Comment by lproven
5 days ago
> in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu)
For what it's worth, that's the point when your comment jumped the shark. I knew then that this was just a rant.
The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design, as was Win95 in general. If nothing else, the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design:
KDE; GNOME 1/2; MATE; Xfce; QNX Neutrino Photon; Inferno; OS/2 Warp 4; BeOS Tracker; Enlightenment; Moksha; XPde; Fvwm95; IceWM; JWM; Lumina; LXDE; LXQt; Cinnamon; GNOME Flashback; EDE; Budgie; UKUI; Deepin; Aura; FyneDesk.
I could probably find more, but 24 should do for now. Even combining forks, there are over 20.
You may not like it, and that's a legitimate view I am not arguing with, but billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
> the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design
That's where you're wrong. The desktop environments that imitate Win95 elements do it to provide something familiar for their users. The KDE team is not sitting around going, "you know what was designed really well? The Start Menu!" In fact, many of the desktop environments you mention (GNOME Flashback, Cinnamon) were a conservative reaction to the new GNOME 3 design which broke from the Windows aesthetic. The Wikipedia page for Cinnamon, for instance, says it aims to "follow traditional desktop metaphor conventions" and aims for a "gentle learning curve." They're explicitly choosing familiarity over innovation.
> The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design
Not really. It achieves a reasonably clean look, but at the expense of excessively hierarchicalizing programs and documents. GNOME's Activities panel allows you to click "Activities" then click the program you want to run. Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter. On Windows 95, I remember trying to launch a calculator, and clicking Start, then clicking Programs, then clicking Utilities, then clicking Calculator. In 1995, lots of people were complaining about the Start Menu, how clunky it was and how it slowed down common tasks. GNOME 3's approach is better, as is MacOS's Launchpad, as well as lots of other desktop launchers.
> billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
The idea that pervasive ideas are somehow good, just because they're popular, is a well-known logical fallacy called Argumentum ad Populum. The Start Menu was never good. It was just popular. One does not follow from the other.
> Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter.
Most DEs do that today, including KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce (at least in some config), and Windows itself (although that last one does to much including web searches when you do this).
The categories in the start menu have its advantages, that's how I discovered what program exists and does what as a child in a KDE based distro. I fail to see what's wrong with a start menu + this feature you are citing. It does discovery + efficience very well. Gnome 3's Android-like icon grid without categories (from what I recall and from the screenshots I see) seems awful for discoverability seems awful. If you don't know the icon or the name of the program you are looking, the icon grid seems awful (although I recognize keyword search should get you there, but keyword search + the categories that other DE provide seems more useful - and today, it's rare to have deep hierarchies like in win95)
I disagree on all points. I suspect that you lack historical context to this design, and may be too young to thoroughly grasp it. I have read that younger people (millennials and younger) tend not to think in hierarchies and find them complex and difficult.
Tell me, what pre-Windows 95 GUI designs are you familiar with? I don't mean know slightly, I mean know well.