I like the hamburger menus, because they are usually one-level deep and contain very few items.

I cannot tell you how many times I want to go into an app's settings, and it takes longer than 20 seconds; some have it in File, some in Edit, others in random menus like "Tools". Further still, the damned menu item itself could be named Settings, Preferences, Options, whatever. Even further, looking at Gimp here, Preferences is one of 25 menu items that I need to scan through. This is not good UX, this is Stockholm Syndrome.

Contrast with Gnome apps: Hamburger -> Preferences, invariably, never takes longer than three seconds to find it.

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pndy 4 days ago | parent [-]

Hamburger menu is a good solution for simple and small desktop apps but it's not a good choice to use it for anything complex.

There's this Pinta image editor that since its initial release offered standard menus - for years it looked nearly identical to Paint.NET on which is partially based. In January devs switched to GTK4/libadwaita; new 3.0 release replaced menus with combined hamburger menu which of course cannot be decoupled in any way and which make advanced editing annoying. There's more clicking to do anything unless you decide to learn all shortcuts. And this "learn shortcuts" is quite common answer to hamburger menu complains.

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tadfisher 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I just installed Pinta to check it out. That implementation is just bad, you are not supposed to just migrate your menu bar into submenus under the hamburger menu.

If I were to assist with their design, I would eliminate everything that already has a headerbar icon or an on-screen affordance; so most of Files, Edit, View, and Layers is taken care of.

The stuff that remains:

- Quit: superfluous, not present in Gnome apps

- View: borrow the Ephiphany (gnome-web) zoom controls, move Grid, Show/Hide, and Ruler units into a preferences dialog

- Add-ins: Move to a preferences dialog

- Window is useless, they have tabs

- Help can stay

So no surprise that the laziest implementation of a hamburger menu is not good.

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pndy 4 days ago | parent [-]

It's kinda funny how Pinta changed while Paint.NET remains same with just minor tweaks to the interface. Luckily devs there never considered utilizing ribbon interface...

In the end I swapped from Pinta to Gimp and Krita because I couldn't stand that interface

	▲	dminik 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Tbh, at this point I would pay for paint.NET on Linux. Pinta is interesting, but the UI is terrible. Did we really have to remove the resize handles? They're there when adding shapes, but not when manipulating pixels/selection? Half the options I need being hidden in a hamburger menu isn't great either. Gimp is gimp. I don't need Photoshop. And I don't want a Photoshop level of a learning curve. Krita is interesting, but it seems to be aimed at drawing. I struggled to copy the color code from an image. By default my eyes are drawn to the massive advanced color selector on the right, but it's a trap. You actually need the tiny color selector in the top bar. It shouldn't be this hard. I need a subset of image manipulation features in my work and each tool has a different one.

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dismalaf 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

While Pinta uses (and abuses) GTK4, it has nothing to do with Gnome.

Inkscape is also a GTK app that follows Gnome guidelines, and every menu and tool is out in the open. No "hamburger" menus anywhere.

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dminik 3 days ago | parent [-]

I was under the impression that Inkscape explicitly doesn't follow the gnome guidelines.

That's why every few months, there's a proposal to redesign it which trades usability for minimalism. Here's one I pulled from a random Google search:

https://gitlab.com/inkscape/ux/-/issues/236

	▲	dismalaf 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Inkscape_invariants They claim it's one of the cornerstones of their project. Who am I to argue. Personally, I like how functional Inkscape's UI is AND how minimal Files is, for example..