Organisation of Garuda GUI tools

[anon71037787]

I love the Garuda GUI tools.

As I was new to Garuda, they had been signaling to me, that Garuda is different.

They introduced me to the idea, that this distro cared about its users.
Making the distro more accessible, is rarely something you see in this capacity.

The apps were never really much in use by myself since I know my way around most of these options on the command line by now.

And I really would loved to have them, as I was a newbie.

So they still had been a part of the reason why I adopted Garuda.
Simply because it showed me, that people there actually do care about user experience.

I also found lots of good options (like hblock) just because they were exposed by such a GUI.

So, I think one of the problems that they do have, is that they are shattered all over the place.
There are currently 7 different Garuda apps. And I think we could trim this down a little.

The functionality of some of them is duplicated, and some apps have features in them, that would you assume to think you find in another.

They make things a bit more complicated, and that’s the exact opposite of what the apps are supposed to do.

I do share some suggestions on how they could be significantly improved.

In software development, we often have to make tradeoffs, and I think the best option is inherently prohibited by one of the weak points of Garuda:

If we want to have all options in one place, we would accommodate the Settings panel by the desktop environment as well.

That would mean, integrating them as KDE Control Modules, short KCM.

As much as I would like that, is this probably not an option, since the multitude of choices of DEs is something that is unlikely to be understood yet as a problem, and so I think we have only the choice, to do the second best thing.

That could be, from my limited perspective, to reorganize the existing options, so they make more sense and eventually abandon one or two at that process.

As a use case, that happened to me today:

I wanted to switch to another Network Manager, and obviously, you would assume this can be found in the Garuda Network Assistant.

It’s not there, so I opened up a forum post since I thought this functionality could be useful.
It turns out, it is already in the Garuda Assistant.

I could have also searched for this feature in the KDE Settings.
Particularly, if I am not an experienced user, who knows that this is not available there.

I could have looked in Garuda Settings Manager.
That sounds fairly generic, and if something like that could be there.

So there are now at least 3 possible places where this could have been, and it was at a place, where I had absolutely no chance of finding it, other than looking through each app.

For somebody who is inexperienced, that is very discouraging.

Playing hide and seek with the system is not something to define an intuitive user experience as.

I hope you agree with me.

Garuda Settings (Manager)

This app has a very elevated name, and still, it does fairly little and duplicates some of the settings with the KDE system settings.

People who are new to Garuda, might open it and be disappointed, as this app suggests to be the central app to set the preferences, and then it ends up being this fairly bland set of options.

Newbies could open this app and find themselves disappointed by the spare amount of options.

Particularly since they read the name of the app as something, that allows them to control a wide field of settings. To make matters worse, are some of these parts duplicates of the KDE settings.

DRY

There is also no suggestion within the app, to indicate that the desired option could be in Garuda Assistance, Garuda Network Manager, Garuda System Maintainance Settings, or the KDE Settings.

The user just feels lost.

Garuda Assistance

1. The Garuda Assistance app has a lot of useful stuff and is still a bit disorganized.

   • The “reset config” section is very prominent on the first page, despite the functionality potentially being relatively rarely used. I see the benefit of offering the reset, and also making it easy to find, although I would suggest making a tab dedicated to debugging.

   • The btrfs section is also fairly prominent, with it being the second tab.
     The only thing that it does, though, is redirecting to yet another app.

The whole thing feels, again, just lost, and as if has grown organically over time, and then stopped to do so. It lacks coherence and conscious choices toward a streamlined user experience.

[Bro]

@anon71037787

So, I think one of the problems that they do have, is that they are shattered all over the place.

I really, really, really dislike, “you must improve this” posts by relatively newcomers to a distribution–any distribution. I further dislike posts that go, “but in this or that distribution, we did it thusly” posts.

I don’t know if the totality of it amounts to trolling or just simple bikeshed but it grows wearisome. I suppose I could block such posts or posters, but once in a while they contain a useful element. Then again, “even a broken clock is right twice a day.”

