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The end of the nice GTK button

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• malermeister 5y ago
  libadwaita is very unfortunate in general and the zeal of the GNOME community has been very off-putting
  • naoqj 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? Especially about the first part
    • smoldesu 5y ago
      They're probably referring to the functional regressions it made with it's first official release, and how it furthers the idea of GNOME/GTK lock-in. libadwaita has made it extremely difficult to package cross-platform desktop apps, especially while appearing native on different desktops (eg. adopting the native Breeze look on KDE while retaining the native Adwaita look on GNOME). The lack of this functionality at launch (and subsequent empty promises of a replacement) have rightfully left a bad taste in some people's mouth, particularly now that much of the GNOME leadership denies that this is a problem in the first place.
    • Gualdrapo 5y ago
      I don't think adwaita is that bad, but rather feel like they _yet_ have to polish some small details. Like the interline spacing on things, sometimes it feels inconsistent. KDE menus, for example, have a nice spacing - but GTK ones feel cramped. And those submenus that they place on things like the top-right menu on the panel have different line heights. Some other third party apps, for example that mail client I tried the other day (it wasn't evolution, but I can't remember its name) had serious layout issues. libadwaita was supposed to fix those inconsistencies and make devs lifes happier, but... And speaking of buttons and top right corners, I will never, ever get why they place the open/save/select dialog buttons in the top right corner of the dialog. Where you are used to find the 'close' button. Why?
• kuon 5y ago
  I don't like flat design. But I do like the new neomorphism trend. Not everything, but having clear states (hover default active disabled) is nice.
• smoldesu 5y ago
  All of this is pretty much how I feel on the matter, too. GTK3's interface was a really lovely blend of skeuomorphism and more abstract widgets that came together to make a really unique experience. Even if it didn't work in every context, I appreciated how well it worked for less complicated applications and making great-looking, device-agnostic GUIs. Cawbird was a wonderful native Twitter app made possible with GTK3. Curlew packed all of the important features of Handbrake/FFMPEG into a more streamlined, simple package. Foliate took e-book reading into the 21st century. So many amazing apps were enabled with this switch, and even though it's still a second-class toolkit, it was my guilty pleasure on Linux. In comes GTK4. Much like the article alludes to, the elegant and simple shadow of interactive elements goes poof. Developers spend hundreds of hours crusading against letting people use third-party themes, just so they can simplify and reduce UI elements to a nigh-unusable pulp. Developing with GTK4 is a nightmare. Using GTK4 is a pain in the ass. For christs sake, there was a devastating font-rendering glitch that existed for more than ten months after the first GTK4 release that was ignored in lieu of simplifying buttons, developing a new forced stylesheet and telling people "don't theme our apps!" Whenever I take this up with a maintainer, they immediately take it personally and write out a litany of reasons why I'm wrong and why I'm not allowed to disagree. The priorities here are almost unbelievably misaligned, I've pinned my GTK packages at the last GTK3 release and await some sort of admission of failure. I simply can't take it anymore. These are the people making desktop Linux miserable, and I frankly feel no remorse watching their attempts at "simplifying" the ecosystem crash and burn.
  • MartijnBraam 5y ago
    This is exactly how I feel about it. The sad thing is that if the whole gnome ecosystem burns down I'd have to use the alternatives that I like even less. I'm just not designing gtk4 apps untill it's actually better than gtk3
    • smoldesu 5y ago
      Definitely. Keep on trucking, I'm developing GTK3 apps right alongside you!
  • throwaway82652 5y ago
• von_lohengramm 5y ago
  The font rendering on that example of "the perfect button" is rather atrocious. It's kind of sad that Windows is (was?) the last bastion of serviceable font rendering.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    If you think that looks bad, wait until you see what GTK4 was stuck looking like for the first 10 months of it's life cycle: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
  • naoqj 5y ago
    I agree that the defaults are atrocious, but freetype can be configured and the options are limitless.
    • von_lohengramm 5y ago
      Linux font rendering has come a long way in the last couple years. With TrueType2 and Windows fonts taken from an installer ISO (and not the ancient corefonts package), you can actually get some overall mostly okay font rendering. Every now and again, the hinting bugs out and it looks unreadable, but its far better than the olden days.
      • eMSF 5y ago
        What exactly has happened in the last couple of years? And how would installing those newer Microsoft fonts affect font rendering elsewhere than where they are used (not at all by the desktop environment by default, and as to web sites, it depends on what you use)? IIRC the last big-ish change for me was around 15 years ago when some patent-encumbered patches were enabled by default by (some) Linux distributions. Which is okay for me because overall I think freetype font rendering is better than that in Windows with most fonts, the arguable exception being certain Microsoft fonts – however, freetype has the additional advantage that it rarely if ever produces pixelated ugliness with unhinted webfonts, unlike what I've seen happening with Windows.
• mholt 5y ago
  The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and buttons baffles me. For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before. MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons along the top of native apps like Finder don't have text anymore, the buttons are flat without borders, and the icons are thin lines. How is anyone supposed to know what they do?? In most UIs (Apple and Android in particular), I can't tell when one of those on-off switches is ON or OFF. Is the dark side ON or OFF? Maybe the light side is ON. Oh, it's the opposite when Dark Mode is enabled; great. Bring back text. Bring back nice buttons.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • gjsman-1000 5y ago
    In macOS, you can actually right-click many header bars (like Finder) and choose "Icon and Text" instead of "Icon" for what shows.
    • mholt 5y ago
      I do this, but I do not want to do this. Also it looks funky. The padding is messed up and the text doesn't fit.
      • duskwuff 5y ago
        There's also an accessibility setting (under the "Display" section) for "Show toolbar button shapes".
        • phkahler 5y ago
          >> There's also an accessibility setting (under the "Display" section) for "Show toolbar button shapes". Fascinating. Sounds like if you can't read the mind of the desinger you must have a disability. What a great attitude :-p
• gjsman-1000 5y ago
  For everyone mad at at "Don't theme my apps," consider why developers are doing it. Getting complaints about how your app is broken because of an overzealous theme that is beyond your control sucks. And after 10 years of dealing with it, GNOME developers decided it was enough. And... I don't wholly agree, but at the same time, themes had a decade to get their act together and stop angering GNOME developers. They didn't.
  • MartijnBraam 5y ago
    I handle "random theme breaking my app" as a valid bug report, it's not that hard. It's either something I'd have to fix in my app or fixed in that theme. Just ignoring the situation is just a shitty response.
    • gjsman-1000 5y ago
      https://stopthemingmy.app https://stopthemingmy.app
      • MartijnBraam 5y ago
        Yes I'm aware of it
  • simion314 5y ago
    But why Qt/KDE developers don't lose their minds ? Either GTK theming is broken or the GTK app developers are not using it correctly or GNOME devs are assholes and really.really want to force their branding and vision. The above OR is not exclusive so it could be all 3 things.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    I develop GTK3 apps. Theme breakage is generally a very real concern, as it usually points towards an issue with either a. The usage/implementation of widgets in the application or b. The stylesheet the end user is implimenting In either instance, the solution is very simple and within arms reach. It will always make more sense to encourage robust development practices over building fragile application stacks.
• SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickability, the current status), but in many cases nothing was added to supplant the loss of those visual cues, so now it is just a label (or a label in a white or grey box) and there is no way of knowing if it is clickable or its current status.
  • Sunspark 5y ago
    The flatness of some UIs along with the removal of some visual cues has happened that I have tapped on things that aren't actually a button thinking that they might be one. When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.
    • Forgeties79 5y ago
      Just go full-audacity and drown people in drop down menus lol at least I know what to click!
      • WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
        Audacity is a piece that made me learn its hotkeys. Once you do that, it’s pretty nice actually.
