Comment by ankurdhama
2 hours ago
So this is essentially Android desktop mode with Android 17 Gemini integration. Please get rid of that top panel. I just don't get why this and desktops like GNOME tries to copy macos top panel when clearly in macos it is menu bar that host app menus but that concept doesn't exists in these other desktops and yet they have a top panel. This is just bad UX.
This will follow same model as Chromebooks i.e different devices from different OEM partners and for x86 and arm. So soon someone will be able to create a generic ISO for this that you can boot on a standard x86 PC/laptop.
Samsung is also working on such devices but they will probably have Dex which is much better then the current Android desktop mode.
>Please get rid of that top panel.... This is just bad UX.
How so? It displays useful info at a glance. Where's the bad UX?
I like the top panel in gnome. You need a place for your clock and you status icons. I don't really care much if it's at the top or bottom or sides.
As an aside: From a 'clickability' perspective the app menus in the top bar are nice of course and I theoretically agree that's the best place for an app menu. But in practice I really dislike macos' 'separated' app menus when a window is not maximized.
On MacOS it was a great example of the use of Fitts law, a vertically infinite target for your mouse pointer for commonly used tasks when you didn't memorize the keyboard command. But on a giant monitor it's too far away from your work. Macs, for the longest time, had 512x342, 640x480 or 512x384. It was already getting far away at 1152x882.
Many apps these days have tabs at top like chrome or firefox and having a top panel (with or without menu bar) means you loose the useful of the fitts law for accessing the tabs of such apps.
The panel itself is not the problem, it's the lack of integration with windows. In GNOME, when you maximize a window, the title bar stacks underneath the top bar. If that window also happens to have a menubar (e.g. LibreOffice) that gets stack underneath as well.
This is just a lot of wasted space and makes the menubar harder to click, compared to having the menubar at the very top, next to the screen boundary.
>" Dex which is much better then the current Android desktop mode"
Maybe it is better but my experience using it as desktop was absolutely atrocious. I mean it works as designed but it sucks