Re: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1220007
There seem to be a bunch of users asking for inclusion of the Tweak Tool in Workstation.
On the one hand, I'm not sure this is coming from a solid use case perspective, beyond "I like to fiddle more settings in the GUI than the standard GNOME Settings allow." It seems to me that if someone knows what they want to tweak at that level, it would follow they're capable of installing a piece of software for this.
On the other hand, this may be an opportunity to gather useful information on tweaks to GNOME. It would be nice not to close the BZ bug peremptorily. We should consider the request thoughtfully in the context of Workstation, and if possible, see what information we can glean from the reporters or interested parties, and see what action is worth taking.
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 16:18 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
Re: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1220007;
There seem to be a bunch of users asking for inclusion of the Tweak Tool in Workstation.
On the one hand, I'm not sure this is coming from a solid use case perspective, beyond "I like to fiddle more settings in the GUI than the standard GNOME Settings allow." It seems to me that if someone knows what they want to tweak at that level, it would follow they're capable of installing a piece of software for this.
On the other hand, this may be an opportunity to gather useful information on tweaks to GNOME. It would be nice not to close the BZ bug peremptorily. We should consider the request thoughtfully in the context of Workstation, and if possible, see what information we can glean from the reporters or interested parties, and see what action is worth taking.
I don't think that patching the control-center to launch the tweak tool makes sense. That's entirely out of line with how the other control-center panels work.
I don't have a problem with making the tweak tool easily available, but I have to wonder: are we failing so badly in our attempt to make software readily available via gnome-software and search that everything still has to be pre-installed ?
As an experiment, I removed gnome-tweak-tool and then I searched for 'tweak' in the shell overview - the tweak tool shows up among the search results provided by gnome-software, and it is 3 clicks from there to having it running (one to open gnome-software, one to install, one to launch).
Is that still too hard ?
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hi I haven't read all the comments here, I'm kinda jumping in the middle. But from what I have read, it sounds more as if the OP wants tweak tool functionality folded into gnome. I agree with this. Most of the things tweak tool does are arguably things gnome itself should do. I mean, seriously? To change what my power button does I have to launch tweak tool? Why isn't this included in the power settings? That said, I'm not picky. Gnome does all the basic stuff and some advanced stuff from it's control center, and it integrates very very well, so I'm fine with either decision. If tweak tool gets folded into gnome, great. If not, I can just install it. What it does need is some a11y love, but that's for a bug report, not here. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 16:18 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
Re: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1220007;
There seem to be a bunch of users asking for inclusion of the Tweak Tool in Workstation.
On the one hand, I'm not sure this is coming from a solid use case perspective, beyond "I like to fiddle more settings in the GUI than the standard GNOME Settings allow." It seems to me that if someone knows what they want to tweak at that level, it would follow they're capable of installing a piece of software for this.
On the other hand, this may be an opportunity to gather useful information on tweaks to GNOME. It would be nice not to close the BZ bug peremptorily. We should consider the request thoughtfully in the context of Workstation, and if possible, see what information we can glean from the reporters or interested parties, and see what action is worth taking.
I don't think that patching the control-center to launch the tweak tool makes sense. That's entirely out of line with how the other control-center panels work.
I don't have a problem with making the tweak tool easily available, but I have to wonder: are we failing so badly in our attempt to make software readily available via gnome-software and search that everything still has to be pre-installed ?
As an experiment, I removed gnome-tweak-tool and then I searched for 'tweak' in the shell overview - the tweak tool shows up among the search results provided by gnome-software, and it is 3 clicks from there to having it running (one to open gnome-software, one to install, one to launch).
Is that still too hard ?
I don't have a problem with making the tweak tool easily available, but I have to wonder: are we failing so badly in our attempt to make software readily available via gnome-software and search that everything still has to be pre-installed ?
As an experiment, I removed gnome-tweak-tool and then I searched for 'tweak' in the shell overview - the tweak tool shows up among the search results provided by gnome-software, and it is 3 clicks from there to having it running (one to open gnome-software, one to install, one to launch).
Is that still too hard ?
Why not remove Gedit, Evince and Evolution? Or better, remove all software and leave only Nautilus, Gnome-Shell and Gnome-Software. Everting can be installed in 3 clicks.
Sorry guys, but after Christian Schaller blog posts and mails I have this "hope" that things can change a little but some days after his posts and mails what I can see is that everything will be exactly as before. Fedora is exactly what you guys want it to be and users are not important.
----- Original Message -----
I don't have a problem with making the tweak tool easily available, but I have to wonder: are we failing so badly in our attempt to make software readily available via gnome-software and search that everything still has to be pre-installed ?
As an experiment, I removed gnome-tweak-tool and then I searched for 'tweak' in the shell overview - the tweak tool shows up among the search results provided by gnome-software, and it is 3 clicks from there to having it running (one to open gnome-software, one to install, one to launch).
Is that still too hard ?
Why not remove Gedit, Evince and Evolution? Or better, remove all software and leave only Nautilus, Gnome-Shell and Gnome-Software. Everting can be installed in 3 clicks.
Sorry guys, but after Christian Schaller blog posts and mails I have this "hope" that things can change a little but some days after his posts and mails what I can see is that everything will be exactly as before. Fedora is exactly what you guys want it to be and users are not important.
I'm not sure that throwing the baby out with the bath water is warranted. We don't agree with what you're requesting (otherwise we wouldn't even need to have a tweak tool, and the control center would offer every configuration, which would either result in us removing hidden configuration, or offering every configuration under the sun, which would make it unusable).
Just because we don't agree with what you requested, doesn't mean that "users are not important". And that's after discounting the fact that you're not "users".
If you want specific configuration items added to the Settings, file separate upstream bug about those with a rationale as to why it should be there.
Cheers
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hi This smells like just another "you're not doing things my way, I'm going to go cry in a corner now" post. I do think some, maybe most, of the options that are currently in tweak tool could be better used being put in their appropriate panel in the control center. But I'll go with it. If gnome puts tweak tool into gnome, great. If not, oh well. And who said anything about uninstalling all software? If you balk at installing one piece of software to tweak something (something you have to do on windows too) then you should really consider whether you really want to use the distro you're using, or if a more user friendly distro might be better for you Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
I don't have a problem with making the tweak tool easily available, but I have to wonder: are we failing so badly in our attempt to make software readily available via gnome-software and search that everything still has to be pre-installed ?
As an experiment, I removed gnome-tweak-tool and then I searched for 'tweak' in the shell overview - the tweak tool shows up among the search results provided by gnome-software, and it is 3 clicks from there to having it running (one to open gnome-software, one to install, one to launch).
Is that still too hard ?
Why not remove Gedit, Evince and Evolution? Or better, remove all software and leave only Nautilus, Gnome-Shell and Gnome-Software. Everting can be installed in 3 clicks.
Sorry guys, but after Christian Schaller blog posts and mails I have this "hope" that things can change a little but some days after his posts and mails what I can see is that everything will be exactly as before. Fedora is exactly what you guys want it to be and users are not important.
I'm not sure that throwing the baby out with the bath water is warranted. We don't agree with what you're requesting (otherwise we wouldn't even need to have a tweak tool, and the control center would offer every configuration, which would either result in us removing hidden configuration, or offering every configuration under the sun, which would make it unusable).
Just because we don't agree with what you requested, doesn't mean that "users are not important". And that's after discounting the fact that you're not "users".
If you want specific configuration items added to the Settings, file separate upstream bug about those with a rationale as to why it should be there.
Cheers
This smells like just another "you're not doing things my way, I'm going to go cry in a corner now" post. I do think some, maybe most, of the options that are currently in tweak tool could be better used being put in their appropriate panel in the control center. But I'll go with it. If gnome puts tweak tool into gnome, great. If not, oh well. And who said anything about uninstalling all software? If you balk at installing one piece of software to tweak something (something you have to do on windows too) then you should really consider whether you really want to use the distro you're using, or if a more user friendly distro might be better for you Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Sorry if I offended someone but after this 18 years using Linux, I could say that I am a little "sensible" about this messages. Anyway. Sorry.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 12:17 AM, kendell clark coffeekingms@gmail.com wrote:
then you should really consider whether you really want to use the distro you're using, or if a more user friendly distro might be better for you
Hi Kendell, Please avoid this kind of commentary on the mailing list or otherwise. Fedora is user friendly, and telling people to "go away and use something else" is not constructive at all, even if they have opinions that differs than yours.
Let's keep this discussion polite and constructive.
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hi I wish you'd posted that before I hit the send button on the last post. Sigh. It's why I shouldn't drink alcohol before going to sleep. I'll go shut up now. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 12:17 AM, kendell clark coffeekingms@gmail.com wrote:
then you should really consider whether you really want to use the distro you're using, or if a more user friendly distro might be better for you
Hi Kendell, Please avoid this kind of commentary on the mailing list or otherwise. Fedora is user friendly, and telling people to "go away and use something else" is not constructive at all, even if they have opinions that differs than yours.
Let's keep this discussion polite and constructive.
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 16:17 -0500, kendell clark wrote:
I do think some, maybe most, of the options that are currently in tweak tool could be better used being put in their appropriate panel in the control center. But I'll go with it. If gnome puts tweak tool into gnome, great. If not, oh well.
To make this clear: gnome-tweak-tool is a part of gnome. It lives in git.gnome.org, gets maintained by the same people who look after the control-center, gets released in sync with the other gnome modules.
I don't think it is fair to say unless we merge the control-center and the tweak tool we don't care for users.
If you want the tweaks to be integrated on a more equal footing with the regular settings, one fun project would be to add a search provider to gnome-tweak-tool, similar to what gnome-control-center has, so you can find individual tweak tool pages in the shell search.
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 17:29 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
If you want the tweaks to be integrated on a more equal footing with the regular settings, one fun project would be to add a search provider to gnome-tweak-tool, similar to what gnome-control-center has, so you can find individual tweak tool pages in the shell search.
Another fun project would be to pick important settings from Tweak Tool and merge them into gnome-control-center. We're not getting requests for Tweak Tool because it's a good app (it's not), but because gnome-control-center isn't good enough.
I agree that Tweak Tool doesn't need to be included by default. It's dead simple to install with the gnome-software search provider, and it's home to the settings that we *don't* want to be offered to users. Anything we expect users to change belongs in gnome-control-center.
I took a look through Tweak Tool and identified some candidates:
* I think there's a strong case to be made for having the other background and lock screen settings in gnome-control-center. This has been a longstanding complaint from users since the background panel was redesigned in 3.6.
* Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
* Fonts: Frequently-requested settings, since people have extremely different preferences for how fonts should look. It'd be good to have a fonts panel. This would be a big project, though.
* Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed" settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
* Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
Curious for thoughts on these (Bastien? Rui?). I'll file bugs if they seem sane.
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hi Completely agreed. I was actually hoping for a shell extensions item in control center, maybe under personalization? It could list which extensions you have installed, offer to update, remove, etc, and an add button which would open a search box for you to type into. It would search extensions.gnome.org, present results, and allow you to install them right from the window Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 17:29 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
If you want the tweaks to be integrated on a more equal footing with the regular settings, one fun project would be to add a search provider to gnome-tweak-tool, similar to what gnome-control-center has, so you can find individual tweak tool pages in the shell search.
Another fun project would be to pick important settings from Tweak Tool and merge them into gnome-control-center. We're not getting requests for Tweak Tool because it's a good app (it's not), but because gnome-control-center isn't good enough.
I agree that Tweak Tool doesn't need to be included by default. It's dead simple to install with the gnome-software search provider, and it's home to the settings that we *don't* want to be offered to users. Anything we expect users to change belongs in gnome-control-center.
I took a look through Tweak Tool and identified some candidates:
- I think there's a strong case to be made for having the other
background and lock screen settings in gnome-control-center. This has been a longstanding complaint from users since the background panel was redesigned in 3.6.
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
- Fonts: Frequently-requested settings, since people have
extremely different preferences for how fonts should look. It'd be good to have a fonts panel. This would be a big project, though.
- Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed"
settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
Curious for thoughts on these (Bastien? Rui?). I'll file bugs if they seem sane.
On 05/11/2015 10:00 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
I agree that Tweak Tool doesn't need to be included by default. It's dead simple to install with the gnome-software search provider, and it's home to the settings that we *don't* want to be offered to users. Anything we expect users to change belongs in gnome-control-center.
Wait, what? Why don't you want those settings to be offered? Put in an Advanced button and throw them in there. That should make everyone happy. Seriously.
Look, we all know that Apple popularized the "minimalist" idea for user interfaces. And their UIs are considered by most to be both visually appealing and elegant, which in turn leads them to be "learnable" (notice I didn't use the term "usable"[1] since many power users *don't* consider the Mac to be "usable" - at least not without some heavy customization, including a hefty assortment of third-party tools). And the truth is that the Mac's UI is "good enough" for most. Plenty of my power-user friends don't even notice that Command+Tab is LRU to switch between apps, but Command+` is cyclical to switch between windows within an app (and it's maddening that the latter works that way, as well as the fact that everyone fumbles around not even noticing that it works that way (of course they may not even bother and use the mouse/trackpad and/or Expose))
Hypotheses: * A large proportion traditional Linux-on-the-Desktop users are "power users" * Somewhere on the order of 100% of the Fedora-on-the-Desktop users who will be "spreading the word" about Fedora are "power users" or higher * Power users appreciate the ability to (often heavily) customize their computing experience - not just because "they can", but because they heavily optimize their systems for their usage models so they can operate most efficiently. We are hackers * "Learnability" is important, but so is "usability". "Power users" are willing to put up with *some* inconvenience (like additional configuration options in a list, a button marked "Advanced", etc...) which may negatively affect minimalist ideals, in exchange for increased customizability
I'm not saying that we should have to drop to a shell to get anything done. But I'm saying that the well-manicured, super-integrated Gnome UIs could use a few extra tweaks and options to make "power users" happy. And let's face it, most people on this list would consider themselves a "power user" in one form or another and we're the ones going out and advocating for Linux and Fedora.
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we shouldn't
relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Indeed. When I first used Gnome 3, I had trouble finding where to install, uninstall and manage extensions. Then I had trouble believing that the only built-in way to do it was through a Firefox browser extension. While "innovative", the current model is counter-intuitive at best and dangerous at worst (really? are there not enough security holes in our web browsers and websites that we need to force the primary/only installation method for system-level software to use that combination?)
[1] https://rickosborne.org/blog/2007/04/usability-vs-discoverability/
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hi This message makes a lot of sense. While I wouldn't count myself a power user, I do like to change some settings but I can adapt to nearly any interface, other than windows 8. Extensions really should be handled more securely other than a firefox extension. Perhaps integration with polkit, either ask the user for authorization before allowing an installation or take the gnome software approach and simply handle the installation in the background. Either way, I really feel extensions, as a primary selling point of gnome, deserves prime placement in the control center. And for those of us who don't use firefox, we cannot install extensions at all, unless the chromium/chrome extension was fixed. I don't use chrome, but there it is . Just my opinion Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Adam Batkin wrote:
On 05/11/2015 10:00 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
I agree that Tweak Tool doesn't need to be included by default. It's dead simple to install with the gnome-software search provider, and it's home to the settings that we *don't* want to be offered to users. Anything we expect users to change belongs in gnome-control-center.
Wait, what? Why don't you want those settings to be offered? Put in an Advanced button and throw them in there. That should make everyone happy. Seriously.
Look, we all know that Apple popularized the "minimalist" idea for user interfaces. And their UIs are considered by most to be both visually appealing and elegant, which in turn leads them to be "learnable" (notice I didn't use the term "usable"[1] since many power users *don't* consider the Mac to be "usable" - at least not without some heavy customization, including a hefty assortment of third-party tools). And the truth is that the Mac's UI is "good enough" for most. Plenty of my power-user friends don't even notice that Command+Tab is LRU to switch between apps, but Command+` is cyclical to switch between windows within an app (and it's maddening that the latter works that way, as well as the fact that everyone fumbles around not even noticing that it works that way (of course they may not even bother and use the mouse/trackpad and/or Expose))
Hypotheses: * A large proportion traditional Linux-on-the-Desktop users are "power users" * Somewhere on the order of 100% of the Fedora-on-the-Desktop users who will be "spreading the word" about Fedora are "power users" or higher * Power users appreciate the ability to (often heavily) customize their computing experience - not just because "they can", but because they heavily optimize their systems for their usage models so they can operate most efficiently. We are hackers * "Learnability" is important, but so is "usability". "Power users" are willing to put up with *some* inconvenience (like additional configuration options in a list, a button marked "Advanced", etc...) which may negatively affect minimalist ideals, in exchange for increased customizability
I'm not saying that we should have to drop to a shell to get anything done. But I'm saying that the well-manicured, super-integrated Gnome UIs could use a few extra tweaks and options to make "power users" happy. And let's face it, most people on this list would consider themselves a "power user" in one form or another and we're the ones going out and advocating for Linux and Fedora.
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Indeed. When I first used Gnome 3, I had trouble finding where to install, uninstall and manage extensions. Then I had trouble believing that the only built-in way to do it was through a Firefox browser extension. While "innovative", the current model is counter-intuitive at best and dangerous at worst (really? are there not enough security holes in our web browsers and websites that we need to force the primary/only installation method for system-level software to use that combination?)
[1] https://rickosborne.org/blog/2007/04/usability-vs-discoverability/
Hi
This is my first mail in this list, and yes I have opened the bug about the Gnome Tweak Tool in Workstation.
I know than a bug if not a good place for this kind of things, but at less was a good way to track some comments of people thinking than could be good to have the Gnome Tweak Tool by default, but what users really want to access some options of the system, the tool itself is not the important.
Than I see here is than there is many options, than power users want and are not available in the control center, people is asking for a way to get access to these options and the control center will be a better place for things like managing the fonts of the system and the power options when I am using a laptop, and maybe newcomers will like to set the maximise button by default, or play with a different theme and icons pack.
These is not about say to Gnome People what they must do or not with the desktop, I have read all the comment in the bug, in bugs outside Fedora and in the archive of these mailing list, and there not intention of may anyone angry.
I think these is a valid request from the community of users of Gnome Desktop about some options than need to be included in the Control Center, if these options where available there will not need to ask about include the Tweak Tool, there will be not need of it.
And the Gnome Tweak Tool is written in Python 2 so if not compatible with the Python 3 by default feature, these is a valid technical objections for not include it by default, but as I said, the important thing is not the tool itself, but there are users who want to access options that currently are not accessible otherwise.
But the background of all these is than there is a real need of more options to be included in the Gnome Control Center and is really cool to see than Michael Catanzaro look the users real requests.
And maybe there were a better way to take the attention about this, but I think than at less work fine to show something than users really want :)
----- Original Message -----
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 17:29 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
If you want the tweaks to be integrated on a more equal footing with the regular settings, one fun project would be to add a search provider to gnome-tweak-tool, similar to what gnome-control-center has, so you can find individual tweak tool pages in the shell search.
Another fun project would be to pick important settings from Tweak Tool and merge them into gnome-control-center. We're not getting requests for Tweak Tool because it's a good app (it's not), but because gnome-control-center isn't good enough.
I agree that Tweak Tool doesn't need to be included by default. It's dead simple to install with the gnome-software search provider, and it's home to the settings that we *don't* want to be offered to users. Anything we expect users to change belongs in gnome-control-center.
I took a look through Tweak Tool and identified some candidates:
- I think there's a strong case to be made for having the other
background and lock screen settings in gnome-control-center. This has been a longstanding complaint from users since the background panel was redesigned in 3.6.
"other settings"? It might have been a longstanding complaint, but not one that's happened recently, or was ever very loud. If there are things to do in the background settings, they are probably more on fixing presentation bugs in gnome-shell for particular types of background (say, being more "magic" when setting up a panorama, a portrait photo or a small pattern as a background)
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we shouldn't
relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome-tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
- Fonts: Frequently-requested settings, since people have extremely
different preferences for how fonts should look. It'd be good to have a fonts panel. This would be a big project, though.
Bringing back the old fonts panel is out of the question. There are too many variables, they make absolutely no sense to most users (seriously, do Windows, OSX or mobile platforms allow you to select the direction of anti- aliasing?).
If you want users to be able to select a new desktop font, again, it might have consequences both in terms of identity, and breaking font configurations such that fallbacks don't work as expected ("I changed my desktop font, and I can't see Chinese characters anymore").
What preferences exactly did you want to show users?
- Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed"
settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
Absolutely not. Rationale is in the gnome-settings-daemon bugs and commit messages for that.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
Curious for thoughts on these (Bastien? Rui?). I'll file bugs if they seem sane. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without:
* Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the GNOME designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
* Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they want across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there are two problems:
1) Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume that GNOME is immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome -settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora to popular extension pages, etc.
2) Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be) stable API. So even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new versions of Workstation.
...
- Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed"
settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
Absolutely not. Rationale is in the gnome-settings-daemon bugs and commit messages for that.
Sorry Bastien, but "go look at the git/bz history" is not helpful. I'm also curious why we don't allow users to select lid-close options. At least a pointer to one such example of the rationale would be useful.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 2:59 PM Stephen Gallagher sgallagh@redhat.com wrote:
I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior
It's worth noting that this particular extension does very little - it simply changes the default behavior of some shortcuts. So if you are implying here that something like the window switcher (in contrast to the default app switcher) should be built-in and not require any extensions - that's already the case.
You can reconfigure the <alt>tab/<super>tab keybindings using gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications '[]' gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows '["<Alt>Tab","<Super>Tab"]' (or by clicking around in the appropriate section in gnome-control-center ...)
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:27 +0000, Florian Müllner wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 2:59 PM Stephen Gallagher < sgallagh@redhat.com> wrote:
I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior
It's worth noting that this particular extension does very little - it simply changes the default behavior of some shortcuts. So if you are implying here that something like the window switcher (in contrast to the default app switcher) should be built-in and not require any extensions - that's already the case.
You can reconfigure the <alt>tab/<super>tab keybindings using gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications '[]' gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows '["Tab","Tab"]' (or by clicking around in the appropriate section in gnome-control -center ...)
That may be true, but how discoverable is a gsettings command? I'd argue that it would be easier to discover life on Jupiter's moons :)
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 3:57 PM Stephen Gallagher sgallagh@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:27 +0000, Florian Müllner wrote:
(or by clicking around in the appropriate section in gnome-control-center ...)
That may be true, but how discoverable is a gsettings command? I'd argue that it would be easier to discover life on Jupiter's moons :)
See the quoted text - the option *is* exposed in system settings
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 14:05 +0000, Florian Müllner wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 3:57 PM Stephen Gallagher < sgallagh@redhat.com> wrote:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:27 +0000, Florian Müllner wrote:
(or by clicking around in the appropriate section in gnome -control-center ...)
That may be true, but how discoverable is a gsettings command? I'd argue that it would be easier to discover life on Jupiter's moons :)
See the quoted text - the option *is* exposed in system settings
Oh, so it is. Though I can honestly say that this would not have been the first place I'd have looked. I only dug for it when you hinted that it was there somewhere. I'll admit, I'm not sure where to put that which would be more discoverable.
On May 12, 2015 6:59 AM, "Stephen Gallagher" sgallagh@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the GNOME
designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they want
across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there are two problems:
- Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume that GNOME is
immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome -settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora to popular extension pages, etc.
- Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be) stable API. So
even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new versions of Workstation.
...
- Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed"
settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
Absolutely not. Rationale is in the gnome-settings-daemon bugs and commit messages for that.
Sorry Bastien, but "go look at the git/bz history" is not helpful. I'm also curious why we don't allow users to select lid-close options. At least a pointer to one such example of the rationale would be useful.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
I completely agree with Stephen. Extensions are probably the norm, not the exception - and it doesn't take hard data to see that extensions are fun and often useful. It is *not* an insult to upstream design theory. Enable themes and drop in behavior extensions (which gnome-shell has done well, besides API stability and g-s-s pretending they don't exist) and creative, enthusiastic communities spring up. People that are passionate about using your product are a Good Thing.
--Pete
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Stephen Gallagher sgallagh@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without: [...] or hiding them entirely (Wayland) [...]
This is plain wrong. They work as bad/well on wayland as on X. The only thing is there is no systray icon api for wayland applications. Only X11 apps (through xwayland) can use them.
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the GNOME
designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
The sensible compatibility layer is what you see. We don't want to encourage using a functionality that we've been trying to wean ourselves off for a number of years already.
We can't keep on indulging applications that are designed like Winamp and ICQ circa 1998.
There are alternative ways: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray/Compatibility
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they want
across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
1) Go into the overview 2) type the name of the app followed by enter or 2) click on the app's icon in the dock
Maybe GNOME Classic is a better option for this site?
Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there are two problems:
- Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume that GNOME is
immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome -settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora to popular extension pages, etc.
- Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be) stable API. So
even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new versions of Workstation.
High-value extensions should be in the core of gnome-shell. Support for non-Gregorian calendars for example: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624959
Or support for media player controls, or builtin weather.
I made a list of those for the gnome-shell developers, but cannot for the life of me find them anywhere anymore.
...
- Power: The "power button action" and "when laptop lid is closed"
settings would be good to have in the Power panel. At least we need the laptop lid setting; that's easy and commonly-requested.
Absolutely not. Rationale is in the gnome-settings-daemon bugs and commit messages for that.
Sorry Bastien, but "go look at the git/bz history" is not helpful.
It would answer your questions though.
I'm also curious why we don't allow users to select lid-close options. At least a pointer to one such example of the rationale would be useful.
Everything in gnome-settings-daemon and the gnome-control-center is designed in such a way that "close the lid" means "put the machine to sleep if it's stand-alone, turn off the screen if it's plugged in to a dock/external monitor".
As such, any option that might exist changing that behaviour is provided as-is, YMMV, you-get-to-keep-both-pieces.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
The full date (compared to the week day and time) would also distract from the more important parts. Do we need the year in the full date? Do we need the month? Feel free to file a bug about that, the default and/or having a visible configuration option can be discussed in its own bug.
Cheers
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Bastien Nocera bnocera@redhat.com wrote:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the GNOME
designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
The sensible compatibility layer is what you see. We don't want to encourage using a functionality that we've been trying to wean ourselves off for a number of years already.
We can't keep on indulging applications that are designed like Winamp and ICQ circa 1998.
There are alternative ways: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray/Compatibility
Some of us *want* to be able to see our IM client, new mail indicator and an easily accessible icon for controlling a music player *at a glance* (no clicking, mouse movements or keypresses). And then a single click later an action is performed. Also, it's a cross-desktop standard.
I'm not saying that everyone wants that, but some of us do. And I think enough of us want it that it could be better supported.
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they want
across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
- Go into the overview
- type the name of the app followed by enter
or 2) click on the app's icon in the dock
I assume this is a joke. You want to force me to do 3 different things (which include switching between mouse and keyboard) instead of 1? Again, *at a glance* I can see what I want, then I can immediately click directly on it (or alt+tab to it, knowing that the window I want is already available and I don't need to launch anything new).
Maybe GNOME Classic is a better option for this site?
Yeah, probably. But it always felt like Classic was just a temporary compatibility layer until everyone could be fully indoctrinated into doing everything the One True Gnome Way.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
The full date (compared to the week day and time) would also distract from the more important parts. Do we need the year in the full date? Do we need the month? Feel free to file a bug about that, the default and/or having a visible configuration option can be discussed in its own bug.
Are you really arguing that one part of the date is more or less important (or distracting) to someone else? Or that this is difficult to implement because different people have different priorities? Pick a default then make the rest (easily) configurable.
My whole thesis with all of my grumpy e-mails (that are largely ignored by people with the capability to affect the change) is that everyone has a different style of working and that Gnome is pushing pretty hard for a one-size-fits-all approach, with some customization available through hidden (and often undocumented) settings or a mishmash of randomly collected extensions which may or may not work in 6 months. I'm not saying that my way is better than anyone else's, but my way has worked well for me for the past 15+ years (until everything broke with Gnome 3) and I shouldn't have to justify every little feature that I use in order to prevent that feature from being actively removed. I know I'm not alone: some people grumble, some people suck it up and are silent, some people move to other DEs. I'd love to be able to stick with Gnome since it's well polished, well tested and well integrated with the rest of the system.
-Adam Batkin
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Adam Batkin adam@batkin.net wrote:
I'd love to be able to stick with Gnome since it's well polished, well tested and well integrated with the rest of the system.
That's the thing: You can't really create a highly polished and integrated system if there are settings for everything, it adds too many moving parts which cause a lot of maintenance burden and make bugs harder to find and fix. Having some apps use tray icons as if it's 1998 and other use notifications like they should is the opposite of polish.
On 12/05/15 19:32, Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Adam Batkin adam@batkin.net wrote:
I'd love to be able to stick with Gnome since it's well polished, well tested and well integrated with the rest of the system.
That's the thing: You can't really create a highly polished and integrated system if there are settings for everything, it adds too many moving parts which cause a lot of maintenance burden and make bugs harder to find and fix. Having some apps use tray icons as if it's 1998 and other use notifications like they should is the opposite of polish.
Yeah, right --> www.kde.org
I mean these guys can support all notification modes, plus have notification history *per application* for ~6 years now, AND managed to not implode in a black hole created by the "maintenance burden"...
P.S. Please don't start talking about KDE4, because Gnome went trhough the same crap, but contrary to KDE, it is still going though the same "transition" crap.
There won't be status icon support in KDE's Wayland, just like there won't be any in Enlightenment or GNOME's.
The support will only be there for legacy X11 support. Time to get those apps unbroken...
(I love the fact that you're talking about them as "notifications" which is exactly what we're telling people to replace status icons with)
----- Original Message -----
On 12/05/15 19:32, Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Adam Batkin adam@batkin.net wrote:
I'd love to be able to stick with Gnome since it's well polished, well tested and well integrated with the rest of the system.
That's the thing: You can't really create a highly polished and integrated system if there are settings for everything, it adds too many moving parts which cause a lot of maintenance burden and make bugs harder to find and fix. Having some apps use tray icons as if it's 1998 and other use notifications like they should is the opposite of polish.
Yeah, right --> www.kde.org
I mean these guys can support all notification modes, plus have notification history *per application* for ~6 years now, AND managed to not implode in a black hole created by the "maintenance burden"...
P.S. Please don't start talking about KDE4, because Gnome went trhough the same crap, but contrary to KDE, it is still going though the same "transition" crap.
-- Alex. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On 13/05/15 09:39, Bastien Nocera wrote:
There won't be status icon support in KDE's Wayland, just like there won't be any in Enlightenment or GNOME's.
The support will only be there for legacy X11 support. Time to get those apps unbroken...
(I love the fact that you're talking about them as "notifications" which is exactly what we're telling people to replace status icons with)
You misunderstood me.
Notifications where not working properly in Gnome since the beginning, until 3.16. This has nothing to do with status icons. KDE had notifications working properly for years.
