this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Letting Sterling Archer design themes.
Me: All of the window frames in GNOME are black!
GNOME: Oh, are they? Or are active window frames black, and inactive window frames slightly darker black?
I know that you can change it by digging into some arcane CSS file. I've done it four or five times, since they keep changing the schema.
Bonus peeve, one that's too old to be a trend: Programs stealing window focus. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've missed some dialog box, chose the wrong option, or generally messed up something which popped up and stole focus while I was typing something else.
Only NeXTSTEP ever got this right among desktop operating systems, by having the a "no window focus" state. You could start a program from the dock, and Workspace would lose window focus. If you waited, the new program would pop to the front with window focus. If you didn't want to wait, you could focus some other window, and it would stay focused! The new program would open all of its windows and dialog boxes in the background, waiting until you turned your attention to it.
It was glorious.
Wayland got rid of a lot of the stupidity of apps thinking they know better what to do than the user, fortunately.
I noticed that GNOME 3 has become much better about not stealing focus (one of the reasons I put up with the Archer aesthetic), but I thought that that was a GNOME design decision. So it's a Wayland thing?
On X11 much of the window management was considered a hint, but the application could just ignore it and do whatever it wanted.
On Wayland applications can't do stuff like self position - they can send some hints, but the compostior is in full control of what to do with them.
I use tiling window managers, and applications doing whatever has become more and more of an issue with ion3 over the last years - together with stuff changing the display resolution (they can't do that on wayland). Now with Hyprland on wayland pretty much all issues are gone.
Excellent! Thanks for the explanation. I haven't kept up with the technical side of Wayland development, and I'm glad to learn this.
About the bonus peeve, it's definitely a double edged sword for me. I know exactly what you mean, and I hate those moments.
But at the same time, one thing I've come to dislike on GNOME is when I click a link in Thunderbird expecting it to open right away, and instead get a "Mozilla Firefox is ready" notification. It makes it feel a bit clunkier/slower when I've come to expect that interaction to be instant (and I wouldn't be surprised if that's precisely why it hasn't changed in most places).
So now instead of being bothered by one case, I get bothered by both cases lol. I wish there was more of a middle-ground, like middle clicking the link (or holding control/some other modifier key) would bypass that notification and just directly open/focus it.
I hear ya! I think that the NeXTSTEP way would be the middle way, as in, you click on the link, and Thunderbird gives up focus, which is then up for grabs, and Firefox take it. But if Firefox takes too long to start up, and you focus some other program, then it opens in the background. That'd be my ideal.
I never got the chance to use NeXTSTEP and that sounds great! Would be an excellent middle ground and is definitely one of those "I didn't know I needed this until now" sort of thing!