11 ms·

Well that and the fact that tech website users basically complain about every UI change. Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop e

Well that and the fact that tech website users basically complain about every UI change. Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. This is fundamentally different than apple’s core fan base who seem to like any change just for the sake of change.

dimmke 6y ago
I agree, any change will be frowned upon. It just annoys me that I feel like they're drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them. If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wouldn't be spending years tip toeing towards it like people seem to think. Instead, they've rolled back some really unpopular changes like the crappy keyboard in their laptop, they just shipped a new Mac Pro that is clearly designed for professionals. This chip transition will result in Apple's laptops having better battery life, specs and heating than any other laptops available on the market. It won't even be close. Additionally, they're actively trying to bring a huge swath of developers who currently only develop for their mobile devices into developing for the Mac. If they were trying to turn Macs into something for college students to watch Netflix on they wouldn't be doing any of this. It's insane to me that people can see a UI refresh as a sign of doom while ignoring that Apple has actually been investing in the platform quite a bit more than they were a few years ago.
- rahkiin 6y ago
  I am mostly upset about the low contrast. I hope that gets improved before release. And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.
  - the_other 6y ago
    The contrast changes seem varied. For some features they've increased contrast: "windows" are now white with black-ish icons. You can't get a higher contrast ratio. Other features have received the translucency treatment, and seem to have lower contrast. I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.
    - rahkiin 6y ago
      The toolbar used to be grey and is now white like the content. And the contrast of text on the translucent items... But overall the style is very consistent. If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview
  - codyb 6y ago
    This is a bit off topic but in regards to contrast, I’ve been using Apple’s Music program lately and I absolutely cannot tell the difference between shuffle/repeat on or off. It is the lowest amount of contrast I have ever seen on a toggled button. I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked. Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting. Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I don't think it's your machine, although I hadn't tested this until now because I almost never use shuffle. :) I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.
      - codyb 6y ago
        That may be a wonderful clue, thank you :-).
      - chongli 6y ago
        Thank you! I just changed my accent colour to green and now it’s easy to tell the difference.
      - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
        Where do you set accent colour?
        _frog 6y ago
        It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    While not an excuse, the design looks like it has much more contrast than 10.10 - 10.15.
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  I don't see it as a sign of "doom," but rather more regression. It took YEARS for Apple to admit that their keyboards were shit, and they still haven't admitted that the emoji bar on their so-called "pro" computers is an embarrassing and failed gimmick. In fact, they've doubled down on it and now don't offer ANY proper laptop keyboard. But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? Come on. And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work. This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse. I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.
  - doot 6y ago
    > Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes: > Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814) > Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years. The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.
    - chrisweekly 6y ago
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  I still don't understand how anyone with hundreds of billions of dollars ships really crappy anything. Like do hundreds of people just pretend that a crappy keyboard isn't garbage or is it so siloed that most people never get an opportunity to register an opinion?
  - bitL 6y ago
    "Hey dev, you don't like that new keyboard pushed by your director/VP? Here's your termination notice!" "We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback." -- Corporation 101
    - donw 6y ago
      This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory. Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate. Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm). And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world. But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle. It's not just management -- it's the company culture. On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc. On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc. I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  I still don't have any USB-C devices or wireless headphones. May be in 10 years I'll change my opinion, but as for now, I still think that it was wrong to ditch USB-A and headphone jack.
ceocoder 6y ago
> Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. This is fundamentally different than apple’s core fan base who seem to like any change just for the sake of change. that statement seems perhaps too harsh to both HN crowd and Apple's core fan base, I spend more time on HN than I care to admit and I can assure you that I do not like XFCE desktop experience at all, my desktop is running Debian 10 with Cinnamon on it, but UX is not something that I'd ever list as one of top 5 features of this setup. Similarly I've been using Apple laptops for about 14 years now and do consider myself a part of "core fan base", for the record I hate the butterfly keyboard, despise touchbar with a passion, and am utterly disgusted by the decision to remove MagSafe chargers. To quote great Dr Tobias Funke - there are dozens of us.
- SllX 6y ago
  Nah, I watch most of the WM-related threads because it's more interesting to me than I am willing to admit in public life. XFCE gets trotted out generally any time GNOME, KDE, MATE or Cinnamon does, but especially in the case of the former two. There's usually a cadre of MATE and Cinnamon reps as well, of which you might as well consider yourself at least an honorary member at this point. StumpWM, i3 and dwm are also commonly brought up contenders as peak desktop Linux. If it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you.
  - ceocoder 6y ago
