The end of the nice GTK button
blog.brixit.nl
blog.brixit.nl
Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something.
Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up".
And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well.
Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues?
Things like "Hide cursor while typing" in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad.
Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow.
I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I've been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there's less consideration of almost everything.
The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks.
On Windows, the first letter merely makes the prompt appear, but does not yet type into the prompt. In fact, it will only start feeding letters into the prompt once the little prompt-appearing-animation has finished. If I just start typing my password, it will eat the first three or four letters. So I hit enter, wait for the animation to finish, and only then start typing.
That's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do. It just goes to show the attention to detail that makes a UI feel fluid and frictionless.
Congratulations! You were able to recognize that it's a _login screen_ without seeing that there's a hidden password field.
The first time I booted to Gnome I waited damn near ten minutes for it to tell me it's ready for my login before I decided to start typing things to see if it was stuck.
It's _not_ intuitive.
CLion seems to be quite excellent at recording and replaying everything, including stuff I type while the auto-completion is loading. Plus it has a really fast key to screen loop.
Although I agree this is annoying, to be completely fair, it doesn't suggest that you should start typing your password immediately.
You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to.
Arguably, you have been 'taught' or you have inferred yourself that you should expect a sleeping system to immediately accept your keypresses as a password, which although reasonable is not necessarily a good practice.
For example - I have two computers connected to the same keyboard, one is indeed Gnome, the other Windows. I have twice now typed my password into what I thought was my sleeping Gnome system, hit enter, only to have to apologise to someone on Teams because I accidentally sent them my password because my keyboard was sending my keypresses to the Windows PC.
The worst of which are dropdowns, lists or menus that inserts new items right over where your mouse is so that you accidentally click on the wrong thing.
All browsers do this for the dropdown that appears when typing in the URL bar. I type a few letters, see the site I want is 3 down in the dropdown, hit the down arrow three times and press enter, only to find that the item changed as I was hitting the down arrow.
And don't get me started on user elements that have a new position in the menu system for every release, if they even have a decent menu system.
Everything that reaches the screen should remain FIXED in place unless moved //by the user//.
This might happen E.G. because something was loading and now gets a resize event; so some list suddenly changes the position of everything rather than force the user to click something else to resize the misbehaving entry. (Scrolling could also do this, if it's based on a distinct UI element that is not 'activate the list'.)
I think of this frequently when I interact with bad offenders, Like Waze on my phone. I have like 2 addresses starred in addition to the home and work slots. It should PIN those, in a fixed (probably alphabetical) order under the home and work slots. If it's not going to do that for starred items (maybe I have 300 addresses?) it should give me a different widget to pin them.
The UI must update sooner than some underlying state; this bites me multiple times a day.
How hard is it just to grep The list of local apps on a device entirely before showing me the results? Why on earth does it even take a notable amount of time?
I don’t say this lightly when I say someone should be fired. Everyone on every level of every who let this exist should be blackballed by the entire industry. Managers, QA. Someone should’ve spoken up. It’s an absolute moral failure.
I definitely agree with this, and I like your use of the word disrespect. I think the younger generation has encroached onto the sanctity of "the platform", if you will, and now us old timers are suffering. I time myself for my actions every day since I started noticing these despicable UI trends, and on average I waste about 2-3 hours a week trying to discover what behaviors work with flat UI applications.
But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today.
Coming from that era, I strongly disagree. While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era and that one just got used to the broken design of the UIs of that era/platform.
While usually understanding the UI even in W2K, I don't think that the dumbing down of UI (and reducing palette/layers adds to that) for the dumb users is necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day I am also a dumb user.
Actually using GTK3 for a while now and moving to GTK4 however might also trick me to not notice a downgrade in discoverability, so in that particular instance I might get tricked by getting used to a certain design language even if they simplify it to the point of actually decreasing UX for users that are unfamiliar with GTK compared to GTK3.
Because that‘s what you are accustomed to.
There is one good thing I could think of about the loss of consistency across applications: the underlying operating system matters less when the application works the same across platforms. Ironically this may help with the adoption of desktop Linux; Chrome, Slack, Zoom, and VSCode generally work the same. To paraphrase, this fulfills Netscape's vision in the mid-1990's of reducing the operating system to a bunch of device drivers.
One would think that Microsoft and Apple don't want Windows and macOS to be reduced to a bunch of device drivers. Then again, perhaps Microsoft's and Apple's business models don't require the long-time maintenance of these desktop-oriented operating systems. Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office and Azure, and Apple makes a lot more money from the iOS platform than from the Mac.
Still, I personally lament the rise and triumph of the siloed app, and the decline of platforms that promoted UI/UX consistency through a set of standard human interface guidelines, and I feel personal computing is generally getting worse instead of better.
Win32: Win32, Windows Forms, WPF, MAUI, UWP, WTL, WinUI, MFC and probably more
Gtk: Gtk+, Gtk2+, Gtk3+, Gtk4
Qt: Qt1, Qt2, Qt3, Qt4, Qt5, Qt6
With Gtk and their HIG most stuff looks decent and usable. Windows? Nobody cares about the HIG. Micrsoft provides more toolkits than I know. And a lot developers just do whatever they want on Windows. Or worse, they use Electron. Microsoft Teams is the worst "application" in this regard.
By the way:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
The font rendering issue. I recommend ignoring the blaming (users) and ignoring (developers) on both sides and instead reading the details involved. Looks like mostly intended and used during development on HiDPI-Displays and they need people experienced in font drawing matters. Some fixes are landing already. Taking into account how much effort was put in Harfbuzz, Freetype, Pango and Cairo I think they can only learn from this - being more careful and keeping backward compatible solutions alongside until the new stuff is working fine for all.
Here's another one: "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone"
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-different...
The whole point of the settings app shown in the OP's screenshots is to quickly find the relevant section in the sidebar. But even before the great design madness of 2012, designers have started to remove icon colors everywhere. (Except for app icons, where Google and Apple have now removed shapes instead, sigh.)
From the sidelines, it doesn't look like the trend is reversing in GNOME land. https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241
Reminds me of https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/927/386/c4d...
On Win10 I'm getting regular delays in keypresses and just enough lag when typing to be noticeable.
I've been trying plugging in two USB keyboards as a poor man's split keyboard, and the amount of software (looking at you IntelliJ in particular) that does something that means the characters arrive out of order when typing is hugely frustrating.
Every time I bump into these interaction issues, my stomach churns a little bit.
