Re: Window controls for GNOME 3

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 4:21 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:

OK, I promised Jon McCann to write a mail here giving information on my thoughts on removing the minimize and maximize buttons since I've been resisting the request of the
Why do people minimize windows?
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I think the first thing to realize is that minimization doesn't make sense if you maximize everything. If you run everything maximized, then it just doesn't enter in ... switching between
Feedback?
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If people want to give their thoughts here, that's fine, but I don't think a mailing list debate is the best way to come to a decision, so the decision above should be considered basically final for the 3.0 release.

The real form of feedback that we need going from GNOME 3.0 to 3.2 is careful observation of how users are using GNOME 3 - are they figuring out how to use the overview and workspaces and message tray as we expect them to use them, or are they doing cumbersome workarounds because we took away essential features.

Hi Owen, my two cents.  I'm still going through the process of seeing how much pain it is for not having minimizing.  The first instance of wanting to minimize something is when I have a terminal that is scrolling debug messages and I'm not interested in its contents at the moment.  I really want to move it out of my sight.  I'm not exactly interested in the window unless something broken has happened.  I would probably say the same if I'm on a web browser that is on Pandora or last.fm or some such web page that has dynamic content that I'm not really interested in looking at because I'm using it as a service but it's using real estate that is distracting me. 

Now, as I understand it the work around would be to move this to another workspace.  To do that would require a number of window management steps that I previous accomplished using a single button action.  The other option is to use a key combination.  Now admittedly, things like scrolling texts in terminals could be argued as expert mode and one could expect that a key combination for those people should be sufficient.  But I'm not sure of the pandora or last.fm type thing.

Other than that I haven't really felt an urge to minimize anything.

sri