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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

> it lacks well designed high quality GUI applications. If porting to Linux was done easier that could change.

Fundamental to most peoples complaints about desktop Linux applications is the lack of look and feel cohesion across all permutations of distro, desktop, and toolkit.

Wine applications using the Windows APIs look like complete garbage and fit in nowhere. The same would be true of OSX Cocoa apps - they wouldn't mesh well at all, and it would be practically impossible to skin them with toolkit theming.

That, and recent efforts by Gnome and KDE have been producing tons of good new applications with modern GUI. They just aren't all the applications yet.

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The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion. They either use just one app anyway or have them custom written to use their nvidia quadros with whatever UI they like, But the senior execs that need the absolute monster for outlook and facebook will always be well served by the top end macs.

> The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion.

That isn't true at all. I spend all day in a handful of applications and good aesthetics make my day much more enjoyable.

People will never stop complaining about look and feel. It's such a crap, it doesn't matter. How much clothes do you own? Computers are tools to do work and consume information, they don't exist for you to make a statement about your aesthetics opinions.

It's really nice that you feel that way, but I hope to hell I don't need to use software you designed. "Look and feel" and "Aesthetics" are core components of usable computer software, and consistency is the way you enable users to consistently use your software.

Setting aside the purely utilitarian aspect of being required to use a piece of software to do a task or as part of a job, consistency increases efficiency by reducing the amount of time spent understanding the deviations from expectation in the user interface.

To use your clothing analogy, consider this: what would you think if you bought a button up shirt and the buttons were not spaced equally, they were different sizes and colors, and some were on the right, some on the left. It works just as well as a shirt with standard construction, but it takes longer to put on and maybe it doesn't look very good.

There's been a great deal written about how attractive things work better. It isn't crap and it does matter.

Mad props for extending the analogy to make our point. Nice job!

Now I need to find language to complement someone without it sounding like OO programming style.

HN, may I please have a simple +1 or upvote button? Needs to be usable on my smallish screen too.

perhaps a little bit like http://www.fwrd.com/product-comme-des-garcons-shirt-asymmetr... ? haha

Most (married) people are spending more time with their computers than their spouses.

Would you marry an ugly woman? An ugly man?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Beauty is created by the conniving artist. It is 'absorbed' by the user. Not necessarily all beautiful things are useful.

Beautiful software, looks good, is intuitive, doesn't complain and complements the user. Hence software is different from art.

It certainly is! That's why I choose software that I think is beautiful.

I may think a terminal window is beautiful - if I do then I will choose a terminal.

What I won't do is purposefully use user-hostile/ugly software on principle - if there is a better choice I will choose the better choice.

Look and feel is more than just what colour an icon is, it's about how an application flows. Well designed applications enable you to be more productive, they usually also have had someone really think about what the experience should be as well which can help elevate them.

Some drive a utility van. Others a custom hotrod.

This alien concept (to many engineers) of beauty is a large part of makes new apps, especially web applications and SaaS startups, win or lose. Good design elements are the norm now, and expected. Gone are the days where someone would accept an ugly piece of solid software as a MVP. If it doesn't visually look as good as others in the ecosystem, your application is toast no matter how good it is otherwise.

Who'd have thought it? People getting emotional about stuff.

When all software is designed to be consumed by other computers then we can ignore those emotional reactions, for as long as software is consumed by animals it is going to be a vitally important factor.

I think the point is that many "professional" tools have their own aesthetics independent of the rest of the OS. Things like lightroom or movie editing software. For these programs OS skins are not needed.

That's a very good point. That tool, however, should at the very least be internally consistent and pleasant to use.

I don't think that's what the person was saying that I responded to or he wouldn't have made the condescending remark about people using a pro machine to use Outlook and Facebook.

Not 'skins' per se, but even when themed, most (good) professional apps will still use native or native-behaving controls and similar design language to the host OS.

In comparison, Mac apps will look and feel different from Linux or Windows apps, and QT and GTK+ apps will look and feel different from one another or the other two.

Switching between apps, even with heavily customized UI/UX, is consistent on a given platform, and that's what's important. Taking that away will just frustrate users and complicate things overmuch.

But it's even more important than that.

People find it easier to use apps that have a familiar look and feel. That means less training, less troubleshooting, lower operating costs.

Knowing how to copy and paste or which button to click to close a window is negligible when compared to the training required to properly use an ERP or even the most unique features of, say, Excel.

