Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

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I wholeheartedly agree with you. This "reinvent the classical desktop" trend really annoys me. Traditional desktop environments like Win 95 up to 7 or Gnome 2 are imho closest to the ideal, they have many many years of evolution behind them.

Mistakes that are being made:

1) Thinking that touch is superior to mouse, that touch is the future. That's simply untrue, mouse is quicker and more productive.

2) Focusing on first-time users too much, forgetting experienced users. Example - animations - nice at first, but get annoying quickly.

3) Trying to unify the tablet and the desktop interface. The optimal interface for tablets and for desktops are different.

For me the ideal desktop environment would be:

- take the classical desktop concept

- do a design update (Gnome 2 or Win 7 aren't especially pretty, the design looks outdated)

- add some nice features without changing the whole concept, e.g. some tiling support, useful keyboard shortcuts etc.

I am reminded of the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

The design idioms seen in Gnome 2 and Windows 7 are essentially highly refined versions of what existed on the Apple II OS. Personal computers and what we use them for have come a long way since then and it makes sense to redesign the UI to reflect this. Often this means getting your hands dirty and trying new things. Also - first time users are going to be around for longer than experienced users ;)

Yes, this Steve-Jobsian reasoning is exactly what leads to bad UI designs: "People don't know what they want and if they don't like our UI, it's in some way their fault."

I don't have anything against designers trying new things - unless they are trying them on me. For me, Win 8 or Gnome 3 is clearly a downgrade in terms of user experience.

I think tiling would greatly improve the usability. If windows had tiling and something like dmenu I would be much happier. The start screen sucks, especially if you have a lot of applications that you commonly use. It's impractical to look for a application in the tiles. I know that you can go to the start screen and start typing in the name of the program (sort of like dmenu), but why should you have to go to a pointless screen to do so.

Exactly, and another problem of the start screen is that it's fullscreen - it's distracting when the whole screen changes.

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