anything reasonable -- ie, not Dejavu.  Even Comic Shanns is
     better...


* CSD is still a thing.  No, your special program shouldn't get to ignore
  system theme, put controls in wrong order, miss some controls, not respond
  to minimize/etc if it's currently busy, etc.  Consistency not one-off
  designs.

  => Install gtk3-nocsd by default in all desktop tasks but Gnome.  It's not
     perfect but it helps.


* Likewise, GTK vs QT themes.

  => If default desktop at install time was not KDE, make QT obey GTK theme?


In general: could we please do something to appearance beyond choosing a
wallpaper once a release?  I'm a code hacker not a theme maker, so I see
this only once it gets in my way -- but text readability does matter.

(Discussing before filing bugs.)


Meow!
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