Right now, Windows 11 is especially bad because they have new and old code working side by side. It'll take a few years for Microsoft to rewrite enough of the Shell so everything will be consistent again.
Because it is trying to be all things to all people: including supporting sponsored content and integrating with any fancy new/copied idea that the company is pushing (which may be quietly deprecated in the next major revision, but the hooks left adding abstraction load to everything else so that the few who actually found it useful don't complain).
Also worth noting that keyboards do still have function keys. In fact I use F2 as my `tmux` control prefix. :)
Truly its crazy making.
Since Windows 7 (or 8, I can't remember) and the "Metro" style apps, in the Control Panel in particular one of the controls (IIRC it was something like the 'show/hide icons in task tray'), that was previously a button, became a "hyperlink", essentially clickable text. Clickable text that was the same colour as unclickable text. What. The. **
I understand that this would annoy designers. But they're annoying me so I think this is fair.
My go-to example at the moment is Figma, which is a design tool that I find almost impossible to use because it has so many hidden, unexplained "features" in its UI. If I accidentally brush the keyboard I have to quit the application and restart because I have no idea how to get back to the state I was in.
Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?
Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design patterns. Looks over functionality.
Hamburger menu is just peak modern menus. Lazy.
But instead of being an ordinary honest menu where half the items has their defined places on each OS and the rest can be found easily it is a jumbled mess.
And since there are no standards as for where to put things in a hamburger menu they can move around between each release of the application.
And the only reason to use it instead of an honest menu is because Chrome does it so therefore it must be a good idea. Period.
It is somewhat ironic that even as desktop screens get larger and larger applications has to "maximize real screen estate" by removing menus, while simultaneously working to remove real screen space improvements like the option of Tree Style Tabs on Firefox (yes, it kind of works and it is still awesome but it get harder and harder by the year).
Old applications that actually follow the platform UX and accessibility guidelines
This does not seem to be the case, is it? I recently, accidentally hit Win+term+Enter into a Windows VM (intending it to hit the Linux host machine) and was surprised when a terminal popped up.
The arguably worst offender in MacOS these days is the emoji picker. Press ctrl+cmd+space, and depending on how recently you opened it, it can take some hundreds of milliseconds to open (on an m1). All while eating your keypresses.
How can a grid of unicode characters take 500-1000ms to display on a machine with an m1, 16GB of memory and a blazing fast NVME disk?
They said the same thing about my parents dog which died last year.
> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action.
This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickability, the current status), but in many cases nothing was added to supplant the loss of those visual cues, so now it is just a label (or a label in a white or grey box) and there is no way of knowing if it is clickable or its current status.
Exactly this. I often help others use computers and phones. In the old days it was easy to see what could be clicked. Now input and output look the same. It makes it harder to use.
In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at.
Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/
I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about as long, and regular FOSS users since the late 90s. Like most other designer/developers I know— there are way more than you think— I contribute code regularly but never design work. Why? Because it's a sucky experience.
Most FOSS UIs are akin to someone's first website made from cargo-culted code from free tutorials. Fixing it is harder than starting from scratch and either approach takes significant intellectual work before even seriously proposing changes... and those proposals are received with something on a spectrum of suspicion to outright hostility.
Would you contribute code to a project run by people with no coding experience but were extremely opinionated about code, bikeshedded and poopooed all code changes as a matter of course AND referred to developers and their work with the same glib contempt you and so many other developers here displayed in your comments? Gosh I hope not.
I often hear FOSS developers lament lack of designer involvement, but won't even entertain the prospect of having any culpability for that. I mean, come on.
UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. The problems you see in UIs are because the people running the projects Solicited the wrong kind of designers or let people without subject matter expertise trampler on some core features of the design.
An example taken right now with Firefox under Windows: https://daveflix.deeohhtee.enneeetee.net/stuff/tmp/FocusNotO...
Which of those has focus? There is actually a difference (and to take the screenshot they overlapped making it obvious that way) but it is subtle. Try spotting it reliably when they are on different monitors.
At some point it'll annoy me enough that I'll write a util to scan for the current window that is top of the stack and draw a bright green border (or otherwise unmissable clue) around it… It'll look ugly, but I'll darn well know where what I'm about to type will go!
a flat element can be re-coloured without having to worry you've gotten the shadows correct on the new color. you can put two buttons beside each other without worrying that one appears to have more depth than the other. we make things flat because we're lazy, not because we think it looks good. a culture of lazy designers has convinced people it looks good, so we can continue being lazy.
Or as Statler and Waldorf would have put it: it is a victory of care over matter - we ( developers) don't care and you ( users) don't matter.
Is it? Style is no style at all if the thing in question does not fulfill its function. The whole point of something stylish is that it accomplishes its end so well and respects the appropriate constraints that is pleases the intellect when it recognizes this perfection.
So if someone is designing a UI that is difficult to use, that is a failure of both style and substance since there is no style without substance.
The best i've seen was a web page with a hamburger menu which had no action.
I don't like saying this because I want Linux desktop apps to have every success, but these small and pointless frustrations kill my enthusiasm.
What, on an iPad, should a designer look at in detail to improve the GTK app, for example?
When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.
I had a win phone 7 device. It was the pinnacle of consistent Gui.
Is it colored? Then it's a button. Is it white? It's a Text box. Is it a giant title? It's tabbed horizontal scroll.
Are you a "designer" who wants to color something non-clickable? Piss off, you don't get to do that.
Things like having pull handles on both sides of a door that has to be pushed from one side. Or having no push plate on either side of a glass door. Do I push? Is it a sliding door that's not working? Don't know!
My car has the climate controls hidden behind a graphic of the current state on the stupid touch screen. It used to be buttons that had three zones for head, body and feet, a wheel for fan and a wheel for temp[1]. Volvo used to pride themselves on having controls you could use with gloves on, so all the buttons had 3D features and a positive press feel.
Now it's not even obvious the graphic is a button at all (it's also incredibly dangerous as you cannot do anything without a multi-click modal process with only visual feedback that you have to look at to use). Thankfully the window demister is still a physical button because that would be incredibly dangerous to hide behind a soft screen interface: when you need it you need it. However, it's lost its 3D profile and is now just a flat button.