    I was perhaps a bit unclear in my post - I use Cinnamon and am thankful to those who made it, however I don't think that or XFCE or MATE or KDE are the "height of desktop experience", they get the job done. In my opinion height of desktop experience was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - I still miss workspaces, and TotalSpaces2 is a valiant effort but less likely to work with each new update.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    Maybe i3 wouldn't be peak desktop Linux if other environments realized that virtual desktops extending across all monitors is bad design.
  - 6y ago
bsg75 6y ago
> Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. There are those of us who will have to choose a new DE because Big Sur apparently won't run on our perfectly capable pre-2013 MBPs, and have to choose the least clunky. In that group, Xfce is indeed the bees knees.
- XFCEqueUE 6y ago
  XFCE is good yes. I don't understand why anyone has problems with it. It's perhaps projecting. They're projecting. Wishing their San Bernadino OS Eleven looked as good as XFCE. It takes nine minutes to set up an XFCE desktop looking better than OS XI San Bernadino. So I mean, obviously they're retro-projecting or whatever we'd call it. XFCE for life.
ByteJockey 6y ago
What's wrong with xfce?
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Nothing. It’s just not “the height of desktop experience,” is all.
  - mixedCase 6y ago
    What's the height of the desktop experience?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - gsich 6y ago
      Windows XP? Or 7? Both have a classic theme.
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      It's a deep question. Some think that it is a bunch of virtual terminal windows (the idea driven to the extreme in the GUI of Plan 9), while some would feel at home with a desktop being kind of a picture of a real desk. Still others would prefer a desktop that consistently follows an object-oriented pattern: you click on an icon and get a list of the object's properties and methods. (Unfortunately, too many screenshots that are meant to showcase desktops that people like just show a flowery background image and a bunch of random windows on top of it containing a picture of a cat or some manga drawing.)
    - Narishma 6y ago
      Windows 2000 or KDE 3.5
Insanity 6y ago
I feel exposed :D. I really enjoy using XFCE and run it on all my machines.
- kop316 6y ago
  I agree. I can run XFCE on a modest set up, and it does what I want.
- XFCEqueUE 6y ago
  Why are they hating on or even mentioning XFCE? XFCE can both act and look like Berdoo / San Bernadino, the last OS11 release, what's the problem with it? You new-fangled San Berdoo OSXI users get off my lawn.
  - 3131s 6y ago
    Cause they're going to be $5,000 poorer the next time they buy a laptop.
    - neuronic 6y ago
      At least we don't have to manually adjust fan speed every time WLAN resets after sleep <3
- 3131s 6y ago
  You should feel proud. I pull in some XFCE packages to compliment my i3 desktop and it's absolutely great. MATE and LXQt are two other comparably simple desktop environments that I like. I get comments from my bewildered MacOS-using friends when they see that my 400$ Linux machine is faster than anything they've ever tried.
  - pouta 6y ago
    Where should I start in order to learn this superpower?
zozbot234 6y ago
Some UI changes make sense. You wouldn't want to run XFCE on a touch-capable device, whereas GNOME3 is perfect for that use case. But the macOS UX changes make no sense to me. And really, even OS X itself has always been quite confusing, compared to its more traditional alternatives. Now we're finally on Mac OS 11, but that hasn't changed either.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> Well that and the fact that tech website users basically complain about every UI change. Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. .... Yeah, that's pretty much true, and for very good reason. Every time an interface changes, it forces people to stop using the system and figure out the new interface. As such, while it is possible to make changes that are beneficial enough to justify the cost, UI changes are very expensive and you'd better have a very good reason to justify breaking everyone's workflow. And by that standard, yes; XFCE is nearly perfect. It's been on the 4.x series since 2003, and going by screenshots I strongly suspect that even a user from XFCE 3.x would find the very latest version to be a drop-in replacement. And it does have decent quality, which combined with its general "get out of the way and let me work" vibe and 20 years of continuity makes it easily one of the best options available.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  It doesn't look like macOS 11's new UI is going to need macOS 10 users to "stop and figure out" the interface in the way switching from macOS 10 to Xfce (or vice-versa) would. The buttons aren't all moving around to strange places. The functionality isn't materially changing. What they're changing is the design language, not the fundamental UX.
  - jablan 6y ago
    Well, as an occasional MacOS user, it still pisses me off when I discover that maximize button is in fact full screen button.
    - Toutouxc 6y ago
      Yeah, except it is NOT a "maximize" button and never was. macOS just doesn't do maximized apps the way Windows and some Linux DEs do.
      - jtvjan 6y ago
        Before Yosemite the green button worked like a maximize button, and you had a separate fullscreen button on the other side. Now you need to ⌥-click the green button to maximize.
redwall_hp 6y ago
"XFCE" is a funny way of spelling "i3wm."
HeadsUpHigh 6y ago
XFCE is the ehight of desktop experience.
raverbashing 6y ago
XFCE is obviously not the height, but it is very well executed I'm more likely to prefer XFCE than Gnome, for example That being said, I also use and like desktop Apple products so there's that
polk 6y ago
>fan base who seem to like any change just for the sake of change I think it's more that (visual) UI Design has the same cyclical property of most other "visual design" like clothing fashion, interior design,... Things look fresh when they're new, after a few years people get bored of the look, and what was once considered modern now looks dated. Especially for a company like Apple that has built part of its reputation on having the best UI, they can't afford looking behind on the competition. Calling it "change for the sake of change" is partly correct if we were purely talking about products, but it ignores the fact that Apple is as much a marketing company as it is a product company. Aside from that I think there's also a strong functional argument to be made. iOS and iPad share the same OS, so it makes sense for those to be consistent. As the iPad has matured it's approaching desktop levels of productivity. So now we're in a situation where the iPad is becoming like a Macbook without the keyboard. With so much overlap in functionality, it also makes more sense for those 2 experience to converge rather than diverge. So we're hearing complaints about the "iOSification of the macbook" but they are ignoring the missing link; iOS = iPadOS = macOS

