
Make. It. Simple. Linux Desktop Usability - AnIdiotOnTheNet
https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-usability-part-1-5fa0fb369b42
======
flukus
Global menus only make sense in an environment where only one application is
on screen at once. This is especially true when you throw in "focus follows
mouse"and you have to cross another application on the way to the global menu.

What I really hate lately is the iconification of menus, be it ribbon or that
firefox abomination. Having to learn a different set of hieroglyphs for each
application is a terrible UX. This is taking the form over function approach
that has long plagued media players (still does with spotify and netflix) and
bringing it to all applications.

Humans are much better at scanning through justified lists of text, this was
our fast lookup method long before computers existed.

~~~
magicalbeans
Global menus assume a single monitor setup. And as such are unsuitable.

~~~
Tsiklon
This is not necessarily the case;

The Mac OS X desktop metaphor does attempt to solve this somewhat, the last
application in focus on a particular monitor, is presented within the menubar
on that monitor - regardless of whether or not the program is currently been
interacted with.

For example: currently I have 4 displays with a program full screen in each,
each Menu Bar has the menu options for each program.

All inactive programs present in the menu bars on the other monitors are
greyed out - the effect of this can be seen in the linked image (I have
minimised the other windows because work business) -
[https://imgur.com/MM8sQdt](https://imgur.com/MM8sQdt)

I have Safari Tech Preview [the currently active window], Outlook, iTerm and
Firefox (the display for which isn't included in the screenshot because it
it's a vertical panel with odd dimensions), open on a monitor a piece.

------
phendrenad2
> I’d like to see the Linux desktop improve. And I think a wakeup call is
> needed

This. Absolutely this. Please don’t take his post as a personal attack, and
consider the possibility that Linux is not as usable as it should be.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
It is unsurprising that this falls on deaf ears. The author is the creator of
AppImage, the only remotely sane application distribution mechanism in the
Linux Desktop world, and it is used by basically nobody. I've come to the
conclusion, over time, that the Linux Desktop community just prefers that
everything sucks. Maybe it makes them feel more 1337, maybe they just really
really like terminals, I don't know.

~~~
pasabagi
To be fair, terminals are really nice.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
They can be. I have a lot of fond memories of TUIs from the DOS era. I'd
probably have a lot more respect for the Linux Desktop if they'd not even
bothered with trying to be a GUI Desktop OS and just stuck with TUIs.

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elFarto
I'd like to add to that list, the GNOME Header Bars (the merging of title
bar/menu bar/tool bar) into what ends up being a hodge-podge of button and
menus which is so radically different between applications I never know where
to click.

Bonus points to Nautilus, which somehow manages to have 2 buttons side-by-side
that look like hamburger menus, the actual hamburger menu and view as list.

I really dislike everything looking and acting different, it's like having to
learn a new language just to talk with a new application.

------
likeclockwork
From the second part:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*EXYbO_qnV2m8fv4mB...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*EXYbO_qnV2m8fv4mBuBH-g.png)

> Adjusting the volume in KDE Plasma — why is there more than one slider for
> playback? Hardly intuitive

Because there are multiple outputs and you can assign a source to whichever
outputs you want. Why shouldn't the controls reflect the actual capabilities
of the device?

The next step is saying that the device is too capable and needs capabilities
removed to make it easier to understand. No thank you.

~~~
flukus
You're a technical user, the blogger was speaking of non-technical users who's
mental map of the machine don't accommodate multiple volumes. They also have
no idea what "audio adapted analogue stereo" or "HDMI / display port" means.

Even as a technical user the amount of volume controls can get quite
ridiculous. There is the device volume, the app volume (games, media players),
the context volume (typically on phones), a volume control on the output
device (speakers or display), volume controls on the output devices of output
devices (TV -> stereo setup), volume controls on the input devices (Bluetooth,
keyboard controls). It really is amazing that we have so many places to
control such a seemingly simple so I can't really blame non-technical people
for getting confused.

