To me locale always has been a bigger problem, but yes it quickly becomes hard to use because the splitter makes it hard to view the list. Maybe we can just allow to resize the splitter all the way, so on a really small screen you can view the list or the item details view but don’t have to open both at the same time.
edit: not much of a performance problem though, and i just moved it around with the keyboard in such a case. A bit inconvenient but nothing too major
Chaining your UI to favor just one or two particular screen sizes/display resolutions seems like a poor design decision, especially these days.
Ideally it should be adjustable in a way that can suit almost any resolution. With, of course, the concession that expecting it to fit onto an ancient and absurdly low display resolution without problems isn’t realistic.
800x600 is the minimal requirement for Haiku currently. We already do get some complaints about it from people using eeePC or similar laptops that use a 800x480 display. Call it absurd if you want, but this is the userbase an OS like Haiku attracts. Personally I’m happy that we can keep such machines in use, instead of being sent to a landfill.
I’m sorry if my comment was insufficiently clear, but I was really thinking more along the lines of common resolutions used by MS-DOS (320x200, 640x350, 720x400), classic vga (640x480), or something less common/non-standard.
In any case, the point was not about whether Haiku should support a particular display resolution.
Rather, that there will be a point where having some trouble with the dimensions of the UI or the layout of it’s elements is to be expected.
Complaints of that sort seem somewhat off-base to me. I would consider 800x480 to be low resolution and comparatively non-standard…
I like the idea of keeping usable/useful hardware from ending up in a landfill, but that shouldn’t mean that any operating system that could theoretically run on such hardware must therefore support it.
VESA BIOS extensions are not tied to any specific resolution. Did you mean VGA here? There are few machines otherwise able to run Haiku that would be restricted to 640x480. That’s why we settled on 800x600 as a very conservative low limit, there isn’t really a lot to gain in terms of hardware support by going lower. And in theory you could still get around by display scrolling (setting a virtual video mode larger than the display and scrolling following the mouse) if you’re really desperate to use such low-end hardware. The eeePC (and similar machines using 800x480) is a bit of an outlier, and not the target I would consider spending my Haiku development time on improving.
Lower resolutions can be used if you want to, of course, but some windows from the OS won’t fit. In some cases this can be fixed, in others, it would make the UI less convenient overall (introducing multiple tabs, making some controls tiny or very tightly packed).
If you think this is important and can do it in a way that doesn’t degrade things for larger displays, I think we’ll accept the patches,but that’s as far as I’ll go.
I’d reckon that this is not that hard to modify the couple of apps that would not work in this resolution. My idea would be to have a scrollable view for example for the locale prefs that is only a scrollview if your resolution is actually that small (and is otherwise a full view).
For the eeepcs, are there bug reports about specific apps that are not useable there?
I’m one of those people still using an EeePC 701. Not going to complain, or ask for special treatment! It’s already amazing that Haiku still runs on that machine at all, let alone as well as it does.
From my observations, Qt apps adapt very well to low resolutions. Tk apps come close, but status bars are cut off. Native Haiku apps can run in 800x480, but some of them need extra work, and I’m not going to make such demands of developers.