Expected behavior of Gnome Shell on a touchscreen device

Desktop
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I’ve been playing with Fedora 35 on my Aya Neo, whose notable features are a permanent-attached Xbox360 controller and a touchscreen. Running the latest Gnome there, I’ve been having issues closing dialogs and some applications, Software and Games being the two most notable for me. The options dialogs for Gnome Games I can’t figure out a way to close it. There’s no X icon, nor does clicking in or outside of the dialog do anything. Additionally, the Quit option in the top header bar doesn’t work with the dialog window open. I couldn’t get the X icon to show up in the activity overview view also (when you press Super), so I had to use Activity Manager to close it.

For Software, there’s no X icon on the window itself, so I need to use the Quit option in the top global menubar. I could wiggle the window around by pressing and holding it with my finger and moving it around, then the X icon would show up and I could close it in the activity overview. However, if I opened a dialog, like clicking the OS Updates menu item to pull up the detailed package list, I then couldn’t close that dialog similar to the dialog in Gnome Games.

I don’t get these issues on my desktop, but it doesn’t have a touchscreen, so I assume this has to do with touchscreen-specific adaptations that Gnome Shell has. Is the behavior I have described expected or what should the UX be for closing applications and their modal dialogs when on a touchscreen device?

I’ve also found that notifications are problematic on a device such as this. Most notifications don’t go away very promptly, but overlay over any fullscreen game I’m playing (which is often since the Aya Neo is primarily a gaming device). I try to dismiss them quickly with a swipe, but it doesn’t get rid of them, instead it actually “opens” them: like the ‘Updates successfully installed’ notification will open Gnome Software. This is as pretty inconvenient when playing a real-time game as you then have to navigate quickly back to the game. And some fullscreen games really don’t like alt+tabbing, so it can break things entirely. Are there any plans to revamp the notifications so they are more easily dismissed on a touchscreen device without “opening” (is ‘triggering’ the right nomenclature here?)?

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No. Decorations depend on the backend (X11 or wayland) and on whether the app customizes it’s titlebar, not on available input devices.

Maybe something messed with the underlying setting? You can check the current value with

$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout
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Some applications—like Apostrophe—may hide the window decoration and show it on pointer motion; those are ostensibly application bugs, though.

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That was exactly it! Running that command I got appmenu: on my Aya Neo, but on my desktop where things work right it was set to appmenu:close. Changing it using gsettings set ... worked and I now get the close button again! I dunno how this got changed, as I assume there isn’t a GUI setting I might have accidentally toggled, but it’s resolved now.

Any comment on dismissing notifications with touch gestures also?

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We’d like a swipe gesture for dismissing notifications (like Android), but so far nobody has implemented that (hint hint).

This is the corresponding gitlab issue.

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Thanks for linking to the issue, that’s exactly what I need to follow!

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