For full desktops: Plasma is great, but I personally dislike it for a reason I can’t put my finger on. GNOME is great once I install about 12 plugins, but then those break on updates, and I cannot stand the default GNOME experience. XFCE is “fine” but lacks some refinement. Budgie is on life support it seems. I haven’t tried enlightenment in a while. Never tried Deepin.
There were no things from the Mac I was missing with Unity. There are still things on the Mac that I miss from Unity (most notably, the multiple dots indicating the number of open windows, and the setting where the screen that does NOT have the default window can be subtly dimmed)
It's a continuation of LXDE which was absorbed into another project when LXDE was discontinued, iirc
Best obtained via LMDE
That said, this project looks like it needs a visual designer. Strong "programmer art" vibes from the lack of coherent spacing. Some consideration for padding would go a long way.
Please keep the useless touch-friendly interface as an optional addition on desktop environments. Better yet, contain it to EXCLUSIVELY for mobile apps/usage because a desktop computing environment should NOT have half the screen full of annoying whitespace! I'm trying to do work and see as much content as possible at once.
macOS Big Sur and above, GNOME3+, and even Windows 11 all have such infuriating interfaces. The frustratingly excessive padding added to the window title bars and context menu take up the whole damn screen!
Maybe on tablets and touchscreen laptops running GNOME or Win11 where you use a stylus for writing/drawing, I can sort of get it.
If you use a keyboard and mouse to do work, however, the context menus should be compact and dense so you don't have to keep scrolling and rearranging your desktop workspace to find and organize things.
I have, however, studied this exact thing. A target need to be at least 48dp in diameter to be accurately clicked the first time. The same is true for a touchscreen. Bigger is better on a touchscreen, whereas there are diminishing returns past 48dp for accuracy in clickable UIs.
Despite my interest, I am curious about the motivation for another DE. Is the primary goal to use Go and/or the Fyne library to create a functional DE? Or, is there a larger vision for this DE that Go and/or Fyne enables?
It's especially annoying in the world of tiling window managers. There are few options for a desktop environment with a solid tiling WM. Regolith is one (based on i3 / Sway), and I thank those who develop it, but it's patching together a bunch of independently developed tools and you can tell when you try to change some things and have to deal with disparate config files.
I think its the vim effect where the userbase just has a high demand for customization and don't mind a lot more set up and configuration to get there.
Would love to see something where this was the principle? Very little philosophy or opinion on how individuals do their own desktop, emphasis on "you should be able to add and take things off easily as you want." The metaphor being, you know, an actual physical desktop. It's an EMPTY table. Put what you want on it and nothing you don't.
(Like openbox perhaps, just with a little more friendliness towards well integrated panels etc. Which might be construed as "opinion" -- but seems like most WMs FORCE a lot of the things on you)
Really though, Windows, Gnome, Plasma, MacOS, they're all basically the same and all feel so cumbersome and limiting. Desktop metaphors have been stalled for so long, and when Apple took a shot at something new with Stage Manager they managed to downgrade the experience even further. I'm so disappointed by the state of things.
I'm more of a 'install i3wm, change a few things in the config, done' kind of person these days.
1. Panels are fixed in place and don't have title bars etc. They're the only window type like that so you'd have to go to extra effort to make a UI to "lock" windows and unlock them or whatever.
2. If you delete the launcher then how do users start apps? Some old DEs let you right click the desktop but that's not very discoverable.
Much easier just to have settings somewhere do let you say which side (if any) you want panels on.
Maybe with net/rpc, D-Bus or gRPC, replacing the use cases of dynamic code loading from those environments.
Literally.. the machine has 40 fast cores and 384GB of very fast memory. Wow, just.. kind of nauseating. It could be a case study, I'm sure, because this exceeds even the compiler bloat of Electron.
You may not like material design (I personally could take it or leave it), but visual design itself matters.
But I can't really tell how TFA is Material Design, it does not really look like any of the versions.
See:
Just like a hole in the road matters. /s
I just can't wait for people "designing" material design to grow old. Then they can tell us again how great Material Design is.