        • znowcone 5y ago
          It works, I guess. But after I've worked with a proper DAW (Reaper in my case), Audacity felt like a toy
          • Forgeties79 5y ago
            A toy with the best noise cancellation tool of any audio program out there though.
• gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Backstory: https://stopthemingmy.app https://stopthemingmy.app
  • naoqj 5y ago
    You can't get any more arrogant than this.
  • MereInterest 5y ago
    Wow, that's definitely something. Implying that tinkering with the low level aspects of a system are acceptable, but don't you dare apply a different stylesheet, because adjusting colors is delicate work that shouldn't ever be done by anybody but the developer.
    • jeroenhd 5y ago
      I agree with the key points though, which is that distros need to stop messing with themes unless they can validate that all applications work with custom themes. They bear no ill will against users who download or make their own theme.
      • malermeister 5y ago
        They might not bear any ill will, but they don't mind them being collateral damage either.
  • phkahler 5y ago
    Getting rid of themes is a decision distinct from that of choosing the one true theme. Going with FLAT was a poor choice and is what the current discussion is about. If there is any irony it's that more people will want to change the theme now, since the default is worse than before.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  > The dark theme, while not officially supported as a normal application theme, works absolutely brilliantly and is a great example of how to design a dark theme. There are only three small screenshots of UI in the dark theme, but to me it looks very clearly like a naive "invert all the design token colors and call it a day" implementation.
• phendrenad2 5y ago
  You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose). That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number of benefits, such as a unified visual style across all apps, and an easy to use internationalization/localization subsystem.
  • fxtentacle 5y ago
    No, this will just fragment app developers into those that use GTK4 and those that keep using GTK3.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Gtk+ 3 with a custom theme allowed for a unified visual style across all desktop environments, not just GNOME. I could use a MATE- or Xfce-bundled app and not have it look out of place in a GNOME desktop, or vice versa. It's sad to lose this because of a combination of pointless churn and active hostility ("don't theme my app") to outside efforts that might improve the ecosystem.
  • phkahler 5y ago
    >> You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose Not sure what that even means. The majority are not the Gnome developers, and many users will just adapt to whatever they're fed, even if it's worse. >> That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. No. People aren't complaining about a lack of consistency or a lack of theming (some do). They are complaining about a shitty design where the elements are consistently nonsensical and harder to understand than past version of the same. Top-down means a few people who are at "the top" think they know better. Not that they're great designers either - they are copying stupid trends that other "design" people came up with. This stuff is complained about on all OSes these days. It's not a vocal minority either, and you can tell because nobody complained that GTK was falling beind and needed to update to a modern "flat" design.
• pmontra 5y ago
  Wait ten years. New people will start working, old people will move on to other things. The new people will change stuff, mostly for the sake of it as it always happens, and one of the results will be less flat interfaces. Old people will be infuriated by the change. Very old people will rejoice but also complain that those UIs are not as good as the really old ones. New people will shrug them away and keep changing stuff mostly for the sake of it as it always happens.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    It's already happening, new interfaces from both Apple (see Big Sur/Monterey) and Google (Material design) are noticeably less "flat" and going back to 3d effects for "active" widgets. The effects are much as seen in GTK+ 3 - just subtle enough to not look overly confusing when compared to a totally "flat" screenshot, but still helpful to unfamiliar users.
    • pmontra 5y ago
      So maybe GTK 5 will take notice 10 years from now, when GTK 4 will start looking outdated in 2024.
  • michaelmrose 5y ago
    This presumes that all things are equally good and the only difference is familiarity. This isn't generally true of other functional areas of endeavor. Neither computers nor cars are all alike save aesthetics. I see no reason why it would be true of UIs.
• mikl 5y ago
  Yeah, the new GTK4 UI looks like a clone of Apple’s UIKit with a worse font. Shame that Gnome is following the trend of flat and boring UIs.
  • Shadonototra 5y ago
    GTK4 looks like iOS's UIKit On macOS Desktop, checkboxes, buttons and everything else are still designed for mouse/kb On gnome things are designed for vertical and touch screens, so you forced to endlessly scroll, windows is doing something similar, wich is an indication that they target mobile users, they are so out of touch Only Apple knows what they are doing when it comes to UI/UX for desktop, and they make sure they don't mix desktop/mobile UX
• azinman2 5y ago
  So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be a more impressive portfolio piece for a young designer to properly design GTK/Gnome and put it out there for the world. What is stopping this? It can’t be caring with the history of people sharing their themes. Is it just taste / money?
  • derefr 5y ago
    Lots of rich companies threw money at the problem of Linux UI, Linux application packaging+sandboxing, and several other things. The result is the Android OS ecosystem, where each hardware vendor has its own proprietary shell, in capitalist competition with other vendors’ shells. I’m not even saying that that’s a bad thing. As it happens, Android has been generalized and generalized from its original use-case until it is today a quite-workable desktop PC OS.
  • capableweb 5y ago
    Easy for someone who works at Apple to say "just throw money at the problem" while there is so much more to consider. Design as a workflow for Open Source design (as in UI/UX) hasn't even been worked on that much. Ideally, open source contributors work on projects because they care about it, and want to improve it. I'm not sure how many designers are using GTK applications day-to-day to care enough about it to start contributing. There is a learning curve as well on how to contribute to these large projects. It'd be great if it could be solved with just one pass of design work and then it's done, but I'm afraid the task is much bigger than that, and "big wig design firms" are expensive, so are design people as well. Not to mention the other problems around that.
    • woah 5y ago
      Inherently, good design requires top down authority to force a consistent look, and implementing it requires a bunch of programmers to spend time on boring work. That just doesn't work well in open source where people only want to work on their own thing, sometimes, and in their own way.
• lnxg33k1 5y ago
  --- Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. Apparently not liking flat themes makes me a madman in this world. Why am I not allowed to even have opinions about the look of the operating system I'm using? --- But to be honest, isn't it one of the recurring point of people running away from gnome? Haven't they just proceeded going ahead not listening to anyone?
  • traverseda 5y ago
    It's kind of cathartic watching this happen to a new generation of developers. They can't say I didn't warn them! Ultimately I think this will be quite good for QT/kde in the long term. Gnome/GTK gets a lot of corporate support, especially from red hat, but seeing the issues pop OS had with GTK makes me hopeful that more companies will adopt QT.
    • lmm 5y ago
      I've been hoping that for 20 years but it hasn't happened yet. It seemed like American companies always favoured GTK/GNOME (I guess because Qt/KDE development was more European?), even though Qt/KDE generally managed to do more with less. But I can appreciate that if you're aiming for the corporate market, customizability may be a downside.
      • IshKebab 5y ago
        Qt is far more popular in corporate software than GTK. It's way better, and companies don't care about Gnome or KDE so there's no reason to pick GTK.
      • nine_k 5y ago
        I think that Red Hat (now part of freaking IBM) has always been oriented to big corporations, knows how to speak their language, and is an obvious choice for corporate Linux support. If you're already in bed with RH on the server front, it makes obvious business sense to also follow them on the (much, much smaller) desktop front. Since RH basically owns Gnome development (I know, I know), they impressvely used it as a lever to push systemd adoption, for instance: major distros had to switch to it not (solely) on its merits, but because they could not drop Gnome support. KDE does not seem to have an equivalent behemoth behind them, even though Qt enjoys a lot of heavyweight corporate support.
• zamalek 5y ago
  > Microsoft was stupid for doing it. I think Apple is stupid for doing it Microsoft isn't actually responsible for this nonsense. Metro did get rid of bevels, but it didn't get rid of obvious buttons: they simply turned into trivial colored rectangles. I'm not entirely sure who "refined" it, but Microsoft did eventually end up copying a bad iteration of their own good idea.
