Why I think the GNOME designers are incompetent

[Nicked from a Reddit comment to one of my own posts]

I love Unity and I still use it daily. I think it's the single most polished Linux desktop there's ever been, and although it is succumbing to bitrot a little now, it still works very well indeed.

Whereas GNOME is the canonical (pun intended) instantiation of Chesterton's Fence in desktop design.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

They don't know what the top panel is for, but all the desktops they know have one, so they kept it. But they don't know how to use title bars, so removed them. Desktop icons were hard, so remove them.

It's a deep lack of understanding.

So, for example, title bars. First, you need to know how to use a 3-button mouse properly. The middle button is important. Middle-click a title bar and it sends it to the back of the Z-stack: behind all other windows.

Select text, then middle-click elsewhere, and it copies it. No formatting, just text, and without going through the clipboard.

So, you get the ability to copy & paste two things at once. One in the clipboard, one by middle-clicking. Copy a web page title and the URL in a single action.

But trackpad pilots don't know this, so they think the middle button isn't important, so they take its functionality away.

Secondly, once you know how to use the middle button, turn it into a scroll wheel. It's still a button. You can click it. All the above still works.

But now, you can scroll up on a title bar, and it collapses into just the title bar. It's an alternative to minimisation, called the windowblind or windowshade effect.

Scroll down, it unrolls again.

But GNOME folk didn't know how to do this. They don't know how to do window management properly at all. So they take away the title bar buttons, then they say nobody needs title bars, so they took away title bars and replaced them with pathetic "CSD" which means that action buttons are now above the text to which they are responses. Good move, lads. By the way, every written language ever goes from top to bottom, not the reverse. Some to L to R, some go R to L, some do both (boustrophedon) but they all go top to bottom.

The guys at Xerox PARC and Apple who invented the GUI knew this. The clowns at Red Hat don't.

There are a thousand little examples of this. They are trying to rework the desktop GUI without understanding how it works, and for those of us who do know how it works, and also know of alternative designs these fools have never seen, such as RISC OS, which are far more efficient and linear and effective, it's extremely annoying.