If some applications are not updated to work with wayland, then let then become obsolete :)
But please understand that having properly working notifications, should not exclude the existence of status icons.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi Notifications sounds like a really good idea. Can I make a suggestion though? If it's a notification that's actionable, That is, it has controlls inside of it, emit a "gain focus" or whatever the equivalent event is in at-spi, so that orca can focus on that notification and read it's controlls, rather than just speaking "notification: new software updates are available." As an aside to this, notifications in the calendar are not actionable. I can't click on them. I remember being told by a gnome developer that to access a notifications options, I had to physically click on the notification when it first appears on the screen. This is not possible for a number of reasons. In the old message tray approach, I could press the up arrow on a notification to pop up it's controlls, but this no longer works. I wonder. When you press win+n to access the currently active notification, can you click on them then? I've not tried this. Thanks Kendell clark
Alexander Bisogiannis wrote:
On 13/05/15 09:39, Bastien Nocera wrote:
There won't be status icon support in KDE's Wayland, just like there won't be any in Enlightenment or GNOME's.
The support will only be there for legacy X11 support. Time to get those apps unbroken...
(I love the fact that you're talking about them as "notifications" which is exactly what we're telling people to replace status icons with)
You misunderstood me.
Notifications where not working properly in Gnome since the beginning, until 3.16. This has nothing to do with status icons. KDE had notifications working properly for years.
If some applications are not updated to work with wayland, then let then become obsolete :)
But please understand that having properly working notifications, should not exclude the existence of status icons.
Win+M will open the calendar menu, which has a section with notifications.
Again, any a11y should be filed. I know it's stressful feeling that it's a neverending effort. There are folks that test Right-To-Left languages endlessly, there are folks testing and translating various languages. It's a much appreciated effort.
----- Original Message -----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi Notifications sounds like a really good idea. Can I make a suggestion though? If it's a notification that's actionable, That is, it has controlls inside of it, emit a "gain focus" or whatever the equivalent event is in at-spi, so that orca can focus on that notification and read it's controlls, rather than just speaking "notification: new software updates are available." As an aside to this, notifications in the calendar are not actionable. I can't click on them. I remember being told by a gnome developer that to access a notifications options, I had to physically click on the notification when it first appears on the screen. This is not possible for a number of reasons. In the old message tray approach, I could press the up arrow on a notification to pop up it's controlls, but this no longer works. I wonder. When you press win+n to access the currently active notification, can you click on them then? I've not tried this. Thanks Kendell clark
Alexander Bisogiannis wrote:
On 13/05/15 09:39, Bastien Nocera wrote:
There won't be status icon support in KDE's Wayland, just like there won't be any in Enlightenment or GNOME's.
The support will only be there for legacy X11 support. Time to get those apps unbroken...
(I love the fact that you're talking about them as "notifications" which is exactly what we're telling people to replace status icons with)
You misunderstood me.
Notifications where not working properly in Gnome since the beginning, until 3.16. This has nothing to do with status icons. KDE had notifications working properly for years.
If some applications are not updated to work with wayland, then let then become obsolete :)
But please understand that having properly working notifications, should not exclude the existence of status icons.
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desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Wed, 2015-05-13 at 04:42 -0500, kendell clark wrote:
If it's a notification that's actionable, That is, it has controlls inside of it, emit a "gain focus" or whatever the equivalent event is in at-spi, so that orca can focus on that notification and read it's controlls, rather than just speaking "notification: new software updates are available."
There is a second problem with this: after a few seconds, the notification will disappear and be put in the notification area. But once that happens, the actions are removed. So it's sort of a challenge to use them before they disappear, even if you don't need any accessibility at all. Especially infuriating when a notification with those buttons is the only way to accept an incoming XMPP buddy request, Empathy.
Michael
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi Agreed. Is there anything that can be done about this? Maybe leave the buttons in tact when the notification is moved to the calendar, notification area, whatever it's called now? That would solve the issue. Thanks Kendell clark
Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Wed, 2015-05-13 at 04:42 -0500, kendell clark wrote:
If it's a notification that's actionable, That is, it has controlls inside of it, emit a "gain focus" or whatever the equivalent event is in at-spi, so that orca can focus on that notification and read it's controlls, rather than just speaking "notification: new software updates are available."
There is a second problem with this: after a few seconds, the notification will disappear and be put in the notification area. But once that happens, the actions are removed. So it's sort of a challenge to use them before they disappear, even if you don't need any accessibility at all. Especially infuriating when a notification with those buttons is the only way to accept an incoming XMPP buddy request, Empathy.
Michael
On 12/05/15 19:32, Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:26 PM, Adam Batkin adam@batkin.net wrote:
I'd love to be able to stick with Gnome since it's well polished, well tested and well integrated with the rest of the system.
That's the thing: You can't really create a highly polished and integrated system if there are settings for everything, it adds too many moving parts which cause a lot of maintenance burden and make bugs harder to find and fix. Having some apps use tray icons as if it's 1998 and other use notifications like they should is the opposite of polish.
Please head to www.kde.org
Make sure you remain seated, because you are about to experience a world where all notification modes work, plus said notification manager has per application history for ~6 years now.
Plus, and I know that this is moving close to functionality overdose for you, you can either type, click, search *and* use the settings program to change everything you wish, *if* you wish to change anything that is.
Finally, if you screw up, there a magic button called "Defaults", which will undo all stupid customization you mistakenly made.
And yes I am writing this from Gnome 3.16 F-22 and no i do not try to say that Gnome is useless.
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 14:26 -0400, Adam Batkin wrote:
Some of us *want* to be able to see our IM client, new mail indicator and an easily accessible icon for controlling a music player *at a glance* (no clicking, mouse movements or keypresses). And then a single click later an action is performed. Also, it's a cross-desktop standard.
I'm not saying that everyone wants that, but some of us do. And I think enough of us want it that it could be better supported.
I'd like all three of those too, but built-in to the shell, like in Unity, not using the current systray, which needs to die. I think it's past time to pull the plug on our systray in the bottom-left experiment: everybody hates it.
Yeah, probably. But it always felt like Classic was just a temporary compatibility layer until everyone could be fully indoctrinated into doing everything the One True Gnome Way.
I think it's here to stay, so that Red Hat can sell RHEL. (And SUSE can sell SLED, but let's not pretend they still have influence in GNOME.)
P.S. Most of us are reading all the emails; it's just a long thread, we can't reply to everyone. Suffice to say that this is a controversial issue, with developers on both sides.
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Bastien Nocera bnocera@redhat.com wrote:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the GNOME
designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
The sensible compatibility layer is what you see. We don't want to encourage using a functionality that we've been trying to wean ourselves off for a number of years already.
We can't keep on indulging applications that are designed like Winamp and ICQ circa 1998.
There are alternative ways: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray/Compatibility
Some of us *want* to be able to see our IM client, new mail indicator and an easily accessible icon for controlling a music player *at a glance* (no clicking, mouse movements or keypresses). And then a single click later an action is performed. Also, it's a cross-desktop standard.
I'm not saying that everyone wants that, but some of us do. And I think enough of us want it that it could be better supported.
And those of you can use the topicons extension, or whatever else.
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they want
across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
- Go into the overview
- type the name of the app followed by enter
or 2) click on the app's icon in the dock
I assume this is a joke. You want to force me to do 3 different things (which include switching between mouse and keyboard) instead of 1? Again, *at a glance* I can see what I want, then I can immediately click directly on it (or alt+tab to it, knowing that the window I want is already available and I don't need to launch anything new).
It's not a joke, it's 2 other ways of achieving what you wanted.
Maybe GNOME Classic is a better option for this site?
Yeah, probably. But it always felt like Classic was just a temporary compatibility layer until everyone could be fully indoctrinated into doing everything the One True Gnome Way.
This sort of vocabulary grates me the wrong way.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date & Time
panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
The full date (compared to the week day and time) would also distract from the more important parts. Do we need the year in the full date? Do we need the month? Feel free to file a bug about that, the default and/or having a visible configuration option can be discussed in its own bug.
Are you really arguing that one part of the date is more or less important (or distracting) to someone else? Or that this is difficult to implement because different people have different priorities? Pick a default then make the rest (easily) configurable.
No. Because those questions are important. That's how those questions get answered, and we design GNOME. I'm not jesting, and those really are questions that need answering if we're going to make progress on this particular, small but important, pain point for you.
My whole thesis with all of my grumpy e-mails (that are largely ignored by people with the capability to affect the change) is that everyone has a different style of working and that Gnome is pushing pretty hard for a one-size-fits-all approach, with some customization available through hidden (and often undocumented) settings or a mishmash of randomly collected extensions which may or may not work in 6 months. I'm not saying that my way is better than anyone else's, but my way has worked well for me for the past 15+ years (until everything broke with Gnome 3) and I shouldn't have to justify every little feature that I use in order to prevent that feature from being actively removed.
If you're so tired, annoyed (as you tone notes) and blasé, maybe you want to use MATE. They do a fine GNOME 2 impression I've heard.
The whole tone of this email is dismissive. "Why aren't the developers doing what I want (when what I want is how it used to be)". Well, software changes and, we started with a new base in GNOME 3, which we're iterating on.
I know I'm not alone: some people grumble, some people suck it up and are silent, some people move to other DEs. I'd love to be able to stick with Gnome since it's well polished, well tested and well integrated with the rest of the system.
-Adam Batkin
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 01:58:07PM -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
High-value extensions should be in the core of gnome-shell. Support for non-Gregorian calendars for example: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624959 Or support for media player controls, or builtin weather. I made a list of those for the gnome-shell developers, but cannot for the life of me find them anywhere anymore.
I asked this before, I think, but I don't remember the answer. :) Where does the "popularity" rating on the Shell extension website come from? https://extensions.gnome.org/#sort=popularity How accurate are these numbers? It seems like this could be a good source of information for either extensions to migrate to core functionality or areas where the design could be improved. Right now, the top-ten list is:
1. Applications Menu 2. User Themes 3. Places Status Indicator 4. Alternate Tab 5. Removable Drive Menu 6. SystemMonitor 7. Native Window Placement 8. Window List 9. OpenWeather 10. Workspace Indicator
Some of these are part of GNOME Classic; I don't know if that skews the count. But they aren't all. And some of them I can't live without (Native Window Placement, I love you) but others (Workspace Indicator?) seem alien to how *I* use the system. But this isn't all about me. :) (In seriousness, that's entirely my point — can we use this as a data-driven approach to improvement?)
