7 ms·

May be a side topic, but I always wonder even after so many decades why does everything on Linux look so ugly?

diarrhea 6y ago
Terminal applications only get you so far. It's the greatest common denominator. Has it been ugly for decades? Probably, some might disagree. But it sure as heck has been stable.
- piyush_soni 6y ago
  Not sure about the stability part too actually. IT people update kernels on our Linux distributions and it often completely messes up Graphics drivers on that. Surprising, right? There can be two reasons - either our IT people are not competent enough, or Linux flavors that we use have some problems. Then, they sometimes take months to update those graphics drivers because it never works correctly the first few times.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Simple enough: you likely use proprietary drivers, which you shouldn't if you want a hassle-free experience. Proprietary drivers are like getting an a third-party accessory like a new set of rearview mirrors for your car. However, you get your cars for free from the manufacturer, and complain when the mirror you bought doesn't fit the new car frame. The ideal answer here is working with the manufacturer to get those issues fixed upstream. Where the comparison with car accesories stop, is that software drivers isn't the core product you are being sold, so there is no real reason for not upstreaming it. Now, onto the real point the comment you are replying to made: the TUI interface has been very stable and good at backwards compatibility for multiple decades. New extensions exist for displaying images, getting mouse coordinates, more colors, etc. But the basic mechanisms have stayed the same, hence stability. Drop a greybeard UNIX tech strakight from the 80s inside a WSL2 environment, and they will be able to do their business as usual. I'm getting better at working with MAC GUIs. Last time I used one (6 years ago), I was able to open a terminal myself to fix the issue the person had with their storage device. Unsure if the GUI changed much since, but I can likely still manage to do so from the CLI.
loopz 6y ago
Windows did catch up though. Without window outline, you can trip up in Windows UI in so many ways.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
Considering the linked announcement contains exactly one picture and that picture is not of "everything on linux" but one MS cli app, what are you basing your opinion on? Also, can you give an example of a non-ugly MS cli app for windows?
- piyush_soni 6y ago
  Because it's Linux and not an entirely new thing that's getting launched today, you'd assume I'd have seen more of it before in my life? And why would you want an example of a CLI app? That's the whole problem with Linux - you take some of the biggest software distributions for it and even they'll have you change some secret ascii file somewhere on the disk for it to work properly, while on windows you just click a few 'Next' buttons and you're done installing (before people start talking about package managers and how easy it is in comparison to Windows, I know about that, but they're honestly not foolproof). If Linux wants to get popular among masses (rather than a bunch of proud geeks who feel that the ones who use a GUI are all dumb people), it would have to be better at that front. Just updating a graphics card driver is so much pain on it - it would randomly not work, or it wouldn't update all symbolic links that you have to waste a day in finding, or always something like that). Instead, you should give examples of the best looking GUI applications for it. Our company has a flagship product on both Linux and Windows and we use Qt for the UI. Exact same cross-platform code produces relatively ugly looking UI on Linux. In almost all discussions people start blaming both users and developers alike as if it's their problem.
  - blux 6y ago
    > Our company has a flagship product on both Linux and Windows and we use Qt for the UI. Exact same cross-platform code produces relatively ugly looking UI on Linux. In almost all discussions people start blaming both users and developers alike as if it's their problem. That is either because of a Qt problem or a problem in your implementation, not with Linux in particular.
    - piyush_soni 6y ago
      I've heard this before - in fact, every single time. But application writers blame third party library vendor, third party library vendor blames difficulties in implementation - I have seen it multiple times. Every time the problem is "not with Linux", but it ends up being one.
CodeGlitch 6y ago
I prefer the look of terminal applications. Additionally I get more control over the fonts and colors. Unlike most Windows applications, which have no customization (generally) and no consistency.
- piyush_soni 6y ago
  Some would definitely like terminal applications more, but the fact that on Linux by default it comes up to be terminal apps says a lot about the platform. One can just go and compare the ProcMon on Linux and Windows. Probably over the years people have figured out that there are so many hurdles in making basic GUI applications work on it? Some random Linux distribution would always complain about missing some random dependency, and the users would get totally confused, so developers are like let's not even go that way. Half the times Anti-aliasing wouldn't work on text fonts and mouse cursors and what not. I agree Windows applications don't have a lot of consistency as well, but it's at least better than Linux where half are on terminal only, and half have some kind of casually created GUI.
  - CodeGlitch 6y ago
    Terminal applications are more open to automation - something that Linux excels in. GUI applications are far harder to automate. In the case of ProcMon I'm not sure there's a case for automation, although happy to be proven wrong. Agreed about the casually created GUIs on Linux, but I'm happy someone has put the effort into them.
    - piyush_soni 6y ago
      Actually, our company's product supports both GUI and a text user interface so everything can be automated as well as used via GUI (and that's on both Windows and Linux versions). I'm not sure why more people don't do that.
      - CodeGlitch 6y ago
        This x1000
boltzmann_brain 6y ago
wat https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/
rbanffy 6y ago
As opposed to what? PowerShell windows?
- piyush_soni 6y ago
  ProcMon Windows (the software we're talking about here)?
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    Well... Most of my Linux software looks better than this. You can file a bug with your concerns and the team responsible will address it. Also, looking at the Windows version of Process Monitor, I wouldn't call it a beautiful UI: it's a grid of values with a little bit of drill-down ability and a couple colorful buttons on a toolbar. I assume they prefered to make it a text user interface because it's much easier to get to a remote machine and run it there than it'd be with a GUI tool without having to either split the app into remote and local parts or install an X client on the server and pipe it over X to the user's workstation (and relying on an X server on the graphical side). I would have chosen different colors though, but I also imagine they wanted to restrain themselves to the base ANSI color palette for compatibility reasons.

