Well, I thought the minimap is a permanent solution for now, because the issue for it was closed by the designer…
Yes, the immediate issue of a missing workspace thumbnail was fixed. Doesn’t mean things won’t change in future cycles.
TLDR;
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New transitions and animations and touchpad gestures? Fabulous, Gorgeous, Fantastic!
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The vertical overview layout? Feels claustrophobic, and tiny. Displays are wide, not tall. Stacking them makes it cramped.
3.Vertical workspaces are more intuitive to organize high priority on top and low priority on bottom. Left and right have no difference.
- Design simplicity and well-sized UI of Gnome 3 + Beauty and polish of Gnome40 = perfect gnome UI.
About a month ago I made a post here about some of my criticisms about the Gnome 40 updates made. As the Gnome devs considered user criticism we saw many changes from the original design.
Using Fedora 33 with the COPR repo and in VMs of the latest GnomeOS releases, I have been following the development closely and would like to share my thoughts on the matter.
Gnome’s design strengths, IMO, came from the “Single Entry Point” of the Activities overview. From the activities overview, you could access any part of the computer. Whether it was opening a new application, searching for a file, viewing the opened applications on the desktop, viewing all the additional workspaces, or moving different applications to other workspaces. It was a sort of hub for you to do anything you needed.
Starting with the transition animation. The background darkened, signifying that it was no longer the point of focus. Open windows shrunk in size to display all the apps available. The dash and workspace grid slid from the left and right of the screen. The search bar simply appeared into existence, since the top bar would block the transition animation. This transition preserved our focus and happiness. We knew which workspace we were using, and why we opened the Activities Overview.
The layout of the activities overview was perfect as well. The dash on the left, the workspace grid on the right, and the search bar in the middle. With both the left and right of the display populated, there was a sense of symmetry and stability to the layout.
The latest releases of Gnome 40 improve some of the aspects but feels like a regression on others.
Transitions and animations.
Instead of UI elements fly into the screen, the entire desktops shrinks to show the dash, workspace grid, and search bar hiding behind the desktop. Moving between workspaces is different as well. In Gnome 3, moving between workspaces felt like moving a group of applications in and out of view. On Gnome40 it feels like moving between different displays(which are closer in concept to workspaces). Overall, I like the transitions and animations of Gnome 40 much better, even though I prefer a verticle workspace layout. The transitions are stylish and the animations provide better feedback to users.
The layout of Gnome40 went through many changes. The latest ones contain a dash at the bottom. Workspace view on top, and a search bar on top. The issue I have is that the UI looks very cluttered. It feels like the area is cramped. This is likely due to the UI being more verticle. Most displays we use are wider than tall. There simply is not much space to put things on the top and bottom. This has an additional issue as well. The UI elements are much smaller than they were on Gnome 3. Particularly the window preview and the workspace previews.
If the Gnome devs can fix the cramped UI issues, I think gnome 40 can be a great desktop environment for all to use. While I do not have any suggestions to fix this issue, there are community designs that look promising. Perhaps the developers could take inspiration from these designs?
I hope this gets the attention of the developers. Good luck to all those who work on Gnome, and I hope to see these changes soon.
Edit: Additional feedback about verticle vs horizontal workspaces
Workspaces, always start at the top. Subconsciously, intuitively, or consciously you always remember your top task for the day. Makes sense, you want to be on top of things for the day. Even if multitasking or getting distracted by additional tasks, you didn’t have to think much about where you started. Horizontal workspaces, while still possible to have an organization, is not as intuitive as verticle ones. Simply put, Top is a higher priority than the bottom, left and right has no difference subconciously.
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Just wondering if the new workspace changes in gnome40 829a096ba are intentional? If I try to click an empty workspace in the overview it goes to the app grid then I have to click the workspace again in order to open it. The extra click and transition seems unnecessary and is quite disrupting to my workflow.
Just wondering if the new workspace changes in gnome40 829a096ba are intentional?
Yes and no.
The Fedora package contains a downstream patch (from !1666) for a behavior that is being discussed by the design team. The idea that all inactive areas in the overview can be clicked to bring up the app grid, to address the increased distance from the activities button to the dash.
But this shouldn’t apply to the workspace minimap, that behavior was a bug in an earlier iteration of the patch set. Both the merge request and the Fedora package have since been updated.
well i finally tried gnome 40 in gnome boxes. thanks for making it so easy with that image.
I can see that gnome 40 would probably be easier to understand and use for new users, or users who only use 1 workspace. I can appreciate this about gnome 40.
I still prefer vertical work spaces for myself, but i could probably learn to accept gnome 40, and might even learn to like it, if there were two changes from the implementation i tested. There are probably other minor things, but i’ll wait to see how it pans out before picking through those.
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The dimensions of the workspace picker and the work spaces are not suitable for me. It would be ideal if users could configure percentages/a scale for this. For me, right now, the picker is too small in comparison to the work spaces. I need to be able to see what’s in the workspaces like i can with gnome 3.38…
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the ability to nuke the dock/dash with prejudice. No, i don’t want to depend on an ever-shifting ext ecosystem just to disable something that IMO is superfluous.
I think y’all are already planning to make the search bar a hidden overlay, so i didn’t add that to my list. i don’t want it taking up (the newly more limited) real estate unless i need/call it.
I didn’t test dual/multi monitors so my list assumes i can use dual monitors like i do now. one as primary with work spaces and one as secondary as one “workspace” with windows in it.
After this disruptive change, i hope gnome devs will focus on bugs and usability polish for a long time. It’s not as fun, but needed, IMHO. There are crashes, hangs, unusable behaviors, annoying defaults, etc. Now all that stuff that needed to still be fixed in 3.38 is probably on the back burner, while new issues are undoubtedly being added to the mix.
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