Unfortunately I wasn't able to watch Langdon's video, but I watched
Christian's talk and read Langdon's the slides. I actually spoke with
Langdon at OSCON where he accurately described me as a "developer on
Linux" which is [usually] distinctly different from a "Linux developer".
To me, the biggest thing that I would like to see, is Gnome to be more
comfortable for a developer (that's why we're all here, right?).
Developers often spend a lot of time with their hands on the keyboard
(as opposed to the mouse) and are already comfortable installing
packages, etc... I'm sure Gnome is great for general computing users
(though we can debate that too) and maybe touchscreen users like it, but
I find it maddening. I just built a new PC though, and for the first
time in a long time I'm forcing myself to use Gnome instead of XFCE (I
tried KDE as recently as a few months ago and found it to still be
unstable and have really weird theme/UI interactions).
I know there are some good extensions included (yay for Alt-Tab). Some
defaults to enable things like Alt+Drag to move/resize windows would be
great, as well as sane Virtual Desktop functionality, but I fixed all
that locally within a couple minutes.
But there are a bunch of other "polish" things that I think also need to
be fixed. For example:
* There are at least half a dozen Gnome Bugzillas that I've come across
around focus and window stacking issues - and I think I've encountered
every one of them. This is maddening. For someone who uses the keyboard
as much as possible, this makes the system almost unusable
* The default theme makes it difficult to easily distinguish the Focused
window from all other windows - again, maddening when you have lots of
windows spread across multiple very high resolution monitors. Especially
with all the window focus/stacking issues
* The default theme uses a lot of extra empty space around UI controls
and also as part of window titlebars. Sure, it's pretty, but you lose a
TON of useful space. Open something like Eclipse on a Mac and compare
with Gnome and see how much extra "stuff" you can see on the Mac (hint:
Apple has found a way to make the UI both pretty AND functional even on
screens with limited vertical pixels). Oh, and when I tried another
theme that had less blank space around Window titlebars, it turned out
that some windows use some new Gnome API which draws the titlebars
differently, so those windows still look like they are using Adwaita
* Silly things like the fact that you need to drag to get rid of the
screensaver/blanker thing - Individually, this isn't *that* important,
and there's already a BZ for it, but no one seems rushing to fix it. I
can't think of a single case where a non-touchscreen user would WANT
that functionality, but there still doesn't appear to be a way to rid
yourself of it
What do people think? I'm trying to be constructive here. Do other
people agree or disagree with these ideas? I do have some thoughts on
how to actually fix some of these things which might be suited to fresh
threads, if I'm not barking up the wrong tree...
Thanks,
-Adam Batkin
On 08/11/2014 09:22 AM, Matthew Miller wrote:
Some important talks from Flock:
First, Christian Schaller's "Fedora Workstation - Goals, Philosophy, and
Future" <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYtJZBgOrKw>
Second, Langdon White's "Fedora for Developers"
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAeCYSxEQk>
I'm particularly interested in feedback on the second one. A good discussion
started at the conference, but we ran out of time. Overall, it is somewhat
different from the "Workstation" idea I had in mind at last Flock and with
the _initial_ .next proposal, but I think Langdon and others arguing for
this more dramatic approach have convinced me.
What do you all think? The impact on F21 will be small, but a clear
direction here can guide our marketing, and, not so long from now, the
production of F22.
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