Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

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For me it started with the Ribbon interface, or maybe in the iteration before where they started hiding meny items.

For me this was the starting point.

After or around the same time someone from Gnome (or Red Hat?) realized (at least this is how I remember their marketing) humans think spatially - and used that observation to decide that everytime I click on a folder in Nautilus it should open in a new window. (Yes, it becomes a mess really quick.)

Also the insistence on removing every configuration option.

Same goes for Unity: my best explanation is someone heard Mac OS had great UX and decided to copy it wholesale: Move controls to the left. Change Alt-tab. Introduce dock.

Common for all these "improvements" is that nobody asked us users, and nobody cared to make it easy to go back.

I now have an acquired distrust of ux designers (and I am really happy whenever I meet good ones which thankfully happens often where I work.)

- Ribbon has mostly been fixed now, and is mostly pleasant to use even if the File menu is still jarring.

- Nautilus was fixed in the next major version.

- Unity was never fixed. I hear some people like it but I guess we are a good bunch of old Ubuntu users who cannot stand it. More importantly it is hard for me to see any reason besides arrogance for why there couldn't an option somewhere to get back to normal alt-tab.

The debate about whether a spatial metaphor or a browser metaphor is better for file managers has a long history. The classic Mac OS finder was designed around a spatial metaphor, which is probably what influenced the Gnome developers. Classic Mac OS nostalgics like John Siracusa [0] and John Gruber [1] argue that the spatial metaphor is superior.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2002/11/that_finder_thing

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/2/

I need to read up on the debate, because I'm honestly surprised by it. The "spatial metaphor" in context of a file manager sounds like complete nonsense. I'm actually surprised to see your link [1] list efficiency as a benefit of arranging stuff spatially on the screen, and their explanation doesn't make much sense (doing stuff with muscle memory isn't unique to spatial arrangement of things).

The way I see it, arranging things in space works well when you have enough space to fit these things in; once you have to scroll or zoom, the utility rapidly degrades with the number of excess stuff. On top of that, remembering where things are works when there are couple things. Not when there might be couple thousand.

For comparison, it's worth thinking about two other things human beings seem to understand and employ rather well:

1) Lists. Note that while you may put different lists in different places, you generally don't generally put each item on a separate post-it placed in a different location. List items belong together.

2) Hierarchies. That one is probably biological, and almost as fundamental as understanding 3D space. We inherently grok hierarchies - both abstract and social. We navigate them every day.

Unlike spatial arrangement, hierarchies and lists scale well. And so that's why a filesystem is a hierarchy, and it's usually rendered as either list, or - if you need to see multiple hierarchy levels at the same time - as a tree.

I'm an old Ubuntu user and I love Unity. It's pretty, space efficient, & keyboard friendly. I'm sad to see it was discontinued and don't know what I'm going to eventually switch to.

Isn't Gnome 3 more or less the same?

I at least felt Gnome 3 was about the same only it was possible to configure it.

My plan was to use the Pop OS edition since they actually had put some thought into shortcuts.

Another DE I actually enjoyed despite being initially skeptic was Elementary OS.

After KDE 5 became stable though I've stuck with thatm

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