Adaptative UI

[Minkiu]

Hello all,

I would like to start a conversation around Adaptative UI (https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Tutorials/Adaptive_UI/index.html). Another example, if you are under GNOME, open the settings and resize the window to a small width.

I've been lucky enough to get my hands on a PinePhone and I would like to use variety there, I know there are other steps that needs to happen in order to achieve that, but I wanted to start tackling the UI within a desktop environment.

So this ticket is me actually asking questions:

1. Are you guys okay with this? My idea of first task is to shuffle widgets around so that it looks good in a smaller screen without any major UI change.

2. How do you manage to use Glade with this set-up? I can't seem to get Glade to load the UI files. This also could be added to the CONTRIBUTING page once I got the info 😄

3. Would you guys be happky with maybe re-factoring the UI a bit so it matches more the GNOME style? I know a lot of people that use variety don't do GNOME, but since it's GTK we might as well might? I think this would make it easier to user libhandy.

Thanks for your time,
Cheers!

[jlu5]

Hello all,

I would like to start a conversation around Adaptative UI (https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Tutorials/Adaptive_UI/index.html). Another example, if you are under GNOME, open the settings and resize the window to a small width.

I've been lucky enough to get my hands on a PinePhone and I would like to use variety there, I know there are other steps that needs to happen in order to achieve that, but I wanted to start tackling the UI within a desktop environment.

So this ticket is me actually asking questions:

1. Are you guys okay with this? My idea of first task is to shuffle widgets around so that it looks good in a smaller screen without any major UI change.

I wouldn't mind tbh. There's already an open issue where the preferences window gets cut off on smaller screens, e.g. on netbooks: #72

2. How do you manage to use Glade with this set-up? I can't seem to get Glade to load the UI files. This also could be added to the CONTRIBUTING page once I got the info smile

This is what I have in my notes:

GLADE_CATALOG_SEARCH_PATH=./data/ui glade ./data/ui/<whatever thing>

👍 for a contributing page.

3. Would you guys be happky with maybe re-factoring the UI a bit so it matches more the GNOME style? I know a lot of people that use variety don't do GNOME, but since it's GTK we might as well might? I think this would make it easier to user libhandy.

Variety has been broken on GNOME proper for quite a while and it's a situation I've been quite frustrated with (#87). At this point I have little trust for their UX strategy, all with reworking key desktop features without actually consulting external developers and a general air of dismissiveness towards this project. At this point I really don't see the point of integrating more with GNOME, as it'll just be a headache for us later on when they decide to break things again. But that's just my 2c.

Thanks for your time,
Cheers!

[peterlevi]

Reimplementing the UI to be adaptive - I feel this would be a HUGE effort and I wouldn't like to end up in a situation where the current almost-Glade-only UI ends up being "unrolled" into dynamic code that adds a huge chunk of complexity to the codebase. Maybe if we go with just implementing 2 different versions of the Preferences dialog in Glade and switch dynamically between them depending on size, things might work, though it'd still increase future support efforts as we'll have two UIs to update. I'd like to hear specific ideas how this could be achieved without huge complexity overhead before I commit to green-lighting an effort like this.

In general I don't have anymore a lot of time for supporting Variety and when choosing what to do with it and what not, I try to keep in mind "will this increase or decrease my future support efforts" and having an adaptive UI definitely falls in the "increase" category, not only dev-wise, but because now we'll have screen-size specific bugs as well that might be harder to reproduce.

One aspect here is that I also think very few people use Variety on anything other than a laptop/desktop simply because Linux on mobile/tablet devices is an utterly niche thing.

BUT, a simpler initiative would be to just reimagine the UI in order to make it more usable on low-resolution screens, but still have a single non-adaptive UI (which is your point 1). The UI is anyway too complex in many aspects, so making it both simpler and smaller could be the best thing to do. I definitely support efforts in that direction.

Reimplementing Variety for GNOME-specific designs, I'm with @jlu5 here - I don't think it's worth chasing a specific desktop environment's design guidelines too much as those change more often than we can keep up. But it's especially important to not tie Variety too much to a particular DE's specific APIs. I.e. whatever we do with the design, it must run and look decent on GNOME, Xfce, KDE, WhateverDE, ... We want to avoid as much as possible having branches in the code just to support one or another DE.