• dheera 5y ago
  UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D
• wolpoli 5y ago
  I don't understand why modern toolbar icons are basically abstract shapes represented by lines. It's 2022, we have 32 bit colors, but toolbar icons have less color than back 30 years ago in Windows 3.1.
  • airstrike 5y ago
    The reason is because colorful designs were ugly AF in virtually all but the very best (or native) applications so users developed an allergic reaction to them. Minimal design felt fresh and it’s harder to fuck it up...sadly it’s also harder to tell icons apart
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    Old win 3.1 toolbars had tiny 16×16px icons, that could be quite colorful without being overly distracting even on a lower-resolution screen. With the new emphasis on "touch" readiness combined with higher screen resolutions we get bigger icons but simpler, black-and-white shapes, which helps tell apart simple toolbar functions from icons that might represent all sorts of other things within an application.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > I don't understand why modern toolbar icons are basically abstract shapes represented by lines Much, much easier to style based on whatever the surroundings are. Also easier to maintain a good look if you switch to a completely different theme, and for third party icons to mesh with the OS set of icons (only so many ways you can mess up the sillouette of the shape). Oh, and they scale to basically infinite proportions without looking weird, which cannot be said for color vector icons.
    • anthk 5y ago
      >Oh, and they scale to basically infinite proportions without looking weird, which cannot be said for color vector icons. Check Haiku OS.
  • Izkata 5y ago
    > I don't understand why modern toolbar icons are basically abstract shapes represented by lines. Eventually it'll mutate into cuneiform and no one will realize they've learned an ancient script.
• dv_dt 5y ago
  Can I also mourn the loss of title bars as I carefully hunt for a spot to grab a window to move it?
  • jeroenhd 5y ago
    For what it's worth, I recently discovered that I can move windows on GNOME by holding down the Windows/super key and dragging. It's a small thing but it's actually quite nice.
    • worg 5y ago
      that has been the case in gnome since the 2.x days edit: #dyac
    • drekipus 5y ago
      What's also good, is windows/super key and dragging right mouse button -> resize window. I don't remember if that's enabled by default, or you have to install some gnome tweaks to do it, but it is nice.
    • stjohnswarts 5y ago
      the ones for resizing and moving are quite handy indeed. Learn them. Sometimes windows have bugs and get bizarrely huge and this is a way to get them back down to a reasonable size
  • jms55 5y ago
    You can grab any part of the headerbar to move the window - even buttons and other widgets. It won't trigger them, it will just move the window.
  • eMSF 5y ago
    For me, what you're referring to is one of the reasons I don't like to use Windows as a desktop OS (because you need to hunt for these relatively small target areas to organise multiple windows). The alternative which I greatly prefer is outlined in the other responses. In the past, I used to disable title bars entirely even on full-sized monitors. These days it's not so easy to do that, though.
• hoistbypetard 5y ago
  The old button was good in the desktop context, but I can't get behind this point: > The design even works very well on Linux phone formfactors. The author must mean something very different when they say "works very well" than I do when I say that. As much as I want it to, nothing about GTK works well in a phone form factor, IME. I look forward to continued improvement that will make that statement incorrect.
  • xedrac 5y ago
    I for one don't want the phone form factor to influence my desktop experience. They are two completely different workflows that have conflicting needs IMO.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      The main influence so far has been enabling smaller window sizes for gtk+3/libhandy apps, which is good for all users especially those on older, lower-res hardware. Hopefully libadwaita can get forked into something like a libhandy equivalent for gtk+4, that otherwise preserves sane defaults doesn't enforce their silly "flat" theme choices.
      • traverseda 5y ago
        >The main influence so far has been enabling smaller window sizes for gtk+3/libhandy apps I don't think so, touch targets are a lot bigger. Using the default theme for both a KDE App with equivalent functionality will take a fair bit less space than a similar gnome app. Of course I think plasma mobile uses a theme that makes the touch targets bigger... KDE also manages to get a lot more functionality into their similarily sized windows. Take a look at this page showing comparisons: https://www.linuxadictos.com/en/aplicaciones-de-gnome-y-aplicaciones-de-kde-puestas-frente-a-frente-porque-los-escritorios-no-son-solo-sus-entornos-graficos-de.html https://www.linuxadictos.com/en/aplicaciones-de-gnome-y-apli...
    • linguae 5y ago
      Agreed. The major sin of modern UI/UX is the desire to create a one-size-fits-all experience that works for both touch devices and desktops, when in reality the work styles of touch devices and desktops are very different. Unfortunately Windows (since Windows 8), macOS (since Big Sur), and GNOME (since GNOME 3) have sought (and continue to seek) these unified designs that work okay on touch devices but are a downgrade on desktops. The desktop reached its zenith in the late 2000s with Windows 7, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, GNOME 2, and KDE 3, and today's desktops are a downgrade from these (though KDE Plasma is nice and is an improvement over KDE 3). I'll go as far as to say that the desktop experience hasn't received much love by major software companies; since the late 2000s the money has gone toward smartphones, tablets, and the Web. Since those platforms get the attention, the desktop is increasingly getting populated with ports of smartphone and Web apps; hence, Windows Metro/UWP, Catalyst, Electron, and the like.
• nyanpasu64 5y ago
  > The only issue with it is that font rendering looks horrific, but that might just be my machine. This is because GTK4 enables pixel/scaling-independent fractional vertical positioning, even with hinting enabled. There's a long (somewhat ongoing) discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787, though I haven't followed the last few months of discussion. Even though GTK4 aims to achieve scale-independent layout, the 4 horizontal/vertical positions still produce a bit of judder, and fonts do not scale smoothly (even with bilinear interpolation) with hinting enabled, and (unless fixed) there are rendering issues due to failing to clear the texture atlas properly: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4322 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4322 Interestingly there's a proposal to switch GTK4 fonts to SDF-style rendering. This is somewhat like what Qt Quick 2 implemented already (and KDE turns off and reverts to FreeType rendering, to make QML apps mimic Qt Widgets font rendering more): https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2022/03/20/rendering-text-with-glyphy/ https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2022/03/20/rendering-text-w... However, I looked at https://github.com/behdad/glyphy https://github.com/behdad/glyphy and it seems to implement vector-based SDFs, instead of earlier texture-based SDF/MSDFs used by Valve games and Qt Quick.
  • layer8 5y ago
    “Scale-independent layout” (layout that ignores pixel aliasing) really requires PPI over ~200, that is, more than most desktop monitors provide. We’re still just not there.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      You could do text hinting (snapping to the (sub-)pixel grid) after layout, based on some kind of auto-hinting heuristics. Arguably, this is needed anyway because text gets "laid out" all the time as part of advanced typesetting, including all sorts of complex microtypography that doesn't really play well with the old-fashioned "bitmap font" type of hinting.
      • nyanpasu64 5y ago
        I proposed and implemented snapping vertical positions to the pixel grid after layout: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787#note_1276560 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787#note_127656... The maintainer responded that "[c]hanges to the rounding behavior of glyph positions really belong into pango, though". I understand, but I don't know whether he's suggesting fractional layout but integer-rounded rendering, or integer-rounded line heights and layout and rendering. And I don't know how to change Pango, and lost interest in digging further.
• woah 5y ago
  Non techies have been using flat design interfaces for like a decade now and the world hasn't ended. If you personally like another style, totally fine. But it's odd that programmers always think they know more about usability than people who study it for a living.
