5 ms·

Looking at the screenshots makes me seriously wonder if any professional graphic artist / ui designer is working on that project... screens are mostly empty gra

by bsaul 8y ago

Looking at the screenshots makes me seriously wonder if any professional graphic artist / ui designer is working on that project... screens are mostly empty gray panels, with weirdly spaced inputs from the 80s , tiny fonts and bland colors... i don’t want to sound too harsh on the nice guys that worked on it, but if they want to have anything popular they should give UI a bit more love ( and i think now is the time when a popular lîux desktop is the most needed)

meddlepal 8y ago
It looks functional unlike most garbage designers produce.
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  This comment is entirely without value. It's possible to make a user interface that's both functional and well-designed. Indeed, good UI design improves functionality by making it more accessible and understandable. Things like consistency of elements and appropriate use of whitespace help to avoid mistakes and confusion. I have to agree with the parent – it's also surprising to me how often otherwise excellent open-source projects are let down by poor user interface design. A large part of this is probably down to the more technical nature of the teams building them, who are probably the group for which design matters least. But I see this a lot in things like internal admin tools too – developers can quite often develop UIs that are so bad they actually become dangerous, and I wonder if some kind of "useful design skills for software developers" might be a worthwhile thing to work on.
- bsaul 8y ago
  I’d like to address this comment because i think it highlights a common misconception amongst developer : a good looking UI isn’t first and foremost about being « pretty ». It’s about being meaningful. About making sense. If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention. Colors, font and layout are of the utmost importance when designning a ui because they convey meaning. Which is what a GUI is all about ( otherwise just use a terminal).
  - anoncake 8y ago
    > If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. If all you see is a big gray panel, there's something seriously wrong indeed, because a panel without any content is useless. But that is not the case here. > There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. The background color does not need a particular reason to "take up space". It is there when nothing else has a reason to be there. That's how a background works. > If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the fonts look tiny, it means they're consistent with fonts elsewhere, including places where space is at more of a premium than in the installer. > If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention. In the screenshots, nothing especially requires your attention. There are no warnings, errors, etc...
    - bsaul 8y ago
      If nothing requires my attention, then why make a screen in the first place ? Of course something does requires my attention. There is content, and content has structure and different levels of importance. A screen in an installer is a step. A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome. If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc Those are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself when you see a screen like that. Just based on visual layout and style.
      - anoncake 8y ago
        > If nothing requires my attention, then why make a screen in the first place ? Of course something requires your attention, the content of the screen. But if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing. > A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. It is. > Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome. They're on the left. I'm seriously wondering whether you even looked at the screenshots. > If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc If the background is the thing taking up the most space, it means that your screen is unnecessarily large for the task. That's unavoidable and not a problem to begin with. You can't just put multiple inputs in one "step", else you'd have a step with no coherent topic like Installation type+timezone.
stouset 8y ago
Also tiny fonts with huge screen sizes, and 95% of the screen real estate being wasted. And the installer icon is small, hidden in the top-left corner of the desktop with an icon that has low contrast with the background.
guessmyname 8y ago
ElementaryOS [1] is the only Linux distribution that seems to care more about design than functionality. [1] https://elementary.io https://elementary.io
- matthewmacleod 8y ago
  And it appears to do that primarily by ripping off macOS. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing…
  - ramenmeal 8y ago
    Looks like it'd fit in reddit.com/r/crappyoffbrands
- nextos 8y ago
  I loved the looks of classical Gnome. Say Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10). My favorite design these days is an extremely minimal UI. A tiling window manager (StumpWM), Emacs, a terminal (xterm) and a web browser (Firefox). It's very efficient, and solves the design issue by having almost no design at all. It can actually look really nice. See e.g. a some images from a random user with a similar setup: https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html
  - ashtonbaker 8y ago
    I tried i3wm for a while - are you able to compare that to StumpWM? I really like the idea of a tiling wm, but haven't gotten around to customizing it exactly the way I would want it.
    - nextos 8y ago
      Both are manual tiling window managers. I tried i3wm and I didn't like it that much, though. StumpWM is essentially Ratpoison reimplemented in Common Lisp. It's really good and stable, plus it resembles Emacs a lot. There's even a winner-mode. There's not much to say except that you can tweak it till infinity and extend it in CL. But for me most defaults are pretty good already.
tahanij 8y ago
KDE has been seriously understaffed for a long while, and this is just one of the symptoms. It looks amateurish compared to GNOME.
- dschuetz 8y ago
  I wonder why it was "understaffed". Wrong decisions? Complete mess that still calls itself KDE?
  - tahanij 8y ago
    I don't think there's any organisation currently funding the development of KDE.
  - emilsedgh 8y ago
    Because the "staff" are volunteers and nobody pays them.
    - justaj 8y ago
      That's not entirely true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Contributors Some core devs are employed or have been employed by companies such as Novell, Nokia and Blue Systems.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - caght 8y ago
        In the past, yes. Currently, no.
- cpburns2009 8y ago
  GNOME looks like it was designed by an iOS fanboy. KDE looks far more mature and professional.
- alxlaz 8y ago
jhanschoo 8y ago
I wonder if this is due to flattenning the UI of KDE 4, but failing to adequately compensate for the space that used to be occupied by the shadows, rounded corners, and embosses now changed to simple lines, etc.
diffeomorphism 8y ago
Almost all screenshots in the article are of the installer which is "mostly empty" or a slideshow of random things for most OSs and does not seem any worse than the windows one. Actually, the only apps shown are system settings and the update manager. Hence, I am somewhat confused what you are basing your (strongly worded) criticism on.
voycey 8y ago
I just don't understand why the majority of them look so terrible, Xfce has weirdly become one of the better looking DE's now and it was designed to use minimal resources.

