Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

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> Well that and the fact that tech website users basically complain about every UI change. Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience.

.... Yeah, that's pretty much true, and for very good reason. Every time an interface changes, it forces people to stop using the system and figure out the new interface. As such, while it is possible to make changes that are beneficial enough to justify the cost, UI changes are very expensive and you'd better have a very good reason to justify breaking everyone's workflow. And by that standard, yes; XFCE is nearly perfect. It's been on the 4.x series since 2003, and going by screenshots I strongly suspect that even a user from XFCE 3.x would find the very latest version to be a drop-in replacement. And it does have decent quality, which combined with its general "get out of the way and let me work" vibe and 20 years of continuity makes it easily one of the best options available.

It doesn't look like macOS 11's new UI is going to need macOS 10 users to "stop and figure out" the interface in the way switching from macOS 10 to Xfce (or vice-versa) would. The buttons aren't all moving around to strange places. The functionality isn't materially changing. What they're changing is the design language, not the fundamental UX.

Well, as an occasional MacOS user, it still pisses me off when I discover that maximize button is in fact full screen button.

Yeah, except it is NOT a "maximize" button and never was. macOS just doesn't do maximized apps the way Windows and some Linux DEs do.

Before Yosemite the green button worked like a maximize button, and you had a separate fullscreen button on the other side. Now you need to ⌥-click the green button to maximize.

No, that's not what it does on macOS. It simply makes the window larger and has done that ever since it was introduced, I believe. (I think for many document-based apps this just means to make the window taller, for example.)

IIRC the green button was "zoom", meaning it should adapt the window size to the window content, which in most of the cases resulted with maximizing.

I know, but it as close to maximize as it gets. That's not my point, but that the behavior has changed dramatically.

I've been a full-time Mac user for nearly 20 years and I'm kind of with jablan here. :)

And it's still fundamentally flawed as ever. (since the suggested behavior in the HIG presumes contextual intent is something that's generally clear or even decidable from the content.)

As far as I know, that part of the UX will remain consistent with macOS Big Sur, and it'll still piss you off. :)

(You can hold down Option and use the green button as its old "Zoom" function, but I think there should be a system preference to reverse that so it's zoom by default and you hold down Option to go into full screen.)

I don't know about you, but my brain is pretty plastic. My workflow isn't so sacred that I'm not at least willing to consider that there are other designs that I may find enjoyable or even more efficient to use.

I don't think for some it is about plasticity, but really to embrace change on one's own schedule. That's my preference and it's a little piece of freedom. I did this recently moving from GNOME to XFCE, to experiment with what XFCE offers specifically with memory consumption, usability, etc. and after some bumps, I am rather happy.

Optimizing things where the primary focus of attention is what I am looking at mostly is more relevant to me than a shifting design languages. But, I know others will have different views on this and this is based on what people are actually happy with.

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