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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

Some day there will be a backlash against UX design that fetishizes minimalism, hiding features, and rearranging the deck chairs every six months. And on that day, when the masses go searching for a simple, organic interface that has logical menus and often used functionality exposed by buttons, I like to imagine that Haiku will be waiting there to salve the weary souls of my fellow travers.

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If you don't like modern UIs, I'd recommend Linux today. The main Ubuntu has all the crazy UI changes that I stopped following long time ago, but all the old stuff is still in repos.

For example, this is blackbox 0.60.0 window manager, released around 2000: https://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/screenshots/19788

Almost 20 years later, the "blackbox" package is still around: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/blackbox . You can install it, choose it in the dropdown from the login screen and start using it. Or get a version of Ubuntu with this stuff pre-configured (like xubuntu or lubuntu)

And the best part? You have all the modern software -- browsers, editors, compilers. You can be fully productive and enjoy the stable UI

I'm running bits and pieces of XFCE (via Xubuntu) with XMonad and dmenu :-)

That said, what document viewer do I use when I want to read a PDF? Evince was the standard GTK/Gnome option, but it has hamburgerized everything to a state of being unusable. I recently discovered Atril, but I literally have to search DuckDuckGo for "evince xfce mate" every time I need to remember what it's called.

Both Firefox and Chromium have buried everything in hamburger obfuscation land as well. I could name more.

In short, even with my significantly customized Linux desktop, UX-ism still bites me. Yes I can find alternatives for a lot of things. No, I don't imagine Haiku being productive for me in the near term. But... Haiku does offer something of a complete thesis of how desktop UI should work. That desktop UI is firmly situated in the 1990s, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that is a good thing.

1990s? Nah, we're at 2003/2004 or so, especially considering how many gradients and saturated colors the UI uses.

>That said, what document viewer do I use when I want to read a PDF?

You should give Zathura a try :)

I use it, but it's a big buggy on big/complex PDF.

For those I just use evince.

For PDF, try qpdfview or xpdf (you cannot get any more old-style than that!)

For images, you can always try feh or imagemagic's "display". Or if you want a bit more UI, "geeque" (which is based on gimageview, and still has not changed the design much)

For web browsers, I am afraid you don't have many options if you want to use modern web apps. The web evolves too fast for that. There are still independent browsers (like netsurf), but I gave up on them and just use chrome.

I doubt that Haiku can ever be practical, unless you live completely offline. Even PDF format keeps evolving -- version 2.0 was released in 2017 -- so you cannot keep maintaining versions just for a single OS.

And once you start porting entire programs from different platforms (like LibreOffice), the platform's unique UI traits will slowly disappear. Who will notice the unique kernel if it has POSIX compat layer and GTK?

> I doubt that Haiku can ever be practical, unless you live completely offline. Even PDF format keeps evolving -- version 2.0 was released in 2017 -- so you cannot keep maintaining versions just for a single OS.

There have been platform-independent PDF handling libraries for over a decade now. The Haiku-native PDF viewer, BePDF, uses one internally to handle PDF files. So that's not a problem, really.

> And once you start porting entire programs from different platforms (like LibreOffice), the platform's unique UI traits will slowly disappear. Who will notice the unique kernel if it has POSIX compat layer and GTK?

BeOS was roughly POSIX compliant, and Haiku is even more so.

Yes, we would greatly prefer native apps to ports (we're not all that different from the macOS fanatics in that way), but we don't have the critical mass for that at the moment. But the kernel isn't and was never the truly "unique" bit; it was built to disappear behind the UI, really.

May I suggest Chromium :) I'm only half joking, I find the browser built-in PDF viewer better than most, and convenient because I already have it. The PDF viewer in Firefox seems to work nicely, too.

I recommend replacing dmenu with rofi and checking out zathura for pdfs. With the mupdf backend it supports both pdfs and epubs it has almost no ui configurable vim like keybindings for navigation and search opens instantly and doesn't use much ram.

I always used xpdf and never had an issue, although i use the Motif versions (xpdf4 seems to have switched to Qt).

As for a browser with a normal UI, Firefox comes hamburgerized out of the box but you can easily bring it back to relative sanity by making the menubar always visible and choosing the "compact" mode from the density option.

> Both Firefox and Chromium have buried everything in hamburger obfuscation land as well.

By default, sure. With Firefox it's trivial to permanently enable a traditional menu bar. Though that's not, I suppose, trivially-discoverable.

I've always used xpdf[1].

1: https://www.xpdfreader.com/

I would love to run gnome exactly like it looked before they switched to unity. I know they switched back to gnome but the default shell still looks like belongs on a tablet (which is a great device and all, but my Linux machine is a workstation, not an internet/communication device), with most (if not everything) hidden instead of being showed in menus.

I tried I3WM at one point, but even with the ability to have tabs I just didn't end up with enough pixel space.

MATE

Personally, the linux UI is a little too weird for me to recommend (and I work 100% on linux intentionally!)—things like keybindings using ctrl rather than cmd/super, the insert functionality (I know zero people who intentionally use this), the crazy window management, and the middle-click-means paste hardwired into applications. Stable, sure, but stably very old and difficult to alter to your preferences. MacOS is clearly thought out on a level that hasn’t been seen on linux since, I dunno, window maker?

I loved Window Maker back in the day, but macOS consistency (other flaws not withstanding, macOS is exceptionally consistent) goes a lot deeper than what a window manager can do. The consistency in macOS derives directly from the NeXT APIs.

GNUStep is my grandest regret for Linux. If I could wave a magic wand, all the mindshare spent on the early KDE vs. Gnome wars would have been dedicated to making a first class NeXT-like desktop environment and applications with display Postscript and the whole nine yards.

If that happens, people will most likely switch their desktop environments, not their OSes.

I think we see some of that already, given the persistence of XFCE and Mate.

Still, for the vast majority of people trying Linux, the recommendation is "use Ubuntu" which means "use Gnome." And the number of people trying Linux is relatively small.

If Haiku's implementation was complete, and ran on the range of hardware people want to use, and ran the apps people want (a lot of ifs in that statement), I could see "use Haiku" being a viable option for a lot of folks. I remember non-technical and technical people alike being very excited when encountering BeOS back in the day.

To be clear, I think the most likely future is crappier desktops for the masses. Windows is downright baffling to use with the unified start menu / advertising billboard / hide-the-control-panel interface. With every release, macOS makes at least one regression in terms of stability, security, usability, or performance and gives us some new useless feature to "defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSPleaseJustLetMeWorkInPeace -bool true." And Linux == Ubuntu == Gnome, which is the Philip Glass of interfaces.

I realize I'm ranting now. BeOS was a happy place for me. I just like to fantasize that Haiku could be such a place again. :-)

You can try Enlightenment for non technical users. It's closer to MacOS, but with the full-fat Linux goodies underneath.

To be clear, I don't want to / don't have time to personally support the non-technical users. I'd just wish there were a better default answer than Gnome.

KDE

Plasma 5 is great

As a long time Gnome user... Yeah, where did they go wrong?

The upper left "hot corner"? That's a 1990's concept that violates so much.

The weird way everything changes when you hit that corner? I mean really, I want the launcher to be there all the time. And if it is hidden, why should all my windows shrink and rearrange just because I want to launch a different program? And why would the workspace switcher swing in on the right too? It's so jarring and unnecessary. Neat features, poor implementation. And and and....

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