Antonio, I really appreciate the hard work you did. It is not easy to develop a project like Nautilus.
Your clarification honors you, but when you say “Unfortunately that’s impossible” , i will say: How about leaving all the sizes and let the user decide?
It’s not a battle between 48 vs 64. Everyone knows the environment in which they work and will have preferences about it. Give him options, not frustrations. As for the rest, my congratulations for the work done.
+1 to Carlos’ note. It’s not about us being biased just because we have a preference due to screen size, resolution, or even disability. Nor this is a battle between 48 vs 64. I’d understand this decision better if there was a clear reason to explicitly have a specific number of sizes, then referring to some stats to pick the most used sizes. I don’t understand why we can’t all win here as this has a small maintenance cost compared to the amount of benefit it has for the community & the accessibility of the GNOME desktop.
Hi, I’m one of those who don’t understand why the 67% size was removed. I’m currently on Ubuntu 22.04, but this is a major thing stopping me from upgrading to ubuntu 22.10 which is so perfect apart from that little detail. You say there is a way? How to build nautilus-enums.h after editing? What is the procedure?
Important context explanation: there were 4 size options in version 42; there are 4 size options in 43. With the introduction of the 256px extra large size, a compromise had to be done somewhere, otherwise we would end up with 5 options.
Genuinely asking since I’m not familiar with the decision making process of the team:
1- Do we expect more people to benefit from the 256px option over the 64px & that’s why they were swapped? In Version 42 64px was set as the standard size in the code, Ubuntu desktop icons default to that size as well even in 43.
2- I’m also curious why 5 options are considered too many. Is there a spec sheet that dictates that there should always be 4 options? Any UX research you can point to that guided your decision? I’m asking because saying “we have 5 size options now, which a little too many” just sounds like one person’s subjective opinion is being forced on the masses. I really don’t want to believe that this is the case, but so far, we really haven’t received an answer that makes us go “you know what, that’s a fair point”.
The work-in-progress designs for the future of the grid view also use only 4 different sizes.
So, we can see there has been a consistent design consensus on the number 4 in this context.
It would be ideal to have a lot of UX research for every design decision, but when such research is not available, I’d rather trust the design experts that have been working on this for quite a long time.
The number of options is not necessarily the issue here, the size of the options is. There is no advantage in reducing the number of options if it leaves you with unpractical sizes.
I’m happy with only 3-4 options, I only used 67% (default) and 150% (rarely and temporarily) in the past.
Having tried working with 50% and 100% for a bit now, I keep coming to the same conclusion: 50% is too small to work with, 100% is too big to be efficient to work with, requiring much more scrolling back and forth.
If it’s options you want to reduce, please offer a more sane base size, configurable if needed.
That is a very comprehensive write-up of the whole decision-making progress
While I don’t have any preference on the icon size, I wanted to point something out. In 1968379a Carlos wrote:
Also, following design guidelines, the new zoom levels sizes for icon
view are 64, 96, 128, with default to 96 and 16, 32, 48 for list view,
32 being the default
That sounds like designers intended 64 to be the lowest icon size before 48px was later brought back. So if a size gets axed, to me it would make sense to go back to that previous state of not having 48px. Also considering that average screen resolution has increased since 2015.
I’d like to echo Peter & thank you for the comprehensive write up as well! It’s really impressive the amount of history there is & how difficult it is for you & the devs to find the right balance.
I personally will leave it at that & as someone who’s inconvenienced by this change (it was really the perfect config size for me & now I have to switch between 2 sizes depending on context) I understand that it’s hard to satisfy everyone, but I also hope that, given the lack of research, the feedback on this thread would serve as real world feedback from real users that you can refer to going forward. UX designers do their best as well, but without data, it’s hard for them to get it right too. I generally find comfort in how well intentioned everyone is
After Antonio’s various posts, I think his arguments are adequates. I still believe that the user should be able to choose, so for my part I have decided to give a chance to the new sizes
I tested on a live CD, it is possible as you say to build the source package by modifying the values. I got help from these 2 sites compiling - How to download, modify, build and install a Debian source package? - Ask Ubuntu and Nautilus-42.2 . So I was able to adjust the size of the icons as it was in Nautilus 42. But I have a question, if a nautilus update runs, for example Nautilus 43.0 to 43.1, the size of the icons will be change it back to Gnome 43 defaults?
Furthermore, 64px has been available forever in Nautilus, whereas 48px was absent for a decade or so. It really sounds like 48px should have been chopped.
Even though it is true that the comments here are expected to be skewed, the user base might not be comparable due the availability of each zoom level over time.
Regarding the number of zoom levels. 5 is a bit higher than the expected by the designers back in the day (3/4), but it could justified as it is adding a new one (256px) for very large screens possibly. At the end of the day, those magic numbers come from perception. An Odd number allows symmetry, 2 less than default, two higher than default (a weak one, I would agree). Personally, I would prefer 3 or 5 zoom levels, not 4… because OCD
Another voice to bring back the 67% zoom, everything looks either too big or too small now, is this even a discussion… many users have already said they prefer this option.