My office has an amusing one: there's a door at each end of the building. The building is the same on both sides, neither side looks more "fronty" than the other, and the doors are the same. Only one of these is the main entrance. The door next to the car park (i.e. where anyone unfamiliar with the site will arrive) is not the main door. Therefore there are no call buttons. However, there's also no indication that there is another door on the other side. A whole building basically has no obvious start menu. Just...why do that?
[1] https://bparts-eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ftp/azor_2/000/...
Now if I can't find anything then I just start clicking on random design elements in case they turn out to be a secret button to a hidden page.
Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D
Windows 95 - 7: 3D
Windows 8 - 10: 2D
MacOS 6 - 7: 2D
MacOS 8 - 10: 3D
MacOS 11: 2D
As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.
System 7 and 8 had support for color, and was as 3D as it could muster, like highlight and shadow treatment on buttons and other widgets, and embossed, draggable thumbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7....
Mac OS X brought Aqua, which was a pinnacle of 3D and skeuomorphic design. You know you're going hard for 3D when you add a drop shadow on all the text in your menubar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacO...
(and that IE logo in the dock wasn't there as a joke: it really was the best browser for OS X until Safari was a thing, years later)
[1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20040728_291_...
I'm using macOS 12 right now and there are a lot of 3D elements especially if you compare it to Windows 10 or Gnome in the screenshots of this post. It seems to be a mix of both approaches (similar to GTK 3).
But a black word in a larger font among black text would definitely NOT be recognized as a button by most people. Context matters a lot.
When designing user interfaces, use the mantra: "Don't make me think!" Don't make the user think about whether something is a button or not. Don't make them have to infer that the label is in fact a button due to context.
Just make it look like a button!
It frustrates me that this sort of design has become not just acceptable but celebrated as 'correct', and I long for the days when interfaces did their best to seek my enthusiastic consent to my chosen course of action.
My initial reaction to a piece of text directly next to a button is "why is there random unrelated text there?" and then the sensation of anger as I come to the realization someone consciously decided to make me think about the UI more than I needed to. It's purely a distraction.
Just make it look like a button. There is literally zero reason not to, and you can eliminate the chance of confusion. Why increase the possibility of uncertainty at all? What value does that provide to anyone?
Every UI or design element that causes me to think about it wastes precious moments I could have been thinking about something I actually cared about, for example the actual task I was in the middle of. On top of that, when you use unconventional design, even after someone learns the seemingly-arbitrary, specific quirks of the design you've used, you will cause them to think about it all again later when you redesign the application.
I don't know how you can reach that conclusion, because we only recognise it because of how many times we've been fed this exact pattern over and over again in flat UIs (and failed to realise it was clickable the first N times)
It's pretty clear that it's clickable, but I definitely wouldn't think it's a button. My best guess would be that it's a navigation element, and that clicking on it brings you to some other page where a decline invitation button might be found, or where you have to fill out some form to explain why you're declining.
Part of it is because it looks exactly the same as "Test User", and presumably that isn't a button... I imagine that is a navigation element. But part of it is also because quite a few recent Microsoft corporate products (Sharepoint, Dynamics, etc.) seem to use the idiom you're trying to use for signaling that something isn't a button.
The new "flat" design that pops up everywhere sometimes just feels like a lazy version of UI design, where you basically don't need proper styles anymore and just make everything b/w with maybe a border here and there.
I find the Breeze theme really well done and its GTK port, Brise, is also very nice, to the point Gnome looks good in it.
There was just the KDE 4 era where I didn't like Oxygen at all (and indeed I used to change the theme to Fusion there) but that's over. KDE 3 was fine and KDE 5 is great. At this point, most things that are not Breeze don't look great to me now.
As for the customization and theme support, that's supported and it works well, they prove that it's nothing insurmountable too. KDE comes with themes that look like Windows 95, Motif, Adwaita, GTK 2 and other things and you can download more if you want.
I'd be curious to have a review of Breeze / KDE by Martijn.
That's false, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582009
Also in System Settings 5.24:
• switch to sidebar view and examine the buttons at the top of the sidebar
• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Desktop Effects and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Virtual Desktops and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Workspace Behaviour → Activities → Activities and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Window Management → Window Rules and examine the buttons at the right
• go Workspace → Startup and Shutdown → Autostart and examine the buttons at the right
• the most egregious example: go Personalisation → Regional Settings → Formats and examine the whole dialogue, it is entirely made of frobable regions
• go Network → Connections and examine the buttons at the bottom of the connections list
• go Hardware → Printers and examine the buttons at the top of the dialogue
I do not understand what goes on in the responsible programmers' heads. Why does the implementer reinvent buttons badly, instead of using a standard button? Is there no one reviewing? Is there no one saying "no, we cannot burden a KDE user with this bad usability, I will not merge this code"?
I abandoned KDE during the KDE-3 (edit: to 4) migration apocalypse, when nothing worked as it did before, or at all, and everything looked like it needed at least another year of refinement.
Is this settled and past now? Is KDE still adament on making virtually every other pixel configurable?
He mentions KDE in the blog post:
> The feedback I get is that I should move to QT/KDE, but I think that theming has had the same issues for way longer already and I do really like the Gnome HIG.
I was a happy GNOME user before the version 3 fiasco. It took years to have a usable GNOME desktop again.
Every time I see a comment like that, I try again KDE, only to leave it 15 minutes later because it is a huge mess. Everytime I try configuring the panel to my liking nothing goes where I want to and I end up with widgets everywhere.
The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind what makes a good UI design for human beings". Otherwise, nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs on a paper and feel like that's a very well thought out work right there.
And here I'm bashing not only OSS designers that think a bland and unclear design is the best that can be done, but also the same for designers of big companies that get paid for their work. Althought ironically now that I think of it, maybe the latter are somewhat less to blame, knowing how the corporate world works and knowing that they possibly don't agree with the results but their boss insists on how all buttons should lack any depth. So in the sense of not having a pushy boss with an agenda to fullfill... yeah it seems to me that OSS designers are acting worse by voluntarily pushing these supposedly "better", but almost quite objetively worse designs, into users' throats.
/rant
So... Since you are talking about scientific studies, could you please reference some studies that back you up and show that flat design is in some way inferior?
You note that visual and UI design in open source and in proprietary applications show some of the same idiosyncrasies.
You conclude that this makes open source designers more blameworthy.
I would suggest instead, that this is evidence that those evil management overlords in the corporate world are perhaps convenient scapegoats, but actually less to blame than we might think?
Apple used to be held as the pinnacle of design, but what does it say when their latest UI is indistinguishable from an amateur design?
