As part of the design process for what ended up becoming GNOME 40 the design team worked on a number of experimental concepts, a few of which were aimed at better support for tablets and other smaller devices. Ever since then, some of us have been thinking about what it would take to fully port GNOME Shell to a phone form factor.
Say about GNOME what you want, but this looks kind of amazing. Of course, the issue will always be application support – or lack thereof – but as a UI for a true Linux smartphone, this is totally workable.
The question i guess is on why it took them so long? As if you haven’t live under a rock then in the last decade it was painfully obvious GNOME shell wants to be mobile first. Due to that a lot of neglect was happening on the desktop front. Alienating a lot of people and making a lot of irrational decision. From the desktop perspective. Anyway. Now they are giving their mobile first goal a more serious push. That is fine by me. As if it will work good on mobile maybe i can again use GNOME over there. As on the desktop i moved to KDE. But somehow i fear that there is so much basics still lacking that it will take a long time before GNOME or anybody else from the GNU/Linux camp to become relevant on mobile. Personally i hope for it to happen someday. But likely not today. And hopefully someday they will again do a better job on desktop. Without all the mobile first nonsense.
But OK fair enough. They don’t have to ditch the mobile first approach for me. I now have KDE on desktop and i am perfectly happy with it. As it is fantastic on desktop. Hence do whatever you like with GNOME as i am not all that much affected by it. Maybe one day what GNOME camp is doing will again click with me. Likely when some new people get involved and some fresh air introduces some real changes.
I mean the dirty, difficult part will be the drivers. KDE ran into the same issue on their mobile effort. It was a great UI ( except for the onscreen keyboard, which often stopped working…), but the hardware selection was very poor and difficult to get on new devices even when they wanted to order some from an OEM. The oems only built things for android oems and couldn’t provide anything even binary that would work with more standard gnu/linux. Maybe things have improved since then a little, but the story of getting linux to work with the Rock64 made me think it hasn’t .
In addition to kde, you also have ubuntu, firefox and jolla fail to get gnu linux on tablets successfully. I’m doubtful that gnome would be much better. So best case scenario, it will be great on a tablet that’s five years old and was only sold in Germany.
I guess things are improving as if you look 10 years back you didn’t have options such as PinePhone. AFAIK they work with chip manufacturers and for them drivers hence aren’t that big of an issue. It’s doable. Maybe GNOME can find their place on such hardware. As for years they are trying to turn desktop into mobile. But obviously that can’t work. Best to wait and lets see if GNOME is really subtitle for mobile.
(sorry for the wall of text)
They didn’t took long. The early releases of GNOME 3 where a tit for that “convergent” implementation under the hardware constrains of 14 years ago following what existed on other mobile first interfaces on Android and iOS. And “convergence” where the buzzword of the day, with both Google and Apple talking a lot about progressive applications and adaptive UIs.
Now, fast forwarding 14 years, there’s a reason why Google keeps Android as a mobile first OS, while their desktop attempt is ChromeOS (a conventional Linux desktop distribution), and Apple goes even beyond that and keeps three different OSs (iOS, iPadOS and MacOS), dropping years ago all their convergence attempts: because they realized that progressive interfaces are a piece of shit and the only way to have a proper, decent, experience all across the board is to polish the experience for the device form factor and use case. Any attempt to “converge” results in unacceptable compromises.
Desktops and mobile are fundamentally different, it’s simple not possible to ‘converge’ them without creating a mess, both on the UI and on the broader ecosystem.
Even keeping progressive UIs on websites usually are a mess and takes enormous amounts of resources (time and money) and experienced developers to get it right. On applications they are usually a nightmare experience for the developer. That’s why one of the convergence “attempts” where to run HTML5 “applications” on desktop: because web technologies where more adapted than conventional UI widgets for this kind of use case. Except that this creates UIs with severe accessibility and consistence issues (made worse if you are a individual with disabilities and special needs that relies on accessibility devices, actually, this may block you from using a computer at all), with no visual identity or relation with each other at all on a desktop, even going down to key bindings.
