GNOME Tweaks issueshttps://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-tweaks/-/issues2020-11-11T21:27:20Zhttps://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-tweaks/-/issues/206Improve messaging on Tweaks' role2020-11-11T21:27:20ZTobias BernardImprove messaging on Tweaks' roleI've observed that a lot of people aren't aware of Tweaks' role as a place for options that are explicitly not supported as part of the platform. This leads to frequent misunderstandings, from questions such as why Tweaks is a separate a...I've observed that a lot of people aren't aware of Tweaks' role as a place for options that are explicitly not supported as part of the platform. This leads to frequent misunderstandings, from questions such as why Tweaks is a separate app and not merged with Settings, to frustration when something breaks as a result of changing things in Tweaks.
In order to mitigate this in the future, it would be good to
- Have better messaging in and around the app regarding Tweaks' role
- Add warnings on certain settings as to how they might break things
- Make it easy to reset settings in Tweaks to the default
A few ideas:
## Warning when you open Tweaks
Other similar interfaces, such as about:config in Firefox show a warning every time you open them (unless explicitly disabled), to make it clear that this might introduce breakage. We could do something similar with e.g. a message dialog.
Example from Firefox:
![image](/uploads/fd7485806d8f2f5986d98f002c461388/image.png)
## Factory Reset
When any option in Tweaks is changed, we show a persistent "reset" button somewhere, which changes everything back to the default value. This would give people an easy way to see if their changes to these settings introduced breakage somewhere in the system, similar to the switch for disabling extensions.
## Improve messaging around individual options
Some options have the potential to cause much more breakage than others. In order to make this more apparent to people, we could add more information on how and and why they break things. Since they are the most likely culprits when something breaks, we could consider having separate per-panel resets for these, so that more harmless settings would not be affected when troubleshooting the more problematic options.
In my experience, these are particularly problematic (though there are probably a few more):
- GTK stylesheet (can break apps)
- Icon Theme (can cause apps to have icons that make no sense)
- Shell Extensions (can break the entire session)