GNOME Receiving Additional Design Help From Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship (phoronix.com) 20
The new GNOME Boxes app for accessing virtual systems has reached beta, announced This Week in GNOME. There's also been more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, and Papers 51 Beta can now add visual signatures to PDF documents.
But Phoronix noted one more announcement. "Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management... paid to help developers with design feedback and reviews, mock-up creation, and other GNOME design related efforts..."
From the blog post by GNOME Design Team member Philipp Sauberzweig: I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years... I believe that it's essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms... This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in.
During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding... To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state-of-the-art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing...
If you're interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you're a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews.
Jakub Beránek from the Rust compiler and infrastructure team also earned a fellowship in Germany's Sovereign Tech program, focusing on improving the Rust toolchain's tooling and infrastructure for Rust's developers.
Other fellows include Pablo Neira Ayuso (Linux kernel maintainer for the Netfilter subsystem), CPython core developer Stan Ulbrych, and Python core developer Hugo van Kemenade, FreeBSD contributor Alexander Ziaee.
But Phoronix noted one more announcement. "Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management... paid to help developers with design feedback and reviews, mock-up creation, and other GNOME design related efforts..."
From the blog post by GNOME Design Team member Philipp Sauberzweig: I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years... I believe that it's essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms... This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in.
During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding... To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state-of-the-art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing...
If you're interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you're a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews.
Jakub Beránek from the Rust compiler and infrastructure team also earned a fellowship in Germany's Sovereign Tech program, focusing on improving the Rust toolchain's tooling and infrastructure for Rust's developers.
Other fellows include Pablo Neira Ayuso (Linux kernel maintainer for the Netfilter subsystem), CPython core developer Stan Ulbrych, and Python core developer Hugo van Kemenade, FreeBSD contributor Alexander Ziaee.
Re: Europe is going to have to drop Microsoft (Score:1)
gnome is not my favourite ui (Score:2)
Personally I find that gnome ranges from OK to cuckoo bananas (moving modal dialog boxes moves the parent) to downright offensive (trying to kill middle click paste, even though everyone else has got onboard with that for terminals).
Oh it's also a massive CPU hog
Here's a thorough review I agree with
https://woltman.com/gnome-bad/ [woltman.com]
Re: (Score:2)
For a while they blatantly copied Apple with the window buttons in the upper left corner with the same colors. I just looked at some new screenshots and again they’re copying Apple with the dock.
Re: (Score:2)
I think that was mostly Ubuntu? But they make sense there, because they are near the main menu. Except for gnome apps having abandoned menubars in favor of hamburger menus, ironically.
Re: (Score:2)
Fortunately I only had to read your woltman link to see the atrocity that I've sucessfully avoided since Gnome was the best UI in all computerland. (version 2.x I think). Notwithstanding it's large memory footprint at the time.
You'd have to be mentally retarded to want to use that given any other alternative. I'm pretty sure even windows vista was better than that. Even the Gnome programmers are probably doing their work on Macs. Who would
Re: (Score:2)
Gnome has gone downhill after version 2, fortunately that has been kept alive as the Mate desktop [mate-desktop.org].
Re: (Score:2)
CSD, neutered theme engine, headerbars, dialogs with buttons in the header bar, their strange dynamic workspace implementation, overview instead of main menu ... they try all experimental stuff and then stick to it instead of seeing how it sucks.
End run around Gnome foundation (Score:2)
How about something different? (Score:2)
arcan-fe.com/about/
Arcan is a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything between user interfaces for specialised embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments.
the only science-based UI? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as I know, the GNOME project has been the only Linux graphical shell that actually performs systematic studies [gnome.org] of the user experience, and based on this, changes the interface. Testing how users are able to figure out a system is crucial, especially watching people (without helping them) who have never worked with Linux before.
This is a very different axis to most Linux developers building UIs based on what they feel like, which is most of what we read about on slashdot.
This is a very different axis to experienced users who have an emotional reaction when things change, which is where most of the software building energy goes.
GNOME indeed has a very nice interface design guide [gnome.org] (likely originally inspired by Apple, but they evolved themselves), that you can consider for your own non-GNOME projects.
I like GNOME's systematic approach, and great to see that Germany is putting money to these efforts.
Re: (Score:2)
If they do, they sure don't consider my use case. Gnome2 was pretty good, though, if not quite as good as KDE3. I find current Gnome unusable, and KDE4 isn't as good as KDE3 was, though it's integration with other applications is better. (FWIW, I prefer Mate, but secondary is xfce.)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing makes sense in gnome
To whom? One of the problems is that people bring their own biases to the table when using any HMI, even if you think you don't. Much like the Office Ribbon many UI studies aren't focused on how to make power users more powerful, they are focused on expanding the pool to new users and how new users interact with systems.
The end result is often a system that is easier and more intuitive, but only if you have NOT been using a computer the past 20 years.
Studies aren't "obviously wrong". They are just obviously
Re: (Score:2)
Testing how users are able to figure out a system is crucial, especially watching people (without helping them) who have never worked with Linux before.......This is a very different axis to experienced users who have an emotional reaction when things change, which is where most of the software building energy goes.
Ideally you only have to figure it out once, as opposed to having to constantly figure it out, which is what happens if it is constantly changing. The obvious answer to their own question eludes them.