Allan Day
afaikblog.wordpress.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Allan Day, a GNOME designer, writes about GNOME Shell and application design decisions and the thinking behind them.
What HN saysHN cites it to show GNOME designers sincerely believe in their minimalist choices, such as removing window buttons, though commenters debate whether users agree.
16HN people shared it
2linked it in comments
19stories submitted
200story points
3 years agolast shared
2011people per year2026
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
tsimionescu · 2024-03-02
I don't agree. Reading Gnome designers' blogs makes it pretty clear that they strongly believe in these decisions as the best UX. Looking around Gnome reddit there's also plenty of people who like this minimalism and think it's actually superior [2].
That's not to say that the designers are not supportive of the existence of extensions. They clearly do, that's why they make a nice Extensions app in the first place. But they never say "yeah, we made it as barebones as possible to make it easy for extensions". They explain why it's better for users not to have a minimize button on windows [1], or why they've removed the systray to avoid confusion and so on [0].
[0] https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gnome/
[1] https://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/where-did-the-buttons-go/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/11bhxa7/comment/j9ypt…
aw3c2 · 2012-11-24
A quote from https://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/fantastic-progress-in-every…
(...) details matter: we have a nicer looking run dialog now. The most important feature of this is that it now has a close button, which means that people have an escape route if they accidentally open it.