[ENHANCEMENT] UI Improvements

[marticliment]

trafficstars

Please confirm these before moving forward

• [X] I have searched for my feature proposal and have not found a work-in-progress/duplicate/resolved/discarded issue.
• [X] This improvement refers to an existing feature. If you want to suggest a new feature, please use this template
• [X] This improvement is not a bug. If you want to report a bug, please use this template

Describe the improvement

Posted by @redactedscribe on #1934

Please dont ruin this software. The new UI is terrible.

3. annoying UI, the buttons on the side are annoying compared to old style

I think the new UI is visually better, but it isn't as ergonomic as v2, in particular when the window isn't kept reasonably small so that the left sidebar remains closer to the rest of the UI. Even still, there is more mouse distance travelled between the common button presses than before.

The main issue: The 3 main buttons "Discover Packages", "Software Updates", and "Installed Packages" are no longer positioned horizontally at the top, and therefore further away from the rest of the buttons which are commonly pressed. Moving them back to their original positions and leaving the sidebar for uncommonly used features would be better in my opinion.

"Package Bundles": This button could remain in the sidebar as it's unlikely that it'll be used on a regularly basis to create bundles, but rather sporadically.

Some ideas: If you want to populate the now less utilised sidebar (should the 3 buttons move back to the middle top), adding some primarily UI info elements to it could be useful:

• Seeing the badge (number of updates) on the "Installed Packages" button is nice, and it could remain on the button even if moved, but the badge count could also be represented as a button / tile in the sidebar as a more visually noticeable element.
• Could also have a button / tile simply showing the number of installed packages at all times. Not sure how useful that is, but you get the idea.
• Could remove the duplicated "Help" button from the horizontal row of buttons on every tab page, and place it in the sidebar instead. Then having it in the sidebar's "..." more menu wouldn't be necessary either.
• Etc...

I still think a couple UI suggestions listed here & here remain worth implementing @marticliment (especially the check-for-updates button: UI prominence and potentially its colour).

2. buggy:

https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI/issues/1911

1. loads slower

As for the program loading slower, it probably does. Thankfully I have a lot of memory and am able to keep the program running in the background so load times aren't an issue here. Operation of the program once running is responsive. I didn't check, but my first impression of v3 was that it is using more memory than v2, but this is (unfortunately) quite normal these days.

Describe how this improvement could help users.

[redactedscribe]

Related: https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI/issues/1958