every time gnome tries to do things, it gets further away from the gnome i loved...
whilst there is a lot of interesting thinking here, it's fundamentally trying to solve a problem I don't want solved. I don't want the pile of papers on my desk to never overlap, it's already overlapping and hiding each other based on where my brain knows they are. It's a mess, but it's a mess my brain knows. it's a structural mess.
It may not be of interest to you personally, but the growing popularity of tiling window managers means there's a lot of demand for this type of feature.
As long as they give the user the ability to opt out/in, what's the harm in introducing it?
The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don’t want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn’t solve the problems the majority of people face.
In the end, this is an open platform and if they make something I don't like, I'll just use something else. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't voice what I see as a misstep forward taking gnome further from the kind of interface that made it so successful.
Not going against Gnome here, but against your last sentence.
As long as they give the user the ability to opt out/in, what's the harm in introducing it?
Pretty sure systemd did this with a lot of things and started removing things they just didn't like. Can't find the website I wanted to link, but it included a lot of reasons why systemd isn't good (for example, binary logging. Why ?) "You can always opt out" doesn't work in the real world ; people don't care enough to switch. Why do you think google is the biggest search engine ? Mainly because it's the default everywhere.
In this context I guess it doesn't matter (and I couldn't see myself using gnome, even if it has some good polish), it's just that "you can always opt out" leaves a bad taste on my tongue.
It's not true to say their use cases are just "children and old people"; they're saying that while it's more of a obstacle to ease-of-use in those groups, all users have to manually relocate poorly placed application windows.
If the OS can remove the need to do that, it improves workflow.
@cx0der
I really like this. Gnome could be just settling and following what other DEs already do, but instead it is inovating. This type of move will always piss off people that already have a set way of organizing themselves, but I am really interesting in testing new stuff. Can't wait it see it implemented
Yeah not everybody likes it but I love how they try to go beyond the normal way of working and improve on it. Instead of sticking to existing ways which are ingrained into people.
This is probably going to make me sound like a curmudgeon, but:
While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing...
I don't understand this thinking (1), and worse, the workflow described seems like it will just make things more confusing (2).
(1) Most tools humans have developed are not especially intuitive - you usually need someone to teach you at least the basics, and then you need to practice. Consider a driving a car, operating a sewing machine, a microwave... Even something "simple" like a hammer has features that need to be explained ("turn it around, and you can use the claw on the back to remove nails").
(2) This seems like it just introduces more inconsistency. Right now, a new window opens on top, and you move it and size it however you need. This works for all windows. With the model described, windows sometimes float next to each other (but the arrangement is random), some times tile, and other times will open on a new workspace. And the tiling features get even more confusing - dragging one window over another causes them to tile, but what if I actually just want them to overlap?
I feel like this is just going to annoy anyone used to the current system and still require a learning curve for anyone new to computing.
I've used gnome 2 and 3, Unity, KDE 3, 4, and 5, and am on gnome 44 now - I actually think the current world is pretty good. I'd much rather see quarter tiling and gesture customization than a whole new window management paradigm.
Exactly, I don't get how these people are supposed to be UI UX experts but don't understand that inconsistent behaviour is a very fast way to confuse and break user trust.
Very excited to see where this will go. I don’t use gnome, but if it manages to become the perfect mix of TWM and the traditional floating layout, then this could be huge