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 9:36 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
(In seriousness, that's entirely my point — can we use this as a data-driven approach to improvement?)
I don't think you can learn much from this data without knowing how many users don't use any extensions at all.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 09:51:33PM +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
(In seriousness, that's entirely my point — can we use this as a data-driven approach to improvement?)
I don't think you can learn much from this data without knowing how many users don't use any extensions at all.
That'd certainly be valuable. I guess this goes to the other thread, about user surveys and metrics.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 7:58 PM Bastien Nocera bnocera@redhat.com wrote:
High-value extensions should be in the core of gnome-shell. [...]
Or support for media player controls, or builtin weather.
Incidentally, I'm mentoring a Summer of Code student to add both of these this summer.
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:58 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the
GNOME designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
The sensible compatibility layer is what you see. We don't want to encourage using a functionality that we've been trying to wean ourselves off for a number of years already.
We can't keep on indulging applications that are designed like Winamp and ICQ circa 1998.
There are alternative ways: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray/Compatibility
That is all well and good if we have access to the sources for these tools. How about the endless supply of third-party software that we don't and can't control? Dropbox, Steam, Chrome Hangouts... are just a few. Without the topicons extension, these tools are difficult to access.
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they
want across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
- Go into the overview
- type the name of the app followed by enter
or 2) click on the app's icon in the dock
Maybe GNOME Classic is a better option for this site?
Neither of these options is sufficient if you have more than one window for a particular application. Some simple examples:
* I have several browser windows open on different workspaces to match what I'm doing in those spaces. * I opened an email composition window and moved it to another workspace in order to easily reference something
Neither of those cases work with the above response.
Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there are two problems:
- Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume that
GNOME is immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome -settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora to popular extension pages, etc.
- Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be) stable
API. So even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new versions of Workstation.
High-value extensions should be in the core of gnome-shell. Support
This is absolutely something I would like to see. Some of them are: the ones attached to GNOME Classic. So that's definitely a step in the right direction.
for non-Gregorian calendars for example: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624959
Or support for media player controls, or builtin weather.
I made a list of those for the gnome-shell developers, but cannot for the life of me find them anywhere anymore.
...
Everything in gnome-settings-daemon and the gnome-control-center is designed in such a way that "close the lid" means "put the machine to sleep if it's stand-alone, turn off the screen if it's plugged in to a dock/external monitor".
As such, any option that might exist changing that behaviour is provided as-is, YMMV, you-get-to-keep-both-pieces.
OK, that's reasonable (and a pretty decent default as well). Thank you for explaining.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date &
Time panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
The full date (compared to the week day and time) would also distract from the more important parts. Do we need the year in the full date? Do we need the month? Feel free to file a bug about that, the default and/or having a visible configuration option can be discussed in its own bug.
In this case, I was actually just talking about having the default behavior match the "enabled" value of the checkbox in Tweak Tool. Right now, on my system that results in the menu bar reading:
Tue 12 May, 15:25
I think this is probably sane and reasonable in general, though I'll admit that others might prefer a different representation of the date.
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 15:26 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
Everything in gnome-settings-daemon and the gnome-control-center is
designed in such a way that "close the lid" means "put the machine to sleep
if
it's stand-alone, turn off the screen if it's plugged in to a dock/external monitor".
Whenever I see complaints about the missing laptop lid setting, the complaint is that the laptop went to sleep when plugged into something (dock, monitor, projector). So perhaps something is not right here.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 05:02:57PM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Whenever I see complaints about the missing laptop lid setting, the complaint is that the laptop went to sleep when plugged into something (dock, monitor, projector). So perhaps something is not right here.
The other case I hear is someone who started their laptop on some task and then want to carry it to another room or across the office without carrying it open.
Office Runner is in Software.
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 05:02:57PM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Whenever I see complaints about the missing laptop lid setting, the complaint is that the laptop went to sleep when plugged into something (dock, monitor, projector). So perhaps something is not right here.
The other case I hear is someone who started their laptop on some task and then want to carry it to another room or across the office without carrying it open.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:58 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them, we
shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way the
GNOME designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
The sensible compatibility layer is what you see. We don't want to encourage using a functionality that we've been trying to wean ourselves off for a number of years already.
We can't keep on indulging applications that are designed like Winamp and ICQ circa 1998.
There are alternative ways: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray/Compatibility
That is all well and good if we have access to the sources for these tools. How about the endless supply of third-party software that we don't and can't control? Dropbox, Steam, Chrome Hangouts... are just a few. Without the topicons extension, these tools are difficult to access.
They get relegated to the corner... A good experiment would be to see if changes in the status icon could be transformed into notifications through an extension.
And contact your app provider to tell them that the GNOME integration is bad...
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window they
want across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
- Go into the overview
- type the name of the app followed by enter
or 2) click on the app's icon in the dock
Maybe GNOME Classic is a better option for this site?
Neither of these options is sufficient if you have more than one window for a particular application. Some simple examples:
- I have several browser windows open on different workspaces to match
what I'm doing in those spaces.
You should try using Epiphany's Webapps. I have separate apps for Webmail, web RSS reader and my NAS' "UI in a web browser".
- I opened an email composition window and moved it to another
workspace in order to easily reference something
Neither of those cases work with the above response.
Worth filing a bug about, with this information. It's kind of weird that we don't search through opened windows when in the overview, in some way.
Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there are two problems:
- Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume that
GNOME is immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome -settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora to popular extension pages, etc.
- Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be) stable
API. So even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new versions of Workstation.
High-value extensions should be in the core of gnome-shell. Support
This is absolutely something I would like to see. Some of them are: the ones attached to GNOME Classic. So that's definitely a step in the right direction.
for non-Gregorian calendars for example: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624959
Or support for media player controls, or builtin weather.
I made a list of those for the gnome-shell developers, but cannot for the life of me find them anywhere anymore.
...
Everything in gnome-settings-daemon and the gnome-control-center is designed in such a way that "close the lid" means "put the machine to sleep if it's stand-alone, turn off the screen if it's plugged in to a dock/external monitor".
As such, any option that might exist changing that behaviour is provided as-is, YMMV, you-get-to-keep-both-pieces.
OK, that's reasonable (and a pretty decent default as well). Thank you for explaining.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the Date &
Time panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
The full date (compared to the week day and time) would also distract from the more important parts. Do we need the year in the full date? Do we need the month? Feel free to file a bug about that, the default and/or having a visible configuration option can be discussed in its own bug.
In this case, I was actually just talking about having the default behavior match the "enabled" value of the checkbox in Tweak Tool. Right now, on my system that results in the menu bar reading:
Tue 12 May, 15:25
I think this is probably sane and reasonable in general, though I'll admit that others might prefer a different representation of the date.
Could you file a bug against gnome-shell about it (upstream)? We'll discuss it there and see whether gnome-desktop and gnome-control-center about it.
Cheers
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I'll add my voice into the debate again. The status icons thing needs fixing. I don't particularly care what the final decision is, but it *needs fixing, and very soon. Here's why. When the message tray was removed, the status icons were shunted off into a sort of hidden area of the bottom panel, accessible by pressing control+alt+tab until "status icons" is heard, and released. You land on the first icon in the list. However, accessibility of this area is extremely weird. The icons are usually, though not always, announced as the application name. EG pidgin. However, when you attempt to right click to bring up a context menu, you end up clicking on the applet to the right of the one orca's focus has landed on. Gnome developers cannot simply blow this off as, sorry, status icons is deprecated, blame your app provider. If the status icon for a particular app is not accessible, yes that's a problem with the app. But this is a problem with the area where the icons are themselves. It's all well for gnome developers to say "use an extension", which is doable, except for one thing. Extensions that modify the top panel to add icons, not menus, for those are accessible, but icons, are as far as I can tell, completely and utterly inaccessible. Top icons, as well as panel favorites both suffer from this. Orca simply cannot focus on the icons. It just won't see them. I hate to sound like I"m complaining, but I grow tired of filing accessibility bugs against gnome, and being one of the only people to do so. The gnome designers design a feature, forgetting about accessibility. Usually, it breaks, I find out about it right before a release, panic and start filing bugs, only to get "we don't do any kind of accessibility testing." To be fair, once bugs are filed they get fixed, and quickly. But would it really be too much trouble to use orca, and other accessibility tools with gnome *before* releasing it? I can and do use orca every day, and I can file the bugs where I find them, but I cannot see. So if a sighted gnome developer finds a bug where orca does not read something that it's supposed to, they can see what's supposed to be read, fix it, and be done with it. All I can do is, "well, orca isn't reading this. I have absolutely no idea why, but here it is." I want to do much better than this, but my programming skills are limited. There are currently many many accessibility issues in gnome's control center. Most of them are minor, but there are quite a few situations in which orca cannot see labels for buttons, I've filed bugs against most of these. There are instances where duplicate controlls, which are actually the "all settings" button, are announced to orca, leading to confusion. Extensions usually, though not always, are accessible. There preferences dialog, which is tucked into the tweak tool, however, are full of "button" "toggle button" No labels. None. I don't know how to solve this, other than nagging the extension authors, most of which will simply tell me they don't know a thing about accessibility, to fix them. An alternative is for the gnome developers to add accessibility guidelines and, preferably, accessibility checks into whatever sort of extension API there is. Long story short, this is gnome's, and not the extension author's, problem to solve. You guys do fantastic work, and I don't want to at all sound ungreatful. I could just use a little help from the people who design the desktop I use every day. I'm fine with the level of customization that gnome offers out of the box. Extensions, however, need a lot of a11y work. Just as an aside, epiphany is not very usable with orca. This is not a gnome problem though. If I understand it, it's a problem with orca and webkit, the details of which are completely over my head. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:58 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
- Shell extensions: As long as we're going to offer them,
we shouldn't relegate them to Tweak Tool. Perhaps gnome-software would be a better location than gnome-control-center, but either would be better than Tweak Tool. (But the gnome-shell browser plugin is very crashy at worst and unreliable at best, so we should fix that first.)
Extensions is what happens when designers and developers don't agree. If you know you want extensions, installing gnome-tweak-tool is only a step away. If people want to integrate that better, they can add support to the gnome-shell web browser plugin to show whether or not gnome -tweak-tool is installed, and launch Software to install it through the browser if not.
At the same time, I think it would be very useful to poll GNOME users for what extensions they are using (if any). I think you'll find that it's very likely that more users have installed (for example) the Alternate Tab extension than are using the default behavior (and it would also be interesting to know whether those using the default behavior know about the extension).