I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average.
But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user friendly. You usually know when something is a button because the context makes it obvious. If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs, but I think they're usually channeling a hatred of something else, like monopolies or proprietary things.
Moreover, I think flat design is not a fad but an inevitability. As a rule, designs become more abstract over time, because as users get more used to UIs, they need fewer clues. It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job.
Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs.
You could argue that we've gone too far too fast. I don't have a dog in that fight. But I would bet my big toe that we're not going to reverse time and end up with skeuomorphism again. Instead, we're going to take advantage of faster GPUs to visualize abstractions in ways we couldn't before. We're seeing that with blurred background effects becoming more common. I for one am excited to see what's next.
That's a really bad way to go about usability. It's pretty frustrating you're looking for a feature to have to hunt for it like you're playing a point & click game. At that point I wouldn't even call it a feature, it's an Easter egg.
This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. Take the original article as an example. How did 3D buttons take away from the "more important things"? Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable from the "To Do" title help to enhance, somehow, the "To Do" title? Does not the strong blue in the flat button ("Add Tasks...") draw user attention to it, distracting from the rest of the UI, rather than withdrawing from the rest of the screen to allow "more important things" to shine?
If flat design really succeeded at helping to direct users' attention to what is important, it wouldn't be subject to the criticism that it confuses users. Users would be helped, not hindered, by such design, no?
I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.
This is admittedly not a flat vs non-flat design problem, but it is exacerbated by the flat design. If actions which started something playing were outlined or something, it would be so much easier to use.
That is how you got bad flat design.
That is how the idea of metaphors got skewed into skeuomorphism — and likewise, how metaphors got swept away by the movement against skeuomorphism.
I'd argue that the flat 2D look is cool these days because it is different from the skeuomorphic 3D look we had before. It will look old and faded in a few years, and in the search for a fresh look, we'll rediscover a more tactile 3D look.
Anyway, I actually like the flat 2D style as well. It might be that many current programs are not doing it well merely because they haven't had much experience with it. This will sort itself out in a few years. Much like the super-skeuomorphic apps from a few years ago that included things like stitching and torn-off paper in calendar apps and notepad apps, respectively.
Nope. It just makes everything horrible, more pressure on brain to find out and slow in the end to do everyday operations. It's just the designers who love these just for the looks (they don't even know what design actually means), not for any usability.
Tech would have better without these type of "designers".
It’s less flat today then it was - because they’re clearly backpedaling.
> There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs
Apple ripped off flat design from Microsoft.
> Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things.
Last I checked, some texture on UI elements didn’t take any additional space.
Your arguments are entirely unconvincing.
Blurred background effects are nothing new - and that’s something that’s been done with GPUs from nearly 20 years ago. They haven’t been able to make it anything more than a fad.
This is because GTK4 enables pixel/scaling-independent fractional vertical positioning, even with hinting enabled. There's a long (somewhat ongoing) discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787, though I haven't followed the last few months of discussion.
Even though GTK4 aims to achieve scale-independent layout, the 4 horizontal/vertical positions still produce a bit of judder, and fonts do not scale smoothly (even with bilinear interpolation) with hinting enabled, and (unless fixed) there are rendering issues due to failing to clear the texture atlas properly: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4322
Interestingly there's a proposal to switch GTK4 fonts to SDF-style rendering. This is somewhat like what Qt Quick 2 implemented already (and KDE turns off and reverts to FreeType rendering, to make QML apps mimic Qt Widgets font rendering more): https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2022/03/20/rendering-text-w... However, I looked at https://github.com/behdad/glyphy and it seems to implement vector-based SDFs, instead of earlier texture-based SDF/MSDFs used by Valve games and Qt Quick.
With font rendering, I think there is hope. Horizontal subpixel positioning with vertical hinting seems like a good tradeoff to me. Grid fitting vertically is not too jarring, and grid fitting horizontally to subpixels instead of pixels looks pretty good too, on low resolution displays.
But it really is a son of a bitch elsewhere. For example, if you want a crisp 1px border on 96 dpi, you could specify it to be a 1px border at 96 dpi… but then what happens at 1.5x or 1.75x scale? From a purely logical position, the blurry line is actually the general case, and the integer scale case is actually an edge case. That desktop UIs aren’t blurry basically always is because we define them in terms of 96 DPI displays.
It gets worse for APIs, because APIs that want to present a resolution-independent world will cause difficult to tolerate bugs. The VS Code terminal will often be blurry at non-integer scales because it is using HTML canvas. If the canvas width or height is not a multiple of the size of a CSS pixel, it will cause the internal buffer to be scaled horridly. The fix might be a new API that reveals true coordinates… very, very nasty.
Apple’s solution was extreme: dump all font hacks, always render apps at 2x, then scale the whole framebuffer for different scale factors. It’s somewhat blurry, but avoids many ugly pitfalls in the common case, and makes apps simpler.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world is just stuck with really bad scaling and more often blurring on 96 DPI displays, the worst of both worlds.
I'm not sure I follow the upstream reasoning, in either gtk/qt/firefox/chrome... I'm reading text all day. The UI is still built around 90%+ text, except in very few edge cases.
I'm using 4k monitors, and I'm still a minority. Despite this, at 4k, we're still several years away from the point where we can turn off hinting. Probably a decade away for universal support. A lot more if we include existing monitors.
Between 92 and 270 dpi text still looks bad without proper grid fitting. Under 120dpi we're talking about garbage-level quality. And between 250-300 the difference is still noticeable to make it worth it.
I'm not sure what these people are smoking.
Lol so make it look like crap the 99% of the time you’re not animating or transforming the text.
But to be honest, isn't it one of the recurring point of people running away from gnome? Haven't they just proceeded going ahead not listening to anyone?
Ultimately I think this will be quite good for QT/kde in the long term. Gnome/GTK gets a lot of corporate support, especially from red hat, but seeing the issues pop OS had with GTK makes me hopeful that more companies will adopt QT.
What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be a more impressive portfolio piece for a young designer to properly design GTK/Gnome and put it out there for the world. What is stopping this? It can’t be caring with the history of people sharing their themes. Is it just taste / money?
Professional designers seem to be the ones creating these problems. Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know.
Now everything is pretty but harder to use.
It'd be great if it could be solved with just one pass of design work and then it's done, but I'm afraid the task is much bigger than that, and "big wig design firms" are expensive, so are design people as well. Not to mention the other problems around that.