dimmke 6y ago

I agree, any change will be frowned upon. It just annoys me that I feel like they're drawing the completely wrong conclusions. Apple was the company that dropped the headphone jack from their phone, shipped a laptop with only USB-C ports etc... they don't shy away from making big controversial decisions if they feel like it's good for them. If Apple was going to do this to MacOS, they'd have already done it. They wouldn't be spending years tip toeing towards it like people seem to think. Instead, they've rolled back some really unpopular changes like the crappy keyboard in their laptop, they just shipped a new Mac Pro that is clearly designed for professionals. This chip transition will result in Apple's laptops having better battery life, specs and heating than any other laptops available on the market. It won't even be close. Additionally, they're actively trying to bring a huge swath of developers who currently only develop for their mobile devices into developing for the Mac. If they were trying to turn Macs into something for college students to watch Netflix on they wouldn't be doing any of this. It's insane to me that people can see a UI refresh as a sign of doom while ignoring that Apple has actually been investing in the platform quite a bit more than they were a few years ago.

rahkiin 6y ago
I am mostly upset about the low contrast. I hope that gets improved before release. And sad about the change in sheets and alerts... I’ll probably get over that.
- the_other 6y ago
  The contrast changes seem varied. For some features they've increased contrast: "windows" are now white with black-ish icons. You can't get a higher contrast ratio. Other features have received the translucency treatment, and seem to have lower contrast. I'm excited to try it all out, but also unsure how comfortable I'm gonna find it. The large white expanses seem glaringly over-bright to me, at first glance.
  - rahkiin 6y ago
    The toolbar used to be grey and is now white like the content. And the contrast of text on the translucent items... But overall the style is very consistent. If it is bright in light mode, it might be nice and dark on dark mode. We’ll find out once people start running the preview
- codyb 6y ago
  This is a bit off topic but in regards to contrast, I’ve been using Apple’s Music program lately and I absolutely cannot tell the difference between shuffle/repeat on or off. It is the lowest amount of contrast I have ever seen on a toggled button. I figure it must be something with my machine but haven’t really delved too deeply and couldn’t find much when I looked. Was hoping for a bit more out of Music. It’s decent, and certainly better than what iTunes had become. But sometimes I’m left wanting. Although having my Pops be able to share a playlist over iMessage with me was a stellar experience in terms of how seamless it was and having it sync from my phone to my computer.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I don't think it's your machine, although I hadn't tested this until now because I almost never use shuffle. :) I think the problem is that they're indicating state by toggling between your chosen accent color and black. If your accent color is, say, pink, the difference is pretty obvious, but if your accent color is relatively dark, like blue or purple, it's harder to see. It seems like they could solve this by toggling between the accent color and gray, or "lighting up" a solid roundrect of the accent color around the control when it's on.
    - codyb 6y ago
      That may be a wonderful clue, thank you :-).
    - chongli 6y ago
      Thank you! I just changed my accent colour to green and now it’s easy to tell the difference.
    - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
      Where do you set accent colour?
      - _frog 6y ago
        It's in the "General" section of the System Preferences
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  While not an excuse, the design looks like it has much more contrast than 10.10 - 10.15.
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