Some other extensions that I personally know a great many people cannot live without:
- Topicons: I understand that systray icons are not the way
the GNOME designers want things to work, but FAR too much software exists today that relies on these icons. Shunting them to the message tray (pre -3.16) or into a tiny little expansion box (post-3.16) or hiding them entirely (Wayland) are not valid solutions for this software. Call it legacy software if you wish, but not having a sensible compatibility layer is harmful to users.
The sensible compatibility layer is what you see. We don't want to encourage using a functionality that we've been trying to wean ourselves off for a number of years already.
We can't keep on indulging applications that are designed like Winamp and ICQ circa 1998.
There are alternative ways: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/MessageTray/Compatibility
That is all well and good if we have access to the sources for these tools. How about the endless supply of third-party software that we don't and can't control? Dropbox, Steam, Chrome Hangouts... are just a few. Without the topicons extension, these tools are difficult to access.
They get relegated to the corner... A good experiment would be to see if changes in the status icon could be transformed into notifications through an extension.
And contact your app provider to tell them that the GNOME integration is bad...
- Window List: For many users attempting to locate the window
they want across a number of workstations, having the window list at the bottom of the screen provides a very quick way to see what is on every workspace. It's far easier to process a short line of information than to 1) go into the Overview. 2) start paging through each workspace. 3) scan the entire screen for the window that matches what you want.
- Go into the overview 2) type the name of the app followed by
enter or 2) click on the app's icon in the dock
Maybe GNOME Classic is a better option for this site?
Neither of these options is sufficient if you have more than one window for a particular application. Some simple examples:
- I have several browser windows open on different workspaces to
match what I'm doing in those spaces.
You should try using Epiphany's Webapps. I have separate apps for Webmail, web RSS reader and my NAS' "UI in a web browser".
- I opened an email composition window and moved it to another
workspace in order to easily reference something
Neither of those cases work with the above response.
Worth filing a bug about, with this information. It's kind of weird that we don't search through opened windows when in the overview, in some way.
Don't get me wrong: the GNOME designers have made many excellent choices: I wouldn't be running the GNOME environment if I thought otherwise. But some choices have fallen well into the realm of "perfect is the enemy of good". It doesn't matter how "clean" an experience feels on paper if people trying to use it get frustrated. There are many extensions out there to alleviate some of these pains, but there are two problems:
- Extensions aren't common knowledge. Most people assume
that GNOME is immutable and limited to only the few choices allowed by gnome -settings. Related to the above: no matter how easy it might be to install GNOME Tweak Tool, it's not *discoverable*. There are no hints anywhere that you might want or need it. There are no links from Fedora to popular extension pages, etc.
- Extensions aren't (and as I understand it, cannot be)
stable API. So even when someone has discovered an extension that they really cannot survive without, there's no guarantee that it won't be broken on the next update. This problem isn't solvable by GNOME, but it can be solvable by Fedora: we could identify a set of high-value extensions and work with their authors to have them ready before we release new versions of Workstation.
High-value extensions should be in the core of gnome-shell. Support
This is absolutely something I would like to see. Some of them are: the ones attached to GNOME Classic. So that's definitely a step in the right direction.
for non-Gregorian calendars for example: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624959
Or support for media player controls, or builtin weather.
I made a list of those for the gnome-shell developers, but cannot for the life of me find them anywhere anymore.
...
Everything in gnome-settings-daemon and the gnome-control-center is designed in such a way that "close the lid" means "put the machine to sleep if it's stand-alone, turn off the screen if it's plugged in to a dock/external monitor".
As such, any option that might exist changing that behaviour is provided as-is, YMMV, you-get-to-keep-both-pieces.
OK, that's reasonable (and a pretty decent default as well). Thank you for explaining.
- Top bar: Maybe show date in clock could live in the
Date & Time panel, where the 12/24 hour setting is.
We already show it inside the menu, is that not enough?
When someone wants to know the date, it's usually because they need to use it for something (like signing a check, etc.) right now. Needing more than a quick glance to the top of the screen is wasteful, particularly since the GNOME design policy is to have none of that space used for anything else. This is one of those cases where I cannot figure out why the default doesn't simply include the date. I can understand having seconds or week numbers in the tweak tool; those are far less interesting.
The full date (compared to the week day and time) would also distract from the more important parts. Do we need the year in the full date? Do we need the month? Feel free to file a bug about that, the default and/or having a visible configuration option can be discussed in its own bug.
In this case, I was actually just talking about having the default behavior match the "enabled" value of the checkbox in Tweak Tool. Right now, on my system that results in the menu bar reading:
Tue 12 May, 15:25
I think this is probably sane and reasonable in general, though I'll admit that others might prefer a different representation of the date.
Could you file a bug against gnome-shell about it (upstream)? We'll discuss it there and see whether gnome-desktop and gnome-control-center about it.
Cheers
----- Original Message -----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I'll add my voice into the debate again. The status icons thing needs fixing. I don't particularly care what the final decision is, but it *needs fixing, and very soon. Here's why. When the message tray was removed, the status icons were shunted off into a sort of hidden area of the bottom panel, accessible by pressing control+alt+tab until "status icons" is heard, and released. You land on the first icon in the list. However, accessibility of this area is extremely weird. The icons are usually, though not always, announced as the application name. EG pidgin. However, when you attempt to right click to bring up a context menu, you end up clicking on the applet to the right of the one orca's focus has landed on. Gnome developers cannot simply blow this off as, sorry, status icons is deprecated, blame your app provider.
This is a bug. A plain bug. There's nothing to discuss. File a bug.
An alternative is for the gnome developers to add accessibility guidelines
There are already a11y guides, which the extension authors don't read.
Long story short, this is gnome's, and not the extension author's, problem to solve.
I really don't see how. The APIs are there, the guidelines are there.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi No problem. I can file a bug. Which component? maybe ... gnome shell, core component? I don't mind filing bugs. My main reason for the ... I don't know if it was a rant, was that I'm the *only*, or it feels that way anyway, person filing these bugs. This isn't really gnome's fault, but accessibility is very fragile. It breaks easily, and the reason why can be very tricky. On a positive note, I've been doing a lot of testing with gnome on wayland, and it's just as accessible as x11. The desktop isn't drawn, but that's a known bug already. What about the duplicate controlls? I have no idea what's causing that. It happens primarily in gnome's control center, in almost every module, but also in gnome tweak tool. I don't think there are actually duplicate controlls, just that orca is reading duplicates, for some very odd reason. Can you point me to some a11y guidelines? It looks like I'll have to start nagging extension authors to read them. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I'll add my voice into the debate again. The status icons thing needs fixing. I don't particularly care what the final decision is, but it *needs fixing, and very soon. Here's why. When the message tray was removed, the status icons were shunted off into a sort of hidden area of the bottom panel, accessible by pressing control+alt+tab until "status icons" is heard, and released. You land on the first icon in the list. However, accessibility of this area is extremely weird. The icons are usually, though not always, announced as the application name. EG pidgin. However, when you attempt to right click to bring up a context menu, you end up clicking on the applet to the right of the one orca's focus has landed on. Gnome developers cannot simply blow this off as, sorry, status icons is deprecated, blame your app provider.
This is a bug. A plain bug. There's nothing to discuss. File a bug.
An alternative is for the gnome developers to add accessibility guidelines
There are already a11y guides, which the extension authors don't read.
Long story short, this is gnome's, and not the extension author's, problem to solve.
I really don't see how. The APIs are there, the guidelines are there.
----- Original Message -----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi No problem. I can file a bug. Which component? maybe ... gnome shell, core component?
gnome-shell.
I don't mind filing bugs. My main reason for the ... I don't know if it was a rant, was that I'm the *only*, or it feels that way anyway, person filing these bugs.
You're certainly an early adopter amongst our orca users.
This isn't really gnome's fault, but accessibility is very fragile. It breaks easily, and the reason why can be very tricky.
Yes, certainly. Which is one of the reasons why we made a11y switchable at run-time. In the olden days, you had to log out and log in again when enabling an a11y feature.
Which is why testing is invaluable.
On a positive note, I've been doing a lot of testing with gnome on wayland, and it's just as accessible as x11.
Yay :)
The desktop isn't drawn, but that's a known bug already. What about the duplicate controlls?
That's usually missing metadata on the widgets, and easily fixable through a couple of GtkBuilder lines.
I have no idea what's causing that. It happens primarily in gnome's control center, in almost every module,
Aren't most of those fixed? Rui released a new 3.16 gnome-control-center yesterday, and we're backporting those fixes for GNOME 3.14 and Fedora 21 as well.
but also in gnome tweak tool. I don't think there are actually duplicate controlls, just that orca is reading duplicates, for some very odd reason. Can you point me to some a11y guidelines? It looks like I'll have to start nagging extension authors to read them.
This is the main entry point: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-how-it-work...
The guidelines are here: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-coding-guid...
Creating accessible custom widgets: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-custom.html...
and examples: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-api-example...
HTH
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi There's a new gnome control center? Great. I don't think I have it yet, I'm still on 3.16.1 here, so I'll wait for an update and write back in with results. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi No problem. I can file a bug. Which component? maybe ... gnome shell, core component?
gnome-shell.
I don't mind filing bugs. My main reason for the ... I don't know if it was a rant, was that I'm the *only*, or it feels that way anyway, person filing these bugs.
You're certainly an early adopter amongst our orca users.
This isn't really gnome's fault, but accessibility is very fragile. It breaks easily, and the reason why can be very tricky.
Yes, certainly. Which is one of the reasons why we made a11y switchable at run-time. In the olden days, you had to log out and log in again when enabling an a11y feature.
Which is why testing is invaluable.
On a positive note, I've been doing a lot of testing with gnome on wayland, and it's just as accessible as x11.
Yay :)
The desktop isn't drawn, but that's a known bug already. What about the duplicate controlls?
That's usually missing metadata on the widgets, and easily fixable through a couple of GtkBuilder lines.
I have no idea what's causing that. It happens primarily in gnome's control center, in almost every module,
Aren't most of those fixed? Rui released a new 3.16 gnome-control-center yesterday, and we're backporting those fixes for GNOME 3.14 and Fedora 21 as well.
but also in gnome tweak tool. I don't think there are actually duplicate controlls, just that orca is reading duplicates, for some very odd reason. Can you point me to some a11y guidelines? It looks like I'll have to start nagging extension authors to read them.
