Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayrag | Hacker News Reader

That's the ugliest GUI I have seen in a while. 1995 was 25 years ago.

https://wiki.trinitydesktop.org/images/4/44/TDE-screen1.png

That could be 2005 KDE actually.

Things like that make me thing this can be arguably the biggest waste of effort of all FOSS development, all because "fear of the new" - Trying to keep the huge monstrosity of Qt3 which EOL was more than 10-15 years ago, the whole DE that was built on it and all of their apps, even developing new ones... Just for the appeal of few people with the nostalgia for that kind of GUIs. One could argue KDE5 is as stable or even more than KDE3 ever was, and less buggy - not even mentioning the ability to replicate that interface with a few clicks and some fiddling.

But whatever makes them happy.

That being said, Cinnamon and MATE were produced because of the "fear of the new". While it has been a while since I've used MATE, Cinnamon is doing fairly well.

It's also worth noting that people have different workflows and tastes. One of the perks of FLOSS is the ability for people to choose what works for them. I would hardly call it a waste of effort because of that.

I'll take predicable over shiny any day. I've not seen an interface that has increased my productivity in decades. I'm not afraid of new things but the best "new" interfaces I've seen are just minor tweaks to what's been working since win95. I'm waiting for something truly unique that's an actual improvement. Until then, I'm still using xfce with all the candy turned off.

Fear of new UIs is justified. The last time anyone did serious usability engineering and published results and methods was Windows 95 (or at least, that was the last round I've seen).

I'm afraid of wasting my time learning totally new interactions that are less useful and get changed again in 1-4 years. I would rather cling to my 'legacy' interactions that keep working for as long as I can, than to keep churning.

I was never a KDE person, but GNOME 2 was getting close to having everything right before GNOME 3 won the race to ruin desktops.

Gnome 2 was nice, but it also lacked serious usability features that were present elsewhere. Windows exposé (overview), a global menu, and window tiling/snapping were just a few.

They could have continued to extend the desktop with these features, but chose to reevaluate the desktop instead. Part of the reevaluation was GTK 3, and part of it was CSS for Shell, I think. I agree it could have been better. I don't agree that the rich choice between DEs (and richness within each) is worse today than it was 15 years ago.

> Gnome 2 was nice, but it also lacked serious usability features that were present elsewhere. Windows exposé (overview), a global menu, and window tiling/snapping were just a few.

I'm fairly certain these were easily available as plugins on Gnome 2 with Compiz.

Gnome 2 had "expose", though you had to run a compositor to use it.

There was a patch for a global menu but IIRC the Gtk developers blocked that feature so it never went anywhere. Does Gnome support a global menu nowadays?

Window snapping was supported as well - many window managers support that for years.

Also note that Gnome 2 allowed you to use any window manager you wanted, so even if Metacity (the default one) didn't do the trick for you, you could use some other window manager (and it wasn't uncommon for people to do that).

My car doesn't require me to learn new pedal placements every year, my steering wheel doesn't randomly turn into a pair of levers, the speedometer doesn't one day decide it's too old school and rearrange itself. I would never put up with random unrequested changes to my car. Or a hammer, or a screwdriver. Why should I put up with random changes to my computer? These are all just tools I use to do my real work.

To be fair, it is very difficult to find car without touch screen today. Or with power switch that physically cuts power to the engine, fuel pump and ignition. Or without GPS tracker...

The underlying tech might be different but the interface is mostly the same. After all you can have a Windows 95-like environment without actually using MS-DOS as your kernel.

It has nothing to do with 1995. Windows 95 was aesthetically conservative but not ugly, unlike KDE3 (which is ugly and NOT conservative).

Except the screenshot is nothing like a KDE 2 default installation looked back in the days. Different colours in taskbar? Nope, was homogeneous in KDE 1/2/3/x (the way it is now is unnecessarily distracting). Taskbar on left and bottom? Nope. There was one the bottom, still is. Dock like macOS? Nope, wasn't there by default.

Also, back in the early days of KDE and GNOME you had applications using all kind of toolkits. A DE providing applications with one sole toolkit (be it Qt or Gtk) was a novel direction in the Linux world.

My thoughts exactly, I understand why people long for the old text UIs, but this sort of thing was never pleasant nor cutting edge. It's like they're aiming at maintaining the first terrible skins people were creating after seeing the Aqua demo and missing the point of it.

Maybe not quite 1995, I’m seeing more of an unholy alchemical mixture of Aqua and Windows 98. Windows 98 was an iteration of Windows 95 which was heavily inspired by NeXTSTEP. Aqua was the theme Apple eventually slapped on the WindowServer that replaced Display PostScript when they renamed Rhapsody née OPENSTEP née NeXTSTEP to Mac OS X.

The long and the short of it is, this is why incest is bad.

This would have been ugly in 1995 too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com