[noop]

Are we reading the same post or are you just being miserable for the sake of it as usual?

It’s called constructive feedback.

[SGS]

Suggestions may be good, contributions to Gitlab with appropriate MR much more helpful.
I’m sure I mentioned before that the existing Garuda team is busy with other things at the moment.

Es passiert nichts Gutes, außer man tut es.

Nothing good happens unless you do it.

BTW, we have to part with some DE’s soon due to lack of maintainers.
Among others from GNOME.

Didn’t you want to test KDE Plasma 6, Qt 6.6, too?

KDE 6 repository / testing

Whats going on here? Hi everyone! During the last weeks, we have been working on building KDE 6 and a new repo called chaotic-aur-kde. @alexjp did most of the work by bringing up the needed PKGBUILDs to build via our infra. Although this is still very early, things are working pretty well. The current status is that KDE frameworks and Plasma are mostly/all ported, but some KDE apps still aren’t, eg. Okular. Needless to say, this isn’t guaranteed stability due to the nature o…

I think alexjp could use some good help.

[Straight]

You want a specific feature ?
Contribute
The Garuda team is busy so its THE best way to help .

[BluishHumility]

I think it is good to provide feedback, request new features, suggest improvements, etc. User feedback can give developers ideas for how to make their software better, or learn what features the community would like to see them implement.

That said, I have to say I personally find this post very discouraging. SGS is right: on the team we have been discussing eliminating some of the desktop environment offerings because a few maintainers have moved on or are not that active anymore, and it’s a bit of a scramble for the rest of the team to keep up with the maintenance tasks. A lot of the folks chipping in on ISO testing and submitting MRs for bug fixes and stuff don’t have the chops for reworking a major GUI app anyway–I know I certainly don’t.

Not for nothing, but I agree with @Bro; hearing feedback like “I really like Garuda but you should consider doing a major overhaul on all of the applications” is just exhausting.

Maybe some highly skilled developer who has sixty hours to kill will be motivated by your post and decide to rework all of the Garuda applications like you mentioned. In the meanwhile, if you want to see any of these changes actually happen I think the suggestion that you should start contributing the code yourself is the best chance you’ve got.

[anon71037787]

I did create this post here mainly to track and discuss this issue.

If you look very, very closely, you will not find any

• delivery dates
• promises
• expectations

So, for gods sake, maybe we can at least look into this, and do the first step:
Discussing how we would like to see this in the finished state.

That could give the person who really ends up implementing it:

1. A documented base to work on
2. A platform to discuss their work
3. The motivation to do it, by seeing that there is demand

[Ankur]

Basically I am not able to understand what do you want to do or what are you saying

@anon71037787

• delivery dates
• promises
• expectations

As already mentioned garuda team is actually very small and by doing these things we will actually put burden on our ownself,

See… we do it for free, for fun and without gaining any profit, if we will make promises then we would have burdens of it’s completion and there is no one who doesn’t have a real life here .

We all have life and we are trying to do the best whatever we can and everything is being done in our free time. It’s not a work for which we are being paid,

@anon71037787

A documented base to work on

This thing as I said will lead to promises and expectation which will give us burden

@anon71037787

A platform to discuss their work

We already have :
forum.garudalinux.org

@anon71037787

The motivation to do it, by seeing that there is demand

I do things less by motivation , more by my own willingness

@anon71037787

It’s not there, so I opened up a forum post since I thought this functionality could be useful.
It turns out, it is already in the Garuda Assistant

If I get a new stuff or a new device then I am supposed to learn how to use it, softwares are also included in it.

[Hanuman]

I like the GitHub issue tracking system; can put bug requests, feature requests, and they can then get sorted out in terms of priority. You’re using GitLab, are you tracking feature requests on there? I think it’s good to hear valid requests from the community. Gives devs something to work with; but at the end of the day, need more code contributors.

