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Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

I feel like elementaryOS [0] comes a lot closer to the original mac vision when it comes to UX.

Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I understand.

elementary also unfortunately shares some GNOME-isms, such as avoidance of menubars in favor of hamburger menus, which goes against Mac UX. Menubars serve as a central index of application functionality under macOS and are a central pillar to its UX.

I think elementary isn't trying to be Mac OS, it has its own UX - even though it's clearly inspired by Macs.

It has its own HIG, which you can see here: https://docs.elementary.io/hig

Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that difference.

Of course, but it's probably going to be a sticking point for many longtime Mac users looking for more FOSS-flavored alternatives.

I worked in computing as GUIs became the dominant mode of computer interaction. The idea that Apple's team, as brilliant as they were, somehow explored the full space of possibilities is just completely absurd. In the decades since their designs were formed, we have come up with new ideas that never crossed their minds (not because they were stupid, merely because they were human), and have new technology that creates questions about their assumptions and new possibilities.

By all means bow down before what they did at the time, but please do not treat macOS or the Apple HIG as "the be-all and end-all of UI/UX for all time". Because it is not.

There’s always room for improvement, no argument there. That said, I don’t see GNOME or elementaryOS as a clean step forward.

It's a compliment to the work Apple did that there is no clean step forward.

>Because it is not.

But in practice it is. Or can you show something better (that exists now)?

Two things I can mention immediately that were not part of Apple's original HIG: optional focus-follows-mouse, and window resizing behavior. They got both of these wrong. Give me time and I am confident I can find some more significant examples.

> Or can you show something better (that exists now)?

Or can you explain why you think it is?

Because it is not.

Many of us don't want to use a Mac not because they are bad computers (they are extremely good) but because of MacOS

Two very popular examples: Finder and iTunes

The good bits in MacOS come from NeXTSTEP

> By all means bow down before what they did at the time, but please do not treat macOS or the Apple HIG as "the be-all and end-all of UI/UX for all time". Because it is not.

Of course. Menu bars are still much better than catch-all hamburger menus. So it is still annoying that a project that supposedly took inspiration from older Mac OS regresses in that respect.

I gotta say, the Mac OS menu bar (and the same on Atari TOS) was great on smaller screens and it still works well on laptops.

It doesn't work so well anymore for example with todays 34" ultrawide monitors, as the application window and it's menu are potentially far away from each other.

In NeXTSTEP (the predecessor of Mac OS X), the application menu was actually vertical and moveable freely on the screen. The menus were also detachable, so you could for example leave the "File" submenu open.

http://toastytech.com/guis/opensteptoolbar.png

I can’t say I’ve had any more trouble with a global menubars on big modern high rez screens than I did on 15” 1024x768 CRTs 20 years ago. In fact the bigger the screen the more annoying I find it for the menubar (or even worse, hamburger menu) to be moving around the screen, because it means that muscle memory doesn’t apply and I’m having to track down a 20px strip or 25x25px button “manually” each time, unless the window is maximized.

As for NeXT style menus, I don’t really have an opinion because with WindowMaker/NEXTSPACE on Linux the only applications that use the floating menu are GNUSTEP ones, so I don’t actually have much experience using that style of menus.

There is also Haiku OS.

See https://www.haiku-os.org/

I used to use elementaryOS but it sucks running on an LTS version when important kernel fixes come for my Lenovo hardware in literally every release.

Yeah I wish they were more of a DE like GNOME or KDE instead of a full distro.

I know you can install their stuff on other distros too, but it isn't well-supported

> Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I understand.

What drama?

https://fossforce.com/2022/04/elementary-os-faces-uncertain-...

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