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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

Ironic that a page that looks like this[0] on a 24" monitor is commenting on design.

Coincidentally earlier today, from a distance, I saw a colleague browse that very article (without seeing what it was about), and the white on cyan header-bar immediately reminded me of the good, old X11 window-manager CDE[0][1].

And it made me feel really nostalgic. I actually wanted to, just for one day, switch my laptop over to it. I bet it would have been blazingly fast.

But alas, Ubuntu (and nobody else) seems to ship it any more. Seeing how building and running it from source required me to put some system-services into a insecure configuration, I reluctantly put the project away.

I guess it comes off as no surprise that I on overall hate the reddit redesign and consider it a net negative change w.r.t. usability. I generally dislike how "modern" design things they make things better by taking away options and removing features.

The "old" reddit gave you full overview of what was going on with all your activity in exactly 2 clicks. Super neat. Super efficient.

The new ... I don't even know. I'm guessing much more than 10. And it involves scrolling and modal dialogues too. Fuck it.

May the old layout remain an option for as long as I keep bother using the site.

[0] https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/cdesktopenv/screenshots/CDE-... [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

If you want a fast window manager try ratpoison (similar idea to GNU screen), which is widely available. It is really nice to have a window manager that actually manages your windows. If you use GNU screen (or, I assume but have never used, tmux) you can have two terminals sharing the same session for split screen use.

For those needs I've used i3[0] (and lately sway[1]), which both are really nice tiling WMs.

Although sometimes, just sometimes... Having manually tweakable windows and a more complete "desktop environment" makes sense and is just what I need.

For those needs, right now I use Gnome 3. It would be fun trying to replace that with CDE though :)

[0] https://i3wm.org/

[1] http://swaywm.org/ [1]

Actually looks pretty great to me. What do you consider wrong with it?

The image conveys little to no information, yet it takes the whole screen real estate.

I clicked on the link to read the article, not gape at a full screen illustration that adds literally no info! Why would the author want me to scroll 1200 pixels before I can read even the title?

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