by bsaul 8y ago

meddlepal 8y ago

It looks functional unlike most garbage designers produce.

matthewmacleod 8y ago
This comment is entirely without value. It's possible to make a user interface that's both functional and well-designed. Indeed, good UI design improves functionality by making it more accessible and understandable. Things like consistency of elements and appropriate use of whitespace help to avoid mistakes and confusion. I have to agree with the parent – it's also surprising to me how often otherwise excellent open-source projects are let down by poor user interface design. A large part of this is probably down to the more technical nature of the teams building them, who are probably the group for which design matters least. But I see this a lot in things like internal admin tools too – developers can quite often develop UIs that are so bad they actually become dangerous, and I wonder if some kind of "useful design skills for software developers" might be a worthwhile thing to work on.
bsaul 8y ago
I’d like to address this comment because i think it highlights a common misconception amongst developer : a good looking UI isn’t first and foremost about being « pretty ». It’s about being meaningful. About making sense. If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention. Colors, font and layout are of the utmost importance when designning a ui because they convey meaning. Which is what a GUI is all about ( otherwise just use a terminal).
- anoncake 8y ago
  > If all i see when i look at the screen is a huge big gray panel, then it means nothing. If all you see is a big gray panel, there's something seriously wrong indeed, because a panel without any content is useless. But that is not the case here. > There’s no important content, there’s just a background color taking up the space for no reason. The background color does not need a particular reason to "take up space". It is there when nothing else has a reason to be there. That's how a background works. > If the fonts look tiny, it means they’re not important. If the fonts look tiny, it means they're consistent with fonts elsewhere, including places where space is at more of a premium than in the installer. > If the colors are bland, it means nothing is especially requiring my attention. In the screenshots, nothing especially requires your attention. There are no warnings, errors, etc...
  - bsaul 8y ago
    If nothing requires my attention, then why make a screen in the first place ? Of course something does requires my attention. There is content, and content has structure and different levels of importance. A screen in an installer is a step. A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome. If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc Those are the kinds of questions that you should ask yourself when you see a screen like that. Just based on visual layout and style.
    - anoncake 8y ago
      > If nothing requires my attention, then why make a screen in the first place ? Of course something requires your attention, the content of the screen. But if you highlight everything, you highlight nothing. > A step has title, a domain, which probably would be nice to write somewhere. It is. > Then there probably are other steps i’ve performed, and other steps to come. Visual queues showing where i am in the navigation would be welcome. They're on the left. I'm seriously wondering whether you even looked at the screenshots. > If the background is the thing taking up the most space, then it means the screen either has no reason to be fullscreen, or that the input doesn’t justify taking a whole step, ... etc If the background is the thing taking up the most space, it means that your screen is unnecessarily large for the task. That's unavoidable and not a problem to begin with. You can't just put multiple inputs in one "step", else you'd have a step with no coherent topic like Installation type+timezone.