Terminal applications only get you so far. It's the greatest common denominator. Has it been ugly for decades? Probably, some might disagree. But it sure as heck has been stable.

piyush_soni 6y ago
Not sure about the stability part too actually. IT people update kernels on our Linux distributions and it often completely messes up Graphics drivers on that. Surprising, right? There can be two reasons - either our IT people are not competent enough, or Linux flavors that we use have some problems. Then, they sometimes take months to update those graphics drivers because it never works correctly the first few times.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Simple enough: you likely use proprietary drivers, which you shouldn't if you want a hassle-free experience. Proprietary drivers are like getting an a third-party accessory like a new set of rearview mirrors for your car. However, you get your cars for free from the manufacturer, and complain when the mirror you bought doesn't fit the new car frame. The ideal answer here is working with the manufacturer to get those issues fixed upstream. Where the comparison with car accesories stop, is that software drivers isn't the core product you are being sold, so there is no real reason for not upstreaming it. Now, onto the real point the comment you are replying to made: the TUI interface has been very stable and good at backwards compatibility for multiple decades. New extensions exist for displaying images, getting mouse coordinates, more colors, etc. But the basic mechanisms have stayed the same, hence stability. Drop a greybeard UNIX tech strakight from the 80s inside a WSL2 environment, and they will be able to do their business as usual. I'm getting better at working with MAC GUIs. Last time I used one (6 years ago), I was able to open a terminal myself to fix the issue the person had with their storage device. Unsure if the GUI changed much since, but I can likely still manage to do so from the CLI.

loopz 6y ago

Windows did catch up though. Without window outline, you can trip up in Windows UI in so many ways.

diffeomorphism 6y ago

Considering the linked announcement contains exactly one picture and that picture is not of "everything on linux" but one MS cli app, what are you basing your opinion on? Also, can you give an example of a non-ugly MS cli app for windows?

piyush_soni 6y ago
Because it's Linux and not an entirely new thing that's getting launched today, you'd assume I'd have seen more of it before in my life? And why would you want an example of a CLI app? That's the whole problem with Linux - you take some of the biggest software distributions for it and even they'll have you change some secret ascii file somewhere on the disk for it to work properly, while on windows you just click a few 'Next' buttons and you're done installing (before people start talking about package managers and how easy it is in comparison to Windows, I know about that, but they're honestly not foolproof). If Linux wants to get popular among masses (rather than a bunch of proud geeks who feel that the ones who use a GUI are all dumb people), it would have to be better at that front. Just updating a graphics card driver is so much pain on it - it would randomly not work, or it wouldn't update all symbolic links that you have to waste a day in finding, or always something like that). Instead, you should give examples of the best looking GUI applications for it. Our company has a flagship product on both Linux and Windows and we use Qt for the UI. Exact same cross-platform code produces relatively ugly looking UI on Linux. In almost all discussions people start blaming both users and developers alike as if it's their problem.
- blux 6y ago
  > Our company has a flagship product on both Linux and Windows and we use Qt for the UI. Exact same cross-platform code produces relatively ugly looking UI on Linux. In almost all discussions people start blaming both users and developers alike as if it's their problem. That is either because of a Qt problem or a problem in your implementation, not with Linux in particular.
  - piyush_soni 6y ago
    I've heard this before - in fact, every single time. But application writers blame third party library vendor, third party library vendor blames difficulties in implementation - I have seen it multiple times. Every time the problem is "not with Linux", but it ends up being one.

CodeGlitch 6y ago

I prefer the look of terminal applications. Additionally I get more control over the fonts and colors. Unlike most Windows applications, which have no customization (generally) and no consistency.

piyush_soni 6y ago
Some would definitely like terminal applications more, but the fact that on Linux by default it comes up to be terminal apps says a lot about the platform. One can just go and compare the ProcMon on Linux and Windows. Probably over the years people have figured out that there are so many hurdles in making basic GUI applications work on it? Some random Linux distribution would always complain about missing some random dependency, and the users would get totally confused, so developers are like let's not even go that way. Half the times Anti-aliasing wouldn't work on text fonts and mouse cursors and what not. I agree Windows applications don't have a lot of consistency as well, but it's at least better than Linux where half are on terminal only, and half have some kind of casually created GUI.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  Terminal applications are more open to automation - something that Linux excels in. GUI applications are far harder to automate. In the case of ProcMon I'm not sure there's a case for automation, although happy to be proven wrong. Agreed about the casually created GUIs on Linux, but I'm happy someone has put the effort into them.
  - piyush_soni 6y ago
    Actually, our company's product supports both GUI and a text user interface so everything can be automated as well as used via GUI (and that's on both Windows and Linux versions). I'm not sure why more people don't do that.
    - CodeGlitch 6y ago
      This x1000

boltzmann_brain 6y ago

wat https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

rbanffy 6y ago

As opposed to what? PowerShell windows?

piyush_soni 6y ago
ProcMon Windows (the software we're talking about here)?
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Well... Most of my Linux software looks better than this. You can file a bug with your concerns and the team responsible will address it. Also, looking at the Windows version of Process Monitor, I wouldn't call it a beautiful UI: it's a grid of values with a little bit of drill-down ability and a couple colorful buttons on a toolbar. I assume they prefered to make it a text user interface because it's much easier to get to a remote machine and run it there than it'd be with a GUI tool without having to either split the app into remote and local parts or install an X client on the server and pipe it over X to the user's workstation (and relying on an X server on the graphical side). I would have chosen different colors though, but I also imagine they wanted to restrain themselves to the base ANSI color palette for compatibility reasons.