From my experience with open source so far, I just publish code, people use it, and I never or very rarely see any contribution.

Might be a whole other discussion but; one issue I found with open source is that it can lead to abandon-ware. And indeed several DE are being abandoned.

[lum1nuss]

For those who want to contribute to the Garuda applications and/or open issues, here’s the GitLab repo

Applications · GitLab

Garuda’s KDE spin was my introduction to full-time Linux on real hardware, so I will chip in as someone who was (and still is) a real noob

Coming straight from Windows, I found the issue of “Garuda Apps vs. KDE settings” to be much less confusing than the hodgepodge that is Windows 10 settings vs. control panel. I always went to the KDE settings first, since that’s where just about everything I needed or wanted was. If it wasn’t there, then I’d look through the Garuda apps (which rarely happened - it was more common that I’d just look through the apps for fun).
The KDE settings are really straightforward. Maybe I’m just of the meticulous sort, but I looked through all the settings available and all the apps before I really touched much.

@anon71037787

I wanted to switch to another Network Manager,

Would your average noob even know what a network manager is? Having looked through the Garuda Settings at the time, I’d just glazed over it. I only knew what a network manager really was once I started using Debian on a separate laptop, and that was like 2 months ago…

@anon71037787

So there are now at least 3 possible places where this could have been, and it was at a place, where I had absolutely no chance of finding it, other than looking through each app.

For somebody who is inexperienced, that is very discouraging.

Playing hide and seek with the system is not something to define an intuitive user experience as.

Actually, at that point, if I were looking into a problem like that, I’d just hit SearX and look up an article or wiki about it instead of searching through the Garuda settings and apps. I think that’d be a lot faster, and you’d learn more about Linux too.

Not to say that I completely disagree with your post, but sometimes you need to remember that noobs are probably more noob than you think, and habits from Windows tend to carry over and have quite a bit of weight on the user experience.

[anon71037787]

@Ankur

Basically I am not able to understand what do you want to do or what are you saying

Yep, as you prove yourself.

I said specifically, that the post does not contain any of the things, you succeeded in assuming I was claiming.

So if you don’t understand what I am writing, why are you replying to it?

[anon71037787]

@lum1nuss

Would your average noob even know what a network manager is?

The point is, that you can guide users much more easily.

So newbies, who come here on this forum, and report an issue that could be solved by switching to an alternative of the NetworkManager, could be easily shown how to do that.

It is also more convenient for people who can do it the manual way, and have still not the time to do it. Potentially cause they have other things to do, like contributing to other parts of the system.

I agree with you, that the KDE Settings are more than enough for anybody just joining Linux and they are still insufficient from time to time.

The Garuda settings are not used as often, and if they are, they help a lot.

@lum1nuss

Actually, at that point, if I were looking into a problem like that, I’d just hit SearX and look up an article or wiki about it instead of searching through the Garuda settings and apps.

Linux is for everyone. The whole idea of open source is, that people have access to their computers, and are free of restrictions.

If we hide all functionality - and even stability - behind eventually outdated and potentially incompatible search results, we are jeopardizing this idea.

Some people may not have the time, nerves, and competence, that is fundamental to solve this issue “the professional way.”

Same as you don’t repair your bicycle, your car, and your house.
Next to maintaining your Linux Distro. And gardening and cooking yourself.

Sometimes, you just consume stuff, and I feel it’s just a sign of bad taste, to perpetuate this whole idea of 'Linux is only for pros" and any other kind of gatekeeping.

In case we consider ourselves as an ‘open and welcoming’ community, we consider ourselves as such to newbies alike.

And not just open, welcoming, and friendly towards people who do everything by themselves.

[lum1nuss]

@anon71037787

The point is, that you can guide users much more easily.

So newbies, who come here on this forum, and report an issue that could be solved by switching to an alternative of the NetworkManager, could be easily shown how to do that.

It is also more convenient for people who can do it the manual way, and have still not the time to do it. Potentially cause they have other things to do, like contributing to other parts of the system.

