System Settings Overview Design

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

I'd like to come up with a plan for the system settings overview.
We've got a bunch of bugs about it (although [1] is the main one) and
I've had a couple of discussions with Bastien recently, but we still
don't seem to have a way forward.

There are some visual tweaks to the settings overview that I think
would help, but the basic problem is the dimensions of the icon grid.
This has become too high due to the item grouping (into personal,
hardware and system), and it also leaves large gaps where there are
only one or two items in a row.

One obstacle to addressing the layout problem is the changing number
of panels. This grew in the last release and is likely to grow again
in future releases. The settings overview needs to be able to
accommodate this growth.

I've also heard it discussed that we're not going to show some
hardware panels if they're not needed, such as the graphics tablet
panel. Can I ask what the plan is there?

Considering the somewhat dynamic situation, the best options right now
seem to be to either change from a grid layout to a list [1] or to use
a fluid grid layout that can accommodate changing numbers of panels.
The only other option I can think of would be to keep a much closer
eye on the number of panels that are included and to manually update
the overview layout to match (potentially having multiple layouts for
different kinds of devices).

Allan

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=657560#c2
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