Re: Debian, so ugly and unwieldy!
Adam Borowski - 07.06.19, 17:24:
> 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.
Similar to you I do not "get" GNOME 3. I have no idea why I would like
to use it. But others may see this quite differently.
> 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.
So far I see KDE's visual design team does a lot of good work, but there
are also things I do not like, like the Androidization of scrollbars:
They are much thinner in Plasma than they were.
Up to Android 7 I still think it is in general a very bad idea to take
GUI ideas from Android.
> 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?
That is why I move the main bar to one of the sides of the screen. On my
laptop on the left. However on my laptop I use the full screen estate
anyway as the side bar and I also have a top bar for activities only
side out when I move near the screen border. That would definitely not
suitable as a default however.
General reply to your idea:
I am not using XFCE, but Plasma… however what you outline spurs a lot of
questions.
Adapt all desktop environments Debian delivers? Or just the Debian
default DE – that is still GNOME 3, isn't it? If it is, do you argue to
change the default DE again? I do not use GNOME 3 on any of my machines
and one can argue whether it is the right default, but uh oh… that could
lead to an epic thread in debian-devel :)
I am a bit reluctant about adapting upstream defaults too much. Why? It
is more of a general feeling, but one reason would be that when the
differences are huge it could make it more difficult for Debian users to
interact with upstream regarding bug reports and so.
And then… reach an agreement on what would be the best adaptions.
Especially as different desktop environments in Debian are maintained by
different, in part already quite under-staffed teams.
Also… large adaptions of all, or at least all major desktop environments
Debian delivers would require a lot of effort. Debian Qt/KDE team is just
a few people for a huge lot of packages. I pretty much bet the interest
in implementing huger changes to upstream default would be quite
limited.
However… first impressions count and sure if Debian by defaults looks bad
and has usability issues… then that is also a first impression. Last I
checked Plasma was quite okay.
--
Martin
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