This is the main entry point: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-how-i
t-works.html.en
The guidelines are here: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-codin
g-guidelines.html.en
Creating accessible custom widgets: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-custo
m.html.en
and examples: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-api-e
xamples.html.en
HTH
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi Unfortunately, gnome control center 3.16.2 did not fix the duplicate controlls issue. Orca still sees two dim screen brightness controlls, two blank screen controlls, etc. I'll file a bug Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Sonar GNU/Linux
kendell clark wrote:
hi There's a new gnome control center? Great. I don't think I have it yet, I'm still on 3.16.1 here, so I'll wait for an update and write back in with results. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi No problem. I can file a bug. Which component? maybe ... gnome shell, core component?
gnome-shell.
I don't mind filing bugs. My main reason for the ... I don't know if it was a rant, was that I'm the *only*, or it feels that way anyway, person filing these bugs.
You're certainly an early adopter amongst our orca users.
This isn't really gnome's fault, but accessibility is very fragile. It breaks easily, and the reason why can be very tricky.
Yes, certainly. Which is one of the reasons why we made a11y switchable at run-time. In the olden days, you had to log out and log in again when enabling an a11y feature.
Which is why testing is invaluable.
On a positive note, I've been doing a lot of testing with gnome on wayland, and it's just as accessible as x11.
Yay :)
The desktop isn't drawn, but that's a known bug already. What about the duplicate controlls?
That's usually missing metadata on the widgets, and easily fixable through a couple of GtkBuilder lines.
I have no idea what's causing that. It happens primarily in gnome's control center, in almost every module,
Aren't most of those fixed? Rui released a new 3.16 gnome-control-center yesterday, and we're backporting those fixes for GNOME 3.14 and Fedora 21 as well.
but also in gnome tweak tool. I don't think there are actually duplicate controlls, just that orca is reading duplicates, for some very odd reason. Can you point me to some a11y guidelines? It looks like I'll have to start nagging extension authors to read them.
This is the main entry point: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-how-
i
t-works.html.en
The guidelines are here: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-codi
n
g-guidelines.html.en
Creating accessible custom widgets: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-cust
o
m.html.en
and examples: https://developer.gnome.org/accessibility-devel-guide/stable/gad-api-
e
xamples.html.en
HTH
On Wed, 2015-05-13 at 04:33 -0500, kendell clark wrote:
hi However, accessibility of this area is extremely weird. The icons are usually, though not always, announced as the application name. EG pidgin. However, when you attempt to right click to bring up a context menu, you end up clicking on the applet to the right of the one orca's focus has landed on. Gnome developers cannot simply blow this off as, sorry, status icons is deprecated, blame your app provider. If the status icon for a particular app is not accessible, yes that's a problem with the app. But this is a problem with the area where the icons are themselves.
I really don't think anything has changed in the accessibility implementation of status icons while they were moved from the message tray to the legacy tray. It has been just as 'weird' before.
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
"other settings"? It might have been a longstanding complaint, but not one that's happened recently, or was ever very loud. If there are things to do in the background settings, they are probably more on fixing presentation bugs in gnome-shell for particular types of background (say, being more "magic" when setting up a panorama, a portrait photo or a small pattern as a background)
To be clear: I would prefer our background/wallpaper panel to look more like Ubuntu's.
Bringing back the old fonts panel is out of the question. There are too many variables, they make absolutely no sense to most users (seriously, do Windows, OSX or mobile platforms allow you to select the direction of anti- aliasing?).
We don't have to bring everything back, and we don't have to expose the preferences exactly as Tweak Tool does. But we could offer a setting like "crisp" or "sharp" ("too narrow" or "unantialiased" to detractors) vs. "smooth" ("blurry" to detractors), for example. If we could find default settings that work for everyone, then we wouldn't need settings, but clearly we can't.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Catanzaro" mcatanzaro@gnome.org To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2015 12:44:13 PM Subject: Re: Tweak Tool in Workstation?
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
Bringing back the old fonts panel is out of the question. There are too many variables, they make absolutely no sense to most users (seriously, do Windows, OSX or mobile platforms allow you to select the direction of anti- aliasing?).
We don't have to bring everything back, and we don't have to expose the preferences exactly as Tweak Tool does. But we could offer a setting like "crisp" or "sharp" ("too narrow" or "unantialiased" to detractors) vs. "smooth" ("blurry" to detractors), for example. If we could find default settings that work for everyone, then we wouldn't need settings, but clearly we can't.
So in general I do think we should probably offer some kind of setting here, and I agree we should not go back to the old GNOME 2 offering, it was not very good. But maybe 2 choice option here like Michael suggests.
But to make sure I understand the problem correctly; so from what I understand there are two main 'camps' in regards to Font rendering, each 'camp' being a collection of rendering settings. One we can call 'Apple rendering' which is what most professional font foundries tend to target with their fonts which relies on fonts being heavily hinted to work well.
Then you have the one we currently use, lets call it the 'free fonts rendering' which works best when you have fonts that doesn't contain a lot of hinting like most free fonts don't and Cantarell doesn't have in particular.
And the problem is that if you use the 'Apple rendering' setup with a font without good hinting the results tends to be worse than with the 'Free fonts rendering' and vice versa?
And since people on Linux systems tend to use a mix of fonts they get suboptimal rendering depending on the fonts in question. And thus depending on what rendering we want to use as default it probably needs to come hand in hand with our default font choice?
Is this summary correct?
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 13:10 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
But to make sure I understand the problem correctly; so from what I understand there are two main 'camps' in regards to Font rendering, each 'camp' being a collection of rendering settings. One we can call 'Apple rendering' which is what most professional font foundries tend to target with their fonts which relies on fonts being heavily hinted to work well.
Well, I would say there is the Windows camp on one end, the Apple camp on another, with Ubuntu and Fedora off in the middle. Or maybe a triangle between Windows-Apple-Ubuntu.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-apples-font-rendering/ is an interesting article. Note the first two images: our fonts look more like Windows, and I get Epiphany bug reports all the time from users who want their fonts to look more like OS X: "my fonts aren't antialiased," (they are), "Epiphany fonts are broken" (maybe, I have no clue, but no user has ever convinced me this is true). But if we make them more like OS X, I'll instead get bug reports who want them to be more like Windows. If you like Windows fonts, you say OS X fonts are "blurry," but if you like OS X fonts, you say Windows fonts are "too narrow." Note the third image: There is no best way to render fonts. Also note that web view fonts ignore your GTK+ settings, the ones you can set in Tweak Tool, and look at only fontconfig instead, since fontconfig allows you to configure each font individually, whereas the GTK+ settings are probably only optimal for the default GTK+ font.
http://blog.codinghorror.com/font-rendering-respecting-the-pixel-grid/ is a good follow-up article. freetype-freeworld (used by Ubuntu, presumably banned by RH legal?) does something similar to what Windows is doing. Anyway, most users seem to think Ubuntu has fonts right, and Fedora is wrong to not be exactly the same. Nobody seems to complain about Ubuntu fonts, so I'd prefer to do exactly what they do, but we can't.
Firefox is doing something different than Epiphany, though I'm not sure what. Understanding code that uses fontconfig is very hard for me. It's really a stupidly complicated library. :(
Then you have the one we currently use, lets call it the 'free fonts rendering' which works best when you have fonts that doesn't contain a lot of hinting like most free fonts don't and Cantarell doesn't have in particular.
Um... I wouldn't say that. Cantarell's problem is broken hinting (which makes the font blurrier) rather than lack of hinting. When a font doesn't have native hints, the freetype light autohinter is used instead. (We should maybe force this for Cantarell in fontconfig, which will no doubt satisfy some people's complaints about our fonts, but infuriate others.) Some people think this is awesome and would be happy if we used it to override fonts' native hints. I think Debian and openSUSE might do this by default, or at least used to.
Some fonts have hints that work badly expect in Windows. Open an article on cnn.com in Firefox for an example of one of these. Then open it in Epiphany (in F22) and see the light autohinter producing a much better result, but a result that's inconsistent with system fonts that use native hints, which is unsatisfactory. (I change it to force the light autohinter for web fonts for this reason. That's also what Chrome does, although they're planning to stop doing so, because the light autohinter is really only supposed to be used for fonts that don't have native hinting.)
And since people on Linux systems tend to use a mix of fonts they get suboptimal rendering depending on the fonts in question. And thus depending on what rendering we want to use as default it probably needs to come hand in hand with our default font choice?
That's why we ignore GTK+ font settings in the web view: the GTK+ font settings are presumably best for the GTK+ default fonts, but for web view content, we'll trust fontconfig instead. This also perturbs users, who complain that fonts are "wrong" after attempting to change settings in Tweak Tool. In WebKit, we will turn off antialiasing (makes fonts look TERRIBLE) if you do so in Tweak Tool, but I think we otherwise ignore the settings (well, we use them as a base, but then we apply fontconfig settings on top, overriding them).
Sorry for the rambling; this was a hard email to write.
Michael (wishes he had a solution to this)
P.S. Big disclaimer: I've looked into font rendering to a very rudimentary degree for WebKit, but *I don't really understand any of this.*
----- Original Message -----
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 06:02 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
"other settings"? It might have been a longstanding complaint, but not one that's happened recently, or was ever very loud. If there are things to do in the background settings, they are probably more on fixing presentation bugs in gnome-shell for particular types of background (say, being more "magic" when setting up a panorama, a portrait photo or a small pattern as a background)
To be clear: I would prefer our background/wallpaper panel to look more like Ubuntu's.
Ubuntu's is GNOME 3.0's one, plus moar buttons!
I really don't think that any more options than there are in the Background panel will 1) help us get more users 2) stop us from covering the 90% use cases.
"I want to use a gradient background with my company's watermark on top" isn't top of the things I would want the Background panel to cover.
If you have specifics, please bring them forward.
Bringing back the old fonts panel is out of the question. There are too many variables, they make absolutely no sense to most users (seriously, do Windows, OSX or mobile platforms allow you to select the direction of anti- aliasing?).
We don't have to bring everything back, and we don't have to expose the preferences exactly as Tweak Tool does. But we could offer a setting like "crisp" or "sharp" ("too narrow" or "unantialiased" to detractors) vs. "smooth" ("blurry" to detractors), for example. If we could find default settings that work for everyone, then we wouldn't need settings, but clearly we can't.
From the conversations I had, where absolutely no one (including our resident
font experts) was able to tell me what should be the default, why that was the default, and what difference it would make, those options are more of the "unbreak my font rendering"-ilk.