Anyone capable of navigating their way in Outlook can probably navigate their way in Apple's Mail or Thunderbird or Evolution. Anyone familiar with LibreOffice can do the basic stuff in Numbers in minutes.

Now, if you want a Notepad user to become proficient in Vi, that's a whole different story. Gedit, OTOH, is pretty easy.

Vi (or gvim) is too easy by comparison. Making them use emacs would be a whole different story.

That's an apples to oranges comparison. Emacs is an operating system, not a text editor like Vi. ;-)

Visual cohesion makes my day more productive because I spend less time mentally context switching between app philosophies.

Mental context switching is just like high CPU system time, with the same results. I/O is slower, user time processing is slower and much less gets done.

    The "professional" market doesn't care about visual cohesion.

[citation needed]

I think the "visual cohesion" of Sketch[1] is a big factor in the success it is seeing. The tagline is "Professional digital design for Mac" (emphasis mine).

[1] https://www.sketchapp.com

Top end macs? Based on the latest MBP offerings, I think Apple has forgotten what that is.

Unless your senior exec is carrying around his Mac Pro from his desk. That's a nice piece of hardware--without even needing USB-C and new dongles.

I suppose it's useful when almost everything works, but that one thing that you absolutely need isn't otherwise available.

This is my problem. Audio editing on Linux is a joke. For everything else I do, Linux can get me there. So I need a Mac or a PC as an audio editor? Might as well just get a Mac or a PC. I'll have to maintain it anyway, and it can do everything Linux can do, plus probably be better supported.

Would like to point out, unless you are running on non-x86 hardware or a tablet, the term pc still applies to linux based hardware.

It technically also applies to Macs -- but in practice it means Windows-based desktops and laptops.

What about video editing? I mean, I can live with Audacity for my basic needs, but I can't find anything simple as iMovie. Or should I just bite the bullet and learn Blender? Does it have preset screen transitions and stuff like that?

Have you tried openshot[1]? I haven't played much with it recently, but when it came out it was the most stable, simple video editor for linux.

[1] http://openshot.org/

No. Wow, a lot of great suggestions here. I need to test stuff now :)

I've had great success with Kdenlive. It's not as simple as iMovie, but it isn't too hard to get started.

Blender is 3d modeling and animation, vastly divergent from video editing with kdenlive / openshot / etc.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Blender actually contains a non-linear video editor as well.

And it's probably one of the nicer options if/when you finally "get it". But the learning curve is tough.

It's the least bad NLE for Linux. The UI is awful, but it's stable and has a reasonable feature set.

Blender probably contains a full copy of Blender inside itself too. That program is nuts.

I was completely lost when I tried to use it. I wasn't even sure I found the NLE section of the program.

Shotcut, Kdenlive, Blender (overdrop)

Blender's Video Sequence Editor just has a couple of quirks to get past. It is not deeply mysterious.

Like: the VSE viewer and the Image viewer are similar but distinct; that can be confusing. And OpenGL acceleration on a Scene strip shows a 3D model rendition that is not (in general) the same as the rendered output of the Scene.

If you want to get fancy with the compositor + VSE, again there are just a couple of quirks but the learning curve is merely steep, not long.

There's also Flowblade from Finland: http://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/

I'm using OpenShot, it's perfectly serviceable, particularly the new 2.x version. There's also LightWorks and many other that works really well.

Have you tried DaVinci Resolve? Last I checked it had a native Linux version. Unfortunately I don't think the Linux version is available for free (unlike the Windows and Mac versions).

What about Ardour?

I've seen a friend use it for some basic multitrack stuff - basically recording his band live whilst practising. But, it is not a patch on something like Reaper.

You're mistaken, Ardour is comparable to ProTools, Reaper and similar DAW. It's also compatible with VST plugins, etc.

It's the same with RAW image conversion software used for photography. I'd dump OSX on my MBP and never look back if Capture One or DxO Optics ran on Linux.

The open source alternatives are no where near as fast, they lag far behind supporting new cameras, their interfaces are ugly and difficult to use, etc.

Using KDE the theme is pretty similar even for GTK apps.

If you theme them, then they look quite a bit less terrible.

There is a clearlooks theme that makes things quite a bit more bareable.

Quick googling "material theme gtk" returns this which looks very nice actually https://github.com/nana-4/Flat-Plat

oh no. Another "flat design" theme. A button must be distinguishable from other design elements in my opinion. I hope this fad goes away soon, it's even more annoying than the glossy look or skeuomorphs.

