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Debian Jesse is going to have Gnome3 as the default desktop.
The desktop re-qualification page, used to help choose which desktop will be default, has in the Jesse version a weight for systemd integration, and of course only Gnome3 does it (at least for now). This will surely make the systemd/gnome3 fanbase happy, but possibly will make others unhappy, as it [may] be seen as another step towards mono-culture, until we soon end up with all distros being redhat clones.
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Integration with systemd Making Gnome3 the Default Debian Desktop
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:06PM
What's happened is that much of the UI design profession has decided, against the wishes of users, that tablets and desktops should look and act basically the same. My suspicion is that many of that crowd believe that tablets are the future and that desktops and laptops are eventually going the way of greenbar paper on dot matrix printers, so who cares if the interfaces for them suck?
Windows 8 is trying to do that. Unity is trying to do that. Gnome 3 is trying to do that. All 3 have users pissed off, and for roughly the same reasons.
The reason this pisses off users is that tablets and desktops have very different human-computer interactions, and the only things that unify their UI hardware really is that both have screens larger than a cell phone.
Things that are easy to do on a desktop but noticeably harder/impossible on a tablet:
- Right-click
- Spin the scroll wheel on the mouse
- Mouseover and hover
- Click the corners of the screen
- Type text (yes, you can attach keyboards to tablets, or use virtual keyboards, but both are a pain in the tuchas)
- Interact with relatively small buttons and text
Things that are easy to do on a tablet but noticeably harder/impossible on a desktop:
- Pinch and related gestures involving multiple points on a screen simultaneously
- Swipe
- Poke near the middle of the screen
- Rotate the screen from landscape to portrait orientation and back
- Interact with relatively large buttons and text (on a desktop, those feel cluttering, on tablets, they're basically a necessity because of how fat your finger is)
So if you're designing for a desktop, you have fairly small buttons and things around the edges, and lots of easy places to type. If you're designing for a tablet, you have large buttons in the center, an appropriate response on screen rotation, touchscreen gestures that do what you'd expect, and minimal typing. If you try to make your desktop UI identical to the tablet UI, you will find yourself doing something unnatural on at least one kind of machine.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:18PM
Things that are easy to do on a desktop but noticeably harder/impossible on a tablet:
- Precision clicking with a mouse
- Choice of operating system installation
- Replacement of hardware components
- Being able to point at the screen without magical things happening
Oh btw, Broadcom and NVidia sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24 2014, @02:34PM
What you describe is true. But I think it's a symptom of the real problem: hipsters.
All of these awful designs have one thing in common: hipsters are responsible for them.
A central tenet of the hipster philosophy is that the hipster is always right, and unwilling to compromise or even consider the thoughts and opinions of others. They refuse to listen to user feedback.
Another central tenet of the hipster philosophy is to be different for no good reason at all.
As long as hipsters are working on these UIs, the UIs will be terrible. Their basic philosophy guarantees it.
(Score: 2) by DrMag on Wednesday September 24 2014, @05:16PM
Informational video for those unacquainted with the origin or traits of the hipster [youtube.com].
(Score: 2) by metamonkey on Wednesday September 24 2014, @03:49PM
I like having the option, though. My primary non-gaming computer is a Lenovo Yoga11s dual-booting into Windows 8 and Debian. It has a touch screen, and the screen can flip completely around the back and it becomes a tablet. I like the fact that if I decide to read a long article I can just flip it into tablet mode, sit back and scroll with my finger, or pinch to zoom in. Of course that only works in windows, and I hardly ever boot into windows. It's handy, but only as an optional thing. If you were required to scroll with the touchscreen instead of the trackpad, that would be awful. But having the extra ability is nice.
Okay 3, 2, 1, let's jam.