Is that still the case? It would be a huge disincentive for other distros to contribute to the commons when ubuntu just parasite from it to a big market share.
I’m not even saying that that’s a bad thing. As it happens, Android has been generalized and generalized from its original use-case until it is today a quite-workable desktop PC OS.
In comes GTK4. Much like the article alludes to, the elegant and simple shadow of interactive elements goes poof. Developers spend hundreds of hours crusading against letting people use third-party themes, just so they can simplify and reduce UI elements to a nigh-unusable pulp. Developing with GTK4 is a nightmare. Using GTK4 is a pain in the ass. For christs sake, there was a devastating font-rendering glitch that existed for more than ten months after the first GTK4 release that was ignored in lieu of simplifying buttons, developing a new forced stylesheet and telling people "don't theme our apps!" Whenever I take this up with a maintainer, they immediately take it personally and write out a litany of reasons why I'm wrong and why I'm not allowed to disagree. The priorities here are almost unbelievably misaligned, I've pinned my GTK packages at the last GTK3 release and await some sort of admission of failure.
I simply can't take it anymore. These are the people making desktop Linux miserable, and I frankly feel no remorse watching their attempts at "simplifying" the ecosystem crash and burn.
Just to clear up any confusion:
- People have been working on the font glitch for the last ten months. It's not easy and the solution is not straightforward. Multiple solutions have been proposed but none are without issues. The problem is not being ignored. I want it to be fixed too.
- The choice of whether to allow themes or not belongs to the app developer. This hasn't changed at all from GTK3. When making an app, you can choose to allow themes or not. Some app developers won't, but you don't have to make that choice.
- The stylesheet isn't forced at all, when you develop an app you can configure your styles to always override the platform theme. This also hasn't changed at all from GTK3 and doesn't change with libadwaita. Take a look at the style context priority system for more info.
- Pinning your packages to GTK3 in protest doesn't help you. It doesn't make a difference to the GTK developers at all. If you want to make use of some GTK4 features eventually, it would be best to start working with it and getting your issues sorted out now. You can ignore what the other app maintainers are saying, that has no effect on you.
Hope that helps, thanks.
I'm just not designing gtk4 apps untill it's actually better than gtk3
And it is efficient, from an MBA point of view. This is pushing evermore cost and risk away from the enterprise, creating externalities along the way. The whole thing is pretty toxic to users overall.
And yes, those users can self serve their way back to competency, and eventually reach a point where they're productive again, but they had to pay a lot harder than they would have otherwise.
Remember all those studies that were done in the 70s 80s and into the 90s? IBM did them, some of the major CAD companies did them, others did that too, and there's too many to list.
We should do that again. And if we were to do that, we're going to find out those other studies weren't bulshit, all those points made sense, and what's really changed is the value judgments related to the development, and who makes those judgments and why.
And I bet the root of all this, is far too many enterprises are in a place where they just don't have to care about the users anymore, and they know it, and they're acting on it.
For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before.
MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons along the top of native apps like Finder don't have text anymore, the buttons are flat without borders, and the icons are thin lines. How is anyone supposed to know what they do??
In most UIs (Apple and Android in particular), I can't tell when one of those on-off switches is ON or OFF. Is the dark side ON or OFF? Maybe the light side is ON. Oh, it's the opposite when Dark Mode is enabled; great.
Bring back text. Bring back nice buttons.
There's something deeply assuring knowing that I don't have to relearn my whole workflow every few months when the trends change. ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. Even the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent.
All I want is to get work done the way I want, and I've found the CLI is increasingly the path of least resistance.
It looks great in print. It doesn't respect the modality of use for an online world.
I'm tempted to think we have to go to browser vendors and ask them to make <blink> happen..
'Yeah I know they have an app but your thing won't show up in the app for about a day so you need to go to their website on mobile to see it. Right, you're on the mobile website and I know your thing is still not showing up now. To see it, go to the hamburger menu in the top right. Yeah I know it doesn't look like a menu, or a hamburger. The three lines, that's a menu. Now go "account -> profile". Now you see the text where it says "XXX"? That's actually a tab. I know it doesn't look like a tab, just a word. You can't see any of the other tabs because they are actually off the right-hand side of the screen. I know it doesn't look like you can scroll, but just drag it across and you'll see the other tabs. Ok now click on the tab marked "YYY"'
Trying to figure out this user flow for myself so I could help people reminded me of charging around hitting random walls in "Dark Souls" trying to find out which ones were illusory. It's really embarrassing how bad things have got.
This is right there in chapter 1:
As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable-or not.
Ah, it was the same way if you didn't love the direction they went with GNOME 3. If you don't love the design-of-the-day GNOME is chasing, they don't want you. I recommend KDE.
Current Gnome is still unusable crap, with all those ugly buttons in window titles and lots of wasted space.
Looks like all these "Connected - 1000Mb/s" can be 2-2.5 times more compact in V direction. And huge spaces between labels and controls. Why do we need these?!
It is plague of last years. You have FullHD screen, you see 3-4 options in FireFox settings,when "old skool" UI could pack all of them onto one FullHD screen.
It is everywhere. Huge spaces, scrollbars (which doesn't work with keyboard, as controls intercept focus)... Scrollbars are for text, not for GU!
Eventually it'll mutate into cuneiform and no one will realize they've learned an ancient script.
Much, much easier to style based on whatever the surroundings are. Also easier to maintain a good look if you switch to a completely different theme, and for third party icons to mesh with the OS set of icons (only so many ways you can mess up the sillouette of the shape).
Oh, and they scale to basically infinite proportions without looking weird, which cannot be said for color vector icons.
This always puzzled me, there's been a time around 2010-2011 where everyone thought desktop was doomed, tablets would take over its space so you had to design everything to be mobile friendly. Those times have fortunately long gone, tablet are almost a thing of the past, desktop is here to stay, yet GNOME and RH designers still take iOS design as a reference... why?
In the past, I used to disable title bars entirely even on full-sized monitors. These days it's not so easy to do that, though.
As for themes, I quite like the new libadwaita theme, and prefer it to the default GTK theme. You're free to disagree, but you can't say your opinion is correct, nor can I.
Keep in mind that libadwaita is an optional library _specifically for gnome apps_. If you don't like gnome, don't use libadwaita. If you want the widgets from libadwaita, but don't like the styling, then either copy the code (it's open source, fork it!), or use libadwaita and disable the libadwaita stylesheet (and add styling for the widgets that aren't part of GTK).
