Hacker News Reader

Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

I'm born in the 80s so it's not totally objective, but I know there's something wrong when I boot up a win95 box and I don't miss 99% of so called innovation regarding UI.

View on HN

I doubt it's nostalgia, even though i m old too. It's just a lot more efficent and faster to use, mouse and keyboard-wise. I often think to roll back to my windows 7 as a more sane desktop environment.

Some of the biggest offenses i 've seen are google's web apps. Total loss of hierarchy and replacement with elusive self-hiding buttons, even when it's clear from their use case that they should never have been hamburgerized. I 'm pretty sure, even in mobile, they are making the UX worse.

I'm mystified every time I try to find my contacts from Gmail. I understand that it's a separate app (I think), but did anyone stop and think that the two apps might warrant a bit tighter coupling (at least in menu placement)?

Google will use three different button schemes in a single app, nobody does product there.

KDE or plasma whatever its name, is basically unchanged from 1995 UI philosophy. The closest we can have today in 2019.

I run XFCE (via Xubuntu) on my home desktop for the same reason. The lightness is a bonus.

Going off on a tangent, but KDE is lighter than XFCE these days.

Or at least https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-... has been making the rounds.

Very interesting news both regarding KDE perf and XFCE team shrink. I hope they can get some workforce.

Thanks, I hadn't seen that. That's quite interesting. I'd ended up settling on XFCE aound the time of the Gnome 2 / Gnome 3 / Unity schism. At the time, XFCE had felt a bit snappier than KDE. I've lately been thinking about giving KDE a try again, so this is good to know.

Considering that Windows 95 powered many people's first exposure to computers, they clearly had to put a lot of thought into user experience. And they did a fantastic job.

I definitely believe almost everything since has been "innovation" for the sake of "progress", regardless of whether it was really better or not. Usually novel but worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com