Comment by ANTSANTS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ANTSANTS | Hacker News Reader

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I think it's worth noting that there's never been a "weird" WM/DE that attracted a sizeable userbase purely on its own merits. Gnome 3 and Unity were to a great extent forced upon their users. If there were real benefits to means of desktop interaction that differed significantly from the established "Windows 95" and "tiling WM" modes, you'd think there'd be a few enthusiasts on the side exploring this realm and touting its productivity advantages.

I'd bet the majority of the lightweight "Windows 95 clone" WMs and DEs exist because GNOME and (to a lesser extent) KDE alienated their userbases by trying to be "different" and "next generation" (mostly by poorly cloning OSX and the latest Windows version that nobody liked anyway), so I'd hesitate to say that experimentation should be left to them.

EDIT: Many commercial products suffer from this problem where the existing version is "good enough" and people are happy using it for several hours a day, but the producer needs to convince users to purchase the new version anyway, so they end up adding a lot of pointless, irritating, and even product-breaking changes just to make the new version seem revolutionary and worthy of an upgrade, even if it's actually making the product worse. Many open source devs don't seem to have realized that there is no reason for them to play this game. They don't need to sell anyone a new version in a cardboard box, so there's no conflict of interest here; they can do less work and make their users more happy by keeping things stable and incrementally improving things. Yet, very often, they ape Microsoft, Adobe, and company's spastic thrashing anyway. More ribbons!

I agree. A desktop environment is one of those things where familiarity trumps innovations. It's like your living room. You might do innovating things in your living room from time to time, but most people would say that the living room itself should remain familiar, conservative, and all around comfortable. You really don't want to re-learn how to sit down in your own couch.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only time when a massive change to the desktop environment is warranted is when there's a massive change to the physical method that people use to interact with computers. The widespread availability of the mouse gave rise to the now-familiar WIMP paradigm. The introduction of multi-touch triggered another round of innovation, but I doubt that this can be backported to keyboard-and-mouse devices any more than Photoshop can be backported to mouseless terminals.

When Windows 7 came out I hated the new menu bar. After using it for a few years I curse Windows XP every time I have to use it.

Sometimes change is good. Just because we do something one particular way (in the world of desktop environments this is often down to a decision made in the early 90s) doesn't mean that it's the most productive method of doing it. Often initially unpopular changes in user interface prove to be more effective.

The problem is that change for changes sake is different to change for UI improvements sake, but the two are often hard to distinguish between. How do we know that a new UI implementation is better or worse than the old one? You don't really until it's being used in the real world. There's not an easy answer, but I don't think that grinding innovation to a halt is the right one. I guess the beauty of the open source world is that there's room for a minimal non-progressive UI as well as a number of innovative ones.

Yeah don't want to get into a big thread about the menu ribbon bar - but the principle reason it is actually worse is, each item in the bar is rendered differently, making it worse for learning by new users. XP-style text menus you could at least search methodically, pulling down each one and opening each submenu until you found something. The ribbon on the other hand, is hard to search at all with different fonts and text positions and icons all scrambled together.

So the menu bar wins now, but principally because its learned (the hard way). Now it would be even harder to switch to anything else.

I'm not usually one to initiate OSX/Windows comparisons, but it is rather surprising that menu searching isn't a thing on Windows.

While it's obvious that MS would have a reason, I have no clue what that could be. The only thing I can think of is that people seem to use Google rather than their app's help functionality even if the latter would do a better job.

Microsoft did implement a sort of menu searching with the revamped Start menu in Windows Vista. Anything that could possibly be accessed through the Start menu (programs, control panel items, administrative functions) can be searched by hitting the Windows key and typing.

The Office team, however, seems to operate more or less independently from the Windows team. The ribbon, for example, was first unveiled around the time Windows Vista was released, but Vista had no ribbon anywhere. Windows 7 added the ribbon to a few random apps, like MS Paint. Windows 8 added it to a few more random apps, like File Explorer. But they don't seem to be in any hurry to unify the look and feel of their own flagship products.

Well, what else could we expect from a company that thinks it's OK to slap two completely different UIs (Metro and desktop) on the same OS? Microsoft UI is schizophrenic.

Windows 7 was an incremental change within the WIMP paradigm. That's what differentiates it from the excessively disruptive, change-for-the-sake-of-change "innovations" that seem to be so popular nowadays.

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