It wasn't even acknowledged as a bug in the beginning, even after screenshots with clear signs of regression were posted. Matthias Clasen closed the bug report saying it wasn't a bug but an intended feature. There's really no appropriate words to describe such behaviour, which is fairly common on the GNOME issue tracker, besides calling it "wilfully dense" or "trollish".
> As for themes, I quite like the new libadwaita theme, and prefer it to the default GTK theme. You're free to disagree, but you can't say your opinion is correct, nor can I.
Sure, but in that case, an officially supported method to change the theme should be provided in case I don't agree with your choice. Apparently, GNOME tweak tool was never supported, is not supported, and will never be supported. For now, GTK_THEME is being presented as an alternative but do you expect me to close all of my programs and relogin to my session to change my theme? Should I create wrapper shell scripts for all of my GTK apps?
> Keep in mind that libadwaita is an optional library _specifically for gnome apps_. If you don't like gnome, don't use libadwaita.
The fact that there are no non-trivial GTK4 apps out there that don't use libadwaita or libgranite tells me what I need to know. Even LibreOffice uses libadwaita now. Is LibreOffice a GNOME app?
I agree... but the gnome devs are directly telling me my opinion is incorrect, by removing the ability for me to change my apps i use to a theme I like.
Oh wait sorry, i guess i should have said gnome's apps.
That's the thing - you can say a particular design decision is incorrect. There's objective metrics around good user design.
Taking the position that all design is subjective, and therefore "just an opinion" is why the gnome team are widely derided.
It's not just an opinion - there's measurements you can make and metrics you can collect that serve as evidence for or against a particular design.
- there's the prominent notification speech bubble on the bottom right, which seems to be very inconsistently used. Almost all the notifications are duplications of an already popped-up notification, and a lot of important stuff doesn't end up in there. So it's just a nuisance. The worst is that for one application, the notification essentially says "you need to push this button to proceed" while covering up the freakin' button I need to push!
- If you have a Word document already open and minimized, and you open up a second one - at least triggered from the browser in Sharepoint - what happens is the already open document opens up, with the newly opened one underneath! If these are based on a common template, I frequently find myself scrolling up and down looking for the graphic I need to refer to, only 20 seconds later realizing I'm in the wrong document again.
These don't have much to do with UI skin annoyances, but they do have to do with this:
Apple stuff had really good UI while Steve Jobs was in charge. Someone powerful enough to get anything changed who is fanatically devoted to good, usable UI was gold there. All these weird inconsistent UIs are "design by committee" or worse, no design at all. Nobody has overall veto power, or at least nobody who cares enough.
This. This! You see people on Apple devices constantly scrolling up and down just a tiny bit while browsing the web. What a weird tic I thought, when I saw different people do that. Turns out scroll bars are always hidden on Safari for elements that have overflow with scroll behavior. So you never know if you're reading some important stuff that actually has another paragraph you don't see because it's otherwise not obvious you're looking at some <div> with limited height. And it seems others are busy imitating this, I feel this happens with Firefox in Android now too.
Then these new navigation gestures on mobile. Gone are the three mighty buttons of Android. When the iPhone released, it was praised for cutting ties with anything that was established in the old computing world, all the implicit knowledge you had to have about how to use a classic desktop os. You could give the iPhone to any tech illiterate person and they could figure it out. Everything was discoverable, a fresh start with a clean and consistent UI language.
But today, not so much. Now phones went through the same iterations as the desktop os, and it's ok that you now need to learn a gesture to return to the home screen, or go back one step. There is no way someone who never used a phone before will somehow think "I might have to swipe into the screen from the left!" So now, just as the desktop os, we just assume you already know how to use a phone, and add "optimizations" on top of that that someone needs to tell you about.
When MS brought Windows Phone and then incorporated same language into Windows 8 I was like "wow, Microsoft got it right for the first time".
Same for iOS 7, same for macOS. I never liked the "Apple" look of UIs before they went flat. After they've switched to flat I started to really love it.
Not even talking about developers and designers needing to do less, and users needing to process less cluttered visual stimuli.
Skeuomorphism and non-flat designs in general had a good purpose and they've fulfilled it perfectly by teaching people about how UIs work in those OSes of digital world by making elements looking like real world things like buttons being 3D-ish. But that era is over and we collectively don't need it, so we've switched to something simpler and more efficient it many terms.
Of course, taste is taste and one may hate it, but I love flat design in almost all aspects, and definitely don't think MS and Apple are "stupid" as the blogger says.
Microsoft isn't actually responsible for this nonsense. Metro did get rid of bevels, but it didn't get rid of obvious buttons: they simply turned into trivial colored rectangles.
I'm not entirely sure who "refined" it, but Microsoft did eventually end up copying a bad iteration of their own good idea.
On macOS Desktop, checkboxes, buttons and everything else are still designed for mouse/kb
On gnome things are designed for vertical and touch screens, so you forced to endlessly scroll, windows is doing something similar, wich is an indication that they target mobile users, they are so out of touch
Only Apple knows what they are doing when it comes to UI/UX for desktop, and they make sure they don't mix desktop/mobile UX
I don't understand linux users' font tastes, apparently. To me the GTK4 screenshots are the only half-way decent font rendering in the lot. All the GTK3 shots have broken kerning in headings, not to mention the awful (lack of?) antialiasing.
I would love to hear from any actual UX professional who wants to try to defend that making functional elements look identical to non-functional ones is a good idea. I would be fascinated to hear what the argument in its favor could possibly be.
Platform developers were incentivized to go flat because it lowered the cost of development and development time if developers were using fewer, simpler custom assets. At this time, both Apple and Google were bragging about how many apps were on their stores, and how fast they were growing, and neither wanted to fall behind the other.
But admittedly, my perspective was that of a third-party developer. I have no direct knowledge of why Microsoft, Google, and Apple all embraced this trend, and I have only anecdotal evidence that it made things more difficult for novice users. There could be a treasure trove of research showing that flat is better, but I have never seen it presented.
It's not just programmers who complain about modern UI/UX trends. The Nielsen Norman Group, a UI/UX consulting group that was founded by HCI legends Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, have written articles against the overuse of flat design (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/).
> I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action.
There is a reason why Apple backpedaled on all that flat insanity for MacOS and iOS. Graphic designers and trendsetters usually know very little about usability, these are 2 completely different disciplines, and the Flat style was imposed by graphic designers, not UX people.