I'd want all that information before we even think of adding any configuration to gnome-control-center.
On 11/05/15 22:12, Bastien Nocera wrote:
If you want specific configuration items added to the Settings, file separate upstream bug about those with a rationale as to why it should be there.
I am lazy, which means that I did not search in either the gnome nor the redhat bugzilla, but is "startup applications" something that should *not* be in "Settings", or even as a separate entry in the app menu?
Abis.
----- Original Message -----
On 11/05/15 22:12, Bastien Nocera wrote:
If you want specific configuration items added to the Settings, file separate upstream bug about those with a rationale as to why it should be there.
I am lazy, which means that I did not search in either the gnome nor the redhat bugzilla, but is "startup applications" something that should *not* be in "Settings", or even as a separate entry in the app menu?
It should probably be an option for favourited applications, in gnome-shell. But that has to be designed. I believe this had already been discussed in the GNOME Bugzilla, but can't find a reference now, so feel free to file a new bug about it.
Matthias Clasen writes:
are we failing so badly in our attempt to make software readily available via gnome-software and search that everything still has to be pre-installed ?
As an experiment, I removed gnome-tweak-tool and then I searched for 'tweak' in the shell overview - the tweak tool shows up (...)
Is that still too hard ?
Quite easy, but user has to know there is a tweak tool. Unless he goes reading about GNOME blogs, news, and so, this will remain an unknown fact.
Searching for "setting" will not reveal it (when not installed ; it will once installed).
This might be good enough: 1 - i can't find how to change font 2 - i search the web how to change font. This will tell about tweak tool 3 - install & use it - the easy part.
(once installed, typing "font" in activities would work, too, for example)
Kind regards, Pierre-Yves Luyten
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 23:57 +0200, Pierre-Yves Luyten wrote:
Matthias Clasen writes:
Quite easy, but user has to know there is a tweak tool. Unless he goes reading about GNOME blogs, news, and so, this will remain an unknown fact.
Searching for "setting" will not reveal it (when not installed ; it will once installed).
Have you tried this ? I have. It works just fine, Tweak tool shows up among the search results when searching for 'settings', regardless whether it is installed or not.
Matthias Clasen writes:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 23:57 +0200, Pierre-Yves Luyten wrote:
Matthias Clasen writes:
Quite easy, but user has to know there is a tweak tool. Unless he goes reading about GNOME blogs, news, and so, this will remain an unknown fact.
Searching for "setting" will not reveal it (when not installed ; it will once installed).
Have you tried this ? I have. It works just fine, Tweak tool shows up among the search results when searching for 'settings', regardless whether it is installed or not.
Sorry it appears to be a locale issue. The fact it appears once installed made me skip this assumption - I was wrong.
Well, it is really a long thread. And sorry to make a "nonconstructive" comment but like all other threads related to GNOME features, we always have the same answer. Developers don't want or think is better so we will not have it in GNOME.
Again, sorry if I will offend someone but it is not better to say "we are going to do what we think is better, doest matter what users think, we know what is better".
To prevent this message to be "nonconstructive" only, let me ask you guys: If I get all Teak Tool features in gnome-control-center with good source code quality and respecting standards, will this patch accepted in GNOME?
I am so tired to see old "linuxers" going back to Windows or Mac because things are not customised like in the past. I am remember the days where one of most important advantages of Linux was "highly customisable".
Cheers.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 06:50:51PM -0300, Everaldo Canuto wrote:
Again, sorry if I will offend someone but it is not better to say "we are going to do what we think is better, doest matter what users think, we know what is better".
I haven't heard anyone say that here; in fact, quite the opposite. Please have a little patience.
To prevent this message to be "nonconstructive" only, let me ask you guys: If I get all Teak Tool features in gnome-control-center with good source code quality and respecting standards, will this patch accepted in GNOME?
Well, this _isn't_ an upstream GNOME development list, so it's not the place to have that answered.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 6:50 PM, Everaldo Canuto everaldo.canuto@gmail.com wrote:
To prevent this message to be "nonconstructive" only, let me ask you guys: If I get all Teak Tool features in gnome-control-center with good source code quality and respecting standards, will this patch accepted in GNOME?
Each one has to be discussed separately. There's no consensus regarding the Fonts settings panel, as mentioned before in this thread, or the Background settings, mentioned in this thread as well. Anyway, a best approach would be to propose the inclusion of every single setting on its on bug report. Please, do that. In doing so, we can have a more productive discussion on it, instead of treating it all as a huge package of inseparable features.
I am so tired to see old "linuxers" going back to Windows or Mac because things are not customised like in the past. I am remember the days where one of most important advantages of Linux was "highly customisable".
Cheers.
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
No. If we wanted all of gnome-tweak-tool's features, we wouldn't have said "build Tweak Tool", which one contributor took us up on.
And GNOME is still more customisable than OS X or Windows in a very important way. You get the sources.
----- Original Message -----
Well, it is really a long thread. And sorry to make a "nonconstructive" comment but like all other threads related to GNOME features, we always have the same answer. Developers don't want or think is better so we will not have it in GNOME.
Again, sorry if I will offend someone but it is not better to say "we are going to do what we think is better, doest matter what users think, we know what is better".
To prevent this message to be "nonconstructive" only, let me ask you guys: If I get all Teak Tool features in gnome-control-center with good source code quality and respecting standards, will this patch accepted in GNOME?
I am so tired to see old "linuxers" going back to Windows or Mac because things are not customised like in the past. I am remember the days where one of most important advantages of Linux was "highly customisable".
Cheers.
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Hi
And GNOME is still more customisable than OS X or Windows in a very important way. You get the sources.
As a developer I completely agree, as a user, I completely disagree. I will not give you more details because I think this phrase is self-explained.
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hi
Do you really want to start *yet another* windows versus linux debate here? If you do, I'll take this off list, so I can rant at you in private. I really, really, really dislike blanket statements such as this one. Especially when it involves windows Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Everaldo Canuto wrote:
Hi
And GNOME is still more customisable than OS X or Windows in a very important way. You get the sources.
As a developer I completely agree, as a user, I completely disagree. I will not give you more details because I think this phrase is self-explained.
Hi
Do you really want to start *yet another* windows versus linux debate
here? If you do, I'll take this off list, so I can rant at you in private. I really, really, really dislike blanket statements such as this one. Especially when it involves windows Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
No. I don't want to start another Windows x Linux debate. Since I am on Linux side, it makes no sense two people arguing in favor of same side. Anyway, fell free to send me private messages, it always good to hear other opinions that can change the way how I see things.
About my sentence "As a developer I completely agree, as a user, I completely disagree", I supposed that it was self-explanatory but looks like I am wrong. As a developer, software with source code can give me completely control over customisation, I can change the source code so I can do anything. As a user, without programming or console knowledge, could be impossible to customize something that is not easy available.
When I compare GNOME 2, KDE, Windows and OS X with GNOME 3 without Tweak Tool, I feel like all others are more customisable than GNOME 3 without Tweak Tool. That is why I strongly advocate in favor of Tweak Tool available by default not only on Fedora but also in all Linux distros based on GNOME. A plus, could be all Tweak features available on gnome-control-center.
I hope this makes my sentence more clear now.
Cheers.
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hi Boy, did that sound a lot worse than I meant it to sound. So sorry about that. That part about the windows argument was supposed to be a joke, it sounded ... a little playful in my mind, but reading back over it it sounded like a threat. Wasn't how I meant it at all. The only serious part of that message was the part about me not liking blanket statements. To expand on that, my point was that if you really dislike gnome's take on things, you can either install extensions, not ideal but workable, or switch to another desktop. That's the great thing about linux, you're not tied down to one desktop. Obviously if you need accessibility your choice of desktops is more limited but you still have options. You don't have this on windows or mac. That was the point of my message. Again, sorry about that. I often forget that people can't always read the tone of my message the way I think it sound s Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
kendell clark wrote:
hi
Do you really want to start *yet another* windows versus linux debate here? If you do, I'll take this off list, so I can rant at you in private. I really, really, really dislike blanket statements such as this one. Especially when it involves windows Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Everaldo Canuto wrote:
Hi
And GNOME is still more customisable than OS X or Windows in a very important way. You get the sources.
As a developer I completely agree, as a user, I completely disagree. I will not give you more details because I think this phrase is self-explained.
On 11/05/15 01:18 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
Re: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1220007
There seem to be a bunch of users asking for inclusion of the Tweak Tool in Workstation.
On the one hand, I'm not sure this is coming from a solid use case perspective, beyond "I like to fiddle more settings in the GUI than the standard GNOME Settings allow." It seems to me that if someone knows what they want to tweak at that level, it would follow they're capable of installing a piece of software for this.
On the other hand, this may be an opportunity to gather useful information on tweaks to GNOME. It would be nice not to close the BZ bug peremptorily. We should consider the request thoughtfully in the context of Workstation, and if possible, see what information we can glean from the reporters or interested parties, and see what action is worth taking.
It will be also a good opportunity to see which settings can be moved on either Gnome-settings and Gnome-software. Having access to an Apple iMac running on OS X Yosemite, I noticed extensions are part of System Preference. See http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/adjust-system-preferences-mac-...
It will be nice to look what System Preference did well and where it falls short.
----- Original Message -----
On 11/05/15 01:18 PM, Paul W. Frields wrote:
Re: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1220007
There seem to be a bunch of users asking for inclusion of the Tweak Tool in Workstation.
On the one hand, I'm not sure this is coming from a solid use case perspective, beyond "I like to fiddle more settings in the GUI than the standard GNOME Settings allow." It seems to me that if someone knows what they want to tweak at that level, it would follow they're capable of installing a piece of software for this.
On the other hand, this may be an opportunity to gather useful information on tweaks to GNOME. It would be nice not to close the BZ bug peremptorily. We should consider the request thoughtfully in the context of Workstation, and if possible, see what information we can glean from the reporters or interested parties, and see what action is worth taking.
It will be also a good opportunity to see which settings can be moved on either Gnome-settings and Gnome-software. Having access to an Apple iMac running on OS X Yosemite, I noticed extensions are part of System Preference. See http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac-software/adjust-system-preferences-mac-...
It will be nice to look what System Preference did well and where it falls short.
Extensions in Yosemite don't allow changing *everything* in the shell like GNOME-shell extensions can.
They're a collection of 7 different types of plugins: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/06/06/app-extensions-ios-8-yosemite/
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