Comment by InsideOutSanta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InsideOutSanta | Hacker News Reader

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I couldn't agree more.

I feel like as the computer literacy of the people making decisions in tech companies has gone up, the care that's being invested into actually making good user interfaces has gone down. This applies to Macs, Windows, and also to Linux desktop environments.

Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics. People used to care about making sure buttons are recognizable and differentiated with icons, colors, and clear labels. Now it's just text. People used to make sure windows had clear, visible borders, and the active window was clearly identifiable. Now it's just a shadow, and if you have a dark user interface, you can't even see the shadow. People used to make sure scrollable areas where clearly identifiable, now you have to just guess at what is scrollable.

From the screenshots, this looks like the same low-contrast, low-usability, but visually pretty design approach most modern desktop environments have adopted.

It's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction we're going in.

I think people learned the wrong lessons from Apple. They thought that Mac products were successful because of their aesthetics, but in reality it's because they were the only products that tried to be usable.

To be fair I think MacOS classic (i.e. MacOS 9 et.al) was well thought out and usable IMHO.

> Just 15 years ago, there was a heavy focus on usability and making user interfaces clear and readable. Now, the focus seems to be much more on aesthetics.

I'm going to make an argument I don't fully agree with, but I think is worth discussing: the dramatic increase in digital literacy affords us the ability to focus on aesthetics more now. When no one knew how to use a computer or what it could do, everything needed to be extremely descriptive and often needed a metaphor back to the "real world." This isn't (as) true anymore.

That is objectively true, but I still think it's a bad decision. Computer-literate people may not depend on good user interfaces, but they still benefit from them.

KDE 3.5 still exists and is still usable. check it out at trinitydesktop.org

Even plasma 5 and 6 are pretty legible. At least, much more so than Gnome-land. The UI is dense, there's lines and separators, buttons are outlined.

Oh that is just beautiful

a classic market irony example is keyboards.. Every single user here has a keyboard, yet keyboards on a mass scale are cheap and badly designed, with no end in sight.

My keyboard was embarrassingly expensive, but I love it. You can get what you want, but what most people want is to not care about it at all.

How could the design of keyboards be improved?

Much like user interfaces: by careful study of how people use them and not by aping what the most "successful" keyboards are doing.

Anyone who has used a mechanical keyboard can tell you that there is much room for improvement. Rubber dome keyboards are cheap to manufacture and adequate when new but wear out quickly, and most people don't treat them like a wear item. Meanwhile, mechanical keyboards provide a superior typing experience that decreases hand fatigue and can easily last 20+ years with no maintenance.

And don't get me started on layouts. QWERTY is ubiquitous but is a piece of tech debt that has hung around for over a century. Studies have been done and layouts have been produced that are much more efficient and produce less hand fatigue, but none have taken hold because of the sheer momentum that QWERTY has.

Want to see an easy place where there's room for improvement? Why are the rows on every keyboard you've ever used staggered so bizarrely? Because on a typewriter, mechanical limitations meant that there had to be room for the linkages. But inexplicably, we continue to manufacture keyboards that preserve this fossilized layout. Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.

Modern mechanical keyboards are overpriced rgb widgets for the most part. And god forbid you’re any literate in switches, lubing, etc, it becomes impossible to just get a keyboard. I’ve returned two m. keyboards and am absolutely fine with kv-300h (cheap island scissors with no bells or whistles). I have two, one from 2017, another from 2024. No difference.

I think the market rewards cheap keyboards because most people don't use desktop computers, most people do almost all of their computing on mobile phones. Some people use laptops for work, which they swap out about every 2 years, so the longevity of the keyboard doesn't matter to them.

I've seen coworkers using 65% or less mechanical keyboards and I have no idea how they get anything done. They always seemed like a cosmetic item to me, though they seem more portable if you're connecting it to a laptop. I use a full mechanical keyboard with keypad and regularly use home, del, pg up/up keys and appreciate having the arrow keys in their own little area. I use a few of the F-keys too. To each their own, but I personally find these tiny keyboards to be far less useful than a full sized keyboard

> Typing on an ortholinear keyboard is sheer bliss in comparison.

I'm curious why. It never occurred to me that this would be a source of discomfort. If I look at how I have my hands on the keyboard, they are angled anyway - my torso is wider than the keyboard center, elbows rest on the arm rests, so the hands then kinda meet in the middle angled. It doesn't look like an orthogonal layout would be particularly advantagenous.

Otherwise, I think keyboards are a case of "good enough" and high transition costs compared to the benefits. I'm a software dev, so certainly above average in the amount of typing I do. But I can't even type with all ten fingers, yet it never seemed like a bottleneck. I can't "outtype" my thought anyway.

Look at Kinesis 2/360, Glove 80, Keyboardio Model 100. I've used most of them for extended periods of time and would not touch a staggered keyboard with a stick.

Another angle for optimization would be QWERTY itself.

The real lesson they need to learn is to add the right UI components. Apple did that right. There gradually added and styled tab bars, sidebars, etc. It didn't come on day one. If they can do that maybe we get a framework that actually adds components necessary to build good desktop applications.

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