I’m sure it has something to do with them needing to justify their existence. No reason to have a designer if nothing has changed in the world of design. Programmers learn new languages (or go back to old ones), designers do the same with interface design principles.
> The design even works very well on Linux phone formfactors.
The author must mean something very different when they say "works very well" than I do when I say that. As much as I want it to, nothing about GTK works well in a phone form factor, IME. I look forward to continued improvement that will make that statement incorrect.
There has been loads of studies showing the amount of mistakes in coding or spreadsheet type work goes up massively with having to scroll windows, but yet, gtk3/4 is a bloated, oversized mess.
Mice precision has increased, so why on earth do we need toolbars that can take upto 1/8th a 768p screen. Stupid.
Another one of those things that irritates me about "modern" design --- instead of showing an empty list, which would've been obvious that it was empty by having subtle cues like gridlines (also now disappeared by this trend), it decides to treat you like an idiot and show a giant banner stating what should be obvious. The "Add Tasks" button probably disappears after you make the list non-empty, and just looking at that UI, I'm not sure where the "normal" one is. But I guess it gave a designer an excuse to create some more bland Corporate Memphis art?
Today, every application seems to just do its own thing, and continually churns its own UI, chasing trends.
There was a time when an elderly relative would say “computers are too hard to use”, and I could recommend a book or manual that would help make it clearer.
Nowadays I tend to just agree with them.
This is so typical for the open-source community. For a supposedly 'open' culture, its full of ivory towers and (layers of) cool kids clubs, meaning if you want to build an app, or change something you don't like, and want others to be able to use your changes as well, you are met with layers of people who are at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, but the thing is you absolutely NEED their approval unless you can make your own distro (your own club) and fork their code and try to somehow keep up with the main branch.
The last thing I want to do with my free time, is solve an issue, only to be met with draconian authority telling me how to build my app, and then have to solve my issue again in 6 months, when the platform people break everything.
I think the culture of abusing volunteers on a volunteer-driven project is exactly why desktop Linux can't break out of the niche OS category.
But it's also the sort of behavior that keeps other developers going. KDE is great at soliciting user change, and nothing is "off the table" for scrutiny or redesign. Many other desktops share that same philosophy. The pockets of high-and-mighty developers are what end up shooting desktop Linux in the foot, and while I do happily daily-drive Linux, I can say with certainty that it will never hit the mainstream with maintainers like these driving the best-funded desktop environment.
ouch. Diversity of opinion is hard to stand but crucial.
https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-original-style.png
Which parts are links? Which aren't? It's a little more obvious that the main text is a link but not obvious that you can click to view the comments. (It can be inferred, of course, but I don't believe that should be necessary.)
A little styling to add underlines back to links, plus a little bold to indicate the comments page, fixes this:
https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-my-style.png
Some might say that this looks ugly, and that's a valid view. But to me, it's usable.
(Why are both the "time posted" link and the comments link bolded? Because they both go to the same place. I didn't even know before I made this style that that was the case! I was surprised to see that the style I made did both, but I'm not complaining.)
Edit: Elsewhere in this thread it is implied that it was deliberately made impossible.
> This is an unfortunately very common misconception: you can still set GTK_THEME on libadwaita apps, it's only the gsettings configuration that doesn't work (due to implementation constraints, unfortunately).
There are only three small screenshots of UI in the dark theme, but to me it looks very clearly like a naive "invert all the design token colors and call it a day" implementation.
I partly agree. Flat look done poorly is terrible. Apple is the only company who's been semi-consistently doing this well.
The design of libadwaita is very reminiscent of the time I was at Apple. Around the time they decided to unify the codebase and lay off the entire OS X team and reorg it into a new software team. I noticed the design changes as part of dogfooding internal OS X versions and design changes were jarring to say the least.
In short, a product cannot be all things to all people. It should play to its strengths and delight it’s existing and new customers/users.
GTK has problems including bad designs of many things including file selection dialog box, scrollbars (which are not always consistent), bitmap fonts sometimes don't work properly, always uses Unicode and although you can enter Unicode control characters they are not displayed while editing (which makes it difficult to use), some things are not documented well, configuration is difficult, kerning in editable text, etc.
So, I do not use GTK in my own programs.
(Some people say that if a program does not need to be documented then it is easy to use, but I disagree; a program is difficult to use because it is not documented well.)
Look, I get all the advantages of the newer way, but for me it's a feature that I can make my UI look the way I want it, even if that's not the same as some theme designer's preferences.
That being said, I'm not sure what it is now, because that original button looks like flat design to me. The only "non-flat" element of it is the 1px border, but surely thats not the source of all this commotion?
I don’t think anyone makes UI these days and not makes it a vector.
Gtk2 -> Gtk3 dejavu.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
I recommend ignoring the blaming (users) and ignoring (developers) on both side both reading the details involved. Looks like mostly intended and used during development on HiDPI-Displays and that they need people experienced in font drawing matters.
It launches apps, provides me with workspaces, and abstracts all the low level details away so I can focus on actually using my computer.
If people want to customise every minute detail of the themes they shouldn't be using Gnome/GTK. The devs don't have to cater for everyone's needs, they are allowed to focus on a target audience.
Is there any way to vote for keeping it? Does 'high contrast' mode possibly bring it back?
(Which is basically Windows 95 with a few minor additions.)
From a user perspective, I prefer this the hodge podge on Windows which I find disorientating. But I agree that a bit of non-flatness can be very helpful for the eyes.
You’re just used to the wrong approach, the old one actually is an inverted-grayscale theme.
The new one correctly follows the principle that foreground == lighter, background == darker in dark mode.
Why is there not a global "compact UI" option?
However, buttons should have still remained buttons. I don’t understand why buttons need to look like Labels.
This is disappointing and I hope the Gnome folks revisit this decision with the next iteration of libadwaita.
“Our stuff looks lickable, buy our expensive hardware.”
“Au contraire, design with colored paper and scissors is hipper than lickable UIs. Buy our less than stellar hardware.”
Meanwhile, the visual design has been hashed over and over: I've lost count. Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities?
All they had to do was go fix the input drivers, the user-space library to communicate them, the compositors to be able to mediate gestures, the toolkits to process them, the X11 server extensions, wayland protocols, etc...
One of the biggest problems in this is that you can't just fix one input driver. You have to go fix them all so that the experience is consistent across as much as hardware as possible.
