6 ms·

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regressi

by swiley 7y ago

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s. This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.

philsnow 7y ago
I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth. [0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver hack settings by creating / modifying a theme. [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#Why_doesn.27t_the_screensaver_preferences_tool_allow_me_to_change_the_settings_for_the_theme.3F https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  Between this and https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/ and the various other systemd/freedesktop “anti-hacker” initiatives, I’ve been finding Linux to be more and more becoming the opposite of the operating system I’ve used for the last 20 years.
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    Still, I try to avoid GUI stuff and freedesktop stuff as much as possible (I do use a window manager, but not GNOME or KDE or whatever), and write better programs when possible, but a few things don't. I don't use any desktop environment at all. The web browser is one thing that isn't so good. Really, many things should be moved out of the web browser and made to work by simply nc, curl, etc. And some things work better with local programs, but others with remote, with whatever protocol is applicable e.g. IRC, NNTP, SMTP, etc, please.
    - yaktubi 7y ago
      My goaty is a goaty goaty vibrating and oscillating goaty sac goaty
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    A neat idea that I hadn’t thought of until your comment: Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation. This is pretty much what many people do in macOS. Apple’s OS supports the bare metal, vagrant / VirtualBox give me my tractably scrutable dev environment. It’s not a particularly ground breaking concept but it might cheer me up a bit when battling with the volatility of user facing Linux distributions.
    - philsnow 7y ago
      sounds a little bit like https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/
    - jimktrains2 7y ago
      Just being pedantic: containers aren't vms. Containers use the native Linux kernel namespacing and segregation facilities to run multiple applications in a somewhat segregated way.
    - eitland 7y ago
      > Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? > Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation. If there's anyone like me here they might be happy to know that KDE Neon exists and is something like: - Stable Ubuntu base. - Infinitely (almost) customizable KDE on top. - And (IMO unlike Kubuntu) sane defaults.
      - nitrogen 7y ago
        Thanks for the tip about KDE Neon. I use Kubuntu, but it definitely misses the mark.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Man there is not space on this comment box or time for all the criticism that link deserves. >Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. Icons were never sufficient metaphors to start with which is why we have text labels. >Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. What does this even actually mean. >User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation. This is only true if the user is completing an action that is solely based on clicking an icon with no text which we have already established is bad. >The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can be arbitrarily restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion. Why has this worked generally fine in lots of ecosystems including gnome? >If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. Earlier discussion seemed to suggest that lots of gnome developers were in fact not fine with this because it hurt gnomes "brand identity" >Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. Reckless? > we urge you to find ways to do this without taking away our agency Your agency? > Just because our apps use GTK that does not mean we’re ok with them being changed from under us. Nobody cares if you are OK with it.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - swiley 7y ago
    It's really just the popular distros that are following redhat. If you build an OS from scratch or use something like alpine or gentoo it's not so bad.
- guug 7y ago
  The problem with gnome is that they don't seem to validate their ideas at all. As a result, gnome users are directly subjected to the unfiltered whims of gnome's UI "designers". Instead of spending the substantial donations they received[1] on who knows what, the GNOME foundation should have spent some of it conducting proper focus groups. 1: https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1m-donation-over-two-years/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1...
  - shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    I don't know if that's true. GNOME 3 is just a dark enlightenment experiment, like an attempt at neomonarchy or the Empire from Elite. Instead of feature creep and user accommodation to Windows idioms, they slash and burn despotically to ease developer burden and try to flesh out their own vision. Do you use Dropbox? Too bad. :3 There's extensions that break but whatever we don't care fuck the tray. I think it's an interesting and worthwhile experimental path; I just wish it wasn't the "default" as much as it is. But I also feel that way about Ubuntu. And Windows. xD
- rleigh 7y ago
  This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option. Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good reason.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    > This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. oh no doubt, I have another comment from 4+ years ago about the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 and even then it was ancient history IIRC man, just looking at that page again reminded me that Windows Registry for Linux^W^W^W^W gconf exists.
_jal 7y ago
Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm mostly a command-line person anyway, and have spent most of my working life dealing with horrible UI. But it does have a lot of implications for Linux that I think a lot of people are not ready to accept.
- yaktubi 7y ago
  Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?
  - gurkendoktor 7y ago
    GNOME, Mate, Pantheon, XCFE, KDE, Deepin, UKUI, LXQt etc. created an unmaintainable mess of competing forks _while all using stacking window managers_. It's maddening how similar they all are to each other. Someone should build a dating site where understaffed Linux projects can find a matching project to merge with.
    - yaktubi 7y ago
      Well, it’s great to experiment. And gnome 2 for example worked really great. I guess I am thinking more in the realm of things like “force touch” gestures, multi touch swipes and such. They could be useful as an added bonus for power users, but I think the traditional paradigm for the OS should work by default: 1) on desktop, single/double click, drag and drop, tool tips, mouse wheel. 2) on mobile quick tap, tap and hold, basic swipe gestures (on mobile these work well but sometimes not intuitive). I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think people out to at least be able to “feel” their way around a UI. Lately there’s been so much push for minimalism like omitting scroll bars and such that make it confusing. But, again that experimentation will root out what works and doesn’t. And new devices like VR of course have yet to be discovered paradigms.
gbrown 7y ago
I actually like Gnome 3 a lot. I feel like it’s the first DE I’ve tried that I could interact with with the appropriate mix of 90% keyboard 10% touchpad on a laptop.
hilbert42 7y ago
"This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole" Exactly, but what perplexes me is why aren't these issues that are so obvious to us not obvious to them. Why do they think so differently to normal users?