I'd love to have just one analogue knob on my keyboard to control everything
and never think about volume again.

~~~
wruza
Non-technical users, who don’t know what HDMI and headphones are, probably
have no computer at all, not to mention a specific linux distribution. And all
these attempts to make an OS for an average complete idiot (that nowhere
exists) just make things worse every year. Thank god few sanity bastions like
xfce are still alive.

Btw, iphones have context-dependent volume control, probably because combining
ring and music volume is impractical. The same for speaker vs headphones. But
now I never know if I turned volume down for “volume”, “headphones”, “ring” or
whatever it shows on that vague screen. This is a complex issue, and when you
hide it behind too clever logic it can get even worse than explaining.

Btw2, in my childhood we had no computers or experience, but no one failed to
manage volumes on chained-together audio systems. A good subject to think of.

~~~
flukus
> And all these attempts to make an OS for an average complete idiot (that
> nowhere exists) just make things worse every year. Thank god few sanity
> bastions like xfce are still alive.

I agree, but to many try to ride that middle ground, KDE is probably the best
example. It aims to be simple but so much is configurable via hidden context
menus and drag and drop controls that users can completely rearrange their
desktop accidentally, even when it's locked. I don't know how but they do. If
they'd just hide everything in text config files it would be better for both
groups.

> Btw2, in my childhood we had no computers or experience, but no one failed
> to manage volumes on chained-together audio systems. A good subject to think
> of.

My family were constantly getting confused by things like the volume button on
the VCR remote and the surround sound home theatre craze was a nightmare (and
notice how so few people bother with this complication any more?). Other
things like only changing the channel on the TV while recording something on
the VCR and why the have to press AV2 when they used to just put it on channel
5 needed constant reminders. Their way of looking at the world just never
understood input/output pipelines, at best they had to learn what to do by
rote.

> Non-technical users, who don’t know what HDMI and headphones are, probably
> have no computer at all

I think you're hugely underestimating the people that still need them for work
and creative tasks that tablets/phones will always suck at. They still act as
the universal hub for all devices so people can do things like print documents
or upload pictures from their digital camera to facebook. Not to mention the
better ergonomics of something like a screen you can tilt but don't have to
hold constantly.

------
apexalpha
>Now, with a menu bar you could reach the “About” dialog box with one single
click, and dragging the mouse around. With this thing, you need at least three
clicks, and you need to know where you have to click. A giant step backward
with no apparent advantages.

This guy talks about some menu options like everyone accesses them 10 times a
day. Who cares if 'About' is tucked away somewhere. Has anyone ever used the
'About' button in a browser? What for?

I much rather have a clean screen with fewer buttons than the 'About' button
sitting there, never being used.

edit: read the other parts as well now and while some of it is nit-picky I
recommend the series to all! worth a read.

~~~
gurkendoktor
It's not just about "About". I often want to revisit a web page and the same
logic applies there. In Safari, the "History" menu is always right at the top
of the screen. With a single click, I can look at recent pages, and hover over
previous days.

In Firefox on Linux, I needed to learn to click on the bookshelf icon (?!) in
the menu bar, then History. Then the menu acts like a wannabe iOS app and
slides the history into the menu with an animation. It feels a lot more
cumbersome for no good reason at all.

Both app and web designers have quickly understood that mystery meat
navigation is a dead-end[1] now matter how clean it looks. I don't understand
why the GNOME and elementary teams keep doubling down on it.

[1] [https://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/04/08/ux-designers-side-
drawe...](https://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/04/08/ux-designers-side-drawer-
navigation-costing-half-user-engagement/)

~~~
Ads20000
From that article:

'My take-away from all of this is that if most of the user experience takes
place in a single view, and it’s only things like user settings and options
that need to be accessed in separate screens, then keeping the main UI nice
and clean by burying those in a side menu is the way to go.'

That article is saying that A/B testing shows that if you have different
content views etc then you should have visible navigation, if it's options
then sure, tuck it away in a side menu. I don't think the History menu is a
'view' per se...

------
oliwarner
Anybody else starting to _hate_ GNOME? I mean, I use it, but I feel like I use
it despite a lot of things that they've actively done to make my life harder.
This article distils some of their finer work.