Ahh, this makes a lot more sense. In this case, I agree with you it’s always a lot less intimidating and faster to be directed to a GUI tool that quickly does it for you than to copy-paste a whole bunch of commands that look like some kind of black magic (at least to the humble noob ;D)

I think if they’re already contributing to other parts of the system though, this is an issue they would already know how to tackle on some level a GUI wouldn’t be needed in their case, but you’re right that it would make it faster for them to switch to a possible solution.

@anon71037787

Sometimes, you just consume stuff, and I feel it’s just a sign of bad taste, to perpetuate this whole idea of 'Linux is only for pros" and any other kind of gatekeeping.

In case we consider ourselves as an ‘open and welcoming’ community, we consider ourselves as such to newbies alike.

And not just open, welcoming, and friendly towards people who do everything by themselves.

I also agree that perpetuating elitism in the Linux community is in poor taste, but that’s also where Garuda’s in a weird spot.
Arch = a distro for seasoned Linux users
Garuda = Arch for humans, and in the process makes it more accessible to noobs like me and let’s not forget that the eye-candy of KDE dr460nised in particular has a lot of pull!

I’ve found that a lot of what happens on this forum is that people will help the noobs to help themselves by doing some research of their own. There’s generally a grace period before people start getting peeved - I think this bridges the gap pretty well between “hold the noob’s hand” and “you’re on your own loser!!!”, which fits well with Garuda’s position.
To some, this kind of attitude is very bad and elitist, and to others, it’s normal behaviour. In the end, you can’t please everyone, which is what makes customer service in real life so frustrating.

---

To get a bit more back on topic
The apps can be more necessary in some DE/WM than others. Aeroplane mode (yeah that’s right I’m gonna spell it like that!! ) is a good example - on KDE, it’s really straightforward with just a button in the widget. On Qtile however, I have no clue how to do it outside of the Garuda Network Assistant.

The BTRFS assistant, which KDE users might find redundant because the old/backup snapshots notice works properly to clear the old stuff, doesn’t seem to work properly on Qtile (which is probably a bug but I never thought to report it before this, apologies…) and so I have to use it in order to clear out that old stuff, since Snapper Tools only handles snapshots.

With some overlapping settings, it’s strictly a DE/WM thing - with other setups, the tools as they are make total sense, so this issue is not so cut and dry.

Also, I think this was just a bad time to present this large amount of feedback, with the new ISOs on the horizon and all as can be seen by the other comments. I hope you don’t take what’s happened here and also in some of your other posts too personally man. Take a break if you need to.

[anon71037787]

@lum1nuss

To some, this kind of attitude is very bad and elitist, and to others, it’s normal behaviour.

Bad and elitist behavior always feels ‘normal’ to the people perpetuating it.
Its the point, and part of the reason why we are still so few.

Developers love to moan and cry about having too less people contributing.
And then they succeed with the exact same behavior, that is causing this.

@lum1nuss

The apps can be more necessary in some DE/WM than others.

@lum1nuss

With some overlapping settings, it’s strictly a DE/WM thing

This is one out of a couple of issues, that going with multiple DEs comes with.

[SGS]

You also only read what you want to read, don’t you?
That was not a question!

No one is complaining here, we were just presenting the situation.
We will also soon reduce the offer to the existing DE’s.
GNOME and KDE would be my candidates, because they do the most work for us.

If you really want to hear unkind comments, go to the Arch forum, ask a question and say that you use Manjaro.
Garuda Linux or M. is based on Arch, but is it not Arch Linux.

@anon71037787

It is either the packaging, in which case Garuda is absolutely Arch.

Kate not reading the backend

[Michael_joseph]

uh oh >.>

[Bro]

@noop

are you just being miserable for the sake of it as usual?

As usual?

You, sir, have just demonstrated the definition of flamebait. I could not have done it better. Thanks!

[noop]

Just stating the facts old man