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Comment by jnsie | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if, in the future, stable diffusion or other AI techniques can be used to generate nice icon sets and other UI elements. Not that I'd expect Apple levels of design, but anything to bridge the gap would be nice...I'm primarily a macOS user, secondarily a windows user, and my forays into *nix have always provided a poor first impression. Anecdotal, of course...

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I'm not a KDE user, but to be honest, I quite like a lot of the KDE designs. I'll admit, KDE design is nowhere near as meticulous as Apple's design, but even since KDE 3 I've always admired the design anyways, just for being colorful and functional.

Focusing too much on style can be a bit of a problem, though. All too often, Linux theming and UX feels very "skin deep" - and obviously, It'd be great if most people focused on stability and robustness at this point.

"here is an open source operating system for creatives"

First HN comment: "I wonder if we could use AI to replace the large-scale creative work of making sets icons."

Visiting The Orange Site provides a wealth of comedy

There's no reason why both can't happen side by side. Don't see any cause for your derision.

Or bring back skins[0]! Have software read textures from areas in a big image, then let the user replace the image. Forest theme for Microsoft Teams! SciFi file explorer!

I tried using MidJourney to generate exaggerated UI themes (not skins, just general themes for inspiration), but the results were disappointing. They were always gorgeous[1], but my prompt engineering skills couldn't coax it to use space efficiently.

[0]: https://skins.webamp.org/

[1] https://i.imgur.com/5KC2u7J.png

Part of me really misses those days, and another part of me is screaming “please no” internally.

this approach does not allow UI scaling, because the UI is made up of pixels.

the open source modular synthesis software VCV Rack has a UI composed entirely of SVG descriptions (even though 95% of the UI is provided by 3rd party modules that get loaded into the main program). They can look like anything you want, but the result is an infinitely (more or less) zoomable/scalable UI.

I feel like this is weak argument these days, places like reddit.com/r/unixporn are overkill when it comes to styling a desktop environment, but a quick change to the Numix icon set and a new GTK theme makes most Linux installations with Gnome look great.

Heh my dream was a real-time generative overlay on top of Dwarf Fortress ASCII art.

(That was before the Steam version ofc.)

that's interesting. I find the icons available for *nix far superior and interesting. The problem is finding out the good stuff, because its hard with the current signal vs noise ratio. I actually dislike the current macOS icon sets, far too colorful and saturated.

Which icon sets do you find superior, in particular?

Note that parent meant the UI holistically, and not just icon sets.

AFAIK, this way of thinking about the design of the entire system, and not just in discrete segments is largely unique to macOS. I think it is because Apple has a design language they try to enforce as rigorously as possible, even onto 3rd party developers, which gives the OS & all applications on it a very uniform and consistent feeling.

Windows is the worst. Microsoft has a design language, but they barely encourage it even among their own apps (Settings vs. Control Panel as one example).

I will make a strong claim: I don't think any O.S. developer takes design truly seriously besides Apple. Definitely not Microsoft, partially Google with Android, and certainly not most *nix distros (with the possible rare exception like System76's Pop!_OS).

Most linux desktop environments (notable exception of Gnome3 though it applies for Gnome2) seem to favour old school UX design which, incidentally, I happen to find nicer than “pretty”.

I personally really like the Adwaita icon sets much more than windows and at least on-par with MacOS, though MacOS has the advantage of being rendered only on extremely high DPI screens. So most people only have that experienfe

For whatever it's worth, macOS/OS X has had very high resolution icons well before high DPI displays were commonly available. Even 10.0 which was released in 2001 supported 128x128 icons, which was 4x larger than what other popular desktops were capable of at the time and enabled far greater levels of detail, even if most users wouldn't be seeing that detail most of the time.

Thats actually true with Adwaita also. :D

the default gnome ones, and the whole Adwaita design language. I would prefer it any day over the current mac. Obviously its a personal preference, there's no right or wrong. But I used to like the mac design much more a bunch of years ago. Now, not so much.

Honestly probably not that hard, could train a model/lora with about 30 images, so gather more than 30 good looking icons, train a model and then take the time to prompt and generate all the icons you need. Then do touchups in gimp/photoshop.

At most would take me a week or so to do I think, more likely less than a day.

Eh icons aren't what set macOS apart, it's UI considerations. I mean it looks fine but macOS would still be worth using if it looked like ass.

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