  • throw_m239339 5y ago
    The problem isn't techies but non techies, unless you think only techies should be using Linux GUI... > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. There is a reason why Apple backpedaled on all that flat insanity for MacOS and iOS. Graphic designers and trendsetters usually know very little about usability, these are 2 completely different disciplines, and the Flat style was imposed by graphic designers, not UX people.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > But it's odd that programmers always think they know more about usability than people who study it for a living. I’m sure it has something to do with them needing to justify their existence. No reason to have a designer if nothing has changed in the world of design. Programmers learn new languages (or go back to old ones), designers do the same with interface design principles.
  • linguae 5y ago
    Do non-techies have a choice, though? Given the lack of theming in many modern apps, its not like users have a choice between flat design and the designs of the 90s and 2000s. What about sticking to old versions? I can only use old versions of software for so long before it becomes infeasible for many reasons (security and interoperability being the biggest reasons), and even on Linux where users have a great deal of control, not all GUI software is themable. It's not just programmers who complain about modern UI/UX trends. The Nielsen Norman Group, a UI/UX consulting group that was founded by HCI legends Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen, have written articles against the overuse of flat design (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flat-design/).
  • 5y ago
• kzrdude 5y ago
  To say that it is the pinnacle of design is a wide stretch give what they did to menus in all the apps. Obscure buttons and burger menus replaced menus..
• seltzered_ 5y ago
  The other nice thing about "the nice GTK button" is that it feels consistent enough with the current tab buttons styling in Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/OEKc4So https://imgur.com/a/OEKc4So . It also just feels better for direct manipulation (touch). Is there any way to vote for keeping it? Does 'high contrast' mode possibly bring it back?
• jraph 5y ago
  It seems like KDE and Plasma is the place where look and feel is constantly but incrementally refined; we've been saved from this flat design trend so far and things keep looking pleasant and modern and being usable. We know they care, and have great attention to details because that's documented weekly [1]. I find the Breeze theme really well done and its GTK port, Brise, is also very nice, to the point Gnome looks good in it. There was just the KDE 4 era where I didn't like Oxygen at all (and indeed I used to change the theme to Fusion there) but that's over. KDE 3 was fine and KDE 5 is great. At this point, most things that are not Breeze don't look great to me now. As for the customization and theme support, that's supported and it works well, they prove that it's nothing insurmountable too. KDE comes with themes that look like Windows 95, Motif, Adwaita, GTK 2 and other things and you can download more if you want. I'd be curious to have a review of Breeze / KDE by Martijn. [1] https://pointieststick.com/ https://pointieststick.com/
  • Aisen8010 5y ago
    I would not be so sure. Sooner or later there will be a QT6 port and most of the work will be lost. I was a happy GNOME user before the version 3 fiasco. It took years to have a usable GNOME desktop again.
    • nyanpasu64 5y ago
      Breeze is being ported to Qt 6, and from the screenshots I see (https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2022/01/15/kf6-continuous-integration.html https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2022/01/15/kf6-continuous-integr..., unsure what others), there are no visual changes so far. Time will tell if they change Breeze's appearance further before/after Plasma 6's release (I didn't ask about KDE's current plans). One possibility is O2 (https://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/ https://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/), a reworked theme by the author of KDE 4's Oxygen, though it's not very far into implementation yet.
      • bmn__ 5y ago
        > Qt 6 […] there are no visual changes so far That's false, examine Strawberry 1.0.2 running in KDE 5. The menus have the wrong background colour. The font size is wrong.
• amelius 5y ago
  The problem with buttons that have shadows (even subtle ones) is that you can't rotate the screen 180 degrees and have it look nice. This is a problem if you put your phone or tablet flat on the table and someone sits opposite to you and looks at the same screen. Better to keep the design flat. It's also simpler.
  • layer8 5y ago
    Even assuming that’s true, it’s totally counterproductive for desktop use.
  • ben-schaaf 5y ago
    The old non-flat button styling looks entirely symmetrical to me. Not to mention that designing applications to look nice when viewed upsidedown is just silly. Even if it was your primary use case to have two people opposite each other view your app your biggest problem is all the text being upside down!
• jms55 5y ago
  A lot of comments in this thread are negative. As a developer using GTK4 and libadwaita, and as a user that uses gnome, I really like the changes. GTK4 brings some much needed changes, and the major bugs like listview scrolling being broken or bad text rendering on non-hidpi displays suck, but both have people working on fixing them. Libadwaita is a huge improvement, and makes it way easier to build good apps. As for themes, I quite like the new libadwaita theme, and prefer it to the default GTK theme. You're free to disagree, but you can't say your opinion is correct, nor can I. Keep in mind that libadwaita is an optional library _specifically for gnome apps_. If you don't like gnome, don't use libadwaita. If you want the widgets from libadwaita, but don't like the styling, then either copy the code (it's open source, fork it!), or use libadwaita and disable the libadwaita stylesheet (and add styling for the widgets that aren't part of GTK).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • akdor1154 5y ago
    > As for themes, I quite like the new libadwaita theme, and prefer it to the default GTK theme. You're free to disagree, but you can't say your opinion is correct, nor can I. I agree... but the gnome devs are directly telling me my opinion is incorrect, by removing the ability for me to change my apps i use to a theme I like. Oh wait sorry, i guess i should have said gnome's apps.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • kirbyfan64sos 5y ago
      This is an unfortunately very common misconception: you can still set GTK_THEME on libadwaita apps, it's only the gsettings configuration that doesn't work (due to implementation constraints, unfortunately).
      • smoldesu 5y ago
        I've tried that, and besides it being a highly inconvenient workaround, it doesn't work on any of my machines.
• bodge5000 5y ago
  Perhaps I'll be crucified for saying this, but I actually like flat design. Or at least, I think I do. I always thought flat design was as the name suggests; flat. As in, no gradient, no faux 3D, and I guess no borders. I'm not such a fan of rounded buttons, I think they often scale badly (pretty much anything round will unless its a vector I guess), but I didnt think that was a requirement of flat design. That being said, I'm not sure what it is now, because that original button looks like flat design to me. The only "non-flat" element of it is the 1px border, but surely thats not the source of all this commotion?
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > I think they often scale badly (pretty much anything round will unless its a vector I guess) I don’t think anyone makes UI these days and not makes it a vector.
  • zozbot234 5y ago
    The original button has gradients and 3d-lighting effects. They're just subtle, but suffice to convey useful information.
• bjourne 5y ago
  It's the cycle of GNOME. Every few years they introduce something new that causes lots of regressions. Some of these regressions are then being worked at, some are defended as "design decisions" (no theming, Nautilus opening a new window for every folder, broken filechooser dialog, desktop indexer you can't turn off). Bugs are worked on and thing stabilize. People learn workarounds for their issues. Then another iOS-inspired thing comes and things break again.
  • aulin 5y ago
    > Then another iOS-inspired thing comes and things break again. This always puzzled me, there's been a time around 2010-2011 where everyone thought desktop was doomed, tablets would take over its space so you had to design everything to be mobile friendly. Those times have fortunately long gone, tablet are almost a thing of the past, desktop is here to stay, yet GNOME and RH designers still take iOS design as a reference... why?
• Aeolun 5y ago
  Is it that hard to make a legacy theme for libhandy/GTK4? Edit: Elsewhere in this thread it is implied that it was deliberately made impossible.
  • kirbyfan64sos 5y ago
    Posted in another comment: > This is an unfortunately very common misconception: you can still set GTK_THEME on libadwaita apps, it's only the gsettings configuration that doesn't work (due to implementation constraints, unfortunately).
• eternityforest 5y ago
  Flat design is pretty awful. It really does seem to be popular because it's the minimum possible amount of design. Skeuomorphism definitely is harder to get right and different elements can clash. But that's less of an issue when you're making one unified theme for all.
