http://i.imgur.com/J82pZMh.png
You'd say that is flashy? Just curious :)
I mean checkout this: https://www.kde.org/announcements/4.3/images/kde430-desktop_...
Too much going on. Too much transparency, too much eye candy as if everything is made of glass. Plus the unnecessary widgets to hold desktop icons. I'm no expert in UI/UX design but as a user I find it unpleasant.
Just other day I was trying latest Ubuntu on a pen drive and I couldn't believe that renaming a directory now open a modal dialog that asks you for the new name of the directory. WTH? What was wrong with the inline directory naming? It was perfect and everyone else does it. It's such a basic thing to understand. You rename an item and edit it's name inline. You see all the time what you are remaning. As soon as you rename it, you see the change take effect immediately and see the new item take new place if sorting changes. Instead we now have a modal dialog that that asks for the new name. I also couldn't find any "create new file" in right click. What was wrong with that? IRRC, the search button also does open a dialog elsewhere.
Then come GnomeShell. That thing has 4 different types of controls on 4 edges of the screen. Every edge has a different control. Left has dock, top has a panel, right has workspace switcher and bottom has yet another panel which hosts different indicators than the top panel. I think bottom one handles 3rd party app indicators. Why do I as a user have to remember which different positions for different indicators? If I open something from top left corner (launcher) and want to switch workspace, I'll to drag my mouse all the way from top left corner to the right edge. I just don't get it.
I do actually really like Unity7. It's simple, clean and yet powerful. All indicators are in 1 place, switcher is simply inside dock and has amazing keyboard accessibility. I hope Unity8 doesn't ruin it with it's focus on mobile.
/rant
I don't hate Gnome. I love Gnome and has great respect and gratitude for it's developers. They are some of the best developers I know. It's just that the recent UX decisions have made it unusable for me and it kills me to think about how amazing and simple Gnome could have been.
They've also integrated features for setting panel layouts, and there is one ("Mutiny") that mimics Unity. They're even working on a HUD-like feature.
It may be underpowered now, but that physical keyboard still makes my envious: I could almost maybe write code on something like that.
> It may be underpowered now, but that physical
> keyboard still makes my envious: I could almost
> maybe write code on something like that.
It was slower than swype & variants for normal (mail, sms, etc) writing.
The physical keyboard had the benefit of providing relatively easy access to 'dev' keys - esc, ctrl, special characters. But it was so teeny that even as a proficient user (it was my primary phone for 3-4 years) the experience was arduous.
Years later I bought a tablet + BT keyboard (a Logitech one with the hard clam shell that became the stand) and that experience is much preferred. Would work well with a phone too, if you're happy with a small screen. Not pocket sized, certainly, but the keyboard is actually usable.
But I could and did use it to write and edit long-form prose.
It's way better than a touch-screen for shelling in and fixing server issues when you're stuck at a party away from keyboard.
Actual code writing tends to mean using lots of symbols though, and while the N900 keyboard was better than a touch screen, both make you want to rip open your skull and put the wires in directly in frustration.
I miss that keyboard.
When I had that keyboard, the best email-interface was still Mutt over a terminal. You could use Vim! Type without looking! It was ace.
That phone had the best microphone out of any I've ever owned by a clear mile too. Certainly the only one that could stand up to being used in the band practice-room without just distorting to hell coz of the volume.
I still use it for that, for video-recording band-practise, cos nothing else ever came close. The USB port broke and now can only transfer files with WI-FI and have to use an external battery charger, and all my batteries are swelling slightly and really ought to be retired.
But I don't have anything else that will actually work for it.
It's almost enough to make me miss my first phone, which was rubbish as a smartphone, but actually did have a real keyboard.
I installed it mostly so I could customize the backdrop, but I stayed because those few added gestures make prose input so much more efficient.
Still entirely awful and terrible for writing code though.
Delete the stupid Gif-Keyboard plugin, add in the "OMW" one for common-phrases-shortcuts (then build lots of templates), add the copy/paste bar, and the numbers row.
I like the fireworks-noises plugin too, audible feedback is helpful[1], but wish it sounded more like Ziggy off of Quantum Leap.
They appear to have ignored my suggestions on their forums to make it sound that way, and can't see a way to make my own plugin.
[1] - A feature of my S7 that nobody I've ever noticed talk about online is the ability to control the volume so easily just by putting your thumb over the speaker as you hold the phone. The fireworks noises are basically muted that way if you're trying to type in public ;)
I've definitely coded bash on it, many times.
I miss that keyboard.
Earlier versions of Maemo had been using GTK.
The intro of the Qt based Maemo 5 on the N900 effectively drove a wedge into the community, in particular as Nokia gave away N900s at the unveiling.
At the same time Nokia and Intel could not agree on the structure of Meego, with Intel first going deb (same as Maemo) but then switching to rpm with Moblin2.
In the end the whole mess was handed over to the Linux Foundation as both parties lost interest (Intel started Moblin in large part to light a fire under Microsoft to support mobile Atom).
Sailfish is based of Mer, A community reimplementation of Maemo without the proprietary Nokia bits (power management being a key part), that was started before the merger. But adopted various Meego elements afterwards.
BTW, it was the Sailfish IRC channel that spawn the supposed Poettering death threat. It was actually a bad joke about using kickstarter to fund an assassin after the Sailfish teams latest late night session of fixing breakages that a updated systemd caused. yes, Sailfish use systemd. And they were also a early adopter, if not instigator, of Wayland.
The one and only feature I want integrated into systemd is the ability to execute a command to punch Lennart in the face. If they did that, I might use it for a week.
Judging from the video, the state of Plasma Mobile is very impressive.
My favorite mobile OS so far has been Meego that ran on N9. That device was mind blowing and that OS. Amazing. It had such a simple, yet useful UI. Multi-tasking was better than what even Android has now. I hope Jolla doesn't die like that and we see a lot more devices come out running Sailfish.