Enhancement: Turn “Reduce Motion” into an adjustable animation speed slider

[lobre]

Problem

The current “Reduce Motion” setting is a simple on/off toggle:

Reduce Motion Disable animations in the window manager and some other interface elements.

This is useful for users who want a completely animation-free experience — it makes the desktop feel lighter and more responsive.

However, the binary nature of this option can be limiting. With “Reduce Motion” enabled, certain transitions feel abrupt or even confusing. For example:

• When switching workspaces, the horizontal sliding animation helps visually convey that desktops are arranged side by side. Without it, the transition feels disorienting.
• The Multitasking View feels strange when entered with no transition — it’s meant to morph smoothly into a “top-down” overview, but with animations fully disabled, it feels like a jarring teleportation.

At the same time, keeping animations fully on can make the experience feel slower for users who prefer a snappier, more immediate desktop. Personally, I enjoy when the desktop feels fast and responsive — like I can move instantly between actions — but not at the cost of losing all spatial context.

Proposal

Transform the current “Reduce Motion” toggle into a slider that controls animation speed or intensity instead of a binary on/off switch.

Concept:

• A range from “No motion” (far left) to “Full motion” (far right).
• Intermediate positions could gradually increase animation speed rather than disabling animations entirely.
• This would let users fine-tune the balance between responsiveness and visual continuity.

Example behavior:

• Far left → disables all animations (current behavior).
• Middle → keeps short, snappy transitions.
• Far right → full default animations, as currently implemented.

Prior Art (Optional)

No response

[danirabbit]

There's a freedesktop setting being merged for this and it is still a binary choice to reduce motion or not. It's definitely in our interest to follow freedesktop here so I don't think we can introduce multiple motion options. But what we can do instead is provide simpler animations or simply keep animations in the places they would still make sense even with reduce motion enabled

[lobre]

I suppose you are talking about this:

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1840

You are right, standardisation seems more important.

Then, I guess the path forward for a snappy pantheon would be to make sure that "Reduce Motion" works and feels great.

I see it is called "reduced" and not "turned off" motions. What would be the strategy to define what can keep a slight animation and what cannot? I see that the compositor does not seem to have any animations when "Reduce Motion" is enabled, while Slingshot still has some, for example.

I currently have two problems with "Reduce Motion":

• Multitasking view feels really weird when activated, as stated above. Don't know if it could still benefit from having a small, lightweight animation just to better understand what happens.
• Trackpad gestures are really finicky in that mode, especially to switch workspaces or trigger the multitasking view. I have a hard time telling if it is a bug or a bad adjustment.

As everything is butter smooth in elementary, it is hard to imagine what "Reduce Motion" could mean in terms of ux, especially if the idea is to "to avoid discomfort for people with vestibular motion disorders".

For example, can we consider that faster animations equal reduced motions? I guess no.

Maybe skipping the beginning or end of an animation? I have no idea what it would be like, but to take the multitasking example again, the user could imagine where the things come from spatially if there was just the end of the regular animation (this is pure speculation, as I cannot properly imagine the effect).

If you ask me today, enabling "Reduce Motion" kind of makes me feel that the desktop is a bit broken.

[danirabbit]

Yeah it's worth probably seeing how other desktops handle this.

I think in the case of multitouch gestures that shouldn't be considered an animation since it's behaving more like a slider or scroll bar. I believe Adwaita handles gestures this way as well. It's worth opening an issue report for this specifically in gala I think

[lobre]

Let me make sure I understand correctly:

You mean that even when the "Reduce Motion" toggle is enabled, multitouch gestures (like swiping between workspaces) should behave more like a slider (continuously tracking your gesture and updating the interface based on your finger position) rather than being treated as an animation.

In contrast, animations would refer to transitions that simply play out automatically after a discrete event, rather than following real-time input.

So if that’s the case, I should probably open an issue in Gala to report that with "Reduce Motion" enabled, multitouch gestures currently feel broken, whereas ideally they should still function smoothly "as a slider." In other words, keyboard shortcuts would have animations disabled, but gestures should remain interactive and fluid.

Am I understanding you correctly?

[danirabbit]

@lobre yes exactly!

[lobre]

I have created an issue on the Gala repo to track the problem of multitouch gestures. I don't know if there is anything special to do here then.

I guess now the whole deal is what you stated earlier:

But what we can do instead is provide simpler animations or simply keep animations in the places they would still make sense even with reduce motion enabled

Not sure how this should be tracked.