• userbinator 5y ago
  > TASKS WILL APPEAR HERE Another one of those things that irritates me about "modern" design --- instead of showing an empty list, which would've been obvious that it was empty by having subtle cues like gridlines (also now disappeared by this trend), it decides to treat you like an idiot and show a giant banner stating what should be obvious. The "Add Tasks" button probably disappears after you make the list non-empty, and just looking at that UI, I'm not sure where the "normal" one is. But I guess it gave a designer an excuse to create some more bland Corporate Memphis art?
• loeg 5y ago
  > Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. Apparently not liking flat themes makes me a madman in this world. Why am I not allowed to even have opinions about the look of the operating system I'm using? Ah, it was the same way if you didn't love the direction they went with GNOME 3. If you don't love the design-of-the-day GNOME is chasing, they don't want you. I recommend KDE.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Gnome3 is a disaster. When Ubuntu made the switch to Unity and dropped Gnome2 support, I played around it and said, "nah", and went for Gnome... And after using it a bit I suddenly thought they Unity Desktop is not all that bad. With time it even grew on me, especially the saved vertical space. Current Gnome is still unusable crap, with all those ugly buttons in window titles and lots of wasted space.
• taf2 5y ago
  Regarding flat - theme movement… it was iOS7 that my daughter 3 was happily able to use her new iPad running iOS6 when I set her up and she could press play on her show. Then one morning we had her in the stroller and taking a walk and I handed her upgraded to ios7 iPad… it was instant tears she couldn’t figure it out… just to get the walk started I pressed the play button for her after many tears… later on during the walk her show ended and in her frustration at not being able to find the play button she raged on the iPad … that iPad is no more… IMO following that experience the flat movement was really bad for usability… driven by a form over function that I’ve seen harm younger and older people alike… my then 92 year old grandfather I remember also seriously struggling with ios7 compared to 6… just my observations… but yeah flat looks better…
• j1elo 5y ago
  > I feel like the designers of this new theme have never sit down with anyone who's not a "techie" to explain to them how to use a computer. The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind what makes a good UI design for human beings". Otherwise, nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs on a paper and feel like that's a very well thought out work right there. And here I'm bashing not only OSS designers that think a bland and unclear design is the best that can be done, but also the same for designers of big companies that get paid for their work. Althought ironically now that I think of it, maybe the latter are somewhat less to blame, knowing how the corporate world works and knowing that they possibly don't agree with the results but their boss insists on how all buttons should lack any depth. So in the sense of not having a pushy boss with an agenda to fullfill... yeah it seems to me that OSS designers are acting worse by voluntarily pushing these supposedly "better", but almost quite objetively worse designs, into users' throats. /rant
  • eru 5y ago
    To slighly go off on a tangent: You note that visual and UI design in open source and in proprietary applications show some of the same idiosyncrasies. You conclude that this makes open source designers more blameworthy. I would suggest instead, that this is evidence that those evil management overlords in the corporate world are perhaps convenient scapegoats, but actually less to blame than we might think?
  • girvo 5y ago
    To back this up, the "actually has a degree in HCI" UX profressionals I worked with at a previous job railed against flat design and ensured our output was clear and intuitive. Though there was only two of them, so I can't say all of them would be like that!
  • eterevsky 5y ago
    > nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs So... Since you are talking about scientific studies, could you please reference some studies that back you up and show that flat design is in some way inferior?
• wubbert 5y ago
  What is the reason for everything having flat UIs now?
  • zem 5y ago
    basically fashion. e.g. if you asked people to describe this app http://ptkdb.sourceforge.net/demo.html http://ptkdb.sourceforge.net/demo.html i'm sure a lot of them would use the word "dated", but the actual widgets are pretty similar to what we're using today, and layout hasn't changed much either. it's just the theming fashions that keep changing so radically.
• maxloh 5y ago
  As someone who born in the smartphone era, I don't found it ugly but a major design improvement. Maybe the author should embrace the latest trends in UI design, instead of insisting the old way.
• zmmmmm 5y ago
  I keep wondering how long it will take for putting borders and edges or some graphical hint around functional UI elements (whether 3d or not) to come back into style. It's such a clear example of form over function to remove these (and if you ask me it doesn't even look good anyway, but let's put aesthetics aside). I would love to hear from any actual UX professional who wants to try to defend that making functional elements look identical to non-functional ones is a good idea. I would be fascinated to hear what the argument in its favor could possibly be.
• akdor1154 5y ago
  You know what? This shouldn't be so bad. I should just be able to change theme to one i like. However, because gnome no longer respects their users' opinions, there is no way to change it. I mean fuck, if i wanted to use a Mac i'd just use a Mac.
• imglorp 5y ago
  I may be alone here, but maybe there are mountains of functionality never tackled in Gnome. Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. Meanwhile, the visual design has been hashed over and over: I've lost count. Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities?
  • cwillu 5y ago
    The cascade of attention deficit teenagers is a jwz classic, which I won't link directly because… jwz.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    > Why is L&F consistently prioritized over basic capabilities? My lips curl ever so slightly apart, my tongue perched between both rows of my teeth. A faint whistling sound escapes between my two incisors and tongue, reminiscent of the "th" consonants that one might expect to hear in the word "thumbnails". Before I'm even capable of getting to the word "filepicker", hundreds of people are stepping on one another to come tell me what I already know. A wave of developers have risen from their standing desks, eager to beat me down for such a blatant disrespect of their favorite desktop. Fourty-some people have convened to demonstrate how I can click and drag icons from Nemo onto a file selection dialog as a replacement. Others yet are deriding me for not implementing it myself, and lacking respect for the developers. Some people have taken to referencing their code of conduct, while more are furiously typing on Twitter, desperate to label me a troll and move on with their life. They all filter off after around 25 minutes. None of them used that time to put thumbnails in the file picker, thou... oh my god, they're coming back again...
  • audidude 5y ago
    > Basic things like trackpad gestures are just now arriving for example. All they had to do was go fix the input drivers, the user-space library to communicate them, the compositors to be able to mediate gestures, the toolkits to process them, the X11 server extensions, wayland protocols, etc... One of the biggest problems in this is that you can't just fix one input driver. You have to go fix them all so that the experience is consistent across as much as hardware as possible.
• jh721 5y ago
  There is actually a thread about the flat buttons on the issue tracker of libadwaita: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/228 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/228
• forgotmypw17 5y ago
  I'm so grateful for today's software diversity which allows me to so easily abandon and unsubscribe from non-consensual interface changes such as this one completely and switch to a different environment as many times as I need to until I find one which just maintains the interface which I want. (Which is basically Windows 95 with a few minor additions.)
• superasn 5y ago
  I think Don't Make Me Think Book by Steve Krug should be a required reading for anybody who is involved with designing UIs and websites. That old book has so much wisdom about what happens when we see something on the screen and why these little details matter so much. This is right there in chapter 1: As a user, I should never have to devote a millisecond of thought to whether things are clickable-or not.
• pipeline_peak 5y ago
  UI themes is the least of GTK's problems.
• aidenn0 5y ago
  GNOME is in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you don't situation here; if they don't adopt the flat theme, they look "old fashioned" and if they do they have a crappy UI.
• travisgriggs 5y ago
  I don’t like conspiracy theories, but I always wondered if the flat design trend wasn’t a genius way to nullify the advantage of higher powered graphic platforms. “Our stuff looks lickable, buy our expensive hardware.” “Au contraire, design with colored paper and scissors is hipper than lickable UIs. Buy our less than stellar hardware.”