by swiley 7y ago

philsnow 7y ago

I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth. [0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver hack settings by creating / modifying a theme. [0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#Why_doesn.27t_the_screensaver_preferences_tool_allow_me_to_change_the_settings_for_the_theme.3F https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
Between this and https://stopthemingmy.app/ https://stopthemingmy.app/ and the various other systemd/freedesktop “anti-hacker” initiatives, I’ve been finding Linux to be more and more becoming the opposite of the operating system I’ve used for the last 20 years.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  Still, I try to avoid GUI stuff and freedesktop stuff as much as possible (I do use a window manager, but not GNOME or KDE or whatever), and write better programs when possible, but a few things don't. I don't use any desktop environment at all. The web browser is one thing that isn't so good. Really, many things should be moved out of the web browser and made to work by simply nc, curl, etc. And some things work better with local programs, but others with remote, with whatever protocol is applicable e.g. IRC, NNTP, SMTP, etc, please.
  - yaktubi 7y ago
    My goaty is a goaty goaty vibrating and oscillating goaty sac goaty
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  A neat idea that I hadn’t thought of until your comment: Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation. This is pretty much what many people do in macOS. Apple’s OS supports the bare metal, vagrant / VirtualBox give me my tractably scrutable dev environment. It’s not a particularly ground breaking concept but it might cheer me up a bit when battling with the volatility of user facing Linux distributions.
  - philsnow 7y ago
    sounds a little bit like https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    Just being pedantic: containers aren't vms. Containers use the native Linux kernel namespacing and segregation facilities to run multiple applications in a somewhat segregated way.
  - eitland 7y ago
    > Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? > Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation. If there's anyone like me here they might be happy to know that KDE Neon exists and is something like: - Stable Ubuntu base. - Infinitely (almost) customizable KDE on top. - And (IMO unlike Kubuntu) sane defaults.
    - nitrogen 7y ago
      Thanks for the tip about KDE Neon. I use Kubuntu, but it definitely misses the mark.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Man there is not space on this comment box or time for all the criticism that link deserves. >Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended. Icons were never sufficient metaphors to start with which is why we have text labels. >Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand. What does this even actually mean. >User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation. This is only true if the user is completing an action that is solely based on clicking an icon with no text which we have already established is bad. >The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can be arbitrarily restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion. Why has this worked generally fine in lots of ecosystems including gnome? >If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. Earlier discussion seemed to suggest that lots of gnome developers were in fact not fine with this because it hurt gnomes "brand identity" >Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. Reckless? > we urge you to find ways to do this without taking away our agency Your agency? > Just because our apps use GTK that does not mean we’re ok with them being changed from under us. Nobody cares if you are OK with it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- swiley 7y ago
  It's really just the popular distros that are following redhat. If you build an OS from scratch or use something like alpine or gentoo it's not so bad.
guug 7y ago
The problem with gnome is that they don't seem to validate their ideas at all. As a result, gnome users are directly subjected to the unfiltered whims of gnome's UI "designers". Instead of spending the substantial donations they received[1] on who knows what, the GNOME foundation should have spent some of it conducting proper focus groups. 1: https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1m-donation-over-two-years/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1...
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  I don't know if that's true. GNOME 3 is just a dark enlightenment experiment, like an attempt at neomonarchy or the Empire from Elite. Instead of feature creep and user accommodation to Windows idioms, they slash and burn despotically to ease developer burden and try to flesh out their own vision. Do you use Dropbox? Too bad. :3 There's extensions that break but whatever we don't care fuck the tray. I think it's an interesting and worthwhile experimental path; I just wish it wasn't the "default" as much as it is. But I also feel that way about Ubuntu. And Windows. xD
rleigh 7y ago
This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option. Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good reason.
- philsnow 7y ago
  > This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. oh no doubt, I have another comment from 4+ years ago about the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 and even then it was ancient history IIRC man, just looking at that page again reminded me that Windows Registry for Linux^W^W^W^W gconf exists.

_jal 7y ago

Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm mostly a command-line person anyway, and have spent most of my working life dealing with horrible UI. But it does have a lot of implications for Linux that I think a lot of people are not ready to accept.

yaktubi 7y ago
Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?
- gurkendoktor 7y ago
  GNOME, Mate, Pantheon, XCFE, KDE, Deepin, UKUI, LXQt etc. created an unmaintainable mess of competing forks _while all using stacking window managers_. It's maddening how similar they all are to each other. Someone should build a dating site where understaffed Linux projects can find a matching project to merge with.
  - yaktubi 7y ago
    Well, it’s great to experiment. And gnome 2 for example worked really great. I guess I am thinking more in the realm of things like “force touch” gestures, multi touch swipes and such. They could be useful as an added bonus for power users, but I think the traditional paradigm for the OS should work by default: 1) on desktop, single/double click, drag and drop, tool tips, mouse wheel. 2) on mobile quick tap, tap and hold, basic swipe gestures (on mobile these work well but sometimes not intuitive). I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think people out to at least be able to “feel” their way around a UI. Lately there’s been so much push for minimalism like omitting scroll bars and such that make it confusing. But, again that experimentation will root out what works and doesn’t. And new devices like VR of course have yet to be discovered paradigms.

gbrown 7y ago

I actually like Gnome 3 a lot. I feel like it’s the first DE I’ve tried that I could interact with with the appropriate mix of 90% keyboard 10% touchpad on a laptop.

hilbert42 7y ago

"This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole" Exactly, but what perplexes me is why aren't these issues that are so obvious to us not obvious to them. Why do they think so differently to normal users?