From way up here in orbit, it seems the problem is leadership, in that it's
way _too_ open. Somebody can suggest a shitty idea, discuss half of the issues
it and then four months later —without quorum— drop a patch to implement the
whole thing. That gets accepted and before you know it you can't launch
executables from Nautilus. See:
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/184](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/issues/184)

I'm not saying Carlos shouldn't have some autonomy here. He's been running
Nautilus for a few years now... But is it acceptable that just one person
steers the most fundamental component of a desktop used by so many
downstreams? I wonder how many of the other GNOME culls
([https://askubuntu.com/a/286438/449](https://askubuntu.com/a/286438/449)) can
be attributed to a couple of people with so little discussion.

I do abhor design by committee and trying to keep too many stakeholders happy
can really lead to a product becoming flabby and inefficient, but interface
decisions within GNOME seem to happen too often without any scientific
rationale, let alone a consideration of how it might affect users.

Also slightly pissed that the major commercial desktop players (Canonical,
SUSE, Red Hat, etc) aren't pushing back. They'd seemingly rather write their
own stuff than feed into the running of the project. NIH.

~~~
nyir
Not GNOME, but the implications for GTK and a whole load of libraries that are
being worked on to support these changes. Like especially GTK is just not a
stable target. I used GTK 1 and 2, and especially the incompatible changes in
3 and removal of features are just super annoying (many examples, we already
had the introduction of header bars etc., there was always a little triangle
in the status bar that was just cut, lots of deprecated widgets, ...). And if
you look at the plans for 4(!) there's more fundamental changes coming.

And personally I still don't want to touch Qt, but it might just come to that.
I don't think I'm up for yet another rewrite with a toolkit that can't be
stable for ten years. That might sound grumpy, but also consider GIMP is still
working on the port to GTK 3 ...

------
MR4D
If more people read this and comment (one way or another), we might get a more
usable desktop on Linux.

I’m going back to Linux after years on the Mac and windows, and it’s killing
me. Finding anything is a pain in the butt, hence me posting this.

~~~
randomsearch
Same situation - forced to used Linux again at the moment and having a hard
time using Ubuntu 18.04 and hence Gnome. Shockingly bad UX, I find myself
googling things like “what’s the Firefox shortcut key for X” all the time.

I decided to stick with it for a few weeks, now considering leaving Gnome and
even buying a Mac for the job.

------
mikkqu
There is a big recent trend for inventing new UI/UX solutions for things that
aren't broken until they are. I'm really looking forward to see this problem
to be addressed in the near future.

That hamburger menu button in Chrome kept me from adopting the browser until I
gave up only about a year ago.

There are so many projects born and die each day, it's a mystery to me why
nobody have solved the famous Linux Desktop UI problem so far (Mac OS did
though). The 'about' item often is the first thing I'm looking for when I see
a new app. And if I can't find it within a minute, it gives me a instant idea
that working with it will be no walk in a park.

~~~
randomsearch
I think the reason UI/UX is not solved on Linux is that designers do not
readily work for free. And there are often very good reasons they don’t. The
only solution I see is for someone to pay large amounts for great designers.

------
mathw
I feel like the author needs to explain why the menu-based user interface is
better. That's taken for granted, but is it actually true?

And consider that the response to that is likely to be different for people
who learned computing on environments like Windows (where global menu bars
would be really weird), Mac OS (where they're normal) or various earlier UNIX
GUIs (where who knows, anything goes and each application probably does it
differently anyway), or on smartphones or tablets, which is where a lot of
younger people are getting their first experiences of computers.

~~~
gurkendoktor
> Windows (where global menu bars would be really weird)

Would they really be weirder than hamburger menus?

Also, GNOME 3 _has_ a global application menu in the top-left corner, but it
only contains around 5 entries on average and is largely ignored. It's the
worst of all worlds.

Ubuntu's Unity had the right idea when they let users choose whether to
display menus at the top, or inside each window. The implementation was
terrible, but I wish the concept would have caught on as some kind of XDG
standard.

