The GNOME project has done some incredible work,
especially in regards to software collections. Each bit of
software has a clear purpose, and performs this exceedingly
well. Where GNOME falls down, scraping it's knees on the
pavement in it's rush to perfection however, is in the area most
important - the window manager and desktop interaction.
Have you got a laptop touchpad handy? Good, try this;
scroll 5 pages of apps in the GNOME app drawer with the touchpad
scroll function. It's a twitch game, move your fingers just a
fraction to far and instead of page 2, you're on page 9000.
I see three solutions to this particular problem.
1: create an option for line based scrolling
2: make the touchpad scroll distance (how far you move your
fingers) a division of how many pages there are.
3: an option to use scrollbar based app drawer, same as what the
folders use.
I don't pretend to know what would be required for
option 2, I'm still very much a newbie when it comes to delving
in to GNOME sources, but option 1 seems much more feasible, and
will probably work much better in the long run, or perhaps
option 3 is less work?
While we're on the app drawer subject, given that it
is a similar concept to many Android app screens, you'd think an
easy way to create groups of apps would be logical right? The
process to do so at this time is rather convoluted, requiring
some tedious commandline-fu. A simple right-click menu with `add
to group` as a command would suffice, preferably a context
sensitive one so that if you're adding to a non-existant group
then it will create it.
And the last niggle about the app drawer?
Configurable rows/colums/icon size, this would be a massive boon
to all users, along with the suggestions above.
Tiling! Everyone's favourite subject. No, no, it
doesn't need to be complex, it only needs to be functional.
Windows beat GNOME to a critical feature; resizable split
proportion. As in, drag the middle of two split windows left or
right to resize the split. We need this, desperately.
What's a use case scenario? How about having a note
taking application open alongside a browser window, right away
you're going to have issues as the default 50/50 split plays
havoc with most webpages, the ideal seems to be 40/60, slightly
larger for the browser. If dynamic resizing isn't possible then
presets might be a poor but adequate solution.
I'm a computer science student, and I'm slowly
getting acquainted with the GNOME codebase. Like most large
projects, reading the code the first time is overwhelming and
requires a hefty time investment, one I don't have much of to
give.
Any input in to what I've talked about above would be
great, especially regarding the app drawer scrolling.
Cheers,
Luke.
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