My lips curl ever so slightly apart, my tongue perched between both rows of my teeth. A faint whistling sound escapes between my two incisors and tongue, reminiscent of the "th" consonants that one might expect to hear in the word "thumbnails". Before I'm even capable of getting to the word "filepicker", hundreds of people are stepping on one another to come tell me what I already know. A wave of developers have risen from their standing desks, eager to beat me down for such a blatant disrespect of their favorite desktop. Fourty-some people have convened to demonstrate how I can click and drag icons from Nemo onto a file selection dialog as a replacement. Others yet are deriding me for not implementing it myself, and lacking respect for the developers. Some people have taken to referencing their code of conduct, while more are furiously typing on Twitter, desperate to label me a troll and move on with their life.
They all filter off after around 25 minutes. None of them used that time to put thumbnails in the file picker, thou... oh my god, they're coming back again...
I wonder if that plays into in (in addition to the effort hurdle mentioned by audidude). I turn off trackpad gestures every time I get a new machine - I just don't get any use out of them. I can't be the only one. And since Gnome lagged behind on gestures, we could presume many Gnome developers either have perfectly good gestureless workflows already, or haven't even had the opportunity to see what gestures can do.
Skeuomorphism definitely is harder to get right and different elements can clash. But that's less of an issue when you're making one unified theme for all.
I agree with the author, the flat look shown here is missing at the very least some outlines on buttons. Hidden UI elements seem like an awful idea.
That, at least, has been consistent since first release of Gnome 3 over 10 years ago.
Honestly, I don't know why I tried that hard to like the new Gnome. I'm so much happier using XFCE.
However, because gnome no longer respects their users' opinions, there is no way to change it.
I mean fuck, if i wanted to use a Mac i'd just use a Mac.
Things that are the same should look the same. Things that are different should look different.
Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks. And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough.
And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They didn't.
It's either something I'd have to fix in my app or fixed in that theme. Just ignoring the situation is just a shitty response.
a. The usage/implementation of widgets in the application
or
b. The stylesheet the end user is implimenting
In either instance, the solution is very simple and within arms reach. It will always make more sense to encourage robust development practices over building fragile application stacks.
That disproportionate response to what comes down to an organizational shortcoming on their end made people upset, I'm not sure what they expected.
My word of choice is amateurism.
Maybe the author should embrace the latest trends in UI design, instead of insisting the old way.
Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D
Windows 95 - 7: 3D
Windows 8 - 10: 2D
MacOS 6 - 7: 2D
MacOS 8 - 10: 3D
MacOS 11: 2D
Some things should be flat, or more precisely - subdued. An Instagram photo page shouldn't be all buttons and underlined links, sure - the photo is the important part so that the rest should be subdued. But the settings page should be all skeumorphic buttons and links and dials and switches, that's what it's for.
It looks to me like there is an unhealthy tribalism invading design-thinking. As long as I have the correct ideology, no matter the context - my design is "good". Get on the flat-design bandwagon. Forget decades of UI research. Think in screenshots, doesn't matter if it's all jank and moves things in and out from under the user's fingers. Put everything on one screen, don't contextualize.
"I'm being paid to deliver", not to think through. To ship, not to test.
My designs require a gaming PC to run a document-like page, and don't scale down. "I'm designing for the future", it will all work out. Eventually. For some.
My tools and my education are a sliver of what a designer used to think about, so I can't really do anything about it anyway, that's just the way it comes out. You don't honestly expect me to learn about the systems and devices my users are running this on, do you? That would make me a coder, that is to say not a designer.
How did that happen?
How did being knowledgeable and well-rounded at your industry become rare? Business reasons? How did using a computer become constantly surprizing and never straightforward? Business reasons? Why do I have this and that humongous app just for one or two things it does, and now there's 200+ apps in there? Always waiting for something to load all that, just so I can do this one thing. Business reasons?
It's not business reasons. OSS is no better.
Maybe it's that the approach that got us to where we are, the moving fast and breaking things, keeping your nose down in your own corner isn't what will get us out of here?
I mean, my computer usage went down over the last 12 years, like 5x. I just don't want to. I'm more or less done with all of it.
It all feels like it got bolted on, and then bolted on, and then ducktaped around.
Terminals, mobile UI, desktop apps, the Web, games, appliances, work tools, control systems; ALL OF IT.
Sure, there's loads of it, and it's cheap. But there is still no choice, not really. This jank or that, it doesn't do it for me. I've checked out, more or less.
I stopped looking at new laptops, and when my phone breaks I pull a couple of old ones from the drawer and make me a working something. I'm not giving them my money, why would I? They got nothing I want. Apple, Google, Lenovo and the rest of them equally.
The last MS product I enjoyed using was MASM. That's until I found out about NASM.
There is no dumb car I can buy. Everything is finicky touch and not user-serviceable. Many things are so flimsy you can't lean on them at all.
But then, one has to understand that if the whole world around you seems to have lost the plot, chances are it's you. So, is it me, what do you think?
Because I can't handle it, I'm legit checking out.
Better to keep the design flat. It's also simpler.
That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number of benefits, such as a unified visual style across all apps, and an easy to use internationalization/localization subsystem.
Not sure what that even means. The majority are not the Gnome developers, and many users will just adapt to whatever they're fed, even if it's worse.
>> That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming.
No. People aren't complaining about a lack of consistency or a lack of theming (some do). They are complaining about a shitty design where the elements are consistently nonsensical and harder to understand than past version of the same.
Top-down means a few people who are at "the top" think they know better. Not that they're great designers either - they are copying stupid trends that other "design" people came up with. This stuff is complained about on all OSes these days. It's not a vocal minority either, and you can tell because nobody complained that GTK was falling beind and needed to update to a modern "flat" design.
They care about that so much that they break Gtk+ every few version, to the point that in 2022 there are still Gtk+ 2 apps around, and there will be Gtk+ 3 apps following old design paradigms for years to come. So much for consistency.
It's 2022 and I don't see Qt 4 around anymore, or apps using it still being widely in use. Guess why? Because Qt developers actually give a damn about people using their library, and they give a damn about people using the _latest_ version of it.
What GNOME is doing today is telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and pushing people towards writing their next app in Qt, which by the way integrates nicely with GNOME and does not look like garbage everywhere else. Now with PySide being finally a first class citizen and working well with QML there's not even the "but C++ is ugly" card to play against going Qt.