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Comment by frankzander | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me, why someone would use such an (in my opinion) ugly looking DE? I think it could be very fast. But using some pretty looking DE doesn't have to be slow. So it looks like some "nerds" sit down and did something like an graphical user interface without anything like prettiness in mind. I always ask myself the whole time why anyone would use something unpretty? I know the history ... it looks like something I used on some old unixes but I'm glad that it's been replaced by KDE or Gnome or XFCE ... something what the eye pleases. Why doesn't not everybody strive for prettiness?

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Speaking personally, I see what you mean, but one thing that I _really_ like that a lot of UI has been leaving by the wayside is making it clear when something on-screen is supposed to be interactable.

Buttons look like buttons. Menus are always in the same place (in-window or top 'o the screen, macOS style) instead of having to play "find the hamburger" in every single application. Title bars are exclusively for identifying and manipulating windows. You don't have to worry about accidentally clicking some control when you're just trying to move a window.

The titlebar thing really gets my goat. Firefox uses the titlebar as a tab bar, so you switch or close tabs if you try to grab the titlebar to move things around. Slack has a big ol' search bar in the title bar. macOS[1] Mail.app and Calendar.app litter the titlebar with buttons. One of the basic functions of the window manager, _moving windows around_, has been hijacked to put controls there in the name of reducing clutter when we have _insanely_ high DPI displays and we can easily afford to give a little screen space to a few controls.

Drives me crazy.

90s GUIs were obsessively focused on making the function of something apparent based on its appearance. You learn a few different common controls, and you know how everything works, and it's consistent. [2]

Modern UI has sacrificed discoverability, and to some degree usability, for style. You can have both, but no one seems interested in that.

[1] I'm at work, so I'm on mac. At home I run pop!_OS and KDE, but I have similar complaints there.

[2] I mean, not always. There are of course a thousand examples of shitty applications not playing nice, but lots of really heavily-used applications did.

Oh that's crazy. Thank you for that. That's something I never thought of. I'm obsessed with prettiness but at the end it have to be functional and all you writing about is something that is also something important BEFORE prettiness. Thx for that.

When I sit down at a computer, I want to run an application and get something done. I don't want a desktop environment in my way, trying to entertain me, or otherwise distracting me. I am also not trying to entertain someone else when using a computer [see footnote]. Looking pretty is for art and games.

The specific aesthetic that matters when you are working and trying to accomplish something are ergonomics. Is what I need where I need it and easily findable?

Below are concrete preferences of mine and likely many others which could lead to a DE prioritizing things other than appearance:

- Can I see at a glance my commands and tools, or are they hidden behind "beautiful" panels and other formerly skeuomorphic metaphors that got rubbed down into large blank areas of color?

- Do all my commands and tools fit on the screen and aren't separated by seas of overly minimalist whitespace or require clicks in weird, unobvious places or require weird mouse gestures that might be misinterpreted from my normal mouse movements?

- I want text labels because I'm literate and can understand words, not impressionistic random icons that look like hieroglyphics.

- When I click on something - is there some immediate feedback to give my brain a sense of interactivity? After all that is why I'm using a graphical toolkit and not a serial terminal. My RAM should go to what I'm using the computer for, which is applications, not the DE.

Footnote: Some who work in sales or marketing and use computers in front of others, such as paying clients, might actually need to "look pretty" while doing their tasks. Their DE requirements would be different.

That's also interesting. I know that not everybody have an eye for style like I have. TBH I wreck my nerves if an interface looks like some ugly pile of sh* (no I do not mean the CDE thing). I do not agree with " Looking pretty is for art and games." because if you take a look at some commercial audio plugins for Cubase/ProTools/whatever you'll see that they always look good, fancy and please the eye. They wouldn't invest any money if looking pretty is only for "art and games" and a "simple" formular based interface is everything the customer needs.

The remaining points you listed are good point's I'll think over. Thx

I think ultimately, out of everything invested in, we see that common sense rarely, but occasionally, factors.

I think it's more likely that someone had to justify their position as a developer somewhere along the line by taking a fat dump on the work of predecessors and poorly reimplementing the lost functions, calling the inevitable bastardization a 'UI refresh'.

Since when has a modern 'invested in' toolkit allowed, for example, to even move the 'X' to close a window elsewhere? Or to set your own background image on the titlebar? Or even... color UI elements? Not long since Chicago!

Seems clear to me the tools to 'make things pretty' are being removed, not maintained, if we can say prettiness is based on the artistry of the user. And otherwise, the prettiness that remains is ephemeral and by another's whim.

Perhaps as long as it is still pretty, it's not bothersome, and yeah, aesthetic has commercial value. But these days I look at things like Windows's flat looks and ask, 'what the hell is this aesthetic?' They must be spending millions, but I don't find the results appealing at all.

I don't agree with the point about audio plugins. Functionality is far more important when I'm evaluating audio plugins than looks. If a plugin has a "good, fancy" custom UI sometimes it takes longer to read labels or view the value of a knob. I usually opt for my DAW's default interface over a custom one unless there is additional information in the custom one. I find this keeps me in my flow and lets me manipulate the plugin more efficiently.

