Comment by darubedarob

5 days ago

Saw a fascinating talk on gui and ui development today, lamenting the stagnation at M$ and apple when it comes to desktop computing (including browsing).

" there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline" and that sentence rings like a bell of all the problems.

Can you ring the same bell at the GTK and GNOME folks? The GTK4 thing with hamburger menus that replace everything is just a mess. I stumbled on nemo the other day while looking for nautilus. That… was a breath of fresh air: compact UI, menus, features, etc.

It’s painful seeing FOSS making some of the same mistakes as corporations

  • Yes, I don't like all of that stuff either. Too many FOSS does make those and other same mistakes; there is much more than just that. There are a few people that try to improve some aspects of them, but leave other the same, and sometimes it is not really an improvement (although sometimes it is a matter of opinion).

    But, I mostly use command-line programs and write my own programs (and sometimes use older DOS programs, even though I have Linux), without emoji and without LLM, and also avoiding Unicode when I can, and without a desktop environment, etc.

"... there simply is nothing for open source to copy but ux-decline ..."

I beg to differ. Tiling window managers like ion, ratpoison, dwm, et. al, and the simple and elegant tooling that accompany them are a wonderful example of UI innovation.

UI/UX designers who copy, and iterate on, infantile eye candy have only themselves to blame.