• zwaps 5y ago
  The problem is that UI has reached its pinnacle with Win2k/xp classic. So if you are a designer, you still have to do your job, you gotta design something. But it is never going to be on that level, in efficiency, looks or usability. It's such a nihilistic proposition, I can hardly be mad at designers of today. Go ahead, make that button flat and call it clever. Why not
• patientplatypus 5y ago
• thawaya3113 5y ago
  I like some parts of the flat design. The lists being flattened out (even without borders) looks immeasurably better, IMO. However, buttons should have still remained buttons. I don’t understand why buttons need to look like Labels. This is disappointing and I hope the Gnome folks revisit this decision with the next iteration of libadwaita.
• ddingus 5y ago
  To me it all looks like an effort to push all of the work related to discoverability on to the users, in a way not unlike this move to self serve self check-out self serve this self serve that... And it is efficient, from an MBA point of view. This is pushing evermore cost and risk away from the enterprise, creating externalities along the way. The whole thing is pretty toxic to users overall. And yes, those users can self serve their way back to competency, and eventually reach a point where they're productive again, but they had to pay a lot harder than they would have otherwise. Remember all those studies that were done in the 70s 80s and into the 90s? IBM did them, some of the major CAD companies did them, others did that too, and there's too many to list. We should do that again. And if we were to do that, we're going to find out those other studies weren't bulshit, all those points made sense, and what's really changed is the value judgments related to the development, and who makes those judgments and why. And I bet the root of all this, is far too many enterprises are in a place where they just don't have to care about the users anymore, and they know it, and they're acting on it.
  • HstryrsrBttn 5y ago
• zestyping 5y ago
  You can get pretty far with one simple principle: Things that are the same should look the same. Things that are different should look different.
• xbar 5y ago
  100% agree.
• johnqian 5y ago
  I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design. I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average. But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user friendly. You usually know when something is a button because the context makes it obvious. If it's not obvious, it's probably not a critical feature, just a nicety for those who discover it. There will always be people who hate everything Apple designs, but I think they're usually channeling a hatred of something else, like monopolies or proprietary things. Moreover, I think flat design is not a fad but an inevitability. As a rule, designs become more abstract over time, because as users get more used to UIs, they need fewer clues. It used to be that UIs needed to be skeuomorphic to be familiar and recognizable, but now simple outlines can do the job. Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs. You could argue that we've gone too far too fast. I don't have a dog in that fight. But I would bet my big toe that we're not going to reverse time and end up with skeuomorphism again. Instead, we're going to take advantage of faster GPUs to visualize abstractions in ways we couldn't before. We're seeing that with blurred background effects becoming more common. I for one am excited to see what's next.
  • matsemann 5y ago
    I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.
    • odonnellryan 5y ago
      Yeah from someone who supports users sometimes they have no idea how to use their iPhones.
    • 5y ago
• Flow 5y ago
  I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something. Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up". And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well. Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues? Things like "Hide cursor while typing" in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad. Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I've been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there's less consideration of almost everything.
  • nojs 5y ago
    > Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up" Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?
    • toxik 5y ago
      It is the “etc” of UI design. It’s a cop out most of the time.
    • happymellon 5y ago
      Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there. Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design patterns. Looks over functionality. Hamburger menu is just peak modern menus. Lazy.
• id02009 5y ago
  I think designer's easily forget that trends exist, and what people want is a mix of what's useful but also new and popular.
• pmlnr 5y ago
  >Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. Gtk2 -> Gtk3 dejavu.
• swiftcoder 5y ago
  > This has all the features I like from GTK 3. The only issue with it is that font rendering looks horrific, but that might just be my machine I don't understand linux users' font tastes, apparently. To me the GTK4 screenshots are the only half-way decent font rendering in the lot. All the GTK3 shots have broken kerning in headings, not to mention the awful (lack of?) antialiasing.
• Sophira 5y ago
  The design of HN has similar issues, honestly, especially on links you've already visited: https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-original-style.png https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-original-style.png Which parts are links? Which aren't? It's a little more obvious that the main text is a link but not obvious that you can click to view the comments. (It can be inferred, of course, but I don't believe that should be necessary.) A little styling to add underlines back to links, plus a little bold to indicate the comments page, fixes this: https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-my-style.png https://matrix.theblob.org/hn-my-style.png Some might say that this looks ugly, and that's a valid view. But to me, it's usable. (Why are both the "time posted" link and the comments link bolded? Because they both go to the same place. I didn't even know before I made this style that that was the case! I was surprised to see that the style I made did both, but I'm not complaining.)
  • Ambroisie 5y ago
    Could you share your style? I'd like to use it too.
    • Sophira 5y ago
      Sure! I've cleaned up the CSS a little bit since it was originally only for private use, and published it under CC0 at https://userstyles.world/style/3825/hacker-news-underlines-comment-page-boldening https://userstyles.world/style/3825/hacker-news-underlines-c... . You should be able to use it with an extension like Stylus[0]. [0] https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/#readme https://github.com/openstyles/stylus/#readme
• sgt 5y ago
  > I personally don't like the flat look. I think Microsoft was stupid for doing it. I think Apple is stupid for doing it and I've been praising Adwaita for being the sane option in an insane world. I partly agree. Flat look done poorly is terrible. Apple is the only company who's been semi-consistently doing this well.
• ricardobeat 5y ago
  > In this dark theme the edges and divider in the theme suddenly become light. I find this really jarring and it looks like it's just an inverted theme You’re just used to the wrong approach, the old one actually is an inverted-grayscale theme. The new one correctly follows the principle that foreground == lighter, background == darker in dark mode.
• mise_en_place 5y ago
  The Linux ecosystem is having a similar identity crisis as Microsoft and Apple. Some are of the opinion it should be mobile first, desktop first, or server/IOT/embedded. These are all competing concerns and will lead to further fragmentation in an already fragmented ecosystem. The design of libadwaita is very reminiscent of the time I was at Apple. Around the time they decided to unify the codebase and lay off the entire OS X team and reorg it into a new software team. I noticed the design changes as part of dogfooding internal OS X versions and design changes were jarring to say the least. In short, a product cannot be all things to all people. It should play to its strengths and delight it’s existing and new customers/users.
• reidrac 5y ago
  > The feedback I get is that I should move to QT/KDE [...] That, at least, has been consistent since first release of Gnome 3 over 10 years ago. Honestly, I don't know why I tried that hard to like the new Gnome. I'm so much happier using XFCE.
• seanhunter 5y ago
  Just last week I found myself in a position where I was at a major event (SXSW in Austin TX) having to support normal users trying to do various things on mobile and it's really eye-opening when you see first-hand how bad the experience is. I had a conversation with a user recently which went something like this: 'Yeah I know they have an app but your thing won't show up in the app for about a day so you need to go to their website on mobile to see it. Right, you're on the mobile website and I know your thing is still not showing up now. To see it, go to the hamburger menu in the top right. Yeah I know it doesn't look like a menu, or a hamburger. The three lines, that's a menu. Now go "account -> profile". Now you see the text where it says "XXX"? That's actually a tab. I know it doesn't look like a tab, just a word. You can't see any of the other tabs because they are actually off the right-hand side of the screen. I know it doesn't look like you can scroll, but just drag it across and you'll see the other tabs. Ok now click on the tab marked "YYY"' Trying to figure out this user flow for myself so I could help people reminded me of charging around hitting random walls in "Dark Souls" trying to find out which ones were illusory. It's really embarrassing how bad things have got.
  • bredren 5y ago
    What was sxsw like this year? Haven’t been for a while, but am curious after the break and current covid context.
    • seanhunter 5y ago
      It was awesome actually. My first time but the vibe was fantastic. Lots of long-term "southbyers" said to me that it was because of a general feeling of being delighted to be back.
• tempodox 5y ago
  The Flat Design fashion is coming to full rage. Everything looks like a bad web page now. Make users waste their time guessing how the interface works instead of getting things done.