I'm sure some people buy plugins because how they look, but people also buy wine because the bottle, and books because the cover. Personally I'd rather buy audio plugins because they sound good and get the job done.

I hear ProTools and Ableton Live disparaged all the time for having simpler "ugly" UIs. Both programs remain popular because many people enjoy them for reasons other than eye candy. Perhaps it isn't that others don't have an eye for style, but simply that their exist other factors that people prioritize over style.

Good point bringing up up audio plugins. I wish many things worked like them. Everything visible/not too much hidden unless it's really complex, available/usually discoverable, and responsive in real time.

> I know that not everybody have an eye for style like I have.

Another way to think of that is that your taste is not the same as others' - do not let that difference blind you and make you think yours is somehow superior, accept that what you dislike can be something that others do like and this isn't about them lacking something you do not.

This looks like it could be very dense and functional. I see the appeal.

Counterpoint: Gnome, in its failed attempts to be like MacOS but "better" for me ends up looking and feeling like "Fisher Price, My First Computer." I'm a grown-up who can handle and appreciate both complexity and customization. Stop trying to make decisions for me and get out of my way.

If I want "prettiness" I'll go to an art gallery. When I sit down in front of the computer, I typically want to get work done. I want functional first and foremost. Prettiness gets very, very close to a "0" weighting from me in relative terms. Just let me accomplish the damn task I'm trying to accomplish, without getting in the way.

You probably (and I definitely) have a flat color for your desktop, rather than a picture of some mountain (much as I like mountains) or garden or some such.

I can't say I've never changed my background to something that I find aesthetically pleasing, but it's rare. At the moment, both my work machine (a Mac) and my personal machine (a Linux box running KDE Plasma) are using the default / initial background. So yeah, changing that definitely isn't something I prioritize very highly.

I will however concede that I always make it a point to configure my terminal to display green text on a black background.

> something what the eye pleases

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. People tend to like the fact that all shapes and UI controls were clearly defined and very easy to tell apart from one another, plus there is a giant nostalgia factor in play. See e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/windows98/comments/ktz5v3/just_made... for an example of this behavior.

I'm definitely in that camp. 4Dwm was nice back in the day. I never got the appeal of CDE back then. That said, after looking at old screenshots, I definitely prefer anti-aliased fonts.

ok good points ... I expected that. Yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder IMHO this counts only for a limited scope. Discussing this further would lead into a philosophical debate. What I never got into my mind is "nostalgia". Nostalgia isn't worth of nothing for me. I tried but can't understand why this is for somebody anything worth because in my eyes it's like hold tight to something obsolete.

> Yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder IMHO this counts only for a limited scope.

And that scope is arbitrary and each person has their own threshold, so we go back to "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" :-P.

I didn't grew up or have any sort of nostalgia for CDE/Motif myself but i think it looks fine. I prefer Window Maker / NeXTStep myself though.

Also appreciate that CDE was designed at a time when a 16-32MB workstation was commonly deployed. The overall footprint of these DEs is quite low, especially compared to today.

"Prettiness", while desirable, is also/can be expensive in terms of everything: CPU, RAM, IO, none of which the machines these were deployed on had in any abundance.

It's really hard to appreciate how slow older hardware was.

Today, if you wanted a DE on a small machine with 1G of RAM, something like CDE might be a really good fit. Especially if you could get away with something like Lynx for a browser.

Haha back in those days they called Motif a resource hog. And it was pretty big for the day, I remember at the uni library we had a whole shelf for all the hefty volumes of official documentation (and those for X11R5)

It was deliberately similar to contemporary Windows and OS/2. (Sadly the only part that stuck was CUA.)

Thank you for voting a honest question down. I just wanted to understand.

> (in my opinion) ugly

There's your answer.

tl;dr: I don't like something, so no one should like that thing, and if they do they get a derogatory label as 'nerds'. You might want to read the room...

For some of us, computers are tools, not manifest expressions of our self-important concepts of 'good taste'. I could not possibly care less about rounded corners, transparent windows so I can see some pretentious background picture through my code, animated anything or whatever else the latest UX fad is. I want my window manager simple, consistent, functional, fast, familiar and out of the way of the actual work I'm doing. Simplicity is it's own kind of 'pretty'.

What??? You're not excited about rounded corners? You must be a crotchety old __ like me!

So, recently, I've been having a problem. I can't control the way my desktop or programs look, nor how I interface with them. For me, control of my environment takes priority over aesthetics but doesn't explicitly exclude them. The nature of the work I'm getting done changes depending on how I do it, which in turn is shaped by the GUI, or what appears and its mechanics.

I want to tell my GUI how I want it to look, feel and work, not the other way around. In my opinion, although CDE is nice and functional, and definitely more so than any recent desktop I see, I'm not sure if I can hold it up as 'the way', if it won't let me decide what that would be. I can just say it works, and well, but it's not 'optimal' if I don't get to change it, just like I can't reach in and rip out every little hamburger menu in modern apps by the seams.

To me a fundamental control problem still exists. CDE restores lost functionality, but I am left to wonder: what do I control?

All that aside, this is a great project, just for proving that someone can get all the modern engines to behave and show consistency again. That's a gift.

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