> List view and view options buttons, while combined,

That's it. You could've stopped here. They are combined. It's a button with a dropdown indicator. The user expects this to be a single control for a single set of features. Not two distinct controls for completely unrelated functionality that you have to pixel-hunt for

> that you have to pixel-hunt for

Fitts law? Never heard of it, but I didn't go law school.

I mean, what user? Someone in his late sixties who grew up on Windows 3? Sure.

Someone in their twenties/thirties...? Coming from Mobile? Young teen?

I strongly suspect they all have different expectations then you. Two different hover tool tips and a distinct hover state difference on a control optimized for screen size is very much the standard there.

"Two things grouped together signify similar/same things" is age-independent

"View options should include settings for list/details view, not sorting options" is age-independent

"Control optimized for screen size".... on a desktop? It's not a mobile screen.

The fact is that "designers" and "developers" like you don't understand the problem and have trained a new generation of people to not expect anything to work as expected/natural/intuitive while throwing away decades of user interface and experience research.

Old man yells at sky energy from this comment.

What you are essentially saying is that you no longer feel like this is expected/natural/intuitive.

And that's a perfectly fine thing to say. I'm mid-30s and I still like sticking my credit card into the machine instead of tapping it. It feels comforting and normal. It's not the better experience, objectively, though.

The absolute same thing applies here. The button is clearly visually distinct halves. If you are not familiar with that paradigm, I understand that it feels unnatural. But given that the fucking tooltips on each half are literally "List view" and "View options" and the hover state is clearly identifying that the button is two parts... what exactly do you want here? The view options has the list setting RIGHT FUCKING THERE. Important enough it's literally at the top level to make it easier to switch, given that that's the thing you most often do with the button. It's objectively the better power user experience - changing views is only a single press, instead of multiple clicks.

You can certainly make some HID research complaints with modern designs, but this really isn't the one that's going to be a compelling example.

> I simply cannot reproduce not being able to get the path bar in edit state by clicking. I'm on a different distro - so maybe this is a debian thing?

This feature on came out this year with Gnome 46.

- List view and view options buttons, while combined, have a visually distinct hover state, highlighting each half of the button on hover, and making it very obvious (at least to me, as a 35 year old power user) that they are different. (you can see this in his screenshots). Perhaps the author has visual issues and contrast is an issue? If so - agreed, perhaps my largest complaint with gnome is that contrast is low by default in the light view.

I would expect more than just two view options, and I would expect the down arrow to reveal all options. If you click on the arrow first, you might be confused if there are no view options there.

- Author complains that the recent and starred sections in the left nav have tooltips that are duplicative. No argument... except... he conveniently leaves out that for the vast majority of the default items (Downloads, Documents, Home, Music, Videos, etc) it shows the exact system path of that shortcut.

The author does mention this: "Granted, some of these tooltips show a full path, but honestly - if I've added something to this bar, I probably know what it is and where it's located."

> Compared to the shenannigans that MSFT is playing with things like onedrive - it's delightful that the system paths are displayed there. I am never confused by where a shortcut actually lives. The only duplicative items are items that don't have a path (they are internal groupings in files, like recent)

What shenanigans? OneDrive lives in ~/OneDrive on Windows, "~/OneDrive - Company" if using the business version. If your desktop is in OneDrive, you will learn its path once and remember it.

> - For the scrollbar... come on man, at least try the thing that is easy. Yes - the scrollbar visually enlarges when you mouse over it, and yes - this leaves your mouse visually pointing at some new padding. That padding works for scrolling just fine (seriously - just complete the action you were intending, it works...) So he is very incorrect with this "meaning that my mouse pointer is now pointing at... nothing. Thanks, Gnomebama." It's pointing at the scrollbar and it works just fine.

It is not at all obvious that the scrollbar can be manipulated when the mouse is on its right. This UI is entirely non-obvious and strange. Why not just make the scrollbar stay in place? Why does it have to move? What purpose does it have?

He didn't add paths like "Downloads" or "Desktop" or "Pictures" or "Videos". They exist by default.

And this

"you will learn its path once and remember it."

Is tiresomely ironic, because it applies to literally every complaint in his list.

> This is the kind of thing I appreciate that the Gnome team mostly ignores.

And that is why everyone ignores Gnome. They like what 25 years behind Mac, still struggling with navigation! ?