I don't see it as a sign of "doom," but rather more regression. It took YEARS for Apple to admit that their keyboards were shit, and they still haven't admitted that the emoji bar on their so-called "pro" computers is an embarrassing and failed gimmick. In fact, they've doubled down on it and now don't offer ANY proper laptop keyboard. But that's off-topic to some extent; I scanned through this page looking for some good news for developers. Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? Come on. And still no user-definable color schemes. Windows (and Unix GUIs, for that matter) had them for decades, while Apple forced its late-'80s inverse scheme on every user that whole time. The hard-coded "dark" theme is a half-baked, belated admission that staring into a glaring light bulb with black text on its surface all day may not be the best way to work. This would also have been a great time to abandon the single menu bar, but nope; that poor decision continues to plague Mac users. Really, this should have been canned in the transition to OS X, but now there's even less of an excuse. I'm sure there will be some good changes, but from this list I'm not encouraged. Getting rid of the distinction between toolbar and app content... WHY? The "flat UI" experiment was a failure. Let's continue to take tasteful steps back toward GUIs that communicate in universal visual terms whenever possible.
- doot 6y ago
  > Topping my list is support for SVG assets. NOPE. WTF? From the Xcode 12 Beta Release Notes: > Added support for Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) image assets. These preserve their vector representation with deployment targets of macOS 10.15 or later, iOS 13 or later, and iPadOS 13 or later. (18389814) > Android has had this how long? Apple's "@2x", "@3X" bitmaps were amateur-hour to begin with, but a decade later? No vector support? PDF assets have been supported on all Apple platforms for many years. The announcements today represent years of work by thousands of engineers and designers. It’s impossible to cover everything in a 2 hour keynote, let alone one geared towards the media/general public. Even the 2 hour “State of the Union” that’s geared towards developers barely scratches the surface, let alone a single webpage.
  - chrisweekly 6y ago
michaelmrose 6y ago
I still don't understand how anyone with hundreds of billions of dollars ships really crappy anything. Like do hundreds of people just pretend that a crappy keyboard isn't garbage or is it so siloed that most people never get an opportunity to register an opinion?
- bitL 6y ago
  "Hey dev, you don't like that new keyboard pushed by your director/VP? Here's your termination notice!" "We love our developers and pride ourselves on individual expression and transparent feedback." -- Corporation 101
  - donw 6y ago
    This is part of it, but I imagine there was a lot of sunk cost in there as well. Imagine: you're in charge of Apple's new keyboard. You spend a bunch of time and money making the thing as thin as possible, because that's the overall design trajectory. Of course, you test this thing internally, and it's okay. It takes a little while to get used to, but isn't awful to type on, and a few months of stress testing seem to indicate that this thing will work in the real world with an acceptable defect rate. Besides, your management chain loves this thing, because It's Thinner(tm). And then, you ship it, and discover that this thing breaks way more often in the real world. But, because Apple, you're a company that never publicly admits to doing anything wrong (because lawsuits), which takes customer feedback with an overly-critical eye (philistines must be using it wrong), and which is more likely to spend it's entire capitalization on cat treats than it is to interrupt an ongoing hardware design cycle. It's not just management -- it's the company culture. On the one hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being proven right. The iPod, no optical disks, bundled GPUs, AirPods, etc. On the other hand, this enables them to do bold things and endure incredible criticism before being shown horribly, horribly wrong. The snowflake keyboard, the touchbar, the iPhone antenna, etc. I also suspect this is why Apple's hardware design is just so overall excellent. They identify perfection, and relentlessly pursue it. Sometimes Apple gets it wrong, and it shows, but when they get it right, they get it really right.
vbezhenar 6y ago
I still don't have any USB-C devices or wireless headphones. May be in 10 years I'll change my opinion, but as for now, I still think that it was wrong to ditch USB-A and headphone jack.

