Hacker News Reader

As a person who has fond memories of Solaris CDE and and Irix, I can sympathize with you.

However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.

The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...

View on HN

What you describe as a "high water mark" is only optimal for a very limited set of use cases. Overlapping windows with toolbars, launchers, and mouse control is on average superior for the total set of use cases especially for non-expert users.

The usability is perfect for me, but I recognise that different use-cases may vary.

It forged my sense of aesthetics, though (alongside BeOS).

""However, overlapping windows and toolbars and launchers and mousey-mouse-mouse for everything ... it's bad usability and very inefficient.""

Citation needed.

""The high water mark for GUI design is something like ion3/ratpoison, xterms running screen/tmux and a "desktop" that you never see ...""

Says who? Again citation needed.

Have you ever used desktop solaris? it was terrible. I'll vouch. resize a window in the file manager, and every single item would need to be reprocessed and the entire system would lock until 1 by 1 they re-spawned. It was infuriating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com