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Comment by unpopularopp | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else find it strange that the screenshots use different UIs and OSes regardless of the context? We got Ubuntu, Windows, white on black, black on white, font aliasing on and off etc. And don't tell me this is real in 2023 https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:SortByColor.png

Seems like everyone who made a commit highlighted by a screenshot made their own, instead of whoever wrote the patch notes made the screenshots on one single system

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It's definitely not great for visual clarity but I kinda like it, it has that old school open source vibe where it's just a bunch of different people hacking on stuff they feel like hacking on

But which "one single system" would you choose?

If the answer is platform X, you put off the users of platform Y and Z.

For different reasons in each case! Really: try substituting Linux, Mac, Windows for any of X, Y or Z and then work it through.

If you can't make the document for each system, I think it's probably better to document it as this more messy reality.

I maintain documentation for a niche cross-platform product. I ended up going with the 3x solution.

Assorted screenshots make clear that all those platforms are supported and look good. There's a common phenomenon in this style of screenshot gallery: second class platforms are only featured in screenshots from old releases, while recent screenshots are representative of what current developers care for. Sometimes maintainers who care redo screenshots on all platforms with the latest release to avoid giving an unwarranted bad impression.

> And don't tell me this is real in 2023

It looks like a high-contrast UI theme for people with vision impairment. In this context, what's wrong with it?

It looks to me like it is a collaborative development environment. It seems like this method of building a release notes file will highlight all of the available options and give visibility to what the developers are using for that change. This could be a valuable clue to tracking down a bug.

IIRC Microsoft does similar things for the VSCode changelogs to highlight that all features work across all platform and colorschemes.

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