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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe is continuously changing interfaces. You've sold me. I'm a customer, I'm using your thing. Why do you want to make it difficult for me to memorize my use of your thing? Moving menus and buttons around all the time is craziness. I don't have time, cognitive capacity, or interest in finding new ways to do the same functionality from before.

Things do need to change over time, I get it, I create things too. Sometimes new functionality evolves and has to go somewhere, sometimes you find a previous design was bad and there truly is an improved layout that will help most. Fine. Those sorts of states should converge quickly so I can memorize and dedicate it to muscle memory vs having to actively look and think all the time.

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> You've sold me. I'm a customer, I'm using your thing. Why do you want to make it difficult for me to memorize my use of your thing?

Typical company these days: you're who? Ah yes, you're an existing customer. You're already paying us, sunk time into learning our product, and rearranged your work or life to be at least minimally dependent on us. We can safely ignore you - it's unlikely you'll leave near-term, so our focus is much better spent on acquiring new customers.

To be clear: I hate it, but this seems to be how most software products are being developed these days - all focus is on making them dumb and pretty enough to sell to first-time users, at the expense of already onboarded users.

> it's unlikely you'll leave near-term

Yeah. You’ve chosen Apple for a reason, and since you have only one real alternative that you emphatically do not want, you’ll just have to deal with whatever we throw at you.

The parent refers to the phenomenon described in detail here: https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...

The two phenomena exist together. Yes, companies target Marls, but most, especially startups, seem to be more interested in acquiring new Marls than it is in milking the ones they already have.

This is a big part of what made me start using linux. On windows, there's a new way to do basic stuff all the time and they screw around with menus that work perfectly well just to have something new.

That means that any tutorials will quickly get outdated and you can spend half your mental capacity just keeping up with this crap. The amount of times I googled how to do something in MS office, clicked an article from half a year ago and found that one of the options it mentions doesn't exist anymore is too damn high.

Things are nice on linux, especially the CLI world. You learn a little program once and use it for decades without thinking about it.

As always with Linux it depends on which distribution you're on but that hasn't been my experience at all with distributions like Ubuntu and Mint. I used Ubuntu back when the close, maximise and minimise buttons were on the top right and they moved them right from under me. I've tried to adjust to using flat packs but struggled with their very serious limitations while programs I rely on are no longer available in other package types. I have seen them see-saw between the horrible global menu and window menus, make wholesale changes to areas of the settings screen like display settings and mouse and trackpad settings. And I don't even know how many wildly different iterations of that horrible main menu application selector UI I have had to suffer through.

I use MATE, an old desktop environment descendant from GNOME 2. If I apply the principle of "It should last at least about as long as it's been around...", I can hopefully use it in peace :) (It'll probably look the same in another 20 years!)

I really don't see the benefit of almost anything else that came later (I did add an app launch shortcut that I rarely use). I also autohide most of the UI by default (bars and menus), so it's just there to do its basic function and allow me to focus. Performance is excellent.

That said, I think the main difference is mostly from community-focused development, it tends to bring out genuine usability concerns (which is why I think most *nix DEs work fine).

I've been through all the ups and downs around Ubuntu and gnome, but at least those changes generally happen at a time of my choosing too. I don't go to a commonly used app one day to do something quick only to find the entire UI was updated overnight.

Of course even the cli world has had it's changes though, systemd alone made decades of documentation obsolete.

As an older person, CLI is unusable. It is impossible to memorize all the switches, need to consult chatgpt at every step. I paid my dues to the CLI gods in my miniVAX days.

The recent overhaul of the Apple Watch was very egregious. Maybe I find it extra offensive since the device is physically attached to me at all times so the muscle memory is particularly strong. There are only 2 buttons on the device and they decided to completely change their behavior, throwing away 10 years of experience I had with the device. The new design isn’t even bad or anything, it’s just that the old design wasn’t bad either, so throwing it away was completely unjustifiable. It’s also offensive because I made the mistake of listening to their marketing and strapped one to everyone elderly in my life to help protect them from falls and heart failure, and now I have to help teach them a bunch of new stuff for no reason. Some of them just decided to stop using the thing instead, and I can hardly blame them.

Which version is this? I’m still on watch 5 and wondering whether I should get a new one.

COUGHmozilla

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