GNOME June 2024: C'mon you can do better

I hope they continue learning lessons from other OSes.

I'm feeling like you are wrong about them outright copying. Some good things can be taken from macOS and Windows. But a lot of bad things too, which is why they are thinking it through.

Please do not reduce the community effort to "cloning macOS". It's insulting to the people working on it... Apple doesn't own modals or modal design.

Here there are not 20 ways of putting 3 buttons in a modal. They just happen to choose a way that will also work on mobile I guess.

Kudos for noticing this extra space which could enhance these kind of modals though.

I don't like everything Gnome has been doing, especially with the lack of customization or the status bar. But Gnome has been my go to for 7+ years and I like where it is going. Extensions are pretty fly too 👌

Funny enough, I find Gnome to be more consistent and better thought than macOS... But that's just me.

These are pretty standard UI patterns.

Gnome is so much better than Mac OS

Also it is kind of insulting to call gnome a clone of something else. It is the work of thousands of people all over the globe. It isn't trying to be a copy of anything.

I think that a lot of the recent GNOME design choices are merely because they're trying to improve usability on mobile devices. It also just so happens that Apple is trying to make the macOS desktop closer to iOS to encourage people to move from Windows. They have similar goals, which leads to similar design choices. And all design is derivative, anyway. Who cares.

Who gives a shit. Use the desktop you like. Don't post this /g/ tier bait.

As someone who tried out MacOS in a VM out of curiosity I don't find gnome to be like MacOS at all in overall functionality. I think to most people it just looks like Mac because top bar, dock and some design choices. Really though gnome is much more like Android. MacOS felt extremely clunky to use vs gnome's fluid workspace and app switching.

Here's the thing: Apple's design you'll find that they carefully included an extra margin between the "Don't Save" and "Cancel" buttons. This avoid accidental clicks on the wrong button so that people don't lose their work when they just want to click "Cancel".

And gnome has those dialogs in a different colour to achieve easily noticable differentiation between the two options

I started on gnome. I love it at first, but as time has gone on my experience with gnome had gotten worse and worse, and my KDE experience keeps getting better. It's a real shame because I actually tend to prefer the gnome look at feel, but KDE has been so much more usable for me in recent years.

I find that "carefully included extra margin" outrageously ugly

My only problem with both designs in your images is the colors. It’s a pretty standard part of UI design (in real life and on computers) that “red means cancel” and “green means continue.” Apple using blue is no big deal and I’m 90% sure they just use a user chosen “highlight color.” (Maybe Gnome as well?) But cancel or delete or similar things should probably be red or another color that signals “Stop.”

I’ve always thought Bootstrap, the web design library, has a good set of base colors. Red means danger. Light blue means info. Green means yes or success. Yellow means warning. Other buttons are a darker blue — basically the highlight color. (Not saying they chose the best version of those colors. Just that the general idea is consistency and what users most naturally expect.)

If you're going to give GNOME shit, at least let it before how much they destroy portability of GTK, enabling cancer like Client Side Decorations, and ignoring their community when it comes to things like desktop icons.

The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.

Wtf... I like the layout of the old dialogue better. It is easier to read.

I actually like it, margin is maybe a bit much. For the apple extra margin, gnome app can add any buttons they want on those dialog, it is up to app devs to add an extra margin between some button!

At least it is not a cheap copy of Windows.

I’ve only spent a few hours on my wife’s MacBook Pro which was still running Catalina (now Fedora) back in the days, and I didn’t think Gnome and MacOs were so similar.

To be honest I felt a bit lost on MacOs Catalina and felt like everything was difficult compared to Gnome.

But I guess Gnome is taking a lot of inspiration from the MacOs aesthetic, and it’s okay with me because it looks great.

I don’t have a lot of experience with other DE on Linux, but they lack the clean aesthetic of Gnome.

Wait - Gnome user here (heavily modified and with multiple extensions) ...

macOS window management and trying to using it via keyboard is a totally miserable experience (forced to use it at work :-/ ) ... at the same time, Apple thinks their users are smart enough to use tags, while Gnome developers think the user are too dump to use tags. I still happily prefer Gnome over macOS on my desktop for literally everything, macOS has no proper software management, all apps try to up-sell me on their shitty i-cloud offerings, setup cannot be properly automated, the 'auto features' totally suck and do everything I do not want them to do and macOS feels too slow for the hardware it runs on...

Gnome sucks, but it sucks less for me than all other alternatives on the desktop at the moment...

My biggest reason to stick with Gnome are Wayland, Evolution/Online Accounts and that I can automatically configure Gnome to something usable with dconf/gsettings. I am not holding my breath that KDE ever gets their KMail story under control, stability as in zero crashes and being fully configurable via Ansible. The very moment this happens, I'll happily jump ship. (Of course also waiting for Wayland support for Xfce :-P)

Looks nice to me. Basing design decisions on contrarianism is silly. If you don’t like it that’s alright. Disliking it because it looks like something else that also looks good is silly.

Both designs are good imo. Adding the extra space for the "cancel" button could cause a copyright claim so I think that's a viable reason why it's absent in GNOME. And I don't see anything wrong in copying Apple design. They can do what they want and the new design is very nice in terms of ease of understanding and accessibility potentials. GNOME's workflow is similar to Apple's so why not copy some more things for better consistency?

They should simply find the courage to implement Apples Human Interface Guidelines. It wont hurt and they are almost there anyway.