Nothing is more annoying than skeumorphs. :)

It should be distinguishable, not just from the theme. A good UX/UI design will make that clear regardless.

Paper (https://snwh.org/paper/theme) is a particularly great theme for the Gnome desktop (it also works with Budgie, Pantheon, and Unity, but I haven't tried it on any of those). The author's icon set is also pretty nice.

That really is quite nice. Looks great in Elementary.

Wow! Definitely one of the best designs I've seen in the OSS world. Finally someone with actual design chops has risen the bar!

It lacks contrast. The fonts in particular are too thin and hard to read for my liking.

+1 here.

Ubuntu or a desktop that only uses Plasma apps may fit the bill. Plasma looks great but has a limited ecosystem. Ubuntu looks ok, but has a wider ecosystem.

What's most amusing to me is that I spend a considerable amount of time with Homebrew and others trying to make my MBP more Linux-like besides running Linux under Parallels. Getting Mac GUI binaries to run on [insert god-like desktop of your choice] would be very nice for the required closed course apps I must use. Developing for iOS (because I must) in Linux would be great. Otherwise, this feels like a step backwards.

-Mr. Fully Open Source Software

I think a better way to handle this is to show people how to use the command line. That does have a cohesive look and feel and is generally very well behaved compared to nearly anything else.

Unfortunately that seems to scare people away so everyone hacks GUIs together to keep them from running and that's how we got to where we are now.

Doubtful.

I like text interfaces as much as the next nerd, but most people want to interact with a computer intuitively: see a thing and interact with that thing.

In other words, "point and click". (Or just "point" if it's a touchscreen.)

My 2 year old doesn't know the first thing about computers, but he'll jab his finger at the screen when he sees something he likes.

I don't know, language seems fairly intuitive but it's not in style. The only people who really struggle with it are illiterate. (ex: very young children) In those situations you really do need a special UI that will be frustrating for normal people.

That's a strong criticizm. There are a lot of equally valid linguistic ways to view the contents of a directory. But only one grammatical and lexical way to command the computer to do it with text.

'Open folder', 'show contents', 'see items', why does 'ls' make more sense? It certainly has nothing to do with literacy.

The same can be said for GUIs though, look at how different mobile GUIs and desktop GUIs are. It's actually a real problem that people think their GUI is intuitive, they never end up documenting it. CLI app authors know this and are forced to face reality and at least write usage text.

GUI tends to be more discoverable - in the worst case you can simply click through all the menus and see what all the available commands are. That tends not to be the case with a CLI - the man page requires a context switch and tends to go on for dozens of pages, some programs have good '--help' output but many do not.

Have fun editing HDR footage or cutting samples on the command line. Don't get me wrong, but MacOS is exactly my platform of choice because I can have a sane POSIX command line as well as a color managed display and high resolution, low latency multichannel audio on the very same computer and can switch effortlessly.

You're actually manipulating graphical data though, in that situation a GUI makes a lot of sense. Using a GUI for editing E-mail or joining a WI-FI network is silly, just like it is for most things people do with computers.

No, it's not. GUIs give amazingly good discovery, when compared to CLIs. Most people use computers as simple tools. They want it to be easy to figure out how to do what they want, not to have to look it up or work it out. CLIs are great for power users, but they suck for casual users - and "most things people do with computers" are casual usage.

Are you truly managing email through a command line interface? Or are you using something like Pine? Isn't Pine just a GUI created out of characters instead of graphics? True GUI interfaces compared to ncurses type solutions offer way more fidelity and power.

nmh FTW!

>Using a GUI for editing E-mail or joining a WI-FI network is silly, just like it is for most things people do with computers.

Englebart? Sutherland? Kay? Idiots! Fifty years of academic and industrial research into Human Computer Interaction? Arrant nonsense. Let's blow it all off and do your thing. What could possibly go wrong? [0]

[0] http://gandre.ws/blog/blog/2015/04/07/why-the-command-line-i...

I think one of the big reasons that many dev tools are command line programs is that command line interfaces are just easier to code, even if you are writing all the parsing logic from scratch. You don't have to worry about designing a layout, hooking logic up across a UI thread, wrestling with a widget library, etc.

On UNIX, the Windows, macOS culture is to provide GUIs for developer tools even if they might look a bit ugly.

> I think a better way to handle this is to show people how to use the command line. That does have a cohesive look and feel and is generally very well behaved compared to nearly anything else.

Not really. CLIs can be terribly inconsistent look and feel, even within the same tool (see git), which makes their lack of discoverability even more painful.

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