Hi,
Yui Hirasawa wrote (29 Dec 2015 14:21:21 GMT) :
>>>>> Also having an option for more keyboard driven DE/WM would be
>>>>> nice for powerusers and especially those of us who only have the
>>>>> thinkpad nipple as our mouse.
>>>> Will you expand on this, usability-wise?
>>> It takes a long time to drag the mouse from the corner to another when
>>> all you have is the nipple.
>> Can this be resolved by adjusting the tracking?
> Probably. But this is extra work you have to do every time you boot up
> Tails.
I see two actionable problems here:
1. Bad default trackpoint settings on this hardware.
Lots of GUI applications we ship are optimized for being used with
a mouse, so even if we were in a position to hide part of the
problem by switching DEs, for many use cases there would still be
usability stumbling blocks.
I suspect that any Live system is affected on such hardware,
provided it uses a similar software stack, so it seems to be worth
fixing the root cause so that everyone benefits from the
solution :) I haven't looked at how exactly these settings are
managed, and especially I'm not sure how the responsibility for
them is shared between the kernel, X.Org, and GNOME.
Of course, a Tails-specific mitigation would be to make it easy to
persist input devices customized settings, but then it only works
for users of persistence, and is maybe not less work than actually
fixing the root cause where it should be.
I don't think this is specific to Jessie, so I'll leave it at that
for now. Anyone up to work on it, please follow-up on
tails-dev@??? :)
2. To drive GNOME Shell without the mouse, one needs to learn its
keybindings. We should check if we advertise them well enough.
I've added a note on
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8068
about it.
In passing:
* The need to learn keybindings is not specific to GNOME, so
replacing the DE/WM would not improve things _substantially_ in
this respect. Of course a real tiling WM would provide quite more
control via the keyboard for people who know how to use that
tiling WM, or are ready to learn, but in practice the difference
is non-existent for the huge majority of Tails users.
* I, personally (as someone who has been using tiling WMs for 10+
years before moving to GNOME Shell), would love to have more
powerful tiling support in GNOME. It's been a while since last
time I tried the extensions that improve things in this respect.
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
