Stupid Modal Dialog Boxes, and Stupider User
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Some time in the past 3 years I started having problems with my dialog boxes being "attached" to their background applications in such a way that I could not move or resize the dialog box without dragging the background application along side it. That was a huge problem for me, as much of my work involved the need to see the work I was doing at the same time as having a dialog box open (I will spare you the details).
I searched every Linux forum I could to find a solution. Not only did I not find a solution, it appeared that I might be the only person on the face of the earth with the problem. (As it turns out, one of my problems, as is usually the case with most questions on forums, was that I did not frame the issue using the word "modal.")
I put up with this productivity-killing problem for three years, every so often posing the problem on yet another forum in the hope that someone—anyone—might know what I was talking about. I repeatedly went back to my Settings to see if there was something I missed. I even went so far as to blame my problem on LibreOffice, haranguing TDF programmers for creating a problem that seemed to show up almost exclusively when I was using an LO program. (duh....I use LO for 75% of everything I do, so, naturally, the issue is going to be related to "something wrong with LO" in my head.)
And then one day I decided to look at my settings in Tweaks, a program that I make sure that I always have, but one which I infrequently use. That's when I noticed a switch button to turn on or off "Attach Modal Dialogs." My switch was turned on. I don't remember ever turning that switch on. I just assumed it was in the default position when I downloaded and started using Tweaks—which it well may have been.
At any rate, turning off "Attach Modal Dialogs" fixed my problem. Finally!
Lastly, I did something I do frequently these days. I asked Google Gemini why someone, anyone, would ever want to "attach a modal dialog to a parent window, so that the modal dialog could not be used. Here is Gemini's reply, but the only sentence that rang true with me was near the end of the Answer, where it said "While modal dialogs are effective for these specific scenarios, some user experience (UX) designers argue that they can be disruptive."
I wholeheartedly agree, except I would have used "stupid" in place of, or in addition to, "disruptive," insofar as to "attaching" a modal dialog to its parent window. I don't see why anybody in his right mind would do such a thing knowingly.
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