Linux

Apparently "modern" means hiding options behind extra clicks

Clearly the dark mode is the modern one! Jokes aside, I just realized that there THREE menu options on that toolbar: hamburger, kebab, and waffle! I realize they do different things, but no wonder people are confused by and scared of computers. Also, now I'm hungry!

Corpo's and social media "designers" who would throw out their own mother because she's "outdated"

Honestly as someone who doesn't use Gnome... I can't really tell much of a difference, Seems like a strange thing to build hype over.

It's just my opinion (since it's not in the article) but a thing that makes Gnome and Libadwaita a "modern design" is the fact that the production behind it tries to bridge the gap between a "mouse and keyboard" and a "touch screen" workflow.
None of the other DEs come even close to Gnome when used on a tablet

Petition to force anyone talking about software to use "trendy" or "fashionable" instead of "modern".

Full height sidebar - from Mac OS 7 or so - must be modern?

The first one doesn't waste space in the title bar by expanding the locator and navigator buttons there.

And column browse

The search on nautilus is probably better because a lot of gnome distros have the file indexer enabled by default, and that's what nautilus uses, but many kde distros don't come with the kde indexer, so dolphin doesn't index by default.

The current version has some problems with adaptivity, e.g. resizing the app window can cause issues. This led to the creation of new libadwaita widgets. If you want to read the technical details, see https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2023/06/15/rethinking-adaptivity/

Also looks like it's removing an important visual affordance (i.e., which areas you can click to drag the window), unless I'm misinterpreting it

The top bar has been full of buttons with no whitespace for a year or more now, that's not new (you can still drag the window using the whole bar, but it's definitely not intuitive and made me subconsciously do Win+drag to be safe many times).

This seems to be a relatively minor visual update to have the left sidebar fill the whole window - ~~maybe they want more space for shortcuts at a given window height?~~ No clue.

Edit: never mind, checked again and it's literally just a tiny visual update with no change to the actual content of the sidebar, but it takes some space away from the top bar.

That's the thing. There is no title bar. The title bar, if forced to exist, would go above both of those sections.

GNOME apps seem to have been headed in this direction for a while.

If I open gnome-disks, for example, the title bar is kind of odd because it doesn't show the name of the program at all. It only shows the size of the currently selected disk, and underneath that in a smaller text subheading is the actual device pathname of the disk. How many other programs do you know that have a subheading under the window title in the title bar?

This feels like an early decision to do something different with that part of the window.

Further along in the evolution is the dconf-editor which no longer shows any kind of title bar at all. The window manager shows that the window title is "dconf Editor" but there's nothing on the window itself that says that.

Earlier versions of each definitely had a standard title bar (I remember dconf-editor having one fairly clearly, because the new interface seemed strange at first), but not any more.

There's also that desktop web browsers generally request that their title bar not be shown. Given that everyone has at least one browser window open, it would be almost foolish to assume there's been no influence from that design choice.

As a laptop user I love the idea that some of the titlebar space being utilized. I don't use GNOME though. I hope there will continue to be good UXs for both of us.

But GNOME is being patched to run on phones!