ceocoder 6y ago

> Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. This is fundamentally different than apple’s core fan base who seem to like any change just for the sake of change. that statement seems perhaps too harsh to both HN crowd and Apple's core fan base, I spend more time on HN than I care to admit and I can assure you that I do not like XFCE desktop experience at all, my desktop is running Debian 10 with Cinnamon on it, but UX is not something that I'd ever list as one of top 5 features of this setup. Similarly I've been using Apple laptops for about 14 years now and do consider myself a part of "core fan base", for the record I hate the butterfly keyboard, despise touchbar with a passion, and am utterly disgusted by the decision to remove MagSafe chargers. To quote great Dr Tobias Funke - there are dozens of us.

SllX 6y ago
Nah, I watch most of the WM-related threads because it's more interesting to me than I am willing to admit in public life. XFCE gets trotted out generally any time GNOME, KDE, MATE or Cinnamon does, but especially in the case of the former two. There's usually a cadre of MATE and Cinnamon reps as well, of which you might as well consider yourself at least an honorary member at this point. StumpWM, i3 and dwm are also commonly brought up contenders as peak desktop Linux. If it doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you.
- ceocoder 6y ago
  I was perhaps a bit unclear in my post - I use Cinnamon and am thankful to those who made it, however I don't think that or XFCE or MATE or KDE are the "height of desktop experience", they get the job done. In my opinion height of desktop experience was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - I still miss workspaces, and TotalSpaces2 is a valiant effort but less likely to work with each new update.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  Maybe i3 wouldn't be peak desktop Linux if other environments realized that virtual desktops extending across all monitors is bad design.
- 6y ago

bsg75 6y ago

> Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. There are those of us who will have to choose a new DE because Big Sur apparently won't run on our perfectly capable pre-2013 MBPs, and have to choose the least clunky. In that group, Xfce is indeed the bees knees.

XFCEqueUE 6y ago
XFCE is good yes. I don't understand why anyone has problems with it. It's perhaps projecting. They're projecting. Wishing their San Bernadino OS Eleven looked as good as XFCE. It takes nine minutes to set up an XFCE desktop looking better than OS XI San Bernadino. So I mean, obviously they're retro-projecting or whatever we'd call it. XFCE for life.

ByteJockey 6y ago

What's wrong with xfce?

Koshkin 6y ago
Nothing. It’s just not “the height of desktop experience,” is all.
- mixedCase 6y ago
  What's the height of the desktop experience?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gsich 6y ago
    Windows XP? Or 7? Both have a classic theme.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    It's a deep question. Some think that it is a bunch of virtual terminal windows (the idea driven to the extreme in the GUI of Plan 9), while some would feel at home with a desktop being kind of a picture of a real desk. Still others would prefer a desktop that consistently follows an object-oriented pattern: you click on an icon and get a list of the object's properties and methods. (Unfortunately, too many screenshots that are meant to showcase desktops that people like just show a flowery background image and a bunch of random windows on top of it containing a picture of a cat or some manga drawing.)
  - Narishma 6y ago
    Windows 2000 or KDE 3.5

