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Comment by juancampa | Hacker News Reader

Personal computing won't be truly "personal" until we, the users (not $BIGCO's lead UX designer) get to decide how things look and behave on an individual level

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There's a lot of value in NOT having to make those decisions. Most users don't want to think about how their computer or phone should work—they just want it to work out of the box. That requires sensible defaults and slowly introducing changes to adapt to evolving user behavior.

To point a change I hate, Chrome on mobile now displays tabs as thumbnails instead of stacked like index cards: https://9to5google.com/2019/09/19/chrome-android-tab-grid/ , a change I really dislike.

I really wonder how that's adapting to evolving user behavior...

In the current state of affairs everyone gets what's best for the average user. Not what's best for each individual users.

Edit: actually, everyone gets what monetizes better, which frequently, but not always, is what works best for the avg user

I would argue that in order to prevent users from leaving your platform or from developing a reputation for being a stagnant platform (e.g. Internet Explorer/Edge, Windows, IBM) you need to be sensitive to new trends. Meaning you'll occasionally need to preemptively try new features before you can be sure they're a move in the right direction. Obviously, not everything you try will be a hit but the constant experimentation is key.

Agreed. My point is that in the current state of affairs, 3rd parties dictate how we use our computers. In an ideal world, users should have the option to customize behavior with relative low effort or cost.

The root problem is that software is incredibly expensive to build.

I lived through the days of skinnable apps and I never want to go back there again.

One of Apple's core values is delegating very few choices to the end user. But the choices that are present are generally good.

There is such a thing as too many choices.

I agreed, but what if I don't like the way something works because it doesn't match my mental model or whatever? Why can't I change it? Or why is it prohibitively expensive to do it? The core issue is cost of course.

Agrees in 2003 KDE

You are welcome to build your own browser or computer or whatever! You can even modify an existing open source one.

Personal computing is dying and deciding how the UI looks is definitely one of the lesser issues on this

You can. It’s called Linux.

Free Software.

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