Comment by frollogaston
4 days ago
Exactly, except the problem with Launchpad is it's cumbersome and takes up the entire screen. I never use it, just have to know exactly what I'm looking for and use cmd-space.
4 days ago
Exactly, except the problem with Launchpad is it's cumbersome and takes up the entire screen. I never use it, just have to know exactly what I'm looking for and use cmd-space.
> just have to know exactly what I'm looking for
And how do you acquire that knowledge? Browsing. Looking and reading, and remembering.
Mac OS X had no mechanism for this, but iOS does. iOS's Springboard launcher is lifted directly from the Dashboard in OS X "Tiger". Apple simplified it for the phone to only show apps. Then later they grafted it back in its simplified phone form -- Dashboard having been removed in the meantime.
Before that you had to browse the filesystem. To do that you need to know where to look.
That's how it worked on classic MacOS, and Windows 1 and 2, and DR-GEM, and AmigaOS, and RISC OS, and basically all other 1980s GUIs.
(Proprietary Unix left you with a terminal. Job done.)
The innovation in Windows 3 was having an app launcher program with groups. It was called Program Manager. It had groups, because it's quicker to look in the group related to what you want than in all apps. ProgMan was stolen from OS/2 1.1 by the way.
Win 95 had a further innovation that built on that. It shrank Program Manager down from a full-screen app to a single button, that opened up on a hierarchical list, and that list had icons in it because some people are more visual and recognise icons better than names.
Me, I'm a reader, I want words not pictures. Pictures waste my time and my screen space. That's why it's important to offer a choice. GNOME takes away choice. The GNOME devs have a Vision and you must use it. The KDE devs don't have a vision. They have nearly as many visions as developers, and they try to accommodate all of them.
Not everyone: just the devs. Examples:
* I use widescreens. We all use widescreens now. I want the title bars on the side, like in wm2, not on top. That's not an option.
* I liked BeOS. I think title bars should be tabbed, like in web browsers. That's not an option.
* I hate hamburger menus. I want menu bars. There is no global option for that. You can't have it.
* I hate CSD. I want a title bar I can middle-click to send behind all other windows, like KDE 1, 2, 3 and 4 did, as well as every other non-GNOME desktop. I also liked Windowblinds on classic MacOS: the ability to roll up windows into the title bar. Again, like in some older KDE versions. There's no option for that any more.
There is important choice, accommodating different needs and usage patterns, and there is cosmetic choice, merely affecting how things look but not the underlying mechanisms of how they work.
Supporting diversity of usage is more important than diversity of appearance.
Both the full desktops that natively support Wayland fail to do this.
Realistically you shouldn't need thousands of applications so remembering the names of the 20 or so apps I use isn't a big deal.
Good for you.
I've been doing tech support since 1988. I've seen many many PCs with hundreds of apps, some maybe heading into thousands, sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.
Yes this is a thing. It is common.
And the typical user does not know what an "app" is, or what OS they are using. I've lost count of the number of people that told me their computer was running Word or Office (not Windows), or who think they access the Web via Google because they don't know what a web browser is.
Here is some proof, in case you don't believe me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.
Normal people are not like that. They don't know what they use or what it's called or what OS they run or what an "OS" is, and they outnumber us by approximately a million to one.