Insanity 6y ago

I feel exposed :D. I really enjoy using XFCE and run it on all my machines.

kop316 6y ago
I agree. I can run XFCE on a modest set up, and it does what I want.
XFCEqueUE 6y ago
Why are they hating on or even mentioning XFCE? XFCE can both act and look like Berdoo / San Bernadino, the last OS11 release, what's the problem with it? You new-fangled San Berdoo OSXI users get off my lawn.
- 3131s 6y ago
  Cause they're going to be $5,000 poorer the next time they buy a laptop.
  - neuronic 6y ago
    At least we don't have to manually adjust fan speed every time WLAN resets after sleep <3
3131s 6y ago
You should feel proud. I pull in some XFCE packages to compliment my i3 desktop and it's absolutely great. MATE and LXQt are two other comparably simple desktop environments that I like. I get comments from my bewildered MacOS-using friends when they see that my 400$ Linux machine is faster than anything they've ever tried.
- pouta 6y ago
  Where should I start in order to learn this superpower?

zozbot234 6y ago

Some UI changes make sense. You wouldn't want to run XFCE on a touch-capable device, whereas GNOME3 is perfect for that use case. But the macOS UX changes make no sense to me. And really, even OS X itself has always been quite confusing, compared to its more traditional alternatives. Now we're finally on Mac OS 11, but that hasn't changed either.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago

> Well that and the fact that tech website users basically complain about every UI change. Hacker News is full of people who think XFCE is the height of desktop experience. .... Yeah, that's pretty much true, and for very good reason. Every time an interface changes, it forces people to stop using the system and figure out the new interface. As such, while it is possible to make changes that are beneficial enough to justify the cost, UI changes are very expensive and you'd better have a very good reason to justify breaking everyone's workflow. And by that standard, yes; XFCE is nearly perfect. It's been on the 4.x series since 2003, and going by screenshots I strongly suspect that even a user from XFCE 3.x would find the very latest version to be a drop-in replacement. And it does have decent quality, which combined with its general "get out of the way and let me work" vibe and 20 years of continuity makes it easily one of the best options available.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
It doesn't look like macOS 11's new UI is going to need macOS 10 users to "stop and figure out" the interface in the way switching from macOS 10 to Xfce (or vice-versa) would. The buttons aren't all moving around to strange places. The functionality isn't materially changing. What they're changing is the design language, not the fundamental UX.
- jablan 6y ago
  Well, as an occasional MacOS user, it still pisses me off when I discover that maximize button is in fact full screen button.
  - Toutouxc 6y ago
    Yeah, except it is NOT a "maximize" button and never was. macOS just doesn't do maximized apps the way Windows and some Linux DEs do.
    - jtvjan 6y ago
      Before Yosemite the green button worked like a maximize button, and you had a separate fullscreen button on the other side. Now you need to ⌥-click the green button to maximize.

redwall_hp 6y ago

"XFCE" is a funny way of spelling "i3wm."

HeadsUpHigh 6y ago

XFCE is the ehight of desktop experience.

raverbashing 6y ago

XFCE is obviously not the height, but it is very well executed I'm more likely to prefer XFCE than Gnome, for example That being said, I also use and like desktop Apple products so there's that

polk 6y ago

>fan base who seem to like any change just for the sake of change I think it's more that (visual) UI Design has the same cyclical property of most other "visual design" like clothing fashion, interior design,... Things look fresh when they're new, after a few years people get bored of the look, and what was once considered modern now looks dated. Especially for a company like Apple that has built part of its reputation on having the best UI, they can't afford looking behind on the competition. Calling it "change for the sake of change" is partly correct if we were purely talking about products, but it ignores the fact that Apple is as much a marketing company as it is a product company. Aside from that I think there's also a strong functional argument to be made. iOS and iPad share the same OS, so it makes sense for those to be consistent. As the iPad has matured it's approaching desktop levels of productivity. So now we're in a situation where the iPad is becoming like a Macbook without the keyboard. With so much overlap in functionality, it also makes more sense for those 2 experience to converge rather than diverge. So we're hearing complaints about the "iOSification of the macbook" but they are ignoring the missing link; iOS = iPadOS = macOS