What you get with this “convergence” thing in practice is desktop users forced execute compromised stretched versions of mobile UI, with lots of empty spaces, cumbersome gestures to be done with a mouse, needless animations that don’t make sense on a application running inside a windows and not even using multiple windows, and options hidden on stupid sparse hamburger menus instead of a decent top bar menu. And mobile users being surprised with small radio buttons, buttons that don’t really fit the form factor… and goes on. All because the developer choose to prioritize one or another kind of form factor and forced to use a SDK full of compromises and terrible UI guidelines to fit both use cases (while being poor at both).
I can agree with that. That is if nobody has made “convergence” work in the past decade or so then likely GNOME won’t do that either. At least not anytime soon. It’s i guess the time for them to come out of the closet as being mobile. And lets see that. On how that will work in real world. But i guess to do it properly and not in the way they approached the desktop. Tried to “converge” it into a semi mobile. The other way around won’t work all that good either.
CapEnt,
I used to believe in this convergence, but over time I’ve changed my mind. It’s not so much that one framework cannot cover both mobile and desktops, I think it can. But it has to do with the applications themselves. Desktop applications are lousy on mobile and mobile applications are lousy on desktops and there’s no responsive design that makes up for this without seriously compromising the usability of each. Of course most product managers are looking to cut costs and a “one size fits all” application well help with that, but the results are generally unsatisfying.
Most sites never get it right with things being too crammed on mobile and/or too sparse on the desktop. A few years ago my bank migrated everyone to a website that was clearly designed for mobile users with fat fingers (and two be fair that is justified on mobile), but I just hate it on the desktop. We’re regressing to fisher price UIs to accommodate small screens and large hitboxes needed by mobile users.
Exactly!
Take osnews as an example. Now I wouldn’t call osnews a bad offender, but even here on the desktop 2/3s of my screen is wasted whitespace, yet on my phone the UI is crammed. The UI limitations on mobile are likely why wordpress imposes the comment depth limit that we complain about. On the desktop there’s a lot more room for deep comments, but on mobile using the same responsive layout it’s a disaster. Oh well.
The worst part of it is… Maemo did it better a decade ago and was using GTK 1/2 without all the nonsense.
If I was using Maemo on my phone today… I’d be totally fine with that. Too bad thigns moved on and morphed into wizz bang over functionality.
I simple can’t believe.
They didn’t learnt nothing and forgot nothing. Appalling. The GNOME 3 where a hot steaming pile of crap in their first 8 years (at least) due their attempts to bolt this “convergence” stuff on their desktop. They demolished the desktop beyond recognition.
Now, when GNOME FINALLY become usable as a standalone desktop again in the past few years…. they will try again instead to keep this FAR AWAY from the main project, in a proper separated project targeted only smartphones and maybe tablets.
I would say Gnome was usable at about the time KDE 4-ish became usable. It just takes the five minutes of doing a little look of how the flow works, then it is lovely.
Try using macoS after getting used to Gnome or KDE or even windows… it feels as if just normal desktop usage has the same crap design it has had since the 90s. With no options to fix it.
I beg to disagree on that.
What made KDE4 unusable where overly ambitious technical decisions that stretched their development team too thin, and resulting in a unstable platform, whose applications and desktop shell crashed every 5 minutes.
GNOME 3 didn’t had that problem. What made it unusable where UI and usability choices that they began to review later on.
CapEnt,
That’s curious, do you still think it’s unusable? I haven’t experienced those crashes and am fairly happy with it.
I didn’t like it when it came out, but I need to try it again to see if things got better.
No, indeed, I’m a happy KDE Plasma 5.24.4 user today.
But migrating from KDE3 to KDE4 was kind of a shock. It was so bad is so many ways, in particular the change for the feature complete Konqueror to the striped down Dolphin and the crashes… crashes everywhere, that I could not bear to use it for productive work. I was already using Linux as daily driver and doing productive work on it, and it crippled me.
I went to GNOME 2, and when GNOME 3 where released, I went to Cinnamon. I revisited KDE again only around 2015.
Is macOS so bad or so good?
The only way KDE’s shell or GNOME Shell will ever take off on phones if they are apps that one can install on an Android or Apple device. Android and Apple have a duopoly on the mobile device market that even Microsoft couldn’t crack.
Angel Blue01,
Good point about the duopoly. Market forces have pushed out all of the little guys and many of the big guys, I don’t think new competition is viable. I actually thought some of the old competitors were good, I liked what webOS had going, but they were unable to compete against the google/apple duopoly 🙁