On 02/22/2015 07:38 PM, Jaromil wrote:
dear Jonathan,
you have very good concerns on usability. After Devuan 1.0 we might be
able to quick fix desktop behaviour, I bet many developers involved will
go do respins and blends.
however, for what concerns us here and at least until the Devuan 1.0
release (which is a base system) you might have more chances interacting
with the XFCE and the Mate projects, which are the main desktop
environments Devuan offers on liveboot/install and are used by many
other distributions. This way your contribution would have also a
broader reach.
Ok, that sounds like a plan.
But which is the default DE for Devuan-- XFCE or Mate?
Also, I'll respond below to Steve (I can't find his message so I just
pasted it from the list archive...)
On Sun, 22 Feb 2015 20:11:12 +0000 (UTC)
Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika@???> wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
I rearranged the order of your post...
/
>>
>> Anyhow, if any of those three are missing under the planned system,
>> I'd be happy to help try to rectify the situation. /
That's supremely cool. Discoverability is *everything*!!!
Hi Steve,
I think discoverability is everything, too. But I'd like to
differentiate discoverability
from "re-discoverability", which is what you get everytime Gnome 3 changes
its design-mind, or when Yahoo Mail feels like their interface isn't
cool enough.
I picked these three features because I don't think they are overly
complex, and
they should be able to provide a decent and stable experience for a
decade or
more into the future.
/
>> Hello,A few questions about the GUI for Devuan...
>> 1) In the default desktop environment for Devuan, will there be an
>> icon or other discoverable item the user can click to see a list of
>> available wifi network connections?/
I can do a lot of the non-gui stuff on this, should we decide that
NetworkManager and Wicd aren't sufficient.
Basically, "iwlist scanning" yields the list, complete with everything
needed to show the security type and signal strength. wpa-supplicant
and the *horribly documented* wpa_cli to make and break connections and
handle passwords.
I'd envision this as a python-Tk program (connection time is huge
compared to executation time, so performance isn't an issue). There's
no reason for this system to use dbus.
A few questions:
* I've read about network manager being designed so that multiple
front-ends can
be used. But is the opposite possible? Is there a way to take network
manager applet's
taskbar dropdown list GUI and use that front-end on something else?
* if not, would pyqt be a possibility? Tk is of course super-easy to
incrementally develop,
but it's missing crucial elements like theming, native dialogs, and a
slew of other stuff that
becomes a brick-wall if you want anything more than a minimally-working GUI.
/
>> 2) When the DE's main menu pops
>> up, will the user be able to _immediately_ start typing characters
>> and see a list of applications filtered to match what is being
>> typed?/
Dmenu does exactly that:
http://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/
Dmenu is a productivity fountain without peer, that can be installed on
*any* Linux. I wouldn't be caught dead without an easy hotkey to Dmenu.
I tweak my dmenu to scroll vertically down the screen instead of
horizontally across the top. I also tweak it for max visibility
foreground and background, for quick recognition. If you know the name
of the executable and don't need to pass it arguments, dmenu is the
king of discoverability.
I also user UMENU:
http://troubleshooters.com/umenu/index.htm
UMENU is a spectacular menu program with single keystroke actuation and
prompted argument substitution (so you can input arguments). It can be
used not only for a "start menu", but also to bolt a discoverable
front-end any complex command. However, UMENU has a nightmare
deployment process, so less than 100 people use it. Sooner or later,
I'll rewrite it to use something other than its current EMDL, so it can
be easily deployed anywhere. I'll probably use a
directory/subdirectory/file config hierarchy like djb uses.
//
Great! I'll check these two out and see how they work.
One great thing about this type of tool is that it doesn't punish the
user for
discovering and learning the tool. When you click a start menu and navigate
some categories, you get worse and worse productivity the more you use
it-- both the latency and the overhead of navigating become obstacles.
But with these kinds of tools you can eventually learn to bring up an
app faster
than your eye can track the animation of the tool. A graphical tool
that can
rival the speed of the command line in any domain is a decent design IMO.
Btw-- I do not mena to imply _replacing_ a point-and-click menu or
right-click
menu in a DE./
>> 3) In the default desktop environment for Devuan, when the user
>> clicks the "Super" key (often has the Windows icon on it) will the
>> DEs main menu pop up?/
I think the preceding is just a matter of hotkey assignment, and of
course is a good idea.
/
>> I put these three features in order of
>> importance for newcomers and non-technical users to have control over
>> their machines. #1 is vital because it makes the entire
>> knowledge-base on the web (potentially) available for users so they
>> can troubleshoot problems outside of network connectivity, even if
>> they haven't a clue what an ESSID is.
>> #2 is important because
>> responsive natural language searches are ubiquitous, simple to
>> understand, explain, and remember, especially when compared with
>> branches of app categories (which are often quite arbitrary). /
One of the executables that comes with dmenu can take any sorted list
and intelligently reduce with each user keystroke. Dmenu is modular, so
one executable searches the execution path, delivering a sorted list of
executables to the second executable, which reduces the list based on
user keystrokes. The selection then gets processed by a third
executable to run the program. Bottom line, dmenu could
conceivably be used for a lot more than running programs.
/
/I'll definitely check it out/.
>> #3 is
>> certainly not vital at all, but its existence is a good indicator
>> that the developers take usability seriously. You may be able to
>> guess that I currently use Gnome 3 under Debian, because Gnome 3
>> includes all three features that I list. But please don't be
>> mistaken-- I'm not looking to pitch Devuan on Gnome 3. Rather, I
>> have neglected to uninstall Gnome 3 because as long as it does those
>> three things it fulfills my needs as a user. I'd much prefer to use
>> a distro like Devuan, where its community is reflecting upon the
>> long-term maintainability of the system (and closely inspecting its
>> source code). As long as it has a default DE with the three features
>> above, I can switch over with virtually no pain. But more
>> importantly, with those three features an entire class of
>> non-technical users can have a safe, sane, and secure place from
>> which to launch Chromium. I'd bet a large chunk of Lenovo's userbase
>> has a desire for just such a system atm. :)/
I hear you Jonathan! For new users and people whose core competancy
isn't computers, discoverability is king, and discoverability is
exactly what your three wishes provide. Moreover, discoverability is a
timesaver for even the most experienced users, because nobody memorizes
everything, and we all use new software sometimes.
I can also help.
Cool! I'll check out dmenu and umenu when I get some time. Once Devuan
gets to a
point where I can easily download and install a relatively stable
release, I'll start looking
at this in a more concrete way.
-Jonathan
SteveT
in any case, thanks for sharing with us your recommendations!
ciao
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