Comment by bmurphy1976

4 days ago

I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.

94 comments

bmurphy1976

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Sohcahtoa82  4 days ago

> If you like bland modern design, great,

I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?

EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.

  • Zigurd  4 days ago

    Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.

    They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

    Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.

    • lelanthran  4 days ago

      > I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

      I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:

      - Lets find the scrollbar

      - Guess which window has focus

      - (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.

      - How do I find the file that just downloaded?

      23 replies →

    • thesuitonym  4 days ago

      Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.

    • Mikhail_Edoshin  3 days ago

      An interesting study, will try to find it, thanks. I've been thinking about "naming things" and it seems the common idea of "good naming" is pretty superficial. I myself would point to MOV in assembly, which is actually COPY, but this never was an issue.

      What actually matters is that:

      - Names express not only differences, but also similarities.

      - Names cannot be totally random; they must have certain pre-baked relations vaguely similar to their relations in the model. But they do not need to be too good. Invented or repurposed names in moderations are perfectly fine.

      - The most important thing in naming is the overall consistency. But when the system changes you need more names and the consistency suffers. After a few rounds it gets too bad and you need to redo the whole system. This us why naming is hard.

      - Certain physical properties matter, such as equal length.

      - Names are very similar to pictograms or hieroglyphs.

    • pbhjpbhj  3 days ago

      >command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.

          cat - con-cat-enates
    sed - is a stream editor
    grep - global regex print

      Not sure you picked the best examples. But trying to think of examples where the name is not related to the function ... ag, unless you're the sort of person to use ag, has an obscure name.

      3 replies →

    • red_admiral  3 days ago

      My experience is that 'ls' and the like are fine once you've used them a few times. 'list-files' would just be more typing, and even with tab completion there's probably other things to list so muscle memory would end up at [l] [tab] [f] [tab] or something like that.

      The one that constantly trips me up is 'which' vs 'where' but that's for a different reason.

      ('Get-ChildItem' is an abomination.)

      2 replies →

    • AlienRobot  4 days ago

      That has nothing to do with discoverability. Discoverability isn't about "guessing" it's about being able to see it.

      Discoverability in CLI is --help. But you can't discover you have to use --help. So CLI is always fundamentally worse than GUI.

      5 replies →

  • roughly  4 days ago

    Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.

    This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.

    (Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)

  • VCFundedGenYer  4 days ago

    > Discoverability? Who needs it?

    Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.

    • thwarted  4 days ago

      I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.

  • pkulak  4 days ago

    > I don't know why anybody would.

    Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.

    • Loquebantur  4 days ago

      The idea of "one size fits all" was never true.

      Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.

    • necovek  4 days ago

      All the multimeters I've seen had pretty bog standard markings for AC and DC resistance, voltage and current. While not an electrician myself, I think one would be pretty annoyed if a "designer" invented new graphics for alternating current or resistance. They might even gotten hurt or damaged some equipment.

      So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.

    • Uncle_Brumpus  4 days ago

      Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo

      If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.

      The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.

      4 replies →

  • prmph  4 days ago

    Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.

    FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.

    None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.

    • hotsauceror  4 days ago

      I fully agree with this take. I don't think of a monitor / desktop as a tool that I interact with like I would a hammer; there is nothing intuitive about "open this high-definition representation of a day planner by clicking a button with your thumb on this little round plastic box somewhere else." I simply do not understand the appeal of skeumorphism, frankly I think these things look tacky but that is just my preference.

      My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.

  • GuB-42  4 days ago

    The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.

    Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.

    Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.

    To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.

  • OroPla  4 days ago

    > Discoverability? Who needs it?

    It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.

    I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.

  • sleepybrett  4 days ago

    I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).

  • roarcher  4 days ago

    Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.

  • manoDev  4 days ago

    These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.

  • Fr0styMatt88  4 days ago

    Ha I feel like modern interior design and apartment design does exactly the same thing these days. Everything looks the same kind of bland.

  • serf  3 days ago

    a single color QT/mosaic interface is the definition of bland jurassic park UI and it's refreshing to use every after getting stuck dealing with modern machines and interfaces.

pkulak  4 days ago

As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.

anonzzzies  4 days ago

I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.

  • lelanthran  4 days ago

    > Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.

    Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(

    Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.

    • seba_dos1  4 days ago

      I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)

      2 replies →

Gualdrapo  4 days ago

Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.

  • BirAdam  3 days ago

    EFL is super lightweight, but it also offers more than does GTK. It'd be a complex rewrite.

Beijinger  4 days ago

What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)

andai  4 days ago

>if you like bland, that should be an option too

That's the main thing we lost, isn't it? Options. I remember playing with so many different themes back in the day.

0xbadcafebee  4 days ago

I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.

  • TFNA  4 days ago

    I installed Debian with KDE on a couple of non-techy relatives' mid-range laptops around Covid, and in spite of KDE being notorious for its abundance of features, neither of those relatives have ever complained about slowness or lag. That era seems far in the past now.

  • hobo123  3 days ago

    Huh? Mate (formerly known as Gnome 2) is pretty functional and almost as lightweight as Xfce.

    Cinnamon (comes with Linux Mint) is a modern refresh that's very functional and not at all heavy or slow.

    If you don't want a desktop, I guess there are many good WMs to choose from.

  • mahboi  4 days ago

    Kinda same, I want there to be something reasonable that 99% of people can agree on. It shouldn't be that hard. Things seemed fine back with Gnome2, then, everything changed when the

haolez  4 days ago

I feel that a desktop like this would just occupy parts of my cognition for no good reason. Not sure.