stouset 8y ago

Also tiny fonts with huge screen sizes, and 95% of the screen real estate being wasted. And the installer icon is small, hidden in the top-left corner of the desktop with an icon that has low contrast with the background.

guessmyname 8y ago

ElementaryOS [1] is the only Linux distribution that seems to care more about design than functionality. [1] https://elementary.io https://elementary.io

matthewmacleod 8y ago
And it appears to do that primarily by ripping off macOS. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing…
- ramenmeal 8y ago
  Looks like it'd fit in reddit.com/r/crappyoffbrands
nextos 8y ago
I loved the looks of classical Gnome. Say Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10). My favorite design these days is an extremely minimal UI. A tiling window manager (StumpWM), Emacs, a terminal (xterm) and a web browser (Firefox). It's very efficient, and solves the design issue by having almost no design at all. It can actually look really nice. See e.g. a some images from a random user with a similar setup: https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html https://lepisma.github.io/wiki/misc/desktop.html
- ashtonbaker 8y ago
  I tried i3wm for a while - are you able to compare that to StumpWM? I really like the idea of a tiling wm, but haven't gotten around to customizing it exactly the way I would want it.
  - nextos 8y ago
    Both are manual tiling window managers. I tried i3wm and I didn't like it that much, though. StumpWM is essentially Ratpoison reimplemented in Common Lisp. It's really good and stable, plus it resembles Emacs a lot. There's even a winner-mode. There's not much to say except that you can tweak it till infinity and extend it in CL. But for me most defaults are pretty good already.

tahanij 8y ago

KDE has been seriously understaffed for a long while, and this is just one of the symptoms. It looks amateurish compared to GNOME.

dschuetz 8y ago
I wonder why it was "understaffed". Wrong decisions? Complete mess that still calls itself KDE?
- tahanij 8y ago
  I don't think there's any organisation currently funding the development of KDE.
- emilsedgh 8y ago
  Because the "staff" are volunteers and nobody pays them.
  - justaj 8y ago
    That's not entirely true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Contributors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE#Contributors Some core devs are employed or have been employed by companies such as Novell, Nokia and Blue Systems.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - caght 8y ago
      In the past, yes. Currently, no.
cpburns2009 8y ago
GNOME looks like it was designed by an iOS fanboy. KDE looks far more mature and professional.
alxlaz 8y ago

jhanschoo 8y ago

I wonder if this is due to flattenning the UI of KDE 4, but failing to adequately compensate for the space that used to be occupied by the shadows, rounded corners, and embosses now changed to simple lines, etc.

diffeomorphism 8y ago

Almost all screenshots in the article are of the installer which is "mostly empty" or a slideshow of random things for most OSs and does not seem any worse than the windows one. Actually, the only apps shown are system settings and the update manager. Hence, I am somewhat confused what you are basing your (strongly worded) criticism on.

voycey 8y ago

I just don't understand why the majority of them look so terrible, Xfce has weirdly become one of the better looking DE's now and it was designed to use minimal resources.