[RFC] A button for advanced options in settings that leads the user to the tweaks app

I want to hear some people’s opinions on having an advanced options button in pages like appearance that popup a dialog or something like it, saying that more things can be changed in the tweaks app but things in tweaks are not guaranteed to be safe. The dialog could also have a button to open or install the tweaks app.

I also want to see what people think about whether this button should be purposely hidden in places like at the bottom of the page or in a menu.

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Your mistake is thinking that GNOME Tweaks contains “advanced” options, as opposed to UI tweaks.

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Can you elaborate on the difference between tweaks and advanced options? In my mind advanced and tweaks both have the potential to break your system and both are not to be messed with if you don’t know what you are doing.

What do you think of having a label at the bottom of the Appearance page saying that more things can be tweaked in the Tweaks app but those options aren’t safe? It would be less direct than a button.

The reason I’m requesting comment is because I’m concerned that power users who have switched to Gnome go into settings and see that they can only change the wallpaper and dark mode and complain about it, giving Gnome an image that it can’t be customised when if you know what you are doing it can.

Which appearance options from Tweaks are you missing in the Appearance panel? Some things are in there that no longer work, like Gnome Shell doesn’t support separate background and lock screen images. I don’t know if all the themes settings work or even make sense to add considering work being done on the recoloring API. What appearance options from Tweaks are you using?

Instead of cut&paste options from Tweaks and hide them a submenu on the Appearance panel I think if you find something is missing, think of a better way to present those options in Settings and make a proposal on the whiteboards? Like wallpaper slide shows. Or think of GNOME 41, which added the Multitasking panel to Settings that eliminated the workspaces panel from Tweaks and offers users a well thought out and designed set of options related to multitasking. Don’t add options just for the sake of adding options.

I wasn’t referring to adding anything from tweaks to the Appearance panel. I was asking the question: should there be a label that tells the user that there are more settings that they can find in tweaks?

My answer is the same on that question. Don’t add that button. If there are missing options on the Appearance panel, think of a design to add them. But what appearance options from Tweaks are you using?

Here is my response from the previous reply. Personally, I have some tweaks to focus, startup apps and seconds on the top bar.

The reason I’m requesting comment is because I’m concerned that power users who have switched to Gnome go into settings and see that they can only change the wallpaper and dark mode and complain about it, giving Gnome an image that it can’t be customised when if you know what you are doing it can.

Don’t add that button.

What about a label?

A tweak is a tweak: a setting that changes the appearances of a UI, or exposes some additional functionality that may or may not have some unintended interaction with some other tweak. A tweak is also not something that has had design input, so it’s not integrated with the rest of the system settings UI.

It is not an “advanced” setting, it does not require additional knowledge, and does not expose any advanced functionality. The implication that tweaking your system makes you a more “advanced” user is not something that ought to be reinforced in any way. The free and open source software community is full of noisy tinkerers, but that does not imply they are more knowledgeable, or more “advanced” than anybody else who uses their computer to do something with it.

This is precisely the mindset that ought to be eradicated from the community. It’s a false equivalence. “Tinkerers” are not power users, and not all power users (whatever that might mean in the context of an OS) are tinkerers.

A tweak is a tweak: a setting that changes the appearances of a UI, or exposes some additional functionality that may or may not have some unintended interaction with some other tweak. A tweak is also not something that has had design input, so it’s not integrated with the rest of the system settings UI.

It is not an “advanced” setting, it does not require additional knowledge, and does not expose any advanced functionality. The implication that tweaking your system makes you a more “advanced” user is not something that ought to be reinforced in any way. The free and open source software community is full of noisy tinkerers, but that does not imply they are more knowledgeable, or more “advanced” than anybody else who uses their computer to do something with it.

Ok, I get it. In my mind a tweak and an advanced option were the same things and when I was referring to an advanced option just replace that with a tweak in your mind. I wasn’t referring to settings that require extra knowledge just ones that weren’t polished or safe enough to be in settings.

This is precisely the mindset that ought to be eradicated from the community. It’s a false equivalence. “Tinkerers” are not power users, and not all power users (whatever that might mean in the context of an OS) are tinkerers.

One of the points of this post was to discuss ways to stop this mentality by adding a label or button that showed or told users that there were more tweaks and options just located in a different app somewhere else. if you read that as me trying to advocate that mentality then I’m sorry and could have phrased that better but it’s definitely NOT what I meant.

You wrote before:

Perhaps you could have phrased it differently but I’m still looking for an example of what from Tweaks’ appearance tweaks you think such users want or need? Half there doesn’t work and the other half probably is time better spent on the recoloring API. Why refer the user to Tweaks for that from the Appearance panel?

The examples you gave of what you use—“tweaks to focus, startup apps and seconds on the top bar”—are not about appearance but about window behavior, XDG autostart, and date & time. If such options are deemed general enough for the average user, and there’s a good design proposal, they might be suitable to be added to Settings like the example I gave of the Multitasking panel.

Tweaks app exposes some selective additional options for tinkerers but if you use gsettings, or dconf Editor, you can find more options (some of these may be deprecated or for future changes). Should the user also be referred to those apps? I think the answer on all is no.

The Settings panels should present a well designed, integrated way to configure the system to the user. Referring the user to other apps that can be use to tinker with system configuration I think does not belong on the Settings panels. That belongs on a wiki.

Maybe add ‘Tweaks’ to the settings, instead of naming it ‘Advanced’, and maybe its own heading rather as part of ‘Appearance’?
Good idea IMO!

Those are some great points and I don’t think there is anything I can add to this discussion. I personally don’t have an opinion on whether this should be added to gnome or not, I was just thinking about it and want people to comment on any ideas they had. If you feel like you(the reader) have some more points to discuss then you are welcome to reply with them.

Tweaks includes multiple non-GUI-related settings. For example:

image

And the keyboard+mouse input settings are far more extensive in Tweaks than Settings.

Why doesn’t it make sense for some of these non-Appearance settings to be accessible but gated behind some warning in the Settings application?

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