GNOME Shell on Mobile!

JUMP TO A SECTION:
0:15 Intro
0:53 Shell layout
- 1:15 quick settings
- 1:30 screenshot UI
- 2:10 home screen/apps on desktop; similar to Endless OS
- 2:56 gesture navigation
- 3:48 keyboard swipe to dismiss
- 4:08 default/dark style quick toggle, animated splash screen
- 4:55 live window thumbnails

6:00 Paper app (for notes)
- 6:10 LibAdwaita About window, window management

6:46 Files (nightly), context menus, desktopiness
- 7:25 Oops, floating windows
- 7:55 more desktopiness in nightly Files
- 8:57 double-click to open doesn't work on touch…

9:35 Keyboard

11:05 Clocks

12:23 Calculator
- 12:48 per-app accent color
- 13:10 text input magnification
- 13:28 oops window management
- 13:49 unsolicited design feedback

14:40 GNOME Web (nightly)
- 14:56 multi-touch
- 15:01 default/dark style CSS
- 15:10 preferences
- 15:19 reader mode
- 16:09 tabs, basic UI

16:43 Settings
- 16:56 About
- 17:30 Displays (oops, window management)
- 18:06 Appearance (default/dark style, wallpaper demo)
- 18:28 Multitasking… desktop settings on a phone?

19:30 Third-party apps
- 19:30 Amberol
- 19:48 GTK4 popover touch bug?
- 20:03 oops window management
- 20:36 beautiful default/dark style
- 20:55 an aside about Notifications
- 21:17 Blanket
- 21:26 MPRIS integration = media controls in quick settings
- 21:58 Drawing (oops, untested)
- 22:07 meta discussion about GNOME Software and non-mobile apps

23:13 GNOME Shell on mobile is so smooth!
- 23:24 quick settings toggles
- 23:57 lock/unlock screen
- 22:06 type to search
- 25:40 oops I opened Lollipop

25:49 Misc
- 25:50 Chats
- 26:30 my apps (Clairvoyant, Dippi)
- 26:50 wrap up

Hey all, sorry about the rough quality here. I meant to upload and edit this later, but YouTube decided to make it public lol

So here you go in all its unedited glory, including me hitting the tripod at least twice!

Phone: OnePlus 6T
OS: postmarketOS Edge with GNOME Mobile

[aronkvh]

There are not many of these demos around. This was really informative, thanks!

[tkain]

Suuuuper cool to see - especially as a 6T owner myself. I know Linux on the 6T probably won't get within 'daily driver' range any time soon, but seeing how far people have gone to make this work is really impressive.

[accidentalibi]

Thanks for the review! The mobile GNOME Shell actually looks quite close to become my daily driver!

[PlatinumLucario]

I'm actually really looking forward to seeing this development branch being merged back into main GNOME Shell when it's ready, because it will be awesome to see the GNOME Shell having the ability to switch between desktop mode and touch mode, especially when a mobile device is connected to a monitor, and then seamlessly switching to desktop mode on a larger display. I can really see this becoming a really good desktop environment for any device, regardless of architecture or display, along with its smooth animations.

[DanielWood]

Absolutely love to see the progress in the shell. It would be amazing if you could make a video of the changes your apps require to make them more touch friendly.

[MasterSpiron]

An interesting gesture colision is the swipe up from bottom which in current (normal) gnome shell shows the keyboard for those pesky times when it doesnt come up. Its useful to have that happen but thats also a useful gesture for the entire system

[Tragicomedy]

Every time i go back to this video I'm drooling. This looks great!

[merthyr]

Looking forward to bringing some flutter apps to stuff like this :) GNOME gets some flak for their UX/UI decisions but you gotta appreciate how good GNOME apps/shell adapts to this form factor and input paradigm!

[proptanz]

Wow I fooled myself to think this was posted a day ago. It's so polished and I wonder how great is it now.

[wvistalover]

Can't wait for KDE mobile and GNOME mobile!

[MastermindAtWork]

GNOME mobile sure looks better than it's previous iterations

[mskiptr]

These app-switching gestures really make me think how much it makes sense to unify desktop and mobile interfaces. Like, obviously the UI needs to adapt to the relative screen size (angular size|resolution), the presence of a keyboard, a pointer or a touch screen and other stuff like that.

However, what I really wonder is whether it's better to design desktop, tablet and phone UIs to actually share the vast majority of concepts and just adapt them accordingly or only be similar on the surface – that is, look consistently, but have fully unique behavior depending on the platform.

The first approach seems enticing, but may just not be feasible or turn out poorly.


Here's the example that made me think of this:
Desktop Gnome uses gestures for switching between virtual desktops (and to go into the activity view). Mobile Gnome has the bottom bar to do a very similar thing. It's only that it switches between apps and not virtual desktops.

