Why design matters

[Patrik Bubák]

Hi Niki,

looking at the screenshot on your page you're using  what appears to be
Adwaita with Greybird for the window, and elementary or
xubuntu-icon-theme. While it looks somewhat polished and acceptable, it
can look a lot better and more professional.

It contains elements which for an eye like mine don't seem quite as
polished as they could be, but yes, for the general audience it might
suffice. Doesn't mean that you never heard a complaint that people
automatically like everything about it. Show them more options and they
will give you better feedback. After all, Linux is all about freedom.

People using other desktop environments could answer your question, when
asked why they don't use Xfce. I am most certain they have tried it at
least once. While answers will vary, I am pretty sure they would all
agree on design.

Generally people often take things as they are because they are used to
defaults (you can still see a lot of people preferring the panel at the
bottom from Windows XP/7) and somewhat accept, at least from their
experience with Microsoft Windows, that not a lot can be changed, at
least not the easy way. While Xfce offers a lot of customization, there
are things that would need tweaking, which is a view I share with many
people, particularly in the design community.

@Simon:

thanks for the reply. I shall provide screenshots for better
understanding of what I meant as cosmetic improvements. It's mostly
about adding some padding here and there, you'll see.

For centring I meant being able to fix elements in the centre, e.g.
window labels often have an offset despite setting the label to be shown
in the centre of the window. They are influenced by window buttons, like
minimize, close, maximize - the more buttons you put, the more narrow
elements appear, even though you would wish for them to stay in the
centre.

Gnome has this covered, where the clock is fixed in the centre of the
panel and even if tray icons collide with it, they are hidden, nothing
moves from its spot.

On Sat, 2015-07-25 at 14:32 +0200, Nicolas Kovacs wrote: 

> Le 25/07/2015 12:48, Patrik Bubák a écrit :
> > Now I'm not going to give you charts, but it's a fact that visually Xfce
> > is one of the least popular desktops, although I am aware it was created
> > for speed and functionality.
> 
> I don't know where you get that information.
> 
> My company installs Xfce-based desktops for schools, town halls, SMB's,
> public libraries. Nobody complained about it being ugly.
> 
> http://www.microlinux.fr/mled.php
> 
> Xfce is perfect as it is.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Niki Kovacs
> 


-- 
Sent using Evolution from Ubuntu

Nothing ruins creativity like too many voices weighing in. We call it
the Ice Cream Principle. Tell 10 people to go get ice cream with one
condition: they all have to agree on one flavour. That flavour is going
to be chocolate or vanilla every time. Groups of people don't agree on
what's cool or interesting, they agree on what's easy to agree on.

-- 
Sent using Evolution from Ubuntu

Nothing ruins creativity like too many voices weighing in. We call it
the Ice Cream Principle. Tell 10 people to go get ice cream with one
condition: they all have to agree on one flavour. That flavour is going
to be chocolate or vanilla every time. Groups of people don't agree on
what's cool or interesting, they agree on what's easy to agree on.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20150725/786a3289/attachment.html>