• iforgotpassword 5y ago
  > While a lot of people now instinctively hunt for labels that have hover effects, for a lot of people who are just not represented in online computer communities because they're just using the computer as a tool this is completely weird. This. This! You see people on Apple devices constantly scrolling up and down just a tiny bit while browsing the web. What a weird tic I thought, when I saw different people do that. Turns out scroll bars are always hidden on Safari for elements that have overflow with scroll behavior. So you never know if you're reading some important stuff that actually has another paragraph you don't see because it's otherwise not obvious you're looking at some <div> with limited height. And it seems others are busy imitating this, I feel this happens with Firefox in Android now too. Then these new navigation gestures on mobile. Gone are the three mighty buttons of Android. When the iPhone released, it was praised for cutting ties with anything that was established in the old computing world, all the implicit knowledge you had to have about how to use a classic desktop os. You could give the iPhone to any tech illiterate person and they could figure it out. Everything was discoverable, a fresh start with a clean and consistent UI language. But today, not so much. Now phones went through the same iterations as the desktop os, and it's ok that you now need to learn a gesture to return to the home screen, or go back one step. There is no way someone who never used a phone before will somehow think "I might have to swipe into the screen from the left!" So now, just as the desktop os, we just assume you already know how to use a phone, and add "optimizations" on top of that that someone needs to tell you about.
• ho_schi 5y ago
  The font rendering issues: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 I recommend ignoring the blaming (users) and ignoring (developers) on both side both reading the details involved. Looks like mostly intended and used during development on HiDPI-Displays and that they need people experienced in font drawing matters.
• rwmj 5y ago
  To be honest they all look terrible. The clearest design I've seen recently is in Haiku. https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/ https://www.haiku-os.org/slideshows/haiku-1/
• RamblingCTO 5y ago
  Sorry but this does not look good. Never looked as good as macOS UI sadly.
• mro_name 5y ago
  > I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. ouch. Diversity of opinion is hard to stand but crucial.
• can16358p 5y ago
  While I'd like the old button as well, I think flat design is great. When MS brought Windows Phone and then incorporated same language into Windows 8 I was like "wow, Microsoft got it right for the first time". Same for iOS 7, same for macOS. I never liked the "Apple" look of UIs before they went flat. After they've switched to flat I started to really love it. Not even talking about developers and designers needing to do less, and users needing to process less cluttered visual stimuli. Skeuomorphism and non-flat designs in general had a good purpose and they've fulfilled it perfectly by teaching people about how UIs work in those OSes of digital world by making elements looking like real world things like buttons being 3D-ish. But that era is over and we collectively don't need it, so we've switched to something simpler and more efficient it many terms. Of course, taste is taste and one may hate it, but I love flat design in almost all aspects, and definitely don't think MS and Apple are "stupid" as the blogger says.
• landswipe 5y ago
  I just want them to fix the mouse wheel...
• prima-facie 5y ago
  All I can hope is that XFCE with its conservative approach will never pick up this new design language. Why have changes for change's sake?
• yhbtgvrfc 5y ago
  I hate rounded corners, giant title bars, no clear borders or 1px borders for grabbig, disappearing scrollbars. I hate when artsy minimalistic designs waste my screen space. Win95 & co got these right for desktop. (touchscreen would be a different matter I admit)
• godDLL 5y ago
  I've been using computers since ZX Spectrum days. I've seen all kinds of design-activity and design-philosophies. What's missing from today's design-thinking for me, is context-appropriate direction. Some things should be flat, or more precisely - subdued. An Instagram photo page shouldn't be all buttons and underlined links, sure - the photo is the important part so that the rest should be subdued. But the settings page should be all skeumorphic buttons and links and dials and switches, that's what it's for. It looks to me like there is an unhealthy tribalism invading design-thinking. As long as I have the correct ideology, no matter the context - my design is "good". Get on the flat-design bandwagon. Forget decades of UI research. Think in screenshots, doesn't matter if it's all jank and moves things in and out from under the user's fingers. Put everything on one screen, don't contextualize. "I'm being paid to deliver", not to think through. To ship, not to test. My designs require a gaming PC to run a document-like page, and don't scale down. "I'm designing for the future", it will all work out. Eventually. For some. My tools and my education are a sliver of what a designer used to think about, so I can't really do anything about it anyway, that's just the way it comes out. You don't honestly expect me to learn about the systems and devices my users are running this on, do you? That would make me a coder, that is to say not a designer. How did that happen? How did being knowledgeable and well-rounded at your industry become rare? Business reasons? How did using a computer become constantly surprizing and never straightforward? Business reasons? Why do I have this and that humongous app just for one or two things it does, and now there's 200+ apps in there? Always waiting for something to load all that, just so I can do this one thing. Business reasons? It's not business reasons. OSS is no better. Maybe it's that the approach that got us to where we are, the moving fast and breaking things, keeping your nose down in your own corner isn't what will get us out of here? I mean, my computer usage went down over the last 12 years, like 5x. I just don't want to. I'm more or less done with all of it. It all feels like it got bolted on, and then bolted on, and then ducktaped around. Terminals, mobile UI, desktop apps, the Web, games, appliances, work tools, control systems; ALL OF IT. Sure, there's loads of it, and it's cheap. But there is still no choice, not really. This jank or that, it doesn't do it for me. I've checked out, more or less. I stopped looking at new laptops, and when my phone breaks I pull a couple of old ones from the drawer and make me a working something. I'm not giving them my money, why would I? They got nothing I want. Apple, Google, Lenovo and the rest of them equally. The last MS product I enjoyed using was MASM. That's until I found out about NASM. There is no dumb car I can buy. Everything is finicky touch and not user-serviceable. Many things are so flimsy you can't lean on them at all. But then, one has to understand that if the whole world around you seems to have lost the plot, chances are it's you. So, is it me, what do you think? Because I can't handle it, I'm legit checking out.
• red_admiral 5y ago
  I miss the days of GTK2 when you could set colours for things individually without having to edit CSS. You could take the buttons from this theme and the window borders from that one, and then make the active window title bar a different colour to the rest. Moving to GTK3/adwaita made that a lot harder for me - like yes I can spend a couple of hours editing and testing changes to the stylesheet but before there was a button in the settings for this. Look, I get all the advantages of the newer way, but for me it's a feature that I can make my UI look the way I want it, even if that's not the same as some theme designer's preferences.
• _abox 5y ago
  Not a fan of adwaita at all, I think everything GTK is too wasteful in terms of screen space. I think Qt is much more efficient. But that's why we have Linux. Everyone can make their own choices
• lovedaddy 5y ago
  Flat I can just about tolerate, the stupid padding round every single element is what bugs me. There has been loads of studies showing the amount of mistakes in coding or spreadsheet type work goes up massively with having to scroll windows, but yet, gtk3/4 is a bloated, oversized mess. Mice precision has increased, so why on earth do we need toolbars that can take upto 1/8th a 768p screen. Stupid.
• ogogmad 5y ago
  Superficial opinion: GNOME 3 is the best-looking DE for Linux, but I personally prefer using KDE. It's a shame then that the new flat design in GTK 4 looks ugly. I suppose it's all subjective -- but I'm struck by how viscerally bad most flat designs look to me. I suppose it's another "aesthetic movement" that most of us philistines won't understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    That's precisely how I feel. Words can't really describe how taken aback I was when I typed in "sudo pacman -Syu" that fateful day and rebooted into... whatever GNOME 40 was.
