All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
I try other options now and again. When something is better I use it. Until then, I have things to do with what works.
People continue to innvote, test, and develop new options. Someday one will eventually work out a superior approach that takes off among the general userbase.
Yeah, if it ain't broke don't fix it. Desktop GUIs have been in development for decades, of course there's going to be little to improve on. Plenty to make worse though, as we've seen with Windows.
Tiling windows managers? I had a glorious i3 config once, and not long ago installed regolith on the ubuntu machine at work. Soon, on my laptop, I will try Noctalia with either Umbria or Niri.
Any WM that relies on keyboard shortcuts as the default has no future on mass market. Also when most people use tiling features in other deskops the most common split for productivity is 1/2 + 1/2 or maybe 1/2 + 1/4+1/4. Pure tiling VMs are overkill in most cases and more splits you have the smaller they get. Something like Niri might be the sweet spot, since for it 50/50 splitting is the default and doesn't go too heavy on the keybinds and with good shell can somewhat work even without them.
The keyboard shortcuts are not as big a hurdle as asking a non tech savvy person to set up their dotfiles.
mum broke her goddamn .vimrc again
Jesus... just learn some lua, mum
it's better than grandpa fucking up his .bashrc. lol
You can build a GUI around that and many desktop environments do just that. All desktops use a config files or registries deep down, not all of them have an options menu. You drop a lifelong windows user in i3 and they will burnout within minutes trying to move a window and will quit thinking that they are stupid.
Oh for sure, I'm saying just out of the box the amount of tinkering is above what most would consider use friendly. My hyprland setup has a GUI and its very intuitive, but they dont all have that.
Noctalia with Niri is nice.
I've been living a simple life with a mostly default xfce. Now I want to try this and I'm annoyed.
Noctalia + Wayfire finally lured me away from XFCE.
second that
Thanks, I hate it.
Desktop works do well because it is a canvas of varying sizes where you can spread out your work. Overlapping windows and tiling are both great for me because they serve different functions and I like using either depending on context. This was a lot of examples of the types of 'helping' that apple does which I hate. Just let me see and interact with things.
A note about change that works for others but not me: Windows turning the list of apps off start to a search. Fuck that bullshit, I don't remember the namd of evert app but give me a list of names or icons and I can find it in a second.
It is fine if someone else likes it, great for them.
I don't remember the namd of evert app but give me a list of names or icons and I can find it in a second.
I'm the exact opposite lol.
I didn't watch the video (yet), but it sounds like I'm going to have the exact same reaction. The best workspaces support a bunch of different workflows "well enough" instead of supporting one workflow really well. Customizability is even better.
I don't care if some people consider having a command accessible via direct text entry, search via text entry, search via browsing a list, navigating dropdown menus, visual shortcut, etc. all at the same time is wasteful due to all the redundancy. I still want those simultaneously all the same.
And yes, agreed on window management. I use (usually simple) automatic tiling, custom prescribed tiling with overlap (see FancyZones and the KDE equivalents), and freeform placement at the same time all the time.
Watch the video.
Window management is only one example of something that he thinks could be improved on widescreen monitors. He has three other demos of pretty interesting ideas, but the main point of the talk was to tell developers to begin thinking outside of the box in order to really drive innovation.
Thanks. I'll be sure to do that. I just haven't already due to being at work.
I like both overlapping windows and a sort of tiling
I use kwin-rectangle extension to bring the hotkeys used by Rectangle on MacOS onto my Linux machines
That way I can stack things, or I can use hotkeys to send the active window to a static tiled position/size. I'm a particular fan of thirds on my ultrawide
Please don't change what isn't broken. We left gnome over this trash
At 10:33 he talks to this point
Unfortunately YouTubr hasn't worked for years
A lot of UI/UX changes of recent years have been geared toward simplifying interfaces for touchscreens. Bigger and bigger buttons for big hands. Can I get the opposite? Changes that utilize the precise movement of a mouse cursor more?
Yeah shit is kind of annoying. I don't mind having "simple" versions as an option, but seems like they (apps and even the OSes) just want to remove options over time by making them hidden. With the mobile OSes wanting to take over more things that traditional OSes can do. It is lame that instead of making those apps being able to be switched to something like "desktop mode," it is just large buttons and everything else. I just want to be able to switch to small clickable UI if I choose to use a mouse instead of all the mobile touch UI. It is already a pain that mobile OSes already try to hide the idea of file management making normies even less aware of how to navigate around and know where their shit is.
His prototype for better management on ultra wide monitors looks great, really interesting video.
Yes.
it's widespread for a reason.
A while back the gnome project had a really interesting and cool unique take on tiling functionality that would bring the otherwise more complex, keyboard shortcut centric desktop ux to a more mouse centric average user userbase
Scrolling wm are also super cool and interesting
On a normal screen the widescreen idea probably wont work as great, but I would like to see a simplified version for normal screen sizes. Maybe instead of the gradual size change a depositing of windows at the left screen edge. Similar to those chat bubble things on Android. Like I would love to be able to snap a music player to the border and it becoming a small interface with the basic controls. So similar to his demo at 31:45. Maybe I need to find a customizable tiling manager and make a preset with a lot of small windows at the left side just to test the general concept, I really dig the idea of it.
I don't.