But wait! It very well may be switching between virtual desktops. It's just that each of them is occupied by an exactly one window filling it fully. It's not fullscreen since there's still the status bar, but the window is definitely not floating (at least shouldn't be) and it has no top bar.


So here's how it could be nicely organized:
* On mobile, when a window is opened, it dynamically gets a new virtual desktop. The window management is set to tiled and not floating and so it naturally occupies the whole screen there.
* Now, if you go to the activities mode, you can drag a window between virtual desktops. If you try to insert it between them, a new virtual desktop will be spawned in that space. If you try to insert it into an existing one, it will have to share that virtual desktop between the other window there and so there will be two tiled window – like with multitasking on Android.
* Any virtual desktop that has no apps gets automatically deleted, so there are no pointless empty ones and maybe even no need to deal with the background behind apps.
* When you use the switching gesture, it switches virtual desktops and thus apps. But if you have two apps tiled on a single virtual desktop it neatly brings both of them at together. (Android behaves differently and it's annoying.)
* It's probably a good idea to cap the max number of windows on a single virtual desktop based on something like window size. If the screen is big, seeing three apps at once may sometimes be useful, but on a smaller one you only really want to fit two of them max. On the other hand, a device like the Surface Duo may very well display 4 apps together.

Desktop Gnome: desktop = set of floating windows; possibly empty, so it displays a background underneath
Mobile Gnome: 'desktop' doesn't exist – it contains one, almost fullscreen app and thus there's no background

With tablets it needs to land somehow in between. They have bigger screens, but are still controlled by touch. Also, attaching a keyboard and a pointing device makes them effectively laptops, so I guess that's when the UI should more or less switch to the desktop behavior.

Now what should happen when you attach a keyboard and a mouse to a phone? Fitting more apps on a small screen like that is probably still a bad idea, but some behavior maybe should get adjusted. Like the on-screen keyboard should maybe be disabled – or at least the user should explicitly bring it up if needed.
And when you also attach a bigger monitor, that monitor should then have regular, desktop behavior, right? Oh, it would be cool to somehow have both of these screens and methods of input integrate with each other! Maybe being able to easily move apps between them could work well. Maybe the phone screen should act as a touchpad? What if you connect your phone via Miracast to a TV and use if for displaying something while the phone itself shows UI for controlling the thing that's displayed (a slideshow, a video, etc.)?


Other thoughts:
power management: Can we suspend apps after a certain period of time? user may mark them as always running (and the distribution can package sensible defaults for that), but otherwise if something is supposed to run in the background, it should either be a daemon or it should register a timer or something.
notches: Which pixels are obscured is a hardware property. Getting info about them via the device trees (which are meant to describe the hardware) would probably be a good idea.
notches: The most fool-proof way to represent notches, cutouts and other obscured parts of the screen is via pixel masks. You get a mask marking all fully-visible pixels, and draw important stuff only there. For better picture, a mask of fully-obscured pixels may be useful. Keeping masks for different screen features (like the camera cutout, rounded corners, speaker notch, curved bezels, etc.) separate may also be useful for styling or for arranging nicer layout.

[robertm]

6:57 a gesture like swiping the folder/file left or right to bring the context menu would be great for nautilus (the file explorer). Also a floating button for the context menu on an empty space would be great to replace the hold dowl right click solution. There is a lot of fine tuning to be done, but after it will all be finished it would sure the an amazing experience. Also having full gnome desktop on external monitors would be very nice, like samsung dex but now with a full desktop experience.

[rtsa]

This looks amazing! Can't wait for the day I try this out on actual hardware.

To make the drop down menu better, I think it should go edge to edge on mobile form factor's with curved bottom corners. Also whatever behind should be less legible (blurred or solid).

[reactionpoolxrx]

The notification pull down only requires one swipe on my Pinephone. Maybe a bug for you. Edit: mixed responses from the Pinephone.

[imhemish]

22:09 the app is just not adaptive by its own, you can change the layout in the preferences

[kevin]

Gnome looks really promising, as a gnome user on my desktop, i think i will probably be daily driving this when it gets mature enaugh
Linux is really growing and maturing now imo

[edyeoliveira]

Thank you for share this review! I'm super excited to see news about Gnome Shell Mobile and also PostmarketOS 😃

[jacobnathanielzpayag]

If the gnome team gives this a bit more love, then maybe by Gnome 50, we'll have continuum as a headline feature

[AP-kxyw]

This would also work great on tablets! At the moment, I have to use multiple extensions on my Surface to make the experience better. When this is merged, I see myself ditching almost all of them. Thanks to everyone who worked on this!