• blacklion 5y ago
  Why. Does. These. Interfaces. Have. This. Amount. Of. Empty. Space?! Looks like all these "Connected - 1000Mb/s" can be 2-2.5 times more compact in V direction. And huge spaces between labels and controls. Why do we need these?! It is plague of last years. You have FullHD screen, you see 3-4 options in FireFox settings,when "old skool" UI could pack all of them onto one FullHD screen. It is everywhere. Huge spaces, scrollbars (which doesn't work with keyboard, as controls intercept focus)... Scrollbars are for text, not for GU!
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    I've always thought that GTK was great at filling the screen with interactive elements. Almost too good, actually. The GTK versions of certain apps like Handbrake and Transmission have almost no whitespace...
• dm319 5y ago
  I suppose the price you pay of having a consistent desktop experience is that changes to the desktop look affect the look of your app, and you don't have much control over this. From a user perspective, I prefer this the hodge podge on Windows which I find disorientating. But I agree that a bit of non-flatness can be very helpful for the eyes.
• dm319 5y ago
  While I'm here, what is wrong with menus? The ribbon interface needs me to learn what 100 symbols refer to, or else hover repeatedly to find what I'm after. I can read. Been doing it for a while.
• myl 5y ago
  Going flat seems a bit late. Apple are in some places backtracking and (although slowly) going back to some form of 3D. Have a look at the logic UI evolution. 10.4 was flat, 10.5 partly undoes the madness.
• alexchamberlain 5y ago
  I think the Disney+ app has to be rock bottom of button design - the blue rounded one is selected, the white flat one is not. I always get it the wrong way around, even after several months of making the mistake.
• jl6 5y ago
  I sorely miss the days when it was possible to explain to someone the principles of how an OS UI worked, and for those principles to be reusable across a wide array of applications. Today, every application seems to just do its own thing, and continually churns its own UI, chasing trends. There was a time when an elderly relative would say “computers are too hard to use”, and I could recommend a book or manual that would help make it clearer. Nowadays I tend to just agree with them.
• torginus 5y ago
  >Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. This is so typical for the open-source community. For a supposedly 'open' culture, its full of ivory towers and (layers of) cool kids clubs, meaning if you want to build an app, or change something you don't like, and want others to be able to use your changes as well, you are met with layers of people who are at best indifferent, and at worst hostile, but the thing is you absolutely NEED their approval unless you can make your own distro (your own club) and fork their code and try to somehow keep up with the main branch. The last thing I want to do with my free time, is solve an issue, only to be met with draconian authority telling me how to build my app, and then have to solve my issue again in 6 months, when the platform people break everything. I think the culture of abusing volunteers on a volunteer-driven project is exactly why desktop Linux can't break out of the niche OS category.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    GNOME is pretty much the worst offender here, which really makes it all the more baffling. They constantly wax helplessness, begging for more contributors or feedback on their OS, and when people try to contribute or give feedback on their OS, they say "no not that part!" and go redesign something they don't take personally. It's especially ironic considering how they worship "usability" in the other hand, insisting that their lack of functionality is so that they can better emulate macOS. It's remarkably frustrating. But it's also the sort of behavior that keeps other developers going. KDE is great at soliciting user change, and nothing is "off the table" for scrutiny or redesign. Many other desktops share that same philosophy. The pockets of high-and-mighty developers are what end up shooting desktop Linux in the foot, and while I do happily daily-drive Linux, I can say with certainty that it will never hit the mainstream with maintainers like these driving the best-funded desktop environment.
• exciteabletom 5y ago
  Anyone else happy with Gnome? It's good to have an opinionated DE that just gets out of the way. It launches apps, provides me with workspaces, and abstracts all the low level details away so I can focus on actually using my computer. If people want to customise every minute detail of the themes they shouldn't be using Gnome/GTK. The devs don't have to cater for everyone's needs, they are allowed to focus on a target audience.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    I'd be happy with it if the developers listened to the users. GNOME 3 had a good balance of "getting out of your way" while still giving power users what they want. I had to leave GNOME 40 within hours because of its unbelievable changes to the UX, and I say that as someone who used to be a pretty big fan of the desktop.
• HeavyStorm 5y ago
  Reading the comments I get that everyone agrees that UI has gotten worse over the past few years. My word of choice is amateurism.
• MarkusWandel 5y ago
  When it comes to UI stupidity in general, here are two from my work machine (Windows 10 laptop). - there's the prominent notification speech bubble on the bottom right, which seems to be very inconsistently used. Almost all the notifications are duplications of an already popped-up notification, and a lot of important stuff doesn't end up in there. So it's just a nuisance. The worst is that for one application, the notification essentially says "you need to push this button to proceed" while covering up the freakin' button I need to push! - If you have a Word document already open and minimized, and you open up a second one - at least triggered from the browser in Sharepoint - what happens is the already open document opens up, with the newly opened one underneath! If these are based on a common template, I frequently find myself scrolling up and down looking for the graphic I need to refer to, only 20 seconds later realizing I'm in the wrong document again. These don't have much to do with UI skin annoyances, but they do have to do with this: Apple stuff had really good UI while Steve Jobs was in charge. Someone powerful enough to get anything changed who is fanatically devoted to good, usable UI was gold there. All these weird inconsistent UIs are "design by committee" or worse, no design at all. Nobody has overall veto power, or at least nobody who cares enough.
• petesergeant 5y ago
  Sorry to side-swipe this. The pictures in the article all have a fuzziness I've come to associate with Linux GUIs over the last couple of decades. Is there a specific reason for it? Is the font the problem? Some kind of font-hinting patent they can't impinge on?
• mrlemke 5y ago
  Thanks to flat design, Athena widgets are now a minimalist widget set. Using X resources, you can even personalize and theme your apps.
• ajyotirmay 5y ago
  As he mentions at the 4nd of his blog, Qt/KDE is his only option if he actually wants decent software specially one where he wants to be heard.
• bfrog 5y ago
  I really like adawaita as well, I’m sad to see the easily visible buttons are disappearing into flatland. I agree with the author, the flat look shown here is missing at the very least some outlines on buttons. Hidden UI elements seem like an awful idea.
• minroot 5y ago
  I saw a few screenshots of GTK4 apps, it looked nice. But today tried a simple one, as like the author, I was disappointed.
• zzo38computer 5y ago
  I dislike GTK; my opinion is that Xaw is better in many ways. GTK has problems including bad designs of many things including file selection dialog box, scrollbars (which are not always consistent), bitmap fonts sometimes don't work properly, always uses Unicode and although you can enter Unicode control characters they are not displayed while editing (which makes it difficult to use), some things are not documented well, configuration is difficult, kerning in editable text, etc. So, I do not use GTK in my own programs. (Some people say that if a program does not need to be documented then it is easy to use, but I disagree; a program is difficult to use because it is not documented well.)
• seltzered_ 5y ago
  After sharing this in https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/tn8why/the_end_of_the_nice_gtk_button/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/tn8why/the_end_of_th... , a commenter pointed out an issue going into more detailed discussion around these buttons and some of the tradeoffs to consider in having outlines or not: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/228 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/228
• Epiphany21 5y ago
  The thing about a lot of GTK apps that kills me is the client-side decorations. I think the window manager should be viewed as its own app with consistent controls. CSD make the title bar of each window different so I have to waste time figuring out where the safe grab area is. The title area also ends up being so fat that you barely save space over normal menu and title bars, and usability is worse because of the hamburger menus.
• jerryzh 5y ago
  >I personally feel like Adwaita has been the pinnacle of Linux design Unity to kde Never liked gnome and endure it for more than 1 hour. Yeah he stated it's personal feel, but still strong disagree of existence of concept of pinnacle of design
• sgtaylor5 5y ago
  User here: the only thing I don't like about GTK buttons is that they are large, and the toolbar they are in has a lot of empty space around them. Does everybody have multiple large monitors on their desk? What about 13 inch laptops? Why is there not a global "compact UI" option?