A little over 4 years ago now, something that I did not remember but that they have been in charge of refreshing our memory, GNOME removed app menus on top panel. They kept the application name, partly as an indicator to inform which window was open in the foreground, but they say users get confused, which is why they have considered removing it entirely in future versions of the graphical environment.
This has been communicated in his last entry of This Week in GNOME, the first of 2023, but they haven't made any decisions yet. It does seem clear that they will remove the "label" of the open app in the upper panel, but what they have to decide is how it will be indicated which window is in the foreground.
This week in GNOME
Regarding this change in GNOME Shell:
The design team has been discussing alternatives to the applications menu for indicating window focus in GNOME Shell, and we are seeking feedback on a prototype of the proposed new behavior.
The why
Back in 2018, we removed unique menu items from the app menu. However, we kept the menu itself, so that it could be used as a window focus indicator, and so that it can display a loading spinner for apps that are slow to display a window.
However, by researching users over the past few years, we have found that the top bar app menu often confuses people. Often, they think it's a task switcher, a shortcut to a specific app, or don't understand what it is at all. It seems to be a danger for new users.
Also, we've noticed that the apps menu doesn't work very well as a window focus indicator. It does not distinguish between several windows of the same application, it is only present on the main monitor and sometimes it is very far from the window it indicates.
Therefore, we are investigating an alternative layout for indicating window focus, which would improve the focus indicator experience and allow us to no longer display the application menu in the top bar. The new design adds a subtle scaling effect to newly focused windows when you switch workspaces, super+tab, or close a window.
As for the charge wheel, we're still exploring alternatives, but we think it's a relatively easy design issue to solve. An obvious option is to display a spinner in the top bar.
For users interested in participating in the tests, it has been published this extension, but you have to be careful using it because they can still introduce changes.
other developments
- Has been launched Tangram 1.5 stable and 2.0 beta. v1.5 uses GTK3 with an updated WebKit engine. v2.0 will use GTK4 and libadwaita.
- Carbuteror 4.0 has arrived with the main window using libadwaita. Carbuteror is a graphical application to connect to Tor, designed primarily for use on mobile phones.
- Graphs 1.3.4 has arrived adding the ability to obtain the indefinite integral or the derivative of the data, as well as the possibility of performing Fourier Transforms
- Money v2023.1.0-beta1 now available, with a new replay system with support for bi-weekly transactions, as well as some design tweaks and performance improvements.
- The sound Recorder TypeScript port has been merged.
- Eyedropper 0.5.0 is now able to change how colors are formatted.
- Fixed a problem in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome where opening a folder would necessarily be read-only. What this change - the default will be read/write and the user can select "read only" - just like for files. For app developers, this means that they will be able to use the document portal to allow users to choose save locations.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.