------
fishtank
Despite a few quibbles (especially re: the prominence of browser settings
menus), following these recommendations would be a great help. The clock bar
at the top of the screen in GNOME 3 is a weird half measure, and its
uselessness drives inconsistency in app UI since every app has to implement
its own menu.

I would gladly hitch my wagon to the author's star if they wanted to organize
a project to implement these improvements. Does anyone with more Linux
development experience know where such a project would start? Is it already in
progress somewhere?

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Part 6 entry mysteriously left out of the index:

[https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-
desktop-u...](https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-
usability-part-6-1c03de7c00a9)

------
dismal2
I don’t understand a lot of the criticisms at modern ui/ux patterns in this
post. Ex: complaining about the hidden settings menu in chrome. Most people
just want their applications to work and have the most common functions easily
accessible. I am sure most users of chrome don’t ever need to delve into
settings and are happy with the minimal set of options presented to them and
that user testing backs this decision.

~~~
doggo
I don't think I understand the author's critique of the Chrome/Firefox menu
button either other than the weird choice of iconography. I'm curious as to
what he would propose as a solution to the problem.

I do agree with the author on his sentiment on the lack of discoverability
with applications nowadays. It might've been better to showcase the
`chrome://settings` interface since it's a prime example of less suitable
mobile design bleeding into the desktop UX. Funny, I just noticed that they
actually use a proper hamburger icon for toggling the hidden settings menu,
not the triple dots.

~~~
TotempaaltJ
> other than the weird choice of iconography

I think that by now, we're well on our way of educating people on the meaning
of the hamburger icon...

------
IshKebab
The problem with global menu bars is that you can have multiple windows on the
screen, and the menu in this other place, totally separate from the windows
(the top of the screen) depends on which window is focused. That is weird.

I'm sure everyone that has used OSX has at some point wondered when they
couldn't find a menu they were looking for only to realise some window on a
different screen was focused.

------
EpicBlackCrayon
I implore everyone to read the rest of the series.

------
diggernet
I totally agree that menu bars and shortcut hints in menus are important ui
features. But I draw the line at global menu bars.

If I've got an app in a small window in the lower corner of my screen (which
in fact I do at this moment), I want the menus for it right there, not all the
way in the far corner of the screen.

Plus, global menus are terrible with focus-follows-mouse, which for me is such
an important feature that I've even set up my work Windows laptop to have that
behavior.

------
psalminen
A lot of this seems to have been written by a mac fanboy.

As for the discussion of ridding cut/copy/paste in menus: who doesn't know the
shortcuts for those?

~~~
diggernet
New users.

------
lillesvin
I disagree that presenting users with a slew of menus that they most likely
won't be using (I'm talking browsers here) qualifies as "simple". "Consistent"
maybe, but not "simple".

------
c22
It's like these people haven't heard about Cinnamon.

~~~
amiga-workbench
Reverting back to Gnome 2 makes me want to tear my eyeballs out. The
inconsistent icon scaling, lack of padding and non-existence of decent
vertical alignment within panels makes it very difficult to design a tasteful
desktop.

~~~
zzzcpan
Desktop is not a picture to look at, it's first and foremost UX.

~~~
amiga-workbench
Can we not have both? Decent UX without all the very easily avoidable and
sloppy design mistakes?

------
niceperson
XFCE4 is all you need

------
sixothree
To be fair to firefox, this has changed recently.

~~~
majewsky
What has changed?

\- Hamburger menu is still there.

\- Sidebar-everything is still there.

~~~
cpburns2009
The menu button has been there for a few years (I refuse to use the
abomination of a name that it's acquired). However, it's layout has become
more sane recently. It used to be a bunch of tiles. Now it looks more like a
classic file menu but with weird, mobile-esque, sliding menus.

------
quzyp
The gnome screenshots look really bad, I agree completely.

Funny sidenote: I have to shamefully admit that I never used a Macbook until a
few weeks ago, when I wanted to watch Netflix on my girlfriends mac. I was
pleasantly surprised that she uses it almost exactly like I use my Linux:
never close windows, just swipe from workspace to workspace, and a nice
launcher bar at the bottom. The only thing I don't like is the screen-width
bar at the top which provides controls for the current application.

